Page 72 of Rancher's Return

That was why he was still so angry.

Because in all these years, he had never met a woman who fired up his imagination quite like her.

And he had seen her first. He had seen her before Buck had ever seen Marigold, who had ultimately become his stepmother, and the only real mother figure he had ever known. It wasn’t that he resented their relationship. How could he? It had created this wonderful stable home environment for him, on the one hand.

On the other hand, it had taken the woman he wanted most in all the world and placed her off-limits.

Or maybe, she had placed herself off-limits and that had just been a convenient excuse.

His mind often toggled between those two potential truths.

He mostly thought she just must not care. Because she had cut things off, and it had been so easy. That had been her first solution. Not just talking to her mom.

That, he would never understand. Not when they had been...

Well. He had thought he was falling in love. Clearly she hadn’t been. That wasn’t his issue to sort out.

“Why not?”

“The roads are closed.”

“What the hell?”

“Weren’t you driving the same roads?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m actually coming from Portland. I had some things I had to pick up.”

“Well, the road from Lone Rock is blocked. There are downed trees, inclement weather. Apparently it’s a whole snowpocalypse.”

“They promise one of those every year and it never happens.”

“I’m aware,” she said.

He chuckled. “Right. Nothing out there really looks like snowmageddon to me. A lot of hysteria and no white stuff.”

“Sure, but this isn’t Portland, city boy.” A silly jab, and yet one she couldn’t resist making. Made extra silly by the fact that he now chose to live in the mountains in Lone Rock and she was the one who lived in Eugene. “The fact of the matter is, the ground here is soft, and when you add heavy, wet snow or ice, the trees just kind of crumple like wilting movie starlets in the 1930s. Across the roads.”

“There’s an image.”

“Anyway. Guess we’re here.”

“Yeah. Guess we are.” He looked around. “So.” He was determined not to make it weird. She didn’t get to be the one that looked cooler and more collected.

He really wished he could get it together and find somebody else. But he couldn’t help but notice she hadn’t either.

She’d never brought home a man for Christmas. That was something he thought about more years than he didn’t. But someday, Lily was going to swan into a family event with a guy on her arm, and he was going to have to figure out what the hell he was going to do about that. He blamed his psychological trauma on the fact that he hadn’t managed to let go of her. Part of him had wanted so desperately for all the good things he got when he first moved to Oregon to be permanent.

At least that was what he told himself.

Because there was no way he was just still in love with her.

Hell, a seventeen-year-old didn’t even know what love was. And perhaps, the case could be made that a twenty-three-year-old maybe didn’t know what it was either, but that meant he certainly hadn’t been in love. And he could hardly claim to be in love with a girl he hadn’t even fucked.

Not that any of the women he’d been with since had done anything to erase the memory of her kiss. He had tried to jump right back into what he knew.

Sex with no connections.

He had become sexually active at far too young of an age. But he basically ticked every box for youth engaging in risky activities. And he had engaged in most of them. It was how he had landed himself at the ranch for troubled youths. He had been a youth. Who was very troubled.

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