She walked back to the counter and slid onto a high top. “And then the shooting in Seattle happened, and Tate became consumed with finding the shooter and suddenly…I started to think maybe I was too happy. Even selfish to want to be the center of Tate’s world. And that probably all this was designed to put me back in my place. To remind me that no one gets to be that happy.” She took a sip of coffee.
Cher was frowning at her, as if Glo had lost her mind.
Maybe. But, “It’s not about my fear of him dying, although that’s true. It’s about feeling like I can’t trust the happiness. I’m pretty sure all this happiness, all these good things are a fluke and someday it’s all going to blow up in my face.”
“Why would it blow up in your face?”
Glo lifted a shoulder.
Cher slid off the stool. Took her by the shoulders. “No one is perfect, Glo. We all have our flaws and our issues and our regrets. I know one of those is that you couldn’t help your sister. That she died even though you gave her a kidney. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve love and happiness.”
“I don’t know, Cher. Maybe it’s not about deserving it or not. Dixie said that the sun shines on the good and the bad. So maybe it’s not up to me. But if it’s not, how do I live with the fear that it could all end?”
“So instead, you end it yourself?”
Glo looked away, her eyes sheening again.
“That’s called self-sabotage. Making yourself miserable simply because you’re afraid of being miserable.”
Glo looked at her, made a face.
“Just speaking from personal experience,” Cher said. “I’m afraid to ping the cutest guy on my dating app because I just know he’ll reject me, so I go out with the guys I know won’t make me happy so if they do hurt me, I can tell myself I didn’t want them anyway.”
She pulled Glo into a hug. “Or I break up with them when I like them too much because I’m sure I’m the one who’s going to get hurt.”
Cher let her go.
Glo drew in a breath. “I am afraid of losing him.”
“Of course you are. But is that fear worth pushing him away?”
The doorbell sounded into the house.
“I have flowers coming,” Cher said. “I need you to pick out a bouquet.”
Glo headed toward the front door. “But the wedding is off—”
Glo opened the door.
Tate stood on the step, such a fierce, exhausted, drawn expression on his face it looked as if he’d waged a small but brutal war on his way to her door. He wore a blue T-shirt with the words Shelly Lions on the front, a pair of baggy jeans, dress shoes, and his suit coat. His hair was unkempt, his eyes red, and he took one look at her and stepped across the threshold into the room.
“Our wedding is not off,” he said as he shut the door behind him. Then he wrapped his arm around her waist, backed her into the wall, and without a word of hello, kissed her.
Not a sweet, I’m so glad to see you kiss, either, but one of possession. Of desire and hurt and fear. He tasted like cinnamon, as if he’d chewed gum on his way here, and smelled like freshly applied deodorant, but his unshaven whiskers, his worn shirt, and scent of salt on his skin told her that probably he’d taken a red-eye.
Maybe the moment she’d hung up on him.
And that only shattered the hard ball of anger inside.
Tate.
The man is crazy about you.
Indeed.
And yes, she was just as crazy about him. What had she been thinking?
She slipped her arms up around his neck and sank into him and slowed them down, gentling his mouth, and his heartbeat settled down from the terrible thunder against her. She wrapped a leg around his, holding him tighter. Deepened her kiss. Hello, tough guy.
No, the wedding was most certainly not off.
He finally let her go, pushing back from her, touching his forehead to hers.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.” His mouth was a grim line.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Me too, babe. Me too.”
She just stared into his blue eyes, lost, found. Happy.
“We are getting married,” he said as he drew away, then caught her hands. “But not here. And not next week.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“We’re catching a plane for Montana. We’re getting married on Saturday. Let’s get this done.”
“That’s in two days.”
He glanced over at Cher, who had returned to the kitchen but was still close enough to hear. “Cher?” he said, raising his voice.
“I can make that happen!” she called back.
Glo laughed. “All right then.”
He smiled, and it was a blast of pure light right to her soul.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“I could eat a rhinoceros.”
She took his hand and walked him through the family room.
He stopped, staring at a wall of family pictures, candids, and other shots. She and her father fishing, her mother on a horse in her youth. A family safari trip with the foundation. She hated that picture, the one posed with her near a dead elephant.
“Where is this?”
“Africa. We were on a safari hunt sponsored by our foundation. Brought a few of the biggest donors.”
He pointed to a man near the front holding a rifle. “Is that—”
“Sloan? Yes. He was the one who shot the elephant.”
Tate drew in a breath, looked at Glo, the ferocity back, this time with a hint of fear. “Pack your bags. We leave in an hour.”
RJ was going to prove to York he wasn’t a bad guy. That his dark memories were simply shadows. That he wasn’t the man he feared he was.
She just needed to get them someplace safe while she figured out how.
“This place is breathtaking, RJ.” York sat in the passenger seat of the rental car they’d picked up in Helena and stared out at the rolling, pine-dotted hills of west central Montana. In the distance, the black hump of the Garnet Range glistened with the smallest rim of white, snow already finding the mountains.
“How many acres does your family own?”
“Around nine thousand. We have about twelve hundred head of beef cattle, but Knox started raising prize bucking bulls after my father died, so he poured all the money into that. I’m not sure what direction Reuben is taking the ranch—he took over a couple months ago.”
York had changed into a pair of jeans, a gray T-shirt, and tennis shoes and appeared so, well, normal, she just couldn’t wrap her head around the guy who seemed actually nervous to meet the rest of her family.
“They like you,” she said, resisting the urge to take his hand and squeeze it. “You met them already. You just don’t remember it.”
“I remember some of it. Like Ford jumping me in Russia—that was Ford, the SEAL, right?”
“Yes. But he didn’t know who you were.”
“I think Wyatt nearly got me shot, too, if I remember—”
“The rest of them are really nice. And no one is going to get shot way out here.”
And it was way out here. A hundred miles from Helena, the closest town, Geraldine had a population of thirteen hundred. Cell service was sometimes spotty, and it wasn’t unheard of to see a cowboy on horseback riding fence or herding cattle. With the blue sky arching high over the land, the pine-laced wind stirring the evergreen trees that dotted their property, it seemed a land lost in time, right out of the Wild West.