Page 59 of The Last Dance You Saved
Or maybe she’d felt guilty but didn’t know how to return them, and so she just shoved them in the trunk and hoped to forget all about it.
A deep voice on the other end of the line told me Ryder had found Gia. She covered the phone and said something that was lost in a silence I could imagine was Ryder kissing her. It was almost disgusting the way he couldn’t keep his hands off her—disgusting in the sweetest sort of way. How had I not realized how much I wanted what they had for myself? A partner. A lover. Someone who knew all your secrets, and saw all your scars, and loved you anyway.
Rafe hadn’t been turned off by my wounds. He’d been growly and protective over them instead. Those possibilities I’d seen shimmering around us last night reappeared, taunting me with hopes I couldn’t imagine coming true. I didn’t know how to take the glimmering mirage and turn it into the real love my siblings had with their spouses.
Instead of Gia coming back on the line, it was Ryder. “Sassypants, I’m sorry to end this call, but Gia and I have stuff to take care of.”
“My God, Ryder, I’m all for having a good sex life, but do you ever leave the poor woman alone? She’s already knocked up. Maybe you can let her have a chance to breathe.”
He laughed, low and soft, and I could imagine that big smile of his easing over his face. It relaxed me just a hair. Even though there were thirteen years between us, I was actually closer to Ryder than either Gemma or Maddox. I’d always felt like I could give him all my truths, and he’d accept them without judgment.
“I wasn’t talking about sex,” Ryder said, the grin evident in his voice. “Gia has a doctor’s appointment we need to get to. She seemed worried when I walked in. Everything okay out there with you? Nobody on the Harrington ranch is giving you a hard time, are they?”
“I’m fine.” I swallowed over the lump in my throat.
He hesitated, as if he knew I wasn’t being completely honest, but let it drop. “I’ve been thinking about this wedding business. A lot of folks around here hold theirs at the country club. Martin and Wendall have always been self-important pricks, who thought they were too good for Willow Creek after they built that damn golf course. I wouldn’t feel so bad about stealing business from them.”
I bristled. “I’m not talking about stealing business from anyone. This is about drawing clients to the area who wouldn’t have come otherwise.”
A clink of glass had me whirling around to find Adam had slipped into the office behind me and was fixing himself a drink at the alcohol cabinet. A chill traveled up my spine, not only at the stealth at which he’d entered the room but the look that was on his face. It was weirdly triumphant, as if I’d handed him a prize. I thought back over the call and couldn’t figure out what he’d heard that would have made him feel that way.
“I gotta go,” I said quickly.
“Fine. We can talk about it more when you get back,” Ryder said.
“Sounds good. Give everyone my love.”
“Will do.”
After I hung up, I placed my phone in my pocket and crossed my arms over my chest. Adam held up the rocks glass. “Want one?”
I shook my head. “No. We have a lot of work still to do.”
He raised a brow, a smirk on his face that felt off again. “Trying to pay penance for your ancestor’s sins, Sadie? You’d have to work a hundred years to pay back the jewels.”
“I’m not working anything off,” I tossed back. I wasn’t, was I? “I just don’t like seeing people drowning and not offering them a hand.”
His smirk disappeared into a glower. “Don’t preach to me. You know nothing about these people, how things work, or just how much skin and bone my family has given to this ranch. All the things that werestolenfrom us.” He let the word stolen drift between us for a beat and then added on, “I’m not offering up anything more than is required.”
“So you let the full load land on your sister’s shoulders when she clearly isn’t in a mental place to handle it.”
“She made her choice.” He said it darkly, staring into the alcohol in his glass. When he looked up, his expression brought goosebumps back to my skin. It was menacing. Ominous. “We were supposed to leave the ranch together. After our dad and grandfather were killed in a wreck while hauling Harrington cattle through the mountains, we promised each other we’d get out as soon as we could. We were going to finally break the cycle that tied our family to the Harringtons, that had left us crawling for leftovers for a century. Then she got pregnant. Fell inlove.” He said it scathingly. “And I was left to break the cycle on my own.”
Holy hell. He'd lost his dad and his grandfather while they’d been working for Rafe’s family? Another shiver ran up my spine.
Rafe had said their family situation was complicated, and I’d thought he’d meant the love triangle between him and Spencer and Lauren, but this was so much more tangled and twisted.
My pulse raced as I watched him try to tuck away his anger and disgust behind the affable charm that had first greeted me. Did he hate the Harringtons enough to put a snake in Rafe’s bed? To smother the sister he felt had abandoned him?
Could he have murdered Spencer?
My palms turned sweaty, and I had to fight my way past a flight instinct that was telling me to get far away from Adam. Instead, I poked and prodded, hoping he’d reveal something, anything. “And yet you’re still here.”
“I left,” he said, and all the darkness seemed to wash away, leaving behind only a tired acceptance as he sank into the chair behind the desk. “I’d actually made a life for myself and enough money to stay away for good, but Lauren begged me to come back after Old Man Harrington died of a heart attack. Rafe had taken off, and Spence couldn’t manage the books on his own. She promised me it would be different this time. Promised me a merger that had been too long in the making.”
“But it wasn’t true, was it? They never intended to give you any of it.”
His head jerked up at my question, defiance and fire returning as he slammed his glass down, and for a moment, he looked like the snake last night. Ready to strike. A rattle waving in warning. “Spencer respected me, appreciated what I did, and even implemented most of my ideas. He’d planned on making me a partner, adding me to the trust, and removing Rafe, but he died before he could do it.”
