Chapter Eleven
“T he love of my life,” Wilder repeated, while his heart did its level best to explode straight out of his chest, in a way that he expected would make a cardiac event seem tame. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But Cat did not look away. She did not let go .
“I do know what I’m talking about,” she told him, with a quiet certainty that shook him. “Because I’m right here. I was there at the Wolf Den that night and I was there every night since, but it was very clear that while you didn’t want to be there, you couldn’t stay away.”
“And I should have,” he gritted out.
He knew he should get up now. He knew he should get her hands off him and put his body where his mouth was.
But her eyes were so blue.
And he couldn’t seem to tear himself away.
“I was also there yesterday, when you married me in front of our family and celebrated that marriage in front of our friends and neighbors,” Cat said in that same quiet and sure way. “Most importantly, I was there last night. All of last night. When you, who made us wait to have sex until marriage, took my virginity in your own bed. In this cabin I’m pretty sure you built yourself. And do you think that I don’t know that this is not how you normally behave?”
That gaze of hers was beginning to feel like a spotlight, and he hated it.
He told himself he hated it, because it was that or ask himself how she knew all these things he’d never said directly. That he’d never brought a woman to the ranch, much less this cabin that he and his brothers had built together the summer he was twenty-five.
That he had treated her like something special from the start.
“How would you know anything about how I behave?” he asked anyway, scowling, and he had never felt less… himself .
That was what he told himself, anyway. Because he had made such a study of being unbothered by everything. He had made it his entire personality. Wilder Carey was never wound up. He was entertaining and always amused. Good for a laugh and always easy-going, as if everything rolled right off of him.
Nothing was rolling today. He felt as if every word she spoke was a boulder and it was sitting directly on top of him.
“I told you this before,” Cat said.
She took her hand off of his face, and the thing was, he wanted her to put it back, because everything about her was a challenge and a problem and he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about it.
Except this. Except getting away from her, by a divorce because he couldn’t manage to just stop going to see her . Which is what he should have done from the start.
“Harlan is the good one,” Cat told him, like she was reading a book. She was huddled up in her blanket, her hair a dark mess that he wanted—desperately—to feel all around him again, like a curtain. He had rosemary and lavender all over his skin, and he couldn’t taste anything in his mouth but that sugar of hers, no matter how much coffee he drank. “You and Ryder are the naughty ones, Boone is a sweetheart, and Knox is a problem.” She shrugged at the look on his face. “That’s the legend of the Carey Brothers, Wilder. And you know it. Every single woman in Cowboy Points, and probably all of Montana too, knows exactly how it is that you and your brothers achieved your reputations.”
His heart was thudding all the time now, much too hard. He was surprised he was still functioning.
“You don’t understand,” Wilder said, feeling something like panicked when that should have been impossible. “Ryder and I really are bad, and I don’t mean in bars.”
She frowned as if she was about to launch into a new argument, but she stopped herself. “What do you mean by that?”
He stared back at her, at this woman who he should never have touched in the first place. This woman who had somehow insinuated herself in between his bones, so he couldn’t take a breath without feeling her, everywhere.
Wilder didn’t understand what sorcery it was that she’d wielded that they’d managed to end up here. Cat in his bed. Cat in this cabin, where he’d never even considered bringing another woman, because he kept his indiscretions in hotel rooms and houses that he could leave behind when he went.
And before her, he always, always went.
Usually before first light.
“My mother was sick,” he found himself saying, haltingly. Because her blue gaze didn’t waver. Because it was cold and she was wrapped up in a blanket and she looked as if she intended to sit there forever. And this was never a story he’d had to tell. He and Ryder never spoke of it, because they didn’t have to. They knew. “Ryder and I were only five or six, but we got into everything. My dad was a mess, understandably, and so my mother’s cousin came to stay. She was supposed to take care of us. As far as I know, Harlan was a saint that summer, but Ryder and I…”
He shook his head. His throat hurt. Wilder regretted even starting down this road.
“What do you mean?” Cat was asking. “You were two little boys. What were you supposed to do?”
Wilder blew out a breath. “Cousin Roberta couldn’t keep us quiet and one day, we got in to see our mother while she was supposed to be sleeping. We jumped all over her, the way we always did, until her cousin had to drag us out. She told us it was our fault.”
“Your fault?” Cat’s voice was barely above a whisper. Her eyes never left his. “What could possibly have been your fault?”
This, he understood, was what he’d most wanted to avoid. Always.
And the person he least wanted to tell this part to was Cat. But he knew that she would accept nothing less than the truth—and anyway, it would solve all their problems, wouldn’t it? She would see who he really was, who he’d been even as a small boy, and that would be the end of love of your life discussions.
This conversation was a mercy killing, that was all.
“We made our mom suffer,” Wilder said, matter-of-factly. “Roberta smacked us and she made sure we listened after that. Every day for the rest of the summer she would wake us up and remind us that every bit of pain our mother felt, every labored breath, could have been easier. We made it harder. We made it hurt.”
There , he thought. It was done.
Now there was nothing left but watching her walk away, the way he should have done before any of this happened.
Cat seemed to forget that she was wearing a blanket. Because it was cold out here, with frost on the yard and a snowstorm brewing in the far hills, and she reached over and got her hands on him again.
Not seeming to notice when the blanket fell open and let the cold in.
“Wilder. Listen to me.” Her palms were on his cheeks, and it was like her blue eyes were tearing him open. “Have you been carrying this around your whole life? You have to know that you didn’t make her sick. You didn’t hurt her. That’s not how it works.”
All he could do was swallow, hard, and shake his head. “When we were older, we each asked our dad individually what had been going on that summer. Was Mom hurting that whole time, that kind of thing. And he told us—separately—that she could have taken more medication to address the pain, but it made her sleep. And she didn’t want to miss what moments she had left, so she refused it.”
He stared at her, waiting for her to understand, and to recoil.
To look at him in the horror he deserved.
“Because she was your mother,” Cat said softly, and her eyes looked too full, almost like she wanted to cry. He didn’t understand. “She loved you. She wanted to savor the moments that she had.”
“I think that’s just a way to pretty it up,” Wilder managed to scratch out. “Cousin Roberta was right. We were responsible, no matter what shine you try to put on it.”
Cat stared at him for so long that he couldn’t take it, and the cold was a factor. Why wasn’t she treating it like one?
He stood, picking her up again and carrying her inside, then depositing her on his couch. He stoked the fire in the stove. Then he went back out and fetched their coffee, planting hers down in front of her.
“What?” he all but growled when she smiled at him.
Because why would she smile at him after what he’d just told her?
It actually made his chest hurt.
“It’s difficult for me to take this seriously,” Cat said, carefully. But not unkindly. “You think you’re such a terrible person but you can’t even bear for me to be a little bit cold for a few minutes. I did grow up here, Wilder. I know what a Montana morning feels like.”
“This isn’t something you can argue me into or out of, Cat,” he told her, trying to find that clarity that had come so easily when he’d woken up this morning, her soft weight tangled up beside him and her hair across his chest. “None of this should have happened.”
“But it did.”
She leaned forward and picked up the coffee he’d made her, then settled back on the couch. And he couldn’t help but notice that she looked perfectly calm and contained. She sat back against the couch in a manner he could only describe as lazy.
Almost amused , in fact.
He didn’t like it.
“It shouldn’t have happened, though,” he said, very deliberately. “The very fact that all this did happen is evidence against me. I don’t understand why you don’t see that.”
“Oh, that’s simple.” Cat waved her coffee mug in the air, as if to dismiss his concerns on this subject. It did the opposite, but she kept on going. “I’ve been in love with you the whole time. Maybe even sooner.”
She laughed at the expression on his face, and Wilder wasn’t surprised, because he felt literally dumbstruck. “The only question is, how did you not realize that was what was going on with us? You chased me down at Mountain Mama that night when I didn’t show up. You clearly don’t like spending a night without me. You asked me to marry you, then did. Everything changed the moment we stood next to each other at that bar in Marietta, Wilder.” That smile of hers was like honey, and it caught at him. “Catch up.”
His ribs ached. He thought maybe he could have handled this if she’d been crying, or begging, or involved in one of the dramatic scenes he’d experienced before, from women he’d spent far less time with.
She didn’t do any of that. If anything, she looked perfectly content in every possible way, sipping his coffee in his shirt in his cabin, and it only made him want her more.
He’d wondered, fleetingly but he’d wondered it, if finally having her would cure him of his obsession with her.
But he’d reached for her again and again in the night.
Then he’d woken up ravenous, as if he’d never touched her at all. Once he’d untangled himself from her he’d stood there in his own bedroom and watched her sleep, feeling as if he’d been turned inside out and left bleeding.
So. Yeah. He wasn’t cured.
If anything, he was sicker than before.
“I don’t deserve the things you feel for me,” he told her, and he tried to say it calmly. Concisely. “I caused damage, Cat. I know you don’t want to believe that. But it’s true. It’s a fact.”
She studied him for a moment, then sighed. “I don’t doubt that you can cause damage, or even that you have. Because that’s what people do. Humans are marvelously imperfect and we hurt each other all the time.”
“This is what I’m telling you.”
But Cat sat forward, her blue gaze intense. “You deserve to be loved, Wilder. You did not make your mother suffer any more than she already was. And I bet that if you could ask her, she would tell you that she would have born that suffering happily if she could have had more time. Because that’s what love is.”
But that was too far. It was too much. He couldn’t take it and he backed away, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. But this is over, Cat. It has to be.”
She looked at him for a long while. And she didn’t laugh again, but he couldn’t tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing. If it proved that she was finally paying attention to him, or if it was something else.
After a while, she drained her mug and set it back down on the coffee table. She didn’t look at him. Instead, she reached for the deck of cards that sat in a shallow basket on one side of the table. She picked it up, undid the cardboard case, then tapped the cards out into her hand.
He watched, not sure why this was so mesmerizing, as she shuffled expertly.
“What are you doing?” he made himself ask.
When she looked up at him she looked half-feral. She shook her hair back, gazing at him with a glint in her blue eyes that he didn’t think he’d ever seen before.
He told himself it would make anyone hard. That it didn’t mean anything that he was.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” she asked him. “Let’s sort this out, Lisle to Carey, as we should have done from the start.”
“Lisle to Carey…?” But he was staring at those cards.
And sure enough, she nodded.
“Double or nothing,” Cat told him. “We play a simple game. You win and we’re done. But if I win? You’re going to be happily married to me for the rest of your life, Wilder.”
He felt something stir in him, then, and he couldn’t quite define it. Maybe he didn’t want to. Wilder told himself it was certainty . In himself. In what he’d told her.
Then again, maybe it was just that he had never been one to back down from a challenge.
Because at the end of the day, he had Matthew Carey’s blood in his veins.
“I should warn you,” he drawled. “I’m great at poker.”
Cat only smiled that surprisingly wicked smile of hers. “This will be strip poker, Wilder. And there are two ways to win. One, if your opponent gets naked before you do. And two, if your opponent can’t keep their hands to themself. Still think you’ll be great at it?”
And he knew better than to do this.
But he couldn’t seem to stop himself.
Wilder walked over, sat down on the other side of the coffee table, and tapped the wood between them. “Deal me in.”