She shook her head. “No. No. I’m me and you’re you. And that’s...that’s it.”
And she felt sad. Just indefinably, horribly sad.
“I’m not running away,” she said.
She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
He frowned. “I didn’t say that you were.”
“I didn’t... I just... I’m not. I’m not. You’re Hunter McCloud.”
“And you’re Elsie Garrett.”
“Right. So that’s...that’s that.”
She stood there, and she just stared at him. And it hurt. Because he was the most handsome man she had ever seen, and now she knew what that meant. Now she knew why it was more than just looking at a mountainside. Now she understood that it wasn’t simply a matter of aesthetics, but something that went bone deep. Something beyond what the eye could see. Chemistry. She had never understood that before.
She did now. She just wished it wasn’t with him.
“I’ll see you around, Hunter,” she said. Because there was nothing else to say. There was nothing else that either of them could say. There was certainly nothing else they could do.
She wasn’t running. She was just walking away.
She turned around, and she headed back toward home.
Back toward safety.
And she didn’t look back. No matter how much she wanted to.
CHAPTER TEN
HUNTER WAS INVITED to dinner at Garrett’s Watch. Sawyer’s house specifically, and he hoped very much that Elsie wouldn’t be present. Of course, he also hoped that she would be. Because he wasn’t sure that he enjoyed dinner at Sawyer’s half so much if he couldn’t spar with her. And wasn’t that ridiculous.
When he walked in, it was only Sawyer and Evelyn, and June. And he wished that he wasn’t disappointed by that.
June immediately ran to him and he scooped her up, giving her his hat like he always did, but his mind wasn’t here.
He kept seeing Elsie as she had been standing there on the riverbank. Soaked through, the outline of her bra showing beneath the flimsy fabric of her tank top, her hair wet and dripping, her expression vulnerable. He had wanted to... Well, he had wanted to reach out and take her into his arms. And it had been more than enough of a reason to turn and walk the other direction.
But it was her that had walked away in the end. And he would question why he hadn’t been the one to do it for the rest of his days.
Right when Evelyn was putting pot roast and potatoes on the table Wolf and Violet came through the door. And that made it weird that Elsie wasn’t here. That made him take her absence a little bit personally. And he probably should. But again, that made her the smart one. If she knew he was coming for dinner, right now she should probably stay away. He hadn’t stayed away. Just like he hadn’t walked away.
He was batting zero right now.
He wished she were here, though, not just because he wanted to see her, but because the amount of domesticity surrounding him made him intensely uncomfortable. That was an understatement.
He had never been part of a family like this.
And he knew the same was true for Wolf and Sawyer. Wolf’s and Sawyer’s mothers had left, just like Elsie’s, and their father had been a piece of work, though he wasn’t the nightmare that Hunter’s own was. Still, they had never... It had never been like this. And he wondered how either man knew how to do it. And why they had wanted to in the first place.
But he supposed the answer had a lot to do with Violet and Evelyn. Because both Wolf and Sawyer had had their pick of women in town. And none of them had ever managed to snare them. Or even get them remotely interested in long-term relationships. Though, in the case of both Sawyer and Wolf, their children had been a big part of that. In Sawyer’s case, it had been becoming a single father, and knowing that he wanted there to be a mother in her life so that she didn’t grow up like Elsie, surrounded by men who had no sensitivity at all. And both had decided to commit to Violet after she’d gotten pregnant. But he could see that both Sawyer and Wolf loved their wives, even if they had come to be in their relationships through unconventional means.
Actually, he supposed they were about as conventional as the marriages that had existed in the West once upon a time. Marriages of convenience—that had turned out happily.
He wondered sometimes if his own parents had loved each other. Ever. But then, that would assume his father had been capable of love. And he didn’t think he had been.
“When is the baby expected?” he asked, shifting June to his knee as he sat at the table, trying to dig deep and find the charm that he was theoretically known for. He had been short on it lately, and all he needed was for Wolf and Sawyer to notice.
“June twenty-fifth,” Wolf said, grinning. “A little girl cousin for June. In June.”
“That’s great,” Hunter said. And he did not say that he couldn’t reconcile this man, who was so happy about his impending fatherhood, with the man he had known all of his life.
Maybe it was even more of a reason to entrench himself in McCloud’s Landing.
The idea of putting distance between him, Sawyer and Wolf didn’t hold any appeal. But looking at this was...
It was painful.
And he hadn’t imagined something like this could be painful. He hadn’t known he’d care about it. He’d figured they could be married. They could be fathers. He could do his thing because he didn’t want any of that.
But the reason he didn’t want it felt heavy right now.
Because he could see—easily—why they were happy.
And it made it all that much more real that he wasn’t going to be that kind of happy because while his father had scarred Gus on the outside, he’d gotten plenty of his own on the inside.
He heard the front door open from his position at the table.
Elsie.
He knew it without having to see her.
And he heard her, because she was stomping. But by the time she entered the kitchen, the scowl he could hear embedded in the stomp was managed.
“Hi,” she said, nearly sounding chipper as she sat down at the table.
“Hi,” Sawyer said at the same time Wolf said, “Hey.” And both of them were looking at her like she was crazy.
If Violet and Evelyn thought anything strange about Elsie’s appearance, they kept it wisely to themselves.
“Did you all hear I lost a poker game against Hunter the other night?” Elsie grinned, then tilted back in her chair and put her boots on the table.
Evelyn grimaced. “Honey. Sweetie. Oh, the table.”