Unless Micah was a bigger liar than you realized.
Yeah. That was a possibility. Because when it came right down to it, she had fancied herself in love with the man, but what the hell had she actually known about him? Nothing. Not a damned bit of anything. She had believed all the stories that he’d told her, but she’d been eighteen. And an idiot. So what the hell did she think she knew now?
“How did you hear about the ranch?” Landry asked.
Because of course Landry didn’t instantly recognize the son of a ranch hand who had been here for just a few months thirteen years ago. Because of course Micah Stone hadn’t been a formative human being in the life of her older brother. Of course not.
“Oh, I just saw something about it. Online. Biggest ranch in the state of Oregon,” the kid drawled, straightening up so that he looked taller.
“Bullshit,” Arizona said. “You heard about it from your daddy, didn’t you?”
She wasn’t a nice person. The years had hardened her and twisted her. And if it hadn’t been Micah leaving, it had been what happened after. The accident and then her father’s unwavering lack of sympathy. His demand that she get up, pull herself up by her bootstraps, heal miraculously, or lose her spot at the ranch.
She was tempted sometimes to go spit on his grave. He wasn’t buried in it yet, seeing as he was alive and all. But still. Spitting on his grave seemed like a decent enough idea.
“I’m eighteen.” He tilted his chin up.
“Try again,” Arizona said.
“Seventeen.”
“Boy, you are a bad liar.”
He shrugged. “I just look young for my age.”
She had a feeling he wasn’t any such thing. She had a feeling he looked older. And while there was a chance Micah had come out here with a kid waiting back home in Texas, there was also a chance...
“You’re thirteen if you’re a day. Your dad did not have a child when he was out here.”
“How do you know? You don’t look any older than I do.”
And suddenly, she felt a little bit warm toward the man-child.
“Well, I am. Does your dad know where you are?”
The kid lifted his chin in defiance. “I don’t answer to anybody. I drove myself all the way out here in that truck, I decided to make the trip. My mom doesn’t give a shit where I am.”
Well. That was interesting.
“She may not give a shit where you are, but I need to make sure that you don’t have a warrant out for you or anything like that.”
“No warrant,” he said. “I just borrowed the truck, is all. But she doesn’t drive it. It was my dad’s.”
And suddenly... Suddenly a cold chill swept over her.
“Wait just a minute. It was your dad’s?”
What if he was dead? What if Micah Stone was dead. What if all the dark, fervent, angry wishing that she had done late at night had actually landed the man in his grave.
She didn’t want that. She realized that right then.
She desperately didn’t want it.
“Yeah, he lives in the country, and I live in the city with my mom. I usually spend summers with him...”
“So he’s not dead,” Arizona said.
“No. My dad’s not dead.”
“But you’re about to be.”
The masculine voice startled then both, and that was when she saw a tall, broad cowboy walk out from behind the truck.
She didn’t see another vehicle, and she had no idea where he’d come from.
But she would know him anywhere.
Micah Stone.
Because there could never be another man that looked like that. There could never be another man who reached down into the frozen, prickly heart of her and made her feel. There never had been, there never could be.
The kid looked guilty and like a rabbit caught in a trap all at once.
“Damn, Dad,” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I knew exactly where you’d gone, you little varmint. I talked to your mother...”
“I’m surprised she even noticed I was gone.”
And she could see Micah steel himself against that comment. It was so strange. To see the years on his face, because in her mind he was forever the man he’d been back then.
The man who’d abandoned her. No matter how much she’d wanted to, she could never make him into half the disfigured enemy she wanted.
No. He was as beautiful now as he’d been then. The nerve of him. The honest-to-God nerve. Why couldn’t he be ugly?
Because what had happened to her after...
What had happened to her after had stopped her. Had compromised everything.
She would never have waited for him. She would’ve gone on and slept with every man that caught her fancy. Would’ve left this ranch. Would have...
If not for that accident. That accident that he’d caused. The one that her father had held over her head.
The one that had destroyed so much of her youthful beauty.
Micah had never even seen her naked. That was the thing that really pissed her off. Maybe that was silly. Maybe that wasn’t fair. But it was how she felt. Her body had been wasted on her anguish for him.
Sacrificed on an altar she’d been too foolish to realize she was flinging herself onto.
Driving too fast while tears streamed down her face.
She’d been eighteen. And she’d wanted nothing more than to take it all back forever. But there was something she couldn’t take back.
And when you were essentially a walking Tim Burton movie underneath your clothes...
She gritted her teeth and looked up at him. No. Not a scar. Just glorious weathering from the storms of life, and dammit all. Back when she’d been young he’d been attractive to her. And now... Well, he was the man she needed.
Why was that? Why was her sexuality so firmly Micah Stone? Maybe it was because that accident had frozen her in time. She’d often thought that. That it had taken all the pain that he’d left inside of her and turned it into an obsidian ball that just sat there, immovable. Time didn’t erode it, or degrade it. Time didn’t change it. And nothing could fix it. No matter how much she wanted it to.
Maybe this was lucky.
Very few people got the chance to stare their demons down, she realized.
Arizona had spent the last thirteen years being a bitch to basically everyone in her immediate proximity, using them as a surrogate for him.