other.
It certainly wasn’t the sharp, strange thing that he felt for Sammy. An overwhelming sense of needing to protect her. Of needing to...hang on to her.
He was everything that she avoided, and he knew it.
It was a relief in some ways that she tended to gravitate toward men that were so different than he was. Because it made his feelings for her clear early on.
Yeah, he supposed he could see where his feelings could have gone off in the direction that Logan was talking about. Yeah, if things were different. If life was different, if he was different, he could have easily fallen in love with all that bright, free-spirited beauty.
If he had been a different person with a different life. A man whose insides hadn’t been crushed, compressed until they’d gone hard like granite. Tested by loss and by the deep burden of responsibility that had been placed on him at the age of eighteen.
And the first time he had ever seen her, curled up in his barn, he thought she was beautiful. Luminous and bright and a beacon of something. Hope. A light on a hill.
And yeah, he’d thought about kissing her.
But then he had started to realize that something wasn’t right about the place she lived. That something in her life was broken. Some nights she would climb through his bedroom window and without a word, get into bed with him. And at first... At first he’d felt...tempted. To press a kiss to her head, to see where else it might go. But then he’d started to realize that she was afraid.
That when she curled up against his body she was trembling like a leaf.
And he’d known then that he could never...
That she would get in bed with him like that showed her trust in him. And he would never, ever do anything to break that trust. To violate it.
She was vulnerable, and she believed that he would protect her. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know why she had decided to come there. Why she had decided to come to him. But she had.
And then that night when he had been expecting her and she hadn’t come... And he’d just known something was wrong. Felt sick in his gut about it. And he’d found her father, pounding on her with his fists in her little trailer that she slept in on the edge of her parents’ property.
And Ryder...
Ryder had seen red.
And everything had made sense. That fear in her. That vulnerability. A man, a man she was supposed to trust had treated her with violence.
She trusted Ryder to protect her. And that day he had. Physically.
After that, she had moved the camper to Hope Springs.
Sometimes she’d still gotten in bed with him.
And it had been easy enough to take that thing inside him that wanted her, that felt sort of ravenous for her, and harden it. Turn it into a cold, dark obsidian. Sharp and unyielding. To put it between her and all the rest of the world.
Because he had experience enough with hardening the soft and weak things inside him. Because he had to do it the day that his parents had died. Because denying the things that he wanted had become second nature, and so he had simply done it with Sammy.
The idea of taking that and changing it now was unthinkable.
“It’s not like that,” Ryder said. “It’s not.”
“All right. I mean, aren’t you worried that she’s going to...do something stupid?”
“Yeah,” Ryder said. “I worry about that with all of you. All the time. Except for Iris. I don’t really have to worry about her.”
“You don’t have to worry about me, either,” Logan said. “You know, since I’m thirty-three years old.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ryder said. “Old habits.”
“We’re the same age now,” Logan said. “So to speak. And I know that it’s hard for you to take that on board. But we are.”
“That isn’t how it works,” Ryder said. “It just isn’t.”
“It can be, if you want it to be.”
“Seriously, Logan, did you want something?”
“Unclench,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yes. I mean, things are settled now. Pansy’s getting married and you don’t hate the guy, which seems ideal, really.”
“I don’t know that I would have chosen him.” Still, the idea that his sister was old enough to get married was... Well, since the entire thing seemed unappealing to him, it was difficult to wrap his head around it all. Pansy was the most like him. Out of everyone in the family.
She was a straight arrow. Somewhat serious. Committed to