17

Of course he hadn’t said he loved her.

Hannah was furious with herself for imagining he would. Or should.

He’d had a couple of weeks with her. A couple of weeks, a few days, and a story she’d told him. What had she expected?

But all the rationalizing in the world couldn’t make her heart hurt any less.

Ty was sprawled out next to her in the bed, and Hannah knew that she could roll herself into his side. That he would hold her automatically. As if his body really did remember her in ways his mind could not. It would feel as comforting and right as it always had.

As he always did.

But there were tears pricking at the back of her eyes. And that kicked-in-the-gut feeling that only got worse, and heavier, by the second.

She rolled out of the bed and padded over to the bathroom. She went in and closed the door behind her, taking great care not to look at herself in the mirror over the sink. After a moment, a breath or two, she reached in and turned on the spray in the shower. Then she climbed in, letting the hot water beat down on her.

Hannah stood there for a long time, trying to lose herself in the heat and wet. Trying to let the water wash away any evidence of tears.

Or she hoped it did, anyway.

Her heart kept right on hurting, like a bruise behind her ribs. When her skin was pickled, she shut off the water. And took her time drying herself off, squeezing out her hair and throwing it into an easy braid on one side.

Another pair of pajama bottoms hung on the back of the bathroom door, so she climbed into them and pulled on the extra tank top she’d stashed there after her last laundry day.

Then, when she could put it off no longer, she opened the bathroom door.

Ty sat on the side of the bed, his elbows on his thighs. He’d pulled on his jeans, but nothing else, and Hannah was struck the way she always was by the beautiful lines of his hard body.

All those lean muscles. All that whipcord strength. Even if she weren’t in love with him, she would have admired him. He was a work of art.

But she wanted a husband, not a piece of artwork.

“It’s been a while,” Ty said in a low voice, “but I’m pretty sure it’s not a good thing if a woman throws herself out of bed and runs for the bathroom as soon as she possibly can.”

Everything inside of Hannah wanted to roll with this. She wanted to smile. Make it all right. Let this keep going.

She wanted to tell him about Jack so desperately that she could feel the words cluttering up the back of her throat. She wanted him to hold her while she did it, while she showed him all the pictures she had, right there on her phone. She wanted all of this to be okay.

But it wasn’t.

“That’s the problem,” she said instead, her voice quiet. Too thick with what she wasn’t saying. “All I am to you is a woman. I could be any woman.”

His dark gaze hit hers. And held. “You’re the woman with my name on a marriage certificate.”

“It’s nothing more than a piece of paper,” Hannah heard herself say. She laughed, because she would have sworn a sentence like that would never come out of her mouth. But here she was again, doing things she’d been sure she never would. “Not to me. To me, it represents everything that happened before and after we got married. But to you? Any woman could have shown up here. Any woman could have told you a story. In the end, it’s a piece of paper to you, that’s all.”

Ty looked stunned. He blinked and looked straight ahead for a moment, like he needed to orient himself. Hannah knew the feeling.

“What are you trying to say?” he asked.

That was an excellent question. But her heart hurt, and this was wrong. And not only because she was here under false pretenses, with a secret so big she shouldn’t have been able to get out a word without tripping over it. That was bad enough.

This was all that and more.

“I love you,” she said, and that hurt too. Especially when he got a different sort of look on his face. More … hunted. “And I know that you can’t feel that, because you don’t remember. I understand completely why you can’t tell me you love me back. You’ve only known me for a couple of weeks.”

“I don’t know how I feel, Hannah. About anything.” He stood up from the bed, but he didn’t move closer to her. “It’s like there’s a thick glass wall between me and everything I remember. I don’t feel anything. I haven’t felt anything, if you want to know the truth, until you came along. I don’t know what to call that. And it’s not what you want from me, maybe. But it’s not nothing.”

“I believe you. I told you I trusted you, and I meant it. But don’t you see why I can’t do that? Why that’s not enough?”

“I don’t see.” His jaw was hard now. “Because from over here, this sounds a lot like a breakup conversation. ‘It’s not you, Ty—it’s me.’ Is that what’s happening?”

“It is me,” she managed to get out. “I’m not … I can’t be the kind of woman who sleeps with a man just because he’s there. That’s not who I am. I’ve slept with one man in my entire life, Ty. Only one. And I waited for him to marry me.”

“I’m the same man,” Ty gritted out. “And we’re still married.”

“You’re not the same man.” That hitch was in her voice again. And those tears were threatening the back of her eyes when she’d cried them all out in the shower, surely. “The man I married was in love with me. The ring he gave me was a symbol of that. And there are thousands of women out there who wouldn’t bat an eye about those details, but I’m not one of them. I can’t sleep with a man who doesn’t love me. I can’t.”

“How are you so sure I don’t love you?” Ty demanded, sounding far less in control than he had been a moment before. “I don’t know that.”

“It’s not your fault.” Hannah was hugging herself, holding herself together. Or trying. “This situation is such a mess. It’s more complicated than you know. And I thought sex would make it better, make us closer, bring you back to me somehow—”

“Didn’t it?” He moved, then, crossing the few feet between them and gripping her arms. “I don’t know what experience you had here, but I’m pretty sure I found religion.”

“I don’t want to be your religion,” she whispered. “I want to be your wife. But I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen.”

“Why not?” he demanded, close and low. “I spent two days away from you, and I hated it. I miss you when I know you’re in the next room. I haven’t thought about the rodeo, not really, since you showed up here. It’s in two weeks and I don’t care, and it was the only thing that kept me going for months. Until you showed up.”

“I don’t know which part of that is less healthy. But I’m pretty clear that it’s not a marriage. Not really. And you would think so too if you knew—”

“I like you,” he gritted, cutting her off. “I don’t understand how it can be easy to live on top of each other like this, but it is. We make fantastic roommates, Hannah. And apparently, we’re magic in bed. What else do you want? What else is there?”

“I told you.” She wanted to push him away, but if she touched all that bare skin right there in front of her, the last thing she would do is push him anywhere. “All of that is playing games. The last time around, we had a lot of sex, but we never spent real time together. Now we’ve had some real time, but no sex.”

“If you want to throw sex in the mix, I’m game.”

Hannah shook her head. “I thought I could love you enough that it wouldn’t matter that you couldn’t remember me. But it does. This makes me feel like I’m cheating on my husband. That I’m betraying him by getting naked with this man who doesn’t know me. And who definitely doesn’t love me like he did.”

Something darker crashed over Ty, then. Hannah watched it roll in like a thunderstorm.

“He loved you so much that you left him. And didn’t come back, even though he was in the hospital. What kind of love was that?”

“I can’t make it make sense, Ty, I can only tell you how I feel.”

“Let me tell you how I feel. Like I have whiplash.”

“I’m sorry about that too.”

He let go of her and took a step back, raking his hair back with one hand.

“I don’t need you to be sorry. But I can’t smack myself on the side of the head and get my memory back. Believe me, I’ve tried.” The look he shot her then felt like a punch. Hard and straight to the gut. “I don’t understand why you came here, if not to give us another chance. And a chance takes more than a couple of weeks. Doesn’t it?”

“I don’t have a whole lot more time, Ty. I really don’t.”

“What are you talking about?” He shook his head. “For somebody who didn’t want to have sex until she was married and in love, you sure seem to have jumped right past the ‘til death do us’ part of the deal.”

She had to tell him. She’d put it off too long, and now everything was even worse than before. Hannah knew why she’d made every decision along the way, and each one had made sense to her at the time. But she still didn’t understand how she’d ended up here.

Rip it off like a Band-Aid, baby girl, she ordered herself, as if she were her own mother, standing right behind her with a militant look on her face. Just get it done.

“Ty.” As if saying his name would lighten this blow. “I know you have a lot of feelings about your family.”

“That’s what I keep trying to tell you. You have a lot of feelings about my family. They have a lot of feelings about everything. I don’t have any feelings.” He moved a hand over his chest, that storm still holding him in its grip. “I’m not trying to indulge my inner cowboy here. I keep trying to tell you. I don’t feel a thing. It’s all … turned off.”

This was exactly what she didn’t want. Ty with no feelings, and her with his baby. How could this possibly end in any way that didn’t hurt Jack? Hannah only wanted to protect her son. She would do anything to protect him. She had—she’d done this.

But she didn’t know which path to take that would hurt him the least now.

“You keep saying that,” she said, her fingers digging too hard into the flesh of her arms. “While everything you do is emotional. Maybe you don’t know how to put your feelings into words. That’s not exactly a surprise. That doesn’t mean you don’t feel things.”

“Telling me how I feel isn’t going to make my memory click back into place, Hannah. But it is guaranteed to piss me off.”

She wanted to cry. Sob. “I’m not trying to piss you off.”

Though she was about to do much worse than that.

“Are you sure? Because from where I’m standing, you seem to be grabbing at things to be mad about.”

Say it, she shouted at herself. It’s never going to get easy. It’s never going to feel right. Just tell the man.

“You…” Hannah could feel herself begin to sweat. Her stomach churned. “I have to tell you…”

He was staring at her. Waiting, though he could have no idea about the bomb she was about to drop.

Hannah swallowed. She wished she could reach out and slap herself across the face, to snap out of whatever this was that held her in its grip.

She had made this bed. She might have done it with the best of intentions, but what did that matter? Everyone knew what kind of roads were best paved with good intentions. And where they led.

“Ty…” she started.

“If you’re working up your nerve to tell me to get lost,” he said, something dark glittering in that gaze of his, “you’re wasting your breath. You and I made promises to each other. You sat in my truck and told me the story. This might not be a fairy tale, Hannah. It might not be working out the way you want it to. But I don’t believe in giving up on things when they get hard. If I did, I never would have met you in the first place, because I would have slunk away the first time a bull threw me on my face.”

This got worse by the second.

“That’s not what I was trying to say. I have to tell you—”

But she didn’t finish her sentence because a pair of headlights swept over the front of the bunkhouse, illuminating the room. That was weird enough, since last Hannah had checked, the whole Everett family was home for the evening. Of course, there were a thousand reasons that someone could have taken a ride out somewhere, from ranch business to Brady in search of a single man’s social life. They’d been otherwise occupied for some time, after all. Maybe she hadn’t heard one of the vehicles leave.

But in the next moment, a horn started blowing. Loud and long, and it didn’t stop.

“What the hell…?” Ty muttered.

He grabbed his shirt and shrugged into it as he moved out of the bedroom. He stamped into his boots and then headed outside. Hannah trailed along behind him, pulling on her own boots and grabbing one of his flannel shirts off the peg near the door to wrap around her. It got cold in these mountains at night, even in August.

There was a truck parked at a weird angle in the yard, right outside the ranch house. A quick glance around showed Hannah that the outside lights were all turned on and Brady was already standing in front of the truck. Abby and Becca were standing together in the ranch house’s door, while Gray strode across the yard, the look on his face akin to another man’s shotgun.

That was when Hannah realized she’d seen that truck before.

She told herself she was confused. She didn’t know enough people in Colorado to go around identifying different pickups, but as she drew closer, her confusion spun out into something far more alarming.

Recognition.

Because once she got out of the glare of the headlights, she could see the woman standing in the open driver’s door. She wore her hair the same as Hannah, in blond curls that tumbled down past her shoulders. She liked her jeans, she loved her boots, and she’d never met a concert T-shirt she didn’t covet. She bought them off the internet, and pretended it was as good as going. Tonight’s featured Tim McGraw and Faith Hill in a spicy embrace.

But Hannah couldn’t focus on Tim McGraw’s forearm and hands. She couldn’t breathe.

Especially when she saw the bundle the woman held in her arms.

“Mama…” Hannah whispered.

No one could possibly have heard her, but still, Luanne’s gaze swung straight to her. And Hannah would have preferred to get hit with that truck, which she’d last seen in Aunt Bit’s driveway. She felt the way her mother’s gaze swept over her, taking in every detail. Ty’s shirt, haphazardly thrown over what were clearly her pajamas. Her wet hair, and most damning of all, the fact she wasn’t wearing a lick of makeup.

Hannah might as well have come out here with a sign, lit up in neon, telling all of Colorado what she and Ty had been up to tonight.

“Can I help you?” Gray demanded.

But Ty was looking from Luanne to Hannah and then back again. On the other side of the truck, Brady was doing the same.

“Well?” Mama said into the dark. Straight into the center of all that tension. Her eyes bored into Hannah, and Hannah knew that she’d never, ever back down. That wasn’t what Luanne did. “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”

Hannah’s mouth was dry. Still, she opened it and tried to say something, only to find no sound came out.

Everyone was staring at her. And she couldn’t summon up any of the tools she normally used. No smile. No drawl. Nothing.

That was when Jack began to cry.

Hannah’s paralysis disappeared in a snap. She leaped forward, suddenly so greedy to get her hands on her baby that she forgot the situation she was in. It didn’t matter. Not when he was crying. Not when he needed her.

She threw herself across the yard, pushing past Ty and Gray, her hands already out. Reaching. Desperate—

Hannah plucked Jack out of her mother’s arms, already murmuring. Already saying his name and moving in to press kisses to the side of his face. The sweet baby smell of him rolled into her, soothing her. Just as her voice soothed him, because he stopped crying. His perfect lower lip trembled for a moment, and then he started to babble. He reached out and put his sticky, chubby hands on her face, right there on her mouth, and she couldn’t help herself.

She smiled at him, big and wide, as if they didn’t have an audience, arrayed behind her in worrying silence.

But they did.

Hannah met her mother’s eyes over the top of Jack’s head and the soft, dark hair he got from his daddy. She cradled him close and didn’t react to the defiant challenge all over Luanne’s face.

Then she turned around, slowly, and it was even worse than anything she could have imagined.

The outside lights were beaming and so were all the lights in the house, so she could clearly see Abby and Becca standing inside the back door. Brady had his hand on the hood of the truck and a scowl on his face. Gray was on the other side of the open driver’s door. Ty had moved closer to Hannah, as if he was ready to protect her.

She would remember them lined up like that for the rest of her life. She could feel this scene branding itself on her heart. The family she’d almost had, but lost.

Right this minute.

Because she could already see understanding dawning.

“This is my mother,” she said, dimly amazed that her voice was working again, now that it was too late.

She found Ty. She held his gaze even though it made her tremble. And she tried to pretend that they were alone while Jack made his noises and seized her braid, tugging on it as if it was a toy. His toy.

She understood, suddenly, why a heart could break and keep hurting. Why each and every piece ached the way it did.

Because she had never understood what it was to love, wholly and desperately and with her whole body and soul, until she’d met Ty. When he’d broken her heart, she’d been sure he’d kept all the pieces with him. Then she’d had Jack, and she’d understood her heart in a whole new way. That it was bigger and stronger and more fragile than she’d ever imagined. That it would forever live outside of her body, contained in a little boy who smelled sleepy and too warm and all hers, but wasn’t hers at all. He was his.

Tonight, she had every love of her life standing there around her. Her mother, who she loved and despaired of, fought against and wanted so desperately to please. Ty, who she still loved, so hard and so deep there should be a different word for it, especially when it couldn’t possibly work out between them. And Jack, her bright and shining joy, whose presence on this earth made her life make a different kind of sense than it ever had before. She wanted to cry, because it was hard, and worse, because she could never protect him from things like this.

Love and all the damage it did. All the ways it hurt.

And how pointless life would be without it.

Jack would grow up and learn all the ways there were to hurt himself. She would have to watch him do it. She would have to let him go.

Letting go, over and over again, was all love ever demanded of her. It was such a tiny thing, and it was the whole world, and Hannah was terrible at it. More than terrible. As this whole mess proved.

Ty was staring at her, frozen solid, a perfectly blank look on his face. She didn’t need to hear the murmuring from behind him. She didn’t need to feel her mother’s impatience at her back.

She felt her own guilt just fine.

“And this is Jack,” she said to Ty. As if they were alone and she’d done this the right way while she’d had the chance. If only she’d done this the right way … but she hadn’t. “I was trying to tell you about him. He’s your son.”