Those words hit him with all the force of a bullet.
“I’m not scared,” he said. “I could say yes to you. I could be with you. I could take all the best years of your life, Rose. I could keep you in my bed, in my house, and I could give you every damn thing I’m capable of giving. But you know what? That is not enough. It’s not that limitless wonder that you’re talking about. I don’t know how to love somebody. Not really.”
“Why do you think that? You held on to your mother’s necklace all this time, and you think that.”
“I did love my mother. So much. And she loved me. That’s the important piece of that, Rose. She loved me. She lived poorer than she would have, if it weren’t for me. She was single for a long time, because of me. Because she didn’t want to bring a stepfather in my life who might not treat me right. Because she didn’t want to be distracted by dating while she was supposed to be raising me.”
“No offense, Logan, and I’m sure that she thought she needed to do that. But it was a choice. It was her choice. Nobody made her do that, and she didn’t have to.”
“What she did. For me. And Hank Dalton cut her open, Rose. He hurt her. He couldn’t be everything that she needed him to be, and he devastated her. Left her on her own with me. And I was a pretty piss-poor substitute. She gave me so much, and I wanted to do something good for her. So when your parents started talking about going on that trip to Alaska... She really wanted to go. But she knew that she wouldn’t be able to spare the extra money out of the budget. So I started saving. I did odd jobs around the ranch for your dad. I saved and saved. And I gave her the money to go. To pay for her part of that chartered plane that went down on its way there. To pay for a hotel room she never even used. Yet. That was my gift to my mother. The last Christmas gift I ever gave anyone. Before you.” His chest burned.
“Logan,” she said, looking utterly stricken. Devastated.
“Why do you think I don’t like Christmas?”
“Logan... It’s...it wasn’t your fault.”
“I know it,” he said. “I’m not an idiot. It would’ve happened whether she went or not. And maybe... Maybe your parents would’ve paid for her to go even. In the end. But I can’t let it go. Because that trip was the deciding factor about whether she was here for all of my life or not. That was what happened when I tried to show that I cared. You don’t get that stuff out of your head, Rose. You just don’t. It stays with you. What you do today. You take that road or the other road? Do you go on the trip or do you not? Do you get on the horse today, or do you stay in bed? Because those decisions matter. They make the choice as to whether you live or die, whether someone you love lives or dies.”
“But you make choices. We all do. We make them every day. And there’s nothing anyone can do about what happens. We can’t control the universe, Logan. We can’t control if other people decide to do us harm. We can’t control any of that. All we can do is try to do the best we can with what we’ve got.”
“It’s not good enough for me. It’s not good enough for you.”
“Don’t you dare tell me what’s good enough for me. You say this is because you’re not scared. And you say you’re not blaming yourself. But you are. You’re frozen. And you figure if you just...keep things the same that you won’t have to deal with the consequences.”
“No. No. I had a family. I destroyed my family. I took it from myself. I took her from the world. My gift took her life. I don’t get to have another family. I don’t get to do it again.”
“We didn’t use a condom last night,” she said, honing right in on his earlier realization. He should have known she’d realized it, too.
“They make a pill for that,” he said.
“No,” she said.
He sighed heavily, the weight of the room pressing down on his shoulders.
“No,” he agreed. “I know. It’s just... It won’t be anything. It’ll be fine.”
“Logan, I wasn’t even going to demand anything of you. Nothing except for love. I never gave a moment’s thought to getting married or having kids. You make me think that might be the future I want. But it has nothing to do with why I want you. I’m not one of those people who dreamed about a wedding, or romance. I didn’t want it until I had you. I just... I love you. Not the idea of you. Not some romanticized version of a family or life. We can call it a family or not, I don’t care. I just want to be together.”
“Already you’re settling for less. Less than you should.”
“Is a soul mate less than someone should settle for? There’s no settling about it. I get out of bed every morning in part so I can see you, you big idiot. It’s half of why I look forward to my job.”
“It’s just new relationship stuff. And someday it will be old relationship stuff. And you’ll get over it. You’ll barely remember that this happened between us.”
“I’m not going to forget.”
“That’s the thing, Rose. You will. Because this was nothing. It sure as hell wasn’t love.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ROSE COULD FEEL the pain and the fury rising up inside of her. Part of her had known. She had known that he would fight this. And she had also known that it
