Chapter Fourteen
I need to get a fucking grip.
I knew Juni was never going to stick around, not long-term anyway, and I shouldn’t be bothered by the idea that in a few months or however long it takes, she’ll be gone. And I would have helped her to do so.
That’s the right thing to do, help her get back on her feet now she’s escaped her abusive husband, so why the fuck is it messing me up so bad?
I turn over in bed, listening to the sounds from her room.
The squeak of a floorboard, the brush of fabric.
Noise travels through this house quite easily; it’s how I like it since I can’t have eyes in the back of my head and my kids like to get up to all sorts of trouble when I’m not looking.
But listening to every single sound Juni makes has my skin feeling entirely too tight.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had any response to a woman. My ex, the kids’ mother, fucked me up bad, it still has me questioning everything about myself. Why wasn’t I good enough for her? What did I do wrong? What did I do to push her away and into another man’s arms?
I try not to spiral about it, especially not when the deep dive into the past produces questions about the present. One day I have to confront the hardest day of my life. The day I found out that my daughter wasn’t biologically mine.
Make no mistake, Rosie is my daughter. She doesn’t have my DNA, but she is mine.
Nothing will ever change that, no test, no secrets or lies.
Rosie is my daughter, and I will always treat her as such.
Those two children are my entire life, my entire world.
They are the reason I keep going, keep pushing to be better. For them.
I’d only found out about Rosie’s paternity after she was born; she was barely a year old at the time.
I hadn’t suspected the cheating, not once, and it only came to light because I walked in on my wife being fucked by one of the workers we had employed here on the ranch.
I hadn’t realized anything was wrong between us, we were still sleeping together, going on dates, movie nights, and family dinners, but she had been cheating for years. Different men in our home.
The confrontation had led to her packing a bag and leaving.
I got the divorce papers a week later, and after that had been completed, she requested to relinquish her rights to the children. She didn’t want to be their mother.
So, I didn’t fight it and she hasn’t seen them since.
It’s been four years, six months and eight days since my kids have seen her face.
It’s been easier on Rosie, she was so young when she left, she doesn’t remember her.
She doesn’t ask questions about her and continues on as if the woman doesn’t exist, but Caleb…
He didn’t truly understand what was happening when everything blew up, he was just confused.
He asked for his mom every night and cried when I had to tell him she wasn’t coming back.
It would have been easier if she had died, which is a fucking terrible thing to think, but how the fuck am I meant to tell my son his mother—who he idolized — didn’t want to be here.
I don’t lie to my kids if I can help it.
As the months went by, Caleb grew angry. He lashed out at me, at his teachers, and his friends at school. He would throw things and hit his hands on the wall. Caleb was so young, entirely too innocent to be harboring all this hurt, so I put him in therapy.
It helped, but it also didn’t.
The anger and resentment eased, but my boy wasn’t the same. He turned quiet and untrusting, and no amount of talking or therapy changed that.
He doesn’t like meeting new people, especially not if they’re just passing through. It took him a little while to warm up to Niamh, but when he realized she was sticking around, he started opening up a little more.
He still asks about his mother. Every few months he’ll wake up in the middle of the night and come to me, curl up into my side and say the same question he always did.
“Did you hear from her yet?” He’d ask.
My arm would tighten as if I could hold all his broken pieces together, and I’d answer, “I haven’t, buddy. I’m sorry.”
He’d shrug it off like it wasn’t a big deal, but then he’d go and hide, and I’d have to listen to him cry.
The doctors say it will get easier with age, that when he starts to understand the world outside of his own little childhood bubble, it’ll make sense to him.
But I think the damage will always be there.
The pain she caused him is irreparable, and I just have to guide him through it.
These are the things that can change a person’s path; it can poison a once bright future, and I won’t let that happen to him.
I haven’t dated since; there’s been the odd hook-up, when the itch got too hard to scratch myself, but they’ve never been anything more than a one-night stand. I won’t say there hasn’t been attempts; I just haven’t been interested in making something more again.
It fucking hurt.
It still hurts.
I shouldn’t have even attempted love in the first place, not when love is what got my mom killed, but if I had done that, my kids wouldn’t be here. So, I don’t regret it, but that doesn’t mean this shit is easy.
When silence finally falls and I can no longer hear Juni moving around in her bedroom, I get up. I can help her and keep her at arm’s length. She’s got her own demons to fight, it wouldn’t be fair to bundle mine on top of hers too, no matter how much I want to gravitate toward her.
Running my hand down my face, I move into the living room and collapse on the couch.
Heavy nights like these always leave me wanting to escape that bedroom.
Too many memories there, too many questions, so I tend to find peace on the couch.
It does get easier; there’s just the odd days here and there that have that old ache in my chest resurfacing.
Like an old wound that didn’t heal quite right and smarts every now and then to remind you that it never really went away.
Juni walks at my side Monday morning, dressed and ready for whatever task I can give her. She signed the contract to start working here the moment I presented it to her. Didn’t even read it through, which had made me pause.
“You’re not going to read it?” I’d asked as her pen scratched over the line where her signature needed to be.
“It’s just work stuff?” She had paused then, flicking her deep brown eyes to me, her lashes impossibly long and curled. The bruise on her face had stood out, attempting to hide the dusting of freckles on her nose and cheeks
“You should read any contract that is put in front of you,” I told her. “I could have put anything in there.”
“Did you?” She’d cocked her head at me, waiting.
“Well, no, but that is beside the point.”
“I trust you,” she finished signing her name without a hint of hesitation and then slid it toward me before she’d asked, “When do I start?”
She didn’t even ask how much I would be paying her or what hours were expected.
Granted, the pay is good, better than it would be anywhere else, and the hours are on a shift pattern.
Summer here is brutal and if we forced our workers to be out in it every day for hours on end, we’d have no workers left.
So, we shift work and try to keep people out of the sun during the hottest parts of the day.
I know Niamh is also going to speak with her, see if she wants to take a few shifts at the bar to supplement her money.
Following the path to the stables, I introduce Juni to the fourteen horses that call this barn their home.
They’re the riding horses for the tours we do throughout the year, a good bunch that have been trained for this reason and they’re great with new people.
Juni stops at a red mare, her eyes turning sad when she lifts her hand to stroke down the mare's muzzle.
“She looks like Ginger,” Juni whispers.
Something in my chest twists. I need to figure out a way to get her horse back, but right now, doing so would alert Cal to where she is, and for as long as I can, I want to give her some damn peace from him.
“Her name is Loni,” I tell her.
“That’s sweet,” the mare lifts her head to Juni’s shoulder and tucks it around, tugging her closer. Juni lets out a startled laugh, tripping forward and only just managing to catch herself on the door.
“She likes to cuddle,” I laugh. “Rosie loves her.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you too.” She tells the horse, a smile pulling up her pretty plump mouth as she looks back at me from over her shoulder. “I’ve got it from here.”
“You sure?”
I wasn’t sure what else I could give her other than stable work, cleaning out the stalls, replenishing feeds and all that, because I didn’t really think this through.
“Absolutely,” she nods confidently. “Go to work, Silas. I’m fine.”
“Alright,” I rub at the nape of my neck, “Just call if you need anything.”
“I will,” she returns her attention to Loni, so I take that as my cue to leave.
She’ll be fine here, and I’m only around the corner teaching a starter class on the basics of riding.
We do sessions like this every week, and they always book out, so I’ll be kept busy.
Busy enough, I won’t be thinking about the blonde in the stable’s next door or how the shorts she put on this morning stuck to the shape of her like a second skin.
Juni has curves I crave to explore. With my hands, my goddamn mouth, scrape my teeth over her skin.
The creases of her ass had peeked out the bottoms of those shorts, moving into toned, strong thighs and sculpted calves and a pair of red cowboy boots that had scuffs on the toes.
I certainly won’t be thinking about the way her mouth turned up at the corner in a sexy little grin that had teased at the person she’s hiding underneath.
Fuck. I’m a terrible human being.
Fucking awful.
She needs to heal. She doesn’t need me lusting after her, especially not when she’s just left the relationship she has.
It just hammers in the need to put space between us.
It’ll be hard with her living in my house, but I’ve gone this long; I can continue at this pace.
I won’t have her living anywhere else, she’s safest under my roof where I can watch out for her.
I’ll be damned if that fuck head she calls a husband gets within fifty feet of her.
Still makes me a piece of shit to even be looking at her the way I am.
“Alright,” I yell to the group of students waiting outside the riding ring, “Get in the ring. A horse will pick you; don’t force it, you’ll get hurt. If a horse doesn’t pick you, get the fuck off my property, got it?”