His eyes darkened, her words touching him for the first time. “You think I wasn’t affected? I changed my entire life because of that accident. You’re right. I was a spoiled, entitled, selfish ass who didn’t think of anyone but himself. I didn’t have respect for consequences. I didn’t think for one second what my behavior might do. I’ve spent every day since then thinking about it.” He looked down, brushing his fingertips over his forearm, over the dark band that was inked there. “This is a reminder.”
Rebecca was shaking. Rage all but consuming her. “That’s lovely,” she spat. “You got a tattoo. So that you would be permanently scarred by all of this too. Well, here’s a news flash for you: I didn’t get to choose a designer scar. I’m marked by it even if I don’t want to be. Even if I want to forget, I can’t. I’m so very glad that my suffering has become a monument to your change and betterment.”
“Would you prefer that I didn’t change at all?”
“I would prefer that I didn’t know a damn thing about you. I would prefer that I had no idea if you felt guilty, if you had changed or if you had drunk yourself into oblivion. Because I don’t want your life touching mine. Not again.”
If he had been human, he would have been reduced to ash by her rant. She was breathing fire. Instead, he simply lifted a shoulder. “I can understand that. But that isn’t the way things are working out. I’m back. I’m dealing with my parents’ property, and your building happens to fall under that umbrella. This is the situation. You can self-destruct because you hate me, or you can accept my help.”
She gritted her teeth, refusing to back down. “Where’s that self-destruct button? I’ll hit it now.”
“You haven’t had any trouble spending my money for the past ten years—I don’t know why you need to stand on principle now.”
A line of frost bloomed down her spine, leaving a painful prickling sensation on her skin. “I’ve never taken anything from you. And if you’re talking about that payoff from your father—”
“I’m not. When you were eighteen you received settlement money.”
“From the insurance company. From your insurance company. That was what the letter from the lawyer said.”
“Yeah. That’s because he lied to you. I sent you the check.”
“And the adjustments after that?”
“Also from me.”
Her knees wobbled, threatening to give out beneath her. She turned sideways, leaning up against the rough-hewn side of her house, trying to keep from collapsing onto the ground. She was such an idiot. But she had no idea how insurance worked. She had no idea how any of this worked. Not beyond the way it had worked for her.
She had gotten a letter from a lawyer claiming to work for the West family, along with a check for an obscene amount of money that had allowed her to cover the start-up of her store. Those payments had given her the livelihood she had, especially in the beginning. Without it, she would have nothing.
That meant that Gage West owned her business. He owned her. In every way that mattered.
Is it any different than if it were insurance money? Isn’t it all money off of your suffering?
It felt different then. Different when it was an arbitrary sum of money that Gage had decided to bestow upon her. Different when it had seemed like an insurance company had decided it was official damages, or something to do with her hospital bills.
Why did everything always come back to him? Why was everything so tangled up in the West family so that she couldn’t escape?
“No.”
“You can say no—it doesn’t make it different.”
“Why are you telling me all of this? Why are you here? What are you doing? I just... I don’t understand why you thought it would be a fun thing to come in and completely mess up my life again.”
“I’m not trying to mess your life up. I’m trying to give you something.”
“Do I look like somebody that accepts gifts?” She flung her hand backward, indicating her house. “I work for what I have. I always have. My brother and I... It’s a point of pride. When life got hard, my mother just sat down and took it, and Jonathan and I refuse to do that. We always have.”
Jonathan had always told her they couldn’t depend on other people to help them out. That no one cared what happened to a couple of poor kids, so they had to make their own way.
So they had. And they’d survived because of it. Not only that, they’d become successful in their own right.
Needing people...that would only leave you crippled when they walked away. And people always walked away.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me. What good is pride if you don’t have what you worked for?”
“It doesn’t have to make sense to you. It makes sense to me. You haven’t been in my life for all of this time, and you don’t have any right to walk in now and pass judgment on the way I’ve been living.”
“I’m going to sell off my father’s assets. It’s something that I have to do to save the ranch. I have to do that for my mother. While I was doing it, I wanted to help you. Instead of leaving you completely screwed in case somebody buys out your building and doesn’t want to give you any kind of fair terms.”
“It’s a little bit too late to worry about my well-being, don’t you think?”
He took a step toward her, and she pressed herself even more firmly against the side of the house. “You don’t need to be so stubborn.”
“Yes,” she said, peeling herself away from the wood. Because why the hell was she shrinking away from him as though she should be afraid of him? She wasn’t. She shouldn’t be. He had been a monster in her closet when she was a girl, but right now, he was just a man. And she was going to treat him like any man who was on her property when he shouldn’t be. “I have to be damn stubborn. Sometimes my stubbornness is the only thing that has gotten me through life. And I’ll be damned if I back down just because you showed up and told me to.”
“That’s where you have yourself a problem. Because I’m not exactly known for my easy disposition and temperament.”
“Are you actually fighting to give me something? I don’t understand you.”
“You don’t have to understand, just be reasonable,” he said.
“No. I don’t know how to be reasonable. I only know how to be right.” This, this right here, her inability to give on anything had gotten her in trouble more than one time over the years. But life was hard, so she had to make herself harder. She didn’t regret it. She didn’t regret learning to insulate herself from hardship. It was a necessity.
“You don’t want to be in debt to me, that’s your main issue. But the way I see it, you already are.”
“Get off my property.”
For once, he complied. Turning away from her and heading toward his truck. She watched him get in, watched him drive away. And then, her knees did give out. She slid down the side of the house, shaking, feeling every inch like the little wimp she was.
The fact that she wasn’t stronger than this was a blow. At least she had held her own when he was here.
Her head was spinning. She was trying to work