A Cold Creek Baby. RaeAnne Thayne

this tangled morass of emotions wasn’t love. She had tried to talk herself out of it—or more accurately into letting herself love someone else. It was only a girlhood crush, something most sane women put away when they reached an age of reason, for crying out loud.

      Yes, they had a history together. She drew a shaky breath and tucked in the bottom sheet, her mind drifting back five years to that surreal, painful time.

      Plenty of people with difficult histories were able to move on. She was trying. She was even dating again, something she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do with any serious intent since the summer night after her Uncle Guff died, when everything changed.

      For the past month, she had been dating the Pine Gulch police chief. On paper, Trace Bowman was everything she wanted. He was great-looking, he was funny, he adored his own family who had a ranch on the other side of town.

      She was trying as hard as she could to let her fondness for him grow into something more. She wanted a husband, a family. Seeing Quinn and Tess together with their darling little boy and now Brant and Mimi and Abigail only intensified that ache to watch a child of her own grow and learn, to have someone else in this big rambling house to fill all the empty spaces.

      She loved the ranch and found great joy in the hard work needed to make it a success. But she was ready for something more, something she knew she would never be able to find while she was hung up on Cisco del Norte.

      She knew darn well she needed to move on. It was long past time. But every time she thought she was on her way, he showed up with that tired, cocky grin and those secrets in his dark eyes and she tumbled head over heels again.

      Not this time. She pulled the thick Star of David quilt she, her mother and Jo had worked on the summer after Cisco came. She looked at the kaleidoscope of colors, the vivid blues and bright purples and greens. She could still see where her stitches had been crooked, amateurish compared to her mother’s and Jo’s.

      She smoothed a hand over the stitches, remembering the time with two strong, wonderful women. After a moment, she tucked the edges in at the bottom.

      She wanted to be tough like her mother and her Aunt Jo, to just forget him and move on. She almost thought she would have an easier time of it if he would only settle down somewhere instead of wandering from country to country in Latin America, doing heaven knows what.

      If he ever stopped running, maybe she could relax a little, but she was never free from worrying about him. In all these years, he obviously hadn’t managed to find whatever he’d been looking for or he would have given up that life long ago.

      And when he was tired of wandering, he would come back to the ranch for a few days or a week, dredging up all these feelings again.

      She wished she could just tell him to stay away until she got her head on straight. But how could she? Winder Ranch was his home, the first and only really secure haven he had ever known.

      As much as her heart cried out for him to give her a little peace and leave her alone, she couldn’t deprive him of that connection.

      She couldn’t turn him away, but she could control how deeply she allowed her heart to become entangled with him. This time things would be different.

      She couldn’t lose all the progress she had made to fall out of love with him. This time she wasn’t going to let those feelings suck her back down again. She needed to move on with her life, to accept that, like that mountain lion she had seen prowling the edge of her property a few days earlier, Cisco del Norte would always be a wild, roving creature she couldn’t contain.