CHAPTER FIVE

      KAYLEE WAS IN her pajamas when her phone rang. She’d just come inside after riding her horse, Flicka, around the trail behind her house and getting her put away, and was currently sprawled on the couch with her cat, Albus, lying across her chest.

      Her heart kicked a little bit when she looked at the screen and saw that it was Bennett.

      “Are you having more cow drama?” she asked. “Because I’m getting ready for bed.”

      “No, not exactly.”

      “What’s going on?”

      He sounded...he sounded weird. Not like himself. Bennett was cool and in control, always. He was the kind of guy you wanted to have around in a crisis, and he professionally handled animal crises on an almost daily basis. He was not the kind of guy who ever sounded... Well, whatever it was he sounded now. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Only that it wasn’t him.

      “It’s hard to explain. Can you come over?”

      Thoughts chased each other around her head like rabid foxes. He was ill. He had some kind of terrible disease. He was quitting the business and leaving her.

      “I’ll be right over.”

      She hung up and started hunting for something to wear. She put on a pair of ripped jeans and a gray T-shirt that had a logo for the veterinary clinic on it. By the time she had gone to her truck, she had thought of at least three new scenarios, each one more upsetting than the last, for why Bennett had sounded so grave.

      Olivia wanted him back. Olivia, who was pregnant with another man’s baby, wanted him back because Luke had abandoned her. Yes, that was it. Luke had abandoned her, and she was asking Bennett to raise another man’s child.

      Bennett was a good man. He was a good and faithful man, and he was going to do it.

      She was going to tell him not to do it.

      Kaylee was completely worked up in a lather by the time she was halfway to Bennett’s place. Ready to fight him over his chivalrous nature. He was not marrying a woman and raising another man’s child as his own. He wasn’t doing it.

      She couldn’t imagine anything more terrible.

      At least when they had been together at first she had thought Olivia was exactly the kind of woman he should be with. And yes, that had burned. Because Olivia was so different from everything that Kaylee was. And having to acknowledge that Olivia was going to fill a place in his life that he clearly didn’t think Kaylee could fill was painful. Painful all the way through her bones in a way that forced her to clench her teeth to make them stop aching.

      But nonetheless, it had been bearable. Bearable because she had thought that Olivia would make him happy.

      But this wouldn’t make him happy. This was outrageous.

      She pulled her truck up to the front of his house and turned the engine off quickly, hopping down out of the cabin and slamming the door, only to stop once she’d climbed the front steps.

      She was just about to raise her hand to knock when the door opened, and she was met by a shell-shocked-looking Bennett.

      “It’s Olivia, isn’t it?”

      It occurred to her just then that Olivia might have lost the baby. That she wanted to marry him now that she wasn’t tied to Luke. That would be a lot harder to talk him out of. Especially if Olivia was upset and Bennett wanted to fix it.

      “Don’t do it,” she repeated. “Don’t take her back.”

       “What?”

      She blinked.

      Right. He hadn’t actually said anything about Olivia. He hadn’t said anything about anything. It was just that all of those scenarios had seemed so possible, and she had latched on to that one so tightly, and turned it over about fifty different times on the drive over.

      “Never mind. What’s happening?”

      He stepped outside, closing the door softly behind him. “I don’t know how to explain this to you,” he said, his words rough.

      “What?” He looked... He didn’t look good at all. His eyes looked like they’d been punched, dark shadows spreading beneath them. “Bennett, you are freaking me out.”

      He shook his head and walked down the front steps past her, his boots making a hollow sound on the wood, then crunching on the gravel.

      He sighed slowly, heavily, looking upward. She followed his gaze, staring at the inky sky, with the stars bursting through like a candle in punched tin.

      “You’re the first person I called,” he said, sounding as if the realization of that was dawning over him slowly. “I’m going to have to talk to Wyatt. And Grant. Jamie. My dad. I’m going to have to explain some things to a lot of people.”

      “What? Do you have some kind of terrible disease? Do you have gambling debt? Have you lost the ranch?” She frowned. “Did you lose our business?”

      He shook his head. “No. Kaylee... You remember Marnie Claire?”

      “Yes,” Kaylee said, and an instant spike of loathing burst hot and insistent through her chest. Yes, she knew Marnie Claire. Bennett’s first girlfriend. Kaylee hadn’t liked her, not at all. Not because there was anything wrong with her specifically, but because Bennett had been so obsessed with her. She’d seen less of him over the months he’d dated Marnie than she ever had since they’d become friends.

      He’d told Kaylee before they’d had sex for the first time, a shy grin on his face as he’d confessed it was going to happen that night. And Kaylee had wanted to die. It was the moment that had forced her to realize that she was...jealous. That she wished it were her.

      She’d decided very quickly after, sometime during his very messy breakup with Marnie, in fact, that she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to be his girlfriend for a little while. She wanted to be his friend forever. To become veterinarians like they’d promised each other, and work together.

      To be something more, better, than a husband and wife. Her parents’ marriage hadn’t made the institution seem all that aspirational.

      “There’s something you don’t know,” he said.

      “What?” He sounded so very, very grave. Grave enough she was starting to wonder if she was going to have to prove that she was a friend who’d help hide the body.

      He lowered his head. “When we were sixteen Marnie got pregnant.”

      Kaylee felt like the ground tilted underneath her feet. “What?”

      “Marnie was pregnant in high school.”

      “Whose baby was it?” The words felt numb and ridiculous. But they fell out of her mouth naturally. Because if it were Bennett’s... It couldn’t have been.

      “Mine.”

      She was...stunned. She couldn’t even process it. Because there had never been a baby. So how could Marnie have been pregnant?

      “Marnie left. She moved away,” Kaylee said.

      “Yes,” he said slowly. “After she lost the baby.”

      Kaylee’s breath rushed from her body, like it was trying to flee the scene of this very difficult conversation. “Bennett, how did you never tell me any of this?”

      “I didn’t tell anyone,” he said. He closed his eyes.