Page 93 of Dark Horse

“I don’t know that she wants a ring. I think once she’s over the shock and has some distance from this, she’s gonna realize she lost everything she loved because of me and hate me for it. I wouldn’t blame her if she did.” I lean on the porch railing, staring down at the wildflowers Hazel’s planted.

“The only thing she loves that she’ll be mad about losing because of you—isyou. Don’t be that guy, Grant. Don’t be the one who thinks he knows better than she does. Don’t fall on your sword because you think it’s noble and break both your hearts in the process.”

“If I have to break her heart once so she doesn’t have to have it broken over and over again when I fail her, I’ll gladly do it the once. I just want her happy. Her life has been nothing but misery and struggle, and she’s the last person on earth who deserves it. Her heart is so fucking pure, so fucking good that I don’t even know what she sees in me.” I shake my head as I look back at Aspen.

“Herself.” Aspen looks at me like I’m clueless. “She sees herself in you, and you see yourself in her. It’s part of the reason you fight so hard to protect her.”

Such a simple statement. Such an obvious truth. And it hits me like a freight train.

“Mom! You ready?” Fallon calls, interrupting my thoughts.

“Come give your uncle a hug!” Aspen replies, and she comes running up the stairs, throwing her arms around me. I hug her back, still too shell-shocked to do anything but squeeze her in return as I look at Aspen over the top of her head. Aspen raises a single arched brow, and a small knowing smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. The same one our mother used to use when she knew she was right.

“I’ll text you when we get back in town. Love you.” Aspen hugs me one last time when Fallon lets go and then follows her down the steps.

“Have a safe flight!” I call after the two of them as they get into the waiting car.

I stand on the porch for longer than I should, staring out at the mountains past the fields, just wishing I could grab Dakota from inside the house, take two of the horses, and ride until we were lost and stay there forever.

FORTY

GRANT

“Doyou remember the last time we were in this room together?” she whispers through the dark. We’ve been lying here silently awake for at least a half hour. We’re in some sort of self-imposed purgatory tonight where neither of us can find the right words, and I’m too afraid to touch her for fear of making her head worse while she’s recovering, or worse yet, begging her not to leave tomorrow when I’ve barely gotten her to agree to it in the first place.

“I thought we silently agreed to never talk about that again,” I whisper back.

We’re in my old bedroom, the one I stayed in while she lived with my parents when Jesse left me in charge of his estate and her until she went off to college. I had no business trying to look after anyone but me in the wake of his death. I was a mess.Blaming myself. Drinking heavily. Wishing I could go back in time and take the bullets instead of him. But I was doing my best to make sure she was financially secure while my mom helped her make it through the day-to-day.

“We did…” She turns over to look at me through the darkness. We said our goodnights and laid down to go to sleep, but the tension in the room had been building as a million unspoken things passed between us in the quiet. “But it’s all I can think about right now.”

“Did you ever forgive me?” I ask because, at the time, she was furious. She barely spoke to me for a year afterward.

“When I was old enough to realize you did the right thing, even if it hurt my feelings.” She shifts in the bed, and the moonlight catches the side of her face. “You’ve always been like that though. Doing the right thing even when it hurts, I mean.”

“Guess I got that going for me at least.” I chuckle. “Now that we’re old enough, I can tell you it wasn’t easy.”

It was the week after her eighteenth birthday, and she’d come home drunk. She found out that her boyfriend had cheated on her, getting a blow job from another girl she’d considered a friend in the back of his truck after she’d told him she wasn’t in the mood for sex. She’d fallen into a deep depression after Jesse’s death the same way I had, and all the psychologists and antidepressants in the world hadn’t stopped her from coming home every night to cry in her room. Nothing I said or did, nothing I bought for her, no amount of distractions or bargaining could fill the void he left.

“You made it seem easy with the way you told me no. You practically climbed the wall to get away from me.” There’s a soft laugh from her, but at the time, it had only been tears. “And then you moved out the next day.” The laugh disappears, and the quiet of the ranch at night returns.

“I’m sorry I fucked that up.” I’d put the incident in a blackbox and had done my best to forget it ever happened. We’d both silently agreed to never bring it up. At least until now.

“You didn’t fuck it up. You did the right thing, and that speech you gave me in the mirror. I still think about it.”

“I don’t even remember what I said; I just remember I didn’t want you to cry anymore. Felt like all I did back then was drink, and all you did was cry, and neither of us knew how to make it stop.” I turn on my side to get a better look at her.

“I think he’d always kept us both grounded, and we just kind of… came unraveled without him.” Her eyes search mine in the pale light. “You stood behind me and made me look in the mirror while you told me that Graham was a moron, and I was better than that—letting him get to me. You told me the best thing I could do was stop giving boys who didn’t deserve me my time and stop giving men who were too jaded to appreciate me my attention. You made me repeat it back to you. Then you said that the right guy would wait until I was ready again.” She smiles in the darkness, rolling her lower lip between her teeth. “You muttered something about how you didn’t even know how he could look at anyone else given how gorgeous I was.”

“Sounds like I was drunk, but not terrible wisdom.”

“You were drunk… I’m sorry I put you in that position,” she apologizes quietly.

When she’d gotten home from drinking with her friends that night, instead of going to her own bedroom, she’d come into mine, claiming she couldn’t sleep. She crawled on top of me and kissed her way down my neck while I was still half awake and then cradled my cock with her palm while she begged to give me a blow job. I fully woke up just in time to see her strip out of her clothes and realize what the fuck was going to happen if I didn’t stop it. My heart had nearly exploded outof my chest in my race to get her off me and keep her from doing something we’d both regret.

“I was a shitty fucking guardian.”

“You had your own grief you were working through, and your mom was so good to me. I still think about her pancakes.”

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