“Don’t you need to be back at the house?”
“They did the gifts and everything last night.”
“Still. Don’t you think you’re going to be missed?”
“Maybe.”
“What is my Christmas present?” He decided to ask that instead, because it was clear she wasn’t going to concede his point on the fact that she should have maybe gone back to her brother’s house as would be expected.
She was playing it fast and loose with his physical safety, as far as he was concerned.
You’re playing it fast and loose with your own, and you know it.
“Chocolate chip cookies,” she said. “Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, to be exact. I found your mom’s recipe.”
He stiffened. “You did?”
“Yes,” she said. “I found the recipe, and I...I wanted to give it to you. Because I wanted you to... I want you to know... I want you to understand that even though we lost something amazing, something really important when we lost our parents...we didn’t lose everything. And there are some things that we bring with us. Some things that we are meant to carry on. I really believe that.”
“Rose...”
His chest went cold, his stomach going tight.
After everything that had happened yesterday this just felt like... It was too much. It was just too damned much.
“Don’t. Don’t argue with me. Look, I understand that this is all really hard for you. And I don’t pretend to understand all the ways that it is. I understand that it is, and that’s enough.”
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said.
“I did,” she said. She sighed heavily. “I wanted to give you something. Like, really something. I wish... I wish that...”
She closed her eyes for a long moment. “Logan,” she said. “I just want us to be healed. To be fixed. I spent a long time protecting myself. Ignoring all of my feelings. Because I just didn’t know how to have them. I’m so grateful for everything that everyone did for me, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m missing something from my life. I’m missing my mom and dad. And...it hurts.”
There was something about those words that hit him right in the chest. Echoed in him. He’d always thought Rose was strong and brave. Always. But right now she was the bravest he’d ever seen. Admitting she hurt. Which was something Logan couldn’t quite bring himself to do. “I never wanted to think about that. That I was still wounded. That there were just things I would always feel the lack of. I didn’t want to think about my own loneliness. I wanted to fix Iris up and not myself, because I didn’t want to look at the things that held me back. My fear of needing someone. The fact that I actually desperately want to be coddled a little bit, but I feel like I have to be tough. Yeah. I didn’t want to look at any of that stuff. It all scared me. Terrified me. But slowly, really slowly, over the course of our time together, I realized some things.”
She looked down at her hands for a moment. “One of the biggest ones is that we can always keep changing and learning and growing. And it’s this kind of magic gift. Recipes don’t have to stay buried. Necklaces don’t have to stay in boxes. And our hearts don’t have to stay... They don’t have to stay so guarded. Everything we’ve lost... Everyone we’ve lost... They might not be here with us in the way that we want them to be, but they’re still here. They’re part of us. If we’ll let them be.”
He looked at her, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how he was supposed to respond to that. She was standing there imploring him like she was so desperate for him to understand, and he didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do with that. Didn’t know how the hell he was supposed to say anything right now.
Because she was standing there, looking like the embodiment of a future that he had never believed he could have. A woman, wearing his T-shirt, baking his mother’s cookies. A woman who could...
His stomach pitched.
He hadn’t used a condom last night.
And there it was. Hank Dalton, coming home to roost. Or maybe it wasn’t even Hank. The man hadn’t raised him. He wasn’t dumb enough to believe that blood might make a man do something quite so stupid as not protect the woman that he was sleeping with.
No. It was just him. Not facing up to the reality of things.
It was him, imagining that things could be different when he damn well knew they couldn’t be. He had imagined a life where he would wake up every morning alone. No one would be in his kitchen bustling around making him anything.
But here she was. Radiant as sunshine, and looking something like hope.
“Logan,” she said. “You know, I wondered, why I never wanted anything more than what I had. And I thought maybe some of that was about my self-protection. I was starting to ask myself... What were my dreams? Because you know, Iris is going to open that bakery. And Pansy is the chief of police. And Ryder is coaching the high school football team. Sammy’s jewelry business is going amazingly well. Colt and Jake are out riding rodeo. And here we are. We are here. I was asking myself... Why don’t I have dreams?”
“You can do whatever you want,” he said, his throat dry, tight. “You could be whatever you want.”
“That’s just the thing. I am what I want to be. I love this ranch. With all my heart. This land is in my blood. It fuels my soul. I don’t remember my parents as well as everyone else. I was only six when they died, after all. Working the same ground my uncle did. Investing my sweat in the soil the same as my father did. Being in the same house where my mother raised
