with someone else. Maybe I do feel like that kid should be mine.”
She had no idea what to say to that. She had no idea what he meant. And she still didn’t think she was wrong, because all of it was that same old possessiveness stuff. Ryder was hers, and she had felt like that for a long time. But she knew pretty firmly that Ryder also felt like she belonged to him. And she had a feeling it was more about that than it was anything else.
“Don’t,” she said. “That’s not fair. Don’t put that on me. You don’t mean it. You don’t really want any of this.”
“You just know that?”
“Yes, I do know it. Because I know what you’ve been through. I care about you and I want you involved in my life, and looping you in on my major decisions is part of that. You accepted because you’re retired. A retired old man living in his golden years, in his thirties. And you don’t want anything to change. You don’t want to lose a comfortable relationship, a comfortable setup that you have. You’re not worried about me having a baby. You’re worried about things changing.”
“I said as much,” he said. “I said I didn’t want things to change.”
“Well, you can’t have your way. Not in this. It’s going to change. I’m going to do things the way that I want. The way they make sense to me.”
He turned off the main highway and pulled beneath the sign that said Hope Springs Ranch. It was a beautiful sign, one that had been there since before his parents had died. Silhouettes of horses and cowboys all around the letters.
She waited for the comfort of home to wash over her when they turned onto the property. But it didn’t come.
Because the man that should have helped provide that homey feeling was like a stranger to her right now.
Which was maybe a touch dramatic. But it didn’t feel like it. Not right now.
When he pulled up to the house, she got out quickly and began to walk back toward her camper.
She could hear heavy footsteps on the gravel behind her. She knew that he was following her. She paused, letting out a long, slow breath. “Did you have something else to say? Because I think we should sleep on it.”
“Go ahead and go to sleep,” he said. “But you ask yourself what you need, and then you ask yourself who you think is going to be able to give it to you.”
Ryder left her there, standing alone in the middle of the drive after that.
She walked back to her camper slowly, replaying his words over and over in her mind.
Think about what you need. And think about who is going to give it to you.
She knew what he meant. He meant: Who was going to help her provide stability? Who was going to be her counterpoint?
And truth be told...when she thought of raising a child, she saw him as a figure in that child’s life. Being... Ryder. The influence on the kid that he had been on her.
He meant health insurance and he meant practicalities.
But for some reason she kept flashing back to the conversation they’d had in the bar. The one she had tried to avoid.
The one about orgasms.
The way he had reacted; the things he had said.
Ryder was beautiful, but she did her best to think of him in terms other than real, human man.
She found it comfortable to think of him as a statue. A man carved from granite. As a guardian. Some kind of supernatural protector. Not a man she could touch. A man whose hands could touch her.
Not a man who knew his way around a woman’s body. A man who might be more proficient at it than any other she’d been with before.
But then the idea of that... Of him touching her... Of him taking control of her in some way, even if it was for pleasure, made her break out in a cold sweat.
She didn’t like that. The thing she liked most about sex was the closeness; she hadn’t been lying. And also, she liked feeling like she’d affected a man in a positive way.
She had been so afraid of men after the way she’d grown up, and then Ryder had taught her that some men could be trusted. The guys she had grown up around at Hope Springs had only reinforced that.
And when it came to sex...
Boys at school had been grateful to