Slow Burn Cowboy(56)

He said the words in a monotone, but they were vibrating with urgency. With emotion that betrayed the fact that he wasn’t as unshakable as he was trying to appear.

“You’re right,” she said slowly. “I do need you. I need you for so many things, and I always have. But I need you to need me too, Finn. Anything less isn’t going to work.” Slowly, she walked over to where her clothes were and began to pull them on. They felt heavy, and her limbs felt like they were filled with lead.

She waited for him to say something. Waited for him to stop her, but he didn’t. Instead, he let her get dressed all the way. Let her walk to the bedroom door.

She stopped, her throat tightening. She bit her lip to keep from crying right there in front of him. She had already broken down in front of him too many times. And yes, he’d held her. He’d braced her. Because he was a wall. And that was easy for a wall. But asking him to bend, asking him to soften, asking him to make himself vulnerable to her in any way... He wasn’t going to give in.

And it reminded her too much of the life in her past. Of living with inflexible, distant people. Of feeling alone in a home that had an actual staff. Because if you could maintain that kind of detachment then you could easily send your own child off to have a baby on her own, to hide her pregnancy from the neighborhood, from the garden club.

Because your own self-preservation would always be more important.

Finn wasn’t her parents. She knew that. But it was far too close. Far too close to everything she had run away from once already. To the things that had damaged and wounded her beyond repair—or so she’d thought.

As she opened the bedroom door and began to walk away, something broke inside of her, and she wondered if she was right back where she’d been as a seventeen-year-old girl driving into town the first time. If there was something in her that would take another decade to heal.

Then, as she made her way down the stairs and out the front door to her car, all the time hoping that he would come after her, she realized something. That it might take ten years for this pain to heal all the way, that it might never heal all the way. But that she would be able to live even with the pain there.

Because she was stronger now. Because she refused to hold on to it. Because she refused to be defined by all of the things she didn’t have. By all of the second-guessing. By the life that someone else was living.

She was broken. She wasn’t destroyed.

That was because of Finn. Ironic now that he was the one causing this destruction when he had been the one to heal so much of it before.

No less ironic, she supposed, than the fact that he was the one ending things when he was the one who had pushed for things to begin. That he was the one who was afraid now, when he had been as confident as a bulldozer in the beginning.

Tears slid down her cheeks as she drove down the winding highway toward her house. It was dark outside and her headlights bathed the road and the bottoms of the pine trees in a wedge of yellow. It was the only light in the darkness.

She laughed. She supposed since it was so dark she was going to have to make her own light.

She would. She would make her subscription boxes, she would laugh with her friends. And sometimes, only sometimes, she would cry.

Because she loved Finn Donnelly with all of herself. Without reservation. And he refused to let himself love her back.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

HE HAD DAMN well expected her to fight for this a little bit harder. For their friendship. The one that she had elevated above everything else that first day he’d kissed her.

But no, the minute she wanted something he didn’t, she walked away.

Typical.

Typical of every damn person in his life.

Finn took the bottle of his grandfather’s favorite whiskey off the bar and didn’t even bother to pour himself a glass. No, he just uncorked the top and took a long drink. He wiped his mouth, starting to feel the effects, since it wasn’t the first drink he’d had in the last few hours.

He couldn’t sleep. There was no point. She wasn’t here. She was gone. As she felt was justified.

He ignored the voice inside of him that called him a raving hypocrite. The same voice that had been poking at him from the time down by the lake when he demanded that she give him her burdens.

But hell. He’d told her. He’d told her that his mother had called the police on him. That he had caught her being beaten bloody by some bastard, had done as much damage as a skinny sixteen-year-old could do, and she’d still left him.

That his grandfather had taken years’ worth of work out of him, and then whatever the reason, everything he’d done still hadn’t been enough to prove that he could run the Laughing Irish on his own.

“What’s that about?” he asked the empty room. “You old Irish jackass. I did everything you asked me to do. And you didn’t love me more than any of the rest of them, did you? I was probably just cheap labor.”

A searing pain went through him at the thought. One person had said she loved him. Lane Jensen. And he’d told her he couldn’t love her back.

The truth was, he didn’t want to. Even if he could.

“What’s going on down here?”

Finn turned and saw Cain standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Inquisitive bastard. Finn missed his isolation. He wished his brother would go the hell back to Texas. And that Alex would go the hell back to the army. And that Liam would go back to wherever the hell he’d come from. Hell, most likely.

“You live in a house with about a million other people. You come down to check on every noise?” Finn asked, noticing that his words sounded a little bit soft, thanks to the liquor.

“I have a sixteen-year-old daughter. I assume every noise that happens in the night is her sneaking out or a boy sneaking in. Granted, it’s less likely here, since she doesn’t know anybody and there’s no way she could walk to town, and she wouldn’t be able to hot-wire my car, but my paranoia has served me well so far when it comes to parenting, so I go with it.”

“No teen angst down here. Do you want to see some ID?” He turned back to the bar and picked up the bottle of whiskey again, tipping it back as he pressed it up against his lips.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. Does any man on earth ever want to talk about it?”

“What do you want to do then?”

“I want to drink about it,” Finn said, doing just that. “If you want to join me, you can do that. Otherwise, why don’t you go back to bed.”

“Wow. My cold, empty bed, or, stay here and get hammered. Tough choice. But, I’ll have a tumbler of the Jack Daniel’s.”

Finn slid a glass across the bar, and then pointed to a bottle. “This is a no-service establishment. Help yourself.”

“I take it,” Cain said, taking the stopper out of the bottle, “that you had a fight with Lane.”

A fight. He wished it had been a fight. A real fight. One where she stood her ground. One where she had pushed back. She had just left.

You let her.

Yeah, well. Enough people had walked away from him that he had learned not to go chasing after anyone. After a while it just started to look sad.

“Not really,” he said, lifting the bottle to his lips again.

“Oh, come on,” Cain said, grabbing hold of the bottle and wrenching it away from Finn. “Have some damn pride. Pour it in a glass. Don’t get sloppy over a woman.”

Cain poured a measure of the amber liquid into a glass and handed that to Finn.

Finn glared, but took it without argument. “Do you know of a better reason to get sloppy drunk?” Finn asked. “If you do, I’m happy to hear it.”

“Teenagers,” Cain said, lifting his own full glass. “But, since you don’t have one, women I guess. But only women that mean something.”

His chest ached. Of course Lane meant something. She had always meant something. That wasn’t up for debate.

It was all this other stuff, her asking for things, saying things. The kinds of things that a man like him had decided he never wanted to hear. And then she was saying them. Lane. If he had ever wanted to hear it from any woman, it was her. Except, it was bull. Because she had immediately walked away. That was the kind of love he was used to. And if that was all the love he could ever get? He would do without it. He would deal just fine.

“Well,” Finn said, “she’s my best friend.”

“I have a buddy back in Dallas—we call him Slim, because it’s Texas and they really do things like that. We had our disagreements. I’ve never gotten drunk over him. I just don’t feel that strongly about him, even though he’s great to go out skeet shooting with.”

“Well, unless you’re also sleeping with him, I guarantee that you don’t have the same attachment to him that I have to Lane.”

“No,” Cain said, “we are not that close.”

“Right.”

“This looks like love stuff to me, I’m just saying.”

“You can just say your way back to Dallas,” Finn said, taking another drink. “I don’t think I asked for brotherly advice from the brother that I didn’t even grow up with.”

“All you have are brothers you didn’t grow up with,” Cain responded. “Grandpa is dead, your best friend is mad at you, so, who else are you going to talk to?”