Jagged (Colorado Mountain #5)(95)

When he came down, he started gliding in and out as his lips trailed down to my neck and moved there. He did this awhile before he slid in, filling me, connecting us, and stayed put.

Then he said against my neck, “Want you off The Pill, honey. We start now.”

“Okay,” I agreed quietly, liking that.

Ham and me, we’d already started. But a family, we were going to start now.

Yes, I liked that.

And he’d obviously liked Zander, and meeting him reminded Ham, like me, of the bounty we had before us. No reason to delay. We started now.

He lifted up and looked down at me. One of his hands was still curled around the back of my neck, the other one he used to drift his fingers lightly across the skin on my face as his eyes watched.

Then they caught mine.

“Loved Rachel,” he stated and his words were so unexpected, considering the mood he’d created, I blinked.

Where did that come from? And why was he talking about Rachel now?

“Ham, I think—”

“Bear with me, darlin’,” he whispered.

I shut my mouth.

Ham continued. “We met after high school. She was beautiful, think I fell in love with her the minute I laid eyes on her. Stopped at nothin’ to get in there then bind her to me.”

He paused and I said nothing, doing my best to bear with him.

When I didn’t say a word, he kept going.

“Had a good life with my folks. Mom bein’ so sick, she took a risk havin’ me. She couldn’t take more risks after that, though. But, the love they had to give, love they gave me, I knew the only thing that would have made growin’ up better was havin’ brothers and sisters. Never, when I was a kid, when I was growin’ into a man, did I dream of doin’ big things. Goin’ to the moon. Makin’ lots of money. Bein’ some kind of hotshot. I just wanted to build on what my parents gave to me and showed me. A man in love with his wife. Dad takin’ care of her, me, our home. A woman in love with her husband. Them makin’ a child outta that love and workin’ together to teach him to be a good man. Havin’ that I knew that was the only thing I needed.”

“Okay,” I said softly, liking this part of what he was saying even as my heart broke, knowing Rachel took away that simple dream.

“So young, in love, I shared all that with Rachel. Laid it out for her. Stupid,” he stated and I tensed my limbs around him.

“She was the one who was stupid, Ham.”

He gave me a small smile, dipped his head, and touched his mouth to mine before he lifted it and kept talking.

“She told me she wanted the same things. She agreed with me on everything, our life path, how we’d get there, how many kids we were gonna have.”

I nodded.

Ham went on. “I believed her. So gone for her, I sucked that shit up. Woke up in the morning, told her I loved her. Left for work, told her I loved her. Rolled into bed at night, worked bars then, too, babe,” he shared something I knew. “Woke her when I got home and told her I loved her. Every time, she said the same thing back. She’d even call me durin’ the day for no reason, she said, except to say she loved me.”

This wasn’t fun to hear but I held him close, held his eyes, slid one of my hands up his back so I could sift my fingers through his messy hair, and stayed silent.

But I did it thinking the woman I’d met a few days ago still loved my man. Back then, she was young, stupid, selfish, and I didn’t understand her kind of love, why she did the things she did. I just understood in that moment with the sadness I read in her face, the gesture she’d made for Ham driving all the way out to Gnaw Bone, that she’d spent twenty years paying a big price for doing them.

And the price she paid was losing Ham and, after doing that, knowing exactly how much she’d lost. But it was worse. She had to live with the fact that it was what she did that meant she hadn’t lost him. She’d actually thrown all that was Graham Reece away.

Ham broke into my thoughts to ask, “After what she did to me, I didn’t get it. How could you love someone and do that to them?”

“I don’t know,” I answered on a whisper.

“No,” he replied. “You wouldn’t.”

The way he said that, like he really believed it, meant the world to me.

Ham continued. “The two after her, cookie, same thing. I wasn’t stupid, though I was still young. But I’d learned. With them, I didn’t lay it bare, open myself, but we eventually got to the discussion and they told me they wanted the same things as I did out of life. They also told me they loved me. Swore it. Said it over and over. Then they showed how they felt, who they were, and it was not that.”

“No,” I agreed.

“And after the third, I really learned. After the third, I knew those words were empty. You can say anything but it’s what you do that says it all.”

My hand in his hair clenched as where he was going with all this finally dawned on me.

“Never said those words again, cookie,” he told me. “Women said them to me, didn’t believe it. Those words had lost their meaning.”

Yes, I now knew where this was going.

“Darlin’,” I murmured.

“Then you said it.”

I closed my eyes as beauty scored through me.