Always On My Mind (The Sullivans #8)(34)

Although, if she wasn’t going to dance again...

Wait, she hadn’t come into the stable today to work out her own mess of a life. She was here to help Grayson. To get him to see that he could trust her enough to finally open up.

She moved around the side of the horse so that she could see Grayson’s face. “My father died when I was two. He was forty-eight and my mother was left with all eight of us to raise. I would climb into her bed to cuddle with her some nights and her pillow would be all wet and she would just hold me until we both fell asleep.” She could guess without Grayson’s telling her that he hadn’t had anyone to hold after his wife died. Or if he had, he’d turned away from them before they could get too close. “I know how hard it is to lose someone—”

“You don’t know a damn thing about how hard it is!”

His outburst was so loud the previously calm horse spooked and began to rear up. Grayson yanked Lori out of the stall before a hoof could connect with her head.

His expression was so fierce, his grip on her arm so hard, that she had to steel herself not to shrink back from him. He needed her, she knew he did.

Surely it was why he’d worked so hard to keep her at arm’s length.

“I know you must still be in terrible pain over what happened. Have you talked to anyone about your wife? Have you tried to work through any of your grief? Because if you haven’t, then maybe if you talked to me about it, I could help you—”

“Help?” He spit the word out as he released his grip on her so quickly she almost spun into the opposite stall. “Helping is all you’ve been trying to do since you got here. Trying so damned hard.”

“I have been trying, Grayson, and I’ve been doing a pretty good job with everything,” she interjected. “But I think the reason I ended up here, on your farm, wasn’t because I needed to learn to be a farmhand. Maybe—” She forced herself to continue despite the fury on his face. “Maybe I had to come here because you needed me.”

He laughed, but instead of joy, the sound was harsh and brittle, as far from true laughter as anything she’d ever heard.

“All you’ve done since you showed up is ruin things. Break things. Push your way in where you shouldn’t be.” His eyes were black as night, hard as coal. “All you’ve done is go where you’re not wanted.”

Holy crap, he was mean. Even meaner than her ex had been when she’d finally told him what she thought of him and his dancing and his endless career-climbing. Even meaner than he’d been when she’d accidentally let the pig she’d nicknamed Sophie decimate his strawberries.

But when pushed hard enough she could be mean, too, cruel enough to remind him, “You wanted me plenty last night.”

“Then that makes both of us idiots.” His glare was hot enough to spark a fire in the loose hay they were standing on. He raked his eyes down the length of her body and she actually felt dirty by the time he looked back up at her face. “You could take off every scrap of clothes right here, right now, and I wouldn’t be stupid enough to make that mistake again.”

No, damn it, she wouldn’t let another man tell her she wasn’t good enough. She wouldn’t let anyone else chip away at her until her insides curled up into a tight little ball of misery.

“Don’t worry,” she told him in an equally hard tone, “I won’t make the mistake of trying to help you again, either. If you want to wither away in your grief and let it eat up your entire life and your future, go right ahead. I thought you were worth helping, that maybe there was a real human being—a man with a beating heart—beneath all the fury and nastiness. But now you’ve helped me see that you aren’t worth anything at all.”

She turned to walk out on him, but before she could leave him to stew in his own misery until kingdom come, he said, “Instead of pestering me with your questions, you should be asking yourself what the hell you’re doing hiding on my farm. Because we both know this isn’t where you belong, Naughty.”

God, it hurt to hear him say that, and then to fling the family nickname at her, one she now knew she never should have shared with him, as if every last part of her was tainted. Unlovable.

Because if she didn’t belong here with the animals and the land and the bright blue sky—and if she no longer belonged in the dance world—then where did she belong?

Lori knew she just needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep on walking out of the barn and out of his life. But even as she tried to get away, he kept coming at her with more words aimed where they could do as much damage as possible.

“How would you like it if I turned my focus to fixing you, because it was easier than fixing myself?”

His accusation stopped her cold, even when she knew she should be running from him as fast as she could, before he could do deeper damage than he’d already done. He’d already hurt her with his complete dismissal of her feelings in the cottage during the storm. Badly. And he’d made her doubt her own feelings, made her ask herself if she was really nothing more than the self-absorbed person he’d made her out to be.

“Do you know what I saw that day when you drove into my fence and sent my chickens running down the road?” He didn’t wait for her to answer, didn’t stop to notice that she was crumbling apart one word at a time. Or if he did see it, he clearly didn’t care just how badly he was hurting her. “I saw a scared little girl who’s had everything she ever wanted, everything she’s ever needed, handed to her on a platter. And then, when she hit one little bump in the road, she was so spoiled that the only option she saw was to give up.” He put his hands on her shoulders and spun her around to face him. “If you’re a dancer, then you should be dancing, damn it.”