Page 19 of The Outlaw's Code

All that was left was to tell her the truth.

I foundShane in the afternoon, fixing a loose fence post farther out in the pasture. I quietly snuck up behind him before tightly wrapping my arms around him. “Guess who?”

Shane grinned. “Oh, my God. You make me feel like we’re in high school.”

“That reminds me. Do you already have a date to prom?” I smirked. “Because I think it’d be pretty cool to show up in matching tuxedos.”

“Ha. Ha,” Shane said, right before I turned him around to kiss him, deeply. I placed my hands on his waist, still holding him against me. Shane melted in my grip, something in him seeming to shake loose, getting more comfortable with my touch. A few seconds later, though, I could tell his defenses were right back up. He broke off our kiss, taking a step or two away from me, for good measure.

“So, yesterday in the barn…,” he started, his eyes avoiding mine.

“Yeah?”

“You’re sure it wasn’t a mistake?”

“Shane—”

“How’s your memory?” Shane nodded at my head. “Anything else come back to you?”

“Nothing that changes anything between us,” I replied. “I remembered more of what my life was like before, sort of in a wave.”

“And… you remembered more about the girl in the photo?”

“Her name’s Vanessa. And yes, I remembered more about her. Mostly how unhappy we made each other. We were like fire and ice. All the fun was in the smoke, the chaos.”

“But you were off and on?”

“Right. And?”

“You kept going back,” he murmured. “There must’ve been something about her that made you want to stay.”

“And something about her that made me want to leave.” I took a step closer to him, closing some of the distance between us. “Where’s all this coming from, Shane?”

“I just don’t want it to be a mistake,” he quietly admitted. “I’m not—I don’t open myself up to people that often, Calder. Sure, I’ve had nights with people, here and there, but nothing like that. Nothing like us…”

Shane suddenly shook his head. “Never mind. Forget I said anything. I’m just being stupid. That’s all.”

I gingerly grabbed both of Shane’s hands in mine, putting them together and bringing them up to my mouth. I softly kissed his skin, my eyes locked on his. “You’re not being stupid. And nothing between us was a mistake.”

“Come on. We have a post to fix.” Shane moved his hands away from me, but I still caught the smile on his face, the expression lingering.

“Who’s that?”

Shane and I were headed back to my cabin, when we noticed a white SUV pulling up on the gravel. We slowly approached the vehicle, and I tried to get a good view of whoever was in the driver’s seat. A woman stepped out of the car, her thin, sleek heels seeming so out of place on the ranch?—

Shit.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

It only took my brain a few seconds to connect the dots, images of our fights quickly playing like a projector in my mind.

Vanessa.

She was beautiful, a high fashion model dressed in designer clothes and dripping with expensive jewelry. She walked like she owned the world, and for all I knew she did, my memories still cloudy around her family background or how we met. Everything about her seemed perfect, but in a curated way, like everything had been decided by committee. She seemed like an impossibility, something put together, something too good to be true.

Was anything about her real?

Had anything about us been real?

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