The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(83)

And that was when she realized something that frightened her, sickened her. Not at him, at herself.

She couldn’t control this man. She couldn’t put a limit on his feelings, she couldn’t make them something comfortable. She couldn’t put him in any position in her life and tell him to stay there. Ply him with housing, with sex twice a week, with fake moans of desire when she wasn’t in the mood, but didn’t want to hear complaints.

She couldn’t hold herself distant from him. It would be this. All the time. Every day. This demanding, greedy thing.

She couldn’t turn him into a patient and have office hours. She couldn’t treat him like a child and give him an allowance and send him off on his way.

He would feel what he felt. He would make demands that he expected to have met.

He would require the deepest parts of her. Every day. Relentlessly. And she would have no defense against him.

She couldn’t control him, she couldn’t contain him, she couldn’t fashion him into the image of a boyfriend in the way that she wanted, because Colt would never be anything quite so domestic as a boyfriend. He never could be. Men like Colt were never boyfriends. Lovers, sure.

Husbands. Yeah, they could be that.

Tears filled her eyes and she tried to get away from him. But she couldn’t. Until he let her go.

Her heart was pounding, in terror, because this was the culmination of everything she had sensed from the first moment she had seen him again that morning in the coffee shop. There was something bigger than this, something bigger than them, and she couldn’t do anything to find it. To escape it.

And not only was he something she couldn’t control or get away from, this was.

Of course it was. Because hadn’t it turned out that Griffin was related to him by marriage? That she was renting his cabin?

And she was everything terrified and small. Like a nervous rodent that wanted to go back to her den.

“I can’t do this right now,” she said. “And neither can you. You have... You have Lily, and you need to think about her. I have to think about starting my business, and I have to think about... Colt, I can’t go from living with one man to living with another. I have to... I have to be by myself. I have to get my head on straight.”

“Why?”

“Because I have to,” she said. “This is... This is surrogacy for the independent life that I’m supposed to be building, and it’s just another crutch. I can’t go doing that. I can’t hobble myself forever because I went from one relationship to another.”

“Don’t you dare compare what the two of us have to anything that you had with him.”

“You know... It’s healthy for somebody to be by themselves after they’ve been in a long-term relationship.”

“You know this as well as I do,” he said, his voice hard and firm. “People die. They die every day. They die sooner than they were planning on it. They die when their children are grown, they die before their daughters are born. I’ve seen it happen. Too many times. I’ve loved too many people that I’ve lost. I’ll be damned if I wait. Because there may not be a later, Mallory. There may not be a future to go and get healthy for. You’ve got love now. Isn’t that healthy? Isn’t that what everybody wants to find? Isn’t that the thing that we’re all healing for? What we’re all breathing for? To love somebody. To be loved back. It’s the one thing that I could never accept because it was the one thing that terrified me. It was one thing that I knew could hurt the worst, but it’s the only thing that was ever going to fix the shit show that is my emotional baggage. I was protected for a time. By my own inability to connect. By the guilt and the grief that I kept wrapped around me like a shield. But I wasn’t living. I was looking for purpose because that was easier than looking for love. But you... You opened me up to something completely different.”

“That was Lily,” she whispered. “That was Lily that did that.”

“No. Because without you I never would’ve taken Lily in. Without you, I wouldn’t have thought that I could love her. Wouldn’t have thought that I could be a father to her. Without you, it never would’ve happened.”

“No, you just think that. You just think that because...” And that nervous, scurrying thing inside of her moved around until it found something he could get purchase on. Something that made sense. Because this didn’t make sense. And this terrified her. But this one excuse, well, that made it all feel better. And it made it easier to say no. “And now you think you need me.”

“Oh,” he said, gripping her chin. “I know I need you. I know full well that I need you. To be my partner. To be my wife.”

She shrugged away from him, standing up from the dead. “To be your wife so that I can be Lily’s mother?” The words made her stomach ache, made it feel as if her chest was caving in on itself.

Here was a man standing there offering her the world. Dreams that she had carried around inside of herself and she couldn’t... She couldn’t bring herself to believe it. Not really. She was waiting for the catch, she was waiting for the other shoe, and she would make one, collaged together out of desperation if she had to, so that she wouldn’t be blindsided by it later. Because that was the one thing she couldn’t stand.

She couldn’t stand to be blindsided.