Page 25 of Blue Moon

And a lot of that was thanks to him. He’d believed in me. He’d treated me like a human person when others treated me as a cash machine or a commodity.

“I’m so fucking relieved about that. Moon, I can’t lose you. I want you to have the life Neve never did, and yeah, I’m aware of how screwed up that sounds.”

It was screwed up, totally screwed up, but I was relieved too. Relieved because Ryder had come to Las Vegas not out of some weird obsession with getting into my panties but because he couldn’t bear another woman he cared about dying on his watch. He was in bodyguard mode, not horny asshole mode.

“It’s okay. I swear, it’s okay. Tell me Neve’s brother didn’t get away with what he did?”

“He’s dead.”

“Did you…?”

Had Ryder taken the ultimate revenge? I couldn’t blame him if he had, not when I’d dreamed of wrapping my hands around Julius’s throat more times than was healthy.

“Not that way. I hit them where it would hurt the most.” His smile was grim. “Right in their reputation. Between the voicemail Neve left, my testimony, and the DNA tests on the baby, the cops had enough to charge him with incest. He didn’t last six months in jail. I’ve never met the guy who killed him, but I’ve been topping up his commissary account for the past decade.”

Wow. Just wow. I’d always known Ryder was deep, but I’d never imagined he was keeping that kind of heartache bottled up inside. And even now, he was being a gentleman.

“You can hug me back, you know.”

“You told me not to touch you, and I didn’t want to assume.”

But now he wrapped me up in his arms, and Ryder Metcalfe gave the absolute best hugs in the world. My crouching position was super uncomfortable, so I gave in to my burning thighs and sank onto his lap with a sigh. I’d missed him so much. I’d missed this. Us. Whatever “us” was.

“All this, and we haven’t even gotten to the part about your wife yet.”

He laughed, as I’d hoped he would. “That part’s easier to tell. I made a mistake. I thought I could learn to love Shylah, but it turned out I was wrong.”

“But you still married her?”

“Yeah.”

He released me, and I felt the loss of his warmth immediately. But the hard part was over. Now we had to do the adult thing and have a civilised conversation over dinner, even if I’d completely lost my appetite. I took my seat again.

“Shylah and I met in a more conventional way. She attended the University of San Diego, and one night when we were both in a bar downtown, I saw her wallet fall out of her purse. She offered to buy me a drink as thanks for returning it, and…yeah.” Now the colour came back to Ryder’s cheeks. “I hooked up with her, my buddy hooked up with her friend, and we swapped numbers at the end of the night. It was just a casual thing, but she worried when I got deployed—I couldn’t even tell her where I was going most of the time—and I wanted her to be looked after if something happened to me. She suggested getting married, and I went along with it.”

“You got married because it was the easiest option?”

He wrinkled his nose. “Pretty much? Yeah. And I liked having someone there to come home to. But Shylah graduated, and her college buddies moved away, and suddenly she was stuck in San Diego with no family, no friends, and a husband who was never there, and she began to resent the Navy. Which meant I began to resent her.”

“You loved your job? Even though you left?”

“I loved the job, but not the command structure. In the end, I agreed to leave, but Shylah wanted us to live in Iowa. Her dad owns the biggest agricultural equipment dealership in the state, and he had a sales job waiting for me.”

“She wanted you to…sell tractors?” I couldn’t help it. I started laughing because the idea of Ryder standing in a showroom selling farm machinery was so freaking funny. “Sir, see how big these wheels are? This is absolutely the vehicle you want for ploughing your fields.”

“Something like that. I just couldn’t do it. A friend gave my name to Emmy, and she offered me an interview at Blackwood, and after I spoke with her, I knew that was where I wanted to be. But it’s notoriously hard to land a place on her team, so I swore to myself that if I didn’t get it, I’d suck it up and go to Iowa.”

“But you did get it.”

“I did. And Shylah was as upset as I figured she would be. She refused to go to Virginia, and even if I’d moved into the four-bedroom ranch home her dad bought for us, there’s no way our marriage would have lasted. We’d drifted too far apart by then. So I called time, and she threw a whole bunch of stuff at me. I ducked most of it, but…” Ryder gently took my hand and raised it to his hairline. I felt a small raised scar I’d never noticed before. “That was from our wedding photo. I needed six stitches. Her dad was visiting with us at the time, which was unfortunate, and he drove me to the emergency room, which made me feel like shit because he’s a good guy. Her whole family is great, but we were just wrong for each other long-term.”

I felt sorry for Shylah, but not too sorry. Because if poor dumb Shylah had won the showdown, then Ryder would be hawking the latest HarvestMaster Deluxe instead of picking through chow mein at my dining table. Iowa’s loss was my gain.

And I couldn’t push Ryder away, not now. The first time had nearly broken me, and I knew that whatever my future held, he’d be in it.

In what way?

Well, that was the big question, wasn’t it.

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