Olivia Gates - Best of Desire

“This is your own fault,” she muttered as she listened to the rumble of the men’s laughter. “If you hadn’t fallen for him, then this wouldn’t matter at all. You’d simply leave as you’d planned to do in the first place and you wouldn’t have looked back.”

But that was the trouble, she told herself. She would be looking back. Always.

Jericho laughed aloud at something one of his brothers said and the rich, deep sound of it sliced into her.

Nikki whined and Daisy bent to scoop up the little dog and cuddle her close to comfort both of them. At the moment, she wanted nothing more than to walk right out there and confront Jericho. She wanted answers. She wanted him to look her in the eye and try to say she didn’t belong. That there was nothing between them.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” she told herself quietly, her voice lost in the sigh of the wind. “Daisy,” she murmured, burying her face in Nikki’s soft fur, “why did you have to fall in love with him? Why couldn’t you have just slept with him and kept your heart out of the mix?”

Too late to regret that now, she thought, as pain whipped through her. She wished she could see Jericho’s face. Would she see the lie in his eyes? Or would she see an indisputable truth written there?

But she stood her ground, because as long as he was with his brothers, it wasn’t the time to confront him. She’d only look like the fool she felt for having been caught eavesdropping on them all.

She stayed put and waited until the truck engine fired up and the three men rode off down the long drive. Only then did she come around the edge of the house to look at the fantail of dust rising up in the wake of the truck.

Her heart ached as Jericho’s words played over and over in her head. He was determined to feel nothing for her, she realized. It didn’t matter that her own feelings had grown and changed since she’d first come to King Mountain. Didn’t matter that she loved him—he wouldn’t be interested.

She wrapped her arms around herself and held on, scraping her hands up and down her upper arms in a futile attempt to beat back the rising chill inside her. Until just a few minutes ago, she hadn’t even been aware that she’d begun nursing dreams centered around Jericho. Dreams that had the two of them happily living together here on the mountain. Building a family. Raising their children and loving each other every night.

How hard it was to feel those nebulous dreams shatter and dissolve as if they’d never been. But through that pain, she managed to console herself with the fact that she’d done what she’d originally come here to do. She’d made love with Jericho King and if the gods were kind, she was already pregnant. She’d find out soon and then, while she still was able, she’d leave him here on his precious mountain and find another place to belong.

But not, she told herself, before she found out exactly what he was hiding from her.

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