“I do need to go, though. I have a life. I have a ranch. It’s been great to be here, great to visit family, but it’s time for me to go.”
“You are a grown-ass man, though,” she said, tears spilling out of her eyes. “So you could stay. If you wanted to.”
His face turned to stone, and she knew she was doing the very worst thing. She was crying. She was breaking apart, but she didn’t have the shield of pleasure as an excuse. This was just her being broken apart, bit by excruciating bit. Not by desire, not by the touch of his hands.
By his words. By the horrible, flat look in his eyes.
By her own breaking heart.
“I wish you would stay.”
“I can’t. It was a bad idea, Violet, and I’m sorry. But I told you... I told you. If I had known you were a virgin I would never have taken you to bed.”
“You didn’t have any trouble taking me to bed about a hundred times since then. Which is pretty damn impressive for fourteen days.”
“It wasn’t a hundred. Either way... Look, I never said I wasn’t a bastard.”
“No. You actually told me with your words that you were. But everything that you did... Everything that you did says that’s a lie. I choose to believe what you did.”
“You shouldn’t have. You just... You just thought it was good sex. And good sex makes you a little muddled. You’ll get over it. Start on that career of promiscuity.” And then he winked. Like it was... Like it was a joke.
“You’re honestly okay with that? You’re okay with me going off and sleeping with someone else?”
“You’re not mine, Violet. Do what you want.”
And then he turned, putting his black cowboy hat on his head and walking out the door.
And Violet felt like he’d taken something of hers that she would never be able to get back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ITHADBEENa month since Wolf had left. Violet still wasn’t smiling. Not ever. She was also struggling to get any of her work done. Struggling to function at all. She felt like such an idiot. She was a bad stereotype of everything virgins were in these situations. She was pathetic. She was pathetic and she was... She was depressed. She was more than depressed.
She couldn’t even smile over Thanksgiving dinner.
“Violet,” Clara said. “We really are going to have to talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“He’s been gone a month.”
“I know,” she said, looking around the room at her family. Her uncle Liam and his wife, Sabrina, her uncle Alex, Clara’s husband, her uncle Finn and his wife, Lane. Plus everybody’s assorted children, including her two little half brothers, who were currently sword fighting with turkey legs.
There were so many kids at this point it was difficult to keep track.
And there was Violet, sort of the odd one out. More peer almost to her uncles and aunts, than her own half siblings or her cousins.
But they still saw her as a kid; all except Clara. A kid who wasn’t really a kid. Not like the little ones running around all over the place.
“Bo,” her dad said, walking over and pulling her into a hug. “I’ve barely seen you the last few weeks.” She looked up at her dad and tried to smile. “Are you honestly grimacing at me over the nickname?”
“No,” she said. In the grand tradition of nicknames, her own had very little to do with her actual name.
He had once called her Violet Beauregarde the Blueberry, a nod to Willy Wonka. Over the years it had been shortened to Bo. And it had never fully gone away.
“Then to what do I owe the scowl?”
“She’s full of scowling,” Alex said, walking over to them. “I think she’s working too hard.”