Rae made her way through the maze of boxes, heading toward the front of the house across the wide open space with its high ceiling.
What is this for? she’d asked when they’d moved in, married at last.
If we get sick of the bedroom downstairs, we’ll make a new bedroom up here, Riley had said, grinning.
At that point, the very idea that she might get sick of anything involving Riley would have made her laugh. She would have declared it impossible—and she never would have believed that anything could ever get between them. Not for eight minutes. And eight years? No way.
And here she was, all these years later, dressed in his shirt again as if she’d never left.
She’d never felt more beautiful.
She thought briefly of the red dress she’d worn the night before. Or her wedding dress that had made her so happy the first time she’d tried it on that she and Hope and Abby had all burst into tears. Either one was clearly more suitable for things like impromptu seductions or saving marriages.
But she and Riley had always been a fact. An inevitability.
Maybe that meant they didn’t follow the rules. They made their own and often hurt themselves, but either way, she had no doubt she was doing the right thing when she slid open the window that looked out over the front porch and climbed out onto the sloping roof.
Riley sat out there, a heavy blanket draped around him and his eyes on the cold night hanging there in front of him.
He didn’t look up as she came over, already shivering. And she didn’t wait to make certain of her welcome. She made a beeline for him the way she would have years ago, expecting him to open up his arms the way he did, then wrap her up in that blanket so she could rest her back against him as if he were a chair.
Funny the things that felt sacred now, so many years after she’d thought she’d given them up forever.
But she didn’t really breathe out again until he rested his chin on the top of her head.
“Why are you awake?” she asked softly, burrowing deeper into him as the cold pressed in against her. She hadn’t looked at the clock when she’d gotten up, but she’d guess they were in the small hours now. Three or four in the morning, maybe.
Usually right about the time she crawled out of his bed, shaking with guilt and shame, and cried while she drove herself home.
But not tonight.
Though as she listened to his heart beat steadily behind her, and waited for him to speak, she realized some part of her was terribly afraid that this was his version of that same 3:00 a.m. drive.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Riley said after a moment. “Seems fair enough. I have a lot to think about.”
Rae swallowed back her instant response to that. Rapid-fire questions that were all about the uncertainty in her, not him.
She bit her tongue and made herself wait.
The dark didn’t get any lighter. The cold didn’t get any warmer. But she was safe in Riley’s arms, and that was more than she’d had in a long time.
It felt like everything.
“Tonight, my mother told me I’m just like my father,” Riley said eventually. “Not like an insult. She said it like it was so obvious she was surprised it hadn’t occurred to me by now.”
Rae wanted to hurl herself into that, leaping to his defense—but maybe he didn’t need her defense right now. Maybe he needed her to listen. Maybe if they’d tried that out years ago, things would have been different.
“And you know how I feel about my father.” Riley made a low noise that could as easily have been disapproval as disgust. “I spent the whole drive back from the ranch house telling myself how wrong she was. She told me I was unforgiving like him. So sure I was always right. So determined because I knew what I wanted and always had. Obviously, I dismissed it all as the rantings of a woman who’d decided to stay married to a man with the humanity of the average rock. But then when I got home, ready to nurse my indignation, you were here.”
“Riley. We really don’t have to go over this.” She snuggled deeper into his arms. “Really.”
But it was as if he didn’t hear her. “And what did I do? Exactly what I always do. Blame you. Rehash the same things over and over when I already knew there was no answer. And overlook the only fact that should have mattered to me, ever.” He took a breath, and it was ragged. Rae could feel it. “You were hurt, and I didn’t help you.”
She turned in his arms then, propping herself against his chest so she could be sure to look him full in the face. “I wouldn’t have let you. While you’re beating yourself up, please remember that. I wouldn’t have let you help me, Riley. I went to great lengths to make sure you couldn’t.”
One of his hands gripped the back of her neck, holding her still before him where there was nothing between them but breath.
Hope, Rae thought.
“You already forgave me for something I probably wouldn’t forgive if I were in your shoes,” he said, his voice gravel and heat and her Riley again. Hers. “What am I supposed to do with that?”
“We’ve spent so long doing this,” she managed to whisper. “And I really thought the answer was to stop. To throw it all out and start over, because this seemed too hard. Unfixable. It had to be easier with someone new, right?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“But I don’t want a new person, Riley. I don’t want a new marriage. I want a new start.” Rae reached forward and ran her hands over the beloved lines of his face. The only face she ever dreamed about. The only man she wanted when she woke up. “With you, Riley. Only with you.”
“I don’t think I’m ever going to get over how scared you must have been. How alone. And me here with my head up my—”
“Stop.” But she whispered it, still holding his face in her palms.
“I owe you so many apologies I don’t know where to start,” Riley burst out. “I want to tell you that you were wrong to think that I wouldn’t accept it if you were pregnant, but I remember what I was like back then, and I know exactly why you thought that.”
She looked at him. Really looked at him. With everything she was. “We have to decide, right now, that there’s no more going back, or going back is all we’re ever going to do.”
His mouth curved a little. “My mom said something like that too.”
“Your mom is a wise woman,” Rae told him. “Maybe your parents decided to keep their marriage private. To take it out of the places where their kids could see the cracks and work it out on their own. Did you ever think about that?” She didn’t wait for him to argue the point. “And they don’t owe you or anyone any explanations. Neither do we.”
Riley shook his head. “My mother thinks I got married early so I could do it better than them. Or what I thought was them. And instead, I became exactly like my father. And worse, I made you the woman my mother used to be. You push, I act like a wall, and everyone comes out of it worse off than before.”
Rae laughed a little, and then more when he frowned at her.
“I appreciate you taking that on, cowboy,” she drawled. “But I think you’re forgetting that I’m the child of a great and glorious lifelong war that’s been going on between my grandmother and mother since before my birth. Remind me to tell you how my grandmother didn’t speak directly to me for nine years.”
“Then I shouldn’t have—”
She shushed him, grinning when he scowled at her. “As far as I can tell, I don’t know love unless it comes with a healthy side helping of fighting. I wouldn’t know I felt anything at all unless it came with the opportunity to do battle. You didn’t make us who we are, Riley. We built this. Together, you and me. Brick by brick.”
There was a gleam in his dark eyes that she didn’t dare believe. His hand around her neck felt like a caress, the way it was supposed to. And between them, that same old sweet heat began to shift into that old, familiar, breathtaking fire.
The way it always had. And always would.
; “Baby,” Riley said, stars in his eyes when the sky around them was dark and cloudy. “It’s time to take those bricks apart.”
“Only if we rebuild,” she whispered. “Together.”
And Rae watched as Riley, the most dangerous of the Kittredges … softened.
Just for her.
Only and ever for her.
He leaned forward to press his lips to hers, and it felt better than hope. Better than promise rings in high school or vows in the middle of a hot, ripe summer.
It felt better than explosively stupid fights and hot, incapacitating passion. It was all of those things and more.
It was better than friends. Better than benefits.
He kissed her like life. Like love.
Like forever.
“I don’t deserve a second chance,” he told her, the frigid air making their lips cold when they touched, but not when the kiss moved deeper. “I don’t deserve you.”
“I promise this time I’ll trust you with everything,” Rae told him in return. “No more secrets, Riley. No more running away. You deserve a wife who stays.”
“I’ll keep you safe,” he promised her. “No matter what.”
“And I will love you so true,” she vowed. “No matter what happens. There will only be this. Us.”
He smiled, there against her mouth. “Rae. I love you.”
“I love you, Riley,” she replied, her heart so full she was surprised the roof could hold them.
And they made it all new, right there.
One sweet kiss after another.
Over and over again, until the snow began to fall.
* * *
They celebrated their reunion energetically throughout what was left of the night, and Rae dragged herself out of bed when her phone alarm beeped at her, already regretting her lack of sleep.
“I hope you’re not planning to drive anywhere,” Riley muttered sleepily, his face in the pillows. “It snowed again, and your truck is still the same old death trap.”
“And yet, it’s Black Friday. The Flower Pot can’t open itself.”
He said a few more things.
She snapped right back at him.
And they were right back on familiar ground.
But unlike all the other times they’d fought over the last eight years, this fight wasn’t instead of the conversation they’d had last night. This was in addition to it.
“In case you’re wondering,” she panted at him when he tugged her down and rolled her beneath him in that too-hot bed, then found his way inside her with a single, hard, glorious thrust, “I still hate morning sex.”
Riley grinned, that wicked, dangerous grin that had sustained her all those long, dark years. “Let’s find out.”
And it probably should have embarrassed her, how quickly he could have her sobbing out his name.
She shook and shook. And was sure one human body couldn’t contain so much joy.
Which was probably why it was so much better shared between two.
By the time she made it out of the shower, he’d fixed her coffee that she was forced to accept right along with the smug look on his face.
“You seemed to hate that a lot,” he drawled.
“Marriage is sacrifice, Riley,” Rae said piously, and then they grinned at each other as she pressed the mug to her lips.
And it wasn’t until he kissed her silly, insisted on driving out ahead of her to the county road to make sure she made it, and beeped twice as she drove off that it really hit her.
They were going to start over.
They’d started over.
She and Riley were going to make it work.
And not because they’d gotten rid of all the tempestuous things that had always made them who they were. That was what this morning had taught her.
They would have that, sure. But this time, they wouldn’t have only that.
It was like flowers, she thought later, as she stood in the Flower Pot in her own clothes instead of the dreaded uniform. A flower, standing on its own, could have a certain drama. Even two flowers, or a little nosegay—they could create a bit of theater. They were what they were, beautiful and often doomed.
But take an arrangement instead. The more flowers she wove together, mixed in with live plants, the better it was. From bright blooms to deeply rooted things, all together, they were more than their individual parts. They were beautiful. They were resilient. They made people smile, shined bright, and made happy occasions happier.
And if planted right, they grew.
The way she and Riley had, however painfully, these last eight years.
The way they would going forward.
This time, at last, Rae was sure.
23
A year later, Riley woke up early on a dark Thanksgiving morning after the usual Harvest Gala shenanigans the night before, tended to his usual chores, and found himself out in the quiet of his own yard. Dawn was still a while away, but there were already lights on inside his house. And the chimney filled the cold air with the scent of wood smoke that always said home to him.
He took the steps to the front porch at a jump, moving right past the place where that clunker of a truck used to sit. It still sat on the property, but now it was more like a mausoleum, out behind the barn.
Insisting that Rae find herself a safer vehicle had taken some doing. He’d had to wait until he had ammunition.
He eased his way inside and took a deep breath, because his house was a home again, and he still wasn’t over it. He hoped he’d never get over it.
Rae had quietly moved back in without a whole lot of fanfare. Riley had packed her up at Hope’s, pretended he didn’t see the way Hope beamed as if this was all her doing, somehow, and took Rae back where she belonged before the end of that Thanksgiving weekend.
But neither one of them was interested in starting over in the same place where they’d gone off course so badly so many times before. They’d wrestled that bed of theirs upstairs, fought about it and then made up, and then made the second floor—with all its windows to the stars—theirs.
They’d hunkered down for the winter there. And by the time spring came, Riley had not only added another bathroom and opened up the chimney to create another fireplace right there across from their bed, they’d gone ahead and created that ammunition he needed to make Rae take her safety more seriously.
And Riley had loved Rae Trujillo any number of ways. As a distractingly pretty teenager. As his newlywed bride, half-drunk on the things they could do to each other, and did, whenever possible. He’d loved her long and hard, even through all those angry years. Because none of that had been fun, but they’d sure made up for it night after night.
But he wasn’t sure he’d ever love her more than good and round with their baby, cranky and in no way glowing, and yet despite that, still his.
Always and forever his.
As time went on, Riley found they braided together the parts of them that loved to fight with the parts of them that should have been better friends from the start, and the idea of the two of them that they wanted to be this time.
And day by day, they grew together instead of apart.
Anytime he thought he was falling down in one of those areas, Rae was there to pick him up. And anytime she got a little lost in her own fears, he remembered that night on the roof, the snow on their faces, and how he’d promised that he’d keep her safe.
Even if it was from her own head.
At the end of the summer, she gave him a son. They’d had big plans for a hospital birth, but the tiny little creature they’d made together and would soon christen Hunter Donovan Kittredge had other ideas.
He’d come into the world in a fury, scaring his parents half to death, right there in the house where everything else had happened.
And later, after they’d gone into town to make sure everything was as it should be, they took him back home and found themselves standing over his little bassinet. Both of them so strung out by the powe
rful love they felt for this tiny, scrunched-faced creature that Riley was surprised either one of them could breathe.
It’s like he knew, Rae had whispered. He needed to be born here. To make sure there were no more ghosts.
Riley knew the truth. Hunter was magical.
For any number of reasons, but one of them was that his appearance had prompted Riley to do the unthinkable and sit down with his father, his son’s clearly besotted new grandfather, and lift a few beers.
They didn’t talk about much.
But they went ahead and made it a standing thing.
Magic.
Today, he found his wife and child cuddled up in the armchair in the living room when he came inside. And he thought, as always, that Rae could never be more beautiful to him.
Until she was.
Like this morning, nursing Hunter with a tender smile on her face that made him think about the way they’d ended up on the floor right here in this room when they’d found their way back to each other. The way they’d christened that comfortable old couch when it was new and they were too. It made him think about the way she’d looked up at a church picnic a lifetime ago and sent a fourteen-year-old kid who’d thought he was a man reeling.
She looked up and smiled at him, and she was home. His home.
“I love you,” he told her, and saw the delight in her eyes and the way it melted quickly into that sweet, hot heat. “God, Rae. I love you so much.”
“I love you too,” she said. “And I’m glad you feel that way, because there’s something you’re going to have to face, Riley. It’s happening.”
He laughed, shrugging out of his cold weather gear. He went over to sit on the arm of the chair and waited until the baby finished feeding. Then he maneuvered Hunter to his shoulder to see about the burping.
“Ignoring it isn’t going to make it go away,” Rae warned him. She stretched as she got up from the chair, looking sleepy and grumpy and entirely his.
Secret Nights with a Cowboy Page 27