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  Hope shook her head, her eyes filling with a sadness that seemed like it went way beyond whatever was happening with this Sadie person. “No, my mother isn’t feeling well. I should get back.”

  “Okay, go. Don’t worry about me—I’m fine. We will have tons of time to catch up. I can drop by tomorrow and hang out with the two of you, okay?”

  Hope nodded. Sarah watched the interchange with interest but tried not to look nosy.

  “I can drive you back,” Tyler said.

  “No, no. I’ll call a cab,” Hope said.

  “I wouldn’t feel right about that. We drove you here,” Tyler said, standing.

  “We both know there’s only one cab in town, and it’ll take him an hour to get here. I can drive you home. I have to be at the hospital in a couple of hours anyway,” Dean said, standing.

  Hope’s face turned red. “I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “Not a problem,” he said.

  They stood side by side stiffly as they said their goodbyes to everyone.

  “That should be a fun car ride,” Cade said under his breath.

  “Ten bucks says they don’t say a word the entire ride to Hope’s house,” Tyler added.

  “You guys are horrible,” Lainey said with a laugh. “I’m pretty sure one day those two will see eye to eye.”

  Cade smiled at Sarah. “It’s a long story, and I’d be happy to tell you when Lainey isn’t sitting here and able to report back to Hope.”

  Lainey burst out laughing. An older man and lady approached their table. They were a charming couple. He walked with a cane and, despite his age, he still had retained the good looks of his youth. The woman was slightly plump and very cute in her fuchsia dress and matching shoes.

  “I hope you’re having fun, dear,” the gentleman said, his voice slightly unclear but carefully articulated.

  “I am. This is so wonderful, Martin. All of you did way too much,” Lainey said.

  “Sarah, this is Martin, my father, and Mrs. Busby, a close family friend,” Tyler said, and they exchanged greetings.

  “So you’re the one Cade left us for,” Martin said with a wink.

  Sarah laughed. “Sorry about that.”

  They spent a few more minutes talking, and then Tyler and Lainey excused themselves to go mingle with the rest of the guests. An attractive young woman waved to Cade, and he stood. “I’m going to go catch up with an old friend. Are you okay on your own for a few minutes?” he asked.

  She looked up at his handsome face and searched those aqua eyes for something…some hint that there might be something between them. Her smile dipped along with her stomach because there wasn’t a flicker there. She picked up her wineglass and made a salute, forcing a smile again. “Of course I am. I’m going to check out that dessert buffet soon.”

  He gave her a wink. “Sounds good.”

  She watched him work through the crowd and ultimately end up with the woman, who threw her arms around him. He hugged her back, and the two of them spoke, looking completely at ease.

  She sipped her wine, leaning back in her chair, letting her gaze slowly wander the room. Laughter and chatter floated around her, hovered, but never came back to her table. There were young people and older people and everyone was alive, happy. Resentment sliced through her, its unfamiliar sting immobilizing her. She resented her parents for not only ruining their own lives but for ruining hers. Staring at Cade and the woman, she knew she wanted to be her. She wanted to be that woman who was so comfortable throwing her arms around him. She wanted to be able to walk through a crowd and chitchat and know people. All these people were her neighbors in some way, and she barely could recognize a familiar face.

  She toyed with the locket, willing some of that courage she had as a child to come out tonight. Taking over her family’s ranch was step one in her mission to reclaim her life. Step two would be getting a social life.

  Chapter Eight

  “Ready to go?” Cade asked, finding Sarah after an old friend had talked his ear off. He’d felt bad to leave her, but he’d been confident that she’d be okay in this crowd.

  “Yes,” she said, standing from the booth. After saying goodbye to Lainey and Tyler, they made their way outside. The sound of rolling thunder in the distance and the flash of lightning made Sarah jump.

  “Looks like we’re in for a storm,” she said, looking up at the sky.

  “We could probably use some rain.”

  “I like your friends,” Sarah said once they were settled in the truck and on the road again.

  “Thanks.” He glanced over at her before turning his eyes back to the road. There was something off with her. She’d been excited to come with him tonight, but something must have happened during the party. After his friends had left the table, she’d seemed to withdraw.

  It was a new crowd for her, but everyone had been welcoming, and she laughed and joked with his friends and fit in fine. It had bothered him to see her by herself. She’d plastered a smile on her face and sat at their empty table and hadn’t budged. “Lainey and Hope really liked you,” he said. Hell, he didn’t know how to tell someone to get out more, but she needed friends, women her age. It wasn’t right for someone so young to be living the way she was.

  “Really? How do you know?” She was staring at him expectantly, and he realized this actually meant a lot to her.

  He racked his brain, trying to think of something that wasn’t contrived. Truth was, Lainey and Hope were just nice people and so was Sarah. He didn’t actually know that they really liked her, but he wanted to put her at ease. “They’re not usually that chatty with just anyone.”

  She sat back in her seat with a smile on her face. “How did you guys all meet? Did you go to high school together?”

  He clenched his teeth for a moment, that wave of embarrassment that he always felt for not having finished high school the regular way coming into his mind. “I didn’t go to high school in Wishing River right away. By the time I came to town, I had dropped out. I decided to start working instead. I did end up going to high school with them for my last year.”

  He didn’t decide to start working full-time. He had to. There were no other options for him when he left his grandfather’s home. It was Martin who forced him back to school, to get his diploma.

  He caught the flicker of surprise or maybe pity that swam through her eyes, and a part of him wished her eyes weren’t so expressive. Pity was the last thing he wanted from Sarah. “Oh. I get not being in school. Sounds like we didn’t miss much?”

  He knew she was trying to be sweet and make him feel better, but instead it reminded him of how different they were, how different their backgrounds were. But it wasn’t her problem that he didn’t have parents around. He cleared his throat and kept his eyes on the road, turning the windshield wipers on as the rain started. “Did you like being homeschooled?”

  She shrugged. “I missed hanging around other kids, but I didn’t realize that until about a year later. I was in no condition to go to school…for a long time.”

  A jolt of sympathy for her twisted in his stomach. He knew she must be referring to when her brother died. He glanced over at her. “So you were out of school for a while?”

  She tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear. “Some stuff happened in our family, and I left school for a few months. I wasn’t ready to go back and I didn’t want to. My parents were fine with it, and then my mother thought of homeschooling. It seemed like the right thing at the time. It wasn’t until later that I realized just how lonely I was. Then there are times like tonight, when I see a group of people together, that I wish I’d had more of a social circle. Yours is great.”

  That hung there between them, and he wanted to know more, but he also knew that would be opening a can of worms. Because when people started sharing secrets, they got closer, and he and Sarah couldn’t ge
t closer. “I met Dean and Tyler here, and we became fast friends. Lainey and Hope were best friends, but they were younger than us, so we didn’t actually hang around together until Lainey and Tyler got together.”

  “Really? You seem to all know one another so well.”

  “It’s a small town, so even though we didn’t go to school together, we all knew of one another. Lainey, we knew because of the diner. Same with Hope—she was always at the diner visiting Lainey. She got married pretty young to a really good guy, they had a baby, and…he died a few years later.”

  She let out a small gasp. “That’s so sad. Oh, I feel so bad for her. She’s so young. That’s why she had to leave tonight? It’s just her and her little girl?”

  He kept his eyes on the road. He’d always liked Lainey’s friend Hope. He also liked how she spoke her mind and didn’t take crap from anyone. Maybe she’d learned the hard way about that, being on her own with so much responsibility at a young age. “It is sad. She’s a pretty strong person, and she managed to keep it all together. She’s running her business as a naturopath and raising her little girl, Sadie.”

  “Wow. That’s amazing. What about Dean? He’s a doctor, isn’t he?”

  He smiled slightly. “He is. He’s also a rancher. He comes from one of the wealthiest ranching families in Montana, and he’s also a doctor over at the hospital.”

  “He’s not married?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. He’s pretty driven, career-wise. I don’t even think he has the time for that.”

  “What about Tyler and Lainey?”

  He smiled again. “That’s a helluva story. Tyler left Wishing River nine years ago. Just picked up and took off. He was my best friend, and I was working at his ranch. His mother had died a few months earlier; they’d been really close. He and his dad had a big argument, and Ty couldn’t deal with it. When he took off, Dean and I were pretty pissed at him. Martin, his dad, had a stroke last year, and when Dean managed to track Ty down, he came home. We gave Tyler hell, of course. But it was Lainey who got through to him, managed to repair his relationship with his father, too. Along the way, they fell in love…and got married.”

  “This is amazing,” she whispered.

  He glanced over at her. “Really?”

  She threw her hands in the air. “All these lives, these friends. I mean, it’s, like, life. I’ve been missing out on life. First it was the cattle drive, and being out there? That’s what I always wanted, what my father did. Then tonight…your friends, their lives, the way they all care about one another, whatever it is that’s going on between Dean and Hope…”

  He turned to her sharply. “What? Who? Dean and Hope?”

  She nodded. “Obviously, but you know that already.”

  Huh. News to him. “Obviously. So what’s stopping you from going after what you want? You have more opportunity than most with that ranch. You’re young. There’s nothing stopping you from living, is there? I mean, you’re a grown woman. Your parents are gone…if they’re the ones who were holding you back. What’s stopping you from living the life you want?”

  She bit her lower lip. “Nothing. There’s nothing stopping me.”

  “Good.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, and he wondered what she was thinking and if she was going to say anything about her family or her parents or exactly why they’d tried to keep her in a cage. This wasn’t his business, so he wasn’t going to ask. He also wasn’t going to spend the night constantly looking at her, admiring how beautiful she was or how he liked the sound of her soft voice or the way she laughed or the way those green eyes seemed to catch and hold on to him.

  He was already thinking about her way too much. Last night, after he’d gone home and showered and was happy to be lying on clean sheets in his bed instead of outside, he hadn’t fallen asleep right away. Instead, he’d been thinking about Sarah. Replaying the cattle drive, the sheer will he’d witnessed in her. She was strong and capable and smart. She had been fearless. In fact, she’d appeared less afraid at the prospect of riding down that shitty, eroded section of the mountain than she did at Tilly’s tonight. She was complicated. She was his boss. And she was so much more. The much more was giving him grief.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said as the turnoff in the direction of the ranch came into focus.

  “What?”

  Her hand clutched his shoulder, and he was shocked because they didn’t usually touch. Or, as little as possible, anyway. The feel of her hand on him reminded him of why he shouldn’t put himself in positions where it was just the two of them. It would only fuel the attraction he felt for her, especially with these conversations that told him more and more about her. “Don’t take me home. I don’t want to go back,” she said, her voice whisper-thin, her eyes glued to the road.

  Cade gripped the steering wheel tightly, and she dropped her hand. Hell. He kept telling himself he couldn’t get involved with Sarah, but the more time he spent with her, the more he wanted to know her. “Why don’t you want to go back home?”

  “I’ve never been anywhere or done anything in the last fifteen years. I haven’t lived. All those people at that party had real lives. I’m the same age, and I felt like an outsider tonight. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. I was more comfortable on the sidelines. I… Don’t drive me home. Take me anywhere but there. Please, Cade.”

  He clenched his teeth and knew he couldn’t take her home. It couldn’t be him to take her back there. Things he’d suspected about her, all those pieces were coming together. Her desperation clung to her words like fresh dew on the grass at dawn. “Okay. So where are we going?”

  She turned to him and gave him a smile as though she’d just won the lottery. Her green eyes sparkled, and damn if her happiness didn’t punch him in the gut. “Anywhere! The city! Billings. Where do people my age go? Where did you go when you were my age?”

  His brows snapped together. “Oh, well, back in my day, we rode our horses to the saloon and made sure we were home before dark, since there was no electricity.”

  She burst out laughing, and he found himself smiling despite the fact that she thought he was from a different era. “I didn’t mean it like that. So where should we go?”

  “All right, let’s head into the city.”

  “Road trip!”

  He had no idea who the woman beside him was. Layer by layer, she was coming alive. The night she’d taken out that horse, it was as though something had snapped, shifted, and now she was trying to become someone new. Or maybe she was just trying to be the person she always wanted to be. “When are you planning on going back?”

  “Well, you have the weekend off. It’s only Friday. So how about tomorrow? That way you still have Sunday to relax and do whatever.”

  He ran a hand over his jaw. “I’m not sure that’s going to look great,” he said, trying to choose his words carefully.

  “Who cares? I don’t. I don’t care what anyone thinks of me anymore. I have spent my entire life living by rules made up by well-meaning but horribly flawed people. They are gone now. I’m the only living person in my family. Do you care what people think of you?”

  He cleared his throat. “Not particularly, no. But I wasn’t thinking of me. I was thinking of you and the guys at the ranch.” He was also thinking Edna was going to hang him on her wash line if he stayed away overnight with Sarah.

  “No one is paying attention to what I’m doing, and everyone knows you aren’t working. They’ll assume you went away. I’ll text Edna and tell her that I’m going away for the weekend with a friend and that I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Sweetheart, you have no friends.” Dammit, he hadn’t meant to use that endearment. That was reserved for…well, it wasn’t something you said to a woman you were trying to keep your distance from, certainly not one you worked for. Then again, going on a road trip with that pe
rson wasn’t exactly his smartest move, either.

  “That’s just rude. You’re my friend…right?”

  He smiled, despite the fact that he shouldn’t be smiling. He should be frowning, wondering how the hell he had gotten himself into this situation. He was now Sarah’s only friend. There were so many things wrong with that. “Yeah, I suppose I am.”

  His life had been fairly simple over at Donnelly Ranch. He’d worked for Martin, and then when Tyler had come home last year, sure, things became a little more complicated, but then they returned to normal again. He, Dean, and Tyler managed to mend broken fences and had picked up on their long-standing friendship quite easily. He didn’t have any real or significant relationships with women. He liked women, loved women, and generally they reciprocated that feeling. But he was always very clear—Cade Walker was not a forever-after man. There had only been one woman who had ever made him come close to rethinking that policy, but even then, it was one-sided, and it had ended before it started.

  But as he drove down the empty highway, with this woman beside him, he decided that complicating his life might be good sometimes. “All right, friend, so you’re going to stay in a hotel room with me?”

  Even in the dark cab of the truck, he could see the red flood her face. “Well that’s what friends do. It wouldn’t be a weekend away with a friend if we had separate hotel rooms.”

  It was going to be hell on earth. “Right.”

  “Oh, unless you don’t want to share a hotel room with me. No, right. Of course. I mean, we’re friends, like casual friends, not room-sharing friends. That would be uncomfortable. Awkward. Right?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. Hell yes, “awkward” might be one word that came to mind. “Okay, we’re friends, we’ve established that. Do you share rooms with guy friends?”

  “I don’t have any except you, remember? Do you share rooms with girl friends?”

  He cleared his throat. “On occasion. But I don’t really have women friends.”