Page 80 of Swift and Saddled

When I looked in the mirror, it reminded me of the other night at Baby Blue. First I thought about Wes kneeling in front of me, watching the muscles in his back flex as he devoured me.Look up, sweetheart. Take in the view.Then I thought about how we looked together in the mirror and how he felt inside me.I want your eyes on me.

I watched a blush creep up my cheeks in real time. Jesus Christ, I felt like Wes.

Okay, Ada. Get your game face on.I jumped up and down a few times and shook out my shoulders. It didn’t help.

Everything felt weird today, like I was on the edge of something. It was the same feeling I’d had when I walked into Baby Blue for the first time three months ago.

It was also the same feeling I’d had when I saw Wes for the first time in the bar. I just didn’t recognize it then.

There wasn’t a huge difference in my appearance since I came to Wyoming. My hair was a little longer, and a few freckles had popped up from spending time in the sun.

Even though there wasn’t really anything tangible that had changed about my appearance, I looked lighter—happier.

I’d spent the past three months doing a job that I loved, and right now I was trying to tell myself that that was theonly reason. Because I could do the work that I loved anywhere, so if I believed that that was the only reason I looked—and felt—happier, then it would be a lot easier to leave for the job in Tucson.

Fucking hell.Why was I having so many feelings? This annoying internal monologue while looking at myself in the bathroom mirror had to stop.

I left the bathroom before I could have another deep thinking session.

The room I walked into wasn’t the one I’d been spending every night in. Honestly, I didn’t remember the last time I’d slept in here.

The thought of sleeping in a bed without Wes made me sad. He was always so warm, and he never got mad when I put my frozen feet on him.

Nope. Don’t go there. No more deep thinking.

I slid on a pair of jeans and a plain black short-sleeved shirt. One thing was for sure about Wyoming, I’d never experienced so many seasons within such a short period of time—sometimes they hit all four seasons in a day. The decent amount of snow that remained when I got here was long gone, and everywhere I looked it was lush and green.

It made me want to know what it all looked like in the fall.

If everything worked out, I’d be in Arizona, working on a delightful little bed-and-breakfast. My shoulders noticeably drooped, which is the opposite of what they should have been doing. Since when was I not excited about a delightful old bed-and-breakfast?

Since Weston Rhodes Ryder. That’s when.

He’d said a lot of things that had made it abundantly clearhow he felt about me, but when I thought about them now, my heart started to kick.

Not in the good way.

Everything he’d said—distance not being important, that he’d wait for me, that I was the moon—was hitting me all at once, and my head started to spin.

The timing could not be more inconvenient.

My brain was starting to take his words and warp them into something they weren’t, into something I’d heard before. From someone else.

Someone who’d made me mistake control for care and dependency for love. All of a sudden, all of these false parallels were knocking around in my head like a pinball machine. The truth was in there too, but everything was going so fast that I didn’t know which was which.

Did I get out of a situation where I was completely and solely dependent on one man just to get into the same situation less than two years later? Did I leave the place that felt like a cage just to get locked in a new one?

I sank to the floor and pulled my knees to my chest.

When I looked up, I saw my car keys on the nightstand. The keys to the car that still didn’t work.

Wes had told me he was going to fix it, but he still hadn’t done it. I knew it was because he’d been busy, and when he asked me if I wanted him to fix it, I told him not to make it a priority. But when I thought about a car that I couldn’t drive, all I thought about was the life I’d had before Rebel Blue, and the life I’d had before the family that came with it.

Wes was good. He was gentle. So why the hell was I freaking out?

Because once I got the urge to run, I couldn’t stop it. Wes could, but he wasn’t here right now. Before I knew what I was doing, I stood up and grabbed my small duffel off the back of the bathroom door.

I was calm as I walked down the hall and opened the garage door. My mask was on, and I knew from experience that it wasn’t going to slip.

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