Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
Nothing says ‘I love you’ like the sex washcloth toss.
—Holly to Denver
HOLLY
A week after the kidnapping I was now terming the “incident” in my head, and two days after the fire, I found myself at the kitchen table with the Windsor children.
We were in the middle of making dinner for the entire crew, ranch hands included, and they were rapid firing questions at me.
“Do you want kids?” Catalina asked.
I thought about that, then scrunched up my nose. “I love kids. I love y’all. I love everyone else’s kids. I just don’t think I want any of my own.”
Catalina frowned. “You don’t want a baby? Doesn’t everyone want a baby of their own?”
I shrugged. “I mean, not everyone. Seeing as I don’t want one.”
“Why not?” Joe asked, absently rubbing her belly.
I smiled. “I have nothing against babies. Or children. Or anything really. I just haven’t ever envisioned myself with children of my own.
I’m not really sure why. I mean, nothing happened to make me not want them.
But I’m pretty happy with my life right now.
I get to work when I want, where I want.
I don’t have anything tying me down. I can pick up and drive to Texas if I want, and I don’t have to consider much of anything.
” I scrubbed at Froto’s neck. “And even this little guy was a little too much for me. If it wasn’t for y’all and Nettie, he might very well have died. ”
“It was kind of touch and go there for a while.” Joe looked worried. “He’s pretty demanding.”
I grinned. “I think it’ll be different when it’s your own baby. A dog and a child are two completely different things.”
“Going by that, don’t you think that you might feel differently about your own child?” Catalina, so much like her father it was comical, asked.
She was the devil’s advocate for sure.
“I mean, maybe?” I shrugged. “I don’t really know, to be honest. And I’m not all that gung-ho about figuring it out.”
“So…” Joe asked. “You and Dad…”
I smiled, though the nerves did tickle my belly at the mention of her father and my relationship. “We’re exploring things right now.”
“Does that mean you’re in a relationship?”
I was already shaking my head, because that hadn’t been discussed in the week and a half that we’d been doing whatever we were doing.
“Uh, not exactly,” I admitted. “Hey, did you hear that I might be moving out?”
They all gasped. “What?”
“The really cool thing about the building that Boone and the Windsor trust just bought is that it comes with a fully functional unit. Boone already offered it to me.”
I hadn’t exactly considered it when Boone offered it to me at first, but the situation I found myself in was really weird.
I wasn’t really needed here.
I mean, every morning that I got up—I tried to sleep in my own bed at night despite Denver trying to get me to stay in his bed—he was already up and doing the chores with me in the barn.
So, in all actuality, he didn’t necessarily need me.
Plus, I was in this weird sort of limbo with him that I wasn’t exactly sure where I should stay and what I should be doing.
The girls looked shocked. “You’re leaving?”
Before I could open my mouth and explain that I was thinking about it, we were interrupted.
“Who’s leaving?” Denver came in through the door, his motorcycle cut slung over his shoulder.
“Holly,” all three girls said, throwing me under the bus.
Denver’s sharp eyes came to mine. “You’re leaving?”
My cheeks flushed. “I don’t…this…”
“Where would you go?” Denver asked, sounding hurt.
And, because I didn’t do hurt, I blurted, “How did it go today?”
Denver had gone to the hearing that would determine who would be getting parole with the dog fighting ring and who wouldn’t.
Most of the attendants were given parole the day of the initial hearing.
But there were a select few that hadn’t been able to be arraigned until today seeing as there’d been over ninety people needing to go through the system.
And poor little Jesper County had been inundated with cases, and hadn’t been able to get through them all until today.
They’d, of course, saved the worst offenders until last.
Denver, correctly reading that I was severely uncomfortable having the conversation about my living situation in front of his children, allowed the change of subject.
But the relaxed look he’d been sporting as he’d walked in had disappeared.
He now wore the same one he wore every single time this subject came up over the last few days. Tense and uncomfortable.
Kind of like he didn’t want to discuss it, and didn’t want to put a label on things.
Which, I honestly couldn’t blame him.
He’d had to deal with Juliana still, and that was trying. Not to mention he’d only been divorced for less than a year. He needed time. And I wasn’t going to force my hand, even though I really wanted to put a label on things.
“Everyone but what’s his face got parole,” he grumbled as he slung his cut around the kitchen chair. “What did y’all make for dinner?”
I got up to make him a plate of enchiladas and set it down at his usual spot.
He took the seat before he went into more detail, digging in with a gusto only a cowboy used to interruptions could master.
And speaking of interruptions, his came when he was about to get up for seconds.
“Sir!” A young ranch hand came barreling through the door. “The bull is in with the cows.”
“Goddammit,” Denver grumbled as he got up. “Son of a bitch.”
He hightailed it out of there, and the girls sighed. “He works too hard.”
“We need to find him some more people,” Catalina grumbled.
“Mom took a lot with her when she left, and poisons everyone else in town to working here. I asked someone at school if they wanted to work here for the summer and he said that he heard that it was a bad job and ‘Denver is hard to work for.’”
I gently steered them away from the topic, thinking that this family could really use a break.
Somehow our topic of conversation got changed to another hard one, and that familiar ache in my chest started to throb.
“What’s a heart horse?”
“In the equestrian community, a heart horse is generally used to describe a horse that you have a deep emotional connection with,” Catalina added matter-of-factly. “A one in a million, never going to have that kind of horse again, kind of horse.”
“Oh,” DeeDee hummed. “What happened to yours?”
I thought about Harry and smiled, even though it was hard to dive into those memories without feeling like I was going to cry.
“When I was eleven, Dad entered this auction and came across this abused one-year-old horse. He was so ugly. Had huge hips and walked funny. He hated everyone. Was so damn mean that literally everyone gave him a wide berth. And Dad saw him and thought…Holly would love him.”
“And you did love him, didn’t you?” Joe asked quietly.
“With my whole heart,” I said. “We got him young. I couldn’t ride him for a year.
And then my dad said that if he was going to be mine, I had to take care of him.
Train him. Ride him a lot. We grew up together.
Learned to be an adult together. When we had to get rid of him, I cried so hard. It was the worst day of my life.”
They seemed to sense that I needed to change the topic, so they moved back to cows.
“Don’t you think it’s funny that cows leave their babies with babysitters?”
DeeDee looked over at me. “What?”
I gestured toward the one cow that had like twenty babies with her in the field just beyond the house. “Look at them. She’s not the mother of all of them. How do you think they assign babysitters?”
DeeDee looked contemplative for a long moment before she said, “Usually they foist their babies on the youngest mother. At least, that’s what I’ve found.”
“They’re so mean.” I snickered.
Dinner was finished, and the only thing that was left was a single enchilada, which I put on a plate in the fridge for Denver when he got home.
I stayed around his place for an hour after the girls all went to bed and eventually decided to head to my apartment.
As I did, I thought about leaving.
It made my heart hurt to think about that, but maybe that was what needed to happen. I mean, it wasn’t like me moving out to my own place would really be that big of a deal. Right?
I got ready for bed and tossed and turned for an hour before I fell into a fitful sleep.
At some point in the night, a warm body slipped between the sheets next to me, and I woke with a hand doing naughty things to my body.
Denver and I made love in the dark.
It was sweet and soft and everything that I never knew that I needed.
When I woke up the next morning, he was gone.
The stalls were cleaned. The horses were fed. And I felt like I had one reminder that I wasn’t necessarily needed here.
I didn’t like the feeling at all.