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Almost without consciously deciding, she stepped back a half step. Ry took it the rest of the way, coming through the doorway in a single stride. In almost the same motion he pushed at the door. He was so close, so nerve-shatteringly close, she was barely aware of letting go of the knob, barely heard the sound of the door closing and catching. The four hundred square feet of her apartment had never seemed smaller.

She’d thought it little when she’d arrived home, told herself it was only natural after days spent looking out over land where the glorious hills met the horizon so far away, the hills portrayed so beautifully in an incredible painting. But now it seemed absolutely tiny. Ry’s presence dwarfed it until she thought if she turned, if she tried to back away, she’d hit a wall. She groaned inwardly at the double meaning of the phrase. She’d already hit the wall, on so many fronts it was dizzying.

He was so close she felt more than saw him move. His arms came up and wrapped around her. The common sense that told her to back away warred with her heart’s urge to hug him back, resulting in a stalemate that had her simply staying there, not moving either way.

“You heard me on that call, there at the saloon, didn’t you.”

It wasn’t really a question, but she felt compelled to respond as the probable answer came to her. No matter how he felt about her, Ry wasn’t a cruel person, and he wouldn’t have wanted her to hear him say what he’d said that night.

“It’s all right,” she said, hating the shaky sound of the words even as she was surprised she managed to say them at all. “I understand.”

“Kaitlyn—”

“I said I understand. You didn’t have to come here to say it in person. I overheard something I shouldn’t have. I know you would have been…kinder if you knew I could hear.”

He went very still. And then, as she’d been expecting all along, he pulled away from her.

“Kaitlyn Miller, look at me.” It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but she did it. And looking into those stormy-gray eyes made her feel as if she were back in the Hill Country, where that horizon was the only limit. “That call,” he said firmly, “was not about you. How could you even think that, after that night we had? And after what she told you to do?”

“I thought…that’s why, because you thought that’s why I…”

“You thought I believed you slept with me because she told you to? You really thought that?” He looked so aghast it blasted any lingering remnant of that idea out of her head. And her heart. “It was Jacobs I was telling the magazine to get rid of. To get her the hell out of my life because she’s nothing but a…a…”

He broke off like a man who’d been about to descend into profanity.

“Fancied-up troublemaker?” Kaitlyn said, staring up at him as she quoted his words back to him.

“I said that, yes. I was thinking self-serving, arrogant, manipulative and a few less kind things.”

“I thought…you meant me. The dress, the makeup.”

Something changed in his eyes then. His entire expression changed. “You,” he said, sounding almost breathless, “were incredible. When I saw you walking across that room I nearly lost it. But then the phone rang, and knew I had to get rid of that…witch, get her out of our lives.”

Our lives.

She was now feeling breathless herself.

“You looked incredible, sweetheart. But this Kaitlyn,” he said, reaching up to grip her shoulders as his words started coming in a rush, like someone who’d feared he’d never get the chance to say them, “the one who gets up and faces every day despite the odds, who sacrifices endlessly to help others, who is loyal beyond belief, the Kaitlyn who has that eye, that knack of seeing and framing the world in such incredible ways, the one who would understand when I get crazy and obsessed with capturing something a certain way, the one who made me finally face why I was denying the core of who I am—an artist—that’s the Kaitlyn I love.”

That’s the Kaitlyn I love.

The words rang in her head, and that inner voice, that thing that had been with her since childhood told her that was the only place she was hearing them, that a man like this would never truly say something to her. Not her, plain, ugly duckling Kaitlyn who had none of her mother’s looks or charm.

I’d argue that, but more importantly, you have none of her weaknesses either.

She stared up at him, this man who had seen her as no one ever had.

That’s the Kaitlyn I love.

“Ry?” It was all she could get out, and her voice trembled even on the single syllable.

“I know it’s happened fast, and we’ll have to give it time to be sure but give us a chance. Please, Kaitlyn, give us a chance.” He swallowed visibly. “Give me a chance.”

She wondered, surely inanely, if Rylan Rafferty had ever had to beg a woman before. Even the idea was laughable. Yet here he was.

He hadn’t been talking about her that night. Jillian. It was Jillian he had called…well, everything Kaitlyn had ever thought about her. And he’d told Jackie Hyland that he’d cancel a project any artist would covet because he wouldn’t deal with her.

Any artist.