Chapter 21
DAISY
My hipbone is still burning where his thumb was and Wyatt Hartley is already three feet away, hands in his pockets, looking at the terrace like nothing happened.
It’s not even nine thirty, but I find myself nodding.
“Sure,” I blink owlishly. “Okay.”
We cut back through the terrace.
Colt is at the roping station now, showing his date how to hold the lasso, standing behind her the way Wyatt just stood behind me. Except Colt is laughing, and his date is laughing, and the photographer is right there getting all of it.
Easy and fun.
Must be nice.
Wyatt’s hand finds my lower back as we navigate through the crowd toward the doors but it’s gone before I can decide what to do with it.
Shelby catches us at the entrance.
“Leaving already, y’all?” Her hand lands on Wyatt’s arm. Again. The same arm. The same easy, sure touch that makes the green-eyed monster in me spring to attention. “I was gonna save you a spin on the bull.”
“Early start tomorrow.” Wyatt’s voice is polite, bordering on warm. A sight warmer than anything he’s given me all night. “You and June did a helluva job, Shelby.”
“Well.” She beams up at him, and winks utterly shamelessly. “You know where to find me.”
Oh yes. We all know where to find you, Shelby.
“Night, Daisy.” She squeezes my arm like we’re friends. “So great seein’ you.”
“You too.” The smile I plaster on my face deserves a freaking Oscar.
This is fine. I’m fine. Everything is so spectacularly fine I can’t breathe.
Wyatt holds the door. I step through and keep walking toward the truck because if I slow down, I’m going to say something I can’t take back.
I don’t wait for him to get my door, and stare out the window into the darkening sky.
The return trip is worse than the drive over.
At least on the way here, I could engineer small talk. Now there’s nothing between us but the sound of the engine and the county road and whatever just happened at the roping station that neither of us is going to mention.
And Shelby.
His hands are tight on the wheel, at ten and two, and his jaw could just about cut steel.
I stare out the window at the mountains, still holding the last dredge of light along the ridge, and replay the pressure of his thumb on my hipbone.
The nickname I’ve hated until recently that felt like it tumbled out of him before he could catch it.
The rasp of his voice against my ear. The heat of his chest against my spine.
The way he dropped his hands and stepped back as though I’d burned him.
Gettin’ late.
Nine twenty-seven. I checked when we climbed into the cab. Late my good goddamn ass.
The silence thickens with every mile. I can feel it pressing against my skin, and every second he doesn’t speak is another second I have to sit here pretending I’m fine when I am so far from fine, I’m in a whole other continent.
The ranch gate appears in the headlights, and he takes the turn without a word. The gravel pops under the tires as we roll past the empty main house and down the track toward my cabin.
He parks and kills the ignition, but neither of us moves.
The tick of the cooling engine is the loudest sound in the world as I stare at the cabin door. I try desperately to find the version of myself who can say thanks for dinner and get out and walk inside and close the door and be done with this. She’s in here somewhere.
She has to be.
Wyatt nods once in my peripheral vision before opening his door and coming around to my side.
He opens my door the way he’s opened every door tonight, because he’s Wyatt Hartley and the manners are stitched into his bones.
I step down, and we walk side by side to the cabin porch.
He waits in utter silence while I find my key, and then this is it.
This is where I say goodnight.
This is where I walk inside and he drives back to the main house.
This is where I know that tomorrow I will finish packing so that next week I’m back in Denver with a staff position and a new apartment and none of this.
“Thanks for dinner.” My voice sounds as though it’s being held together by sticky tape and a prayer.
“Night, Daisy.”
Not Daisy-girl. Daisy. The correction is deliberate and I feel it like a door slamming in my face. I put the key in the lock, ready to be done feeling like this, but suddenly something inside me snaps.
There’s no buildup. No warning. It detonates like a fuse that’s been burning since I drove back onto this ranch two weeks ago.
“Why the fuck did you bid on me?”
The words come out before I can stop them. I whip around, and he’s still standing there at the edge of the porch steps. One boot on the bottom stair, and his hand on the railing. As though he was about to leave and some chivalrous part of him couldn’t until I’d been ushered safely inside.
“Daisy—”
“No.” I step toward him. “You don’t get to Daisy me right now. You bid two thousand dollars, Wyatt, in a tent full of people. You outbid a Blackwood. Then you walked me into that orchard and you looked at me like—”
My voice cracks, and I hate it.
“Like what?” His voice is low and rough and oh-so goddamn careful in a way that makes me want to scream.
“Like you were really seeing me. Like I was something more than Tom Monroe’s daughter who you were just looking out for.”
His face changes. Just barely. “You read that.”
“I read it.” I’m shaking now, and I can’t stop. “‘She’s Tom’s daughter. Drop it.’ Yeah, Wyatt. I read it. After I slept in your bed because you didn’t come home because you were with Shelby, and I lay there in your shirt breathing you in like some pathetic loser who—”
“I wasn’t with Shelby.”
His hand drops from the railing as he takes a step forward, but he suddenly stops.
I shake my head, my hair swishing around my face. “It doesn’t matter either way.”
His nostrils flare as his jaw tics. “Daisy—”
But I cut him off, ready to burn it all down now.
“It doesn’t matter because the message was clear.
It’s been clear since I was twenty years old in a red dress I bought for you, hoping you’d look at me like a woman for once in your life.
And you called me Daisy-girl.” I spit it out through clenched teeth.
“You know what that nickname did to me? Every single time? It told me you’d never see me.
That I could stand right in front of you and you’d still see a kid trailing after her dad.
And I told myself that was fine. I told myself I’d get over it.
I’ve been telling myself that for six years and I’m still standing here at twenty-six years old, physically shaking because you put your thumb on my hip and called me Daisy-girl in that damn voice and I just can’t do this anymore. ”
The words run out, and silence rushes in, and he just stares at me. And for the first time since I’ve known him, Wyatt Hartley looks like he doesn’t know what to say.
“Are you done?” His voice is so quiet I strain to hear the words.
“Yeah.” My eyes are burning, hands balled into fists at my sides. “Yeah, I’m done. I’m done with Blackstone Creek and I’m done pretending. I’m going back to Denver next week and you can go back to being exactly who you’ve always been. And I can finally stop wishing you’d see me.”
I turn toward the door, but his hand catches my wrist.
I didn’t hear him move. Didn’t hear the steps creak or his boots on the porch boards. But he’s right behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat of him before I spin back and his other hand is on my jaw, tilting my face up.
His eyes are dark when his thumb brushes over my cheek as his breath whispers over my lips. “I see you, Daisy-girl.”
My heart feels like it’s about to beat clean out of my chest as his other hand releases my wrist and reaches up to palm my cheek. “Christ help me, you’re all I see.”
And then his mouth is on mine.
The kiss isn’t gentle. It isn’t careful.
It isn’t polite. His teeth catch my bottom lip and I gasp and he swallows the sound, pulling me closer.
One hand fists in my hair as the other arm bands around my waist so tight my feet leave the porch.
I grab his shirt with both hands because it’s that or fall, and I kiss him back with everything I’ve been carrying since I was twenty years old and stupid enough to wear a red dress to a Christmas party and think he might notice.
Holy shit, he noticed!
He kisses me like he’s starving. My back hits the cabin door and his hips pin me there. His heart is hammering so hard I can feel it through his chest.
He pulls back just far enough to breathe, our breaths tangling as his forehead drops against mine. His hand is still in my hair, his arm is still around my waist and he’s shaking. Wyatt Hartley, who has never once lost his composure in front of another living soul, is shaking against me.
“I wasn’t with Shelby.” His voice is rough, barely held together. “Never was.”
“Okay,” I breathe.
He lifts his head, and his eyes find mine in the porch light. I inhale sharply as the intensity in those green eyes makes my chest ache.
“And I have been tryin’ not to do that since you were twenty goddamn years old.”
I close my eyes and lean into him.
“So yeah, Daisy-girl.” He says it differently now. Soft and warm and nothing like a wall. “It meant somethin’.”
His thumb traces my jaw and I open my eyes. All the air leaves my lungs when I see he’s looking at me the way he looked at me in the orchard. The way I thought I’d imagined.
“It meant everything.”