Million Dollar Cowboy (Cupid, Texas #5)(102)

"Although, be fair, you never did give us a chance to apologize. You packed up your things without hearing us out and cut off all contact with your father and me. I understand why you did it. You were hurt and angry. I don't blame you. But by not giving us an opportunity to apologize, well, we didn't get a chance to heal either."

That startled him. He'd never considered that they were hurting too.

"Well hell, Vivi, thank you for that," he said because he didn't know what else to say, and damn, if he didn't feel a little bit better.

"When will you be back?" Vivi said, folding her arms over her chest.

"Don't you get it?" The briefcase was heavy against his shoulder, but he wasn't putting it down. He needed to get out of here. Now. "I'm not coming back."

"The work, right? It's always about the work."

"What else is there?" he asked, not to be sarcastic but because he truly had no idea.

Work was the one thing that had never failed him. Never let him down. Or disappointed him. He could not say the same for the people in his life.

"On their deathbed no one wishes they'd worked more," Vivi said. 

"Someone might."

"No one does."

"I have to go."

"Wait right here," Vivi said.

"I gotta . . ." Ridge jerked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing in the direction of his plane, and he already had his hand on the doorknob. "Trail. Hitting it. Tell Duke goodbye for me."

"Stop!" she said so firmly and succinctly he did indeed stop.

"What is it?"

She reached over, plucked a white bud from the get-well rose bouquet sitting on the foyer table and thrust it under his nose. "Smell this."

"What for?"

"Because in all the years I've known you, you've never once stopped to smell the roses, Ridge Lockhart." She shook the rose until a couple of petals peeled off and floated to the floor. "Smell it!"

"It's a figure of speech. You're not supposed to literally smell the roses."

"Yes, you are. Smell it."

He couldn't help but smell it. It was right under his damn nose. Soft. Floral. And totally irrelevant. He made a big deal of inhaling. "Okay, I sniffed it. Happy now? Can I go?"

"Take a deep breath."

"I don't have time." Ridge tapped his watch.

"Which is exactly why you should take the time."

"I'm outta here."

"You disappoint me."

Ridge gave a stiff-shoulder shrug. "Not the first time. I'm sure it won't be the last."

"Stay."

"Why?"

"You belong."

Ha! He didn't belong here. He'd never belonged here. Hell, truth be told, he didn't belong anywhere.

"You're hopeless. You know that?"

"Probably," he agreed, the smell of roses clogging up his sinuses.

"I give up. The only person who seems capable of getting through to you is Kaia Alzate, and you're pushing her away the hardest. She loves you, dammit. For once, just let someone love you."

"Vivi!" Duke called from the top of the stairs. "The boy wants to leave, let him go."

Ridge glanced up the wide double staircase at the end of the entryway. His father was leaning against the banister in his pajamas looking ashen beneath his outdoorsy tan. The bachelor party bruise at his eye was almost gone, but a shadow of color lingered. A quiver of regret seized him.

His father frowned, studying him hard as if trying to read his thoughts. His hair silvered, his forehead deeply etched with lines. The man he'd once seen as a lion. The man who'd once controlled his life no longer held any power over him.

So much contention lay between them, so much stagnant water under the aging bridge.

"He's got to make his own mistakes," Duke said. "One day he'll see where he went wrong, but by then it will all be too late."

And as Ridge stood there feeling pity for the old man, he realized with shock, the old man was feeling sorry for him.



The fourteen-plus-hour flight to Beijing left Ridge wrung out and feeling like chopped liver hash on a stale cracker.

Or at least that's what he told himself.

His head throbbed and his shoulders ached and his butt was numb from so much time in the seat, never mind that he'd flown first-class. It was still too long to be stuffed into a winged metal tube at thirty thousand feet.

But the truth was, he'd been unable to think about anything but Kaia since he'd walked away from her in the dark.

Images flipped and fluttered through his mind, quick and vivid, a vision of Kaia in a teeny-weeny red bikini doing the breaststroke in the springs at Balmorhea, an utterly disarming smile on her gorgeous face.