I cried and nodded, ate a cookie piece and cried some more. Thatcher was… God, he was perfect. Nice. Charming. Protective. Definitely possessive, especially of my boobs. He dealt with my family like a champ. Fucked me like I was a princess and a slut, and I’d loved every minute of being with him. And then I pushed him away because I felt too much. Instead of running into his arms as he’d offered, I’d done the opposite. Now I was eating broken cookies and crying over a broken heart.

“I… I left him in Cutthroat.”

“He’s a big boy,” Aunt Jean said. “He can get himself home. Did he do something?”

I shook my head. “No. I did. I fell in love with him.”

THATCHER

“Let me get this straight. You went with Astrid Turnbuckle to her sister’s wedding as a fake boyfriend.”

I nodded at Alice, who was sitting at the foot of the huge kitchen table. She’d sent Claire down to my barn house to retrieve me for dinner. I might be thirty years old but I knew it was something I couldn’t refuse, no matter how I felt.

Huck and Claire sat facing me, Sarah on my right. Sawyer was working at the firehouse and Kelsey was in town. Alice had made one of my favorites, chicken and dumplings. I hardly tasted it.

When she gave the one sentence recap of the weekend, I swallowed hard, my latest bite stuck in my throat.

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. She gave me the stare that in the past meant I was in trouble. “It was what she wanted. That was why she bought me at the auction.”

“Then you love each other!” Claire cried out, waving her hands around. “That’s what happens when you get bought.”

Alice covered her mouth with a napkin, clearly trying to hide her smile. Huck slid his hand down Claire’s head, who happily forked a piece of strawberry and shoved it in her mouth.

I wasn’t so sure about that. Astrid had left me in Cutthroat. I knew where I stood with her. She’d made it very clear how she felt, and it wasn’t love.

All she felt for me was fake, fake, fake.

“No woman wants a man to pretend. That’s what gets him in trouble in the first place.” Alice added a humph to that and stabbed her fork into a cucumber slice.

“Take Sawyer for example and what happened at the preschool with Kelsey,” Huck said.

“What happened to Seesaw?” Claire turned her head and looked up at her father.

“Miss Kelsey thought Seesaw was pretending to be something he wasn’t and she got mad. Real mad,” he added.

Meaning she’d kneed him in the balls.