The Hero of Hope Springs Page 9

  “Don’t,” she said. “That’s not fair. Don’t put that on me. You don’t mean it. You don’t really want any of this.”

  “You just know that?”

  “Yes, I do know it. Because I know what you’ve been through. I care about you and I want you involved in my life, and looping you in on my major decisions is part of that. You accepted because you’re retired. A retired old man living in his golden years, in his thirties. And you don’t want anything to change. You don’t want to lose a comfortable relationship, a comfortable setup that you have. You’re not worried about me having a baby. You’re worried about things changing.”

  “I said as much,” he said. “I said I didn’t want things to change.”

  “Well, you can’t have your way. Not in this. It’s going to change. I’m going to do things the way that I want. The way they make sense to me.”

  He turned off the main highway and pulled beneath the sign that said Hope Springs Ranch. It was a beautiful sign, one that had been there since before his parents had died. Silhouettes of horses and cowboys all around the letters.

  She waited for the comfort of home to wash over her when they turned onto the property. But it didn’t come.

  Because the man that should have helped provide that homey feeling was like a stranger to her right now.

  Which was maybe a touch dramatic. But it didn’t feel like it. Not right now.

  When he pulled up to the house, she got out quickly and began to walk back toward her camper.

  She could hear heavy footsteps on the gravel behind her. She knew that he was following her. She paused, letting out a long, slow breath. “Did you have something else to say? Because I think we should sleep on it.”

  “Go ahead and go to sleep,” he said. “But you ask yourself what you need, and then you ask yourself who you think is going to be able to give it to you.”

  Ryder left her there, standing alone in the middle of the drive after that.

  She walked back to her camper slowly, replaying his words over and over in her mind.

  Think about what you need. And think about who is going to give it to you.

  She knew what he meant. He meant: Who was going to help her provide stability? Who was going to be her counterpoint?

  And truth be told...when she thought of raising a child, she saw him as a figure in that child’s life. Being... Ryder. The influence on the kid that he had been on her.

  He meant health insurance and he meant practicalities.

  But for some reason she kept flashing back to the conversation they’d had in the bar. The one she had tried to avoid.

  The one about orgasms.

  The way he had reacted; the things he had said.

  Ryder was beautiful, but she did her best to think of him in terms other than real, human man.

  She found it comfortable to think of him as a statue. A man carved from granite. As a guardian. Some kind of supernatural protector. Not a man she could touch. A man whose hands could touch her.

  Not a man who knew his way around a woman’s body. A man who might be more proficient at it than any other she’d been with before.

  But then the idea of that... Of him touching her... Of him taking control of her in some way, even if it was for pleasure, made her break out in a cold sweat.

  She didn’t like that. The thing she liked most about sex was the closeness; she hadn’t been lying. And also, she liked feeling like she’d affected a man in a positive way.

  She had been so afraid of men after the way she’d grown up, and then Ryder had taught her that some men could be trusted. The guys she had grown up around at Hope Springs had only reinforced that.

  And when it came to sex...

  Boys at school had been grateful to her for it. And after that, it hadn’t really changed. Sixteen or twenty-six, men weren’t all that different.

  And that made her feel...valuable and powerful in a way that she could contain all inside herself.

  One that made her partner not matter quite so much as she did.

  Ryder was talking about uncharted territory. Not just for their relationship but for her.

  He was... Was that what he was expecting, really? To request that he give her a baby, or was he thinking to give her an orgasm, and to...

  She couldn’t even wrap her head around it. So she decided not to.

  A skill she had acquired growing up in a home that contained reality she found distasteful.

  She was so good at deciding to be finished with thoughts.

  And so she decided to be finished with that one, because she could not sort it out, and she didn’t like that. Didn’t like the uncertainty of certain lines of thinking.

  She approached her camper, tiny but home, and jerked the door open, which caused the whole thing to rattle slightly.

  This place still felt familiar. Smelled like her incense and candles. Things that Ryder really wished she wouldn’t have in her camper, because he was concerned about it being a fire hazard, in spite of the fact that she told him she only ever lit any of that stuff when she was watching it.

  He didn’t trust her.

  She frowned.

  He didn’t really trust anything.

  She crossed the tiny space and sat on the edge of her bed, batted the netting that hung from the ceiling and cocooned it in a diaphanous veil out of the way.

  Ryder not trusting her didn’t have all that much to do with her, really.

  He didn’t trust life. He didn’t take anything for granted. He never assumed that things were simply going to work out just because.

  Of course he wanted to get his hands all up in her baby plan.

  That was the wrong way to think about it. That made a flush creep out over her skin.

  She was not going to think about her friend that way. Not anymore.

  But for some reason, she couldn’t just banish these thoughts. And they played over and over in her mind. Her best friend in a towel. Her best friend talking about orgasms. Her best friend offering to be the father of her baby.

  And by the time she woke up the next morning her entire mind was a tangle of all these thoughts, and she wasn’t any closer to sorting out anything.

  There was only one person she could talk to about this.

  She got up and angrily dragged herself toward the main house.

  Thankfully, she knew that she had missed Ryder for the day.

  But Iris would be there.

  Iris would be in the kitchen at this point heating up something delicious for breakfast.

  Sammy walked into the main house without bothering to knock and angrily stamped toward the location of her friend.

  “Wow,” Iris said when Sammy appeared in the doorway. “You look rough.” She winced. “Did you...sleep rough?”

  She had a feeling that was her friend’s delicate way of asking if she’d hooked up.

  “I did, but not the way you mean.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m in a fight with your brother.”

  Iris cleared her throat. “Well, after all that the other night I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

  “It’s not his business,” Sammy said.

  “Sammy,” Iris said, affecting a humorous, deep voice. “Everything the light touches is his kingdom. He absolutely is going to think that this has everything to do with him. You’re part of his... His whole thing here.”

  Except, she didn’t really think she was. She was a part and different. And she didn’t think that just because he had essentially proposed marriage to her. But because of the way he had talked to her about sex.

  It wasn’t the same.

  And that wounded her in a strange way, too, because it made all this feel precarious.

  And she didn’t like it.

  “I know,” she said, f
eeling it was best to gloss over any of her internal rambling. “But I don’t like it. And he...”

  She didn’t know how to tell Iris, actually. That was the problem. Standing there now, pondering it, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

  Because Ryder saying yes to the baby meant he was saying yes to the two of them having sex.

  That thought, cold and blatant, stopped her cold. And she knew she wasn’t supposed to think of any of this in those terms.

  Because it was all supposed to be about conception, of creating life and babies. But he had brought up orgasms. So now there it was.

  He had brought up marriage, so that was something else entirely.

  And she was suddenly caught in a place where she didn’t want to say what was on her mind. Where she didn’t want to talk about everything that had happened the night before. Usually she would, and count on a little bit of shock and awe.

  But she didn’t want to. She wanted to wrap herself in this whole thing and sit in a corner with it. She wanted to stay quiet. She wanted to think.

  And if she had thought that she couldn’t be any more irritated with Ryder than she was, she had just proven herself wrong. Because as annoying as it was to be this confused, it was even more annoying to feel out of character.

  To be confused by herself, and not just him.

  “Why have you suddenly gone quiet?”

  She looked over at Iris. “I just... I don’t know. I need to think. Maybe I need to talk to Ryder.”

  “Well, normally that doesn’t stop you from talking to everyone else first.”

  “I... Do you think I’m crazy, wanting to have a baby?”

  Iris paused, staring at the back wall behind Sammy’s head. “At first. Yes. My initial thought was that you were a little bit crazy. I’m not going to lie. But I don’t know. Mostly I’m happy with my life here. And I’m here still because of choices that I’ve made. Nobody made them for me. But yes, sometimes I think about what it might be like to change things drastically. And I know if I did that Ryder would be the first person in line to tell me that I needed to go see a psychiatrist. But I don’t think he gets a sense of quiet desperation being here. I think the quiet is something that he likes.”

  “Well, why don’t you do something about it?” Sammy asked. “I mean, no one is stopping you.”

  “Because I don’t want to do anything drastic. Drastic doesn’t appeal to me. But you’re you, Sammy, and I can see how you would be the first one of us to do something different for the sake of it. That’s not a criticism. It just is.”

  “But you could do something drastic. If you wanted. I mean this is the thing. We all stay in our prescribed boxes, in our little houses, doing everything that’s expected of us just because. And I can’t help but think that even though there were deeper, more toxic things at play, to an extent my mother stayed with my father because she didn’t know what else to do. We get entrenched in things and people and places, and we don’t know what else we can be. Well, I don’t want to be that. I want to be everything that I can be, and I don’t want to wait around to have it.”

  “I have a feeling I’ll just end up waiting around,” Iris said, smiling sadly. “I just don’t have it in me to do things the way you do.”

  “You could,” Sammy insisted.

  “Some of us are caged birds,” Iris said. “Some of us aren’t. I don’t know if you can learn to be wild when you’ve been kept inside for so long. Afraid of everything out there.”

  “Is that the problem? You’re afraid?”

  Iris’s smile turned sad. “I’ve been afraid of everything since I was fourteen years old.”

  Of course. That was when her parents had died. It was easy for Sammy to forget that she wasn’t from the exact same background as the rest of them. Sometimes she felt like they were all the same merry band. In other times not. This was one of those times.

  She had most definitely had her share of trauma. But it wasn’t the same. She had never known what it was like to live in a safe house, not until she had come here. But this place was where they had lost their innocence. Where they’d had their childhood ripped away from them.

  She had never looked at Iris and seen fear. She had always seen her friend as someone steady. Even-tempered in a way that Sammy herself could never be. Practical and industrious.

  But now she could see clearly just how contained she was. How perhaps her practicality was more necessity than anything else. How it kept her rooted here.

  Both Rose and Iris were very different from Pansy, who had gone out and made a life of her own. Who had so consciously patterned herself after their father by becoming the police chief of Gold Valley.

  Rose, on the other hand, was irrepressible. She worked on the ranch, fizzing over with energy. She ran wild over the place, but she definitely had a territory and a range. She didn’t venture out beyond the edges of Hope Springs, as it were.

  And then there was Iris.

  “You don’t have to be what everyone expects you to be,” Sammy said.

  “Neither do you,” Iris said.

  “I’m not,” Sammy protested. “I’m unconventional by design.”

  “Yeah. Well, don’t be afraid to be conventional if you feel like it. You don’t have to go around surprising everybody all the time. You could just be.”

  Sammy felt like the interaction had been flipped on its head and she didn’t really like it. She was much more comfortable in the advisory role. Acting as the more experienced and worldly woman in the group. Honestly, if Iris had ever dated a man, Sammy didn’t know. And Sammy usually managed to ferret out whatever information she wanted. And if she smelled a secret, she went right in for it.

  And with Iris, she had never gotten the hint that there was one.

  Rose wouldn’t be able to keep it quiet if she’d found a guy. That meant there wasn’t one. And never had been.

  She looked up at her friend, who was staring at her with clear, amber eyes. And suddenly, Sammy realized she had been arrogant to think that she was the only one who observed anything about these people she lived with. Suddenly, she saw a world of opinions in Iris’s eyes. Opinions about her.

  She wanted to turn away from that. She was used to Ryder and his opinions, but she often brushed him off. She did that because she was sure that half of his issue was that he was stodgy and boring. That he was reacting to whatever she did, whatever she wanted from that standpoint.

  It would be tempting to paint Iris with the same brush, but she wasn’t like that.

  And maybe the real issue was that Ryder had seen some things in her all along that she didn’t want to acknowledge.

  He might be closer to the right solution to all of this than she wanted to admit.

  She closed down that part of her brain.

  “Do you want anything?” she asked.

  “What?”

  It took her a moment to realize that she had changed subjects very abruptly and there was no way that Iris would have any idea what she was talking about.

  “Jewelry,” Sammy said. “I think I’m going to get going on some projects today. I have some sunstone from Eastern Oregon and some moonstone that I’m really happy to work with and figure out what kinds of combinations I can make. And of course, you know my current obsession is rose gold when it comes to settings.”

  “Oh,” Iris said.

  Okay, so it hadn’t been the smoothest transition. And it was probably pretty obvious that the reason she did it was that she wanted to be done talking about deep things inside herself. It was one thing to kind of pry other people apart; it was quite another when they started doing it to her.

  “So if you want anything...”

  “You can surprise me,” Iris said. “I mean, if you end up with something you don’t want to sell.”

  “I’ll let you know,” Sammy said.

 
She left the kitchen and realized she hadn’t even taken any food with her. But she didn’t want to turn around and go back now. She also realized that given the inconclusive nature of that entire interaction it was probably clear to Iris that Sammy hadn’t shared even half of what she had intended to.

  She hoped Iris wasn’t hurt by that. Iris was so difficult to read in that way. She was often serene in a way that made Sammy certain there was more going on beneath the surface than anyone knew.

  Her ultimate conclusion was that while she hoped her caginess didn’t hurt Iris, Iris hid enough of herself that she didn’t have the right to be annoyed.

  By the time Sammy was halfway back to her camper she was grouchy.

  She felt completely topsy-turvy and turned upside down, and it was all Ryder’s fault.

  Her camper came into view, and she saw the silhouette of one tall, infuriating cowboy.

  “Speak of the very devil,” she muttered, kicking a stone to the side and trying to affect her best detached look.

  “So it’s ice today,” Ryder said.

  “What?”

  “You’re ice or fire, Sammy Marshall. And very few people ever see the ice. But I’m lucky enough to be on the receiving end of it every so often.”

  “Well, you deserve it. And you’re the last person I want to see right now.”

  Mostly because when she closed her eyes now he was all she could see. Mostly because now when she thought about who should be the father of her baby he seemed to be the only answer.

  No.

  There were risks she could take in life, and had taken many of them gladly. But compromising her relationship with Ryder like that...

  If he married you, he would have to keep you for basically ever.

  She felt rent right down the middle with that thought. A jagged streak of terror on one side and a blinding, white-hot need on the other.

  She was also starting to see herself the way that Ryder might.

  And lame was about the only word for it.

  She scowled. “Anyway, what do you want?”

  “Just checking in.”

  “My answer is still no. I mean, we could do...some kind of agreement, I guess. But we can’t do marriage.”