Secret Nights with a Cowboy

by Caitlin Crews

  But she did. She knew she did.

  “You’ve always been so definite about who you are and what you want,” she said then. “I remember, you couldn’t have been more than ten years old and Lucinda Early asked you what you were going to be when you grew up. You told her you were going to train horses better than your daddy did. You were matter-of-fact about it. So matter-of-fact I remember it, and I was only eight.”

  “What does this have to do with you thinking that I would…” He couldn’t finish. “Is this what you really think of me? You really believe that I would—what? Lift my hand to you? Throw you out?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Riley,” Rae said urgently. “I’m not going to pretend that I’ve done a good job of it, but this is what I’ve been trying to tell you for years. You’re so sure of everything that it leaves no room for anyone else to be uncertain. Or scared. Or worried. It’s not a simple as your way or the highway. There is no highway. There is only your way, because you don’t allow for anything else.”

  He let out a sound then that she couldn’t possibly consider a laugh.

  Especially when that dark gaze of his slammed right through her.

  “I’ve spent eight years paying for a crime you never bothered to tell me I’d committed,” Riley hurled at her, his voice not particularly loud. But lethal all the same. “It’s not my way or the highway, or anything to do with me. It’s your way. It’s always been your way. You’re the only one who’s ever known what happened between us. How can you look me straight in the face and tell me that’s my fault?”

  She knew he was right. But that didn’t change anything.

  “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m telling you it was a factor.” She threw up her hand when he started to come back at her. “Riley.”

  And he stopped when she said his name like that. Because that was who he was.

  Why did she know that beyond any doubt and yet had still been too afraid to tell him any of this while it happened? Why had she kept all of this bottled up?

  But she had to tell him everything, because she didn’t think she could bear to do this again. And she doubted he’d want to.

  She tried to calm herself. “The cramps started while you were away. The night you left.”

  “The cramps.”

  She saw when he got it. He paled. “It happened fast, I guess. Though it didn’t feel fast at the time.”

  He only shook his head, like he couldn’t speak.

  “I spent the night on the bathroom floor. It hurt. God, did it hurt. But then it was done. The … the worst part was over. And I was the only one who knew.”

  Riley looked sick.

  “How could you keep something like this to yourself?” He ran a hand over his mouth. “Why would you?”

  And that was the question, wasn’t it?

  Rae sighed. Or maybe it was a quieter sort of sob. She couldn’t tell the difference tonight. “I hadn’t told you I was pregnant in the first place. How could I tell you that I’d lost the baby? It seemed … kinder not to tell you.”

  “Kinder.”

  “In retrospect, maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  Maybe she hadn’t been. But she could remember those days almost too clearly. She’d tried so hard to act like herself. She’d tried to sink back into her life. She’d tried to forget any of it had ever happened.

  But the more she tried, the harder and harder it became to even remember what she’d been like before. It began to feel like her skin didn’t fit. Soon enough, that began to hurt.

  She didn’t know how to tell him that part, but she tried. “And then, as time passed, I didn’t want to tell you. I started to resent you instead.”

  He broke away then, turning his back on her. That wide, strong back that she’d used to press her cheek against to feel his strength and the rumble of his voice when he spoke. She’d believed he could save her from anything and he hadn’t. She’d been drowning right in front of him and he hadn’t seen it.

  It wasn’t fair. She knew that.

  But what she felt and what was fair weren’t the same things.

  “Those last two years.” Riley sounded like a dark, forbidding stranger. “The coming and the going.”

  “I was confused. Most of the time, I think I was lashing out. Then I decided there was no point staying with you when it was nothing but bad, all the time.”

  “That’s not how I remember it.”

  “Because you remember the sex.” Her voice was shaky, and she didn’t know what to do about it. “Fight, then make up. Fight, then make up, then fight again. But every fight seemed to hurt worse. And the making up was fake, because you didn’t know. I thought that if I left, it would be better. I truly believed that.”

  “Did you?” Riley sounded even darker, and Rae was happy she couldn’t see the expression on his face. “I went down to Denver. Tried to get my head on straight.” He wheeled around again, his gaze like a punch. It made her wheeze a little. “And there you were on my doorstep when I got back.”

  “I wanted to see if you were okay.”

  “I bet. And you checked in on me almost every night after that, out of the goodness of your heart, I’m sure. For six years.”

  It would be easy to let her temper take over. Familiar. She could lean in, let her mouth take her away, and see what happened.

  And nothing would change. Everything would stay exactly the same. They would be standing just like this ten years from now, nothing left of either of them but a collection of the scars they’d left on each other.

  Rae knew she couldn’t let that happen. “And every time, I would vow that I was done. Because all we did was get further apart.”

  “Once again, Rae, you’re not remembering this the way I do.”

  “We’re good at fighting. We’re even better at making up. But when it comes to actually being married to each other? Riley, come on.” She leaned forward a little to underscore her point. “We suck.”

  “How would you know?” His voice was like a blade, a low, gleaming, terrible thing that cut straight through her. “You never gave me the opportunity to figure out how to weather this crisis with you. It never occurred to you in all this time to clue me in on any of this.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Riley blinked as if her voice, so raw it felt torn from her, hurt him too.

  He kept going. “I don’t believe for one second that you thought that I was going to react badly enough that I deserved … all this.” As blades went, his voice was bad enough. But the way he looked at her cut her to pieces. “When have I ever been violent with you?”

  Rae wished, deeply and wildly, that she hadn’t started this. That she’d let things stay the way they were. Anything was better than this.

  “I didn’t think you were going to hit me, Riley,” she made herself say. And now that it had gotten to this part, she still sounded raw, but she was quieter. Much, much quieter, when she would so much prefer to yell. “I thought you weren’t going to love me anymore.”

  His head jerked back at that, as if she really had hauled off and hit him. Hard, the way his brothers did when they were pretending their roughhousing was casual. Harder, even.

  But she knew, didn’t she? She knew that love might look different than expected, but it was conditional. It could be rescinded at any time.

  All you had to do was make the wrong mistake, and people disappeared.

  “And after all this,” she managed to say then, though her voice started to shake. And tears started pouring down her cheeks. “After all the times you would tell me how you wanted to be free, not tied down like every other parent you knew, you just … Say we could have a baby together. Just like that.”

  Riley let out a low, awful noise that could only be pain. “Maybe I would have said that then. You don’t know. You’ll never know.”

  “I do know,” she whispered. “And so do you.”

  She thought he might argue with that, but he didn’t. And that was
worse. Why hadn’t she stopped to wonder who they were when they stripped away all the temper and fire? Why hadn’t she been more worried about what was underneath?

  Then again, maybe she had been.

  He stood there, a few feet away from her, and it might as well have been an ocean between them. Several oceans, here in Cold River, high up in the Rockies, nowhere near any oceans at all. She could taste the salt in her mouth when she’d never even seen an ocean in person.

  She wiped at her eyes. She stood where she was, close to him but apart from him. It seemed fitting.

  Rae could see Riley sifting through the wreckage of this near decade of theirs. Looking for clues, turning this year and that night over and over in his head. Because she’d given him the code to what happened in their marriage, finally. Everything must look different.

  She regretted that too. She regretted everything.

  “How long were you…” He stopped. He cleared his throat. “Were you hurt? Then or … permanently?”

  “These things happen,” Rae said, and she felt … small. Forlorn and alone, in a way she never had. Not quite. Because there was always him. She’d always had him, one way or another. How had she waited until tonight, when she was letting go of him, to realize that? “They happen a lot, it turns out. I bet if I asked in the ballroom, most of the women there would have their own similar experiences.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good thing.”

  “They say it helps to talk. But I didn’t.” Rae tried to summon up a smile, but it dissolved, and there was salt in her mouth again. “The only person I wanted to talk about it with was you. And at the same time, you were the last person I wanted to talk about it with.”

  He looked at her for a long, long time.

  “Maybe,” Riley said, “you weren’t really worried that I might stop loving you. Maybe you were worried that if you actually told me what was going on, we’d both have to face the fact that you never loved me that much to begin with. Because I have to think that if you did, none of this would have happened.”

  Rae felt dizzy. Amanda’s words mixed with his and sloshed around inside her until she thought they might make her ill. She managed to swallow it back. Barely. “You know that’s not true.”

  Riley ran his hand over his jaw again, and he wasn’t normally a fidgety man. Watching him not know what to do with all that leashed power inside him made Rae … empty. “I hate that you were scared. I hate that you went through something like that by yourself. Both thinking that you couldn’t tell me you were carrying my baby. Then losing it. There in our house where I’ve been living for years, thinking I knew all the ghosts by name.”

  She flinched at that and almost wished he really would hit her. Some part of her thought that had to be better. Quicker.

  But she couldn’t even seem to speak anymore. Not when he looked at her, not like he’d lost her but like he’d never known her at all.

  “I hate all of that, Rae.” He sounded like gravel, and she was still tasting oceans. Or maybe that was just regret. “But what I hate the most is that you never trusted me. You didn’t trust me enough to tell me then. Or in all the years since. If you’d never decided your biological clock was ticking, would you ever have told me?”

  “You have no idea how many times I’ve tried to tell you.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. I just know you didn’t.”

  “Now you know.”

  She wanted to tell him so many things. How many times she’d wished she could go back, do it over, do it better. How she’d second-guessed herself, then and now.

  How regret tasted like rain and the sea, and she was drowning, and had only herself to blame.

  “Maybe I never should have told you,” she said shakily. “Maybe, since I didn’t tell you then, it’s selfish to tell you at all. You can’t do anything about it. You can’t change it.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  He sounded so final.

  Rae heard a faint, whimpering sort of noise, and only distantly realized it was her.

  And Riley looked at her with nothing but anguish on his beautiful face. He moved as if he were stuck in someone else’s body, as if he didn’t quite know what his limbs might do. But he moved toward her, not away. And very carefully, as if he thought at least one of them was breakable, he fit his palm to her cheek.

  “Riley…,” she began.

  “I want to comfort you, Rae,” he told her. The look on his face was devastating. She couldn’t breathe. “I always want to comfort you. You’re my wife. But you wouldn’t let me when it mattered. And I can’t do it. This time, I can’t.”

  And this time, he was the one who walked away.

  Giving Rae what she’d always said she wanted.

  There were no more secrets, she tried to tell herself as she stood there, staring out at the cold street she couldn’t see thanks to the bright chandeliers above her.

  There were no more secrets, but Rae was very much afraid that there was nothing else.

  Just a ghost whose name she knew only too well.

  19

  Riley had always thought that having the Harvest Gala the night before Thanksgiving was dumb, no matter how many jokes the Heritage Society told about folks fitting into their finery on Wednesday so they could feast on Thursday.

  A joke he’d been pretending to laugh at for years.

  But he’d never thought it was dumber than he did this year.

  Because it was a national holiday, he was forced to both handle himself in the wake of last night’s revelations and present himself at his parents’ house. Where he could look forward to being under the intense scrutiny of every single member of his nosy family when he had no intention of talking about the things Rae had told him.

  Riley didn’t particularly want to think about the things Rae had told him.

  It was more like he couldn’t.

  Had it been any other Sunday-dinner-type thing, like the ones they usually had throughout the year that people showed up to as their schedules allowed, he would have avoided it. Come up with some excuse to stay away and not really cared what anyone thought.

  But there was no way that his family would let him get away with missing Thanksgiving.

  Especially not after they’d seen him with Rae last night.

  They would show up in a fleet of pickups and drag him over to the ranch house whether he liked it or not, then use the opportunity to interrogate him on his personal life until he actually gave in and told them, just to shut them up. He could envision all of that a little too clearly.

  Riley did his usual chores, showered longer than necessary without managing to clear his head, then made his way over to the main house.

  It had snowed again in the night, dusting over the fields that stretched across the valley and clinging, wet and heavy, to the branches of the trees in the forest. Riley took his time, not because the roads were treacherous but because he was putting it off. The roads were what dirt roads always were in snow—an opportunity to forget whatever might be pressing in on him because they required a little more of his attention.

  That ended when he made it to his parents’ drive, where his family members had already created snow tracks for him to follow.

  Great.

  He bumped his way over the snow and parked out in the yard in his usual spot. Then he took his time climbing out of his truck, wishing he could take even more time on his horses in the stable complex. An excellent way to avoid his family—but Connor had texted earlier to say he’d taken care of all the horses already this morning. In an unprecedented show of self-motivation.

  Demands for future repayment in kind were implied, obviously.

  Riley faced facts. He had no choice but to suck it up and go inside.

  He ducked in the side door, hanging up his hat and coat and kicking off his boots. And instantly wondered if maybe he’d been overestimating how rough this was going to be, because the house he’d grown up in smelled like sugar and gravy. He could hear
conversations and laughter, pots and pans clattering in the kitchen, and the sound of the television from the family room.

  It all felt like a big old hug, not that he would allow one.

  Riley might like to pretend there were no good memories in this house, but that wasn’t entirely true. Just because his childhood had felt a lot like a front-row seat to a circus, that didn’t mean there hadn’t been days like this. Pie and turkey and his grandparents, who had always stood like a stoic wall of much-needed sense between the generations.

  Settle down, he told himself. Give some thanks, eat some stuffing, and go home.

  Because his life hadn’t changed last night. Only his understanding of it.

  “Nice of you to show up, sunshine,” Zack drawled when he walked into the family room.

  “Who called the cops?” Riley replied in kind. “Not very festive.”

  Zack replied with a razor-sharp smile and a hand gesture—but not where their grandparents could see.

  Riley didn’t relax, exactly, but he did a good impression of it. He and Brady talked about a whole lot of nothing while Connor and Amanda cheerfully insulted each other under the guise of a conversation about tractor parts.

  “Are you a farmer now?” Connor asked, kicked back on the couch while Amanda mirrored him from across the room, each one of them trying to outdo the other with the force of their studied disinterest. “Thought you were a farmers’ market, monkey.”

  “And here I thought you mucked out stables, Connor. But apparently, you’re also the local authority on tractor repair?” Amanda smiled. “Quite the Renaissance man.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in this room who’s an expert on farming equipment,” Grandpa offered after a moment, sitting in his favorite armchair in his Sunday best. Almost as if he were musing out loud, possibly to the football game on the television.

  But that ended that squabble. Grandpa had never needed to be loud.

  As the late morning wore on into afternoon, Ellie continued to refuse all help in the kitchen. The way she always did. But because it was Thanksgiving, when it started to get even later and there were more sounds of crashing from the back of the house, everyone quietly helped, anyway.