Idiot, she scolded herself, don’t do this. Don’t care.
But she couldn’t help it.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he started to shake his head.
Oh. Oh God. Her heart fell into pieces.
She sucked in a quick breath as if she’d been punched in the stomach, and with the breath came all the pain she’d known would come with telling him how she felt. She’d kept her feelings secret for a reason.
He didn’t love her. She’d always known it and it still hurt.
Embarrassment swamped her, followed by an agony so big she had to brace herself against the stall or fall to her knees in front of him.
“Mia.” He reached for her, the jackass, and she stepped away, nearly hissing in warning, a wounded animal ready to strike out. “I had no idea,” he whispered.
“I know.” Tears, stupid tears, burned in the backs of her eyes and she curled her hands into fists, digging the sharp edges of her ragged nails into the flesh of her palms. She’d done this for a reason, and she needed to work through this vast ocean of hurt so she could get to the other side and get on with her life.
It wasn’t his fault he didn’t love her.
“I was always just…little Mia to you and that’s okay, Jack. And I knew, going in, what this marriage was going to be like. I knew you’d be gone most of the time and that, in time, you’d probably—” She stopped, swallowed. Her pride sticking in her throat. “Find someone else.”
“I didn’t,” he said quickly. “I mean, I never cheated.”
“I know,” she said. Probably because he just forgot to, or got too busy looking at charts and digging holes to notice the women falling at his feet around him.
Just like he’d been too busy growing up and away to notice her.
“What was Santa Barbara?” he asked.
“It was goodbye.” She shrugged. “You were right the other night. I was a coward. I ran because…because it hurt to finally have you just when I’d decided to let you go. And I’m sorry I didn’t answer your emails. And I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me after the attack. I just never thought…I never thought you would.”
The silence pounded against her ears like she’d gone too deep under water and she realized, in an instant, that she couldn’t stand here anymore, watching him watch her like she was a surprising bug crawling across his shoe.
She backed away. “If you want to help me, and I know you do, Jack. I’ve never doubted that. But if you really want to help, stop talking about selling the ranch and leave. Go back to your life. Leave me to mine.”
9
The walls of his room were stifling. Suffocating. He walked through the rest of the house, unchanged since his mother had lived there, and he couldn’t quite take that, either. So he grabbed the keys for Mia’s finicky pickup truck and then ransacked the mudroom for some tools.
“Where are you headed?” his father asked, standing in the doorway to the living room.
Go back to your life.
“Good question, Dad,” Jack said, and left.
He remembered the well in the high pasture. He’d put it together himself as part of an advanced earth science class in high school. Frankly, he was surprised the thing still worked.
And within minutes of taking the mechanism apart, he saw that Mia had been keeping the pump together on a wing and a prayer and probably a fortune in gasket replacements. He dismantled it, laid the parts out in the back of the truck and did his best to clean them. The work was familiar. Comforting. Like the exertion of the past few days.
His hands got busy and his mind went right back to Mia.
I’ve loved you my whole life.
Christ, had he just been blind? Or was she that good at hiding her feelings? He played over every encounter in the last five years, pulling apart his memories for a clue. A sign. And maybe in hindsight there were some, but they were practically in code.
How he must have hurt her. Over and over again. The Los Angeles trip, he remembered her sitting in that lawyer’s office, listening to him talk about wills and trust funds, all the precautions Jack was taking in case he died.
And she’d sat there like a statue. Blinking into the sunlight coming through the window. Her hands in fists in her lap.
And that night, in that terrible hotel, how shy she’d been coming out of the bathroom. How quiet. So un-Mia-like. He’d ignored it, preoccupied with the year ahead, the final preparations.
Regret choked him. Regret that he’d been so blind, so cavalier with her. And for a second he couldn’t stand his own skin.
He thought about that night in Santa Barbara, the frantic way she’d made love. And how she’d left, run away while he gloated to himself in the bathroom.