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“Of course. I’m not an idiot. I told him the same thing I told you. I’m not selling right now. But I can see in his eyes he wants it for a different reason.”
“That’s what worries me. Johnny doesn’t hear no.”
“What else has he taken of yours?”
He looked at her, a small tic in his jaw belying his discomfort. “The only other person I dated after… well, you know. Jenny Bristol.”
“She cheated?” Maggie asked, sitting up straighter. Whether Jenny was the same rodeo girl from that fateful night remained to be seen.
“No.” Bennett shook his head. “She—Jenny—didn’t like ranch living. It’s hard as hell on a good day, I get it. When Johnny showed up with something close but that gave her the city life she craved, she took it. Can’t say I blame her.”
“Wow. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s not like we were in love or anything. It’s about time I realized this life isn’t for everyone.”
Maggie felt the stab of those words as if they’d physically pierced her heart. They were meant for her, but it wasn’t like he’d given her much choice back then.
A hawk screeched overhead, and Bennett’s gaze followed its arc in the sky. Maggie’s will was too weak to resist watching him while he watched the raptor. The muscles in his neck strained beneath golden scruff. Her fingers itched to trace his strong jawline, to touch the indent of his dimple and feel the rough scrape of shorn hair against her skin. But she’d lost that right so many years ago. Or rather, he’d taken it from her and transferred it to someone else.
That he didn’t understand the irony of what he’d done to Maggie and what Jenny had done to him in turn boggled Maggie’s mind. So did something else that had been bothering her for days now.
“Bennett,” she said, taking a smooth stone in her hand and rolling it over her palm, “there’s no oil or anything on my dad’s land, is there?”
The surprise in his eyes and arched brows was too authentic for her to doubt him.
“Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“You offered far more than the property and operation were ever worth, even when they were profitable.”
The blush on his cheeks deepened to crimson. “Oh. Oh, I see why you’d think that. But I’d never hide that from you, Maggie. No matter what we’d been through. Your dad would haunt me if I tried a stunt like that.”
She smiled weakly. “You’re probably right. I could see him chasing you with his rake like he did that time he found you wandering outside the barn.”
Bennett laughed as he reached down and picked up a handful of stones that he tossed one at a time into the creek. “He was furious, wasn’t he? And for some reason that rake might as well have been a twenty-two gauge for how he swung it around at me. I think he meant to take my head off.”
“That head did happen to have lips that were frequently pressed against his daughter’s. Now that I’m older, I sorta get it. But back then we were…” Back then we were crazy about each other and nothing could have come between us.
She let the memory trail off along with the end of her sentence. No use bringing up anymore back thens. Not when the right nows were clamoring for attention.
“Yeah. We were.”
A pause fell over them like silence.
“Maggie. I need to ask you something.”
She nodded, and the air stilled around them as if the canyon wanted to hear his question and her response.
“Why didn’t you come that morning? Even if you didn’t have an answer, you owed me that, at least.”
“Please,” she begged. “Ask me anything but that.”
“I have to know. All these years, it’s the not knowing what happened that’s haunted me. If we’d decided to break up or gone our separate ways, that would be one thing, but as far as I knew we were set to start our lives together and you just vanished.”
Maggie’s jaw trembled and she actually laughed. Her hand tensed around the stone in her hand.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not. Please. What happened?”
