Page 19 of Love Me Back
If they knew about my family, not only would they tell me to stay away from Grayson, but the whole Powell family, the MC, and Diamond Creek entirely. And I liked it here. But they wouldn’t want to take the risk that my uncle might show up and cause trouble.
So, I didn’t call Ellie, or Beck, or Haizley. Instead, I watched the clock until it was time to drive out to the ranch. I was confident once Grayson saw me, he would once again ask me to leave.
And I would.
I refused to stay where I wasn’t wanted.
Pulling into the ranch drive at exactly five, I stared at the front door and remembered the first time I had been here. Ellie had dragged me along when she and Ryder brought Danny and Dante here to stay in one of the cabins at the ranch.
They’d only stayed the night before leaving for Oklahoma. Now they were back and staying on the ranch again, semi-permanently.
I’d stomped on his foot that night after he fibbed to the girls about needing me to come to the baby barn with him becausehe’d hurt his foot. Guilt washed over me as I thought about how he wouldn’t feel it if I stomped on his foot now.
Addie told me he had lost the use of his legs. That meant something had happened during his fall that injured his spine. The question was, how much damage had been done?
And was it permanent?
My hand trembled as I reached for the door handle. My foot hit the ground as the door swung open. I lifted myself from the seat, my eyes held on the front door, waiting for it to swing open and him to yell at me to go home.
I didn’t understand this feeling of dread. The man had been lazily pursuing me for months. But what I saw in his eyes at the hospital when he told me to leave screamed disinterest.
I slammed the door shut and shook my head. My feelings for the tall cowboy didn’t matter. Neither did his feelings, or lack thereof, for me; I was here to do a job. Help an injured man regain the use of his legs or help him adjust to life without them.
Taking a deep breath, I straightened my shoulders and held my head high as I walked gently up the stairs. I told myself not to think about how he got up them and why a ramp hadn’t already been built.
I didn’t knock, knowing they wouldn’t hear it over the mumbled arguing I heard from the other side of the door.
“Fine, who did you hire?” he asked in defeat as I stepped over the threshold. Everyone in the room turned to look at me. His sister Addie and his brother Carson smiled. Hudson looked at me with suspicion, but Emerson looked bored. As if he would rather be anywhere but here.
When my eyes landed on Grayson, pain lanced through my heart at the sight of him in that chair. Every time I was near him, I felt things I never thought I would.
It wasn’t that I was cold and calculating like my uncle, but I didn’t live in the same world as people like Ellie. I knew everything about her family. The pain and neglect she grew up with, as well as the deceit of her parents in their quest to rise to the top of New York’s social ladder. Now they were climbing theranks in prison.
But through all of that—losing her brother for over a decade, her parents trying to force her to marry someone she didn’t love, and even her rocky start with Ryder, who was the love of her life—she stayed true to her nature. Ellie was love and light and happiness.
I was suspicion, contempt, and loneliness. It was what I knew, what I was taught. But Grayson showed me emotions I didn’t believe I was capable of.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. He didn’t smile as he usually did when he saw me. His eyes were hard, mistrusting, and I wondered what had made him look at me that way. How had his accident severed the connection between us I had denied since the day we met on that mountain?
Unless my uncle lied.
It wasn’t unthinkable that he would lie to my face.
“Addie asked me to come.”
“Why?” He spun his chair so he faced me directly. “You went to MIT; they don’t have a medical program.”
“That’s not entirely true. They have a joint program with Harvard. While most of what I learned has to do with the engineering aspects of paralysis, I also worked with med students learning physical therapy techniques that coincide with the use of wheelchairs, prosthetics, and biomedical engineered enhancements.”
“You make people into robots?” Emerson asked.
I smiled. “Not exactly.”
He shrugged. “Eh, cyborgs. Same thing.”
I liked Emerson. The little I knew about him told me we had a lot in common. I, too, often said things people didn’t understand. Only where he was seen as unintelligent, I was seen as rude.
Neither were true.
