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“Did he really not know about me?” Dallas asked, leveling that angry brown stare at her.
“Well, I didn’t know about you until five minutes ago,” Kaylee said. “And he told me he didn’t either. I’ve known him for a long time. He’s a terrible liar. On that you can trust me. He’s actually kind of a goody-goody. If he tells you something, I would be inclined to believe it.”
“Well, you’re his friend, so you’re biased.”
“It’s true,” Kaylee said, nodding. “But if I thought he was being a dumbass I wouldn’t protect him. Count on that. That’s real friends. Weak-ass friends just tell you what you want to hear. Real friends call you out when you need it. I’m a real friend.”
There was something about the vulnerability that flashed through Dallas’s eyes just then that hit Kaylee in a place she would rather not acknowledge. She didn’t want to relate to this kid, but suddenly she did. Yeah, she had both parents at home, but she knew all about uncertainty. She knew all about what it was like to spend your life walking on eggshells and hoping that you didn’t land on someone’s bad side.
She knew what it was like to live on a system of earning affection. Earning your place. Earning the right to get through the day without getting slapped upside the head.
Not even Bennett knew that about her. But she wondered in that moment if his son might have guessed just by looking at her. Like she had found common ground with him the moment their eyes had met. And suddenly, all that hurt she had felt a moment before over Marnie seemed ridiculous. The kid wasn’t a hypothetical anymore. He was real, and he was standing right in front of her.
A teenager who needed assurance. Who needed to know that he deserved to feel safe. That he deserved to have someone take care of him.
“He’s a good guy,” she said, tilting her head toward Bennett. “You can trust him.”
“Well, this random woman that I don’t know says I can trust you,” Dallas said, his eyes going flat as he looked up at Bennett.
But Kaylee didn’t care. Because he needed to hear it. She didn’t know anything about kids. But she knew about the kid she had been. She knew what she would have wanted to hear. Even if she wouldn’t have been able to believe it or receive it. But it would have sat there. If just one person would have told her that she deserved some kind of stability, it could have helped. Bennett had shown her that. As a friend, he had been constant and steady. And even though she had talked about the tumultuous nature of her home life, he had somehow seemed to know exactly what she needed.
He had given her focus. He had made her feel like she deserved to go for her dream of being a veterinarian. He and his father, Quinn, had helped her figure out how to get scholarship so that she could go to school.
Yes, having someone be interested, having someone be adamant that you could do something, that you could have something, mattered.
“If it’s all the same to you,” Dallas said, “I think I’ll head to bed.”
“I thought you already had,” Bennett said.
“Which is why you were talking about me.”
“Yeah,” Bennett said. “I’m going to talk about you sometimes.”
“Is this more of that honesty that you promised me?”
“Yes,” Bennett said. “I plan on being relentless with that until you start believing me when I tell you things.”
“Good luck. I have about fifteen years of people proving they’re useless liars. I would say that in about fifteen more you could maybe undo that. But I doubt we’ll be speaking by then.”
“If we aren’t,” Bennett said, “then it won’t be because of me. It won’t be because I stop talking. Guarantee it.”
Dallas reeled back, a deep crease between his brows. “Why?”
“Because you’re my son. And that’s how that works.”
The fire and intensity in Bennett’s eyes caught Kaylee by the heart and held her fast. She was useless and hopeless. Hopeless for him, and this only introduced a new way for her to be that.
Bennett was gorgeous to her, always. That was part of the problem. Maybe, if she had some kind of quiet, sweet love for him based only on feelings she could have redirected it. But it was more than that. It was a violent, intense visceral attraction that was physical on a deep and very sexual level.
So sexual it was impossible to pretend it was anything else. Feelings she might have been able to squish into another box. That deep, intense ache between her thighs was very difficult to pass off as anything but sexual attraction.
She’d tried.
And she would have never guessed that watching the man deal with fatherhood would have ratcheted that up a notch. She would have said that nothing could. But Lord Almighty, this did. Bennett full of righteous fury staring down his son. Fury at the world for what it had put him through. Uncompromising with a kind of deep intensity, a commitment that no one had ever offered to Kaylee.
It was more than her poor ovaries could bear.
Every little biological thing inside of her was screaming about the suitability of Bennett as a partner. A protector of offspring.
It was ingrained on a hormonal level. She was powerless against it.
That still didn’t make it less disconcerting.
Somewhere in the back of her brain she felt a little itch.
Michael.
Michael was the itch. She had a date with him next week. She had a date with him next week and she was standing here getting hot and bothered over Bennett.
But then, that was kind of the normal state of things. Exacerbated in the moment, but relatively normal nonetheless.
And again, she was mired in her own stuff and she felt like a tool.
Dallas shrugged, as if he was fully unaffected by the proclamation that Bennett had just made. But Kaylee knew otherwise. She just did. Because whether it hit him today or in five years, he was going to realize eventually what Bennett was saying to him. What Bennett was offering.
It would matter then. When he needed it to matter, it would. Someday when a little bit of that anger had subsided, or when he was feeling particularly angry and his body needed a break from it.
She was certain because sometimes having the friend that she’d had in Bennett, having the support she’d had in his family, had been the only thing keeping her grounded, rooted to the possibilities of the future, rather than those old, ugly feelings of inadequacy. Of not deserving.
And that—she knew—was what all that bluff and bluster was.
Feeling undeserving. Unwanted.
“I’m really scoring points all over the place,” Bennett said, when the bedroom door slammed shut.
“You are, actually,” Kaylee said softly. “You just might be saving them up for later. Want to go back outside?”
“Yes,” Bennett said.
They wandered out to the front porch, and Bennett leaned over the railing, lifting the beer bottle to his lips. “He’s real,” Bennett said. “You saw that too.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry I can’t tell you it’s some kind of hallucination.”
“I was actually almost afraid it might be,” Bennett said, his voice rough. “That I was going to take you in there and he was going to be gone.”
She didn’t say anything. She had the feeling that he didn’t want her to.
“I didn’t want him to be,” Bennett said. “As little sense as that makes... Now that he’s here...”
“It makes as much sense as any of this does,” Kaylee said. “If you felt like you wanted him gone in the next five minutes, that would be okay too, because nothing about this is normal. There’s not exactly a guidebook for what to do when the son you didn’t know you had shows up out of nowhere.”
“I guess not,” he said.
“I just can’t believe it,” Kaylee said, shaking her head. “I mean, now that I’ve seen him I can. He looks just like you, Bennett. And I mean in an uncanny way. It’s like looking at you when we were in high school.”
“He doesn’t look that much like me,” Bennett said, kicking against the edge of the porch rail with the toe of his cowboy boot.
“He does,” Kaylee said. “And it’s everything. The way that he stands, the set of his shoulders. He’s just...you through and through, and he’d never even met you before today.” She sighed. “He’s not as happy as you were.”
“Of course not,” Bennett said. “Because he’s had an awful life, and I’m partly to blame for that.”
“You couldn’t force her to tell you. She lied to you, and you had no reason to think that she would do that.”
“My whole...everything since then...this is why I plan like I do. Why I make sure I have everything mapped out in my head, because I know what happens when you don’t do that. When you just...think of the moment and not the future.”
“I thought... I thought it was because of your mom.” She reached out and touched his arm.
“Partly,” he said. “You know things were hard after she died. We missed her, and Dad didn’t do a great job organizing. Not that I blame him. I had to keep my part of the world organized or it would all fall apart.”
Her heart twisted. “I know. I get that.”
“I know you do,” he said. “And then Marnie got pregnant. I knew that I had let us both down. I just wanted... I didn’t ever want anything like that again. I was young, and sex was new, and I didn’t think. I didn’t think, and I put her through loss and pain. I blamed myself for everything that went wrong in her life. And maybe I still own part of that blame. Because I was dumb. Because I didn’t keep control. I thought of my own physical pleasure over anything else.”
Kaylee didn’t like the way this conversation was going. Didn’t like the way it made her feel like there was heat crackling beneath her skin. Didn’t like how off-kilter she felt. Didn’t like imagining Bennett, her steady, staid Bennett, losing control with a woman.
It made her feel hot all over, imagining Bennett making love with intensity.
Hell, she was about to have a hot flash.
“I’ve never felt anything like that,” she said, the words sticking in her throat on the way out.
Bennett whipped his head sharply to the side, his beer bottle frozen midway between the porch rail and his lips. “You... Never...”
“I’ve never felt out of control. In that...situation. That’s all I’m saying.”
Something caught between them in that moment, and it was electric, intense enough that it was undeniable. It rolled over her like a wave, an ultrasonic wave, sharp and shocky and quite unlike anything she had ever felt coming from him before. Yes, there had been some small moments. Little pops of awareness, of both of them suddenly remembering that they were male and female, and not simply two genderless people sharing a friendship.
But not like this. Nothing like this.
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat.
“Nothing good comes of it, apparently,” she said, her throat feeling scratchy.
“No,” Bennett said. “And I’ve made sure it never happened to me again.”
“Does that mean...” She shouldn’t be continuing this conversation. She really shouldn’t. “You didn’t feel that way about Olivia?”
“I never slept with Olivia,” he said, his tone rough.
Kaylee felt like she’d been slapped. This was a lot of weird revelations for one night. “You never...you never slept with her?”
“No,” Bennett responded. “I never did. She wanted to wait until we were engaged. And we never got engaged.”
“I thought that you...” She had spent so much time imagining dark-haired, petite Olivia wrapped around Bennett, had made herself sick thinking about it. And he hadn’t done it. “She’s so...beautiful,” she finished lamely.
Olivia was everything Kaylee wasn’t. Petite. Feminine.
“She was safe,” Bennett said. He took another drink of beer. “I wanted safe. I wanted something that I could plan. I wanted to be able to plan my life. And she seemed like a pretty great thing to plan it around. She felt the same way about me. It was never... We were never in love, we were just hoping to make a good life together. And then I lost her, and now I have a kid. So I give up. I give up on sensible. I give up on control.” He shook his head and took another drink.
She had a feeling he did not give up on control at all. That he was going to try to corral and take the reins of this situation, whatever he said now.
“I see,” she said, looking up, her eyes clashing with his.
She hadn’t imagined it. Hadn’t for one moment fabricated that spark between them. It was there. It was there now.
And then he looked down at her lips.
She felt the impact of that shoot down between her thighs. Good Lord Almighty. Bennett Dodge was looking at her mouth.
Bennett Dodge was having a breakdown. And if he did something with her now, it was only going to be for that reason.
That snapped her back to reality. She took a swig of beer, needing for her lips to be busy so that they didn’t decide to occupy their time with him.
“I should go,” she said.
“Do you have to?”
“Yes,” she said, not quite sure if they were talking over the top of the same subtext. She knew what she felt. She knew what she read here, but apparently she didn’t know much of anything. Bennett hadn’t slept with Olivia. He thought she was safe.
It was a totally different relationship to the one she had thought she had been witnessing. The one where he called her princess. Where he treated her like this beautiful, delicate and fragile thing that Kaylee was so certain she could never be.
This wonderful, deserving little creature that Kaylee knew she wasn’t.
But his relationship with Olivia hadn’t been passionate or physical. All that time she’d tortured herself over it and he’d never been with Olivia. She would never have guessed that.
So maybe Bennett was looking at her mouth because he wanted to kiss her, or maybe he was trying to figure out how much beer she was going to drink, or he was just spacing out because everything was weird.
Whatever, she wasn’t in the space to try to figure it out and she needed to stop trying before she did something really foolish.
“I’m going to have to go over to the ranch and talk to my brothers tomorrow. Will you go with me?”
“Of course I will.”
No matter what was wacky and off tonight, she was going to be there for him. There was no question about that. That was the kind of friendship they had. That kind of unconditional support that he had been the first person to show her.
“Thank you,” he said. She shrugged and set the beer on the porch rail, turning to walk down the steps. And then, Bennett spoke again, his voice heavy. “Kaylee... I really need our friendship right now.”
Those words were so weighted down that she knew in that instance he had felt the same thing she had.
