“Just let me know when you’re ready,” Ethan said.
“Ok,” Amy replied.
They rode in silence. Amy stared out the window at the reflection of the moonlight off of the snow. For the whole ride, Amy couldn’t manage a word. She just kept staring off into the distance. The landscape that had seemed so beautiful earlier in the day seemed like a wasteland. How had she been able to fool herself into thinking that she could be the carefree woman she had been over the past few days?
Amy had spent her entire adult life worrying and planning and fixing other people’s messes, and she felt ashamed of herself for thinking that maybe she could change, that maybe she could let go and enjoy herself for once. There was a reason she never let her guard down. She couldn’t even look over at Ethan. She just wanted to get on that plane. She wanted to quit the marriage and just put all of it behind her. She wanted to get back to her aunt and her sister, to the people who really needed her.
She barely managed to say goodbye as Ethan helped her up the steps to the plane. Once inside, she belted herself into a seat and closed her eyes. Soon, she’d be back in her life. Soon she’d be able to make everything right.
***
Ethan leaned back against the SUV and watched as his plane took off in the predawn darkness. He watched until it disappeared from sight. He let the cold Wyoming wind blow through him. He had spent the entire ride down to the airport wondering what he should say, wondering whether he should tell Amy what their time together had meant to him. He knew she wouldn’t want to hear it, that she’d say something about him not needing to spare her feelings. Why was it that he could stand toe to toe with any man in the business world and say exactly what was on his mind, but he couldn’t say the simplest words to her?
Ethan got back inside the SUV and started it up. Just when things had really started to take off with Amy, she was gone. It was like fate didn’t want them together, at least not yet. Ethan wasn’t a fan of fate, and he wasn’t a fan of waiting any longer to tell Amy how he felt about her. He wasn’t looking forward to the ride back to Hilson’s lodge, but business was business, and he had a job to do.
Chapter 14
Amy leaned back in the leather chair and closed her eyes in an attempt to relax. She had a headache, and her heart was racing. She could feel her pulse in her temple as she tried not to think about what all of this meant. She had allowed herself to let her guard down for one weekend, not even one weekend. She had let herself pretend that she was someone else, someone who could live in the moment, someone who could be playful and silly and fall in love. Amy traced her finger back and forth along the armrest. She felt so foolish to have believed that things would somehow work out, that she could just forget about all of her responsibilities to her family and her employees so she could chase after a dream she never knew she had.
She felt ashamed. Deep in her bones, deep in the pit of her stomach, she felt ashamed and angry at herself. Violet, one of the only people in the world Amy truly cared about, was in the hospital, fighting for her life, and all Amy could think about was herself and her love life. She kept on running through that scene in the bedroom, wondering what would have happened if she had ignored the phone call and come back to bed with Ethan. The more she thought about it, the more she hated herself for listening to him and believing that she could take time for herself, believing that she could just think about herself for once instead of taking care of everyone else.
Against her expectations, the trip to Wyoming had been wonderful. In a few days, Hank Harris had become more of a father figure to her than her own father had ever been, and Ethan, well, Ethan had surprised her. She knew he was charming. She knew he was handsome, and though she hadn’t expected his abs to be quite so hard or his jokes to be quite so funny, there was something else about him that had gotten through to her. She had felt like he understood her, like he knew what she needed when she was too afraid to admit to herself what that was. And she had been surprised by his gentleness that he hid so well behind his trademark wit.
There was a part of her that didn’t want to trust Ethan. It was the part of her that told her the whole marriage was a bad idea, the part that helped her keep her guard up, the part that had made her successful. It was the part of herself she had turned off over the course of the weekend, little by little letting herself believe the fairy tale that somehow she and Ethan could be together, that he just wanted to make her happy. It was the part of her that made her reach for the phone when all she wanted was to return to bed and pull herself close to Ethan again.