“Fifth grade?” Sutter frowned. “I think Dallas’s eldest is in fifth grade.”
She nodded. “Ryder’s in my class.”
“He’s had a rough go of it...since his mother walked out.”
“It hasn’t been easy on any of the boys.” She felt herself softening in response to his obvious concern about his nephew, just a little, and steeled herself against it. “But when one person walks out of a relationship, it’s inevitable that someone else is going to be hurt.”
His gaze narrowed. “Are we still talking about Ryder?”
“Of course,” she agreed, the picture of innocence. “Who else would we be talking about?”
“Us,” he said bluntly. “I thought you might have been referring to the end of our relationship—when you dumped me.”
She hated that he could still see through her so easily. “I wasn’t talking about us, and I didn’t dump you,” she denied. “I simply refused to run away with you. Because that’s what you did—you ran.”
“I’m back now,” he told her.
And standing close to him, it was all too easy for Paige to remember the way she used to feel about him. Far too easy to want to feel that way again. Thankfully she wasn’t a naive teenager anymore, and she wouldn’t let it happen. Because sooner or later Sutter would leave Rust Creek Falls again. He always did.
“Yes, you’re back now,” she acknowledged. “But for how long?”
Sutter’s gaze slid away. “Well, as Collin’s campaign manager, I’ll be hanging around until the election.”
His response was hardly unexpected, and yet Paige couldn’t deny that she felt a pang of disappointment in response to his words. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“It’s not easy being here,” he reminded her. “No one has ever welcomed me back with open arms.”
She would have. If he’d come home at any time during those first six months that he’d been gone, she would have welcomed him with open arms and a heart so full of love for him that it was near to bursting.
But he hadn’t come home, not at all in the first year or for a very long time after. And the longer he was gone, the more she realized that the overwhelming love she felt for him wasn’t reciprocated—at least not in the way she needed it to be if they were going to build a life together.
Instead, they’d each moved on without the other. By all accounts Sutter was doing very well in Seattle. Apparently he’d opened his own stables in the city and had established quite the reputation for himself. Paige had been sincerely happy to hear the news and genuinely pleased for him, because she was more than content with her own life in Rust Creek Falls.
She loved her job, she lived close enough to her family that she saw them regularly—although she sometimes wondered if maybe a little
too
frequently—she had good friends and she even went out on occasion. She didn’t want or need anything more—and she certainly didn’t want Sutter Traub turning her life upside down again.
“You saw that tonight,” he pointed out to her. “No one has forgotten what happened, why I left, and no one will miss me when I’m gone again.”
She could tell that he believed it, and her heart ached for him. “This is your home,” she told him. “Whether you choose to live here or not, this is where you belong—with your family and your friends and everyone else who cares about you.”
He managed a wry smile, but his tone when he responded was more wistful than skeptical. “Would you be included in that list?”
Copyright © 2013 by Harlequin Books S.A.
ISBN-13: 9781460321317
HOW TO MARRY A PRINCESS
Copyright © 2013 by Christine Rimmer
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