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Aaron jumped up on the porch, the smile on his face as big as any she’d ever seen. He leaned down and gave her a hard kiss without a word, then grabbed Samuel the moment he straightened.
“How’s my favorite cowboy doing today?”
“He’s having a good day.”
Aaron looked down at her, the bright smile on his face dimming. “His ma isn’t though, is she?”
Betsey sighed. “No.” She looked across the prairie, trying to put off this talk as long as possible. Aaron let her, taking a seat in the chair beside hers and playing with Samuel for long minutes before looking over at her.
“Want to talk about it?”
She laughed, bitterly. “No, but I have no choice.” She met his gaze and felt the back of her eyes burn with tears and blinked them away. “I’ve done something really stupid, Aaron, and I don’t think there’s a way out of it.”
He lifted his hand, tucking a stray strand of her hair away. “What is it?”
She told him. The whole sorted mess from the day he showed up in town with Morning Dove, to what she thought it meant and how devastated she’d been by it. Then she told him about Harrison McBride and the offer he’d made her. How perfect it had sounded. How willing she’d been to leave, to not subject herself to constant torment seeing him and Morning Dove together and how, since the moment he showed up and things between them had changed, she’d been trying to find a way out of the contract.
Then she told him of Harrison’s visit the night before. Of Ben’s anger and Harrison’s refusal to destroy the contract. When everything was told, she took a steadying breath and turned her head to look at him. He was staring out across the prairie. By thetime he finally turned to look at her, she wondered if he would just leave and never come back.
“You’ll never know how sorry I am for the way things turned out, Betsey. If I could rewind time and make it all right again, I would.”
“Make it right, how?”
“By never leaving. By asking Ben for your hand all proper like the minute he got back from that cattle drive.”
The tears were burning her eyes again.
“You could come with us.”
“To California?”
She nodded.
He didn’t say anything for a long while, just stared out across the prairie. When he finally spoke, her heart broke all over again. “I don’t want to raise a family in California, Betsey. Willow Creek is our home. It’s where we belong.” He looked at her. “Do you want to go?”
“I want to be wherever you are.”
He smiled and leaned over, giving her a soft kiss. “Then I guess you’re staying in Willow Creek.”
“Not if we can’t get Harrison to break that contract.”
“We’ll buy the contract from him.”
“How?”
“I’ve got a wad of cash headed my way. It’ll just be enough to pay him what he says your in debt to him.”
Betsey stilled. Was he talking about the land money? He looked down at Samuel, smiling at him when he started reaching up for him. “What about the land you wanted to buy?”
He shrugged. “There will be other pieces of land.”
The words were spoken evenly but she could hear the heartbreak in them when he said it. He would give up that dream just to bail her out of trouble? “No.”
“No what?”
She met his gaze and said it again. “We’ll find another way. I won’t let you do that, Aaron. You’ve wanted it for too long.”
“There will be other pieces of land.”
