CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I’M BACK OUTSIDE because I couldn’t sleep.
I tossed and turned in my bed, stared at the white walls, did some breathing exercises.
Or rather simply followed what he taught me over the last few weeks, how to breathe in through the nose, fill my belly with a large breath instead of my chest, and how to let it go with an open mouth.
Nothing really helped, so I’m back to watching the horizon, the rolling plains, the mountains in the distance, the night sky.
Which is when I feel it. The prickle in the back of my neck.
And my mouth falls open. My lungs expand with the first easy breath I’ve taken since I left that barn, his ranch.
God, I’m an idiot. I’m also an idiot for letting my heart race the way it’s doing as I brace myself, prepare myself, to face him.
For the last time ever.
Pressing a hand to my belly, I spin around and there he is.
Standing only a few feet away in his usual plaid shirt, rolled-up sleeves, washed-out jeans, and big boots.
His Stetson is missing, though. Something about that tugs at my heart, his dark hair mussed up, the ends curling over his ears, his collar.
I don’t think I mention it enough, mostly because I love him in the Stetson, but I love his hair.
I love how thick it is and how messy it gets, standing up in clumps when he wakes up first thing in the morning.
How it falls over his forehead when he dips his face to look down at me.
Or when I fist it because he’s dousing me in pleasure and I don’t know what else to do other than claw his skin or pull at his hair, which feels so smooth and rich. So mine.
Anyway, there’s something boyish about his hair, other than being sexy I mean; it’s so adorable, so open.
So lovely and vulnerable. So much so that I wish he had his Stetson on.
I wish I didn’t have to see something that he usually lets people see only rarely, when he’s done with the world for the day.
I also wish the moon wasn’t so strong tonight that I can see the glint in his green eyes. That are, as always, locked on mine.
Watching, staring, taking me in.
And now that he’s here, looking at me, I can admit to myself that I put on this nightie, pink and lacy, for him because I know pink is his favorite color.
Not to mention, I braided my hair for him too.
Which is fucked up. Because first, I knew he’d come for me—he has a better code of morals than all the men I know combined—but I didn’t know it was going to be tonight.
But I knew when he did come for me, it would be for a goodbye. Our final goodbye to each other.
In my head, I thought we’d do this somewhere else.
Maybe in town since I was going to be here for the summer; on the street with people passing by while we stood still, looking into each other’s eyes.
But now that he’s here, so big and broad, so beautiful that he takes my breath away, I realize there was no way we could’ve done this anywhere else.
Definitely not on a street like other conventional people.
We met in the shadows, didn’t we? He watched me from the dark and I reveled in his spotlight of a stare like the world was my stage.
So this is where we’d do this, too, in the middle of the night, when everyone is sleeping and on a ranch he technically shouldn’t be on.
Plus, I know he can be patient, but I also know he wouldn’t be patient for this.
For paying his dues or whatever it is he thinks he has to do.
“That’s not north, is it?” I ask without context and point behind me, where I was looking at the horizon.
His strong brow furrows in question.
And with my heart in my throat it’s hard for me to swallow. I will miss that. I will miss reading his silences. But like everything else, it will get easier. It will. Then, “Everyone says Rawhide is the north of Wildfire. I don’t think that’s it, though, right? Those mountains.”
He stares at me a beat before shaking his head. “That’s east.”
“Oh,” I say, frowning, before it occurs to me. “Right, makes sense. Another one of the reasons why I hated my room growing up. The sun would be right there in my face every morning.”
Like an idiot, I kept staring in the wrong direction, thinking that’s where he’d come from. But of course he caught me off guard once again. I seriously need to learn directions if I’m going to stay on a ranch. Maybe I can ask Breck to teach me that too.
His chest moves with a breath. “You hated your room growin’ up.”
“I hated everything about this place,” I tell him.
His jaw clenches. “You—”
“How did you get in here?” I ask, even though I’m pretty sure I know how.
He lets a beat pass before answering, “You gave me the codes. That night. They still work.”
That gives me pause. I wasn’t expecting him to say that.
I thought he beat up the security guy out front or jumped the fence or something.
This is worse. This is him, going to his barn and looking for that piece of paper.
Deliberately. That love/murder note I wrote him all those weeks ago.
That I remember letting slip from my fingers before he came at me.
Before he pinned me to his wall with knives and I asked him to be my first kiss.
I thought I was saying goodbye to him that night, too, that it would be the last time I’d see him, but he proved me wrong.
He took me for the second time, and… and made me fall in love with him.
Well, he made me fall in love with him the first time I saw him, but still.
The point is that I’m starting to feel afraid, have been since he arrived here a few minutes ago.
And I’m beginning to feel a sense of déjà vu, like this may not be our goodbye after all.
Like he’ll steal me again, and whatever determination and strength I’ve gathered in the past two days while being away from him will scatter in the wind.
I’ll let him take me and ruin me completely.
I’ve been all calm and collected about this.
I was going to say my piece and send him on his way, never to see him again.
But now I don’t know. Now I’m shaking, moving back from him.
He notices my retreat and his body tenses. The body of a hunter.
God, I should stop acting like his prey, but I can’t. I fist my hands at my sides and keep moving back. “If I scream and call for help, are you going to just beat them up? The men who come to save me from you.”
Something flashes through his whole body, making it shudder before he replies, “Yeah.”
I clench my thighs at that. And then kick myself in the head because if I don’t stop acting crazy for his insane possessiveness, I will never come out of this alive. “And I can’t really run from you either. Because if I do that, you’ll only chase me down.”
He glances at my retreating feet before looking up, his features hard. “Yeah.”
My heart soars and flies in my chest, and dear God, I’m so sick of myself. “So basically, you won’t leave until you do whatever it is you came here to do. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you here to pay your dues?” I ask. “For, I don’t know, not being able to protect me from being taken, or something like that? Because I’ll have you know that was my choice. I did what I did because I wanted to. You couldn’t have stopped me.”
His jaw tics before he says, his voice rough, “I know.”
I open and close my fists. “So then are you here to be mad at me? Because I know how crazy you get when I put myself in danger. I remember your pet wolves.” Another tic of his jaw, but I ignore it and continue, “If so, then again, you could not have stopped me, and I’m not going to apologize for what I did.
You saved me. You got your sister back and everything is fine, so—”
“Not here to be mad.”
My chest is heaving as my mind races for any other reason why he might be here.
But I come up empty, which scares me so much I snap, “You promised. You promised you’d let me go at the end of this.
” He flinches at my words, but I keep going, no matter how hard it is to say them. “So what the hell are you doing here?”
I know he hates me cursing, but he’s going to have to make his peace with it. And maybe he does because he replies, “Learnin’.”
That gives me another pause. Both literally, as in I do come to a stop finally, and my frantic thoughts break. “What? What does that mean?”
Instead of answering me, he glances down at the ground again, at the distance between us.
At how far apart we’re standing right now.
He doesn’t like it, the gap between us, because I notice his jaw pulse again and his nostrils flaring.
Not to mention that when his eyes come back up they’re dark, brimming with a million things.
A million things to bring me to the highest of highs and to the lowest of lows.
And I’m still reeling from the low he dealt me in his barn two days ago and so I warn, “Don’t move, do you hear me?
You’re not going to move. You’ll stay there.
All the way over there and you won’t come near me. Is that clear?”
His jaw moves back and forth, his wide chest jerking, but he dips his head in a nod.
I breathe out a small sigh of relief and wrap my arms around myself. “Now, do whatever it is you came here to do and leave.”
His eyes circle over my features, my body, as if he doesn’t want to stop watching me.
As if he hasn’t seen me in ages instead of only a couple of days.
And as much as I hate him looking at me like that, I can’t bring myself to find fault in it because I understand.
I understand how those two days of not seeing me may have affected him when he needs to watch me every second of every day.
When I feel the same way about him. When I can’t stop watching him in this moment either.