said. “And I’ve made sure it never happened to me again.”
“Does that mean...” She shouldn’t be continuing this conversation. She really shouldn’t. “You didn’t feel that way about Olivia?”
“I never slept with Olivia,” he said, his tone rough.
Kaylee felt like she’d been slapped. This was a lot of weird revelations for one night. “You never...you never slept with her?”
“No,” Bennett responded. “I never did. She wanted to wait until we were engaged. And we never got engaged.”
“I thought that you...” She had spent so much time imagining dark-haired, petite Olivia wrapped around Bennett, had made herself sick thinking about it. And he hadn’t done it. “She’s so...beautiful,” she finished lamely.
Olivia was everything Kaylee wasn’t. Petite. Feminine.
“She was safe,” Bennett said. He took another drink of beer. “I wanted safe. I wanted something that I could plan. I wanted to be able to plan my life. And she seemed like a pretty great thing to plan it around. She felt the same way about me. It was never... We were never in love, we were just hoping to make a good life together. And then I lost her, and now I have a kid. So I give up. I give up on sensible. I give up on control.” He shook his head and took another drink.
She had a feeling he did not give up on control at all. That he was going to try to corral and take the reins of this situation, whatever he said now.
“I see,” she said, looking up, her eyes clashing with his.
She hadn’t imagined it. Hadn’t for one moment fabricated that spark between them. It was there. It was there now.
And then he looked down at her lips.
She felt the impact of that shoot down between her thighs. Good Lord Almighty. Bennett Dodge was looking at her mouth.
Bennett Dodge was having a breakdown. And if he did something with her now, it was only going to be for that reason.
That snapped her back to reality. She took a swig of beer, needing for her lips to be busy so that they didn’t decide to occupy their time with him.
“I should go,” she said.
“Do you have to?”
“Yes,” she said, not quite sure if they were talking over the top of the same subtext. She knew what she felt. She knew what she read here, but apparently she didn’t know much of anything. Bennett hadn’t slept with Olivia. He thought she was safe.
It was a totally different relationship to the one she had thought she had been witnessing. The one where he called her princess. Where he treated her like this beautiful, delicate and fragile thing that Kaylee was so certain she could never be.
This wonderful, deserving little creature that Kaylee knew she wasn’t.
But his relationship with Olivia hadn’t been passionate or physical. All that time she’d tortured herself over it and he’d never been with Olivia. She would never have guessed that.
So maybe Bennett was looking at her mouth because he wanted to kiss her, or maybe he was trying to figure out how much beer she was going to drink, or he was just spacing out because everything was weird.
Whatever, she wasn’t in the space to try to figure it out and she needed to stop trying before she did something really foolish.
“I’m going to have to go over to the ranch and talk to my brothers tomorrow. Will you go with me?”
“Of course I will.”
No matter what was wacky and off tonight, she was going to be there for him. There was no question about that. That was the kind of friendship they had. That kind of unconditional support that he had been the first person to show her.
“Thank you,” he said. She shrugged and set the beer on the porch rail, turning to walk down the steps. And then, Bennett spoke again, his voice heavy. “Kaylee... I really need our friendship right now.”
Those words were so weighted down that she knew in that instance he had felt the same thing she had.
That just made her mad. She had spent all this time subsuming her feelings, and there was one moment of mutual electricity and he was making veiled proclamations.
She’d been guarding their friendship for years. She didn’t need him to go talking about the importance of it. She damn well knew.
“Good,” she said, not offering him any indication that she had any clue what he meant. “I’m glad that I can be your friend. Very glad.”
And with that, she turned and stomped her way back to the truck, not quite sure what the hell it said about reality that the earlier scenario where Olivia was pregnant with Luke’s baby and wanted Bennett back was somehow less complicated than the one she found herself in now.
EARLY THE NEXT morning Bennett found himself embroiled in indecision.
His son—that was still the weirdest thought it was possible to have—was still asleep, and Bennett had to get to work in the next hour.
He went out and slowly, methodically began to feed the animals. Pepper and Cheddar, his Australian shepherds yipping excitedly at his heels as he navigated the morning chores with all the conviction of a robot performing work on an assembly line.
He didn’t know if he could leave Dallas alone. He thought of the business card that the social worker had left for him. Should he call her about that?
Logically he knew that a fifteen-year-old could handle himself for a few hours, but Dallas had only just shown up and Bennett didn’t know if it meant the kid would run away if he was left unattended. Of course, it wasn’t like he could prevent him from leaving if he wanted to, short of tying him up and locking him in a bedroom, and that was probably frowned on.
He didn’t feel comfortable about leaving him, though. Whatever was technically acceptable and wasn’t, he knew he didn’t feel right about it.
He had to talk to his family tonight. He had decided that he wouldn’t do it until then. Until they had all gotten through the workday and could see each other face-to-face.
But until then, he had patients to see.
Dallas could hang out at the clinic, or he could ride in Bennett’s truck all day. That would work well enough.
Bennett couldn’t think of what they would talk about if they ended up trapped in a vehicle together for the entirety of the day.
He supposed that was a stupid, selfish thing to concern himself with.
But he was concerned.
He walked back into the house just as the clock rolled over to six, and he knew that he was going to be tempting a lot of rage waking a teenage boy out of a dead sleep but he had to do something.
