Chapter 41
Vivi carefully lifted the last golden peach pie from the oven, the buttery scent curling around her like a warm hug and, for a fleeting second, she allowed herself to drift.
She imagined Boone standing behind her, arms wrapped around her waist, his body close, his rare laugh—the one that always made her chest ache.
The thought of him and his easy confidence.
The way he saw her in all her messiness and still loved her made her smile despite the peach filling sticking to her hands.
She pictured lazy Sunday mornings and stolen kisses in the barn.
In that little daydream, everything was simple, everything was hers, and everything felt right.
She set the pie on the cooling rack, closing her eyes for a second to savor it.
The sound of the back door slamming on its hinges and rattling cabinets made her jump.
She whipped around expecting a loose bull in the kitchen and found Boone. His boots pounded across the floor, and Vivi froze mid-breath. His face was a dark, almost violent mix of fury and ache, his eyes blazing as if he could burn through the walls themselves.
"Vivi." His voice was low and controlled. Not a bellow, but something worse. He held up the letter. Didn't wave it or throw it, he just held it between them like evidence. "Did you send this?"
Her stomach dropped straight through the floor.
"Did you send it?" he repeated, and this time the control cracked—just slightly but enough for her to hear everything beneath it.
"I was trying to help," she managed, her voice already unsteady. "I thought—"
"You thought, what?" He set the letter on the counter between them, like he didn't trust his own hands with it anymore. "You went behind my back."
"When I sent it, I thought I was helping."
"Well, you didn’t. You fucked everything I was working for and I'm not just talking about the letter.
At this point I don't even care about the letter.
I care that you looked me in the eye, heard me tell you where the line was and you crossed it anyway.
Without a word. Without asking or trusting me to handle my own business. "
The words hit her like a physical thing.
"That's what this is," he said, quieter now, which was so much harder to bear than shouting. "You decided I needed saving and you went and did it your way and you didn't think I deserved to know."
"I did it before I'd promised to stay out of it," she said, her voice cracking. "I forgot about it."
"You forgot? How fucking convenient." He looked at her for a long moment, something hollow moving behind his eyes.
"Vivi, I have spent my entire life with people deciding what's best for this ranch.
What's best for me. People who thought they knew better.
" He swallowed hard. "I trusted you. I let you all the way in—into my home, my family, my life—" He stopped again, pressing his fist briefly to his mouth.
"And the first chance you got, you did exactly what everyone else has always done, you made that call for me. "
She felt the floor drop out from under her.
"I didn't mean it like that," she whispered.
"I know you didn't." And that was almost worse—the way he said it. He wasn’t angry anymore. He just sounded tired, and damn if that didn’t hurt more. "But meaning well isn't the same as doing right by someone."
The tears came before she could stop them, and she pressed a hand to her cheek. "I thought I was protecting you."
"I didn't ask you to protect me." His voice broke on it, just slightly, and that tiny fracture undid her completely. "I asked you to trust me."
“I do trust you.”
“Then why did you go behind my back and decide for me?”
“I didn’t anticipate it would end up like this and make it worse.”
“But it did. And that’s the problem.”
“What you mean is that I’m the problem.” When he didn’t answer, she lifted her head and could feel the sting behind her eyes forming. "I can't just stop being who I am. I can't shut off the part of me that wants to fix things for the people I love. That's not something I know how to do."
Boone looked at her for a long, hard moment. "Then maybe you need to decide if you can learn to."
That lodged itself in her chest like a splinter she couldn't reach.
The kitchen went very still, and a tight knot of fear crept up from the pit of her stomach.
She closed her eyes for just a second to savor the memory of the men who had wanted her before—the ones who demanded she shrink the best parts of herself, the ones who wanted to reshape her life into their version of a woman. They flashed like a warning signal.
She had made a mistake, one she wished she could take back but he wasn’t asking her to apologize or trust him, he was asking her to become someone who didn't do the thing that was most essentially, irreducibly her—caring, fixing, throwing herself headlong into the people she loved.
He wanted her to learn how not to do that.
To learn to be less.
She’d been here before. Not with anger like his, but with the ask underneath it. Change this. Give up that. Make herself a little smaller so someone else could be more comfortable. She’d done that enough in her life, and every time, she’d lost a little more of herself. She wasn’t doing it again.
Not even for someone she loved. Not even for him.
"I see," she said quietly.
The two words fell completely flat. All the tears suddenly gone, replaced by something much more frightening—a terrible, settling calm.
“I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I made things worse when I was trying to help.
” She swallowed past the ache in her throat.
“But I can’t be the person you want me to be, Boone.
I can’t love someone and stand back when I think they need me.
Maybe I should’ve asked. Maybe I should’ve trusted you to handle it.
But if loving me means I have to stop being that person… ” She shook her head. “I can’t.”
Something flashed across Boone's face, like he'd finally understood the ramifications of what he’d said and was watching the gap open between them.