Page 76 of Cowboy SEAL Homecoming

Except in your dreams.

“Why didn’t you come home?”

He blinked. Of all the places he thought she might go, that wasn’t it. “I don’t know.”

“You can ignore a question, Alex. You can say you don’t want to answer, but I don’t ever want you to lie to me. I think that’s more than fair.”

Fair. She had to throw that word out there. None of this was fair. He’d always thought of himself as a fair man, but a fair man would not drag her into his life when he wasn’t one hundred percent on top of things.

But he’d get there. Once the bunkhouse was fixed, once the foundation was up and running, this thing lodged in his gut would disappear. It was just another reason the order of things was so important. If they dated, if they took things slow, he would be right and fine once… At some point. Maybe he didn’t know the exact point yet, but it was out there.

“When, specifically, are you talking about me not coming home?”

“The entire time after our parents were married. You came home…what? Twice? And…the thing is I don’t get it. I thought maybe you hated it or Burt, but you loved him and he loved you. You love this place. It’s home. I know coming back and building this is complicated, but it’s still so clear you belong here. So why would you have kept away so much?”

“How do you know all that?” he asked, surprised at how raspy his voice sounded, how affected.

“I have eyes, don’t I?” she said with one of those sweet smiles he wished he could see as pitying, but from her it just felt like comfort. “I’ve seen you look at the sky, at your father’s truck, at the mountains in the distance. I’ve seen you work with the cows with a smile on your face and laugh with Hick. You love this place. That’s obvious to anyone who’s watching, and I have…well, I’ve been watching. In a totally not-creepy way.”

He laughed, and it was so easy with her to remember how again. To lose that weight on his chest and remember life had all this—humor and light. Love and people.

“So?” she prompted, a tenacious fighter to the end.

Alex sighed. He wanted to lie or to refuse to talk about it, but he was a fair man, and it was all too fair a question. “I didn’t know I was doing it, I don’t think. I just…” He raked a hand through his hair. It was easier to admit things to himself in the privacy of his own thoughts than it was aloud to another person. “I never wanted to see someone take my mother’s spot. I thought Dad had every right to remarry, and I never took issue with your mother. I just…I didn’t want to see it—this place that was my family’s turned into someone else’s.”

She was so quiet he wasn’t sure she was breathing, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to look at her, because all of that still hurt. That he hadn’t realized he was doing it to himself, and he’d lost all those chances to have another moment with Dad.

“I never knew my father,” Becca said into the eerie quiet.

He did look at her then, not sure why she was offering that kind of confession.

She shrugged jerkily. “Mom was seventeen. He disappeared when she told him she was pregnant. Her family kicked her out. So it was always just…us, and then I was so sickly.” She swallowed. “That’s why Burt was such a miracle for us. For both of us. After all that bad. That something and someone so good could happen was a miracle.”

“And you still believe that, even after he died so out of the blue?”

“Yes.” She smiled, her eyes bright with tears, but she didn’t shed them, and her smile was real. “Because…because once you know it can happen, that miracle, you have to believe it can happen again.”

His chest was too tight, and so was his throat. Everything was squeezed, and for a few panicking seconds, he didn’t think he’d be able to breathe. He might die right here—death by hope.

Except Becca reached out and touched his hand, a featherlight brush of her fingertips, and suddenly he could inhale and then exhale. Suddenly, she was close and she was all the air he needed.

“You are something like a miracle, Becca Denton.” And he knew without a shadow of a doubt he didn’t deserve that miracle, but somehow she was still here. “Let’s go inside.”

“Are you coming to my bed?”

“No.”

She huffed. “You’re such a stick-in-the-mud. No wonder your nickname was Dad.”

“Who told you that?” he asked, stepping into the dark night with her and closing the door behind them.

“Jack told me.”

“Jack needs to shut his mouth.”

And she laughed as they walked, hand in hand, back to the house they’d both grown up in at different times of their lives, and somehow that felt just about right.