His gut churned at her words. He’d never met Bobby Weston, not that he could remember anyway. He wished he had, wished he could know the kind of man Elena had been willing to change her life plans for when she hadn’t been willing to do the same for him.
But then, he’d just been a ranch hand, offering her an uncertain life on the road. He hadn’t had a spread like this to offer her. Maybe if he had, things would have been different. Maybe she would have picked him.
With a jolt of anger at himself for even thinking about it, he did his best to push the thoughts away. What did it matter? It was a long time ago. Things had happened the way they had, and there was no changing them. He had a perfectly good life, and it looked like she had, too—at least up until the point her husband was killed.
“Must have been some guy,” Matt said, keeping his tone neutral.
“He was,” she said quietly. “At least in the beginning. We started seeing each other…the summer after you left.”
The words sent another jolt through him, and again he was irritated by his response. A year was a long time, so why did it feel like a betrayal, like she’d moved on far too quickly? It wasn’t as if he’d been a monk in the year after he’d left this place—left her—behind. But then, he hadn’t ended up marrying any of the women he’d been involved with, either.
Pulling out one of the chairs from the table, Elena sank into the seat. “We’d known each other, or at least known of each other, for years, of course. The town’s too small for us not to have. I can’t remember us saying two words to each other, though. He was a few years ahead of me in school, a member of one of the town’s founding families, and I…wasn’t. Our paths never really crossed. Then that summer I was waiting tables at the diner again, and he struck up a conversation with me. It was probably the first time he ever really noticed me. We got to talking, and we actually had some things in common.
“First and foremost, Bobby didn’t want to stay in Western Bluff, either, and he wasn’t supposed to. I don’t know how much you heard about the Westons, or even remember if you did, but Bobby’s older brother, Jim Junior, was the one who’d been groomed to take over the ranch. Bobby’s father, Big Jim, died about twenty years ago when Bobby was just a boy. Junior was all of eighteen, but he managed to take over and make the ranch his own. He offered to make Bobby a place as he got older, but Bobby wasn’t really interested in the ranch. The summer you were here, he had an internship at a company in Houston, so he wasn’t in town. He wanted to be in the city as much as I did. The only reason he was back that summer was because Junior said he needed his help and asked Bobby to stick around. Bobby had already graduated but didn’t have a job lined up yet, so he agreed.”
Elena grimaced, her eyes far away. “That whole summer we talked about how we were going to get out of here. He was going to come to Austin with me when I went back to school.” Matt nearly flinched at the words, at the significance of them, but managed not to. “He knew people there so he could try to find a job just as well as he could in Houston. It should have worked out perfectly. But when the summer was over, Junior asked him to stay a little longer, and made a big enough deal about it that Bobby agreed. That’s when he asked me to marry him. He wanted to make things permanent, because he said there was no doubt we’d be together. And I said yes.”
“How long had you been going out with him before you got married?”
Her eyes flew to his face. He met her gaze and held it. He could tell she didn’t like the answer, and suspected he wasn’t going to like hearing it, either.
“Three months.”
He had no trouble understanding her reaction and did his best to hide his own.
Three months. The same amount of time Matt had been involved with her before they’d parted ways, before she’d refused to make the same commitment to him she’d made to another man just one year later.
“You must have really loved him,” he said, instantly hearing the trace of bitterness in his own voice and hating himself for it.
She lowered her eyes. “He was crazy about me, and I—” she swallowed “—was crazy about him.”
Matt didn’t miss the way her voice faltered before she finished the statement, or how strained it sounded uttering those words. Were they that hard for her to admit? Or was it admitting them to him?
“I’m sure your father must have been thrilled that you got married so fast,” he said wryly, remembering the man’s reaction to Matt’s involvement with his daughter. Ed Reyes had been so protective of his daughter Matt couldn’t imagine him thinking anyone was good enough for her. Or maybe Bobby Weston’s background had made him a more acceptable prospect than a humble ranch hand.
“He wasn’t,” she acknowledged with a sardonic smile. “We eloped and didn’t tell anyone about it until it was done, and then I went back to school.
“We both thought it would only be a few months until he joined me in Austin. Instead, a few months later we found out the truth about Junior. He hadn’t been feeling well, had been going to doctors to get checked out, which is why he needed Bobby’s help, though he assured everyone he was fine. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t just sick, he was dying. He was going fast, and didn’t admit it almost until the end. Then he was gone. He wasn’t married and didn’t have any kids, so Bobby inherited the ranch.
“At first I assumed he’d sell. But Bobby felt like he owed it to Junior to stay and run the ranch. I understood, and felt like I had to support that. His brother had just died, this was his family spread, and he was the last of the Westons. I couldn’t exactly argue with him. So when I finished school, I came back, too, and we stayed.”
“And you’re still here,” Matt summarized.
Elena nodded, more than a hint of resignation in the gesture. “Still here.”
“Were you happy?”
She looked at him, her gaze steady. “No,” she said flatly. “Neither of us were. After the first couple years I did begin to argue that Bobby should sell, but he wouldn’t. The thing is, Big Jim was something of a local legend around here, and all his life Bobby heard about how great his father was. And then, after being the second brother, the one who wasn’t expected to take over, he suddenly had pretty big shoes to fill, especially since he was the last Weston. It was a lot of pressure. At least he saw it that way, and it changed him. We had some setbacks over the years, some rough times, and Bobby took every one of them personally, as though he was failing his father and his brother. He became obsessed. The ranch was all he ever thought about. He was constantly coming up with plans and schemes to make things work better around here, none of which ever panned out, which only made things worse.
“The night he was killed, we’d had an argument. I’d pretty much had enough. Bobby had this idea to build this new irrigation system, claiming it would make things work a lot smoother around here. Of course, it would also require digging up half the spread and spending every last remaining cent we had. It was complete madness and would do nothing to solve any of the actual problems.” She swallowed hard. “I told him if he intended to go through with it, I would have no choice but to leave him. I wasn’t going to stand by and watch him destroy himself and what was left of our lives on his obsession with the ranch. He told me to go, because if I couldn’t understand how important it was to him, then I didn’t really love him anyway.
“I walked out and went for a drive to clear my head. I just needed to think about things for a while. I didn’t really go anywhere, didn’t think about where I was headed. I just drove until it seemed like I’d gone far enough, turned around and came back. I was gone for about four hours. When I came back, I noticed the door to his study was open and the light was still on. I almost ignored it, just wanting to go to bed and not have another confrontation, but I knew if I did he’d just stay up all night the way he