“Are you going to make me keep interrupting you?”
He almost didn’t recognize the woman next to him. There was something so cold and remote about the way she spoke, the way she held herself...
It was exactly how she’d been on that first day when she’d waltzed into his office. Had it really been a month?
One month with Renee, watching her grow and change with her pregnancy. Watching her discover who she wanted to be and making sure she had the space to be that new woman.
This was a huge problem. Because there had to be a way to keep her in his life without telling his family to go to hell or resigning. There had to be a way to get what he wanted and still honor his promises. She had to let him fix this because if she thought he was going to hang her out to dry...
“Well,” she began and instead of sounding upset or even worried, she sounded...amused? “I knew this would happen.”
“Babe...”
She held up a hand to cut him off. “It’s fine,” she repeated again. Oliver decided that the more times she said that, the less fine it actually was. “It was lovely while it lasted. And I did learn how to bake cookies. So that was nice.”
The hair on the back of Oliver’s neck stood up. He didn’t like how everything had suddenly become the past tense, as if the time they’d spent together was a chapter and Renee was closing the book. “It’ll be nice again,” he said, hating those pitiful words. Nice didn’t cover waking up in her arms. Nice didn’t cover laughing with her. Nice didn’t come close to how he felt about her. “I’ll—”
“No, you won’t.” She all but whispered the words. And then it only got worse because she turned to him and said, “I shouldn’t have come and I shouldn’t have stayed. I’m sorry, Oliver.”
“This is not your fault,” he ground out. That did it. Flash was a dead man.
She smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. “That’s sweet of you, but we both know the truth.”
“The truth? What ‘truth’ do you think you know? Because here’s the truth, Renee—if I thought it’d make things better, I’d marry you today. Right now.” She went dangerously pale but otherwise, she didn’t react. Oh, hell. “I’d turn this truck around and head right back to the rodeo because there’s always a preacher who gives the opening prayer and I’d marry you in front of God, my crazy family and a bunch of livestock because, even though it’d be a huge scandal, it’d be the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter what your father or your brother or that ass of a husband of yours did, not to me—just like I hope it doesn’t matter to you that Flash is a jackass and my father is lost in his own little world and I’ve given years of my life trying to help them only to have them fight me on every single damned thing. I don’t care about them, Renee. I only care about you.”
Her eyes glimmered and her armor almost cracked. Fight, he wanted to yell. Fight for us.
“I care about you, too.” He took it as a good sign that her voice wavered just a little bit. “But I can’t hurt you like this.”
“Like what?” He stared at her, aware that his mouth was open. “How are you hurting me, Renee?”
She turned to look out the windshield. “Did you ever wonder why Clint and I were always at your house?”
So much for that crack in her armor. “Because we were friends and our house was more fun.”
Her mouth moved into something that would have been a smile if it hadn’t been so damned sad looking. “Fun. That it was.”
When she didn’t have anything to add to that, he said, “Renee?”
“Do you know what those marks on my legs are?” she said all in a rush.
“No.” He looked at her thighs as if he’d magically acquired the power to see through denim in the last five minutes.
He hadn’t. But he remembered those evenly spaced dots clustered together over a few square inches of her skin. They were too perfectly spaced to be random.
“She liked forks,” Renee said softly. “Whenever we did something that displeased her, she’d smile that cold smile and insist that we sit on her left side. She was left-handed. But once Clint tried to stick up for me, she stabbed him in the other leg, just because she could.”
Oliver blinked and blinked again. “Those are...stab wounds?”
“The scars of them,” she said with a single nod.
“Who stabbed you?” He felt an odd sort of relief that at least it hadn’t been her husband.
But that relief was short-lived. “My mother, of course.”
Oliver let out a slow breath. “Your mother.”
Another single nod. “She had these rules. No noise, no mess, obviously. Anything that might embarrass her was not a smart thing to do.”
He reached over and covered the spot on her leg about where the scars were with his hand. “I didn’t know.”
“We didn’t talk about it,” she said, as if that weren’t obvious.
Another long moment passed as traffic streamed past them in the direction of the Stockyards. All those people were putting down good money to see if Flash would get stepped on by a bull or not, and to see Brooke Bonner and her leather miniskirt bring down the house. They’d buy Chloe’s clothes and the men would spend money on All-Stars merchandise—all of which also had Lawrence Oil logos on it. People would buy nachos and beer, and there were games for the kids, who would buy stuffed horses and bulls. The rodeo was an evening of family fun.
He’d pay any price if he could give that to Renee.
He’d do anything to change the past. To do a better job of shielding her from an abusive, controlling mother and the scandals of her father. If he could go back, he’d give Clint a job, one that was legal
