Seventeen
CASS
After the rodeo wound down and the crowds dispersed, Walker drove me to the overlook.
The same spot where we’d first kissed. Where everything had really begun, despite all the complications that followed. The hills rolled away into the dusk, the creek catching the last light, the first stars pricking through a sky going from coral to violet.
“I have something for you,” he said.
I looked at him, curiosity mixing with something that might have been hope. “What kind of something?”
He pulled out a small velvet box.
My breath caught. “Walker—“
“I know we’re still figuring things out,” he said, and his voice wasn’t quite steady. “I know trust is something we’re rebuilding one day at a time, and I’m not trying to rush you into anything you’re not ready for. But I want you to know where I stand. What I’m hoping for.”
He opened the box. The diamond caught the last of the sunset, glittering like a captured star.
“I’m not asking you to say yes today,” he continued. “I’m asking you to consider it. To wear this as a promise—a promise that we’re building toward something. That when you’re ready, if you’re ever ready, I’ll be here. Waiting.”
I was crying. Tears streaming down my face, catching the fading light.
“You impossible man,” I said, laughing through them. “You couldn’t just ask like a normal person?”
“Is that a yes?”
I pulled him to his feet and kissed him hard enough to make my head spin.
“It’s a yes,” I said against his lips. “Yes to the promise. Yes to building something together. Yes to seeing where this goes.”
“And eventually? To the rest of it?”
I pulled back far enough to meet his eyes. “Eventually? Probably. But you’re going to have to work for it.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He paused, and that crooked smile I’d come to love tugged at his mouth. “For the record, you should know I’m a patient man. I tracked one cattle ring for two years without quitting. I can wait out one stubborn rancher.”
“Careful,” I warned, but I was laughing. “That stubborn rancher threw you off her property the day you met.”
“Best thing that ever happened to me,” he said, and the laughter went out of it, replaced by something so naked and true it stole my breath. “I mean that, Cass. The day you slammed that door in my face was the day my whole life turned around. I just didn’t know it yet.”
He slid the ring onto my finger, and it fit perfectly. Like it had been waiting for me all along.
We stood there a long time as the stars came out, his arms around me, the whole of Henderson Ranch spread below us in the dark.
I thought about the woman I’d been a few months ago—so sure that needing no one was the same as being whole, so busy holding everything together that I’d never let myself imagine being held.
I’d been wrong. And I’d never been so glad to be wrong about anything in my life.