CHAPTER 35 #2
“That’s not possible,” my father sneered. “The bank?—”
“It’s not impossible.” I felt the careful, terrifying calm in Colt’s voice as it rumbled through his chest. “I worked my ass off for the last ten years to help her pay it back, then I sold a portion of my land from my father’s ranch to pay the rest.” He said it like it was nothing.
Like it was a single stone in a wall he’d been building for years.
The silence that followed pressed against my chest until I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“Why?” I looked at Colt, my vision swimming with shock and something wild and painful that I didn’t dare name. This ranch, this land, it meant everything to him. “Why would you do that for her?”
He finally looked down at me, and the world narrowed to just us standing there. His eyes, the same blue that haunted my dreams, searched mine with a rawness that made my chest ache.
“I didn’t do it for her,” he whispered. Then, he gently reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, his hand shaking just enough for me to notice. He leaned in, so close I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Always for you.”
The words struck bone.
My father’s face flashed with disbelief, outrage, then the cold calculation of a man who’d never known what it meant to lose. For a second, he looked older than I’d ever seen him, lines of power and privilege suddenly cut deep with panic.
“I’m going to call my lawyers,” my father snarled as he reached for his phone.
“Go ahead.” Colt shrugged. “I can have the paperwork couriered to your office before you get back to the city.”
My father looked at me, and if Colt wasn’t holding me against him, I probably would have cowered. “You think this is over?”
“All of June’s land has been restructured in a new Trust for Blaire,” Colt interrupted his threat, and there was a finality to his words. “We went through every step. It’s untouchable.”
I felt his words in my teeth, my gut, behind my breastbone.
He did that for me.
He’d cut out pieces of his own legacy, the land he’d lived and bled and breathed, just so my future could not be weaponized by the man in front of me.
If there were any remaining walls between us, they would have collapsed with his words.
All that remained was something terrifyingly tender, a wild hope I hardly recognized as my own.
“Bullshit,” my father seethed. “I’ve sacrificed too much for you to just throw it all away, Blaire.”
“That’s enough,” Mr. Calloway said, and though he didn’t raise his voice, it cut through every one of us.
He shifted his weight, boots scuffing against the porch, and looked at me the way a rancher sizes up a storm, narrow-eyed and entirely without fear. Then he turned, facing my father.
“You think you know something about sacrifice?” His voice was like sandpaper and old whiskey.
“I’ve lived on this land my whole life. I’ve chosen this land and my family time and time again.
You think this ranch is just dirt and fence posts?
It’s the sum of every heartbreak and every homecoming.
It’s the sweat poured into the soil and the way you love your children more than you love your own damn self.
You want to talk about what a man gives up for the people he loves?
” Mr. Calloway looked right at Colt, before he wrapped his hand around the back of his son’s neck, unflinching and real.
“A man works this earth so hard he forgets how to say the things that matter. Sometimes he fumbles it. Sometimes he fucks it up so bad the only thing left is to keep going and hope he gets a second chance to do it right.”
He looked at me. “There isn’t a thing in this world my boy wouldn’t give up for you. He’s been losing sleep and about half his mind for a decade, waiting on the chance that you’d come home and let him try again.”
I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted salt on my lips. I blinked hard, trying to focus on anything other than the ache in my chest that made it impossible to breathe.
“There are two different kinds of men in the world, Blaire,” Mr. Calloway went on.
“You’ve had both. One who did anything to keep you, even if it meant breaking you to fit his own design.
” He nodded toward Grant, but I didn’t look away from him.
“And the other let you go when it killed him to do it, then spent every day since working himself to the bone making sure you had solid ground to land on, even if that ground never brought you back to him.” He held my gaze without wavering.
Colt’s arm trembled around me as he tightened his hold.
All the anger and regret and battered hope in the world was in the heat of his palm and the steadiness he tried to muster just for me.
He pressed his face into my neck, his breath warm against my pulse point, and the brush of his mustache sent a shiver down my spine.
“Enough of this nonsense. Blaire, get your things.” The sound of my father’s voice made me flinch. “You have a job in Raleigh. We have a wedding we have to deal with. You have five minutes,” he said, each word weighted with consequences.
I looked at my father, and I watched his eyes sweep over me, calculating the losses and gains like I was just another column in his ledger.
Then my gaze flicked to Grant who still stood beside my father, hands in his pockets, jaw working hard as he tried to keep control of his smug, easy smile.
But his gaze was zeroed in on where Colt still held me.
I laced my fingers through Colt’s, gripping his hand like a lifeline.
His skin told stories my father would never be able to read.
Every callous was a sacrifice, each crease a burden shouldered for someone else’s sake.
I thought of Ruby’s tiny fingers wrapped around his thumb, the way she looked up at him like she’d never questioned the way he loved her.
My chest constricted, vision swimming as rage and protectiveness collided.
I couldn’t bear the thought of her ever standing where I stood now, desperate for a love that should’ve been given freely.
This was my family now. Colt, Ruby, and me, and I’d fight like hell to protect it.
I turned back to my father, and my chest cracked open with grief not just for the woman I’d become, but for the child I once was. I used to curl under my blankets after my mama tucked me in, and I would pray for him to love me enough to come back.
Ruby would never stand where I stood now, trembling with the pathetic hope that maybe this time, just this time, she might be enough.
Her mother had left just as my father had left me, but I would choose Ruby every day. I would fill her doubt with so much love that she never questioned it for even a moment.
“Get off this land,” I snapped, my words hard and sure, and this time, the tremor was gone. “Don’t come back.”
For a heartbeat the whole world stilled, the porch and the yard and the sky itself contracting to the flash of my father’s eyes and the slack-jawed shock twisting Grant’s face.
My father’s lips pinched, the first hint of real anger seeping into his voice as he searched for some new weapon.
“You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know what this will cost.” There was the threat he always delivered.
He’d always measured love in ledger lines, and he couldn’t help but reach for it now, even as the ground fell away beneath him. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream.
“You can take your money and your name and go back to your world.” Every word felt like letting go of the woman I had become under his thumb. “I don’t want either.”
Colt’s hand steadied against me.
“Blaire, you are my daughter?—”
I didn’t let him finish. “I am my mother’s daughter. Not yours.”
His head snapped back at my words, and he blinked.
I met his gaze and held it, letting him see exactly how serious I was. “I have your drafts, timelines, and every ‘private matter’ you made me scrub. If you ever come here and threaten my family again, I’ll leak them to the press myself.”
Colt’s hand shuddered against me.
I watched the calculations tick behind my father’s eyes, the way he weighed which of us would do the most damage if cornered. “You’ll regret this, Blaire.” He shook his head. “And don’t come calling me when you do.”
Grant let out a low chuckle, and he looked at me with a smile that would have made me cower just a few weeks ago. “You think this is noble? You think this is love? He’s going to let you rot here, same as your mother did.”
One second Colt’s hand was on my waist, the next he was gone. A streak of rage hurtling down the porch. Colt’s fist caught Grant square in the face with a sickening crack that echoed through the yard like a gunshot.
Grant went down hard, crumpling backward onto the gravel, his expensive shoes skittering up dust. His hands clutched at his nose as blood poured between his fingers.
Colt loomed over Grant, chest heaving, fists still clenched at his sides. “Don’t talk about her mother,” he said, and his voice was pure, undiluted fury. “Don’t you dare look at my girl ever again.”
Grant glared up at Colt with wild, watering eyes, then spat a bright red streak onto the dirt at Colt’s boots. No one moved for a long moment then Mr. Calloway walked down the stairs and crouched beside Grant with a handkerchief outstretched.
“Here,” he said quietly, voice stripped of any judgment. “It’ll help slow the bleeding.”
Grant batted it away, more child than man, then staggered to his feet, swaying a little. His nose was already swelling, his eyes watering with pain.
“You’re both a fucking joke,” he whined, the words muffled and wet.
“Go,” I said, and he did, stumbling after my father like a wounded dog.
Colt stood in the dust, his shoulders rigid. His knuckles were split, a smear of Grant’s blood across them. He didn’t move until my father and Grant had climbed into the SUV and disappeared over the horizon in a cloud of dust.
Even then, he stared at his hands, breathing hard. I stepped down from the porch, the soles of my feet hitting the sun-warmed wood.
Colt looked up at me then, and there was so much in his eyes I thought I might drown in them. Grief and relief, yes, but also a kind of awe. Like he finally let himself believe I was real and here and his.
I walked to him, standing so close I could smell the sweat and the iron and the faint hint of his cologne. “You didn’t have to do that,” I said, and his mouth twitched.
“He had it coming.” His gaze held mine, his eyes searching.
I reached out and traced my fingers over his hand, below his busted knuckles. “Does it hurt?”
A flicker of emotion crossed his face, vulnerability shining through. “Not anymore. Not as long as I have you.”