“Yeah. I seem to recall you having difficulty with them.”
“We shouldn’t have been friends,” she said. She stopped swinging herself, letting the swing stop. “And we weren’t, were we? Because when you left you never got in touch with me again.”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “Because the thing is, we were friends. But I was also attracted to you, and I had to go home and deal with the mess that I’d made myself. And... I had to grow up. You were young, but I was hardly finished maturing myself. I’m not saying that I am now, but I’ve come a long way.”
“Yeah. Well. I...”
“I want to know what’s happened in your life since then. You can see what’s happened in mine.”
But she didn’t want to say. She didn’t want to tell him about what she’d been through. She didn’t want to talk about all of her pain. She didn’t want to admit that she was the least popular person at Four Corners. That even her own brothers would probably sell her out in exchange for other people. Because she was such a pain in the ass. Because she just wasn’t... Because she had all this pain and anguish inside of her and she didn’t know what to do with it. She never had.
Because she had never been understood, not once in her whole life, and then she’d gone and made it worse. That she had thought she met a person who saw her. Knew her. Got her, and then he left and...
“Why do you want to know anything about me? You’re going to leave again. We both know that. What’s the point in knowing me?” She jumped off the swing, and she felt that irrational anger rising up inside of her that tended to show up right when she needed to push someone away.
“Are we friends, Micah? Were we ever? Or were you just some guy sniffing around looking to get a piece of ass?”
“It was not like that. And you know it. I happen to think you’re worth getting to know. I always have. The reason that Daniel knows about this place is that I talk about it. I didn’t want to leave.”
“But you never contacted any of us ever again. So how much could we have ever mattered?”
“Did it ever occur to you that you meant so much to me I couldn’t contact you again?”
And then he turned away from her, and without a word, he walked away, leaving her with a jumble of confusion and feelings that she didn’t know what to do with.
CHAPTER NINE
ARIZONA WAS DOING her level best to keep space between her and Micah. But she wasn’t having similar luck keeping any kind of space from Daniel. The kid was everywhere. He was a nice kid, but kids weren’t really her thing in general.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, coming up to her while she was grooming one of the horses.
“I have a feeling you’re going to ask whatever I say.”
“Yeah, maybe,” the kid said. “It’s only that... I want to learn more about horses. I mean, I’m at my dad’s ranch part-time. But not all the time.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That must be tough.”
“Yeah. I’d like to spend more time with him. But it’s... The agreement he has with my mom. She’s... She’s difficult.”
She felt uncomfortable. Like she shouldn’t listen to slander about Daniel’s mother, particularly given the tangle of a relationship she’d had with Micah back then.
“Sorry about that.”
“What about you?” he asked. “How was your mom?”
“Well, she’s dead,” said Arizona. “So there’s that.”
“I’m sorry,” the kid said, looking uncomfortable.
“Don’t be sorry. I was pretty little when she died. I don’t really remember her. My dad’s the one who did most of the raising. He’s hard. He thinks that life is going to break you, so you need to get really tough. Tough love, I guess, except he always forgets the love part.”
“My dad’s not like that,” he said. “My dad is great. He tries. He’s kind of hard, but he tries. He calls me every day on video call, when I’m with my mom.” He smiled. “I’m probably closer to my dad than people that live with their dads all the time.”
“But you still ran away out here.”
“I just wanted to get away. I don’t like school back in Texas. The classes are huge and I can’t pay attention. I’d rather be outside working. I just... I don’t like it. When the teachers get mad at me my mom gets mad at me and...”
“Right. So you were in a little bit of a tough spot.”
“I shouldn’t have made my dad worry.”
“No,” she said, “you shouldn’t have. But I can teach you about horses if you want.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Can I help you with this one?”
And even though she felt like she was going to regret it, getting close to this kid, letting him help her out... “Yeah. All right. Come on.”
CHAPTER TEN
HE HAD BEEN tempting fate, going and looking for Arizona a week ago, and he had managed to stay away from her since then.
He had also...taken some of what she’d said to heart. Oh, not the part where she’d gotten angry at him. There was nothing to be said about what he hadn’t done all those years ago. He wasn’t going to pretend that he was the greatest man of all time, but he had behaved appropriately with her, and he wasn’t going to let her take his skin off about it. He might not have been able to help his attraction to her, but he hadn’t taken it as far as he’d wanted to.
She had been young, it was true. She had been a woman. It was just that she had been a very young one, and he had scruples enough—even then when he’d been an idiot—that he wasn’t going to take advantage.
But he definitely took on board some of what she had said about Daniel.
One thing he did remember from being here was that she had always had an adversarial relationship with Gentry King. He didn’t want that for himself and his son. Hell, they already spent too much time apart, and that wasn’t what he wanted, nor was it what he would’ve chosen but that was the life they had as decided by the court. There wasn’t much he could do about it. He’d tried. But she was right. He had told Daniel that they would do this for thirty days. And he needed to try in earnest rather than just using it as a chance to teach his son a lesson.
And he told himself he didn’t have anything to do with Arizona or the fact that she still captivated him. Even keeping a distance from her the last few days, he could observe quite a few changes about the way she was. She was angry now. He didn’t really know why.