Page 97 of Burned & Bound

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Ain’t that the Myles and McNamara way?”

“I never wanted it,” he told me.That wasn’t a surprise.West never did like the ranch. The horses, yes. But the rest of it? It never interested him. “Did you?”

“I was raised to run this place.”

“I know that. We both fucking were. But did youwantit?” West repeated. “Or are you just doing it because we’re supposed to?”

Well, that was a fucking question, wasn’t it?Our entire lives were woven into the ranch—our ancestry and our legacy. But when I let myself entertain the thought of an ideal future, it never involved this ranch. Duty outweighed desire every time. In the end, I’d die on this ranch, and I knew that.

But for the sake of honesty, I didn’t tell him that.

“Bull riding,” I said. “It was always bull riding that I wanted to do. If I had my way, that’d be all I do, even after I retire.”

“What’s that like?” West asked. I made a questioning sound, not following his line of thinking. Honestly, the whole conversation felt completely off-topic compared to where it started. But sometimes, talking to West was like that. He’d get that far-off look in his eyes and come back with somequestion that made no sense compared to everything else going on. I just kind of rolled with it to see where we ended up. “Knowing what you want from life I mean. What’s that like?”

“Oh.”Well, fuck.That I didn’t know how to answer. Not easily anyway. “It’s… comforting and devastating. When I’m able to do it, it feels right. It’s… where I belong, you know? But when I can’t? I don’t know. I don’t feel like me.”

“I don’t know what that’s like.” His voice was so damn quiet I could barely hear him over the breeze around us. I nudged Zeus a little closer. “I’ve never wanted anything for my life.”

“Not even when you were a kid?”

“I just wanted to feel safe as a kid.” The barbed wire he kept weaving around my heart dug in a little deeper with those words.

“And now?” I dared to ask, mostly because I wanted to know—for both him and me. “Do you feel safe now, West?”

He gave half a shrug.

“Most days I don’t feel a whole lot of anything,” West said. He fell silent, which was probably a good thing because I didn’t know how to talk to him like this. How did I comfort him? How did I make him feel better?

How the hell did I help him?

CHAPTER 66

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Hot water soothed theperpetual ache in my muscles as I stood under the shower. It did nothing, however, to calm the chaos in my mind. And it wasn’t so much chaos as it was uncertainty and sadness—feelings that were becoming synonymous with West. The more he divulged about himself, about his life, and about the little ways he felt, the more out of my depth I felt.

I had no idea what I was doing. And what little I was doing, was it enough? Was loving him through this enough? It hadn’t been for Peter’s brother. I didn’t want to lose West because I didn’t do enough.

The glass door slid open, and I turned just as West stepped in—completely naked, of course. My heart stuttered at the sight of him. Working the ranch had given him more muscle and tanned his skin. He was sinfully hot with his tattoos and piercings.

I shut down that line of thinking real fucking fast.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked. It wasn’t that my shower didn’t have room for the two of us—it did—but I was a little confused as to why he wasjoining me. After everything, I didn’t have a clue where he and I stood in the physical department of things.

I moved aside, his body brushing against mine as he stepped under the water. The audible little sigh he let out was sexy as hell, and it shouldn’t have been.

“There’s no hot water downstairs.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“It is. But you’re not down there.”Yeah, that was hard to argue with.The idea that he wanted to be around me was a nice one.“Why the hell do you have so many soap containers?”

“Let me guess, you have one bottle for everything?” I retorted. “Actually, I don’t want the answer to that.”

“It’s a bar, not a bottle,” West told me. There was something akin to amusement in his voice, and I couldn’t tell if he was fucking with me or not. I decided he had to be. No self-respecting man would use a bar of fucking soap for everything.At least, I fucking hoped not.“May I?”

He reached around me to grab the shampoo bottle. His body slid across mine in more places than I could acknowledge. All I knew was it set my nerves on fire, awakening everything all at once, and I tried real damn hard to get my dick in control. I thought of the stupidest shit I could come up with out of respect. I could handle one shower with West without my dick running rampant.Maybe.