REMY DIDN’T CARE for the look on Keira’s face then.
She looked...dumbfounded. Something almost like betrayed, though that didn’t make any sense.
He headed back into the house and heard her shut the door quietly and carefully, which he figured didn’t exactly bode well.
He’d dressed in a hurry, thinking he might have to get out there and handle Michael himself. And now Remy wished he’d put his belt back on, since his jeans were riding low on his hips, reminding him with every step that he’d gone ahead and done it.
He’d gotten the taste of her all over again, and that was that.
He could tell himself all the lies he liked, but one taste was all it had ever taken.
Remy had it bad for Keira.
Distance hadn’t lessened it any. Time hadn’t cured it.
And he wasn’t any happier about it now than he’d been back when she was too young and too bold and too focused on him.
Remy got a glass out of the cupboard and filled it with water from the tap, then drank it all down, as if the real issue here was that he might be dehydrated. Instead of just pissed and filled with a very old, very dark storm that had already about drowned him once. He didn’t need to do it again.
Why was he doing it, anyway? Why was he here, doing this? Again?
He could see his reflection in the dark kitchen window, here in this farmhouse that had been everything to him even after Keira had left him. And now he’d gone and messed that up, too, when he could have played this a lot smarter and just waited for summer to come. Keira would leave again. Another one of Grandma June’s granddaughters would come.
Life would go on the way it always did, and he wouldn’t have to feel all this crap inside him. He wouldn’t have to wonder, yet again, if he’d survive it, when he already knew the answer. He would. He had, and he would again.
But it would be lonely and long, bitter and cold, and the years would feel like nothing at all the next time she aimed that smile at him.
Damn her.
He might as well have loved spring itself. At least it came around every year.
“Why haven’t you talked to your family in so long, Remy?”
She was using that cool, even voice on him. The same one she’d used on her father. The one that reminded him that she’d gone off and grown up out there, whether he liked it or not.
“And don’t tell me it’s not my business, or that I don’t get to ask the question,” she said before he could throw some version of that at her. “You’re the one who brought it up.”
Remy set down his glass. Then he ran his hand over his face.
“I didn’t have much to say to them after you left,” he said gruffly.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I didn’t have much to say.” He turned around to see she’d followed him to the door of the kitchen and stood there with her arms crossed, glaring at him. He didn’t much feel like being glared at just then, so he returned the favor. “They didn’t support me much when you were here, did they? The problem wasn’t you. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t our relationship. It was them, and I wasn’t about to pretend otherwise just because you were gone and the relationship was over.”
Keira shook her head slowly, as if she was trying to clear it.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.”
“Not sure I can say it any clearer.”
“I understand the words, Remy. Just not why. Is that why you’re living in the cabin?”
“It turned out I didn’t much want to work for my father, either. Since he threatened so many times to cut me off, if not in so many words, I figured, why not do it for him?”
Does you wanting to marry Michael Long’s daughter mean I’ll end up supporting Michael Long? Flint had asked, more than once, while Keira was in college and Remy had made his intentions clear enough to be seen all the way over at the coast in Copper Ridge. Because Keira’s sweet enough, but no way in hell am I giving that man a handout.
That was when Remy had still worked on the ranch with the rest of his family. He’d had every intention of marrying Keira and continuing that work. When Keira had been around, no matter how frustrating it got to have her treated like she might spontaneously transform into her father at any moment, Remy had maintained a certain amount of optimism that he could make his father see his way, eventually.
But when she was gone, Remy had lost any shred of optimism.
You really want to cut off your nose to spite your face? his father had demanded when Remy had announced he was leaving. We wanted to like the girl, Remy, even when all she seemed to do was cling to you. We did our best. Why are you defending her now?
Your best needs work, Dad, Remy had retorted.
And while he might have regretted how complete that cut was at certain points over the years, he couldn’t say he missed having to deal with his father’s famous temper, his mother’s hard-as-nails version of affection and the fact everything he did required a committee vote with each and every one of his brothers. Grandma June had let him do as he liked, and as long as he kept the operation running smoothly and in the black, she was happy.
“What about your brothers?” Keira asked now, staring at him like she didn’t recognize him, which made him feel put together wrong. “I can’t imagine they’d let you just...stop talking to them.”
“It’s not about what they let me do, Keira. And I talk to them when they hunt me down to get in my face. I ask them, real nicely, to leave me alone.”
“There are more of them than you. Why didn’t they hold you down and make you deal with them years ago?”
“They tried that. A couple years running.”
He shrugged as if he could hardly remember any of it, anyway. As if he didn’t care.
Keira stared at him.
“You know, it’s funny,” she said in a soft sort of way that felt like a blow. “Every time I think about what happened between us, I think about how it was my fault. What I did. All the ways in which I betrayed you. How I walked away from something wonderful, which is such a part of the story of us that my mother, of all people, threw it in my face earlier tonight.”
“That’s how I remember it.”
“I bet you do.” She did something with her hand, and he couldn’t tell if she was pointing at him or trying not to. “But I always forget this.”
He didn’t want to ask the question. He didn’t want to encourage whatever look was on her face. Much less that storm in him that wanted too badly to get out.
As if he wanted to drown.
But he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “This?”
“No compromise, no give, and that’s it,” she said very distinctly. She slashed a hand across the air. “They’re cut off forever. Believe me, I never thought I’d say this because I know they never liked me much, but I have sympathy for your family.”
There was noise in his head and Remy knew it was that same old storm, pounding into him. Shaking him.
“You have a lot of gall saying something like that to me,” he managed to get out.
“You gave me a ring and that was it,” Keira replied, clearly unaware of the danger. More likely, she didn’t care, not if she was prepared to stand there in front of him like this, no tears or I’m so torn. Just that fire in her gaze he found he admired a little less when it was aimed his way. “We had to get married immediately. On your schedule. Any deviation from that schedule, and that was the end, as far as you were concerned. Total betrayal.”
“You gave me that ring back, Keira. I guess you could have picked up a knife and actually stabbed me in the back if you wanted to make yourself really clear.”
“First I asked you to wait.” She didn’t sound calm or amused. She sounded...angry. At him. When he would have said he’d never seen more than a hint of Keira’s temper, and only in passing. And never, ever aimed at him. “I wanted to get engaged. I had no problem whatsoever making that commitment. But I wasn’t ready to walk down the aisle. I had things I needed to do first.”
“Yeah, because everyone needs to run off to some city and pretend they’re someone else for a while.” He rolled his eyes. “Like doing that in college wasn’t enough.”
“I didn’t ask you to do it. I told you it was what I needed.”
“Who needs to do that, Keira?” he demanded, and he could hear the echo of the past in his words. In the sound of his voice.
Because he’d known, hadn’t he? He’d known it when she was eighteen and she’d cried when she’d told him she wanted to go away to college. He’d known then that he wasn’t enough for her, but he’d convinced himself that college would fill in that gap. That she would get what she needed there and come back. But it hadn’t worked. And she might have said she would wear his ring while she tried on different lives that day in the cabin, but he knew she wasn’t going to be satisfied with that.
She already hadn’t been satisfied. And what if his parents were right?
Do you want a wife who has her eyes on the horizon instead of the land? his mother had asked when he’d shown her the ring he’d bought for Keira.
But what if Keira never turned that gaze of hers to him? What if she always wanted something out there—something Remy could never give her?
She said she needed a little more time, a little more space. Did that mean other men? Other hands on her perfect body? Did she really want time, or did she not know how to walk away from him? She needs you a lot, Remy, his mother had said. Are you sure you can be everything she needs?
He’d wanted to be. But whether she wore his ring or didn’t, Remy knew how it was going to go if she took all her needs to a city where he couldn’t follow. Where he didn’t want to follow. Because sooner or later, wasn’t that how it always went?
Remy had always wanted all of her.
“Who wants to do that? Maybe someone who was forced to live a hundred different lives before she turned ten,” Keira said now, temper and something else all over her face. “You know who my father is, what he does. He tried to do it to your family, too. And I think you know your father isn’t this angry all these years later because my dad tried to rob him. It’s because he pretended they were friends and your father believed it.”
“You refusing to marry me is my father’s fault? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Imagine what it was like to grow up with that,” Keira invited him. “Your father is tough, but he’s not slippery and awful, always trying to make you think maybe you’re crazy. I needed to live somewhere no one knew him. Or me. So I could see, once and for all, how much of that man I inherited.”
He thought of all the questions she hadn’t answered. All the times he’d asked the right thing, but hadn’t noticed how good she was at directing his attention elsewhere.
All the things he’d missed, and she’d hidden, that had led to her handing him back that ring.
“Maybe you should have said all this then.”
“I didn’t know how, Remy. And it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway, because it’s not as if you could come with me, could you? You belong here. You love the land. The hills, the fields, the woods. You would die in a city.”
He’d died without her, Remy almost said.
Almost.
“You could have asked,” he said instead.
“When?” Keira shook her head. “You told me it was everything or nothing. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s what you did to your family. Why not me, too?”
The unfairness of that stung him, so hard Remy was forced to wonder if maybe there wasn’t a little bit of unpleasant truth in it.
Not that he wanted to face that.
“You’d already made me wait for years for our life to begin,” he reminded her. “It had already been forever, Keira. What point was there in waiting around to see what you’d need to do next?”
“Or we could have been engaged.” And her voice was so quiet it made Remy almost see what that could have been like. All those dark, lonely years, brighter. Better. Still missing her, but not mourning her the way he had. “And we could have done all of this together. But you didn’t want that. We had to have the future you imagined, the way you imagined it, or you didn’t want it at all.”
“I’m not going to have this what-if argument with you,” Remy bit out. “That’s not how it happened and you know it.”
“That’s exactly how it happened,” Keira retorted, instead of backing down, as he’d half expected she would. “And if I had any doubt about that? If I wondered if maybe I was changing things around in my head because it made me feel better not to shoulder all the blame—”
“It’s not about blame. At the end of the day, if you wanted to leave, it’s a good thing you did.”
He almost meant that.
“Remy.” The way she said his name seemed to expand inside him, like another unpleasant truth he didn’t want to face. “The fact that you cut your family off for half a decade proves it wasn’t just me. You’re a remarkably stubborn man. Maybe you’re more like your dad than you want to admit.”
She was the second one to say something like that to him in a single season, and the sheer injustice of that accusation just about ripped a hole straight through him.
“My father could teach hardheaded to a slab of granite,” he thundered at Keira.
“You’re making my point for me.”
“He’s unbendable, unforgiving and has never met a grudge he can’t—” He stopped himself, because Keira was smiling.
“Look, I grew up here,” she said. “I know tough men. I don’t know anyone who gives their whole life over to the land who isn’t hardheaded and stubborn as hell. How would you make it if you were any other way?”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence.” He glared at her. “But I’m not my father.”
“Okay, but is Flint a con man who loves nothing and no one but himself?”
“He loves two things. His land and his woman, and nothing else, as he’d be the first to tell you.”
“He loves more than that.” Keira rolled her eyes at Remy’s expression. “Your father never had much use for me. And your mother never actually told me you could do better, but I know that’s what she thought. And you know why? I was a silly girl who was dating their son. With five sons you’d think they’d come to a place of peace with silly girls, but no. You were serious about me and they didn’t like it.”
“They don’t like anything.”
“That’s not true at all or they wouldn’t have a single friend in this valley, and they’re widely beloved. They weren’t sure about me because they love you, Remy. A lot.”
He stared at her as if her words didn’t make any sense. Because he’d never thought about Flint and Annette West as being capable of love. Not like that.
He’d always thought they viewed their sons the way they did their cattle: useful. Especially as they grew older and could take on more of the work. His parents weren’t emotional. Not the way Remy always was where Keira was concerned. He’d never imagined it was possible his parents could feel that.
Then again, the story they told about how they met boiled down to one look across a Christmas party and that was that. They’d been together ever since, working ranch land and raising boys, which couldn’t have been easy. And they still preferred each other’s company to anyone else’s.
What was that if not love? And if they loved each other hard and tough, it wasn’t a huge jump to think maybe they loved their sons the same way. Flint and Annette weren’t going to gather Remy on their collective lap and ask him about his feelings.
But they’d sure as hell harbor serious reservations about a girl who they’d worried from the start would break his heart.
Why hadn’t Remy seen this before?
He felt like the world had shifted beneath his feet. Like if he wasn’t still standing there at the sink, he’d fall off it altogether.
“My parents loved you, of course,” Keira said now. “They thought that they might have a connection to the West family again. So people would have to stop talking about that steer and what a backstabbing liar my father was.”
“Keira.”
But he had no idea what he was trying to say. What he could say.
“My parents love only themselves.” He wished she was still looking at him with anger. Whatever this was, it was worse. It made that shifted-world feeling grow inside him. “Your parents wanted to save you from pain. And from my family, while they were at it.”
Remy’s head was swimming. He didn’t understand what was happening inside him. He couldn’t seem to get it under control. It was like something was cracking open. Or cracking into pieces.
And he couldn’t understand why, when he knew this was all Keira’s fault. He had the strangest notion that if he could only cross the kitchen floor and put his hands on her, she could save him.
He tried to shake it off. “You’re the last person in the world I would have thought would lecture me on the things you have to do to handle family.”
“You actually have a family.” And Keira didn’t sound cool and controlled anymore.
She sounded as ragged as he felt, as if the world wasn’t any steadier beneath her feet. Something in him wanted to see that as a victory. But all he felt was hollow. Raw.
Messed up, all over again.
“They don’t try to steal things from you,” Keira said, her voice tight. Almost harsh. “They don’t demand you give them money and tell you it’s your duty to provide it. They don’t try to tarnish your grandmother’s reputation or try to muscle in on the house she left her granddaughters. My God, Remy.” And her voice broke then. “Do you know what I would do to have what you have? Why would you throw it away?”
There was no pretending that wasn’t emotion in her voice, deep and painful. She scrubbed her hands over her face, shook her head as if she couldn’t let herself think about this any longer and then turned away from him.
But she didn’t walk away.
And he wanted that to mean things it didn’t.
He felt as if he was pushed into moving, whether he wanted to or not. All he knew was that his feet started heading across the kitchen floor, seemingly of their own accord, and then he was behind her.
He wrapped his arms around her and dropped his head down next to hers.
Because he might feel hollow and scraped raw, and he might not know how to handle all these things storming around inside him. He might still be pissed. At everything. And she might never convince him that she hadn’t betrayed him by refusing his ring, no matter what he might have done in return.
But she was Keira.
And he’d had a taste of her again.
He couldn’t seem to keep himself from sampling her a little bit more. His mouth moved against her neck, in apology and in support, and because he had never stopped loving her just because she’d left. He tasted her until she made a broken sort of noise, and turned around in his arms.
“Remy...” she began.
“I’m tired of talking,” he told her, gruff and certain.
And so he spoke to her in a different way altogether, right there on the kitchen table, until it smacked so hard into the wall it should have knocked the light fixture out of the ceiling. But it didn’t.
In case that didn’t quite get his point across, he picked her up afterward and carried her back upstairs to her bed.
Where he set about telling her all over again. And again.
How he loved her. How he missed her.
And how he didn’t think he had it in him to let her go again, the way he knew he would have to.
But not tonight.
He told her these things over and over and over again.
But he never said a word.