“When my brother and sisters are safe and have a future.”
“And then what? You’ll magically slot back into life as though you hadn’t been on hiatus for more than a decade?”
He wanted to snatch the words back the second they left his mouth. The fear that flashed across Audrey’s face made his gut churn, but it also reinforced his concerns. She was scared of the future. And she was avoiding it.
She sighed. “If you’re ashamed of my lack of—”
“Stop.” He held up his hand, fury burning a path through him. “Don’t even finish that sentence, because it’s the most insulting thing you could possibly say to me.”
Audrey folded her arms across her chest. “It’s a fair assumption. You’re the one who wrote a whole damn chapter of your book on motivation—so if I, the person you supposedly care about, am not able to go back to school, what’s motivating you to force the issue?”
“I looked into a few things so we could discuss it. That’s not forcing the issue.”
“You spoke to someone else about it. About me.” That’s when he saw the armor crack more fully—the shimmer in her eyes, the tautness in her full lips. “Behind my back.”
“It was a hypothetical conversation. I called an old friend, and I didn’t give them your name or anything,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me first?”
“Because you would have told me not to do it.”
“Exactly!” She tipped her eyes skyward. “So why did you do it anyway?”
“Because I thought if you could see how things might be…then maybe you’d consider not letting the next five years blow by you.”
“How things might be?” She bobbed her head slowly. “You mean like leaving my family behind.”
Of course Ronan hadn’t said those words, but he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t allowed himself the little fantasy of him and Audrey somewhere else, in a big city, doing great things. Chasing their dreams together. Yeah, he’d thought about that…a lot.
More than he should have for a relationship that only recently had a label attached to it.
“I’ll take that silence as your confirmation,” she said.
“I don’t expect you to follow me. But have I thought about where this relationship might go beyond my contract? Yeah. I have. I’ve thought about you and me and what a life might look like.”
Just saying those words was like taking a steak knife and carving his chest open. For a kid who’d grown up on a steady diet of rejection from his own parents, he avoided being vulnerable wherever possible. It was easier to chase success with unemotional things—like school and work—because that, he could control. But Audrey had snuck into his life and under his skin and deep, deep into his heart.
“What a life might look like so long as it isn’t here, you mean?” There was something raw in her words, like a trace of hope that he might give her the answer she wanted.
“My job is going to take me to different places,” Ronan said. “You knew that from the start.”
“Then why do you care what I do with my life?” she asked. True to form, Audrey wasn’t yelling or getting angry. She had too much of a wall around her for that—too much of a tight fist around her emotions to let them run away with her. For a woman who could be so passionate, seeing her like this was like seeing a poor imitation of a work of art. The thing that made the original so special was totally erased.
“Because I care about you,” he said. “Haven’t I made that clear?”
“If you cared, you’d let me do what I need to do instead of tempting me with things I can’t have. It’s cruel!” She sucked in a ragged breath. “Kissing Creek is my home, my family is the thing that’s most important to me in this world, and I am doing everything I can to be the kind of woman who would make my mother proud.”
Her conviction was like an old tree root—it went down so deep it could hold anything in place. Even a brilliant, shining beacon of a woman like her.
“If that’s not enough for you, I’m sorry. I don’t see the point of dragging this out toward its inevitable conclusion.” She yanked the door open and walked out onto the landing, letting it swing shut behind her. The noise triggered something in him, like a chain yanked deep in his brain, dragging to the surface a memory he’d long tried