Page 19 of Maverick (The Bull Riders #3)

Chapter Eight

Stella

It’s a stupid thing to go to his house. I know that. What I should do is take a hint. Take a goddamned hint. I know that, even as I get in my truck. I tell myself the fact that I know it proves that to an extent I am taking a hint, I’m just not doing anything with it. I’m doing what I want.

He doesn’t want to see me. He doesn’t want to talk to me.

But I want to see him. I want to talk to him.

I want to find out what the fuck that was about.

Why he took me like it was the most transcendent, wonderful experience, like he was dying for me, starving for me, then looked at me like I was an alien before walking out without saying a word.

Letting sleeping dogs lie is not my forte.

I will not be letting freshly fucked cowboys off the hook either.

Because literally, how dare he? How dare he do that to me and then…

Okay, the real issue is he left me without water. I’m going to go with that. I need water.

I don’t know where the valve to turn it back on is, and if I do turn it back on, there are going to be rat-bitten pipes leaking into my bathroom. So not only did he abandon me post-sex, he abandoned me with a broken house. And I think it’s reasonable to chase him down for that reason.

I pull my truck up beside his in front of the house. Then I take a deep breath and go to the front door. I knock.

He doesn’t answer.

I swallow hard, and turn the doorknob. It turns.

It isn’t locked. I don’t really know what I should do with that.

I think I should probably turn around and walk away.

But even as I think that, I’m opening the front door and walking in.

I just saw him naked. I had his penis in my mouth.

It seems like a fair enough thing to go into the house.

Or at least, it doesn’t seem like a total violation.

All things considered. The intimacy we have shared, etc.

I tell myself that even as I creep in quietly. I bite my lip and look around. I don’t know what I expected his house to look like inside. But it’s…

I frown. There’s a shelf in the entryway that’s decorated beautifully. A few little vases. Bunches of dried flowers in those vases. There’s a little plate with a horse painted on it. Very nice decorations that must be heirlooms. Something maybe he got from his mother or…

And then I stop in front of a wall of photographs.

It takes me a minute to figure out what I’m looking at.

And then it all comes to me with startling clarity.

There he is, at a wedding. Not just at a wedding, he’s the groom.

Dressed in a tuxedo, holding onto a beautiful brunette woman in a fitted white gown.

He’s looking at her like the sun rises and sets with her smile, and she’s looking at him the same way.

My stomach cramps painfully.

It’s tempting to completely lose my shit.

Because if I just had sex with a married man I might fling myself off the nearest cliff.

Because it would be one thing if I made the decision to have an affair with a married man – I wouldn’t – but it would be one thing if I had decided to go.

Quite another to be dragged into someone else’s potential betrayal without consent.

But that’s just a brief thought. The truth is, no one has ever talked about him having a wife.

Ever. He looks young in that picture, too.

It’s not recent. Is he divorced? No. Divorced men don’t leave pictures up in their houses.

Not of their weddings and not… I look at the pictures that surround the wedding portrait. Engagement photos.

Him dipping her like they’re dancing, twirling her in the middle of a field.

He did that for her. Because he’s not the kind of man who would ever choose to do something like that. I know it.

And this doesn’t look like something he simply forgot to take down.

It also doesn’t look like a relationship he would betray.

This looks like a memorial.

Something grips my chest. Hard.

And then, I hear footsteps on the stairs. I turn sharply, and there he is. He’s wearing a pair of sweatpants low on his hips. His hair is wet. He’s shirtless.

He’s gorgeous. And he’s staring at me like he wants to strangle me.

“I let myself in,” I say.

“You broke in,” he says.

“You abandoned me with no water. And then went home and took a shower, which honestly feels mean.”

He nods slowly, coming down the stairs. “It was mean. I’m not going to deny that.”

“Well, why did you do it?”

He closes his eyes and holds onto the banister. He takes a deep breath, in that moment, the expression on his face, makes me think I’m right. Then I think back to the way he looked at me before. That sort of torture.

I’m scrambling to hang onto my fantasy of him.

To this wild idea that I’ve been carrying around that he’s the sort of dark, villainous character.

That he’s nothing more than that character.

That he’s a one-dimensional bad boy fantasy.

That was all stuff I projected onto him. He didn’t push any of it onto me.

Looking at him right now, I know that none of it’s real. I can’t continue to pretend he’s not a real man. That he’s just a fantasy object.

He opens his eyes and continues to walk down the stairs. He closes the distance between the two of us and stands next to me, looking at the wall of photos.

“Questions?”

“Yeah,” I say. “A lot. But obviously they’re not really questions that you want to answer, so I don’t want to…”

“Her name was Sadie. She died five years ago.”

Five years ago.

Just as I was getting into barrel racing. So I wouldn’t have known anything about her, or anything about that.

“What happened?”

I realize that was probably an insensitive question. A stupid one.

If it was, he doesn’t indicate that. He makes a pained sound in the back of his throat. I look at him as he tilts his head back and looks up. He’s looking at the picture at the very top of the wall. One where he has his hand on her face, and it grabs hold of my stomach and grips me tight.

Pain. Envy. Sorrow.

Complicated and intense.

He clears his throat. “Car accident. Just really fucking random. Best guess is that she swerved to avoid hitting something. Out here, probably a moose or an elk. Maybe even a deer. She hit a tree. She died instantly. You know, I think that’s the worst part.

It shouldn’t be. I should be glad, I guess.

Because she probably didn’t even know what happened.

But there was just no negotiating. By the time I found out there’d been an accident, she was already gone.

When I was a kid, when cops would show up at the house, it usually meant they were there to arrest somebody.

So that was my first thought when I saw them walk up to the door.

I couldn’t figure it out. Because I knew I hadn’t done anything illegal in a hot minute. She never had.”

I take a breath like I’m shattering. I take a breath like I’m trying not to cry. His voice is steady. Like he’s replaying something that he’s watched a hundred times before. But I haven’t seen it before, and I am bracing myself for impact.

“It was the middle of the day,” he says. “A really nice day, too. She had just gone down to the grocery store.” Then there’s an expression on his face that’s so bleak I can’t look at him. “I still remember there was a loaf of bread in the middle of the road.”

It’s so unfathomably cruel. These mundane things. A sunny day. A loaf of bread. A trip to the grocery store. Losing somebody that you love forever.

He makes sense to me now. I’m not sure that I want him to. How selfish is that? I want him to be my fantasy. I want all the things he’s doing to be about me, but they’re not. They’re about him.

I might’ve been a virgin, but I know with certainty that my read on him is totally wrong.

I suspect that… The reason he couldn’t resist me is that he hasn’t had sex since she died.

Replaying the whole thing in my head, I get it all.

So, of course, he was never going to sleep with me when he won the bet.

In my head, he was just a western fuckboy, down for anything.

But I was wrong about him. He’s got this deep, relentless pain, and I never thought about him as a whole human being.

“It’s her horse, isn’t it?”

That hits me like a bolt of lightning, and I don’t even hold it in.

He turns to look at me, hands shoved into his sweatpants pockets. “Yes. It is.”

I put my hand on my chest. “Thank you for trusting me with him. I understand that… That can’t be an easy thing to do.”

He shakes his head. “Something has to be done with that horse. That was her dream. She knew that he was going to be a special one.”

“Did she ride dressage?”

He nods. “Yes. Though her goal wasn’t actually to ride in the Olympics.

She just wanted the horse to make it. She didn’t think that she was talented enough.

Or, I think more to the point, she didn’t want to invest all her time in that.

And that’s fair enough. It takes an incredible amount of dedication. She wanted to start a family and–”

He breaks off.

In that simple sentence, he’s revealed an awful lot to me. And he’s changed the way that I see him again.

He was a husband. He wanted to be a father. He had planned to be one. This ranch existed because he was supposed to start a family on it.

He’s not this swaggering bad guy I told myself he was.

“It’s not a secret,” he says. “But I don’t really have friends on the circuit. And honestly, by the time I came back after taking a break, a lot of the guys I did know were gone, there was a new crop of assholes.”

“Me and my friends.”

He nods. “You and your friends.”

“So you never told anybody because people didn’t really know.”

“It’s nice to be able to go be something else for a while. Because around here, you know everyone knows.”

“Right. Of course.”