The hard part was that I loved her. My heart ached at the idea we wouldn’t be together. Hell, I’d been close to asking her to marry me, but she’d pushed me away over a little thing like money.
No. I’d done my part. A man without pride is no man at all. If she couldn’t respect that, then I didn’t know if we had a future together, even if I did love her.
I threw open my bedroom door and tromped into the shower.
Maybe it’d been a mistake to fall in love.
* * *
Fresh out of the shower, I slipped some pajama bottoms on and toweled my body off before throwing on a T-shirt.
The doorbell rang. I groaned and headed downstairs.
I thought that stupid Carl probably came over to cheer me up. I didn’t want to see him right then. Sometimes a man just needed to be alone to blow off some steam.
I hurried to the door and threw it open.
It was the second time that week that Aspyn had surprised me. She stood on the other side of the door, a bottle in her hand.
My gaze dipped, and I laughed despite the darkness that had been swallowing me minutes earlier.
“Boone’s Farm? Really?” I said.
Aspyn smirked. “I know it doesn’t probably meet your standards of quality, Mr. Money Bags, but, as someone once told me, it’ll get us plenty drunk.”
I eyed her for a moment. Her little joke was a reminder of why she’d been avoiding me. Still, my heart leaped at the smile on her face.
She averted her eyes and held up the bottle. “Look, I was wrong, okay? I know it. Not just wrong but stupid. I also know that. I never knew that money would bother me like that until the stark reality of it was staring me down.”
“And now?”
“And now I realize it’s pretty damn stupid to be mad because the man I like and my little girl’s daddy has money.”
I frowned and looked around, suddenly realizing Kadie’s absence. “Where is she?”
“Mama’s watching her. I didn’t think Kadie needed to see her mother groveling and drinking Boone’s Farm.”
I shrugged. “She might have found it funny.”
“Oh, shut up, you, before I hit you with this bottle.”
I nodded inside. “So, you don’t have a problem now? You don’t think I’m trying to buy you or Kadie?”
I wasn’t trying to be a petty bastard. I honestly wanted to make sure we were in the clear.
“No, I think I got jealous and scared, and I hurt a good man who was just trying to prove to me he could provide.”
I took that in for a moment before nodding. “Let’s go get drunk, then.”
Chapter 37
Aspyn
We sat at Alex’s dining room table, each taking swigs from the bottle in turn. The table was damn fancy. Oak, I thought. I didn’t even want to ask how much it cost. It’d take me a while to get used to dating a rich man, even if he was a rich rancher in Livingston.
Neither of us said much of anything the first few minutes. I wouldn’t say the silence was all that comfortable, but Alex wasn’t frowning or anything, so I hoped that was a good sign.
Maybe because it’d been a few days, or maybe because of the cheap-ass wine I had in me, I noticed just how nicely his T-shirt clung to his muscles and how his pajama bottoms hung a little too low, giving me a little peek of hair. My center warmed at the thought of Alex inside me.