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“But she never came back. And it was just me. I wanted somebody to come back for me. To protect me. I didn’t want to protect everybody. I was scared. I was scared and then...he really did try to kill me. He almost did. And no one did anything about it. No one was coming for me.”
Her stomach sank. “Gus, the rest of the adults on this ranch have a lot to answer for. If they had any idea that this was going on...”
“I don’t know what anyone knew. Except my mother. My own mother. And I know that she was afraid of him. But I didn’t expect... She just let me go ahead and be a sacrifice. And what I wanted more than anything was for her to love me. When you told me that you loved me, Alaina. Finally. Finally, somebody loved me. Because I felt all this time like there was nobody that was there for me. And I just wanted to take it. I didn’t want to tell you I loved you. Because the last person I ever said it to was her. And she left. It didn’t make any difference.”
She crossed the space between them and bent down and wrapped her arms around him. Crushed the flowers and the candy between them, and she didn’t care. “I love you,” she said.
“And I let myself get really angry, that night in the bathtub. And the night you left. I let myself get really angry. About the fact that no one was there for me. No one was there for me. Except for you, Alaina. It was always you. You were my sunshine before I ever knew why.”
She held his face firm in her hands. “I loved you before there were butterflies, Angus McCloud. Before I understood what it was.”
“Me too.” He swallowed hard, and her stomach lifted. “I did too.”
“It’s hard to say?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s okay.” And it was. Because she didn’t feel that distance between them. Not anymore. The walls weren’t there. But Gus was there. With hearts and flowers. He was there, sharing the things that he’d been through.
“I don’t think your anger makes you dangerous,” she said. “I don’t think your passion is wrong. I do think that you let yourself be protected by that anger. Because it lets you tell yourself that maybe you didn’t deserve all this.”
“That’s true,” he said. “It was easier to hold people at a distance that way. I’m okay with the whole world being at a distance, Alaina. But not you. Not anymore. You are all I have ever wanted. You have no idea. It ruined my life. Ruined my damn life when I looked at you that day at the lake and saw you as a woman. At least that’s what I thought. Now I know it saved me. It saved my life.”
As his declarations went, that was a pretty damn good one.
“I love you,” she said, kissing him on the mouth.
He just held her.
But she knew.
SHEMOVEDBACKin with Gus. And they worked on revamping the place together. Including the old kids’ room.
Which they did decide to go ahead and make a nursery. They turned the other room into a guest room, for her mother to stay in when the baby came. It was kind of a tricky bridge to build, but she decided that she would rather build it than not.
That she would rather have a relationship with her mother than hang on to the bad things.
There were a lot of things in Gus’s life that would go unresolved. Relationships with his parents. She had the power to fix things with hers. At least, as best as they could be.
She finally called her dad and told him that he was going to be a grandfather. He was actually excited. In that way that he could be. It was never going to be perfect. But she didn’t need it to be. Because she wasn’t lacking. Not anymore.
She and Gus decided not to find out what the baby was. And they spent a lot of time sitting on the couch with a show playing in the background, talking about the future. And one night, he put his hand on her stomach, and the baby kicked. Right against it.
“The baby knows,” she said, smiling up at him. “That you’re their daddy.”
And something changed in Gus’s face. And his eyes went bright. And he just froze for a moment, looking down at her.
“You changed my whole life, do you know that?”
“You changed mine.”
He shook his head. “No. You changed everything for me. I never thought that anyone would love me. I never thought... I waited. All those years for my mom to come back. For my love to mean something. You make it mean something. This means something.”
He leaned in, and he kissed her. And she could’ve sworn she felt dampness on her face from his. “I love you,” he whispered against her mouth.
The words were rough and scraped raw, heavy, as if he wasn’t sure that he could carry them.
“Thank you,” she breathed.
