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Well, not just her mouth.

  And frankly, if it was limited to her body, that might have been okay. But it was her heart again. And that just wasn’t.

  “Good night,” he said, his breath hot against her cheek.

  “Good night.”

  Then he turned around and left, and she stood there like an idiot, watching him walk down the street, just barely illuminated by the streetlamps, until she couldn’t see him anymore. Then she stood there for a couple more minutes, just for good measure, her fingertips pressed to her lips like a teenage girl who had just gotten her first kiss. Definitely not like a woman in her thirties who had been married, deeply disillusioned, abused and divorced. A woman who should know better.

  A woman who was still standing there like an idiot, watching the blank space where the man who unraveled her heart had just stood.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “HEY, BO.”

  Cain knocked on the open doorway to Violet’s room. It was late, and she had flung herself sideways across the bed, her feet hanging over the edge, one leg tipped up, kicking absently. It took him a second to realize she had headphones in her ears.

  He walked forward, gripping the cord that was attached to the left earbud and pulling it out of her ear. “Bo, I want to talk to you.”

  Violet startled, then rolled over onto her back. “You want to talk to me?”

  He did. He really did. There was a mountain of regret between them, and all of it was his. He was the parent, he was the one who had to make things right. Yes, she was being difficult. Yeah, she had disrespected his rules, and him, and in general had been a pain in the ass. But he was the parent.

  That meant when there was fixing to be done, at this point, he had to do it. Hell, he was thirty-eight years old and he had just now realized why he did the things he did. He could hardly expect his sixteen-year-old to have greater insight into her behavior than he had into his own.

  “I need to talk to you,” he amended, sitting on the edge of her bed. “How has everything been for the past...little bit?”

  “Good. I’ve just been...at home. You have actually talked to me recently.”

  “I know. But Alison brought it to my attention that I don’t do it enough. I’ve been talking with her. A lot.” He didn’t know why he was bringing Alison into the conversation. Didn’t know why he would even allude to that to his teenage daughter, since what was happening between him and Alison was supposed to just be sex.

  Except it’s not, and it hasn’t been for a while. You just sat across from the woman and spilled your guts to her.

  Yeah, that was the truth.

  “I like Alison,” Violet said.

  He wondered if there was a hidden meaning to that, if she was alluding to the fact that she knew something about his relationship with Alison. He was going to choose to think that maybe she did, but he also wasn’t going to give any details.

  “Me too. But that isn’t really what I want to talk to you about. I know that your mom leaving has been hard on you. And I hate that your childhood is screwing you up, Bo, I really do. That was never the intent. I married your mom so that you would have both parents. So that you wouldn’t end up with my life. With one parent just off somewhere doing their own thing, rather than raising you like they were supposed to do. I was so focused on not being my father. On being around. On supporting you. So focused on that it meant there were other things I missed. Other things I’ve forgotten to do. The main one being to make sure that you know you aren’t the cause of my stress. You aren’t the cause of my hardships.”

  He reached out and put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “You’re the reason I breathe. When everything is bad, and hard, you’re the reason I get up in the morning. The reason I put one foot in front of the other. I didn’t have a father, Violet. Not really. I never saw an example of how to be a dad. But the minute the doctor put you in my arms, I knew that I was going to move heaven and earth to be one to you. To figure it out. It...it kills me that I’ve done such a bad job sometimes. It kills me that I haven’t said these things before. They need to be said. You need to know.”

  She was just looking at him, her expression blank, her cheeks pale. He couldn’t read what in hell she was thinking. He was almost afraid to. Dammit. He was scared of his own daughter. As scared as he had once been to face down his mother and ask why she was sad. As scared as he had been to find out that he was the reason Kathleen hated her life.

  He was afraid it was true for Violet too. That no matter how much he might love her, he was more of a burden than anything else. That he would only ever be the cause of people’s pain, and never the solution to it.

  He was afraid. He was a damned coward. But he couldn’t be a coward anymore. Because that cowardice had built walls between himself and the people he was supposed to be closest to. Because that division had caused the kind of pain he had never wanted to inflict on anyone, much less people he loved.

  Because it would keep him separate from his brothers. From Violet.

  From Alison.

  Alison, who had bewitched him from the beginning. Who hadn’t been afraid to beat him over the head with his stupidity. To tell him just where he was failing. To force him to share, and to make him want to pry her open in return and learn all of her secrets.

  Alison, who was teaching him this new beautiful, painful art of honesty.

  “I know that to you it’s always looked like I walked away when things got tough. Like I went out and worked the ranch instead of staying where you needed me most. Then I threw myself into working on this house for us on the property. But I never felt like... I never felt like I had much to offer you. Because when the doctor handed you to me in that hospital, not only did I feel the biggest surge of love I’ve ever felt... I felt afraid. Scared shitless. I’ve never known how to talk to people, or how to say the right things. I know how to build things. I know how to pound nails. And I know how to work. So I did that for you, as best I could. And it’s taken me all this time to realize that it didn’t look like love to you. And no matter how I meant it, if it didn’t look like love, it wasn’t worth much.”

  Violet pushed herself up into a sitting position, a tear overflowing from her green eye and dripping down her cheek. “No,” she said, her lips quivering slightly. “Dad, that’s not true. It’s not nothing. I knew it wasn’t. I did. I get... I get scared. So scared. That you’re going to leave me too. And I’ve been awful. I don’t know why. Maybe to try and make you hurry up and leave? So you’ll just do it now if you’re going to.”

  He closed the distance between them then, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her against him, cupping the back of her head like he’d done when she was a baby and holding her against him, letting her cry.

  “Maybe I don’t think that,” she said, her voice muffled. “A lot of the time I don’t know what I’m thinking at all. It just hurts. And I’m scared too. I’m going to be eighteen, and then I’m going to have to leave, and I don’t think I can stand leaving you because you’re all I have.”

  That admission shocked him. He had been pretty sure she’d been counting down the days until she could leave. All of the bitter grumbling and long silences certainly hadn’t made him imagine she was afraid to leave home.

  “I’m not going to kick you out when you turn eighteen, Violet. As long as you want to stay with me you can. Whatever you need. I’m your dad, not just until you turn eighteen. I’m your dad forever.”

  She pulled away from him, wiping her eyes, wiping her nose with her shirtsleeve. “Well. It’s just hard to...to trust anything.”

  “I know,” he said, his heart squeezing tight. “She hurt us both pretty bad. I think it’s made us both wary. But you’re right. We have each other. We have each other and even though I’ve felt that this whole time, I’ve done a bad job of making sure you knew. And you know... I d
id move us here for me as much as you. I know I said it was for you, but it was definitely for me too. Because I couldn’t stay there anymore. Because I couldn’t wait for her to walk back through the door.”

  Surprise flashed over Violet’s face. “Are you... Did you love her that much?”

  Ouch. It hurt him that she had seen just how not in love with her mother he had been at the end. “No,” he admitted, his voice rough. “Which is a whole other problem. A whole other thing likely related to why she didn’t want to be married to me anymore. Her leaving didn’t hurt me because I loved her so much. It’s because I love you so much. It’s because of how badly it hurt you. How wrong and awful it is that she left you. I deserved to be left, Violet. I can’t deny that. You don’t. You deserve better. Better than her. Better than me.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said, tucking her knees up against her chest, her expression miserable.

  “It was supposed to make you feel good,” he said.

  “All I hear is that you don’t think you should be with me. I don’t want that. You’re my dad. That’s what I want. I want you to be my dad. And if you think you can do a better job, then do a better job, but don’t say I deserve something different. I’m not saying you could do a better job. I mean, I could probably do a better job being a daughter.”

  “That’s the thing. Being a daughter isn’t really a job. You’re supposed to mess up. You’re still figuring things out.” He laughed, and shook his head. “I’m going to let you in on a secret though. I’m still figuring things out too. I don’t know what I’m doing. I haven’t, not from day one. In fact all this time I’ve only known one thing. I love you. So, since I love you I’m going to do whatever I need to to be a good dad to you. Sometimes that’s going to mean bursting into a barn full of drunken hooligans and humiliating you and carrying you back out. So we’re clear, I’m not apologizing for that.”

  A slight scowl appeared on her face. “Okay.”

  “But for not making sure you knew how much I love you, for not making you feel more secure in the fact that I’m not going to leave... For that I am apologizing. And there I’m promising to do better. If you need to talk, you can talk to me. I want more of what we’ve been doing. More honesty. Even if it’s messy. Even if it does make me mad, and I make you mad. And everybody’s mad. We’ll both be mad. But, we’ll both know neither of us are going anywhere. How about that?”

  “Sounds good.” She flung herself back at him, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I love you.”

  He closed his eyes and hugged her back. “I love you too, Bo. I love you too.”

  * * *

  CAIN STOOD OUTSIDE on the street feeling like he probably should have texted Alison first. There was a light on in her apartment window above the bakery. Every other window on Main Street was dark, but not this one. It seemed like a sign.

  Though at this point he would probably take something as innocuous as a car turning left onto the street as a sign that he needed to be at Alison’s tonight.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and let out a long, slow breath, watching as it tangled with the night air, the cool temperature making it look like he was blowing smoke. Or maybe he was, because his blood was running so hot.

  But this was more than just arousal. It was more than just sex. Something was changing inside of him, and he blamed Alison. Or maybe he gave her credit, since he really wasn’t all that sad about the changes happening inside him.

  She had made him want more. Because something about being near her, something about knowing her, had made him acutely aware of how distant he was, not just from her, but from everyone. She had a warmth that he wanted to touch, that he wanted to absorb into himself, and if he was going to do that he had to figure out how to change himself. How to get close to people. How to let them in.

  And it was working. With his brothers, with his daughter.

  Funny how Alison was the last person he was actually going to make the move with. But, at the end of the day, he felt like this was the relationship that had the most uncertainty. Alison was... Well, she was skittish as a colt.

  She had come at him guns blazing when it had come to Violet, and what she felt Violet had deserved. But as soon as she felt like things were changing between them, she retreated. And he understood that, he did. He hadn’t entered into this wanting more, wanting a relationship.

  But now... Now he didn’t want to imagine what his life might be like if he didn’t have her in it. She was changing him. Knowing her, being with her, had changed him. But he needed more. More of what she had given to him. This couldn’t just end.

  Much like that compulsion to get to know her, he couldn’t remember ever feeling like this before either. A desperation to hold on to what he had.

  He wasn’t sure he had ever valued a life, his relationships, the way that he did right in this moment.

  He wanted to hold on to this town, his ranch, his brothers, his daughter and Alison with all he had, ’til his hands were bloody. This life, these people, he would fight for. He would lay down a lifetime’s worth of baggage for them.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and started a new message to Alison, mostly because he wasn’t exactly sure if she would be able to hear him if he knocked on the door.

  Standing outside. Don’t have a boom box. Not going full Cusack.

  The curtains twitched and he saw Alison’s silhouette in the window. Then he saw her lift her phone. He looked down at his screen and saw the dots indicating that she was writing a response.

  I’ve never seen that movie. You’re old.

  He smiled. You know it’s a movie though. So the reference is good enough.

  Come back when you have a boom box.

  I did bring something else that rocks hard.

  What?

  He hesitated for a moment. My dick.

  In that case come on up.

  That worked?

  In the absence of romance I will take sex.

  He intended to give her both, but he wasn’t going to say that. Mostly because he had a feeling that would send her running off into the mountains. He was going to have to seduce her first. But he was up to the task.

  Before he went to knock on the door he dialed his brother’s house. Finn picked up. “I’ll be home late tonight,” he said. “If I’m home at all.”

  “Okay,” his brother said slowly.

  “Just letting you know. If I’m out all night, I’ll probably be late tomorrow morning too.”

  “Good,” Finn said. “Glad to hear it.”

  “Yeah well. Don’t let everything burn to the ground while I’m gone.”

  “Don’t you burn anything down either.”

  “Not planning on it,” he said. “Planning on building something.”

  Cain hung up, feeling resolute. Then he went to the door, which jerked open before he was able to knock. “It’s taking you long enough,” Alison said, leaning against the doorframe, crossing her arms and cocking her hip to the side.

  He liked that. That fake little bit of confidence she was projecting, while it was clear to him that she was frazzled and trembling a little bit.

  “I thought I would stand out here and let the anticipation build.”

  She rolled her eyes and stepped out of the doorway. “Come on up. My anticipation is built.”

  He walked over the threshold, then shut the door behind them, immediately backing her up against the wall, pressing his palms against the drywall on either side of her face. “I meant me,” he said. “I’m enjoying this. Wanting you. Making myself wait for you.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking down.

  “What? You don’t like that.”

  She looked back up at him. “I didn’t say that. It’s just weird, I guess. To have this. I’m not used to it.”

&
nbsp; “You’re not used to a man telling you that you keep him up at night? That you’re all he thinks about. That you make his body burn?”

  “No. But you’re welcome to keep talking.”

  “Alison,” he said, his voice low, rough even to his own ears. “No matter how much I have of you, I seem to want more.” It wasn’t just her body, it was everything. And it was beyond words. Something he could only feel. Something he didn’t know how to say, because it was just a feeling at the center of his chest. One that felt too big for him to hold.

  So he had to try to get it out somehow. And maybe, just maybe, that would be the key. The one that would unlock the door he needed opened. That would give him what he craved with her. Because there was more. Something deeper, something intangible and desperate that flared up when he looked at her.

  “I didn’t think you were going to come back tonight,” she said, clearly uncomfortable with the declaration. Clearly wanting to sidestep it.

  Physically, she did exactly what he knew she was hoping to do emotionally, and ducked underneath his arms, moving toward the staircase that he assumed led to her apartment.

  “Up this way,” she said, tilting her head to the side.

  He had half a mind not to let her get away with this. To grab hold of her and take her right here in the doorway so that she couldn’t get the distance she was clearly trying to achieve. Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets and followed her up the narrow staircase.

  “Did your conversation with Violet go well?”

  He felt impatient, he didn’t want to talk about that. Emotionally, he was moving forward, moving down a list of things that he wanted to deal with. He had moved on to Alison, now, and he didn’t want to take any of the focus off her.

  But he also knew that this—conversation—was part of it.

  “It did,” he responded. “Better than expected, actually.”

  “Good,” she said. “I mean, I’m glad to know that the two of you are going to be okay. I really like her, and, you know, it’s just reassuring to know that when I’m not facilitating communication between the two of you, when I’m not around, everything will be fine.”