Page 61 of Rancher's Return

He had abandoned his family. Nothing in him was...

He didn’t deserve this.

And above all else, he couldn’t handle it.

“What exactly do you think you want?” He asked it carefully. Slowly. Because he was making assumptions. He was jumping to conclusions. And she didn’t deserve that.

“Everything. Nothing less. I didn’t want to fall in love with you, Buck. You are the most inconvenient person for me to fall in love with.” Her eyes filled with tears, and he wished he could say something to make it better. Except he was the one making her cry. He was the one who was going to make it worse. He was the one who was going to break everything.

So there was nothing he could say. There was nothing he could do.

“Of course you didn’t,” he said, his voice rough. “Nobody would.”

She shook her head. “No. It isn’t because of you. It’s because of me. Because I told myself you were absolutely the worst person to fall in love with, but what if my perspective was all wrong? It’s a terrible thing, trying to figure out how to categorize your brother’s death. Trying to figure it out while you’re all laden down with the stuff life throws at you. And at the same time, people say all these things to you. Well-meaning people say the most horrendous things. About how it was meant to be. About how he’s in a better place. But I always wanted him to be here with me.”

“Of course you did,” he said.

“It’s just, because of that, I really resisted looking for meaning in what happened back then. Like finding any meaning there was a betrayal. Like it diminished the loss. But not accepting what it meant, that was just me fiercely holding on to pain I didn’t need to hold on to. I think I can believe both things now. That Jason should be here, and that because he isn’t here there were certain things I had to learn and accept. Certain ways I had to grow. And certain people I am connected to. Forever.” She made eye contact with him, her gaze like an arrow. “You. I think you are one of the only people in the world who could possibly understand me. My pain, what I’ve been through. I think you’re the only person, other than my parents, who felt the impact of that loss. But you do.”

“Yeah. Because I’m complicit.”

“You’re not. And you know that.”

He did. But something in him was desperately seeking a shield to throw in front of her words. And taking responsibility for her brother’s death was a big, easily accessible shield.

She was quiet for a long moment. “I can’t help but notice that you’re not saying it back.”

That stuck him, right in the gut. The truth of the matter was, he couldn’t say it back. But he also couldn’t deny that he did love her.

He loved her.

He had fallen in love with her over the course of these weeks, months. And it wasn’t just working together, sleeping together, these family dinners, seeing her with his family. With his boys. It was everything. It was the way she smiled, the way the sunlight caught her hair. It was the way she made him feel. Like anything was possible.

But he knew it wasn’t.

Because he knew what he was.

He was the man who had left his family for twenty years. He was trying to make up for it. He was trying to be new, trying to be better, trying to be different. But he wasn’t. Not yet. And he maybe never would be.

And so he couldn’t say that he loved her. He couldn’t promise her a future. He couldn’t promise her anything.

“Now you don’t have anything to say.”

“I can’t.”

“You know, there was a man who once told me he paid close attention to what the universe was trying to say to him. To his intuition. The checks in his gut. Where is that man?”

“I’m listening to my gut,” he said.

“And your gut says you can’t be in love with me?”

“My gut says we can’t make a future out of this. My gut says I went way too far off the path to get back on it now. I’m sorry. I wish things could be different. But I have Colton and Marcus and Reggie, and I am trying to make up for the fact that I have been a bad son and a bad brother for two decades. I am trying to make up for the fact that...”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe any of it. You know what I believe? You need your guilt. Because it’s your security blanket. Without it, you’re afraid of what you’ll become. But I know you don’t need it. You’re a good man, Buck Carson. I don’t care what anyone in this town used to say, and I don’t care what my thirteen-year-old self said to you in the streets all those years ago. You don’t need guilt. This is why you didn’t want to accept my forgiveness. You wanted to come home and have everybody throw stones at you. All the better if your own family would’ve picked up the rocks. Because then you can insulate yourself with that guilt. You could say you were right to be gone. Because everybody hates you. Is it that bad to find out people are actually happy to see you? That we actually want you?”

“I just can’t do this.”

He turned away from her, and he walked to the door. He got his coat and his hat from the peg. And he felt like a damned coward. He felt like he was doing the same thing he had always done.

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