Read Her Dakota Man (Book 1 - Dakota Hearts) Online

Authors: Lisa Mondello

Tags: #contemporary romance, #western romance, #Badlands, #reunion romance

Her Dakota Man (Book 1 - Dakota Hearts) (13 page)

BOOK: Her Dakota Man (Book 1 - Dakota Hearts)
2.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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“It took me a long time to forgive her, Logan. I don’t even think I truly did while she was still alive. But I did eventually and…”

“What?”

“I promised her I’d come back. On her deathbed, she begged me and I made that promise to her. So here I am.”

“Because Kelly asked you to.”

She nodded. “I didn’t want to at first. I couldn’t face you. I was angry with her. Angry with you. Angry with myself. It was killing me. Everything I’d believed, every decision I’d made...” Poppy sighed and shook her head as if she was somewhere else other than in that room. “Logan, she’d begged me. I thought that I’d gotten over you long ago after the initial pain of hearing that you and Kelly had gotten married wore off. She always told me you two were so much in love.”

He turned away.

“Don’t,” she said. “Tonight is the night for the truth. I think there have been enough lies and secrets over the years, don’t you? If we can’t be honest now, what’s left?”

He couldn’t argue with that so he simply nodded.

“She told me you both were happy,” she said.

“She was happy. At least I thought she was.” Logan got up and paced the floor. “I…”

“What?”

“I wasn’t…I grew to love Kelly,” he said, watching Poppy’s expression.

But only when he’d pushed his feelings for Poppy out of his mind. The thought of how he’d still thought of Poppy while being married to Kelly had eaten him up inside for years.

Poppy nodded and smiled, a reaction Logan wasn’t expecting. Somehow he’d expected her to be jealous, maybe as disgusted with him as he’d been with himself for so long. He’d certainly been jealous enough over the years listening to stories about the men in Poppy’s life. Although after reading this letter, Logan wondered just how many of those stories were fiction, much like the novels that Kelly always read.

“I’m glad. I’d hate to think she did all this for nothing.”

Anger simmered inside him, making him want to lash out at someone or something. Except the person he needed to confront wasn’t there. “She manipulated me into marrying her under false pretenses.”

The emotional mess he was caught in was just as devastating as the mess from the flood. Everything was spinning out of control. Everything he believed, everything he’d been able to count on for the past eight years evaporated. Numbness overtook the shock he felt and Logan wished he could dial back to another time where life was real.

He’d loved Poppy tonight in a way he’d never loved any woman. Not even Kelly. And at that moment he wished Poppy had never come to Rudolph again. How was he ever going to get his equilibrium back and go on with a life that had kept him putting one foot in front of the other for over a year?

Poppy didn’t know when it happened exactly. But somewhere between the journey downstairs and now, she’d lost Logan. He wasn’t angry with her the way he’d been when she’d first arrived a few days ago. Instead, he’d retreated somewhere and shut her out with his sudden silence.

Poppy extended her hand to him. “Come back to bed. Keith will be back bright and early. We don’t have to figure everything out tonight.”

Emotional fatigue dragged him down. “Not just yet. You go.”

Poppy looked at Logan and knew the connection that had fused them all afternoon had been broken.

“Logan you’re exhausted,” she said, desperate to hold on to what they had a short time ago.

“I just need some time.”

Without her.
Poppy nodded. “Don’t be long, okay? It’ll be light soon.”

“Keith is coming home early.”

She stood before Logan and bent over to kiss mouth, but he turned away. And she wanted to die.

“How long are you staying?” he asked, looking up at her with eyes filled with emotion she couldn’t decipher.

“I don’t know. That all depends.”

“On what?”

She took a deep breath. “On you, I guess.”

He bent his head and looked at his hands.

“Goodnight, Poppy.”

With each step she took upstairs, her feet dragged behind letting the happiness she’d felt all day slip away. And her world had shattered all over again.

###

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

She’d lay in bed alone the rest of the night, as she knew she would. She’d tossed in bed, hearing movement downstairs and then the door slam before light started to illuminate the room. She hadn’t slept but for those few short hours after she and Logan had made love and then she’d awoken alone.

Dragging herself out of bed, she quickly dressed into a fresh pair of jeans, pulled on an oversized sweater, slipped into her sneakers, sans socks, and made her way downstairs. The living room looked much as it did last night. The long letter from Kelly that Logan was reading when she’d found him was spread out on the floor again. The paper was wrinkled and looked as if it had been smoothed out again. The letters Kelly had written to her were still wrapped in the ribbon she’d tied together with a neat bow.

Walking the length of the hallway to the kitchen, she’d hoped to find Logan sitting at the kitchen table, but was disappointed to find it empty. She pushed the curtains to the window over the sink back so she could get a better view of the barn. The red barn doors were open.

Keith was going to be home soon and Poppy desperately needed to talk to Logan before they both had to pretend everything was normal in front of family and friends. Without the bother of her jacket, she stepped out onto the porch and quickly made her way out to the barn, hugging her middle to ward of the bitter chill of the South Dakota morning.

“Logan?” she called out as she stepped through the door. It took a second for her eyes to adjust to the difference in light, but then she saw him. His jacket was hung on a hook on a beam and he was mopping the floor of a stall with such force that beads of sweat were pouring down the sides of his face. His shirt was soaked.

Poppy slowly walked toward him. He didn’t stop working until she was standing just in front of him. He slammed the mop into the bucket and dragged it over to the next stall, pausing for a second before acknowledging she was even there.

“Talk to me, Logan.”

“I’m no good right now, Poppy,” he said. Such pain. In every move he made, she could see it, feel it.

“I understand how you feel.”

He looked at her as if she were crazy. “How could you? I’ve spent the entire time I was married to Kelly beating myself up because I thought I’d saddled her with a loveless marriage. I couldn’t be the husband she wanted. She was so good and so determined and she loved me. She told me all the time. And every time she did it made me want to work harder to give her what she deserved. And I beat myself up because I knew I could never give her what she truly wanted. And now I find… You just don’t understand, Poppy. She lied to both of us, but for me it was different.”

“I understand more than you know, Logan. I’ve had a year to come to grips with all that happened. You’ve only just found out the life you lived was a lie.”

“That’s just it, it wasn’t. Not all of it.”

Shocked, she had to steady herself against the wooden rail to keep from falling.

“Kelly and I might have gotten together for all the wrong reasons. But we stayed together for the right reason. Keith. I could have left her before that. Neither one of us were happy. But after Keith was born, it was like we had a purpose. And we were both okay with that. It wasn’t just Kelly’s fault. Hawk was right. I became numb to what I wanted, to being that man full of passion and adventure that I was when I was younger. Now I’m thinking that man only existed when I was with you.”

“What are you saying?”

“I wasn’t in love with Kelly when I married her. That much was true. That hurts me probably as much as it hurt her. But not everything was bad. We were good together. And if she hadn’t gotten sick, if you hadn’t come back, we probably could have lived our whole lives content with that.”

“Is that all you want in life? To be
content
? What happened to the man I knew? You were there with me yesterday. Listen to yourself, please!”

“I did. Last night after you went back to bed I came out here and yelled at Kelly. Yelled at the sky. And then yelled at myself more. We started out a lie. The friendship, the trust I thought was there was a lie. It was bad for a long time, but in the end we became a family.”

His words were like a cold dagger to her heart.
We became a family.
And that family didn’t include her. It never did.

She cleared her throat and fought to hold back her tears. “So what was yesterday all about?”

His expression warmed and she waited to hear the words she so desperately needed to hear. That Logan was in love with her and had always been. That he would love her forever and that they would have many years of making love and playing in the sun as they had yesterday. He was so transparent with her, naked with emotion that it was hard to breathe.

“Yesterday was wonderful. It was a dream.”

Her mouth dropped open. “A dream? That’s it?”

“Do you ever wonder why we didn’t let ourselves take that next step while you were still here? Why didn’t we? You left and it became clear to me that I wanted you. And believe me, I wanted you with ever fiber of my being. Why didn’t we ever act on that?”

She didn’t have the answer to that, and it’s one she’d struggled with herself. “We were young, still figuring things out. Our friendship was everything and it grew. Just because we didn’t act on how we felt back then doesn’t mean what we felt wasn’t real. Everything about us, everything we did was full of passion.”

“Maybe what we had back then was all it was meant to be.”

She couldn’t breathe. What was he saying to her? “So was making love to me yesterday your way of finally getting me out of your system? Unfulfilled passion finally realized.”

The corner of his lips lifted to a bittersweet smile. “Passion. We always had that,” he said softly.

“That’s not all we had. Before Kelly—”

“What Kelly did was wrong, but it’s always going to be there, Poppy. I can’t wish it away without erasing everything that’s good in my life now.”

“Keith,” she said.”

“Lie or no lie, Keith is my life. Kelly will always be a part of my life because of him. Where do we go from here? How do you make something like that right without erasing the past? I can’t do that.

“Regret is a tough thing to live with. I should know. I’ve lived with it for a long time. I thought I’d gotten past it. Maybe I will again. But to die with it is even worse. You said you forgave Kelly. She never even gave me the chance. Don’t you see? You didn’t come back for me, Poppy. You came back because Kelly asked you to.”

She swallowed hard, trying to keep her emotion down. “Even now that Kelly is gone, she’s still standing between us.”

To his credit, Logan didn’t turn away.

“She’s still the one who is calling the shots and she’s not even here anymore. And I don’t know how I feel about any of it.”

Poppy cleared her throat before she dared to speak. “I guess that settles it. I've fulfilled my promise to Kelly. I came back like she wanted me to. Now you know the truth. I guess there’s nothing left to say. I’ll see about getting a flight out of Rapid City as soon as possible.”

She turned and walked out of the barn. Rounding the corner, she placed a hand on the barn door and listened, waiting. She drew in a slow breath of cold March air. Nothing. Logan hadn't said another word. And he didn't come after her.
Again.
It was more than clear to Poppy now that Kelly had been wrong all along.

* * *

Logan so desperately wanted to run to Poppy. And yet, he wished to God she’d never come back to Rudolph. Having her leave this time hurt worse than it did all those years ago. At least then he’d had hope.

He couldn’t reconcile his feelings about what Kelly had done. He only knew that deep down, his feelings for Poppy had never changed. He knew that now. And worst of all, Kelly knew it.

I never had a miscarriage after we were married because I was never pregnant in the first place. I lied to you because I loved you so much and I thought I was going to lose you forever.

The anger Logan felt inside was consuming. Anger for what Kelly did and anger with himself for not seeing it.

I thought if I could just get pregnant, we’d be a family and you’d stay. I thought I loved enough for both of us. I was wrong. It wasn’t fair to you. I knew you weren’t happy and that only made it harder for me to tell you the truth. I’m so sorry. I hope in time you won’t hate me.

He didn’t hate Kelly. He had loved her, but she was right. He’d never truly been
in love
with Kelly. Not the way he should have been. He’d worked so hard to make her happy, thinking that would be enough. But now he knew for sure he’d failed only because he’d known for the first time what true happiness was yesterday when he’d been with Poppy. And Kelly had known all along.

BOOK: Her Dakota Man (Book 1 - Dakota Hearts)
2.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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