Steal Her Heart (Kaid Ranch Shifters #1)(26)

He shook his head hard. “Don’t pity a man when the fault is his, Maris.”

“You didn’t know—”

“Doesn’t matter. I should’ve made her wait. I should’ve tracked down someone like me and asked questions. I was a stupid kid and did it all wrong, and that’s the kind of man you want to take you out.”

“No. The kind of man I want to take me out protected me from a pack of wolves. He brought me pain killers and ice packs and came to check on me when I wasn’t his responsibility. When I was basically a stranger.”

“Maris—”

“No, you’ll let me finish before you deny it. The type of man I want to take me out told me I’m enough and helped me heal parts of myself I hadn’t managed to fix in a whole year. You did that in a few days. The man I want won’t make mistakes like that twice. He learns. He’s hard on himself. He keeps himself accountable.” She looked around. “Last week I was losing everything, and I met a man on the worst day of my life. At an auction. It was the lowest I’d ever fallen. I was completing my loss, giving up the last thing I’d been fighting for. And what did you do?”

Bryson bit the corner of his lip and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You took what I was giving up, my herd, my lifestyle, my ranch, my livelihood…and you protected it instead. And I was nothing but a stranger you met in a sad moment. You aren’t that boy anymore, Bryson. And I can sit here and tell you to forgive yourself all day long, but that ain’t the kind of person you are. You’ll shoulder that guilt for always. You won’t let yourself off the hook. But that decision, that loss and the consequences that came afterward, also built you into the man you are now. The one who protects. And that man is the one I want to take me out.”

Bryson let off a shuddering breath, and she saw it in a flash. Just a moment. His eyes were rimmed with emotion, and he swallowed over and over, nodding. Hoarsely, he uttered, “Okay.” And then he opened her door and offered her his hand.

And as she stepped up into his truck, she knew. She had a moment of realization.

He wasn’t just breaking her, and she wasn’t just breaking him.

They were breaking each other.

Break little ponies…break.





Chapter Twelve


“Can we stop somewhere before we go?” she asked, watching her hand out the open window as she caught the wind between her fingertips.

“Woman, you can have whatever you want tonight.”

“Oh, good, can we do Wine and Drawing Spines?” she teased.

“Except for that. I’m not drawing dicks.”

“Fine, consolation prize, can we go by the Kaid Brother’s Ranch?”

He jerked his attention to her and then back to the muddy road. “Why?”

“I want to talk to Wes and Hunter,” she said primly. “About Marmalade.”

“Last part’s a lie.”

“About the fence between our borders.”

“Nope, try again with the truth.”

“About you.”

He was quiet for a few moments. “What about me?”

“Can we please just stop by there for a few minutes? You still go there to sleep. You aren’t done with that place yet. You haven’t talked about losing that job, but it’s heavy on your mind, isn’t it?”

He answered by turning in the long dirt drive of the Kaid Brother’s Ranch. He didn’t slow until they were under the big wooden sign with a K and an X branded into it. When he pulled up to the house, Wes and Hunter were near the pens, separating calves from the mommas. Wes was on a big red roan, cutting back and forth easy between the cows, and Hunter was manning the gate.

“I’ll be back in two minutes,” she said, hopping out of his truck.

“You don’t want me to come with you?”

“Nope!” She grinned at his baffled face and shut the door.

And then she and her Black Widows moseyed on down to the pens. She sashayed her hips juuuuust in case Bryson was watching her.

“What the fuck do you want?” Wes asked rudely.

“You here to waste more whiskey?” Hunter asked sarcastically from where he was holding the gate, keeping the calves apart from the mommas.

“You working them today?” she asked, climbing up on the fence as best as her ankle would allow.

“Tomorrow,” Wes said, frowning at her leg. “What happened to you?”

“Wolf fight. A bear sat his fat ass on my leg and rolled my ankle.”

“Ha!” Hunter laughed so loud it echoed. He cleared his throat and glanced at Wes’s pissed-off face. “She called him a fat ass. It’s funny.”

Wes ghosted a glare at Bryon’s truck. “He all healed up? From the fight?”

“Apparently, he heals real fast,” she said with a dead-eyed smile, because she had her suspicions they knew what he was, especially if Hunter thought it was funny she called a bear a fat ass.

Wes twitched the reins, kicking his roan, and trotted over to her. “What do you want, lady?”

“Well, adding a hundred more cows to my herd would be nice, my debt all paid off, for my ex to get some kind of disease in his groin where he can’t get a boner ever again, and for that one back there”—she jerked her thumb toward Bryson—“to forgive himself and be happy. Also world peace, higher pay for ranchers, for someone to make peas illegal, and for—”