who had always been there was there, including Sammy. At Hope Springs Ranch. It was also the same, and yet so completely different. He didn’t know how to hang on to that feeling and examine it. Didn’t even know what to call it. It was all nostalgia wrapped in a brand-new package. And he was afraid of what he might find if he examined it too closely.
The only pictures they got were on everyone’s phones, and when they cut the cake Rose was chanting for him to smash it in Sammy’s face. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t do that. He was supposed to take care of Sammy, and he would never in a million years do something to disrupt the reverence that he found today.
She laughed and smeared a little bit of frosting on his lips, then surprised him by licking it off, before laughing and kissing him. Then Logan started to play a song on his guitar, and the demand became for them to dance.
He pulled her against him then, and brought her back underneath that arbor. And he was glad that he had done this with her the night before. A dance that was just for the two of them. Because it was fine doing it in front of his family, but it wasn’t quite the same as it had been to hold her against him when it wasn’t a show.
And when it was all over he fully realized the change that had happened. The shift. Because when he thought of Sammy now she would no longer be his friend first. She would be his wife. And soon, the mother of his child.
His.
That was the bottom line. And wasn’t it what he had always known? That from the beginning she was his?
And when he swept her into bed that night—his bed, their bed—the words played over and over in his head. His wife. His wife. His.
He was living a life that he had never imagined wanting.
One that had actively terrified him for as long as he could remember. To have a woman in his arms, in his bed, his house, his heart, that mattered so damned much. Because life was cruel, and loss could hit you when you least expected it, and he knew it better than most. Because to want to hold on to someone so tight was a terror that he had never, ever wanted to experience. Because he knew that no matter how tight you held, someone could be torn from your grasp. Because he knew that love couldn’t keep someone with you. No matter how fierce you felt it.
But he had also lived a life that proved that it could bond people together in the throes of grief. And that you could stitch together new things out of broken pieces.
But it was hard to figure out which truth to take on board. It was hard to figure out which thing to let be largest. It was easier, damned easier, to let it be fear. Fear was so easy. He had learned that early.
Because it let you hide. It was the rest of everything that was so much harder.
But as he lay next to his new wife, exhausted from making love with her, looking at her face, relaxed in sleep in the light of the moon coming through the window she had climbed through as a teenager, into a bed that they now shared, that was now theirs, he knew that nothing that beautiful would ever come easy.
And Ryder was a man who had been built for tough.
So that was exactly what he would be.
* * *
THEY HAD BEEN married a week. It was a strange thing. Living in the ranch house. And something that she hadn’t entirely thought about when they had gotten engaged. She had woken up late that morning, as she had started to do, and he had made sure that there was a bowl of fruit sitting there on the table for her, covered with plastic wrap and all ready for her to eat.
Insult to injury, their baby did not like bacon. And given that bacon was a big foundation of their initial friendship, she felt somewhat betrayed. How on earth had their genetics combined to make a being that didn’t care for the most sacred of cured meats? She didn’t have an answer to that. She truly didn’t.
But she sat down in front of the fruit gratefully and pulled the bowl to herself. Then she heard footsteps in the kitchen.