Page 84 of Swift and Saddled

I’d made it farther out of town than I thought. It took nearly thirty minutes of mountains and the sun setting behind them for me to see theWelcome to Meadowlarksign in the distance.

As I approached, I noticed a familiar truck right in front of the sign.

It couldn’t be.

But it was. A cowboy was sitting on the hood of the truck, and a ball of white fluff was sitting on the ground next to him.

I’d know that cowboy, and his dog, anywhere.

For the second time today, I pulled the truck onto the shoulder. As I brought it to a stop, I could feel Wes’s eyes on me.

I took a deep breath before I raised mine to meet them. I was worried he would look angry or sad. He didn’t.

He was smiling. Dimples on full display.

I got out of my truck at the same time he slid off the hood of his, and Waylon ran toward me. When he got to me, I reached down to scratch his big, fluffy head.

“He has a thing for beautiful women,” Wes said, still smiling.

I remembered he’d said that the night we met, so I responded the same way I did then: “Has that line ever worked for you?”

“You came back, didn’t you?”

We didn’t run to each other. We didn’t collide in some extraordinary cosmic moment. We took slow, ordinary steps toward each other, and we met in the middle.

“Hi,” I breathed.

“Hi.” He was still smiling.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. There was no way he could have known I would come back.

“I was waiting for you.” But somehow I guess he did.

I didn’t know what to say, so I figured I’d start with an apology. “I’m sorry I ran away.” Wes nodded but didn’t respond right away.

His smile faded a little. He looked like he was thinking—a small line formed between his brows. “Ada”—his voice was hesitant—“I’m sorry if I made you think that I was the typeof guy who would be okay with you not doing something you wanted.”

Now I was the one who probably looked confused.

“I want you to go to Arizona. I want you to take that job if that’s what you want,” he said.

I did want that. I felt like I’d learned so much at Rebel Blue, and I wanted to try to do the same thing somewhere else. I wanted to bring things back to life and create spaces where people felt like they could belong.

But there was something else I wanted more.

“I want you,” I said. “I want to be with you.”

Wes studied me like he didn’t understand. After a few beats, he said, “You can have both. You don’t have to choose between me and the job. You don’t have to give something up to get another thing in return.”

I blinked slowly.

“You can go to Arizona. You can go anywhere you want,” he said. “And I’ll come to you when I can. And then, when your project is over, you can come home—like everyone else does when they’re done with work.”

“We can’t do that forever,” I said, letting him know that I wanted to be with him that long.

“I know.” He nodded. He lifted his hand to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear. “Something will have to give eventually, but it doesn’t have to give right now, so there’s no need to force it to.”

I threw my arms around him. He held me there, a hand cupping the back of my head. “Do you mean that?” I said into his shoulder.

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