Page 45 of Ride Me Cowboy (Coyote Creek Ranch #1)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Beth

I SUPPOSE IF I HAD to distill it down to just one thing, that I really, particularly love about my time on Coyote Creek Ranch, it’s that I stopped feeling like an outsider a long time ago. I no longer have to pretend, or fake it, to act like someone I’m not.

But this afternoon, for the first time, I started to sense a shift. To sense my impermanence here, and to accept that this family is full and busy and has existed for a long time without me, and will continue existing that way when I leave.

Seeing Cassidy launch to Mack’s defense filled me with joy, but simultaneously left me cold. There is nothing quite so isolating as recognizing you’ve been usurped.

I’ve been so conscious of how things with Cole and me are developing, I haven’t really stopped to consider that my life was braiding together with everyone else’s, too. How my feelings were getting bound up with all of their lives, not just Cole’s.

So, I ran away. That’s what I’m good at. I came to the stables because it’s here that I feel most safe, most secure. Most like I’m in the place I’m meant to be.

“Beth?” Cole’s voice reaches me from a long way away, all gruff, husky tones and deep urgency. “Are you here?”

I move out of the apartment, toward the top of the rickety staircase, but he’s storming up them, two at a time, never mind that it’s visibly swaying under his exertion.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Is it Mack and Nash?”

He reaches the top of the steps and looks at me, like he’s searching for an answer I have no idea how to give.

“Elsie’s here.”

I stare at him through a strange swirl of lights in my mind, too bright and glaring to immediately see through. Hearing him say her name is jarring, like the last thing I expect.

“My Elsie?”

I think he flinches a little, but I’m too thrown off by the mention of her name to fully notice it. He nods once, eyes narrowed with concern.

The upstairs of the stables has always felt flimsy to me, so it’s no surprise that in this particular moment, I have the most nauseating sense of the balcony becoming disconnected from its supports and sliding to the ground.

I reach out a little blindly and grab the railing, staring at Cole as if he too can anchor me to a safer, better reality.

“She turned up, looking for Beth McMahon,” he says, gently, but now it’s my turn to flinch. That name belongs to my past—to a part of me I desperately want to shuck.

“How the hell did she find me?”

“My guess? Mack’s video.”

I drop my head on a groan, because that possibility hadn’t even occurred to me when we uploaded it.

We’ve started to amass followers but the type of people interested in a Northern Arizona ranch seem pretty removed from my sister-in-law’s normal life.

I got so swept up in being here, I stopped thinking about the possible bleed into the world I used to inhabit.

“It can’t be that,” I say, shaking my head, simply because I don’t want it to be true. “Believe me when I say that video is not something Elsie’s algorithms would feed her.”

“I do believe that,” he says, with a slightly derisive flicker of his lips so I can only guess Elsie has arrived in full blown McMahon mode.

“Is she here?” It’s Elsie’s voice, barely audible and yet, I recognize it immediately, even when she’s still a ways off.

“Shoot,” I reach out and curl my hand into Cole’s shirt.

He looks at me intently. “What do you want, Beth?”

“I don’t know.” I’m in a state of panic. I can’t see Elsie. I’m not ready.

“I know you’re only here a few more weeks, but you’re a part of this. We can take care of you.”

He means it kindly, but the mention of how temporary my time here is somehow makes everything worse. New York is my real world, even when I don’t want it to be.

“Listen to me,” he says, moving closer, putting his hands on my hips like he has a thousand times. But I can hear Elsie getting closer, her voice indistinguishable but unmistakable. “Have you ever thought that maybe the only way you’ll ever be free of him is if you own the truth of what happened?”

I stare at Cole with a sinking heart. I know that’s probably true, but how can I destroy Elsie like that? His parents? And for what? Christopher’s gone.

I pull away from him, shaking my head. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand you,” he says, in a way that makes my heart beat faster. “You will destroy yourself if you keep living this lie.”

“What choice do I have?”

“Be honest with them, so you can move on. Think about your future.”

That’s the problem. When I think about my future, all I see is the present. This ranch, this family, this damn man. My throat thickens and despair flares inside of me.

“No,” I say, hard and fast, rejecting what I’m pretty sure is impossible. A quick glance downstairs shows two shadows sliding through the open door of the stables—they’re almost here. “I appreciate your concern, but this is my problem, not yours.” I sidestep him, needing to intercept Elsie.

“Beth, wait,” he growls, lacing his fingers through mine as I pass and squeezing them. “Just wait.”

I shake my head quickly, because there’s nothing he can say that will fix this. I will always be Beth McMahon. I’m Beth Tasker, too, but being Christopher’s widow is a part of my whole future. My whole existence. I was stupid to think, for a time, it wasn’t.

“What for?” I bite back a sob of raw emotion. I wish, to bits and pieces, that I could control my feelings better, but the truth is, I’m so spent. It has been a long road, since Elsie’s birthday party, when I met Christopher for the first time.

“Wait for me,” he says, slowly but like it’s the most important thing he’ll ever say in his life. “Let me do this with you.”

“No,” I shake my head quickly, my heart racing.

In that moment, I’m looking at Cole, but all I’m seeing is Christopher.

All I’m feeling like is Christopher’s wife.

I don’t know how else to explain it, but to say that it’s like I’m on one side of a cracked mirror, and my old life is the other.

It’s distant and distorted, through cracks and fissures, but it’s still right there, within easy spotting distance, easy reach.

I feel far from untouchable. Far from safe.

Not with Elsie here, bringing it all back to me.

Trauma is a schism, splitting me into a trillion shards.

But I am not the only one reacting out of emotion.

Cole wraps his other arm around me and pulls me against his body, hard and fast, shocking me with his intensity, in the same way a Jane Austen heroine might have felt when smelling salts were wafted beneath her nose.

“I know what we are,” he says throatily.

“I know you’re leavin’ here. You and I have been clear about that from the first. You have a whole life ahead of you, and it will be a wonderful life, darlin’. But I also know that?—,”

Elsie is down the far end of the stables now.

I hear her. I need to pull back, but my body is begging me to just hold on a second, to take a beat and inhale this intoxicating moment.

To build strength from Cole, and let his goodness and warmth soak into me and prepare me for what I know is going to happen.

“That what?”

“Above anythin’ else we’ve got going on, we’re friends. I care about you. I don’t want you to face this alone. I can help you.”

Friends. A profoundly deep sadness washes over me—for myself, and also, for Cole.

“You are broken by your past. You must see that. You couldn’t save your mom, or your dad, you’re worried you can’t save this place, and all the while, you beat yourself up for things that aren’t your fault.

You want to fix everyone and everything, just like your dad did.

Maybe you even think that if you make me all better, put a big fat plaster over everything that’s happened to me, you can redeem whatever you think you’ve done wrong in the past.”

His jaw clenches and I can’t tell if it’s from pride or anger.

“But you can’t fix me, Cole. No one can.

I’m not your redemption; I just can’t be.

” Saying that is both a breaking point and a relief.

It’s an admission I’ve been fighting, so hard.

I came here hoping that with time, and the right circumstances, some breathing room, I could come back to myself.

But Christopher has permanently broken me, morphed me into something and someone I no longer know.

He is dead; and yet he wins. He’ll always win.

He was right: I will never be free of him.

Finally, in this place that has become my home, my heart, my hopes, I accept the truth of my reality, the burdens of my cage. I stare at Cole, but now, I’m staring at him through an impenetrable barrier.

He is a reality I can never have.

This whole time has been a fantasy.

I ran away. I pretended. I faked it.

But I was wrong.

I sob, but this time, no noise emerges. It is just a guttural, aching, throat-burning sensation that bubbles from the deep pit inside of me, and I have no way to stem the pain that floods my entire nervous system.

“I should never have let this happen,” I whisper.

“Are you kidding me?” He lets go of my wrist, my waist, and instead grabs my face with both hands, staring at me like he’s desperate to get through the barrier, even as I’m furiously raising my shields, making sure he can’t. “All because his sister is here, Beth?”

“Yes,” I say, then shake my head, so his hands drop away. “And no.” Another sob chokes in my throat. I know Elsie is down there somewhere. I feel almost disconnected from reality—another defense mechanism from my marriage.

“Your husband was a bastard,” he says, but I flinch at that.

Elsie’s being here has thrown me—hard—back into the role of dutiful wife.

I cannot hear that reality without a deep, abiding sense of guilt and an almost heart-stopping panic.

The visage of Christopher is so close. “But his sister is not him. It’s pretty damn clear she cares about you. She’s here out of concern, not anger.”

I can’t answer that. It’s so much more complicated than he knows. “He wasn’t just some guy I knew. He was my husband. I was his wife.” Tears pour down my cheeks. My stomach is in knots. “She thinks we were happy and that I loved him. She thinks?—,”

“So, tell her the truth. Why does that jackass deserve your protection now?’

It is a very complicated thing, I know that.

Perhaps, before meeting Christopher, I might have felt as Cole does.

That is, that my situation is black and white.

Christopher was bad, I was good, I am therefore right and he is wrong.

But when you love someone, as I once thought I loved Christopher, and they betray that love, so it turns to hatred, it is a far messier, more complicated proposition.

I don’t love him any longer, and yet the love I once felt is a part of the swirling feelings I have for my husband.

So too, the weight and power of our lost dreams, my lost hope.

On the day I married him, I imbued our promises to one another with decades’ worth of expectation. I saw beyond the ceremony, the rings, the champagne, to the days that would follow: the laughs, the failures and joys, the children, grandchildren, for better or for worse.

Accepting that my husband was abusive, that every day might be my last, and at his hands, was not only shocking, it was jarring. It was the slow release of those dreams, and yet they’re still a part of me. It is an essential disconnect, and I have no idea how to explain any of that to Cole.

How can I tell him that in defending Christopher, I am simply defending the girl I once was? Protecting the innocence and sweetness of her hopes?

It’s all so futile.

But as I look at Cole, through a now unbreakable film, as though he is a full football stadium away, I acknowledge that if I weren’t still that damaged girl, so broken on the inside, I would be reaching for him with both hands, and holding him so damned tight.

I would admit to myself that Cole, and Cole alone, is the sum total of what I want and need. Because he really truly is.

“Listen to me,” he says, his voice calm, when his eyes show a swirling torrent of emotion. “This isn’t something you can just run away from. She’s a part of your life, and if you keep lying to her, it’s only going to hurt you. You can’t keep pretending?—,”

“How do you know?” I hiss, heart racing, because Elsie must be down there, somewhere, still looking for me. “I spent years pretending, just fine.”

“Is that what you call it?” he demands. And because he’s right, I go on the attack.

“Look who’s talking, anyway. You run around this place like everything’s hunky dory and all the while you have the weight of the world pressing down on you. You’re lying to your family every single day.”

He goes very still, staring at me, expression like iron, body totally static.

I suck in a deep breath, aware I might have gone too far, but not able to care.

I’m panicked and guilt-ridden, and feel totally adrift.

The one person I’d come to think of as a sort of anchor is spinning away from me—because I’m pushing him.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go talk to Elsie.”

“Beth, wait,” he says, when I’m almost at the top of the stairs, and this time, when he pulls at my hand, he draws me against his body, one hand at my cheek, his fingers in my hair, and then he kisses me.

I need this kiss more than I can say. I wish I didn’t, but there’s something in the way his lips mesh with mine, his body molding against me, that makes me feel like I’m myself again.

It somehow washes away all of my uncertainty and doubt, all of my angst, and plonks my right back in the middle of my safe space.

His arm wraps around my waist, tighter, harder. This is such a perfectly familiar embrace, a connection that starts in the very middle of me and wraps all the way around him. I zone everything else out and exist purely in this moment, soaking it up, feeling tranquil and at peace.

“You aren’t alone, Beth,” he says against my mouth.

I don’t know what to say to that. I don’t know how to reply. I don’t get a chance, anyway.

Elsie’s voice is unmistakable, out here, in the middle of Coyote Creek Ranch. “Beth? What the actual fuck?”