THIS HAD BEEN a mistake. And Everett had known it. From the moment that he had come to find Lila, he had known that it was a mistake.
Things had fractured this morning, and he should have gone ahead and made a break.
But he hadn’t been strong enough.
For all his talk of realism, what had he gone and done? He’d let himself get involved with Lila to an extent that he was no longer thinking clearly. To an extent that he was no longer doing what needed to be done.
He’d let himself begin to believe she might not be wrong about magic. About fairy tales.
And he knew better than that.
He knew it.
Lila didn’t love him. Not really.
Lila had been a virgin. Lila had a big, soft heart, and he had taken advantage of that.
He had been selfish, and he had only looked after what he had wanted, and he had told himself a whole bunch of lies to get there. And it hit him then that he was no different than his father.
What had his father told himself all those years?
That he was practical. That he was a realist. And that firm belief in himself had set it up so that he never questioned what he did.
And damned if Everett wasn’t the same.
Everett had used the trappings of his financial success to convince himself that he wasn’t like his old man at all. Hell, he wouldn’t work the land if the land didn’t give anything back.
But they were the same. Different excuses, same outcome. Money was just a big glittery shield that let him pretend he wasn’t like him.
It sneaked up on him.
But there it was. In the way that he bent this woman around his life to suit him.
And she would just... She would just end up getting hurt.
Is that really what you’re afraid of?
He wasn’t afraid of a damn thing, but he could recognize well enough when he was being a prick.
He moved Lila away from him, trying to keep his movements gentle.
“Lila,” he said. “This is just really good sex.”
“Don’t say that to me,” Lila said, scrambling to her feet, naked as the day she was born.
“I can’t have a conversation like this,” he said, indicating his current state.
He went into the bathroom and handled the practicalities, gripping the edge of the sink and looking at himself full in the face. Here in Grandma June’s house... She’d been the woman who had taught him that he could work hard for what he had, that he could step away from his father and the family land and make something of himself, make something of his own. And he was hurting her granddaughter.
Right in this farmhouse that should have been sacred in some ways, hallowed ground for the way that it had taught him what kind of man he wanted to be, and he was...
A long way off from that.
He turned to walk out of the bathroom, and he tripped on that loose floorboard and cursed Cade Mathewson yet again for the lack of care he’d given the place when he was here messing with JJ.
And then he asked himself how he was any better.
Cade Mathewson had proposed, and Everett wasn’t prepared to do anything like that at all. He returned to the sitting area and found Lila still naked, perched on the edge of the couch like a small, angry queen daring him to comment on her lack of dress.
He didn’t understand this woman. Didn’t understand how she opened herself up like this, how she conducted herself with such fearlessness and defiance.
“I still love you,” she said. “Just in case you were wondering, I changed my mind in the last two minutes or so.”
“Lila, I appreciate it—”
“Don’t you dare,” she said, standing. And she stamped her foot. “Don’t you dare patronize me. I don’t want you to appreciate my love. I want you to accept it. Everett, I have loved you forever. And I believe in fate, just a little bit. I think that it brought me here this autumn and threw me together with you. Fate. Grandma June. I believe in it. I believe in her, and I believe in us. In this. And I just think that some things in life we can’t see or touch, we can only feel them.”
“I just don’t believe that,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Well, you’re not going to like the rest of my revelation,” she said. “I also believe that we can have all this magic, but if we don’t put the work in behind it, then it doesn’t matter. We have to show up. And we have to give. But if we do that, we can make it. And, Everett, I know you’re a man that makes miracles. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have the ranch that you have. I’ll bring the magic, but let’s both bring the work. I can understand that you need to be up at four thirty in the morning for work. I can do better at supporting you. I can be whatever it is you need me to be.”
Everything in him rejected what she had to say. Because he couldn’t believe it. No one had ever given a damn what he needed, and he didn’t know why in hell they should start now.
Most of all, it seemed to him like this offer required him to need her back.
And the very idea filled him with dread.
He couldn’t quite capture that dread, couldn’t define it, couldn’t explain it, and he didn’t really want to.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to have a fight with you, Lila, and I don’t want you to humiliate yourself.”
“Shut up,” Lila said, moving toward him like a fiery ball of rage and indignation and beauty. “I want everything. And I always have. From you. I’m so tired... Why should I always take half, Everett? Why? Half of my parents. My sister. Why? Why is that my life? Is there something fundamentally wrong with me?”
“There is nothing the hell the matter with you, Lila. There something wrong with me. Stop loving people who are broken and see how far you get.”
He couldn’t even figure out where those words had come from. But the moment he’d said that, he’d known it was true.
He was the one with the problem. It wasn’t her, it was him.
His own father had loved the barren, useless piece of land more than he had loved him.
There was a flaw in him, and it was nothing that he could ever overcome.
His wife had married him, thinking that she could change him. And when it turned out that he was exactly who he had shown he was, she had wanted out.
And he hadn’t wanted to change.
“We’re all broken people,” she said. “If we can’t love each other in spite of the brokenness, the world would be a sad, dark place.”
“It is a sad, dark place, Lila. At least to me. Find a guy like you,” Everett said. “Find a guy who sees the bright side of everything. Find a guy who’s your age. Who isn’t married to a ranch already. Who isn’t... Who isn’t so damned walled-off that he can’t figure out how to feel anything.”
“You feel things,” she said, her voice small. “I know you do. You were torn up about your horse this morning...”
“It’s a responsibility,” he said. “If you can’t take care of horses, you shouldn’t have them. It’s my job to take care of them. I slacked. I got distracted... And, honest to God, Lila, if it weren’t for that, I might let you go ahead and love me and live with me. Except it wouldn’t last. It wouldn’t last—you would get tired of it and you would want to leave, and I wouldn’t be able to blame you. So just go now. Finish out your time here. But it’s not going to be with me.”
“You’re a coward,” she said. “And you need to stop acting like a wounded child.”
“I was a wounded child.”
“So was I. But I grew up, and I want... I want healing. A wounded child just turns into a wounded man, a wounded woman, unless we heal our own selves.”
She looked down, twisting her hands together. “My sister wrote to me about healing, about how she found hers. We have to take control of it. Of this life, of what we’ve been given. That’s what Grandma June did, leaving us this place. I know that her daughters broke her heart. Over and over again, but she’s trying to fix it. With us. She’s giving us something. Something to work with. But we have to be willing to take it. My mother had all this, but she kept waiting for life to fix itself. But we can’t do that. We have to make our own magic, Everett.”
“There’s no magic.”
“Well, then, that’s it,” she said, shrinking back, all small and sad. “There won’t be any if you won’t let us make it. I believe in happy endings, but I believe you have to work damned hard for them. And if you don’t want to work—”
“All I do is work,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
“No, the problem is that you’re afraid. You haven’t seen enough good to believe in it. I would believe in it enough for the both of us.”
“That’s your optimism,” he said.
He dressed the rest of the way and gritted his teeth against the pain as he turned away from her. And he walked out the front door, and it seemed to slam itself behind him.
Like the farmhouse was giving him a shove right on out.
“Don’t be like that,” he growled. “You taught me about hard work. And now I’m doing it. It’s why I have a home. It’s why I have a life. It’s why I’m not starving. It’s why I can go to the doctor when I need to. So don’t get mad at me now.”
But he was just yelling at a slammed door. And for a man who had claimed superior practicality, he had to admit that it was a little bit ridiculous.
And as he walked out to his truck, the night felt oppressively black, and not even his headlights on the two-lane highway could do anything to make that feeling go away. And he pulled into his ranch, through the giant wrought-iron gates and up to the massive house.
And for the first time in his adult life, he wondered why the hell it mattered.
Right now, he just didn’t know.