Page 95 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
The man who’d built her a nursery with carved roses and held her under the stars at the pond was standing in front of her, giving orders like she ranked somewhere between the hired help and the livestock.
“I need you to stay on this property, Grace. That’s what I’m tellin’ you.”
“You’re nottellin’me anything. You’reorderin’me, as we’ve been doggone repeating over and over again.”
“Call it whatever you want. I ain’t budgin’ on this.”
“Logan—”
“I buried my mother on this property.”
Her breath snagged.
“I buried her because I rode off and left her alone, and somebody came, and she—” His throat moved. “She almost made it to the door.Almostmade it. And every day since, I think about that word.Almost.How close she came. How if I’d been here—”
“Logan, that ain’t—”
“So when I come home, and you’re gone, and the baby’s gone, and I don’t know where, and I don’t know why…”
“Ugh! Yes, I understand—”
“I ain’t bein’ overbearing, Grace. I ain’t bein’ paranoid. I’m standin’ in that doorway again. Lookin’ at empty rooms. Runnin’ the same math I been runnin’ for two years. And I can’t do it again. Iwon’t.”
He said it the way you’d nail a board to a wall. Final. Like he’d already weighed her opinion and set it aside.
And the thing that killed her—the thing that took every argument she had and snuffed them out like fingers on a candle—were his eyes. Those pale blue eyes, catching the late-afternoon sun full on, had gone red-rimmed and glassy and looked at her like she’d already died.
How do you fight that?
How do you stand in front of a man who lost his mother to an empty house and tell him he’s wrong for wanting to keep the doors shut?
“I ain’t your mother, Logan.” She said it more softly than she’d said anything all day. “I ain’t gonna almost make it to the door.”
“Then stay inside the gate.Please.”
But he asked for more than that. That was the trick of it. He’d asked for her freedom and wrapped it in his dead mother’s name, and now she couldn’t say no without feeling like she’d stomped on a grave.
Miriam grabbed a fistful of Grace’s collar.
Grace looked at the yard, Thomas and Mason pretending to be busy with their saddles, Jonah studying the water trough like it held the secrets of the universe, Rafe watching from the porch with his arms crossed and his mouth pressed thin.
“Fine.” The word tasted like swallowing a stone. “I’ll stay.”
Logan’s shoulders dropped an inch. Just an inch. Like a rope going slack.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” She pulled the seed packets off the cart and held them against her chest. “I ain’t doin’ it because I think you’re right. I’m doin’ it because I’m kind and I’m a good wife.”
His mouth opened. Closed. A muscle pulled at the corner of his eye.
But he didn’t take it back. Didn’t say ‘You’re right’or ‘I’m sorry’or any of the words that might’ve kept her standing there.
He reached for the seed packets. “Let me carry those.”
“I got ’em.”
“Grace—”
