Christmastime Cowboy

“I already told you that what I did was a kindness to you. You were seventeen years old, Sabrina.” He crossed his arms and watched her. She was agitated, her shoulders twitching, her lips pressed into a thin line.

“Right. Right. And you were protecting me from your big bad penis. I know. And you know what? Maybe if you had just left I would believe that. But you took a payoff, and then you left. Mostly, I think that my virginity wasn’t worth however many thousands of dollars my father paid you. I think that for you sex was cheap, so you might as well go have it with someone else with a flush bank account. Why not? But you know what, it doesn’t matter anymore. Because I don’t regret that we didn’t...you know. I just don’t. But I don’t need you up on any high horses about it.”

“Why did I end up at the big university and you didn’t? I swear to God, if that bastard gave me your money...”

She looked stunned. By his anger, but he didn’t know why. As if he didn’t have any conscience at all? Yeah, he hadn’t been the nicest guy where she was concerned. Or in general, but he didn’t think he was entitled to money that had been earmarked for her education. No way in hell. If he had been told that, he wouldn’t have taken it. Bottom line.

“No. That’s not what happened. My family had more than enough money to send you, me and a few Dickensian street urchins to the university of our choosing. My father and I had a falling-out after you left.”

She looked so arch, so stiff when she said the words. And at the same time, so immeasurably fragile. He wanted to reach out and touch her. Not the way that he had done earlier in the day, unthinkingly placing his hand on her lower back. Even if he wasn’t in the habit of doing that with women, it was still something of a generic touch.

No. He wanted to trace the line of her high cheekbones, down the edge of her jaw, to explore the changes in her face.

The new hollows in her cheeks, the slight little crinkles at the corners of her eyes. To learn the thirteen years he’d missed through touch, as well as through talking to her.

She had always made him want things like that. Things he didn’t understand. Things he had certainly never wanted with anyone else.

Liam had not been...chaste. Not in the last decade, and certainly not before. But Sabrina had never been about sex. At least, not entirely.

“What happened?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“The hell it doesn’t. Your father is a puppet master,” he said. “If he can’t control it, he doesn’t like it.”

She shook her head. “No. What I did wasn’t okay.”

“What did you do?” he repeated the question.

She closed her eyes, looking pained. “I got drunk and shouted something... Something I shouldn’t have. In front of the most influential people in the county.”

“What did you say?”

She met his gaze, looking somewhat defeated. “Oh. I just revealed to all in attendance that my mother was having an affair.”

CHAPTER SIX

SABRINA WAS MAD at herself for telling him any of this. She was mad at herself for walking into this discussion. For letting him know that she had made herself vulnerable like that, that she had been so affected by losing him.

But honestly, she had been angry at herself for thirteen years. For detonating a bomb in her life because she had lost what she could see now was simply a crush. At the time, it had felt like love. Destroyed, broken love. As if her heart had been pulled out of her chest, still beating, and dashed to the rocks to be pounded by the surf. No one had ever suffered as she had, she had been certain.

It hadn’t just been about love. She had been taught at her father’s knee not to give trust. Not to friends or anyone. To hold her emotions close. To keep walls in place to stay protected, and she’d done that. With everyone but him.

When she’d lost him, she’d not only lost the man she’d fallen in love with, she’d lost her first real friend. The only person who knew all of those things about her. How hard she tried to please her father. How she felt continually caught in the middle of being a good daughter and trying to fit in with friends. Trying to have friends at all.

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