Page 80 of Hero for the Holidays

“Yeah. We should. We can do that.”

They rocked back and forth. In theory, now, they had nothing in common except for Lila. Except they lived on this ranch. Worked on this ranch. She knew he’d been with three women besides her. He knew she’d been with only him.

“So the barn, you’re renovating it... I do want to invest in it.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I was just bitter at you because you gave me grief over the farm store.”

“Is that all you were bitter at me about?”

“No,” she said. “But you know that. I... Why did you do that? With the farm store. Why were you trying to get in the way?”

“I was being serious. I wasn’t doing anything to you.”

“I have a hard time believing that.”

“Well, it’s true. I swear, anything to do with the ranch, I would never let our business get in the way of it. I told you, Fia. For the most part, I let myself be cold where you were concerned. And that included anything to do with the ranch. If I had thought that we could make room in the budget to finance the farm store, I would’ve said.”

“But your brother is rich.”

“Yes. And it’s up to him what he wants to dump that money into.”

All right. Fair. She felt slightly cowardly that she had been behaving out of pettiness, while he had not.

While he had been sincere in his objections to the farm store.

“I’m doing it for Lila,” he said. “Like I said, Denver has money, but he can spend it on what he wants. It’s not up to him to finance Lila’s education. But I want to. I want to leave her something significant.”

“It’s not just going to be you. It’s going to be me too.”

“Well, in that way, it’s the collective, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “Except in this case is just you and me.”

“True.”

“I didn’t know that you had dreams for expanding King’s Crest. Have you always?”

He shook his head. “No. For a long time, I wanted to survive. And then I wanted to keep toiling here out of spite. So yeah, I guess I did do some things out of spite. I wanted to show our dad that we could make it better than him. The legendary man himself couldn’t do a better job taking care of this place, and we could. And we did that. Then, I started to realize I might need to want more. Because I had a kid. A kid to leave a legacy to.”

“So this whole time you’d been out here just trying to prove to your dad that he wasn’t that great?”

“Yes. And I get that that’s stupid. Because he’s never going to believe that. He’s always going to see it as his foundation. So everything that came after it is his too. Just like we are. That’s just how he is. He’s never going to be anything more than that. He’s never going to see it as anything more than that.”

“My dad just never even thinks about us. I don’t think he has ever once looked back. And my mom was just so devastated she couldn’t handle it. I tried to have some sympathy for her for a long time. I tried to frame it as her sort of doing the opposite of what I did with Lila. She removed herself because she was on fire inside our house. Does that make sense? She was so devastated by the divorce that she couldn’t be the best version of herself here. So she had to go off and find something new and different. To be better. Because her being there didn’t benefit us anymore. But now I look at Lila, and I just don’t see it that way. I would never...” She looked up and their eyes met. “Whatever we do, it has to be for Lila.”

He nodded slowly. “Agreed.”

“We have to try. To do better. To be better.”

“Definitely.”

But the whole time she looked at him, she couldn’t help but have her gaze drawn to his mouth. She couldn’t help but feel a stir low in her stomach. And it was so wrong. It could not happen.

Because she would never be her mother. Not ever. She would never leave her child because she couldn’t deal with something.

“This is why I avoid you,” he said.

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