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“Are you sure?” Clint smiled, but the warmth in his eyes faded as his gaze shifted to Pike. “I can call someone for you if you need me to.”
Tulsi shook her head. “Everything is fine, but thank you, Clint. You’re one of the good ones.”
“You too, sweetheart,” he said gruffly, his skin flushing beneath his whiskered cheeks. “Just let me know if you need anything else. Anything at all.”
Tulsi nodded but kept her gaze on the bar, as he moved away, and Pike claimed the stool beside hers. She had to get a grip. She couldn’t give away her secrets or make a scene with Pike in a bar in the middle of the day. Someone would see and go tattling to her dad the way they had the night she went line dancing with Bubba’s fiancée, Marisol. Daddy was still making jabs at dinner about the spectacle Tulsi had made of herself, his attitude making it clear he equated dancing in public with working a pole down at the seedy strip club near the border.
She knew he was being ridiculous, but she hated the way he’d looked at her the day he found out about the dancing. She didn’t know if her heart could take another bruising like that one, at least not until her mom got back into town to counter Daddy’s disapproval with a hug and a whisper to “ignore it, honey,” in the kitchen after supper.
“Looks like you’ve got no shortage of protectors,” Pike said, lifting his whiskey shot and downing it with a twist of his wrist. “You’re good at the damsel in distress routine.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, frowning up at him.
Pike pushed the second shot her way with two long, slender fingers. “The quiver in your voice and those big, sad eyes. I mean, how could a man resist doing whatever it takes to make you feel better?”
Tulsi sat up straighter, anger cooling her lust. “You make it sound like I’m manipulating people. I’m not. I’m upset, that’s all.”
Pike seemed to chew on that, his jaw working back and forth as he fought to keep from saying something awful. But she knew Pike and his faces too well for him to hide behind a clenched jaw.
“What?” she prodded after a moment. “Go ahead, speak your mind.”
“I don’t think you’d like it,” he said, taking a long swig of the pale ale sweating on the bar. “Might hurt your feelings.”
“So?” she snapped. “It’s not like you could hurt me any more than you have already.”
Pike’s eyebrows lifted toward the brim of his hat. “Excuse me?”
Tulsi mentally cursed her inability to hold her tongue as she snatched her whiskey shot off the bar and tipped it back in one gulp, hoping Pike would let it go if she refused to answer. She hadn’t meant to start this conversation and there wasn’t enough liquid courage in the world to get her through it without falling apart.
“You’re the one who ended it,” Pike said, proving this wasn’t her day, not by a long shot. “You’re the one who was with someone else while we were supposed to be together. Or have you forgotten that inconvenient fact?”
Tulsi lifted her chin, fighting the urge to cry. “Yeah, well, you hadn’t returned my calls in three weeks. What else was I supposed to do?”
“Not fuck someone else!” Pike said, his voice loud enough to draw the attention of the older men at the other end of the bar and earn a glare from Clint.
“Keep your voice down,” she hissed, narrowing her eyes. “I thought it was over, okay? People who are in love don’t run off and ignore the person they say they’re in love with for three weeks. If I hadn’t been able to read your stats from your games, I would have been scared to death that you were dead. I haveneverfelt more alone or miserable than I did those three weeks. Not in my entire life.”
“I needed some time to pull my shit together, for God’s sake,” Pike said, scowling, obviously still unable to see her side of things. “I was twenty-two years old and my father had disowned me right when I was starting my career. It messed me up pretty bad.”
“Yeah, well, I was eighteen and—” Tulsi trapped her bottom lip between her teeth, biting off the end of her sentence before she wrecked everything. “Forget it.” She slid off her chair, grabbed her purse, and made a beeline for the door, ignoring Pike’s call for her to wait.
She couldn’t tell him that she’d been eighteen, pregnant, and terrified. Terrified of raising a baby alone, but even more terrified of her child ending up with a father like hers. A father who cared more about his job than he did his kids, a man who would always be bitter about the things he’d been denied instead of happy with what he had.
“Tulsi, wait!” Pike called again as she started down the saloon’s front steps, but she only sped her pace toward her truck parked outside the drugstore.
Growing up, Tulsi and her sister, Reece, had worshiped their father—a retired pro rodeo rider who broke horses no other man could tame—but their love had never been good enough. Dale Hearst had wanted sons, and daughters could never measure up to the boys he’d been denied—no matter how much Tulsi loved horses or how fearless Reece was in the saddle. Tulsi grew up watching her sister fight to be loved and fail and knew it was only a matter of time before she, too, fell from grace. She would never be perfect enough to make up for not being the boy her father wanted, no matter how hard she tried.
Back when she was eighteen and Pike was suddenly gone, that was all she could think about. She couldn’t stand the thought of living the rest of her life tied to a man who craved his father’s approval so much he would shut her out of his heart while he licked his wounds. The fact that he’d cut her off the same day she’d planned to tell him the birth control pills had failed and that she was pregnant with his child had made it all that much worse.
Those three weeks without Pike had taught her that her love wasn’t enough for him, the same way it hadn’t been enough for her dad. That hard truth had shattered her, but she hadn’t been able to afford the luxury of falling apart. She’d had a baby on the way, a child she was determined would never know what it felt like to have a hole inside her heart where a parent’s love was supposed to be. So she’d made a choice, and she had never regretted it, not until now.
God, why did Pike have to come back? Why did she have to run into him today and remember what it felt like to be so close and only want to get closer?
She reached for her keys, but her hand was trembling so hard she dropped them on the sidewalk. By the time she snatched them off the concrete, Pike had closed the distance between them.
“Please wait. I’m sorry, okay?” His hand closed around her elbow, but she shook him off, unable to stand the confusion his touch inspired.
“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
