Page 68 of A Forever Kind of Rancher

Why?

These were the rules he had set out for himself all these years ago, this embargo on hope, and now what were the rules doing for him? What had they gotten him?

He’d hurt the woman he cared for most.

And he’d devastated himself.

It hadn’t protected him.

He felt like that boy, crumpled outside a hospital after being told his little sister was dead. He hadn’t tried to hope and he still felt that way.

Because it won’t last. It won’t last.

And nobody understood that half as well as he did.

Screw Buck. Honestly. And cancer and everything else. Everything that had ever taken something from him.

He couldn’t breathe.

He walked out of the main house, and stood there in the middle of the driveway, considering going to the cottage. To what end? Because what the hell was he going to do about any of it?

She was right. He was afraid. But he didn’t know how not to be. And why did somebody like Daniel—heedless, reckless—get to have her? Treat her lightly, hold their love loosely and shatter it almost intentionally?

How are you any different?

Dammit.

And how was he any different than Buck for that matter? Who had run away rather than trying to sort it all out. Who had shut his family out, shut out everyone who cared about him.

How was Boone any different?

He wasn’t different.

He’d just built a different wall around himself. He called it responsibility. He let himself believe it made him different than those he didn’t respect.

It hit all the ways that he was the same.

He texted his brothers.

Because he had to fix this. He had to fix himself. And one thing he knew was that he couldn’t do it alone.

But the biggest difference between himself and those men was that he was going to fix this.

He was going to fix himself.

Because otherwise, it was only hurting other people to protect yourself.

He wouldn’t do that to Wendy.

Because he loved her. And if there was one thing he knew, it was that.

She agreed to meet with him. Finally.

This was the last little pocket of fear. The last foothold. She was done with it.

Because what did she have to lose? She went back to the house that night, and she texted Daniel, and told him she wanted to meet in the middle. So the next morning, she took the girls to school, and then got onto the road, headed a few hours west to where he was stationed—not their house, somewhere out on the rodeo circuit—and walked into the diner that he suggested, feeling oddly calm.

There he was. Her husband of all those years. She was still mad at him. It was impossible not to be. He’d lied to her. Nobody felt good about that. Ever. Nobody liked to be tricked.

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