Page 96 of SEAL of Valor

I head up the stairs, still able to avoid the ones that creak even after all this time, and step onto the landing. After passing where Garrison and Sawyer are sleeping, I pause at the end of the hall just outside Vivian’s room. The door is slightly ajar, so I push it open.

Aragorn lifts his head from where he’s sleeping on the edge of her bed, his ears perked. As soon as he sees me, his tail starts thumping, so I move in to pat him on the head and check in on Reese.

I just need to see her.

Need to know that she’s safe.

Her red hair is splayed across the pillow, a sea of color against the white fabric. As I start to turn away, she reaches out and grabs my arm. The contact jolts me, but I settle quickly when I see her looking up at me.

Slowly, I kneel beside her bed, keeping her hand in mine. “I just wanted to check on you,” I whisper.

“Is everything okay?” Her expression is drowsy, her eyes still heavy with sleep.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Do you want half of the bed? I can scoot over.” She starts to move, but I shake my head.

“Nah. I’m okay.” Even as badly as I want to hold her again, it’s a bad idea. I’m volatile right now, and the last thing I want to do is end up doing the exact thing I’ve avoided since she got pregnant.

I’m not strong enough to deny myself the one thing I’ve been craving since the day I lost it.

“You’re sure?” Brow furrowed, she looks up at me and yawns.

“Positive. Goodnight, Reese.” I love you. How I long to say those three words. But without knowing what’s on the horizon, it feels unfair to her. What if I don’t make it out of this? What if I love her in this short period of time, just to leave her alone in the long run?

“Goodnight, Weston.” She smiles at me and settles back down into the blankets, so I stand and walk around the bed, petting Aragorn as I go. But instead of heading down the hall toward the living room, I take a seat right outside her door, then lean back against the wall and close my eyes.

Chapter 29

Reese

“You’ve been doing this alone all these years?” I ask as Weston finishes tossing flakes of hay into the round feeder in the center of the cattle pasture. They’ve been on us since we came through the gate, and nearly half of the hay was already eaten by the time we got to the actual feeder.

When he turns toward me, there’s pain on his face, but after the argument we had this morning about him taking it easy, I decided it was easier to just let him push through and be there to offer help as he lets me.

Which, aside from driving us around, has happened a grand total of zero times.

Still, he is quite a sight to behold.

Wearing his cowboy hat, a white t-shirt that’s stretched taut over the muscles of his torso, and a pair of dark jeans, he looks absolutely gorgeous. Which has been incredibly distracting despite my intentions to keep things casual…until they aren’t.

“Not really. I have help from Kyle.”

“Sure, but you said Kyle doesn’t come out every day. What time do you get started each day?”

“It varies. Sometimes four, sometimes five.”

“Weston, that is crazy. Why don’t you hire more help?”

“If you remember, that was a conversation I was trying to have with your mom not too long ago.”

Heat flushes my cheeks. That was the morning I came down and found him at the dining room table with my mom. Shortly after that, she’d nearly collapsed. It comes rushing back to me.

For a brief moment, I’d managed to pretend we weren’t currently living in a reality where my mom was being poisoned by a guy who was pretending to date me just so he could make sure I came back to town; that way, they could use my ex-husband in a crazy murder plot. Then, of course, we can’t forget my fake best friend, who is the sister of the lady trying to kill us.

What a crazy reality this is.

“You okay?”