A Rancher's Dangerous Affair. Jennifer Morey

love? She returned her gaze to him. “That’s priceless coming from you.”

      “I’m not confused over what I want.”

      “Yeah, well, love isn’t what you want.”

      “I’ll take love—if it’s right.”

      “What’s right for you, Brandon? Someone who doesn’t challenge you? Someone who won’t pry you off this land, even for a night out?”

      “I go out.”

      “You’re so quick to ridicule me for making a career out of party planning—look at you. You’ve made a career out of being a loner. There’s no bridge over the moat around your cold heart. No wonder Jillian turned to your brother. I bet she wasn’t the first one!”

      “Jillian didn’t turn to him.”

      “Why was she with him then?” She was probably still with him. “She doesn’t have to sleep with him, or even love him, to use him to get to you.”

      “Sounds just like you, except you slept with David.”

      Eliza stopped arguing, stunned that he’d voiced his jealousy.

      “Yeah, it bothered me that you married him.”

      “Why?”

      He scowled at her as though she should know.

      She didn’t. How could she? Unless he still had feelings for her. And Eliza could not allow herself one crumb of hope that he did. She could not endure another heartbreak over him. The original one was still wreaking havoc on her life.

      An outbuilding came into view. It was a yurt, and not just any yurt. It was designed much like a cottage, a warm and welcoming refuge in bad weather. With a quick check on the sky, she wondered if they were going to need it. There was even a small barn for horses. The charm went against her perception of Brandon. To her he was a hard worker with a great capacity for love that he shut himself off to. Why did he shy away from love so much? There had to be a reason.

      She dismounted near the stream and let Willow drink. Brandon did the same.

      “How come you never got married, anyway?” Willow’s ears twitched with the sound of her voice and her whiskers moved as she drank.

      “I haven’t met the right one.”

      Such a simple answer, one that stung but also didn’t dig deep enough into the truth. “Have you ever thought you were close?”

      “Why do you ask?” he sounded wary.

      Thunder rolled in the sky again. Willow lifted her head and perked her ears.

      “You accuse me of using parties as a surrogate. I’m just curious as to what your excuse is.”

      “I have none.”

      When he didn’t meet her eyes and instead scanned the land ahead, Eliza was sure she was onto something. Something about love scared him. It made her think of the day her dad had died.

      She’d been a sophomore in high school. Ryker had come to her classroom and interrupted the teacher, telling her it was an emergency. Several possibilities sprang to mind, none of them involving her father in a tractor accident. Their dog had died. A horse had been seriously injured. One of her grandparents had fallen to old age. Never had it crossed her mind that either of her parents had died.

      She’d gone with Ryker to the hospital, only to find their mother hysterical and in tears. She’d had to be sedated. The next week had been surreal. The funeral. Her mother’s grief-stricken lethargy. her sorrow had been all-encompassing. Eliza and Ryker had talked about their concern. Would she die, too?

      Ryker had stepped in and taken care of her from the start. He’d taken care of his little sister, too. She could imagine the burden that had caused. She also had seen how the deepest love could destroy a person. Seeing the destruction of her mother’s heart and soul, Eliza had feared falling in love. After Brandon had rejected her, she’d sworn off it altogether.

      Had Brandon experienced something similar in his past? Remembering his mother had committed suicide when he and David were young boys, she wondered if that had played any kind of role in influencing him as a man. He’d grown up with only a father, one who’d gone to prison. What had his mother’s life been like in those early years?

      “Why did your mother kill herself?” she asked.

      He swung his head to look at her, no doubt wondering where that question had come from. That brooding look that was his trademark descended. “Any woman who was married to my father probably would have killed herself.”

      She felt raindrops on her skin. “She did it because of him?” Talk around town had painted Brandon and David’s father as a 24/7 drunk. The hit-and-run that had sent him to prison had confirmed it. “Because he drank?”

      He mounted his horse. “Come on. Let’s go into the yurt until this passes.”

      Scowling up at the sky for the interruption, she climbed up onto Willow and followed Brandon across the stream. At the yurt, they put the horses in the barn. The anticipation of being alone with Brandon kept her edgy and a little too excited. If her cavorting with him had ended badly in her teens, it was sure to end worse now if she allowed anything to happen. As easy as that kiss in the driveway had been, waiting out a thunderstorm in a remote yurt was pure folly…and enticement.