Chapter Thirteen
Dana
D ana didn’t know what to make of a question she hadn’t expected. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t like reminders of Tanner. You avoid having anything to do with his family. You dodge questions about him from fans. And yet, here we are.” He gestured between them. “I’m a reminder of him. I’m friends with his family. And you’re keeping me secret.”
“You didn’t want anyone to know about us, either.”
“Not at first,” Levi said, agreeing with her. Odd, the way disappointment beat at her heart over that. “Only because I didn’t want to hurt other people, but I finally figured out that the only people we’re really hurting are us. What if I said I want you to keep what Otto left you? What if I told you I want more from you than what we’ve got now? That maybe we could work on a future together?”
Panic shoved disappointment aside, as if sensing she’d escaped from one trap only to be lured into another. He was offering her what Tanner had wanted and she’d declined. What kind of hypocrite would she be if she accepted?
“I wasn’t looking for anything permanent. You knew that,” she said.
She still wasn’t. She couldn’t go through that again—the incredible high of falling in love, the intense emotions of fighting and making up, then the crushing disillusionment as love slowly faded and the reality that a battlefield was what their life together was destined to be settled in. The sense of entrapment. Her skin crawled with panic, but she wouldn’t—she couldn’t —back down.
She liked what she and Levi had established between them. It was fun. It was easy. So far, they could both look back on this period without any regrets. If they ran into each other again, they might even be able to pick up where they left off—but only as long as there were no hard feelings between them.
There were no hard feelings on her part. She was beginning to think the opposite might not be true.
“You were looking for something, though. What was it?” he asked.
She lashed out, using the first thing that popped into her head. “ Proof of life. Everyone treats me as if I’m grieving. As if I’d died, too. You can’t imagine how lonely that is.”
She wished she could take back what she’d said. She didn’t want sympathy from him. She’d had far too much from others already. She braced herself for it.
She didn’t get it.
“Are you? Grieving?” he asked. He sounded more curious than sympathetic.
Very well. He’d asked for this.
“You wanted to know why I chose you,” she said, rather than answering his last question directly. “It’s because I can trust you.” She twisted her fingers together, sorting her words. “I’ve never told anyone this. Tanner and I… We had a fight, right before his last ride. I’d just found out I was pregnant, and I wasn’t happy about it. I wanted so badly to make it to finals. He, on the other hand, was ecstatic. He admitted he planned it. He kept talking about how we’d buy a place in Grand and start our own business. I told him I was leaving.” She’d only gone to his last ride for the sake of public appearances. Another mistake on her part. “After the accident, no one knew we’d split up. Letting people believe I was grieving gave me the privacy I needed. I didn’t know what to do about the pregnancy, but because people were watching me, I kept on competing. Then Crackerjack threw me, and later that night, I miscarried.” She’d been three months along—just long enough to come to terms with the idea of the new little life about to change the direction of hers. “I was relieved and guilty and sad, and so, so many things about it.”
“Those all sound like pretty normal reactions to me.” His sideways glance reserved any judgment. “You’re human. Humans have complex emotions.” The first hint of sympathy intruded. “And that’s a pretty big secret to keep to yourself.”
“Yes, well, it’s all in the past,” she said lightly. She hated that she’d made him feel sorry for her. She didn’t want to bare any more of her soul. That wasn’t what their relationship was about.
They’d reached Otto’s by now. The rain began to let up. The horses huddled peacefully together, wet flanks pinpointed by the truck’s headlights, unbothered by their arrival. She popped the passenger door open, then glanced at him over her shoulder, sliding desire into her eyes.
“We’ve talked enough for one night,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
*
Levi
Levi didn’t follow her straightaway. The pregnancy news hit him hard. He had complex, somewhat intense, and definitely conflicting emotions about that, himself.
Tanner had been a good friend. He’d been so damned likeable . Levi had so many happy memories of him.
None of which meant he’d been blind to Tanner’s faults, and a big one was that he’d rarely heard the word no in his life. His family had always made sure he got whatever he wanted—and he was always so grateful, so appreciative, that no one saw how badly they’d spoiled him. Not until Dana.
Now, she was the one paying the price.
It’s because I can trust you.
A point in Levi’s favor, considering how badly she’d been betrayed by someone she’d loved. And she had loved Tanner. He’d seen them together. That their relationship had ended the morning of Tanner’s last ride—for her, at least—wasn’t in doubt, although she had some residual issues to resolve on that front.
He’d studied animal behavior. Humans were part of the animal kingdom, and regardless of species, grief was an individual experience. Hers was all bunched up with anger to the point she’d shut down to survive.
But being considered trustworthy by her…being safe. From a man’s point of view, it ranked up there with let’s be friends and he’d have none of that.
He didn’t sleep with his friends. He didn’t reach for them in the night and bury himself inside them, enjoying the heat in their voices in the darkness as they told him what they liked, or the sweet smell of their hair as he gripped it in his hands, breathing it in. He didn’t run his fingertips over their naked skin, or whisper what he’d like for them to do to him in return.
He was pretty sure she didn’t enjoy her friends that way either, no matter how lonely she was. She was ready to move on—another good thing—but she didn’t seem to know how to go about it.
So far, she was going about it the wrong way.
He didn’t know how to make things right for her, other than to follow her lead until one of them figured it out.
The water-slickened, over-long grass had been flattened by the rain. She’d taken her shoes off, and they dangled by delicate straps from her fingers. She didn’t want pity from him. She’d made that perfectly clear. But damned if she didn’t look so alone .
It killed him to see it.
He got out of the truck and followed her to her trailer.
*
He woke tired the next morning with the lingering sense that something was off, but no time to pursue it.
He eased from the bed, trying not to disturb her as he quietly gathered his clothes, then got dressed on the damp grass outside with the fresh air cooling his skin. The sun had returned from hiatus and peeked at him through the cottonwoods as he buttoned his jeans.
He grabbed breakfast to go from the cookhouse at the Endeavour before heading straight to his office.
Midmorning, he headed down to the pens to check on the bull calves in his program. He was at the fence, watching them play in the muck from the previous day’s rain, head-butting each other and kicking their heels, when Ryan joined him.
“I like the looks of that one,” Ryan said, singling out a roan-colored, longhorn cross.
“You would,” Levi replied. “He’s got a mean streak to him. My money’s on the white-spotted gray.” He pointed.
Ryan dismissed the dappled gray. “If that runt was human, he’d be a hairdresser.”
Levi’s lips twitched. “Maybe so, but he’d be a fast one.”
The two men discussed the merits of each of the calves for a few minutes, then quietly watched for a few moments more.
“What are your plans now that Otto’s left his herd to you?” Ryan finally asked.
“You mean with the horses, or my job here?”
“Both, I guess.”
“I’m not sure,” Levi said. “A lot depends on Dana and Ford and what they’d like to do.”
Ryan rested a boot on the bottom rail of the fence. “You can count Dana out. She won’t stick around. She’s more interested in barrel racing than she is in breeding. And why wouldn’t she be? Put the right horse under her, and she stands to make a whole lot more money riding than selling.”
She’d have the right horse under her soon enough. “Why can’t she do both?”
“She could.” Ryan’s gaze sharpened. “But it would require making compromises with her two partners, and does Ford seem like the compromising type to you?”
About as much as Ryan, although when it came to making business compromises, Levi would put his money on Ford, the more forthright of the two. Ryan kept his cards close to his chest. Ford laid them all on the table.
“I’d buy you all out in a year,” Ryan said. “I’d move the whole operation here. You could add it to your bull breeding program. You’d have cash in your pocket as well as a steady income from it.”
“Because horses and bulls are such similar animals,” Levi said dryly, and Ryan let loose a rare laugh.
“Just something for you to think about,” he said.
Nix McCray joined them. Nix was another one of Ryan’s new hires. He came from Texas, a former rodeo buddy of Miles Decker’s, here to offer professional bull riding training. Levi liked him.
“What’s your take on that puny little gray dapple?” Ryan asked Nix, shifting the conversation off Otto’s horses, to Levi’s relief.
*
That evening, before his truck had rolled to a stop, Levi finally figured out why he’d felt something was wrong.
Lady remained penned with the stallion, but Dana’s truck and trailer were gone.
He entered the cabin to see if she’d left anything else behind and found an envelope on the table. A note. She’d left him a note .
He picked it up. Tapped it against his palm. Opened it.
A piece of paper fell out. It didn’t say much, other than that Ryan had agreed she could take Tanoa, under conditions she’d meet, and her father would collect both horses for her in a month.
He should have paid more attention to his instincts. He’d overlooked how good she was at deflection—mostly because it had been working out in his favor. When she didn’t want to talk, particularly about feelings, she turned to sex.
They’d had a lot of sex over the past week or so, including last night.
He should have understood what was really going on. For her, sharing confidences was a lot more intimate than sex. She trusted him, but she didn’t want him to get close because she’d then have to put that trust to the test. Tanner had really messed with her head.
Levi’s head cleared. She had feelings for him. He knew it as surely as he knew how he felt about her. The intensity of them was what scared her, and he chose to take her running from him as a good sign. It meant sex was no longer working for her as an adequate deflection for the way she felt about him.
He crushed the note in his hand. He’d give her the month. Then, when she came for Lady and Tanoa, they were going to have the talk she’d distracted him from long enough.
She might have a problem with sharing her feelings, but he didn’t have the same reservations.