Broken(22)

“But why? We all thought she’d return after that internship. You were going to ask her to marry you.”

Cade squeezed his eyes shut. That memory still gnawed at him. The ring he’d bought her still rested at the bottom of the keepsake box he’d tossed into the deepest recesses of his bedroom closet. It took a moment for him to find the words to describe how he’d felt that night. “She hooked up with that fancy designer she wanted to meet. And she hasn’t looked back since.”

Stone furrowed his brows together as if he was trying to make sense out of the entire situation. “I got that part, but when you confronted her, that’s where the rest of the story gets jumbled.”

“She was still staying with that friend of hers, Hanna, I think her name was. Anyway, Jocelyn had told her she didn’t want to see me.”

“Knowing you, you probably pushed your way past the poor woman.”

Cade laughed without humor, his head starting to ache as he was assailed with memories he’d tried so hard to suppress. “Jocelyn tried to lock the bedroom door against me as if I would hurt her. Me! I would never lay a hand on her, but I damn sure came close to it that night. I kicked the door in, and that’s when it happened.” The remainder of what he wanted to say stuck in his throat, though he opened his mouth to force the words out. A tight fist of pain knotted in his stomach.

Stone patted him on the back. “Take your time, little bro,” he gently encouraged.

As a boy, Cade had never been prone to tears, but he was dangerously close to them now. No. He wouldn’t let that woman push him this far. Not sure how much time had passed since his last statement, Cade finally managed to finish. “To make a long story short, I demanded she tell me why she’d phoned me with that abrupt message about not wanting to see me again. I felt she owed me that considering we’d talked about having a future together. She told me she didn’t want to see me again and that she had no intention of returning home.”

“And then?” Stone prompted after a long pause.

“I wanted to know the exact reason, considering everything was great between us before she left. She kept telling me to leave it alone, that she didn’t want to hurt me but if I kept insisting she’d be forced to.”

Stone frowned, the disbelief on his face clear. “Really? That sounds so out of character.”

“I thought so too at the time, but I continued to demand an explanation and that’s when Jocelyn gave me this look…she looked at me with such…contempt, like I was a piece of dog shit on the bottom of her shoe and told me she had outgrown me. Then she went on to explain how I couldn’t give her the lifestyle she longed for—that I wasn’t good enough for her and that she’d found a new set of sophisticated friends she could carry on an intelligent conversation with. She had a few more choice words about not wanting to waste the rest of her life on the ranch, hanging around the dull, unsophisticated people living on it.”

Stone’s mouth fell open. “Get the hell out of here. She didn’t say that, did she?”

“I heard it with my own ears. Even after hearing it I didn’t want to believe it, but she made it pretty clear how she felt. And it wasn’t so much as what she said, but the way it was said. Her words were delivered with so much venom she treated me as if I had no feelings at all.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, my sentiments exactly.”

“But it makes absolutely no sense, Cade. You guys were joined at the hip.”

“I know. I don’t need a reminder.”