Part Time Cowboy (Copper Ridge Book 1) (32 page)

“The horses,” she said, gasping for air. “Animals?” She couldn’t think. She couldn’t remember the layout of things, not now. Her brain was just swimming.

“No animals in there,” Eli said, his brow creased, his mouth turned down. “Just the equipment. The feed. All Connor’s equipment,” he repeated. “Did someone call the fire department?” Eli asked.

“Yeah.” Sadie turned and saw Liss standing there, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I did.”

“Is there anyone inside?”

“Not as far as we know,” Liss said, her eyes not on Eli, but on Connor, who was standing nearer to the blaze than anyone else, his posture stiff, staring right at it. Watching so much of his livelihood burn.

“There’s insurance,” Eli said.

“Of course,” Liss said. “It’ll be okay.” She didn’t sound convinced, not at all.

A group of boys, who must have been twelve, walked up to Eli, their faces ashen, their eyes wide. “We didn’t mean to, Deputy Garrett,” the smallest one said. “But it’s a Fourth of July thing and we were messing with fireworks...”

“In the barn?” Eli asked, his tone hard.

“Well, yeah, because we didn’t want our moms to see. And we didn’t think...”

“About the hay,” Eli said.

“We thought,” one of the other boys said, “that we’d gotten all the sparks doused and we left...”

And they’d left a smoldering firework in the hay, to burn it all from the inside out so that by the time anyone realized, the blaze inside had consumed the fuel and moved on to the structure.

Sadie was starting to shake. It was too similar to her last night in Copper Ridge. Too close to sins she’d already committed. Eli hadn’t wanted this on his property, Connor hadn’t wanted it and she’d pushed. She’d come onto their property, into their lives and destroyed their order.

And this was the result.

This is what happens when you try. You can’t fix it. You never could.

She was watching the Garretts’ world burn in front of her. Her handiwork. No, she wasn’t going to fall prostrate to the ground and take total fault. She wasn’t an idiot. It had been little boys with firecrackers, not her with a match. Not her at a party knocking over a lantern.

But it didn’t change how horrible she felt. Didn’t change the way it was unfolding. Or the fact that the boys were only here because of her.

“Eli...”

“Not now, Sadie,” he said, his voice rough.

“I’m so sorry... I...”

“I said not fucking now, Sadie,” he bit out, forking his fingers through his hair, his eyes on the scene in front of them. Sadie’s heart curled in tight around the edges, like it had been set on fire, too.

She took a step back from him, her head swimming. She wondered if she should do something with the crowd? Try to manage? But everyone was frozen, staring at what was happening, and she just felt useless. Helpless. Like she’d been as a child in her home growing up. Watching sick, unending horror playing out before her eyes while she cowered, powerless to stop it.

The fire department came, en masse, sirens rising up over the sound of the blaze. And when it was over, there was no question as to what was left: nothing.

Nothing but a charred husk. Unusable, unsalvageable. The crowd had thinned by then, families with small children taking them away from the upsetting scene. They’d all moved on to the main fireworks display down at the beach. Though mainly they’d left so quickly to escape the smoke and debris. Sadie wished she could get carried away from it, too, but she had to watch, her own eyes gritty with ashes. She felt honor bound in so many ways.

Finally, all that remained were Liss, Jack, Kate, Eli, Lydia, Ace, Bud and the fishermen.

And Connor. Who stood alone, silent and in sharp contrast to the blackened ruins in front of him. Unmoving.

Liss was the one who broke from the small crowd and went to him, her hand going to his shoulder. He jerked away from her and walked back toward the main house, leaving Liss standing there with her arms folded beneath her breasts.

A moment later she took a deep breath and marched after him, a stubborn set to her jaw and shoulders, and for a moment, Sadie could only admire the other woman’s strength. Liss was a woman who stayed. A woman who went the tough rounds.

It made Sadie feel painfully inadequate, standing there in the semi-darkness, with cooling ashes just in front of her.

“Whatever you need, Eli,” Ace said. “You know we’re here to help out.”

“I know,” Eli said.

“Anything,” Lydia said. And Sadie knew she was ready to offer comfort as well, and Sadie couldn’t even be mad because she felt so unequal to the task.

“Probably we all just need sleep right now,” Eli said, forcing a smile.

Kate was standing silent, tears streaming down her cheeks, her shoulders shaking. Sadie moved nearer to her and put her arm around her. Feeling so inadequate to do anything to stanch the flow of grief around her.

“Of course,” Ace said. “We’ll get out of your hair. I’ll come by tomorrow if you want, help assess the damage?”

“Thanks. I imagine we’ll just be making an insurance claim. And they’ll have to send someone out. Best we leave it untouched for now.”

“Fair point. Come by for a drink, though,” Ace said, touching the brim of his ball cap before walking away.

“Guess I better let you get rest, too,” Lydia said, putting her hand on Eli’s shoulder in a decidedly nonsisterly way. “I’ll come by and check in on you tomorrow.”

Eli didn’t protest.

Lydia squeezed Sadie’s shoulder, too, as she walked by her. “I’m happy to check in on you, too.”

That tipped her over into utter misery. Because she didn’t deserve that kindness. Not at all. “Thanks,” she said, her throat raw.

“I’ll go talk to the firemen,” Jack said, “see if there’s anything we need to know. I’ll report back.”

“I’m going to go find Connor,” Kate said, her voice thick as she pulled away from Sadie and walked in the direction of the main house.

That left Sadie and Eli, and a pile of glowing, charred wood, alone in the darkness.

She swallowed and tried again. “Eli, I...”

“We have to be done,” Eli said, cutting her off.

“What?”

“This. Us. It has to... I can’t do this,” he said.

* * *

E
LI
’
S
HEART
TWISTED
into a knot in his chest, but it had to be said. It had to be done. Because yet again, while he’d been out enjoying himself, the whole world had fallen apart. All of this, the time spent with Sadie, had been an illusion.

When he didn’t keep control, the world burned. In this case, literally.

It was just too damn close to his other failures. Too damn close.

“When I’m with you, I forget what I’m doing. I forget other people. I forget myself. No, I don’t forget myself, because myself is all I think of. Myself and my dick, and it can’t happen like this. There is a reason that I’ve lived my life the way that I have. A reason that I can’t ignore for good sex.”

Sadie blinked rapidly, her eyes glossy in the dim light. And his stomach twisted, sick regret forming. But there was nothing else he could do. He needed to stay on top of this stuff and he wasn’t doing it.

His sister had just stood there in tears, his brother watching the one thing he’d held on to since losing his wife burn to nothing.

It was all way too reminiscent of the night when he hadn’t taken the keys. Of the last time Eli had let himself become distracted.

And it didn’t matter what Sadie said, because in the end, this was the result. It didn’t matter if he shouldn’t feel at fault. He did. And it didn’t change the fact that when he wasn’t holding up the world around him, it all seemed to fall apart.

For a second today, he’d thought he could be something different, have something different. And then all this had swooped in and reminded him just why that wasn’t possible.

Why he had to forget their moment in the woods, and every moment before. Why he had to stop wanting more, when more would never be in the cards for him. He knew that. He’d known that before Sadie Miller had blown into his life like a windstorm and rearranged his existence. Made him think that maybe everything he’d believed about his life, about himself, had been a lie.

Which was a whole lot crueler than never having hope had ever been.

For one moment, he’d thought he could do it. Thought he could punch the hell out of a guy who deserved it, thought he could sneak into the woods for a moment alone with the only woman who’d ever driven him that crazy.

Thought he could go to sleep with her every night and wake up with her every morning.

“Good sex, Eli?” she asked. “Really? Good sex? Because I think, I mean, I pretty freaking well think what we have is a lot more than that. I mean, I think we’d both had good sex before we ever met each other, and that...this is something else entirely. What we share is something else.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It can’t happen.” He wanted to lash out. To blame someone other than himself. He was so tired of carrying it all. And this was just another failure. “It seems like when you’re around barns tend to burn down,” he said. “You have a knack for spreading disaster, I guess.”

“Eli, please don’t do this. Not now, not... Please.”

“Sadie, I can’t afford any more distractions,” he said, the words scraping his throat raw. “And that’s all this was. All you are to me is a distraction.”

She stumbled backward and he felt like his heart lurched through his chest to follow her, leaving nothing but a bloody, vacant hole behind. This felt like he thought dying might. But he couldn’t take the words back now.

He wouldn’t.

It was the right thing to do. Other men could have wives and kids. Other men with other lives.

Not him. Never him.

“Well,” she said, her voice thick as she put distance between them. “Don’t let me distract you any longer.”

She turned and walked back in the direction of the B and B, which he only thought of as hers now. What a difference a few weeks made.

But he couldn’t afford the difference, and neither could any of the people who depended on him.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

S
ADIE
DIDN
’
T
SLEEP
AT
ALL
.
She spent the whole night out on her newly stained deck, a mug of coffee clutched tightly in her hand, tears rolling down her face as she slowly accepted what had happened. As she slowly accepted what she’d let herself do.

She loved Eli Garrett.

He was the first person she’d loved since she’d lost hope in her family a decade ago and run out of town.

He was the first person she’d been close to in as many years, if not more. If not ever.

She stayed on the deck, wrapped in her blanket and her misery, Toby snuggled in her lap, until pink started to bleed into the sky, extending up above the tree line.

Well, damn. There went her theory about the world stopping because she was devastated.

She deposited Toby gently onto the deck, then went into the house with him following behind her. She went upstairs, undressed and stepped into the shower, letting the hot water wash away the stiffness, the misery.

In the end, some of the stiffness got worked out, but the misery remained.

She brushed her teeth, which were fuzzy after an evening of nursing coffees, then made herself another in her single-serving brewer, bought especially so that her guests could have a fresh cup at any point in the day.

She let out a heavy sigh. Her guests. She’d had several people get in touch since the night before, inquiring about availability through her website. So soon there would be guests. She had a five-year contract.

She lowered her head, feeling very much like she was sinking into the mire. A mire she couldn’t just cut and run from.

And suddenly she felt claustrophobic. She wanted to claw her clothes off, claw her skin off, step out of her body and just run from all of it.

Get away and start fresh. Away from that man, away from the feelings he made her feel.

She looked around the B and B, at her attempt to build something permanent. To make something stable. She should have known it was never about her surroundings. It was about her. It always had been.

She couldn’t sign a five-year lease and expect it to make her different.

The simple truth was, she’d never been important enough for anyone to change for her. That was the painful heart of it. Her mother would rather spend her life being beaten by a man, the same man who beat her child, than leave him for the good of them both.

Her love for a husband who dealt out pain and misery was stronger than her love for Sadie. And that made it impossible to imagine anyone changing their life drastically for the sake of her love.

And Eli was proving that no one would.

This was why she always left. Because if she left first, if she never let anyone close, if she never asked anyone to know her and accept her anyway, she couldn’t get hurt.

But she’d come back to Copper Ridge. She’d given of herself. She’d fallen in love and dared to hope for it back.

And now she was broken. And she had no idea how long it would take to glue the pieces back together.

One thing was for sure. She couldn’t do it here.

“Toby,” she said, looking at her little gray friend, the only friend she really had, “I think it’s time for us to go.”

* * *

E
LI
PACED
THE
LENGTH
of the living room, eyeing his brother, who was passed out on the couch. He was going to hate life a whole hell of a lot when Eli woke him up.

Which was going to be now, because Eli hated life, so Connor might as well join the living.

In hell.

“Wake up, Connor,” he said, clapping his hands and watching his brother go from blissfully conked out to awake and in a world of pain in an instant.

“Dammit all!” he said, then winced, his hand on his forehead. “Ow.”

“Yeah, I would think
ow
. You drank roughly the amount of alcohol it would take to cleanse all the wounds on a frontier battlefield.”

“Oh...shut up, Eli. Honestly.”

“We have things to do.”

“Like?” he asked. “Work? Because I think all my tools are gone.”

“You have animals that might want to get fed.”

“I don’t have hay,” Connor mumbled.

“So get off your ass and get some,” Eli said, feeling angry. At himself, mainly, but yelling at Connor was more convenient than dealing with that.

“What the hell is your issue this morning?” Connor asked, moving into a sitting position, running his hands over his beard.

“Maybe I’m tired of watching you wallow while I take care of you,” Eli said, resentment flaring up, rage burning hot in his chest.

He’d resigned himself to this last night.

To caring for other people and putting himself on hold. But this morning? This morning he’d woken up alone. And it hurt worse than he’d imagined it could. Thirty-two years of it. He should be used to it. But this morning his bed had felt so empty it had mimicked the damn hole in his chest.

And he was forgetting already why a burned-out barn had mattered more than Sadie next to him.

“What?” Connor asked.

“You are my older brother. You’re a grown man.”

“I never asked you to take care of me,” Connor said.

“You expect it,” Eli bit out.

Connor shook his head. “Look, man, I don’t know what the hell your problem is, but I’ve never asked you for anything. I’m glad you’re here, I won’t lie, but if you weren’t? I would be happy to just stay drunk and live in filth. You’re the one who—”

“And it’s things like that, Connor, that mean I can’t leave you to it. Because you don’t think I know you’d sink in it? I do, and I won’t let it happen.”

“And so what, Eli? I’m supposed to get myself together the way you see fit so you don’t have to deal?”

“Yeah,” Eli said. “Yeah. Just...could you? Because I can’t work a job, and work on the ranch, and run for sheriff, and file your insurance claim and not lose my fucking mind. I can’t... I can’t do it all.”

That was the first time he’d ever admitted that. To himself. To anyone else. That he couldn’t shoulder everything. That he didn’t even want to.

“I didn’t know, Eli,” Connor said, looking straight ahead. “I’ve had a hard time caring about anything other than myself. For the record, I mostly still don’t care about anything else, but...I’m damn sorry you felt that way.”

“It wasn’t ever just you,” Eli said. “But you know you’ve added to it.”

“Well,” Connor drawled. “I do what I can.”

“You make me feel like a dick for complaining since you’ve been through hell.”

“Yeah. Still in it most days,” he mumbled. “But I guess I don’t have to bring you with me.”

“Sometimes I think I brought myself on purpose.”

“Well, stop,” Connor said.

“What?”

“Stop. Being unhappy is stupid. If there’s any way you can fix it? Fix it. I can’t bring my wife back. I can’t...fix anything that happened. I can’t make my life better just by making a different choice.”

“I’m not sure I can, either,” Eli said.

“Does it have to do with Sadie?”

Eli breathed in deep. “Yeah.”

“She’s not dead, is she?”

“No,” Eli said, his voice rough.

“Then there’s still hope.”