Page 41 of Bride for Keeps

Even after admitting his mistakes and telling her he’d been wrong. Even calling the past few months a mess. Admitting his mistakes and pointing out hers and it didn’t feel as though it had diminished either of them.

He’d asked her why she ran away when things got hard, and in the moment she hadn’t known, but right here, she knew without a doubt.

Failure was so much more bearable when you could say you hadn’t tried all that hard.

Was she going to try now?

She looked at his golden lashes against his cheeks, the way his hair had a little curl to it since it was getting too long. The golden glint of a five-o’clock shadow and the peaceful smile of a man who’d had thoroughly enjoyable sex last night.

If she tried now and still lost, how would she ever endure it? If she fell deeper, harder, entwined her life with his even tighter…

She couldn’t do it. She had to be a mother to her child, and she’d never be able to if she started that journey with Carter as a partner.

Panic beat through her, not just in her chest but also in her neck, in her head, in her wrists. Everywhere she throbbed with panic, struggling to breathe as she detangled herself from Carter.

He didn’t budge, instead kept sleeping happily on.

She grabbed her clothes with shaky hands and managed to get them back on her body before slipping out the bedroom door.

She padded into the kitchen, feeling like a criminal. Her heart beat too hard and she jumped at every noise. She was shaking, couldn’t breathe right, and every cell in her being was telling her to go back to bed andbelieve.

But her brain reminded her of all the reasons why she shouldn’t. It might not have control over her body’s reactions to leaving, but it knew what was right.

She shoved her feet into her shoes and shrugged on her coat. She closed her hand over Carter’s keys and paused, looking at the sparkling rings on her finger.

This had to be it. Much more and he’d win and she’d…

What? Be happy and whole?

She shook away that traitorous thought. Because the truth didn’t exist inhope, the truth existed in experience. Her experience was she and Carter couldn’t do this.

Or maybe it was just her.Shecouldn’t do it. She would never belong in a place like this. She would never survive years of cleaning up messes and making things work. She wasn’t strong enough.

So, she snuck out the front door, got in his car, and started driving.

*

Carter rolled overin bed, perfectly warm and satisfied for the first time in months.Months. Sierra wasn’t in bed. But he heard someone out in the kitchen so he didn’t have to panic.

He felt whole again, all those fractures after Dad had dropped his bomb healed.

Objectively, he knew they probably weren’thealedprecisely. But he’d had all his priorities skewed. Thinking everything in life was McArthurs and putting forth a good image and being a respected doctor.

But he should have been worried about being a husband and a partner. It should be more important to be agooddoctor rather than a respected one. Once upon a time those had been his tenets, but he’d morphed into his father’s way of thinking about things. They weren’t necessarily wrong ways of thinking, but they were too rigid and harsh. It didn’t leave room forhim.

So he’d put in the hard work, he’d try, over and over again until it all worked. Which was life, really. As a doctor, if he stepped back and looked at the whole of life, the body was a thing of balance. You never knew when things would throw it out of whack, when things would threaten survival, when time and toil changed the way a body did things.

Life was just like that. Never perfect, though sometimes good enough you barely noticed the time passing. But problems always cropped up, and ignoring those issues rarely made them better.

He should tell that analogy to Sierra. She might not appreciate it as much as his doctor brain did, but maybe it’d clarify where he was coming from.

On a yawn he rolled out of bed and pulled on his boxers and headed for the kitchen to see what she was up to. Except there was no lively blonde in the cabin’s kitchen.

“Lina.” His sister’s presence made…zero sense.

She turned from where she’d been looking out one of the kitchen windows that offered a view of the slew of evergreens dashed with snow. She wrinkled her nose. “Ew, put some clothes on.”

But that didn’t penetrate at all. “What are you doing here? Where’s Sierra?”

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