Page 79 of The Last Promise You Made

“Sit down,” Ryder said to his family. “I’ll dish you up.”

And my heart twisted again. Ryder was good at taking care of the people he loved. I bet he’d doted on Ravyn, and once he’d found out she was pregnant, I bet he’d waited on her hand and foot. The letter she’d written had said she loved him, loved him even now, but she’d still walked away. While part of me understood—if she was part of the Lovato family and they wanted her back, they’d stop at nothing to get her—the other part of me wondered what would have happened if she’d trusted the Hatleys to help. If she’d trusted Ryder and his sheriff brother to protect her, would the Lovatos have fallen years ago, before they’d embedded themselves right at the top of the criminal world?

It felt like she’d taken the easy way out. It would have been harder to stay. Harder to trust. Harder to risk everything.

What would I have done if I’d been in her shoes? If I had someone like Ryder adoring me, taking care of me, loving me—would I have left? Especially while carrying his child? The idea nauseated me, and I pushed my bowl away to focus on the people in the room rather than my tormented thoughts.

Shawn and Ramon offered their condolences to the family while Ryder worked on ladling soup into bowls for his parents and Sadie.

“How’d it go at the funeral home?” Ryder asked his mama.

“We’ll hold the funeral Friday with a celebration of life at the bar afterward,” Eva said, rubbing her forehead.

Addy shifted in her seat next to me, and I looked down. Her face had been smiling and open all morning, but now she’d shut down.

“Once Gemma gets here, we need to talk to all four of you about his will and his estate,” Eva said.

Sadie shot Eva a concerned look that had curiosity spiking in me—curiosity I shouldn’t have as this had nothing to do with me or the case. If Ryder had noticed too, he didn’t say anything, letting it drop.

We finished our meal, I helped clean up, and then the five of us who’d been working all morning headed for the door.

As we stepped outside, I halted. The snow was still flitting to the ground in soft, silent waves, and the temperature had dropped another couple degrees. In the forty-five minutes or so we’d been inside, the snow had stuck and begun to build. A few inches was all, but it was enough to turn the world into a black-and-white photograph. A delightful portrait of winter farm life. Buildings and fields and fences all coated with powder. Our breaths left a smoky cloud in the air.

“Well, I think we’re done with the siding for the day,” Ryder huffed.

“We can still get a few hours in on the electrical,” Ramon offered.

“It’ll be colder than a frosted frog.”

Shawn laughed. “Nothing we aren’t used to.”

The two men dropped their cowboy hats onto their heads and stomped down off the porch, heading toward the cabins. They left dark, sooty footprints in their wake.

Addy leaned forward off the porch, sticking her hand out, catching the flakes. They melted at first and then stuck to her little palm. She looked up at Ryder with a smile on her face that took my breath away. She was an incredibly beautiful little girl, even when somber and serious, but when she lit up like this, it was almost miraculous.

“Snow,” she said softly.

“You ever been in the snow?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Mama didn’t like the cold.”

Ryder gave a quiet chuckle. “She really didn’t. She’d wear so many layers during winter it looked like she was a ball you could roll down the hill. She even wore three pairs of socks to bed.”

The little girl looked up with both sadness and interest in her gaze. What I felt was the same jealousy I’d been having over a dead woman. Because Ryder knew what she looked like in bed. Because she’d shared a bed with him. But I also felt a strange affinity with her as we had at least two things in common—I wasn’t overly fond of the cold myself, and I found myself strangely attracted to the man Ravyn had been engaged to.

“If you’d like, I can grab some gloves from Sadie for you, and we can build a snowman,” he suggested, and Addy nodded, smile growing wider. He turned toward the door and looked back at me. “You need a different pair of gloves?”

My fingerless ones were definitely not up to the challenge of snow play. As a kid, Holden basically had to bribe me to put myself through the torture of wet and ice. But the idea of playing with Ryder and Addy—watching her experience it for the first time—didn’t seem like torture at all. I shrugged. “Sure.”

He raised a brow at my half-hearted response and then disappeared into the house.

He was back sooner than I liked with a small pair of rainbow mittens and a matching beanie for Addy and a pair of purple gloves for me. “Lucky for us, Mila left these here.”

As I pulled on the gloves, Ryder helped Addy tuck her hair into the beanie and tug the mittens on.

We stepped down into the snow, and Ryder led us out past the barn in the opposite direction of the cabins into the wide-open pasture where the animals had grazed when I’d been here in the summer. At the far end of the field, bright-red crabapples shimmered against dark branches layered with pure white, and I wanted to take a hundred pictures of it all from different angles. Ones that included just the landscape and ones that included the pleasure radiating from Addy’s face and the gentle smile on Ryder’s as he watched his daughter.

Addy and I followed his instructions, patting the loose snow into tight, round balls and then rolling them along the ground. The balls collected sticks and dried grass along the way as the snow wasn’t really deep enough yet. But eventually, we had three balls of differing sizes that he helped us pile on top of each other. He jogged to the trees and came back, helping Addy place sticks for arms, not yet fully grown crabapples for a wide mouth, and more crabapples down the front of the snowman as buttons. Then, they searched under the snow for pebbles to make the eyes and a nose.

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