Steal Her Heart (Kaid Ranch Shifters #1)(29)

So okay, she let him pay, and before she could chicken out, she stretched up on her tiptoes and pecked him right on the lips. She stood there for a few moments, her hands on his chest, stretched up as high as she could go, drinking in his slow smile.

“What was that for?” he asked softly.

“For being nice to me.”

His lightened eyes dipped to her lips, and he slipped his hand to her neck, leaned down, and kissed her gently. When he pulled back, he murmured, “For bein’ nice.”

Oooh, she liked this game. She could’ve played it all day, but Wes stuck his head back in the door and yelled loudly, “Come on, assholes, we don’t have all day.”

Bryson pursed his lips into a frown. “And the moment is broken.”

Maris giggled and shrunk back down to her normal five-foot-six height. “If we have a day of debauchery ahead, I have to use the ladies room. I’ll be out in two seconds.”

“I’ll pull the truck around front,” he said. He patted her on the butt, which made her smile grow even bigger because she really liked booty pats, so she skedaddled toward the hallway with the restroom signs.

She hurried, because the boys seemed anxious to do their criminal deeds, but when she came out of the ladies room, she saw someone that made her startle to a stop. A ghost from her past, Danny Fretogue, was sitting on a chair, right at the corner of the hallway. She hadn’t seen him in years, and time sure had changed him—for the worse.

His auburn hair hung down in greasy tangles, and his cowboy hat dangled from the knee of his ratty, mud-splattered jeans. He hadn’t shaved in a long time, and his skin looked dirty. He smelled awful, but that wasn’t what sent her heart to skittering. His eyes were bright green. Much brighter than she remembered from their days working on the Farrel Ranch together.

She cast a quick glance to the front window of Tap’s, and the sight of Bryson’s truck settled her pounding heartrate a little.

“Hey Danny,” she said.

“Maris Thurgood.” Even his voice sounded different. “It’s been a while. Too long.” He shook his head hard, twitched three times, and settled. “Too long,” he repeated.

“Yeah. Listen, I’ll see you around, okay?” she asked, side-stepping toward the door. Something wasn’t right with him.

“You sure run with different folks now, don’t you, Maris Thurgood?”

She ignored him and made her way out the exit and right to Bryson’s truck.

“I came back for you, you know?” he called after her. “I came back.”

“What’s wrong?” Bryson asked the second she got in.

How did she even explain Danny or what had just happened? “Uuuh, I just saw a ghost from my past.”

Bryson looked across her at the window of Tap’s. “What happened? You want me to go in there?”

She loved that he jumped right in to stick up for her. He was up for putting out any fire that involved her. She loved it. She’d never had that before. But Danny was sick in the head or something, and siccing Bryson on him wasn’t fair. Danny was weak from something she didn’t understand, and Bryson was a force of nature completely capable of bowling down anything in his path.

“When I met Dallas, I was working his dad’s ranch, like your stalker-ass already knows,” she explained. “Well, Dallas was in college at the time, and I lived in a bunkhouse with three other ranch hands, Danny Fretogue, Andy Minor, and Justin—gah, I can’t even remember his last name. He was so quiet and didn’t spend a lot of time with me and the other two guys. Anyway, Danny was my friend. We were the new ones, and we kind of bonded over learning all the new ropes. We just hit it off. He was my best friend for two years, the one I shared everything with. But then things got weird when Dallas came back from school and started paying attention to me. Danny got quiet, and a few months after Dallas and I started dating, he left. Just…one night I went into the bunkhouse, and he was packing his things, and so was Justin. He said he didn’t like being in this town anymore and wanted to go see the world, work different ranches farther south. I was crying, and he told me everything was going to be okay and to be happy. He said that over and over, ‘I just want you to be happy.’ And right before he and Justin left, he told me, ‘I’m coming back someday, and everything will be different. You’ll see. I’m going to be different.’ And I didn’t know what he meant by that, but he never picked up his phone when I called after that. Didn’t text, no letters, no contact whatsoever. He just disappeared. I haven’t thought much about him in a long time, but he was sitting in there and he was right. He’s different. Not in a good way. Something felt…wrong.” She whispered the last word as she aimed her attention at the window of Tap’s again. He was standing there—Danny. Standing there, staring at her.

Bryson slid his hand over her thigh and pulled out of the parking lot, but the look on Danny’s face stayed right there in her mind. The vacant green eyes, the stringy red hair, the empty smile. The boy she remembered didn’t exist anymore, and there was tragedy in that. Every person she’d met had touched her life in some way, shaped it. Every new person was a blessing, and every loss was heartbreaking. And there was no doubt she’d lost Danny all those years ago. She just didn’t realize how much.