to figure out the logistics for. I’m sorry I brought it back down to earth, babe, but eventually it’s going to land there, and you’re not going to like it. And it isn’t going to be my problem.”
“It won’t be,” she said. “I’m going to make sure it isn’t. I’ll go out and deal with it myself and you’re absolved. Just go away.”
“You’re the one who’d have to go away, darlin’. I’ll be right here where I’ve always been.”
“Hanging out making Joan of Arc look like a self-preservationist with a selfish streak?”
Her words were sharp and they cut deep. “What?”
“You’re a martyr, Ryder. Don’t pretend you aren’t. Don’t you think I know what this is all about? It’s not about me. It’s about you. From your offers of marriage to that kiss. It’s about you wanting—needing—to be the one to miserably sacrifice and fix me, and excuse me if I don’t want it.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“It’s what your life is,” she said, the words uncompromising.
Sammy was often shocking, but she wasn’t usually uncompromising, and she was never mean.
But she was pretty mean right about now.
“Why are you still here? Why did you never leave? Because you were going to, you told me that. Before your parents died you were going to follow your football scholarship to college and get a degree. Major in engineering. Figure out how to make the things that hold the world together. You never did it. You settled right in here and you put on your hair shirt and kept it on even though you don’t need to now. Even though you could change your life at any point. You don’t. You keep yourself busy and you just keep on treating yourself like a beast of burden and why? So at the end of it all you can be the great hero, who never had to try and fail at living his own damn life.” Blue eyes blazed into his, scorching his soul.
“Sammy...”
“You’re not the only one who can see through a friend’s bullshit.”
Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving him standing there facing down the inevitable truth that he had jumped into this with both feet to keep things from changing, and now he was the one that had forced them to change irrevocably.
And she’d stabbed him clean through with those words, though they weren’t as true as she believed because being with her—in her bed—oh no, that had nothing to do with him suffering at all.
But as he stood there with regret in his chest and the taste of Sammy on his tongue... He wasn’t even sure he would change it.
Because one was stronger than the other.
A taste of sunshine was brighter than just about anything else.
CHAPTER NINE
SAMMY WAS INCANDESCENT by the time she walked into the Gold Valley Saloon. She was ready to approach the first man she found and ask him to put a baby in her.
Just to spite her best friend in the whole world for daring to put his mouth on hers. For daring to question her like he had been for days.
That was reasonable.
But he wasn’t reasonable. He was calling out all of her secret fears and laying them bare in the light, and it wasn’t fair. Not when she didn’t push him. Not when she didn’t make him feel bad about his life or himself or who he was.
And not because she didn’t see him. Not because she didn’t know that he was a man who’d turned away from the future he could have had if his parents had lived. He’d done it so deliberately that it was clearly a punishment and a shield all in one.
Her whole body was on fire, crackling like an inferno, and she wanted desperately to believe it was all rage, and not because the feeling of Ryder’s rough, commanding lips on hers had been anything other than a gross overstep of their friendship.
And through all that she kept asking herself if he was right. If what he had said was true. If the reality was she was just mad at him because he was asking her to face...well, reality.
If the issue was that she had a nice idea of what it meant to have a baby. It was true, she had a beautiful vision of herself round with child standing in a field in a flowing dress, and then later holding a beautiful newborn, having it there in a bassinet while she made jewelry. Some kind of earth