Claiming The Rancher's Heir (Gold Valley Vineyards #2) - Maisey Yates Page 0,40
time thinking about which canapés I liked best at the party, and not about what we were doing. I knew I didn’t want that in a long-term relationship. Boredom before we got to forever, you know?”
“Sure.”
“But there was never this. There was never any fighting, there was never any passion. I just thought passion was for other people.”
“Why did you think that?”
She sighed. “It’s stupid.”
“Look, Wren, you know all about the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. You tell me why you can’t have passion.”
“I never think about it. It’s one of those things usually buried in my memory. You know when you’re a kid you think you’re going to be all kinds of different things. From a unicorn on down the list. For a while, I even fantasized about being a police officer. Chasing bad guys, solving mysteries. And then I realized that I don’t like to run, and I never want to be shot at, so that kind of takes being a cop off the table.”
He snorted. “Yeah, I can see how that would be an issue.”
“But when I was a little bit older, I thought... I got really good grades in math. I really liked it. I also really liked art, and a teacher at school, at the boarding school I went to, told me that combination was sort of rare. She said it made me special, that I could think creatively and wield numbers the way that I did. She talked to me about the kinds of things I could do with a talent like that. One of the things we spoke about was architectural engineering. I was really fascinated by it. By the way you could put different materials together. Marrying form and function. Art with practicality. My father said it just wasn’t what he saw me doing. He said my brain would be useful for the brand, and that I needed to remember the school that I went to, the clothes that I wore, everything that I was, came from the winery. Which meant I needed to invest back into the winery. I understood that. I really did. And I just didn’t think about architectural engineering anymore after that. I got my degree in hospitality and marketing. And I’ve found that I really love my job. But I’ve just been asking myself a lot of questions lately. About who I might’ve been if my whole life hadn’t felt so rigidly decided.”
“Do you want to go back to school?”
“I have to take care of the winery. Cricket doesn’t have any interest in it. Emerson is awesome, but she does a very particular thing, this kind of global brand ambassador stuff that requires lots of computer savvy. She’s brilliant. It’s actually a very similar kind of skill set as the one I have. She’s so good with algorithms, but she’s also great at finessing public branding. Doing posts that are visually appealing and that have a result. I mean, I get to use my gifts in my job. It’s just every so often I wonder if I had known who my father was back then, would I have worked so hard to make him happy?”
“I don’t think you can know that. The same way I can’t actually know what kind of father I would’ve been. The honest truth is, Wren, I can get myself really angry about what was taken from me, and when I do that... Well, in my head I’m the best damn teenage father ever. I give up everything for my kid. Women and drinking and partying and being carefree.” He paused, working hard to speak around the weight that settled over his heart. “But I didn’t do any of that, I didn’t have to. Louisa did. So did Cal. They are the ones who ended up sacrificing. They’re the ones who gave my son a family. They’re the ones who gave him his life. Yeah, in hindsight I can make myself a hero. But I don’t know that I would’ve been. We can’t actually know what we would have done. We can just do something different now.”
As soon as he said those words, he realized how true they were. And they made his chest feel bruised.
He looked at Wren, and he felt a sense of deep certainty. “From this day on, Wren Maxfield, you can be whoever you want. You’ve chosen to be the mother of my child, and I appreciate that. Whatever else you want to be, I would never