The Hero of Hope Springs Read online

  “No,” he said. “If you want to do this, then it has to be my way.”

  “Why?” It was so irritating and ridiculous that what had started as a suggestion she’d made on a whim had turned into an outright obsession. She was angry at him, and angry at herself. Because the more she thought about it the more she realized that he would be the perfect father for her baby. Because Ryder was perfect. Because he knew how to take care of people. Because he knew how to take care of her.

  And she refused to think about any of the other things, because they were complicated and messy and they made her chest hurt.

  “You’re asking me why I’m acting in character? What about you? Why would you ask that of me if you didn’t want this response?”

  She had thought that he couldn’t possibly strip her closer to the bone, but then, there he went.

  He made her feel seen.

  He made her see herself.

  She didn’t like it.

  “I didn’t think you would take me seriously.”

  “Was it a joke?”

  The seriousness in that gaze of his stole her breath.

  “No,” she said. “I just... I don’t know why I said it. Because... Because you would be a good father. Because you’re protective, and because you are an old retired guy. All those things that I said to you... I know that it was not very nice of me, but the thing is you complement me, and...”

  “But I thought you didn’t want a man to help raise your baby?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I mean...not really.”

  You do, though. Secretly. He’s right. You harbored a fantasy of all of this working out as some big unconventional family in your head, and if you didn’t, then you would have just gone to a sperm bank like a normal person. But you’re not handling this like a normal person.

  She tried to ignore the needling voice in the back of her mind.

  And then another one.

  You expected him to take care of you. But you also expected that you could get your way.

  That cut her in two.

  Because she had to look at herself critically and ask if that was true.

  Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe she could just abandon everything right now. Everything could go on as it had before, and nothing needed to change.

  “We should do something less complicated,” she said, hushed. “I’ve been fighting with you a lot more than I want to. Which means... Fighting with you at all. I don’t like it. I don’t want to be in a fight.”

  “Tough to avoid when you started a fight, baby,” he said.

  “It became something it shouldn’t have. I should not have asked for your help with this. I shouldn’t have accepted it. It is weird, you’re right. I didn’t need to involve you in my sex life, and we crossed some lines.” She used her best calm, rational voice. “But we won’t cross them anymore. You’re the most important person in the world to me, Ryder,” she said softly. “I couldn’t stand it if something affected that.”

  He didn’t say anything; he only stared at her with dark, fathomless eyes.

  “I have to go. I have a custom order and I need to get to work on it. I imagine you have some work to do.”

  He nodded once. “That I do.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

  She slipped past him and into the camper, and it was only after she settled in with all of her fittings and gemstones in front of her that she realized he hadn’t agreed to not let it affect them. And she feared that it already had.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  RYDER WAS ALL bound up in the gut the next day, and on into the evening. He didn’t know why he couldn’t let the thing with Sammy go. She seemed to be ready to do just that, and that meant that he needed to do it, as well. But he found the whole thing difficult.

  You’re not her parent, though.

  He was well aware of that. Nothing he felt for her was parental or brotherly or anything of the kind. It was something he’d never particularly liked. Something that he knew would be a violation of her trust in him. And so he’d done a really good job of keeping it pushed down all this time, but he was failing now more and more.

  He gritted his teeth and returned to the task at hand—which was mucking stalls, an evening chore that he never minded.

  It had been a long day moving the cows from one pasture to another, and in general dealing with cantankerous animals. It was nice to be back at the barn dealing only with the horses.

  He pitched out the last of the foul shavings and took his wheelbarrow out of the stall, heading toward the back of the barn where he would find fresh bedding for the animals. And that was when he saw Sammy, lingering in the doorway, staring at him curiously.

  In one of her typical Sammy outfits, she had on a long skirt that the backlight from the barn door lit up, letting him see the exact shape of her legs beneath the diaphanous fabric. Her blond hair was down around her shoulders, a pale cloud, and the golden glow cast around her hair could easily be confused for a halo if he didn’t know her quite so well.

  She was his sunshine, yes, but his angel, never.

  Because she was something a lot more grounded than that. A wood nymph or an equally ridiculous creature that he would never normally think of, except Sammy put his mind in places that he would never choose for it to go. She made him think of things, want things that were crazy and impossible, and she seemed to put a whole new vocabulary inside his head on top of that.

  “Hi,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her and twisting them, the bangles on her wrists jingling slightly.

  She looked...demure, and he didn’t trust it, because that wasn’t her. Not at all.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting ready to go out,” she said.

  And there was something in that that he didn’t trust at all.

  “You’re getting ready to go out?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. And what aren’t you telling me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Sammy...”

  “I told you I wasn’t going to involve you in this anymore, and I’m not.”

  She whirled around and he reached out and caught her arm, drawing her back toward him. Where he made contact with her skin felt like it was fire, and he couldn’t tell if that was because he had finally touched the sun, or if it was because he was next to the door of hell.

  “Be straight with me,” he said.

  “I think we decided that wasn’t the best idea.”

  She was going to go out and find a man. She was going to do that. After everything. After she had asked him to be the father of her baby. After he had fired back with his ultimatum. After all that. He couldn’t believe the gall of her. The nerve. And suddenly he didn’t much care if it was wrong to grab hold of the sun. Because it felt like an invisible barrier had come down between them over the past few days. She had brought him into this.

  Yes, he’d offered to help her find someone, and yes, it had been self-serving in some ways. But then she had asked him. She had asked him, and it had thrown his mind down a path he had done his very best to keep it away from for all these years. She had admitted to him that no man had ever given her an orgasm and that had put something else right underneath his skin. And she had taken those two things and she had...

  He hadn’t wanted it. He hadn’t asked for it. But she’d done it all the same.

  Sammy.

  His reckless, brilliant Sammy, who was going out to give all that light to someone else. To get pregnant with their baby. To have sex that wouldn’t even make her feel a damn thing.

  What kind of protector would he be if he allowed that?

  All the rules that he made for himself, all the rules he made for her, starting when he was eighteen years old suddenly cracked, crumbled and fell. And left behind was a new world order that gave
him a wide playing field and a reckless way to be.

  He did something he’d told himself he would never do. He propelled her toward him, and she stumbled up against him, her delicate hands pressed against his chest. Her eyes were wide as she looked up at him, her mouth dropping open. She looked afraid, and he had told himself he would never make her afraid. But his heart was pounding too hard and his blood was pumping just a little bit too hot and fast, and he didn’t know what he was.

  He didn’t know what he was.

  He lifted her chin up, holding it tight between his thumb and forefinger, and he could see it in her eyes if only for a moment. A challenge. A dare.

  And he was too far gone to not take it.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind were the last vestiges of his sanity, and they were screaming at him. Screaming at him to get a grip, get it together, be the man that he had promised himself he always would be with her.

  And he would’ve listened, if not for that challenge.

  If not for the way she stood there, with an expression that basically said he didn’t have the nerve.

  Old. Retired.

  Comfortable.

  Steady.

  That was everything he never wanted to be, so why hearing it all come out of her mouth had riled him like it did, he didn’t know. But he was ready to disrupt that story she’d written about him.

  Hard.

  Before he could get another thought into his crowded brain, he leaned down and pressed his mouth to hers.

  If sunshine had a flavor, it would be this. Because it was an explosion more than anything else. Heat and light like a full gut punch that immobilized him for a solid ten seconds.

  He had spent so much time not thinking about what it would feel like to taste Sammy’s mouth, that it was like seventeen years’ worth of fantasies rolled out through his body in one brilliant flash. And when she parted her lips on an indrawn breath, a gasp that became a sigh when he slid his tongue against hers, it was like finding the answer to a question that had been dogging him for years.

  And he made sure that kiss was nothing like she’d said he was.

  Retired or old or steady.

  She didn’t wrap her arms around him. She didn’t cling to him. Her hands were balled into fists against his chest, and she didn’t pull away, but she didn’t lean in, either. Didn’t resist the explosion between them, but didn’t return it, either.

  And in the end, that was what stopped him.

  He wanted to give, but there was a point where the way she was standing made it taking, and that wasn’t what he wanted.

  He took a step back and the look on her face made his stomach a hollowed-out pit.

  “What was that?” she asked, her voice shaky.

  “Something that had to be done,” he responded, amazed that he could even get the words out through his tightened throat. He could barely breathe, much less speak.

  “You don’t... You don’t get to do that to me,” she said. “You don’t... That’s not what you’re for.”

  “You suggested we have a baby together, and you’re very anti–turkey baster, Sammy, so how did you think we were going to accomplish that? Are you going to treat me like a prostitute? No kissing on the mouth. And were you going to lie there and think of England the whole time and make sure that you didn’t enjoy it?”

  “I didn’t enjoy that,” she said. Her breath was coming in short, harsh bursts. “And I didn’t think it through. It was about you, who you are, not about us sleeping together. And now... It’s not even about who you are.”

  “Oh, so now that I decided to make you face up to what it is you actually wanted to do you’ve decided you don’t like me very much anymore?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know full well what it means. I made you face the reality of your plan. What it meant. You’re the one that asked me if I’d be the father of your baby. And now you’re acting like me introducing a kiss was a violation? What do you think would have happened? What do you think any of this entails? You’re angry because you want your dream to stay frothy and cloudy and nothing that you have to figure out the logistics for. I’m sorry I brought it back down to earth, babe, but eventually it’s going to land there, and you’re not going to like it. And it isn’t going to be my problem.”

  “It won’t be,” she said. “I’m going to make sure it isn’t. I’ll go out and deal with it myself and you’re absolved. Just go away.”

  “You’re the one who’d have to go away, darlin’. I’ll be right here where I’ve always been.”

  “Hanging out making Joan of Arc look like a self-preservationist with a selfish streak?”

  Her words were sharp and they cut deep. “What?”

  “You’re a martyr, Ryder. Don’t pretend you aren’t. Don’t you think I know what this is all about? It’s not about me. It’s about you. From your offers of marriage to that kiss. It’s about you wanting—needing—to be the one to miserably sacrifice and fix me, and excuse me if I don’t want it.”

  “That’s not what this is.”

  “It’s what your life is,” she said, the words uncompromising.

  Sammy was often shocking, but she wasn’t usually uncompromising, and she was never mean.

  But she was pretty mean right about now.

  “Why are you still here? Why did you never leave? Because you were going to, you told me that. Before your parents died you were going to follow your football scholarship to college and get a degree. Major in engineering. Figure out how to make the things that hold the world together. You never did it. You settled right in here and you put on your hair shirt and kept it on even though you don’t need to now. Even though you could change your life at any point. You don’t. You keep yourself busy and you just keep on treating yourself like a beast of burden and why? So at the end of it all you can be the great hero, who never had to try and fail at living his own damn life.” Blue eyes blazed into his, scorching his soul.

  “Sammy...”

  “You’re not the only one who can see through a friend’s bullshit.”

  Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving him standing there facing down the inevitable truth that he had jumped into this with both feet to keep things from changing, and now he was the one that had forced them to change irrevocably.

  And she’d stabbed him clean through with those words, though they weren’t as true as she believed because being with her—in her bed—oh no, that had nothing to do with him suffering at all.

  But as he stood there with regret in his chest and the taste of Sammy on his tongue... He wasn’t even sure he would change it.

  Because one was stronger than the other.

  A taste of sunshine was brighter than just about anything else.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SAMMY WAS INCANDESCENT by the time she walked into the Gold Valley Saloon. She was ready to approach the first man she found and ask him to put a baby in her.

  Just to spite her best friend in the whole world for daring to put his mouth on hers. For daring to question her like he had been for days.

  That was reasonable.

  But he wasn’t reasonable. He was calling out all of her secret fears and laying them bare in the light, and it wasn’t fair. Not when she didn’t push him. Not when she didn’t make him feel bad about his life or himself or who he was.

  And not because she didn’t see him. Not because she didn’t know that he was a man who’d turned away from the future he could have had if his parents had lived. He’d done it so deliberately that it was clearly a punishment and a shield all in one.

  Her whole body was on fire, crackling like an inferno, and she wanted desperately to believe it was all rage, and not because the feeling of Ryder’s rough, commanding lips on hers had been anything other than a gross overstep of their friendship.

  An
d through all that she kept asking herself if he was right. If what he had said was true. If the reality was she was just mad at him because he was asking her to face...well, reality.

  If the issue was that she had a nice idea of what it meant to have a baby. It was true, she had a beautiful vision of herself round with child standing in a field in a flowing dress, and then later holding a beautiful newborn, having it there in a bassinet while she made jewelry. Some kind of earth mother, bohemian existence that was a completely unrealistic vision of how that would actually be.

  But she knew there was more to it than that. That vision was just a concrete picture of the longing inside her.

  But underneath that longing was some fear. That she still needed help. That she needed some real security. Safety.

  It was why she’d asked Ryder.

  She had actually dated plenty of men who would be fine with the kind of thing she was proposing. But Ryder wouldn’t be. He was right; she did know that.

  And so he was right again to ask why she had thought that she could ask him for that and get the outcome she had imagined she would get from the made-up man in her head. She wasn’t thinking about Ryder anymore. And she was ignoring the way her lips burned. Because it wasn’t fair, and she didn’t like it.

  Don’t you?

  She ignored that, too. She didn’t like the way this quest had thrust her into some weird situation where she had to continually ask herself honest questions. That was Ryder’s fault, too.

  The continual taker of her moral inventory. Her rock. Her touchstone. For better or for worse. And in this case for maddening.

  It wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t want to have his baby.

  She gritted her teeth and made her way farther into the bar.

  And she looked at the men there. Men that would be expected to touch her if she wanted to sleep with them. If she wanted to get pregnant. And she could only think of Ryder.

  The problem was, she couldn’t seem to banish thoughts of Ryder from her mind. No matter how hard she tried. No matter how many men she looked at.

  His words kept echoing in her mind.