Total pages in book: 166
Estimated words: 160042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 800(@200wpm)___ 640(@250wpm)___ 533(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 160042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 800(@200wpm)___ 640(@250wpm)___ 533(@300wpm)
“Okay,” Peyton agrees, albeit reluctantly.
“I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you too,” she says, bumping our shoulders. “Sister.”
I chuckle. Out of all the misery and trauma of the last few weeks, finding out Peyton’s my half sister has to be one of the highlights. We already knew we had a connection, but finding out how true it was makes me think everything is going to be okay.
So that’s how I leave Rawhide with a smile on my face: because I have a sister. But I also have a broken heart in my chest because the man I love doesn’t love me back. He isn’t even there for the send-off. Only Haven and Marsden. I give Haven a tight hug and we decide to keep in touch. And even though Marsden isn’t all that approachable, I still end up giving him a hug and thanking him for giving me a place on his ranch. Axton is driving me back, so I guess our goodbye will happen when I reach the city.
In any case, I’m moving on and I’m going to live my life.
I’m crying.
No, I’m sobbing. I’m curled into a ball in my bed in the apartment in Bozeman and making a mess of my pillows. Which is fine; I don’t care about my pillows or my sheets. They’re the same ones from when I left weeks ago, so they are dirty. I don’t have the strength to change them when my chest feels hollow. What I do care about is ruining the letters.
The ones he wrote from prison.
I’ve been reading them for hours now and crying. His letters didn’t start my tears, though. It was Axton. It was what he said at the end, just before he left: “For what it’s worth, I wanted you to be my sister-in-law too. I’d hug you but Arsen will tan my hide so—”
I already knew what he was going to say, so I just ignored it and hugged him anyway. I don’t know when it happened, but he kind of grew on me these past weeks and that was a really sweet thing to say. Sweet and heartbreaking. As soon as I shut the door behind him, my tears started falling and I ran straight to my room. I went to my desk, opened the drawer where I keep his letters, and started reading them frantically.
Which only made things worse because now that I know the real him, every word he wrote as Bo screamed of the man I love. I could hear his voice while reading, all drawling and low. I could picture his expressions—whenever he lets them out—when he called me college girl for the first time. Or hinted about keeping the inmates away. His possessive voice when he told me to stay away from that professor or his angry one when I told him about my parents. I pictured him telling me about how he’d touch me if we ever met in real life, his eyes dark and his cheekbones flushed. How he thinks my body would be so soft and warm and how he’d want to leave his marks on me.
Then, to torture myself, I went on to read the little notes he’d written to me when we were at the ranch. No matter what, there was no way I was going to leave them back there. Even though I’ve read them all countless times and remember every word, I read them again. They’d range from his favorite color to any random thought he had during the day. A little tidbit about his childhood to what he wanted to do to me when he saw me later.
And hours later, here I am, sobbing and wheezing, hurting from all this pain in my chest, wondering where he is, what he’s doing. Is he able to sleep? Where has he been this past week? How is it that we lived on the same ranch, and not once did we run into each other? It has to be deliberate, right, on his part. Because it wasn’t as if I was trying to stay away from him.
When I’m tired and sick of myself for being a pathetic loser who can’t get it through her head that it’s over so I should stop wondering about such things, I force myself to get off the bed to go wash my face or something to shake it off. But I never make it past three steps to my destination because my eye catches a flash of something—a dark brown Stetson—through my bedroom window, and I freeze.
A dark figure stands right across the street, under a tree, a rocky mountain maple, looking up at my window.
For a few seconds, all I can do is stare. At the tree. At the figure—so familiar looking, so achingly familiar that I can’t breathe. All I can think about is how I used to watch that tree every time I sat at the desk to write him a letter, and over the course of the last six months, it became my favorite. But I never in a thousand years imagined that he’d stand there in the flesh one day, and before I can give it much thought, I’m angrily wiping my tears away and running out of the bedroom.