“Yeah,” she murmurs. “And I love you.”
“Yes.” The word scrapes out of me. “But is that you telling me no?”
She cups my jaw gently. “Billy… look at me.”
I do. I always do.
Her eyes are soft at the edges but wild in the middle, like her heart’s sprinting. “Your question just stunned me,” she says. “Can you give me a minute to think about it?”
My stomach drops somewhere near the floor, but I nod. “Okay.”
She tugs me down into a kiss before I can crumble. I kiss her back because I can’t not—because her mouth is home and her touch steadies me even when nothing else can.
Her hips press against mine. Her fingers slide up my spine. My palms skim the warm skin beneath her shirt again. She shivers for me, a tiny tremor that shoots straight through my chest.
For a heartbeat, I almost forget she didn’t say yes.
Almost.
But the question hangs there between us like dust in sunlight.
I hold her close anyway.
Because she’s mine.
Because I’m hers.
Because loving her has never once scared me—until now.
CHAPTER THREE
Sedona
I love him.
Of course I love him.
That truth hums somewhere deep in my chest even while my thoughts scramble in a dozen directions at once. He’s watching me with that patient, hopeful look that always manages to pull something warm out of me, and it takes everything not to break apart right here in the middle of the clinic.
I try to focus on my paperwork, but my mind drifts back to the very beginning, to the day everything shifted between us. I had known Billy Carson and his brothers my whole life—Tex the wild one, Joey the stubborn one, Seth the sweet one with the crooked smile.
Billy is the oldest, the quiet strength of the bunch, the one who checked fences at dawn and fixed tractors at sunset. Six years older meant I never thought I’d be more than the little Archer girl who tagged along after her dad.
Then everything changed when I was nineteen.
I had been sweeping up the clinic floor when he came in carrying a gray-blue heeler against his chest. The dog’s trembling body was pressed to Billy’s shirt, and there was dried blood along its flank.
He said he’d found it by the edge of their back pasture, right where the ridge drops toward the creek. He’d been on the tractor and almost missed the shape curled under the mesquite.
I remember how scared I was at first—the dog’s labored breathing, the bite marks, the raw scrape along its ribs—but Billy didn’t hesitate. He held that dog like its life mattered more than anything else in the damn world.
We worked together to clean him up, and somewhere between disinfectant swabs and the slow rise of hope that the dog would make it, something opened between us. Boone survived because he’s a tough little thing, and Billy adopted him the very next day.
But that wasn’t what stayed with me. What stayed was the way Billy lingered before he left that night, scratching the back of his neck, cheeks a little pink, looking anywhere but directly at me.
He asked if he could take me out for coffee to say thank you for saving his new dog, and my heart practically tried to crawl out of my chest. Coffee turned into him driving me home, and in the parking lot outside the clinic, he’d leaned close, breath warm near my cheek, and said I was beautiful.
Then he asked if he could kiss me. He didn’t just kiss me, though—he changed the direction of my entire life with that first press of his mouth.
