Ben—or whoever he was—stared at me.
“I just told you, my uncle and—”
“I don’t care what you did for them,” I said, the burn building behind my eyes. “I care that you didn’t tell me.”
“It was a secret,” he said. “Strictly forbidden.”
“So was I, but you broke that rule with no problem,” I said. “You could have confided in me.”
“Josie.”
“We talk about everything,” I said, tears spilling over my lashes that I angrily swiped away. “Everything. Our pasts, our dreams. I gave you—” I sucked in a breath as a heat wave washed over me. “I gave you all that I have. All of me.”
“And I love you for that,” he said, crossing the space I’d put between us. “I wanted to tell you so many times, but I’m telling you now, love—”
“Only because you’re caught,” I said, backing toward the door as realization dawned. “That’s why you didn’t want me here. It wasn’t about other men’s attention on me. It was about my seeing you here.”
“No,” he said. His eyes said otherwise.
How could I have been so stupid?
“I trusted you,” I said, my breath hitching.
“Josie, please,” he said, his jaw tight. “It wasn’t like that.”
“No? How was it?”
“It was doing a job and ending up falling in love with the boss’s daughter,” he said roughly, blowing out a breath. “Yes, I maybe should’ve told you, but I won’t apologize for feeling the way I do.” He took my face in his hands again, his large thumbs wiping away tears. “Damn it, Josie. I mean it when I say I’ll love you forever.”
He dropped to a knee.
“What—what are you doing?” I cried, covering my mouth with my hand. “Get up.”
This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t possibly be—no—not after everything he’d just told me. Not after knowing that I’ve been lied to and played for a pathetic fool for months. This man who I gave my heart and virginity to, who I’d loved beyond reason—it was as if a knife kept turning in my chest with every second that passed.
“God is my witness,” he said, looking up at me with something so passionate and palpable that the naïve girl of ten minutes earlier would have believed it. He looked like he loved me to his very soul. “I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my life with you, Josie. I know this is smack in the middle of chaos, but I need you to believe me and trust me that this—right here,” he gestured between us, “is real. You’re the other half of me. I don’t know what we’ll do or how we’ll do it. We can stay here on either ranch, or go anywhere you want to go. Any town. Any state. I don’t care, as long as you’re by my side.”
It was dizzying. Was he actually saying these things in the same breath as the other horrendous sentences?
“Marry me, Josie,” he said, his voice almost a whisper as his eyes pleaded with me, so full of everything I thought I knew about him. His hands gripped my hips softly, and he bowed his head against my stomach. “Please be my wife.”
Hot tears flowed freely down my face as my every breath trembled and hitched. I gazed down at his beautiful head, my shaking hands touching his hair tentatively. I needed the grounding sensation to balance the horrible twisting ache in my heart.
His fingers tightened on me at my touch, and I felt him exhale a rough breath.
Nothing made sense. Nothing would ever make sense again, but—
“Benjamin Mason!”
I jumped at the shrill female voice and whirled. I’d never heard the door open, or the whispers of the crowd peering in around her. The blond, petite, impeccably put together woman standing in the doorway, her cat-green eyes fixed on Ben. Who was still on his knee.
Then she raised that gaze to me.
I knew instantly who she was. Or some version of it anyway.
Benjamin Mason.
She knew his last name.
Ben rose to his full height, stepping in front of me protectively. That told me the rest.
“Winifred,” he said, shoving the word through his teeth. “This is a private conversation.”
“Conversation?” she said on a biting laugh. “Hardly an appropriate one, considering.”
“Considering?” I managed.
Her gaze slid to me as though I were a bug on the floor.
“Considering,” she seethed, lowering her voice so that the many ears behind her wouldn’t hear, “my fiancé is behind a closed door, on his knee, with the likes of you.”
“How dare you,” Ben said, stepping toward her. “You know—”
“Fiancé.”
The word fell from my mouth as it shot through my brain and around the room like a shooting star, bouncing off every surface. The horror that had given way for two seconds as I came up for air was back, shoving me under.
He was—engaged?
“No,” Ben said, turning to me. “That’s a lie.”
“Is it?” Winifred said, holding up her left hand. A beautiful square diamond sparkled from her ring finger.
“I allowed you to keep that when I broke things off, Winifred,” he said, anger rolling over him now. “And you’re using it against me now?”
“I’m not using anything, Benjamin,” she said, holding up her chin defiantly. “Just because you throw a fit and leave, that doesn’t break our bond.”
“We have no bond.”
“Oh,” she said, lowering her hand to her belly, resting it against the fancy layered fabric of her dress. “But we do.”
God himself could have crashed the very roof down on top of us, and it wouldn’t have had the crushing blow that that one simple movement delivered.
My feet wouldn’t move. It felt as though they’d taken root in the floor, punishing me forever by forcing me to watch this scene. To watch Ben’s eyes follow her hand, to see the two of them look at each other, to lock the image in my mind of him making love to her the way he had to me. His desperate growling of my name as he spilled into me—being her name instead.
Making a baby. Making a family.
“That’s
