Page 25 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

But she flinched all the same. “I made vows, Boone.”

“So did he,” Boone shot back. “But that didn’t seem to get in his way.”

That was maybe too hard, he acknowledged. He should have kept that inside.

Sierra blew out a breath. “I know that he was never faithful to me,” she said in a low, hurt sort of voice that he’d never heard before. Not directed to him, anyway. “What kind of idiot do you think I am?”

“What do you mean, you know?” Something in the vicinity of his chest seemed to run head on into a wall. Or maybe the wall just collapsed on top of him. “You do? You…always have?”

He knew she wasn’t an idiot. He knew that better that anyone But he had wondered if she was blind.

“Of course I knew,” Sierra said in a rush.

She turned in her seat so that she was facing him, but Boone had to keep his eyes on this road or they would fly right off the side of this mountain to their deaths. And he really couldn’t tell if that seemed like a good solution to this moment or if he needed to slow down even more and be even more careful, because he was finally having one of the many conversations he’d been wanting to have with her forever.

Painful though it might be.

“I knew in high school,” she told him, and she sounded like she was finding this as painful as he was. “There were all those rumors and people were talking about me and him andher.” Her voice sounded shaky, but only a little shaky. “When I asked him directly he responded the way he always did. No conversation, no explanation, nothing. He immediately told me to break up with him if I didn’t trust him and if I did, he said we’d never speak again.”

“You should have.”

“Thank you, that’s very helpful. I didn’t, as you know.”

“I do know that,” Boone said, and there was a new kind of simmering thing in him. Not as simple as fury. It was sharper. Edgier.

He wasn’t entirely sure he was going to be able to keep it inside.

“He could have had anyone and he chose me,” Sierra said, she sounded… Not sad, exactly. More like she couldn’t access the version of herself who had truly believed that.

But Boone had been there. He knew that girl. He knew that as enraging as he found that sentiment, back then and now, she’d believed it. She had more than believed it.

“He was a punk when he was sixteen, Sierra. Even more of a punk than he is now, and that’s saying something. You should have laughed in his face.”

“He was so popular,” Sierra said softly. Not wistfully, he was happy to hear, but it was something close to that. Like a sad sort of nostalgia. “His father was so rich, and everyone knew it, and they were always going off to Sun Valley to ski or to Cabo in the winter and it was like another life from the one everyone else was living out here in rural Montana. He seemed like some kind of celebrity.”

Boone shook his head. “He really didn’t.”

“Half the girls in our class were in love with him for absolutely no reason but that.” Sierra shifted in her seat. “I like to think that I was a little deeper, but you know. My parents loved him. Adored him. They still do. They would have married me off to him at sixteen if it had been up to them. So no, I didn’t break up with him when I heard those rumors as a sophomore in high school who couldn’t believe that the boy everyone liked actually likedme.”

She took another breath, and this one sounded deeper. Harder. “Instead, I told him that it was impossible to trust him when there were so many rumors swirling around about him. That it would be a lot easier if I never heard any.”

It took Boone a minute. It was the way she said that. It was the brittleness in her voice. And something else that sounded a lot like shame.

Then he got it. “Oh Sierra,” he breathed. “You didn’t.”

“Did I know that day, standing at our lockers in Marietta High School, that he would take that as me giving him permission to do whatever he wanted as long as I didn’t hear about it? No. I didn’t know that.” She sounded… not beaten down. But like this was a thought she’d returned to again and again, and had lived with for far too long. “Still, as the years went by, he made me doubt that. Sometimes I actually thought I’d fully understood what I was agreeing to back then. That it had been my idea from the beginning. Because I was smart enough at sixteen to understand that boys will be boys. What did it matter what he did if he always came home to me? That’s what everybody thinks, isn’t it? This is how the world works.”

“Like hell it does,” Boone gritted out.

He took another glance at her, then. She was staring down at her lap, where she was clenching her fingers a little too tightly. And he was pretty sure he could see moisture in the corner of her eye.

Boone hoped that Matty was there when they got to the house. He more than hoped it. He began to actively pray for that outcome.

“It was such a slippery thing,” Sierra was saying softly. “I couldn’t even tell you why how it happened the way it did. It was like it just got more confusing as time went on. Things began to seem inevitable. Like there weren’t any choices. There was only that. Him.”

That made Boone want to break things.

“One time,” Sierra continued, “I decided I should hire a private investigator to tail him around so I could see the reality of it, for once. So there could be no more hiding. This was a few years ago. I sat outside Honor’s Edge Investigations for a whole morning, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually go in. I decided that probably meant that I really had wanted things to be the way they were all along. That Matty was right. That it had all been my idea from the start.”

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