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?”
Chapter Two
“Of course,” Paige agreed. “Despite everything that’s happened between us, we’ve always been friends.”
Even as the words tumbled out of her mouth, she wished she could haul them back. Because as much as she believed coming home and making peace with his family was the right thing for Sutter, she knew it wouldn’t work out so well for her. Not when even this brief conversation had her churned up inside.
“Well, speaking in confidence to a friend,” Sutter said, “I’m afraid Collin’s fighting an uphill battle in this election.”
She was surprised, and grateful, for the change of topic. “What makes you say that?”
“The fact that every time I go into town, I hear rumblings—and none of them are very subtle.”
“What kind of rumblings?”
“Just the other day I was at the general store and I heard Ginny Nigh comment to Lilah Goodwin that it’s a sorry state when people nowadays don’t understand the importance of family values. It used to be that when a man got a woman pregnant, he did the right thing and married the mother of his child.”
“You think she was talking about Clayton?”
“I know she was. Of course, she didn’t mention the fact that Clay didn’t even know Delia was pregnant until she showed up on his doorstep with the baby—or the fact that Delia turned around and hightailed it out of town only a few days later.”
“Leaving your brother with the son he never knew he had—which, to me, proves that he does understand family values. He stepped right up to be a daddy to Bennett and never tried to pawn him off on anybody else.”
He smiled, just a little. “I wish you’d been at the store with me.”
But of course they both knew that such an occurrence would have generated gossip of a different kind.
“Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about Ginny—everyone knows she’s just an old busybody.”
“Unfortunately, she isn’t the only one who’s been talking. Even the minister in church the other day was talking about wedding vows and that ‘till death do us part’ needs to mean till death and not until one of the spouses decides he or she has had enough.”
“Pastor Alderson has never made any secret of the fact that he’s opposed to divorce.”
“And Dallas is divorced—but he only took the step to end his marriage after his wife walked out on him and the kids.”
“I think most people around here know that the divorce was instigated by Laurel’s abandonment.”
“Do they?” he challenged. “Or do they see it as proof that the Traubs don’t reflect the traditional family values that are a cornerstone of Rust Creek Falls?”
“Collin has to pick his battles,” Paige said reasonably. “He can’t expect to win every argument on every issue, so he should focus on what he’s doing and not worry about rumors.”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to do,” Sutter admitted. “The purpose of his national online initiative to help rebuild Rust Creek Falls was designed to give people a reason to look past the devastation and focus on the positive.”
“‘A vote for Collin Traub is a vote for success and prosperity for the future of Rust Creek Falls,’” she quoted.
He grinned. “You’ve been
