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Oh, God. They probably saw us walking along the property and were stopping by to set things straight with Wyatt. It wasn’t unreasonable to think they would be worried I might not be able to remain strong and would do something to jeopardize the farm.
“Excuse me one second,” I said as I moved out of the room and toward the front door.
With a trembling belly, I unlocked the door and pulled it open. In an instant, my stomach dropped, and my blood ran cold.
It wasn’t my parents standing outside my front door.
It wasn’t my grandparents, either.
It was Tristan.
And I was seeing him for the first time in just under a year.
20
RHEA
“What are you doing here?”
I was seething mad at the sight of Tristan and stumbled back a step when he had the audacity to step forward into my house. It was taking everything inside me not to completely lose my mind and start shouting at him.
“I’ve been trying to reach you, but you haven’t taken my calls.”
Like it was nothing, he intended to place the blame on me. Tristan, like always, had his cocky display of confidence out in full force.
How could I have ever thought, even if only for a brief time, that Wyatt was anything like Tristan? Other than both of them being extremely wealthy, they were nothing alike. Wyatt was everything Tristan wished he could be, and I cringed to think I could have ever put them in the same category.
“And so, instead of taking the hint, you decided to just show up here?” I fired back. “You’re a fool, Tristan. I need you to leave.”
“I need to talk to you,” he declared, ignoring my request.
“That’s unfortunate, because I don’t want to hear a word you have to say,” I told him. “You’ve wasted your time coming here. I don’t have anything else to say to you. Now, will you please go?”
Tristan did not go. Instead, he decided he was going to tell me what he came to tell me, and he didn’t care if I liked it or not. “You were right.”
That had been unexpected. “What?”
Shaking his head with disappointment, he said, “I realize now just how wrong I was for the way I treated you when we were together. I regret it, Rhea. The last ten months without you taught me a lot. When I had you, I should have made the time to do things right with you.”
“I’m glad you can see that now, but it’s over between us. You need to leave now,” I demanded.
“We can be good again,” he insisted, ignoring my demand once again. “Traipsing all over the world didn’t bring me the happiness I thought it would. I don’t have you to come home to.”
That he thought this was the way to win me back was unbelievable. Those words had just proven he hadn’t learned a thing. “So, you’d still want to travel all over the world, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Then you’ve learned nothing,” I shared.
He sighed, clearly frustrated with me. “I’m not saying I want to travel on my own. I want you to come with me. But if I know anything about you, it’s that you’re stuck in your ways. So, if you won’t come with me, I’ll make the time we have here more special.”
Not that it mattered either way, but I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t actually planned to make any real changes to try to win me back. “So let me get this straight. You just want me to be there, waiting for you whenever you’re ready to make time for me? How is that any different than what we had before, Tristan?”
“You have to trust me, Rhea. Give me a chance to prove to you that it’s going to be different.”
I shook my head. “No. You had your chance, and I’m not going back to that. I deserve better than you gave me, and I deserve better than I’m sure you would give me if I was foolish enough to give you another chance.”
Tristan dropped his head back, closed his eyes, and sighed. When he returned his attention to my face, he said, “I tried. I tried to give you what I thought you deserved, but you never wanted to go anywhere.”
