He laughed. “I don’t need a safe space.”

“Everybody needs a safe space,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I talked to my mom.”

“And?” He turned to face her, his broad, naked back toward the mountains, his...everything facing her. There was something incongruous about the picture.

Gabe naked in the open air like that, as if he had nothing to hide, when she could feel the walls going up between them.

“I understand if it hurt you...” she began.

“My dad didn’t know about the kids. She did. She hid it from him. She used me. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

She frowned. “No. I mean, I guess. But there’s nothing satisfying about that. Gabe, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be,” he said. “I mean, it is what it is.”

“What are you going to do?”

“There’s only one thing to do. I’m going to write some letters. I’m going to see who I can find.”

“Well, that’s...good. That’s a good thing to do.”

He made a grunting sound.

“I’ll help you,” she continued.

He shook his head. “You don’t need to help me.”

“Why not? I’m helping you with the ranch. I’m helping you get everything set up to bring those boys on. Why can’t I be involved in this, too?”

“McKenna, Jacob, Caleb and I are handling it.”

She was so frustrated she wanted to scream. She wanted to take care of him. She didn’t want to do that strong, silent Dodge thing and ignore the pain. Cover it up, and pretend that it was being self-sufficient. Pretend that that was the way a family should take care of each other.

“Secrets and dividing lines are the ways messes like this start,” she said.

He frowned. All those lines that had seemed lighter in sleep seemed more pronounced now. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s all about keeping things from each other. And not being able to talk about feelings.”

“You just started talking about feelings two weeks ago, and now you’re lecturing me about mine?”

She shook her head. “Every problem I’ve seen in my family has come down to secrets. Sure, there were things we couldn’t control. Things like my mother’s death. But everything else... The reason that Wyatt left, the reason that Bennett didn’t have his son... Secrets. But you have to break the cycle somehow.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” he said.

“While also building walls between you and me.”

“You’re not my family.”

The words hurt. So damn bad, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why, when they were true; she wasn’t his family. She was just...the woman he was sleeping with. And maybe for him that really didn’t mean anything. Even now. It had been tempting for her to make it into something, because it felt like a hell of a lot to her. But he’d never promised anything more than this, and she was the one who had changed. She was the one whose feelings had changed.