Page 45 of Blazing Hot Nights

Page List

Font Size:

“Which is why I didn’t fight her about it. I knew that about her from the day she insisted she was moving to Wisconsin with me. All I could do was teach her how to be safe. I did that, and she accepted the risk. That was just how it was.”

“I’m still the reason she’s dead. I was the one who rode into your ranch, yelling about the bison. No one else was there, and I insisted it couldn’t wait until you got back. My daddy was fit to be tied that there was another hole in the fence. He refused to fix it himself, and his bad attitude just aggravated me that day. If I hadn’t made Callie go out and do it—if I had just disobeyed my father and done it myself—the bull might have gotten out, but the love of your life would still be alive.”

“Callie wasn’t the love of my life, Heaven,” he whispered.

“Excuse me?” I rasped, my breath tight in my chest.

Blaze nodded, his eyes staring over my shoulder at the opposite wall of the cottage. “I knew that before I married her, but she wasn’t taking no for an answer. I went along with it because I was desperate to hang onto something familiar. Don’t get me wrong, Callie was a good woman. She worked hard and she loved hard, but we … our marriage … the easiest way to explain it is we were great friends, but that didn’t translate well in the bedroom.”

I checked to make sure my mouth wasn’t hanging open on the floor. “Callie told me your marriage was struggling, but I had no idea it was like that, Blaze.”

“I was just starting to come to the realization when she died. She was talking about starting a family, and I couldn’t work up any excitement about that idea.”

“Maybe it was just too soon to think about kids. You were working a new ranch with new animals in a foreign land. That’s enough to undertake without worrying about children. Or, heck, maybe you just don’t want children.”

His head nodded along with me, his chin resting on his knees. “That was part of it. I needed more time under my belt in Wisconsin. Hell, we were still kids ourselves. I had a lot of responsibilities already. It stressed me out to think about adding more.”

“I can understand that, Blaze. I don’t think you have to defend not bringing children into the world when you weren’t feeling financially stable yet.”

“That wasn’t the reason I didn’t want to start a family with her, though. There was this voice in my head telling me we weren’t going to last. I want children, but I didn’t want to bring children into a marriage I already knew was failing. Don’t get me wrong; I loved that woman to death. It’s just taken me a lot of years to conclude that I loved her for the wrong reasons.” He paused and shook his head, his eyes closing. “No, I loved Callie for her dedication to me and the life that we were building and for the way she treated everyone with so much light and love.”

“You loved her as a friend but not the way a man should love his wife.”

“Exactly,” I said, rubbing my temple. “I honestly tried to break it off before I left Texas, but she wasn’t having it.”

My head fell back against the bed, and I cocked an eyebrow at him. “It is possible for one person to be in love with someone who doesn’t feel the same way.”

“Oh, I know that one all the way to my soul,” he whispered.

“What do you mean?”

Blaze stared straight ahead like what he was about to say would change him forever. “When I left Texas, I convinced myself I could learn to love Callie the way a man should love a woman.”

“Then real life hit, and you realized you couldn’t?”

He shook his head with his eyes pinned to the floor. “No, it took one pivotal event eight years ago for me to know that loving Callie the way she wanted me to was never going to happen.”

“What happened eight years ago?” I asked, trying to do the math in my head.

“I met you.”

Twelve

Dammit to hell, man. Did you just say those words to her?

I was standing with my hand in my hair by the window to avoid being too close to her. I couldn’t make eye contact with Heaven, and I sure as hell couldn’t touch her ever again. What was wrong with me? Was I just horny? I was never a player when it came to women. My momma always told me you don’t go warming someone else’s bed if yours ain’t empty. Since I was with Callie all through high school, I certainly wasn’t dating other girls. Then we moved to Wisconsin and as the long, cold winter set in, I convinced myself the woman warming my bed was who I would hold until my dying day. I just hadn’t counted on Heaven Lane changing my world so completely. The last and only woman I’d ever made love to had died five years ago and I had been alone since.

I wasn’t horny. I was lonely. The difference was vast, but there was still no way in hell I could let Heaven Lane cure my loneliness. I could never be with her, not after what happened to her because of me. I would live with the knowledge of that for the rest of my life, but she would live with the pain of it, which was far worse.

“Blaze,” she whispered from the bed, where she’d lifted herself after my admission. “I wasn’t trying to come between you and Callie. You hired me to work on the ranch part-time, and that’s all I was doing. Callie was my friend.”

I leaned my butt on the wall next to the window and nodded. Relief flowed through me that she didn’t understand what I meant by that statement. She was tired, I could tell by the way she held her arm close to her and every time she rubbed her elbow, her eyes drooped a bit more. It was almost eight in the evening, and we still hadn’t slept after being on the road overnight. That had to be why I couldn’t stop myself from telling her every one of my damn secrets. I was tired too.

Tired of living a lie, that voice said.

“I know why you were working at Bison Ridge, Heaven. Your ranch was struggling, and I thought the extra money would come in handy for you.” I braced my hands on the sill and shook my head. “That’s only partially true. I offered you the job so I could see you more often.”

She stared at the bed, her hand rubbing at her bad shoulder. I couldn’t stop myself. I had to help her. I moved to the bed and started rubbing the arm again, working at the shoulder and then moving toward her elbow. She let me, but I was uncomfortable having my hands on her after my confession. She still hadn’t figured it out, and I was glad that at least one of us was still in the dark about how I felt about her.