Tough Luck Hero (31 page)

Based on the family resemblance and Colton's anger, Lydia could make a fairly educated guess about who the newcomer was. It didn't seem possible. Not after he'd been gone for so long. But this could only be Gage West.

“Then why are you here?”

“I was contacted by Dad's lawyer,” Gage said.

Lydia looked at Maddy and Sierra. They were both white-faced, their lips blue around the edges. For his part, Gage barely flicked them a glance. His younger sisters, who had to have been children the last time he'd seen them, and he was barely giving a nod to their existence. But then, based on what Colton had said about him, she couldn't be too surprised that Gage had a self-absorbed streak.

“How did he know where to find you?”

“I've kept in contact.”

“Not with us,” Colton said.

“With Dad's lawyer.”

“Well, great. I hate to break it to you, but Dad's still alive. So if you were expecting to show up and collect some money...”

“I'm sure you would enjoy that,” Gage said. “But I don't have any interest in Dad's money. I do have an interest in a few things, though. But I'm not going to discuss them here, not with you.”

“I don't think you've earned the right to be cagey with me,” Colton said. “It may have escaped your notice, but you walked into a situation that was being handled. A situation that has been handled for the past seventeen years. We didn't need you to come back in to handle things. I'm not going to apologize for assuming you're here for money.”

“If I gave a damn about Dad's money I never would have left in the first place.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Responsibility.”

“That's a joke. You haven't cared about responsibility at all from the moment you left. You left all of us to deal with life on our own, so don't barge in here now like some busted-ass savior ready to rescue us. If we waited around for you things would have fallen apart a long time ago.”

Lydia felt like she was on the verge of panicking. It wasn't fair. She knew it wasn't fair. This was something major and terrible that was happening to Colton; it wasn't happening to her. But she shouldn't be here. She shouldn't be here witnessing this. She wasn't anything to him, wasn't anything to them.

It was just too much. It was too big, too real. It had nothing to do with her and still it reached beneath her protective layer and squeezed at her heart, threatened to crack her open completely.

She couldn't do it. She just couldn't do it. She should never have been here in the first place. This was for the West family, and she had inserted herself into it, under the guise of helping Colton keep the peace, but really just to serve her own ambitions.

Now she was mayor. She had accomplished everything she had set out to accomplish, maybe because she had ended up getting the endorsement of Nathan West. Possibly because of her marriage. She would never know.

And now she was here, taking up space during this tense moment between family members. Taking a space she didn't deserve. A space she wasn't equal to.

She stood up, and no one seemed to notice. Then, she slowly extricated herself from the group. It was Madison who saw her. Madison who made eye contact, whose expression spoke loudly. With accusation. With understanding. Lydia ignored it.

She turned and walked out of the emergency room. The early-morning air was sharp, cutting into her like glass. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold herself together. It was up to her to hold herself together. Colton had enough on his plate, was preserving enough things. He didn't need to preserve her too.

She swallowed hard, scanning the parking lot for her car. One of his siblings would take him home, he would be fine. But she had to go.

So she did what she did best when things got too painful. She ran.

CHAPTER TWENTY

C
OLTON
FELT
LIKE
he was living in a bad dream that wouldn't go away. He kept waiting to wake up in his bed, next to Lydia, and find that he was not in fact in a hospital with his father lying incapacitated in the other room. That he was not facing his brother, who he had not seen for nearly two decades.

He refused to wake up. This seemed to be real. He was pretty pissed about that.

This evening had been waves of change, rolling over and over. When Lydia had won the election it had become clear that the two of them would be continuing on with their marriage. And he had been...happy with that. He had seen a future there. Maybe one that he didn't deserve, or one that would be difficult, but he had seen it.

For Lydia, he wanted to do the bigger things. The harder things. He had seen a life where he grew the ranch for them. Where their children went out to that swing to play. And he had been...happy. Then it had all come crashing down when his father had been lying there on the ground. Colton had realized then that freedom was never going to be in the cards for him. The West Ranch was going to pass into his possession; there was no doubt about that. He couldn't abandon it. Couldn't abandon his family.

And as he had been grappling with that, and with fear over what exactly his father was facing, Gage had walked in. He was claiming that he was here to handle things. His brother who had been away all this time. The reason that Colton was where he was at. In every damn way.

Because of Gage, Colton worked the family construction business. Because of Gage, Colton had seen nothing more than a future building his father's legacy. Because of Gage, Colton had thought he needed to marry a woman who would help keep him in his place. Because of Gage, he had chosen Natalie. Because of Natalie, he had gone off and married Lydia.

His older brother had set off a chain of events that had been continually rolling for the past seventeen years, and he hadn't been here to witness any of it. And now, he simply was. And all Colton wanted to do was haul off and punch him in the face.

Hell, they were at a hospital. If he was going to get into a fistfight with someone who matched him in size and strength, this was the place.

Instinctively, as his anger threatened to overwhelm him, he looked for Lydia. And discovered she wasn't there.

“Where's Lydia?” It was entirely possible she had gone into the bathroom, or something.

“She left,” Maddy said.

That made him feel like the wind had been knocked out of him, like he was in danger of tipping over. He hadn't realized until that moment just how much having Lydia there really meant.

How much she meant to him.

He looked around the room, at his family. It was the worst time for him to leave. Gage was here. It was also three in the morning. They were all exhausted. They weren't solving anything tonight. And he needed to go see his wife.

“I'm going to go,” he said.

“You're just going to leave?” Maddy asked.

“No, Maddy,” he said. “I'm not just going to leave. It's difficult for me to leave. But I need to figure out what's going on with my wife. That's just something I have to handle. And it can't wait.”

“I can't believe you're being so selfish.”

Her words nearly knocked him on his ass. “I'm sorry you feel that way,” he bit out. “But the way I see it, everyone here is an adult. I want to support you. I want to support the whole family, of course. But sometimes you have to stand on your own feet, Madison. I have an issue that isn't going to take care of itself, and I can't send anyone to take care of it for me.” Lydia. The most important thing was Lydia. That was where he needed to be; it was who he needed. He hadn't been willing to stand up to his family, not for himself, not for the ranch. But for her? He would lay it all down for her. That was what you did when you loved somebody.

And dammit all to hell, he loved her.

“Go,” Sierra said, squeezing Ace's hand. “We can deal with...this. In fact, I might go home too. I'm exhausted.” She looked at Gage. “And I don't even know what to do with you. I probably won't until I sleep for fourteen hours.”

“I'm staying here,” Maddy said, thrusting her chin forward.

“So am I,” Gage said.

“I would rather you didn't,” Maddy said.

The hardest thing that Colton had ever done was turn away from the confrontation. Not intervening. Not trying to solve it. They were adults, and they would make their own decisions. He couldn't do it for them.

If he did it now, he would do it forever. Apply a series of temporary fixes to the cracks that made up his family. And he would never get around to dealing with his own life. Ever.

As he walked out of the hospital and into the cold night, he realized that not dealing with himself was probably a huge part of why he did this. Why he poured himself into solving everyone else's problems when things went south.

Because they were easier than solving his own.

Whatever the hell his own were. He looked around the parking lot, and realized that he didn't actually have a car there. He had come over with Lydia, and she had left without him. He pulled out his cell phone and called the lone cab service in town. Fortunately, it was about that time for them to be ferrying drunks home from the bar, so there were drivers out and about. Copper Ridge was not the kind of place where you could stand on the corner and grab an easy ride.

It took about ten minutes, but the car did show up, and Colton instructed the driver to take him back to his house. Hopefully, Lydia was there, but if she wasn't, he could take his truck over to her house. Because that would be the next guess on his list.

When the car pulled up to the front, he saw that the kitchen light was on. And then he saw her slight figure moving around inside. And he realized beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was what he wanted. That no matter the time of day, no matter the situation, he wanted to come home to this. To her. It didn't really matter if it was here, if it was her house, if it was his parents' home. As long as she was in it.

Yeah, he still had his other dreams. But she was the big one. He didn't know how that had happened. Only that it had. Sometime between waking up at a hotel in Vegas married to the last woman on earth he would have ever claimed to want, and this moment, standing in his dark, cold driveway watching her make tea in the kitchen.

Lydia Carpenter had become his dream.

He paid the driver and walked up the steps, heading into the house.

“Lydia?”

He got silence in response. Which he imagined wasn't the best sign. Still, he didn't care. He was in the middle of a damn revelation, and she had to listen. He didn't do this kind of thing. He didn't do mad, crazy revelations and over-the-top declarations at three in the morning. But he was about to.

Because he also didn't storm out on his family when they were in the middle of a crisis. He didn't do any of this. He did it for her.

“Glad I found you here,” he said, walking into the kitchen.

She turned, clutching a mug in her hands, her dark eyes wide. “I wasn't hiding.”

“You didn't say goodbye.”

“You seemed like you were in the middle of something.”

“Yeah, well. Gage coming back was a little bit unexpected. Or a lot unexpected. But it isn't something that I want to deal with right now. Just because he stormed back in doesn't mean that he gets all the attention now. I don't have to drop everything just to deal with him. I have my own life.”

The corner of her mouth tilted upward. “Yes, you do.”

“I've had a lot of...revelations over the past few hours. It's actually all kind of surreal.”

She nodded slowly. “I can relate.”

“I haven't helped my family. The way that I've handled things. I've been...I've been trying to hold everything together since Gage left. And tonight I just...stopped. Not because he's back, because honestly I don't care that he's back. I mean, I'm angry at him, but we're going to have to deal with that later.”

She took a sip of tea, her eyes never leaving his. She didn't speak. So he continued.

“It will never end. This thing that I'm doing. It just doesn't end. And you can't... I can't keep doing it.”

“I hope you told them that,” she said.

“I didn't really. But I did kind of leave them to handle all of this by themselves. And hopefully everyone will still be speaking to me tomorrow. Later today. I don't even know what day it is.”

“It's tomorrow.”

He nodded slowly. And then he felt like he was out of words. So he just did the thing that made the most sense. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in for a kiss. Her tea sloshed over the edge of her cup, burning his chest through his shirt, but he didn't really care. He just kissed her, because it was the only thing that made sense. Because she was the only thing that made sense. And on the other side of this kiss were revelations and confessions, things he didn't want to say, but that he knew he had to say. But right now, there was just this kiss.

And so he kept it going, long and slow, and not caring that there was a ceramic mug between them.

Then, it had to end. He let her go reluctantly, taking a step back.

“We should probably talk about that,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

“About what?” He knew, but he wanted to make her say it.

“About the kissing. About all of that. Because I got elected and...”

“I know. And so you're going to keep living with me.”

“I mean, that was the original plan.”

“And you're questioning things now?” he asked.

She pushed her hand through her hair. “It's just...tonight, with your family. Everyone that was there is part of you in some way. And I'm not. I'm your fake wife, and I can't keep tricking your sisters. Your mother is only more vulnerable now than she was before, your father is... And now your brother... Like you said, it doesn't stop.”

“If it's too much for you to handle, I can understand that. I mean, it's borderline too much for me to handle, but they're my responsibility, so I do it.”

She frowned. “That isn't it. It has nothing to do with handling your family.” She looked away, and he knew she was lying.

“So you left tonight because you felt guilty.”

She lifted a shoulder. “Yes.”

“That's bullshit.”

“It is not,” she said, her voice raising half an octave with the protest.

“It is. Something freaked you out back there, and I want to know what.”

“I don't like hospitals, okay. Can you understand that? The last time I spent any significant time there was when I ended up leaving my sister behind, because she died. I'm sorry. But I couldn't stay.”

Her words hit him with the force of a punch. “No,” he said, “I'm sorry. I should have thought of that.”

“Why? Why should you have thought of that? As you reminded me not long ago, Colton, you are not my real husband. It isn't your job to deal with my emotional crippling.”

He took a sharp breath, the intensity of it stabbing him in the chest. “Actually, I should have thought of that, because I care about you. Because all of this
not your real husband
stuff, that's what isn't real.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing about you is dumb, Lydia Carpenter. Don't play stupid now. You are my real wife. I married you, I sleep with you every night, I damn well love you. Tell me what isn't real about that?”

She took a step back, her dark eyes wide, and unless he misinterpreted the emotion in them, she was afraid of him. Afraid of what he had just said. “Don't. Don't act like our drunken marriage that only happened because you got left at the altar by the woman you actually wanted to marry is real just because suddenly you're comfortable in it.”

“That isn't why. I said that I loved you. Are you just going to ignore that?”

“Yes,” she said, exploding. “I would like to ignore that. I would like to pretend that you never said anything of the kind. I...I don't love you Colton. I really don't need you to love me.”

Her words hit him with the impact of a bullet. “You don't love me?”

“I never wanted any of this. None of it. I didn't want to marry anyone. Never. You met my ex-boyfriend—you know all about that. I'm possibly the only woman in Logan County that has no interest in a husband and children.” She drew in a shuddering, shaking breath, evidence that she was not unaffected by this, no matter what she was saying. “I never wanted this. This was supposed to be something convenient, something that kept my campaign running smoothly. It was supposed to just be a little bit of sex on top of that. It was not supposed to be feelings, and hospital rooms, and family drama.”

“Yeah, well, I was supposed to marry a woman who made me comfortable. I was supposed to happily take the helm of my family legacy. I was supposed to fall in line with what everyone asked of me. I wasn't supposed to fall in love with you. So, I'm real sorry that plans didn't go the way you wanted them to, peaches. But I'm not really in a better position. I'm just not running scared.”

“That's what you think this is? You think that I'm scared?” She laughed, borderline hysterically.

“Yes, I think you're scared. I think that's why you left the hospital tonight. I think strong emotions terrify you. I think that's why you've been running all this time.”

“How dare you?”

“What? How dare I make you examine yourself? How dare I ask you to answer a question honestly?”

She flung her arms wide, releasing her hold on her teacup, sending it crashing down onto the ground. She looked startled by her own actions, by the shattered ceramic on the floor and the dark tea stain spreading over the tile.