Iris can come pick you up when you’re done, if you don’t find a man to take you home. But you think about what I said. And if you find anyone in here that you think would be better than me, fine. I’ll let it go. But I don’t think you will. Because I think you and I both know, you can protest all you want about me protecting you and taking care of you and making sacrifices for you, but you want it. I’m the one who’s been there for you all this time. Don’t tell me you don’t want me to be here for you now.”
And then Ryder turned on his heel and walked toward the exit. And the son of a bitch actually walked out the door and left her standing there. She couldn’t believe it.
She looked around the bar, taking a swig of her beer and no, she didn’t want any of the men here. Not even a little. Not even at all. She felt like she’d been hollowed out. Like Ryder had reached inside her and taken everything she contained and everything she knew, and just stolen it from her. She had no idea who she was now. No idea how the world kept spinning. When it was so clearly knocked off its axis. And so she did a very stupid thing.
She turned on her heel and ran out onto the street. “Ryder!” she shouted. “Don’t leave me here.”
“I thought you were finished with me for the night.”
“Stop being an idiot. I don’t want to call your sister to come pick me up. And I don’t want to go home with some random guy. Stop acting like you had a personality transplant.”
“You’re the one who changed things,” he said.
“Just take me home,” she said. “I want a do-over. Let’s just pretend that this whole evening didn’t happen.”
He laughed. “Fine. Whatever you want, Sammy.”
They walked beside each other in silence to his truck.
“What did you do with your beer?”
“I just left it on a table. I didn’t really want it anyway. I just wanted to irritate you.”
“Yeah, I knew that,” he said.
“Then why did you let me do it?”
“Hell if I know, Sammy. Sometimes it’s easier than others to ignore your shenanigans.”
“Shenanigans? You know, that’s the problem, Ryder. That’s what you think this is. You think I’m full of shenanigans. And you think that I’m selfish. And you think that I’m immature. And for one moment you don’t think that maybe I... Maybe I’m responding to the same kind of thing you are when you say that you don’t want to get married. When you talk about how you’re just done with the life that you lived before. With the pain. With the past. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m just done. I’m done being the person that my dad beat me into being. I have been done with that. But a lot of my life since then has been built on the reaction to that. And I’m tired of that, too. I just want to find my own way, my own life. I don’t think that’s terribly difficult to understand. And I don’t think that you have the right to look at me and decide that what I want, and what I feel, and what I need are shenanigans. That the things that I really want are things that you have to save me from.”
She got into his truck and slammed the door behind her. “It hurts me,” she said quietly as he started the truck and pulled away from the curb.
He didn’t say anything for a long while. They got on the two-lane road that headed outside of town, away from Main Street, away from the bar.
Farther and farther away from the scene of all that had happened tonight and closer to the familiarity of Hope Springs Ranch. Where maybe sanity would prevail. But she didn’t know if she even wanted that. Because she just felt so raw and scrubbed the wrong way.
She didn’t know if she wanted to keep fighting, or if she wanted to wrap herself in the blanket of home and pretend that none of it had happened.
“Well, the thing is, Sammy,” he said, his voice quiet, firm and steady. “You seem to think that the only reason I might have accepted was because I’m protecting you.”
“Well, because you’ve made it very clear that you don’t want to have kids.”
“Maybe I don’t like the idea of you having them