And just like that, Suzanne was forgetting about the hundred and one ways Grady might kill her and thinking about the hundred and one ways he might kill himself out on that ranch without anybody knowing or maybe even caring for days. It was way out of town, and who did he really have looking out for him?

How often did Burl check in?

When would his ranch hands start to worry?

Up until a few days ago, Grady had been an infuriating enigma—a big, tough, taciturn rancher dude whom Suzanne would have said didn’t need anybody. But she’d been slowly getting to know him since her parents had arrived, and after his big reveal last night, she thought she was actually starting to understand him. God knew she’d lain awake long enough thinking about the trauma he’d been through and how it explained a lot about why he hadn’t wanted her here—particularly not this time of year.

It also explained a lot about why he was hiding away from everyone. Isolating himself from people because it was too hard to be constantly reminded of what he’d lost and that going through the motions of life, working hard every day, was much more preferable to having to deal with his losses.

Maybe he even told himself he liked it or that it was enough. That the life he had was enough.

But god…what a sad indictment. What was life without…joy? Without people to share it with? Would his parents have wanted him to shut everyone out? And surely there’d been a woman somewhere, sometime in the intervening years? There had to have been. He was too damn sexy for there to have been no one.

He’d been in the military, for god’s sake. In a uniform. There must have been a woman. Probably even women.

Or was cutting himself off from those possibilities just another way he walled himself off from any more hurts? From the everyday human things that took little chinks out of your heart that never quite healed?

She didn’t know why thinking about him all alone out here was like a hot fist in her gut, but it was, and she already knew that when she left here, when she went back to New York and left him behind, Joshua Grady was going to weigh on her mind.

If he didn’t kill her first.

“That’s a great idea; I’d love to. Sounds good, don’t you think, Suzanne?”

Suzanne blinked and came back to the conversation as a bunch of eyeballs looked to her for approval. “Um…I’m sorry, I was miles away. What?”

She avoided Della’s gaze that was saying, Hell yeah you were, precisely twenty-six miles out on the ranch with Joshua Grady.