“Is that better?” he asked again, concern roughening his voice.
“You’re wearing your ring.”
Colton’s stomach dropped at her quiet statement, but he didn’t say a word as he stared at her red fingers and fought the urge to hide his hand. Damn it. He’d become so accustomed to its slight weight, he’d forgotten to remove it. She pulled her hand from his and shut off the water before taking a step back. Away from him.
“Why did you come here?” she asked into the sudden, deafening silence.
He finally shoved his hands into his pockets, hiding the proof of his foolish heart. “Joel needed someone to drive the horses—”
“You could’ve said no.”
“He signs my paycheck,” he pointed out.
She shook her head, hands clasped together in front of her. “You could’ve said no.”
Yeah, okay, I get it. You wish I wouldn’t have come. Colton turned, suddenly wishing he’d left when he had the chance. She never would’ve seen the ring and he—
“You walked away that day without so much as a backward glance…”
Kendra’s words brought him around fast. “That’s the second time you’ve said that, but what about you?” he demanded in self-defense. “First flight out the next day pretty much covers it. Couldn’t wait to get back to the city and your money, and everything that goes with it, could you?”
For the first time that morning, she met and held his gaze. Confused anger blazed in her brown eyes. “If that’s the way you feel, then why are you still here?”
He gave a self-deprecating half-laugh. “You know, that’s a good question with a very simple answer. I—”
“He loves you.”
Colton whirled around to see a grinning Noah standing in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas. “What…where’d you get that idea?” he asked sharply.
Noah’s smile fell away. “J-Joel said that you—”
Colton banged his fist hard on the counter and Noah jumped back in surprise. Ignoring the stab of guilt for frightening the kid, he strode toward the door.
“Do you?”
Kendra’s soft question jerked him to a halt as if he were a puppet on a string. When he glanced back, the tip of her tongue swept along her lips, before her teeth caught the corner of her bottom one. Her mouth twitched, as if she were fighting a grin. Unbelievably, humor lit her eyes. Pain squeezed his heart, chest and lungs. She thought this was funny?
Of course—the poor cowboy falling for the rich city girl was always good for a laugh.
He bolted from the kitchen, damning Joel all the way to hell and back. His hand reached for the apartment door, but Kendra was suddenly in front of him, her back pressed to the wood, blocking his only escape.
“Do you?”
This time the question was infused with her demand for his answer.
Faced with the possibility of a future he wanted more than anything, the truth hit Colton like the impact of a hoof with a thousand pounds of horse behind it. For the first time since his father’s accident, he realized it wasn’t only guilt that’d kept him running the past eight years. He was scared. Terrified that if he opened himself to the kind of love his parents had shared, there was the chance that he, too, could lose it someday.
It was clear he had two options. Confirm Noah’s declaration for a fifty-fifty chance at having a life worth living; or deny it and lose one hundred percent.
In a low voice, he answered, “So what if I do? It doesn’t change anything.”
The smile he’d glimpsed in the kitchen made a full appearance. “Of course it does.”
He shook his head, unable to completely let go of the fear he’d carried for so long. “You married me for your money. It doesn’t get more cut and dried than that.”
“I married you for Noah,” she corrected.
Confusion rushed in. “For Noah?”