Chapter Sixteen #3
Zero’s voice dripped icicles. She wouldn’t have believed in the possibility of such a thing if she hadn’t heard it for herself.
Now she got it. This was the side of himself he usually presented to people, the one that made people think of him as cold.
The fact he’d never been like this with her— until this moment—struck at a place deep inside.
“I’m telling you that she’s really good at it.” His face was hard stone as she explained what she’d done. “Hunter adores her now. He tolerates it when the others lay on him and beg to be petted, but I can tell Elizabeth Swann is his favorite.”
“The others are learning to be emotional support dogs, too?” he asked with terrifying calm. “Do tell.”
“Just Will Turner, mostly, but the Captains, too, sometimes. It was an accident,” she blurted out before figuring out how best to frame it.
“They all wanted to get in on it. Probably for the treats, yes. But they love laying around and getting lots of tummy scratches from Hunter. He’s really blossomed lately, don’t you think? ”
The look on his face gutted her. He wasn’t mad. He wasn’t disappointed. He wasn’t…anything. Just eerily calm and expressionless as if she’d broken him completely.
Hadn’t she, though? She’d known his goal was to start up the ranch with dogs working the cattle in the place of personnel he couldn’t afford, and she’d ruined that plan.
This was her fault. Her mess. She had to fix it.
“I’ll buy you some new dogs,” she suggested, her voice cracking as she laid out Plan B. “I’ll train them to work the cattle. It’ll be fine.”
“You just said a minute ago that you weren’t sure you could.”
Ugh, yeah, she’d said that because it was true. “Well, I didn’t know if I could train emotional support animals, either, but I did that. So I think we’re okay.”
Possibly, anyway. She’d worked with the Captains a lot, but they were such a handful she’d never gotten them quite to the point they needed to be.
“You’re asking me to trust you, to give you another chance to do the job I’ve already paid you to do. To continue to place my family’s well-being and future happiness on the premise that an art history student can magically transform into a professional dog trainer because you think you can.”
Delivered with absolutely no inflection, as if he’d read the words off of a prepared statement. Worse, it sounded ridiculous when he put it like that, even though it was pretty close to what she’d said.
She heard it through the megaphone of what she’d always known. Her father was right. She could never be a dog trainer.
“You’re right, it’s not enough,” she croaked as the enormity of the situation crashed down on her, what she’d done and how cavalierly she’d treated his plans.
“I’m not enough. I knew what you wanted out of a dog trainer, and I put your ranch business in jeopardy by not being upfront about my credentials. ”
His mouth tightened. “That’s how I see it, too. I have no choice but to start over with new dogs apparently, which pushes out my timeline for having a working ranch. For having a place where my family can recover and heal from the blows life has dealt us.”
“I know,” she whispered, her heart aching for him, for Hunter and Sheridan, who’d trusted Zero to take care of them, and in turn, he’d trusted her. She’d let him down. “I’m sorry, Zero. For everything.”
There was only one way to fix this, and it wasn’t by buying him new dogs and pleading with him to trust her to figure it out.
She had to make it right.
“I’ll go,” she told him with a sharp nod. “I’ll find somewhere else to stay until I get my loan money.”
Part of her hoped he’d reach out then, tell her that he still cared about her and wanted to keep winging it with her, because it was okay and he forgave her for everything.
“That would probably be best,” he acknowledged without a hint of emotion in his gaze, like all of his feelings had already been shut off.
“I need to focus on my family and my ranch without distractions. They’re my priority, and I lost sight of that.
Besides, we were just having fun. That’s what happens when there are no expectations. We can end it easily.”
Her stomach hollowed out. He was going to let her go. As he should. That’s what was always going to happen when she went back to school. This brief period of bliss had been an illusion, where she’d started to believe it might turn out differently.
And maybe it might have, if she’d trained the dogs like he’d expected her to.
Instead, she’d lost him. And the dogs. The ranch, Hunter, her view of the pond. Everything she’d counted as a blessing—gone. The money, yes, but it felt secondary to everything else. Ironic, since the dollar signs had been her primary motivator at the beginning.
There was nothing easy about this on her side. And it rubbed her heart raw to realize he didn’t seem to be affected by losing her at all.
She fled the kitchen and escaped to the room she’d come to think of as hers. Adrift—again—she blindly started throwing things into her suitcase.