Chapter 39
thirty-nine
Briar stood on Tarr’s front porch and watched her dog trot down the street behind him. Wiggins caught up to her boyfriend—ex-boyfriend now?—easily and settled into an easy walk at the cowboy’s side.
Tarr didn’t move in an angry way, and he hadn’t gotten in his truck and driven away.
Briar looked down at the kneepads she’d collected as she’d followed Tarr outside. She breathed out, everything inside her that had tightened and gotten boxed up during her conversation with Tarr now deflating.
I’m in love with you, Briar.
Tears pricked her eyes, and Briar moved to the top step and slumped to a sitting position. She looked down the road where Tarr had gone, but she couldn’t see him anymore.
“What just happened?” she asked herself and the blue-blue sky surrounding her.
She’d spent the afternoon making one of Tarr’s favorite soups, because he’d been working so hard to finish his house.
He wanted to move into it desperately, and Briar had thought if she brought him dinner and just sat with him, he’d be able to keep working on the floor installation.
She should’ve known he’d question her about her decision not to try to make contact with her parents.
That was what Tarr did, and Briar didn’t hate it.
Sometimes, his questions helped her iron flat her own thoughts and feelings, and she’d been able to find her way through the maze of them to what she should do—or not do.
“I don’t want to be rejected by my own blood,” she whispered.
But being rejected by Tarr was far, far worse.
He has to come back here, she thought, and part of her wanted to get behind the wheel of her SUV and just start driving. It didn’t matter what direction she went in; she just needed to go.
She stayed put, because Briar didn’t want to run from Tarr. He did have to come back here, and Briar wanted to be there when he did.
She wouldn’t run, and Tarr had promised he wouldn’t abandon her. She checked the road again, her pulse increasing in volume in her ears. He had walked away, but she told herself that everyone deserved a few minutes—or an hour, whatever—to clear their head.
Tarr had given her so much time, in so many instances, to gather her thoughts, or defer a hard conversation she didn’t want to have. She could give him whatever he needed.
“He’s not a fool,” she said to his house. “He’s hardworking, and smart, and loyal.”
With her spoken words, a new door opened in Briar’s heart, then her soul. “Tarr is loyal.”
And not only to Tucker and Bobbie Jo, or his rodeo brothers, or the animals he cared for and trained.
Tarr had been nothing but loyal and true to Briar herself.
“I can trust him.” Her voice rang with truth, and tears rushed into Briar’s eyes and right down her face. She wasn’t sure if she’d been holding herself back from trusting Tarr, but she’d never realized or acknowledged that she did, in fact, trust the cowboy.
“A cowboy.” She scoffed, but she couldn’t look away from the dirt road where Tarr had last been. Yes, she trusted a cowboy, and a former bull rider at that.
“Miracles do happen,” she whispered, and she leaned over her knees and cradled her head in her arms as she closed her eyes. “Lord, I need more miracles, please.”
Even if she didn’t deserve them, she prayed that God would give her the words she needed to explain everything to Tarr. She prayed God could give him a forgiving heart. She begged the Lord to provide a way for her and Tarr to find their way back together.
“We could be a family together,” she said. “Me and him, and then neither of us are alone, and it doesn’t matter where our blood comes from.”
Kristie had said something similar when Briar had talked to her about her parents not attending her wedding. She lifted her head and navigated to those texts now, needing the reassurance of them.
Honestly, Kristie said. It was a much better wedding without them there. If they had come, it would’ve been so stressful, and I would’ve been on-edge the whole time.
They’d chatted a little bit about that, and then Kristie had said, I’m not sure I made the right decision by reaching out to them. They know where I am, and they can reach out to me any time they want—and they don’t.
Briar’s situation wasn’t exactly like Kristie’s, especially since her parents didn’t know where she was. They didn’t have her phone number. For all they knew, she’d fled the continent and could be anywhere.
She sat there with those thoughts, the way she had in the past, trying to find how she felt about these facts.
She arrived right back where she’d been before bringing up this topic with Tarr. “I don’t miss them,” she whispered. “I know that’s sad, but I don’t. I don’t want to be the Briar I was in Canada. I can’t go back, and I don’t want anyone from that time of my life in this chapter of it.”
Her resolve to not reach out to her parents solidified, and Briar wasn’t doing it out of spite or hurt.
“Or preservation,” she murmured. It simply felt like the right thing to do, and she knew that sometimes those things morphed and shifted as time went on.
So what felt right today might change in five years, or ten, or twenty.
When Briar thought that far ahead, she saw herself on this farm, with a dog, and maybe a cat, and all of Bobbie Jo’s goats.
And Tarr?
“Yes,” she said as the picture came into clear focus. “Yes, Tarr is there with me. I’m with him.”
She closed her eyes and let the fantasies roll through her head as if someone had made a movie of her future just for her.
Do you love him?
That question rolled through her body and soul, and Briar tried to riddle through the complicated emotions, former promises she’d made to herself, and miles of fear to find the answer.
She wasn’t sure, but as Tarr’s words filled her ears again—I’m in love with you, Briar. I know you’re lovable, because I love you—Briar decided she didn’t have to know the answers to every question that entered her mind.
She knew she wanted Tarr in her life long-term. She wanted him to be her family. She didn’t want to be alone anymore, and more specifically, she wanted to share every aspect of her life with none other than Tarr Olson.
Now, she just needed him to come back so she could tell him.