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“You must be kidding. He meant it enough to push me out of the house. To shove me through the door and tell me not to bother coming back because I wasn’t his son anymore.”
“He was scared, Cole. He was terrified he was losing you for good, and he lashed out.”
Cole shook his head. “I broke his heart. That’s what killed him. He was fine. Never been sick a day in his life. And then—”
“He broke his own damned heart, acting a stubborn fool!”
“You’re wrong. But it doesn’t matter. If I can’t make him proud being a cowboy, I’ll have to think of another way.”
“We’ll figure it out, Cole.”
He would, because he had no choice. He’d figure it out. But not here. This place was him and his dad and Easy all pushed into one small space. He’d been thrown off by the endless sky and the lonely trails, but he could see now what Easy had tried to say. He’d boxed himself in here, like a kid building a fort.
He needed to get away. To think. Maybe California wasn’t the place for that. Or maybe he needed to face it. Get it out of his system. Leave it behind on his terms.
But more than anything, he just needed not to be here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
IT WAS OVER. MADELINE Beckingham and all her people had left. Eve’s studio was back to normal. And Grace had nothing to do. Nothing. For days.
She’d finished Cole’s books, but she couldn’t make herself knock on his door to give them back. And she couldn’t leave them on his doorstep. It’d look like she was tossing his stuff on the floor in a huff.
So she read them again and told herself she wasn’t done with them yet. She read and went for walks and tried her best to avoid any chance of seeing Cole.
On Sunday, when her phone rang and showed Scott’s number, she blocked him. She’d purchased a money order on Friday and put it in the mail. Maybe he’d received it already. Maybe he was calling to tell her it wasn’t enough.
Maybe he could kiss her ass.
They all could. The next time she needed to scratch an itch, she’d use a vibrator. Well, once she had the money to buy one, anyway. Until then, she’d freehand it. Not her preferred method, but desperate times and all that.
But she wasn’t desperate, she told herself. She was good. She was fine. Things were looking
up. Eve had heard from her friend in Vancouver, and he’d said to have Grace stop by his office whenever she made it to town. But even better, she had steady work for at least another week with Eve, who needed help getting her office back in order after the insanity of the week before.
Things were good. In fact, tonight she was hanging out with friends. People who liked her. So why did her chest ache like fire when she forgot to keep her guard up? Why did she want Cole so much?
Just admitting it made her angry. She wanted to slap him. Scratch him. Push him until he took her down to the floor and made her feel pleasure instead of this awful pain.
Grace put down the book she wasn’t reading and curled up into a ball on her mattress. She crooked her arm over her eyes to block out the afternoon light and breathed as slowly as she could.
It didn’t hurt. There was no reason it should. So it didn’t. She wouldn’t let it.
But why had he asked for so much from her? Why had he wanted more? His hands sliding over her back as if she were fragile. His mouth against the ink on her skin, asking what it meant.
That bastard.
None of that mattered. Because he touched her more truthfully than that sometimes. He touched her rough and cruel. That was what he’d really meant, she told herself. That was real. Nothing else.
Her phone rang again. This time it was an unfamiliar number.
“Hey, girl,” a woman said. “It’s Jenny. Are you ready for the makeover party?”
“I’m ready! But ‘makeover’? Does that mean more than makeup?”
“Well, I keep buying hair dye and not using it, so I’m hoping you’ll help me pick a color. You must be good with color even if it’s hair, right?”
“I’m not bad.” Regular trips to the salon were expensive. She’d done her own hair color for years.
