The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(102)

“I’m good,” she said. “Tag... Whatever happens after this, I want you to know that tonight means so much to me. I wanted to find a way to start changing. To start healing, and I didn’t know...” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t expect to talk. I didn’t expect...”

“You just expected to lose your virginity?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“I guess that’s fair enough. You and I haven’t ever had all that much to talk about.”

“I wonder if we did have a lot to talk about, and we just never... And we just never did. Because we didn’t realize.”

“Maybe,” he said.

The air was balmy and wonderful, and he took her hand, leading her slowly into the water. Then he held her tight as she hissed, when the cold water got higher than her belly, covered her breasts. It was very cold. But he was right there, hot and perfect. Everything that she had never known she needed.

It made her heart feel like it was breaking open. She hadn’t expected this. Not with him. But maybe... Maybe she should have. Because he had been part of her life; he had been someone she couldn’t deny or avoid or stop thinking about, for so much time, and it had to be more than sex, because it had been since way before she knew what sex even was. There was something deep here. Something deep and connected that she didn’t necessarily want to examine. Because she had a feeling that heartbreak would be on the other side of that examination.

Tag might have opened up to her a little bit tonight, but it was only a very little bit. And his having a conversation with her didn’t mean that he wanted to change his entire life.

She liked her life. Hadn’t she just said? How would the two of them ever make one together anyway? He liked to go out. He liked to drink. He didn’t like to read. He had never even been to the library to see her.

And she ignored the little voice inside of her that whispered it didn’t matter. That they would find a way to learn each other. To understand each other. That if the two of them could just spend their nights in that cozy little cabin, everything would have to be okay, because there was nothing quite like them. But that was fanciful, fairy-tale talk.

In the end, she’d have to walk away from this, because Tag wasn’t the kind of man who would want more.

And would she change just because she had slept with a man, or was it about something deeper?

It was deeper, and she knew it. It wasn’t about virginity, or the lack of it. It was just that she had lied to herself to get up here. Had lied to herself in order to work up the courage to be with him. “Rope swing?”

“I’m not that brave.”

“You ran naked through a forest, and you’re currently skinny-dipping with Four Corners’ resident bad boy.”

“I hate to break it to you,” she said. “But at Four Corners bad boys are a dime a dozen. And if it didn’t matter to me which one I was with... Well, I could’ve had an easier night with Landry or Denver or Wolf for that matter, or even Hunter...”

“Now, you talk one more time about being with one of my brothers, and there’s going to be trouble.”

“Trouble might be something I’m more interested in now than I was previously.”

“I bet. Still, I think you’re pretty brave. A hell of a lot braver than I am, Nelly Foster.”

She couldn’t read his expression in the light. She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. But she felt like he wasn’t. Like nothing between them had been a joke since that first kiss. Not at all. Not the way he usually teased her.

She’d always known that fairy tales weren’t real. Her mother had never told her stories of Prince Charming, had never let her believe in anything quite like that. Because for her, Prince Charming hadn’t existed. For her, Prince Charming had turned out to be a nightmare. And Nelly had never been foolish enough to believe that she could dream past what her own mother had endured. And then there was Breanna, who’d found love. Who had found love and lost it, and it was just as terrible a thing as could ever exist in the world.

And how audacious would it be to believe that they could have something more?

Except what she’d said moments before about choice rang in her ears, and she had to wonder.

Because there were things you didn’t choose—her mother being deceived by her father and being abused by him after she’d given him her trust. Breanna dying. And there were things you did choose—treating your family poorly. Using your fists on your sons.

And allowing the bad things that had come before you determine what you did ever after.

Yes, there were things that were choices.

She shivered, and Tag lowered his head and kissed her. And she just drank it in. Drank him in. Lived in this moment, because this moment was the most transcendent of her entire life.

Because this moment meant something deep. Something unending. Because it meant change.

“Trust me,” he said, his voice husky, and she wanted to. So she clung to his shoulders and let him swim her over to the rope swing. He made sure that she was clinging to the jagged rocks that went up alongside the bank, and then began to climb up the side. He reached down and helped hoist her up onto the top of the rock with him. She clung to him, and he grabbed hold of the rope, which was looped over the branch of one of the trees.

“I won’t drop you,” he said. “Until I drop both of us.”