Stirred: A Love Story (28 page)

The rain had stopped as they lay on the blankets thrown over bales of hay in the darkness of the early morning hours, moments before the moon handed the sky over to day. Sage threaded her fingers through his as if he might slide away with the moon. His chest slowly pulsed up and then down as her eyes fell to the scar on his shoulder.

She swallowed. “How’d you get this?” She gently traced the smooth faded line.

Garrett closed his eyes and said nothing. He had declined to share before, but somehow this was different. The intimacy of allowing him to take her was more than she’d ever offered to another person. It left her empty, needing something in return. She hated that feeling and was getting tired of asking for more. They were somehow able to speak with their bodies, but once the passion passed, he was often so hard to find.

Sage sat up and grabbed her clothes in the dim light. The scratch of the blanket beneath them was now uncomfortable on her bare skin. She climbed off the hay and suddenly wanted to be anywhere other than where she was. As if someone had slammed a door, she saw things as they were. She loved him to complete distraction, probably always would, but there was no way she was going to give away all of her light if he couldn’t—wouldn’t—keep her warm. She’d been left in darkness of doubt before, in the cold with nothing. No way in hell would she go back there, not even for him.

Garrett shifted and pulled on his jeans, still without a word. Bare chested, he sat with his hands on his knees. The curve of his beautiful body was lit by the first glimpse of morning. He broke her heart. Every time. She grabbed her jacket and walked toward the light.

“Where are you going?”

“Home.” She turned back as he jumped off the hay. “Did you have something you wanted to say?”

He ran his hand over the stubble of his far-too-tired face and shook his head. “What time is it?”

Sage pulled out her phone, wondering why she was still standing there as if one moment or one word would wake him up and change things. “It’s five.”

He blinked and appeared as if he’d been called to attention. “Shit, I’ve got. . . we’ve got harvest and I need to check on Dad. Where’s Jack?”

Tears slid down her face. Sage walked into the early dawn toward her car, ignoring him as he halfheartedly called her name.

Garrett spent the morning getting back on schedule. Jack was asleep in the corner of the bedroom. He’d driven them both home and stepped into the shower. Eyes burning as the warm water hit his face, and with an exhausted will, he tried not to think about her. The look on her face, her beautiful naked body rushing to redress while he lay there unable to tell her that he knew. He knew he was fucked up. Everything he’d ever understood was growing apart, falling apart, and it frightened him. He should have held her, held onto her, but he couldn’t move. He didn’t know how to make something new. He should have told her that, let her help him, but even with his mind screaming, “Don’t let her leave feeling like this, you asshole,” there was nothing he could do. He was trapped in a past that simply wouldn’t allow him to have her.

After drying off, he dressed and went to work. Harvest of anything was usually a great time. Fields so teeming with life, he couldn’t help but leave the office and join his men in the sunshine. As he jumped in his truck, all he wanted to do was work himself to within an inch of his sad, selfish life.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

G
arrett walked into the kitchen at The Yard almost a week later. He’d put Logan’s order on the delivery schedule, telling himself it was for the best, but somehow there he was, the blaring sounds of some hair band bringing back the faint memory of the garage his father used to take the truck to when it needed repairs or new tires. Every now and then, when Garrett heard bad eighties rock or smelled used oil, he was transported back to a time when getting a Dr. Pepper with his dad on a summer afternoon or scoring a lollipop at the register was all it took to make his day. Things were different now. Nothing was simple about the music or the woman he knew had turned it on.

“What the hell did you do?” Travis asked, his hands tossing something in a large silver bowl.

“Specifics please, and try not to sound like a damn chick.”

“This is Motley Crew. Do you have any idea what that means?”

“No, but I’m guessing it’s not flowers and running through a field?”

Travis shook his head and washed his hands. “Hair bands are ‘I don’t give a shit’ music. It’s a personal favorite of mine, but Sage never plays this. She’s been listening to it nonstop for the past week. It feels like the whole damn world is off its tilt.”

Although he always thought of hair band music as mindless, “I don’t give a shit” worked too. He put the delivery down on the counter. “That’s the last of the brussels sprouts, and tell Logan we had a run on the chard, so he needs to pull from his own garden to supplement this week.”

“You could tell him yourself,” Logan said, stepping out of his office.

Garrett nodded his head in greeting and was quiet.

“I’m guessing this is you?” He gestured toward the speakers playing overhead.

“Probably.”

“You know, both of you are a real pain in the ass. First Travis, and now you. Quit messing with my damn restaurant.”

Travis laughed. It figured he would laugh, he was probably sleeping soundly, his story had worked out.

Garrett wasn’t feeling as good about his chances.

“Are you going in there?” Logan glanced at him.

“I was going to, but according to your man here, Sage and hair bands are never a good idea.”

“Things that bad, huh? You’re relying on Travis’s musical horoscopes?”

Garrett turned on him and wasn’t sure if his brother actually looked good or if Garrett felt like such shit that any kind of happy was accentuated. “You putting on some weight?”

Logan’s eyes sparkled with sarcasm. “Too much bread.”

Garrett laughed at the inside joke, remembering the early morning he had walked in on his brother and Kara. A moment into their joking, Sage came into the kitchen.

“Oh,” she said, stopping short, “I didn’t mean to break up the party.”

Logan and Travis looked at each other and before Garrett could say a word, they were gone. Was there some sort of escape hatch when thoroughly pissed-off women entered the kitchen? Sage, ignoring him, plucked at the herbs laid out on the counter and walked back to the bar.

Garrett closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept well since somehow managing to screw up the hottest rain fantasy he didn’t even know he had. Grabbing a tomato off the counter and popping it into his mouth, he contemplated walking out the back door. But never one to walk away from a fight, he headed into the bar instead.

The music was still loud and still eighties. Smashing something in a marble bowl, Sage didn’t look up, so he took a seat at the empty bar.

“Can you talk for a minute?”

She looked up, feigned being unable to hear him, and continued smashing at the bowl.

Garrett stepped behind the bar and turned off the music.

She stopped smashing, blew her bangs out of her face, and didn’t say a word. Extending his hand, Garrett stepped closer, hoping she would take it.

After a moment of hesitation that gave him a chance to see she was tired and masking hurt behind being pissed off, she put her hand in his. He gently pulled her to the wine cellar and thought he caught a glimpse of a smile break through, but it was gone by the time he closed the door behind them.

She spoke first. “I told you the first day you touched me that I wouldn’t be able to go back. I meant it. All of that seems so ridiculous now because you were right. I didn’t love you then, not like this. This is going to kill me if I don’t walk away. So I’m leaving.”

Garrett felt the tiny room turn.

“Hollis is with my uncle. I’m going to see her for a few days and hopefully get myself together. When I get back, you can start doing deliveries again so you can see Logan. I’ll work nights so you don’t have to avoid me.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

Sage picked up one of the bottles surrounding them and for a minute he thought she might throw it at him, but she only stared into the glass, and Garrett had never felt more helpless in his life. Her playfulness was gone; she was serious and hollow. Was it possible he’d made her this way? He had spent his life in the background, working and protecting when necessary. That was his role, but if he had been meant to protect her, he’d failed.

“I slipped off the roof of the barn when I was sixteen. I was drinking with some friends and lost my footing. Broke my shoulder, but it didn’t heal right so they had to go in.”

“What?”

“My shoulder, you asked about my scar.”

Sage gave him that dumbass look he recognized from his sister. Then she laughed before her eyes returned to the same vacant gaze.

“What are you looking for, Sage?”

She turned the bottle in her hand. “You can’t give me what I’m looking for, you said it yourself. It’s not your fault.”

“What the hell does that mean? I’ve told you I love you and I do, but maybe I’m not who you thought I was, maybe the reality isn’t what you want.”

“This whole thing was messed up from the beginning. I didn’t represent myself, who I am or what I’m about from the beginning. It’s my fault.” She slid the bottle back into its place.

“Stop.”

“No, it is. I pretended to be something I thought would free me and then it let me have you. But you’re right, I’m more than that woman. I can’t change me, and you can’t handle all of me.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Right, sorry you
won’t
handle me. You want sex, banter, and the occasional conversation. I want you, all of you.”

“I can’t be something I’m not. I know I’m messed up, but I work.”

“I get that. We all work, Garrett, but then we go home, we have time off. People love, have a family, lie on the couch, it happens.”

He didn’t respond.

“I don’t want to want anymore. I need to
be
wanted. I’m not the same woman who sat back picturing fantasies. I know the rush of it now, what it is to hold a man while he sees himself in my eyes. I know his laugh, his touch. I can feel him in a room before I’ve even seen him. I’ve experienced all of that now and I can’t go back to the sidelines. I want the whole thing.”

“All the time? Life doesn’t work that way.”

“Mine does, or it will. Remember when we were in Napa in the hot air balloon? You drove all the way up there to be with me.”

Garrett nodded, and his chest tightened at the memory of her flushed and beautiful against a blue sky.

“I felt so. . . desired and alive. I don’t need you all the time, but for that hour, we were suspended. It was like we were kids. I want that in my life. And you’ve helped me figure out what that looks like.”

“Stop.”

“It’s true. I read this book once on visualization. A person needs to see what they want if they are ever going to make it real. I won’t be afraid the next time I want something. I won’t need tequila next time. I’ll grab it, grab him. So, thank you for that.”

The thought of her with another man hit him square in the chest because there was no question it would happen, that someone would find her and love her. She knew what she wanted now, and it wasn’t him.

Sage sighed, probably because he was once again silent. He wasn’t sure what to say, had no idea how to keep her.

“I need you to leave so I can get to work,” she said, giving up and stepping back from him.

“When will you be back? I don’t want you to go.”

“Sure you do, it’s easier this way.”

“I love you.”

“I know you do, it’s simply that I’ve loved you longer. I’ll always be ahead of you. Things should have stayed the way they were before we ever walked into this room.” She tried to smile and backed up toward the door.

He touched her face. She started to resist and then closed her eyes. “Please, go.”

Garrett had been at some crossroads in his life, moments when he could turn right or left, and he liked to think that he’d made good choices. That he’d acted in ways that honored his family and who he was as a man. All that was about to change because he was going to let her go, and that felt wrong in every way possible. She would go back to her family and someday find a man who could return everything she’d given to him. He’d make her feel loved, which was something he’d apparently been unable to do, and Garrett would go back to his work. A life he understood.

Sage crossed her arms over her chest. He noticed the tiny pineapples on her shirt; details that would normally make him smile now made him sick with longing. He missed her already. Brushing past her, Garrett left his heart behind in the tiny wine cellar. Fine by him—he wouldn’t be using the damn thing anymore.