Page 29 of Craving Her Cowboy
She turned, the movement slow, deliberate. “That’s a hell of an ask, Gavin.”
“I know.” He flexed his grip on the rail. “But I’m not going to pretend I don’t want you there with me. I’m not willing to lose what we’ve just started to build.”
Asha threw up her hands and took a step back. “It’s not that simple. You don’t get to do that to me.” She stopped herself, jaw clenching. “We’ve been together less than a month. Hell, only a few weeks if you think about it. You can’t be serious.”
He held her gaze and took a step closer. “As a fucking heart attack. I didn’t say it earlier, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I know what I feel for you. Even when I tried to hide it, you got under my skin. If I leave Ironhaven and I don’t ask you to come with me, I might lose you. I’m not willing to risk that.”
“Why me?”
He started to answer, but the words jammed up behind his teeth. He hated that he couldn’t be clear, that every emotion felt like a foreign language.
She filled the silence, her tone getting softer. “I’m not good at chasing behind people. Never have been. What if it doesn’t work out? What if you decide I’m not really what you want after I’ve changed my entire life for you?”
He shifted, searching for the right angle. “You wouldn’t be chasing. You’d be… with me. By my side. You and I, sweetheart. We would do this together. Come with me.”
Asha stood there frozen. Everything in her was telling her to say yes to him. To take the leap and go all in with Gavin. But she was afraid.
“You don’t have to decide now.”
“But you want me to.” Her eyes darted past him, out to the open sky.
He tried to close the gap, but she sidestepped, putting the full width of the fence between them.
“I don’t want to depend on anybody. Especially not someone who could leave me behind at any second when their world begins to take precedence and life gets too hard.”
He felt the punch of it, sharp and low.
Her next words came out in a rush. “Maybe this was just a short-term thing that happened between us. It doesn’t have to mean more than that.”
He shook his head, not believing it. “You don’t mean that.”
She held his stare. “Maybe I do.”
They stood there, nothing moving but the wind and the pulse in his neck.
“I don’t know how to prove it to you.”
“Maybe you can’t,” she responded.
Silence again, painful and wide.
Asha started to turn, then stopped. “Safe travels back to your home.” Her voice almost broke, but she recovered, spine straight as she walked away, boots crunching the gravel with every step.
He watched her go. He wanted to call her back, to yell at her, to do anything except let her vanish. He stood there longer than necessary. Until the only thing left was the memory of how she felt in his arms and the question in his mind of how did it all go so fucking wrong.
Chapter 12
The next morning Gavin hunched at the desk, bare feet pressed flat against the floor. He wasn’t drinking his coffee, just clenching the mug in his left hand like it might bolt if he let go. His right hand stabbed at the paper with a ballpoint, knuckles white, wrist braced over another lined page that already showed five screwed-up starts.
The last one read:
Asha,
I know you hate this shit—
He’d scratched that out with a single, surgical line. Next attempt started underneath:
Asha,
