Page 21 of Bride for Keeps

Everyone said they were a mistake. They always had. Why shouldn’t everyone be right?

“I don’t want to fight,” Sierra said, looking straight ahead. Facing down Copper Mountain. It suddenly felt like that old disapproving presence again.

“I thought it was interesting,” Carter said, and she’d call it his doctor voice. Detached and inherently practical. Like he was dissecting a frog and telling her about it. “I’ve never really fought before. I always strive to be the better person. I figured I was supposed to be.”

There were a few silent seconds and Sierra told herself not to look at him, but her eyes apparently didn’t get the brain’s message. He sat there, staring at the steering wheel with his eyebrows drawn together. He looked…sad, and ithurt.

“There were a lot of supposed tos,” he murmured.

“I was very much anotsupposed to.” They’d been stupid to ever think Carter McArthur would survive a not supposed to. That wasn’t his fault. She knew he’d married her because he’d wanted to, and maybe he even still loved her, but she’d been stupid to think she could change him when it came to his family. She’d been stupid to think she’d be just as important to him when she’d always been so much…less.

“I never regretted my one not supposed to.”

She wanted to tell him it wasn’t about regrets, but she knew her voice would be little more than a croak. And she’d cry if she said anything more than that. She didn’t want to cry in front of him and show that weakness he already suspected about her.

But Carter reached through the space between them, his fingers brushing across her jaw before he cupped her cheek with his hand. She wanted to lean in to that. His hand was big and warm and she’d always found comfort in him. He’d always been the one person in the world who could calm the storm inside of her.

But he’d calmed it so much she didn’t even know who she was anymore. She couldn’t dwell in that when she was going to have a son or daughter to raise next year. She had to find the storm. Navigate it. Harness it. She had to find some strength and certainty.

It could never exist in the McArthurs’ world, and he might not be a McArthur by blood, but that was still his world by deed. It was still where he belonged. What he loved. If he loved her too, it was in a smaller way.

She was the not supposed to that didn’t fit.

Though it felt like a cracking inside her chest, she flinched away from his touch and leaned against her door. “Don’t.” She shook her head, trying to shake away that slow uncurling warmth inside of her.

“If you still feel something when I touch you—”

“It isn’t about…” Sierra closed her eyes. “I don’t want to feel this way. Any of these things. I don’t want to argue with you about them. I just want to be left alone.”

“We’ll have to deal with each other when the baby comes.”

“And we will.” She opened her eyes, focused on that strength and will inside of her. She had to trust it. Grow it. “With a divorce between us,” she said certainly, because that divorce felt like a shield from all this feeling. If she could keep it up, if she could separate herself from him, she wouldn’t feel all these ugly things.

He sighed and leaned back in the chair. Mom tapped on the window and Sierra could see the apologetic smile on her face.

She tried to work up anger that her mother had conspired with him, but as Carter opened the door and got out all Sierra felt was that hollow feeling expanding, the darkness inside of her enveloping just about everything.

“What time tomorrow?” Carter asked, his deep, confident voice cutting through some of the dark.

She couldn’t possibly take more. “I’m not doing this tomorrow.”

“I’ll come by around noon then?” But he said this to her mother, not to her. The jackass.

“I won’t be available,” Sierra said loudly even as Mom nodded and patted him on the arm.

Mom slid into the seat and Sierra glared at her, feeling peevish and fifteen and not caring because at least it was somewhere for her frustration to go. “I can’t believe you.”

“I know you don’t like it, but until you talk it through, nothing is solved.”

“We’re not staying together. I’m sure of it. So, there’s nothing to solve.”

“Not staying together is fine. If that’s your decision, Sierra, that’s more than fine. Your father and I will support you in whatever way we can. But you have to know why you’re making the decision first, or you’re going to have a lot of regrets.”

Sierra wanted to retort that she knew exactly why she was making the decision, but finding words for all that knowledge seemed impossible.

*

Carter stood onJess’s stoop, waiting impatiently for the genius duo to answer the door. When Cole did, his eyebrows rose in surprise.

---