The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(100)

That she hadn’t known at all.

And then he began to move.

He ramped up that arousal inside of her, pushing it to new heights, pushing her to levels she didn’t know she could go. And then she broke. Shattered. And he followed behind, shouting her name.

And then she lay there, spent and broken.

It wasn’t until she heard a piteous weeping sound that she realized there were tears on her face.



CHAPTER THREE


WELL, HELL. He didn’t know what to do with this.

He’d had a lot of compliments after he was done pleasuring a woman, but he’d never had one burst into tears. This was uncharted territory. And the fact of the matter was, it was Nelly. So, as much as she got under his skin, as much as he might pretend... He cared about her. He cared about her, dammit. She was... She was part of the Four Corners family, and he didn’t want to see her hurting.

Yeah. That’s all it is. Just that general sense of responsibility you feel toward people who are part of this place. And nothing at all to do with her specifically.

He gritted his teeth. “Nelly,” he said, moving his thumb over her tearstained cheeks. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said, sounding miserable.

“You don’t know?”

“I just... Well, I’ve done it. I’ve done it and... It’s really wonderful. It’s really wonderful. And if I had been the seventeen-year-old girl, with a beautiful boyfriend, I think it’s what I would’ve wanted to do all the time.”

“Okay,” he said.

“You don’t understand.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t understand. I fully don’t understand. I’m sorry.”

“It’s just... It was Breanna.”

The name slammed into his chest, a bad memory, a bad feeling, creeping up over his shoulders.

“What about her?”

“She was my best friend, Tag. And I think always kind of out of pity. And that I was so small and jealous when she and Wolf...”

“Did you like Wolf?”

No one spoke about Breanna, not ever. The shadow of her death hung over Wolf Garrett like a cloud, and as guilty as it made her feel sometimes... She hid in the shadow of his grief. Because she didn’t want to think about what had happened. Didn’t want to think about the last time she spoke to her, and the fact that no one at Four Corners ever spoke about it meant she rarely had to.

“No. I didn’t. It wasn’t about that. It was... She had a boyfriend. And she cared more about that than paying attention to me. In the last thing I said to her... I yelled at her. We had a horrible fight. I told her that she was... I told her she was stupid. Spending all her time having sex with Wolf. And I said I didn’t even know her anymore. And she was going to go get herself pregnant, and everyone would know what they were doing. I said that...it was a pretty terrible friend who chose a boyfriend and silly things like sex over... Over their friendship. And... I just... I feel like I get it now, and it’s too late. It’s too late for me to get it. I was mean to her. And I felt isolated, and I passed that on to her. And it just... It would’ve been a stupid fight. It would’ve been. But then she died. She died and it wasn’t fair. And she was... She was beautiful, and she had him. And I was... I was just small and mean.”

“What happened to Breanna was damn tragic,” Tag said. “And there wasn’t a single one of us that wasn’t devastated by it. You know that. And like you said, all that stuff... It was just a fight. I’ve said worse things than that to my own brothers. You get mad. You start fights. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Until it is. Until it’s the end of somebody. Somebody that you cared for so much.”

“I can’t say anything to make that all better,” he said. “I can’t offer you any words to take away years of feeling... Of feeling guilty. Feeling sad. And hell, I’m not the person to do it. But Nelly, you can’t feel guilty about what you didn’t understand when you were sixteen.”

“I want to,” she said.

“Why?”

She let out a shuddering sigh. “I don’t know. I guess because it’s easier than... Because it’s easier than grieving. Because it’s easier than... You know, sometimes you just want to make tragedy mean something. Even if it’s bad. I just... I wanted to take something from it. Because it doesn’t feel fair or right that I’m still here. I grew up with her. And I couldn’t imagine life without her. And then she was gone. And I’m just still here. I’m just still here, and I don’t know quite what to do with that.”

“Sometimes life sucks,” he said. “Really. Sometimes it really does. And there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. You know, my mother left, and my dad is—was—a dick. He was a drunken asshole. There’s not a reason for it. It just is.”

She sniffed, her shoulders shaking. “Well, I don’t think that’s true. He chooses to be.”

That landed hard, sat there in his chest. He didn’t know. Misery, when it came to the McCloud family, didn’t seem to be much of a choice. It just seemed to be a fact. A fact of life. A fact of Four Corners. That was the thing. The ranch could be magical, but there were some tough home truths embedded in the dirt. Much like the Garrett family, the McClouds were unlucky in love. Generationally. The Sullivans had weathered tragedy, generations back, mostly, but they had. And then there were the Kings, who were the most separate—emotionally separated from everyone, and impossible to get close to. Whatever issues they had, they kept with their own.