Page 109 of Tessa and Nash

I swallow hard, forcing the rest out.

“The guest ranch isn’t about ego,” I say. “It’s not about me wanting attention.”

Tessa’s gaze holds mine. “Then what is it?”

I take a breath.

“It’s about legacy,” I say. “It’s about making sure my family has something that lasts. Something that doesn’t rely on the next winter being kind.”

Tessa’s eyes flicker. She understands that. She understands winter.

“And it’s about proving,” I add, quieter, “that I’m not just filler.”

The word hurts to say.

Filler.

The extra brother. The joke. The one people love but don’t trust with the real weight.

Tessa’s throat works as she swallows. She might reach for me. Her body has its own instincts that don’t match her armor.

Then she stops herself.

Which is when I let the real bomb land.

“It’s a legacy that I’m pretty sure now is never going to happen.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Tessa

January 16th

I just stare at him.

At Nash McCoy standing in Juniper House with his sleeves half pushed up, hair a mess, eyes too honest for a man who’s spent his whole life smiling his way out of trouble. His hands are braced on the edge of the counter because he needs something solid to hold him up, and I can see it, plain as ink on paper, how much it costs him to say that out loud.

Because he believes it.

I’ve been in rooms with men like my uncle. Men who argue in polished sentences. Men who never let their voice crack, or their eyes go soft, because softness is how you lose.

Nash isn’t polished.

He’s raw.

And it hits me in the most humiliating way possible. I’m the one about to break.

“That’s not true,” I say automatically, because I don’t know what else to do when someone drops a confession that heavy at my feet.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “It is.”

He laughs again, bitterly, and it doesn’t fit him. It makes him look too young.

Too exposed.

He looks like a man standing in a field after a fire, staring at ash and trying to pretend he’s not mourning the thing he was building.

I hate that feeling.