He didn’t, because he didn’t think he should. “Is this it, then?”
She turned and looked at him. “Maybe when you’re ready, we can try again.”
“I’m ready,” he insisted.
She shook her head and said, “No, Dallas, you’re not.” With that, she gave him a small, sad smile. Added, “I wish you were, but you’re not, and I deserve someone whose main focus is going to be on me, not their ex.” She turned and left, the winter darkness beyond his front porch swallowing her whole.
He didn’t know what else to do, so he simply closed and locked the front door behind her. He turned and stared around at the furniture in the house. He went down the hall to his bedroom, put on his pajamas, and got in bed.
He lay there, eyes closed, mind racing. Yes, he’d been focused on Martha, but he’d had to do that. He couldn’t have drug dealers showing up at his house or the ranch, putting everyone in danger. Putting Jess in danger. Why didn’t she get that?
His confusion turned to anger, which morphed into misery. He’d seen it on her face too, but right now, he was powerless to change the emotion for either one of them.
“Daddy?” Remmy’s tiny voice asked. “Can I sleep with you?”
“Of course, baby,” he whispered. “Come on.”
She hurried over to the bed, and he peeled the covers back for her. She settled on the pillows next to him, and with her tiny lungs breathing in and out, his thoughts evened too.
They now rang with only one item: Jess, Jess, Jess.
How could he fix himself, get ready for a relationship where she was the focus, and then get her back?
Chapter Twenty
“I don’t know, Abi,” Jess said, done with this conversation and it had just started. “It just happened. He’s not ready, like you said, and Nia’s right too. I deserve someone who’s going to put me first in his life. Well, maybe second behind his kids, but not a distant last after his ex-wife.”
Bitterness filled her, and it made the stables far colder than they really were. A bitter kind of cold that never seemed to leave Jess’s soul.
“How long has it been?” Abi asked. “You didn’t say anything last week.”
“It’s been a while,” Jess said. “I’m not even sure what day it is.”
“Okay, Jess, you’re a mess,” Abi said. “You always know what day it is. Day of the week. Date, even. You have training schedules for those horses that you make, remake, redo, and then do all over again for a fifth time.”
Jess laughed, because that was true. Without Dallas in her life, she felt adrift. Purposeless. “I know what day it is,” she said. “It’s Friday, January twenty-second.”
Dallas had been out of her life for fifteen days. She knew every minute of every one of them too. She just didn’t want to hash it all out with Abi, her now-engaged sister.
She could still see Huey down on both knees in the foyer of the farmhouse. He’d been waiting there for Abi when they’d gotten home from the airport. He’d put Abi’s favorite flower—the calla lily—everywhere in the house, and he’d set up his phone to record the whole thing.
He was sweet and romantic—and utterly focused on Jess’s sister. As she watched Abi and Huey, and her mom and dad, and Nia and her serious boyfriend Walt, Jess had seen so many things lacking in her relationship with Dallas.
All of it boiled down to the fact that he simply had too much on his plate. She didn’t want to be a spoonful of potato salad crammed in among the other things he’d taken on, and she’d spent a lot of time talking to her parents about the relationship, about him, about why he’d gone to prison.
She’d shown them pictures, and her heart had filled and warmed as she looked at her and Dallas beaming at the camera in one of their selfies. He’d taken it outside the stable one day, and Jess’s hair was a mess, the wind was blowing, and Dallas had his other hand flat on his head to keep his hat in place.
But that didn’t matter. They looked so happy, and Jess realized the picture had been taken very early in their relationship. The man who’d come home from Miami was not that smiling cowboy in the selfie.
She had pictures of her and the kids too, usually with one of them on a horse while she walked beside it. Remmy had both hands up, her fingers