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“That’s a pretty wide range. Want to elaborate?”
“My sisters-in-law and Hazel staged an intervention.”
“I don’t understand. You don’t have a drug or alcohol problem.”
“It was an intervention to show me how stupid I was being about the two of us. Not that they said that exactly but that’s what it came down to.”
“I’m having a hard time imagining that. Did it work?”
She shrugged. “Kind of.”
“What happened after the intervention?”
“I went riding. Cinnamon threw me and that’s when I sprained my ankle. But never mind that. I came here to ask you if we could try again. I’ve missed you like crazy, Nate.”
He wanted to say hell yes, and grab her and kiss her, but he also wanted to know what brought about this change. Why had she suddenly decided that his ‘lie’ didn’t matter? Had the ‘intervention’ somehow changed her mind?
“What about the lie?”
“Here’s the thing. I lied to you too.”
“How do you mean?”
“When we met and started going out and then I told you we couldn’t be more than friends,” she said.
“Yeah. You said we weren’t suited for each other but you still wanted to be friends.”
“Did you believe me?”
“You were pretty adamant about it.”
“You were surprised, though.”
“Yes. Especially since we almost made love the night before you told me. Gotta tell you, my ego took a severe dive,” he said.
“That night we almost had sex. That’s all it would have been. But I put the brakes on. You’d have moved on almost immediately if we’d had sex.”
He didn’t deny it. Maybe he would have. But maybe not. “We’ll never know because you wouldn’t give us a chance.”
“You terrified me.”
*
“You, terrified?” He laughed long and hard. “Fat chance. I’ve never seen you be afraid of anything.”
If he only knew. “It’s true. You were nice and funny and charming and hot—”
“Hold on. You thought I was hot?”
She narrowed her eyes and gave him a dirty look. “Of course. I knew I could fall for you. And if I had it would have been almost as bad as what happened with Warner. You were a player then, Nate. You know you were.”
He scowled. “Yeah, I was a player but I damn sure wasn’t a bigamist with God knows how many girlfriends.”
“I never thought you were. It wasn’t so much that I had no faith in you. I lost faith in myself. In my ability to make the right decision. Especially about love. I’d made such a huge mistake, I couldn’t bear to do it again.”
“I’ll admit that after you made it clear that you were off-limits other than as a friend, I slept with a lot of women, trying to forget you. There were even a few I might have fallen for. If I hadn’t been in love with you. But I was, so it didn’t work. Eventually, I quit. Sleeping with them anyway. Besides that, I could never be as bad as that bastard who hurt you.”
“I know.”
