They walked beside each other in silence to his truck.

“What did you do with your beer?”

“I just left it on a table. I didn’t really want it anyway. I just wanted to irritate you.”

“Yeah, I knew that,” he said.

“Then why did you let me do it?”

“Hell if I know, Sammy. Sometimes it’s easier than others to ignore your shenanigans.”

“Shenanigans? You know, that’s the problem, Ryder. That’s what you think this is. You think I’m full of shenanigans. And you think that I’m selfish. And you think that I’m immature. And for one moment you don’t think that maybe I... Maybe I’m responding to the same kind of thing you are when you say that you don’t want to get married. When you talk about how you’re just done with the life that you lived before. With the pain. With the past. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. Maybe I’m just done. I’m done being the person that my dad beat me into being. I have been done with that. But a lot of my life since then has been built on the reaction to that. And I’m tired of that, too. I just want to find my own way, my own life. I don’t think that’s terribly difficult to understand. And I don’t think that you have the right to look at me and decide that what I want, and what I feel, and what I need are shenanigans. That the things that I really want are things that you have to save me from.”

She got into his truck and slammed the door behind her. “It hurts me,” she said quietly as he started the truck and pulled away from the curb.

He didn’t say anything for a long while. They got on the two-lane road that headed outside of town, away from Main Street, away from the bar.

Farther and farther away from the scene of all that had happened tonight and closer to the familiarity of Hope Springs Ranch. Where maybe sanity would prevail. But she didn’t know if she even wanted that. Because she just felt so raw and scrubbed the wrong way.

She didn’t know if she wanted to keep fighting, or if she wanted to wrap herself in the blanket of home and pretend that none of it had happened.

“Well, the thing is, Sammy,” he said, his voice quiet, firm and steady. “You seem to think that the only reason I might have accepted was because I’m protecting you.”

“Well, because you’ve made it very clear that you don’t want to have kids.”

“Maybe I don’t like the idea of you having them with someone else. Maybe I do feel like that kid should be mine.”

She had no idea what to say to that. She had no idea what he meant. And she still didn’t think she was wrong, because all of it was that same old possessiveness stuff. Ryder was hers, and she had felt like that for a long time. But she knew pretty firmly that Ryder also felt like she belonged to him. And she had a feeling it was more about that than it was anything else.