Page 41

Wentworth
There are two things I hate most in this world—climbers and cheaters.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been surrounded by both. People who look at me and my sister and see nothing more than opportunity for more.
More money.
More access.
More acceptance.
I grew up knowing that more is all most people believe I have to offer. That none of them really knew me. Cared for me past what I could give them.
Neither of my parents have any concept of fidelity. Affairs and divorce were on a constant loop throughout my childhood. If not for my grandparents, who were so faithful to each other they died within hours of each other, I’d have no idea what fidelity even looked like.
Brock Morris is a conceited prick but he’s also set to inherit the second biggest ranch in the valley. From what I’ve heard around town, he and Kait used to go together back in high school... he showed up at the house a few days ago and I interrupted an argument between them. He told me to mind my own business and that he and Kait were engaged. When I asked her about it after he left, she confirmed it.
After that, I stopped listening.
Damien left a few hours later and I went inside after seeing him off to clean up our dinner mess, loading my own damn dishwasher and running it before I went upstairs to go to bed.
In bed, I stared at the ceiling for about ten minutes before I was back downstairs, too pissed and hurt to sleep.
Climbers and cheaters.
How in the hell did I manage to find a woman who happens to be both—in fucking Montana of all places. In places like California or New York, they’re easy to spot. I can see them coming from a mile away but here... I got sloppy. Lazy. Taken in by the way she blushes every time she looks at me. The fact that she seemed to see past the armor and see me for who I really am.
Like art.
That’s the part that really got me.
The two words that did me in.
Like art.
They chased themselves around my head for hours until they were nothing but a convoluted mess of memories and emotions, balled up in my gut—memories of being forced to sit on the sidelines and watch my parents build and destroy relationships over and over. The way it used to make me feel. Helpless and out of control.
I stood in the kitchen and waited for her because I wanted her to know that yeah—maybe she did see me.
But I saw her too.
A cheater and a climber.
Just like the rest of them.
And what did she have to say for herself when it was all out in the open?
I’m sorry.
When she said it, I realized that up until that moment, I’d been hoping she would deny it. Tell me that Damien got it wrong. That it was all some big misunderstanding. Instead, she apologized and ran out the door with her tail tucked between her legs like a whipped dog.
You’re roughly three times her size, moron, and you were up in her face. Notebook full of dick jokes and hands-on tattoo tour notwithstanding, she doesn’t know you from a hole in the ground. Of course, she ran—she’s a cheating climber, not a dummy with a death wish.
The slam of the door behind her was like a starting pistol. The second I heard it, I was turned toward the sound and chasing after her because even though I told her to leave, that I never wanted to see her fucking face again, I was suddenly terrified that she’d listen to me.
That I was never going to see her fucking face again.
Stopping in the doorway between the mudroom and the kitchen, I lean against the doorjamb on a sigh. Giving my face a heavy-handed swipe, I listen to her tear around the back of the house on her horse, its fast, heavy hooves chewing into the ground so hard I hear dirt and rock spray against the side of the porch.