“She was here for a year, and each day I could see a little bit more of her happiness die. Her spirit was suffocating and the sweet girl I loved was turning into someone I didn’t recognize.” He shook his head and his voice dropped lower. “I thought it would all turn around when she found out she was pregnant.”

I gasped a little because he hadn’t mentioned having kids. My breath caught at the image of him holding a dark haired little girl with gray eyes, atop a horse that had the same black and silver coloring as her dad. I had no idea where the picture came from but it made my heart race and my palms sweaty.

Cy’s shoulders turned to stone in front of me and his horse obviously sensed the change in his rider’s mood because it pulled to the side and jerked its head hard in the bridle. “Dad was down to his final hours but business was doing better with me at the helm. I thought starting a family would settle her in and make her see this was as good a place as any to raise our kids. We were surrounded by family and our baby would have a legacy that they grew up preserving, just like I did. Being away made me appreciate everything I’d worked for, and the fact that I had helped build it with my own hands gave me a sense of pride that I didn’t have in the city. She finally seemed hopeful and reluctantly okay with us building our lives here.”

He went quiet for a minute and when he finally did speak again, his voice sounded like it was being dragged from someplace inside of him that was filled with all those sharp and pointy things I’d been running from when I found him. “It was the middle of winter when something went wrong. She started having cramps and before any of us knew what was happening, she was bleeding and in more pain than I knew any human could feel. The closest town to the ranch is an hour away. In winter, that’s easily two hours or more. By the time I got her to the hospital, she lost the baby and almost lost her life.” He cleared his throat and shook his head as if he was trying to dislodge the painful memory. “She never came back to the ranch. She refused. She blamed this place for taking both her husband and her baby away from her. She begged me to go with her when she was finally well enough to travel, but I couldn’t do it. I had my dad and my brothers. I had the ranch and things that were always going to be my responsibility. She broke my heart but in all honesty, I broke hers even more. She left and I stayed and that’s how it ended. It was a mirror of how things ended between my mom and dad.”

It took me a second to find my voice, and when I did it was strained and thin with compassion. “That’s sad. I’m so incredibly sorry for both of you.” It also explained why he might not be a cowboy on the outside but was one hundred percent cowboy in the inside. His life was what sad country songs were written about. It sounded tragic and heartbreaking. Most people split up because they fell out of love or simply couldn’t remember what they loved about the person in the first place. It seemed entirely unfair that Cy and his ex loved and cared enough but that still wasn’t enough to get to happily ever after.

“Don’t be. Selah is remarried to a chiropractor and lives outside of Boston in Salem. She has three kids and sends me a Christmas card every year. She offered to fly back when my dad finally passed, but I couldn’t handle seeing her on top of putting him to rest and the drama my mom tried to create once he was gone. Selah was always a good woman, she just wasn’t the woman for me.”

“You weren’t for her.” I tossed his words from the other day back at him and was rewarded with a half grin. Gah, it made me feel warm all over and had those tingles in private places pulsing happily to a tune that only he seemed to know how to sing. I lifted my eyebrows, not because he was still on friendly terms with a woman who mattered so much to him, but because of what he said about his mom. “Your mom caused a scene when your dad passed away? That sounds like something my mother would do.”

He shot me a look over his shoulder and our eyes locked. “Dad divorced her when he found out he was sick, not because he stopped loving her, but because he didn’t want her to try and sell the ranch out from underneath us once he was gone. She stopped coming around, but by that time he had remarried so there was no way for her to really manipulate him and play games with him anymore. She took the opportunity to make her feelings known at his funeral about being cut out and left without so much as a dime from him, until I dragged her ass out of the church and told her I never wanted her to step foot back in Wyoming. I must have made my point because she has a five-year-old granddaughter she’s never attempted to meet.”

“Do you still see your stepmom?” I liked the idea that his dad had managed to experience a few moments of happiness before passing away. He sounded like a good man, a strong man. He sounded a lot like my own grandfather and there was no doubt he had imparted all those qualities on the man before me who he had raised in his own image.

He gave a chuckle that had no traces of humor or amusement in it. “I see her almost every day. You’ve met her.” His dark eyebrows shot up and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “Brynn grew up in a trailer park not too far away from our ranch. She and Lane are the same age and were in the same class at school. Her home life wasn’t the best, partly because of her being a quarter Native, but mostly because her dad likes to drink. My brother has always had a soft heart. He brought her home with him time and time again, and each time she was in worse shape than the last. Dad offered to take her in on a permanent basis but her old man wouldn’t hear of it. Every time she was here he would show up drunk, pissed off, and drag her back home. Local police couldn’t do much about it because the trailer park was between state land and Native land so they were always trying to pass the buck.”