“You’ve been distant,” Bradley said as they entered their bedroom a few nights later, sitting on the bed and inviting her to sit. She climbed onto it, sitting cross-legged with her hands in her lap while he turned his body toward hers and placed a hand on her ankle.
“Have I?” Kay replied.
“Yes. You know you have. Are you ready to get a fake divorce then?” he said.
Blunt, to the point, and a fair question. She should say yes and end all of this, but she found that she couldn’t. Something down deep wouldn’t let her. Instead, she felt a knot in her tummy as she accepted that maybe this was what she wanted, she was just scared.
“No. I don’t know what I want, Bradley. Everything about this is all screwed up. We didn’t meet one another and date, get a chance to know one another and then fall in love. Instead, we made a business agreement that hinged on exactly the opposite mindset, not getting attached in any way. I was to come here, pretend to be your wife for a while and then get on with my life.”
“You can still do that.”
The tone of his voice was nothing like the sentiment itself. She knew he didn’t want her to go. She could feel it, but could he accept that she was less certain and that perhaps it had a lot more to do with her than it did with him. Reaching out to him, she lay her hand on the side of his face and caressed his cheek.
“Can I? I don’t know. I’ve been what you want because you paid me to be amenable, but this isn’t me. This isn’t the real me and I don’t want to confuse the way you make me feel inside with what I need to do for myself.”
“I’m not sure I follow all that.”
“I came out here with the intention of giving this job a chance. If you hadn’t wanted to hire me, then I would have gotten a job as a waitress or something until I could figure out what to do next. Instead, you offered me a lot of money, enough that I knew, when this was over, I would be in a position to make something more of myself than just a homemaker and a mother. I know that is what omegas are born to do, but it doesn’t mean we want that to be all we are.”
“Is that what you think I want from you?”
“I don’t know what you want from me, honestly. What I do know is that you are looking for someone who pulls their weight here on the ranch. You want a partner that plays a certain role benefitting a man who is now the alpha of this clan.”
“In other words, you don’t know a damned thing.”
Kay looked at him, surprised. The harshness of his words caught her off guard. Pursing her lips, she looked at him and responded.
“I know a lot more than you realize.”
“No. You don’t, because you don’t know the most important thing of all. You have no clue how much I love you. I’ve been in love with you almost from the beginning and you’ve been determined to still look at it as a job, just with some added benefits.”
Kay bit her lip and looked up at him, into his piercing eyes, now passionate with a mix of anger and pain. She was still looking at him when he made one final plea.
“I love you, Kay. Don’t leave me. I never thought I’d find anyone to love again and then, here you are and it all feels perfect. Stay with me and we will work everything else out.”
“I love you too, Bradley,” she said finally.
He sighed heavily and reached for her hands, holding them in his own.
“But...,” he said.
“But I want my own life too. I don’t want to be a ranch hand.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then stay with me while you figure it out. I won’t keep you from having dreams of your own. If you don’t want to work at the ranch, you don’t have to. For the purposes of putting on a show for the clan, I thought it would be good to show we are on the same page, but we’ve nothing to prove now. We can be anything we want to be, and I’m hardly going to lose money over the absence of one worker.”
“I want to go to school.”
“Then do that.”
“I don’t know what I want to study,” she said. “I know that’s crazy, a woman my age still not knowing what she wants to be when she grows up.”
“It’s not crazy at all. Do this. Sign up for classes. There is a community college in town, or you can go with one of those online universities. Take basic studies toward a general degree until something calls out to you. Lots of people do that.”