Page 94 of Wild and Wrangled

Chloe smiled warmly. “I love seeing you two together still,” she said. “I always knew you’d make it. How long have you been married? Like five years now?”

My eyes widened. “Sorry?” I choked out.

“Oh.” Chloe motioned between the two of us. “Sorry, I just assumed that you guys were married when Dusty bought the house.”

“Bought the…house?”

I looked over at Dusty, who was looking at his boots.

“Oh, sorry, one sec.” Chloe pulled out her phone. “It’s my mom. I’ve gotta go. I’ll be in town until Monday—maybe we can get coffee or something!”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling slightly dazed. My voice felt far away. “Sure.” Chloe gave both Dusty and me another quick hug and walked away, unknowingly leaving chaos in her wake.

I turned to Dusty slowly. “You…own my house?” There was hurt in my voice.

“Ash…” Dusty was looking at me like I’d just kicked him in the stomach. “I was going to tell you.”

“When?” I asked. “When you made me fall in love with you again? What if I didn’t? Were you going to kick me out?”

“Can I explain, please?” Dusty said. “Let’s get your groceries, and we can talk about it at home.”

“Whose home?” I asked. “Because apparently you own mine.”

“It’s not like that. It’s never been like that.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know that, would I?” I spat. “Because you never told me.”

“Please,” he begged. “I don’t want to do this here.”

“Fine,” I said and then pushed my cart to the front of the store to check out. I walked ahead of him and didn’t look at him—not while we were checking out, not while we walked to the car or when he opened my door for me, and not for the entire drive back to my—sorry, his—house.

The silence was tense and heavy, until finally he spoke. “I bought the house five years ago.” He sighed.

I folded my arms across my chest. “I got that part.”

“Anne’s kids wanted her to put it on the market because she couldn’t take care of it. They had a buyer lined up who wanted to try and get the permits to tear the house down and develop on it—condos or some shit—and when my mom told me, I knew I didn’t want that to happen.”

“Why?”

“Because it was your dream house,” he said. “Because every time I came home and I passed the turn that took me up the drive or when I parked here for a hike, I thought about you, and I didn’t want to lose that. But also because I’ve watched places like this disappear around the world, and I didn’t want that to happen to this house.

“So I called Anne, and told her I would buy it—that I would pay for someone to come and do the maintenance that she couldn’t do anymore and that she could live here as long as she wanted.”

“And she said yes?” I asked.

“And she said yes. She didn’t really want to sell, but her kids and grandkids had moved all over the country, and they couldn’t help her, so selling was the compromise. Me buying the house worked for her, and it worked for me. When I decided to come home, I knew I’d have the cabin to go to, and I would get a chance to do a lot of the maintenance myself.”

“Why did you rent it to me when Anne moved into the assisted living facility, instead of moving into it yourself?”

“I couldn’t imagine living in it without you,” he said softly, rubbing his neck—rubbing the “A.” “I don’t know, Cam. I justwanted you to have it, I guess. I wanted you to have something that was your own.”

“But this isn’t mine.” I gestured around the house. “I just went from being trapped in one situation with a man to another.”

“That’s not…” Dusty’s nostrils flared. “That’s not fair, Cam. I wasn’t trying to trick you or trap you, I was trying to help without being weird and invasive. I didn’t know we were going to rekindle things. I mean, I hoped that we could maybe try, but that wasn’t the point of me renting you the house.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“Of course I was.” He ran a hand through his loose blond hair. “I just didn’t know when or how. I was going to do it earlier, but then we started picking things up, and I just wanted us to be stable—whether that was as friends or more.”

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