Come Home to Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

could do exactly the opposite just to prove his autonomy.
    “It’s too bad that she had to come back before he left,” Cheyenne lamented.
    “I’d rather have her here in Whiskey Creek than depending on people she can’t trust to take care of Wyatt.”
    Dylan had been as livid as she was when Presley found those marks on Wyatt. The owner of the thrift shop had let her bring Wyatt to work three days a week, but she still had to leave him on the weekends, because it was busier, and when she went to massage school at night.
    “I agree Wyatt’s better off here,” she said, “but...”
    “What?” he prompted.
    But he didn’t know nearly as much as she did. “Having the two of them in town for even a month is too long.” She gave him a rueful smile as she checked his hand. He’d bruised and scraped his knuckles. “Do we need to take you to the hospital? Have that X-rayed?”
    He shook her off. “No. It’s not broken.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Positive. I’ve broken it often enough to know the difference.”
    She mussed his hair. Although he was as tough as a man could be, there was a childlike innocence in the way he cared for her that formed the foundation of her happiness. “I love you so much, too much. Even when you punch holes in my wall.” She stood up. “Let’s wash off your hand before you get blood on the couch.”
    “Chey?” He caught her wrist, pulling her back to him.
    “Yes?”
    “Does it ever make you...envious to see Wyatt?”
    The gravity of that question gave her an inkling of what might be causing Dylan to act out. It didn’t have to do with Aaron. Not completely.
    “Why would it make me feel envious?” She could guess, but wanted to draw him out. He rarely put a voice to his fears and concerns; instead, he expressed them in some physical act, by making love to her, going to the gym he and his brothers had set up in their barn or—tonight, anyway—punching a hole in the wall.
    “We’ve been married for a while now and...no baby.” He studied her. “Despite how badly you want one.”
    He felt he had to provide something she wanted that much. He wasn’t used to being unable to give her what would make her happiest. Since he was eighteen, he’d been taking care of the people in his life. He always took on added responsibility; it was just who he was.
    “I do want a baby,” she admitted. “I want your baby. But if we can’t have one, we can’t. Nothing could ever make me regret marrying you.”
    “What if it’s me—my fault? You wouldn’t resent it someday?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Because it’s got to be me,” he said. “You’ve never done anything physically damaging.”
    “You think fighting might’ve hurt your...equipment?”
    “If I had a dollar for every time I got kicked in the nuts...”
    He’d started in MMA when his father, grief-stricken after losing his children’s mother, stabbed a man in a bar and went to prison. Dylan had had to do something to augment what he could earn from the family’s auto body shop, which wasn’t exactly a success back then. Without the money he made fighting, his younger brothers would’ve been split up and placed in foster care.
    “If that’s the way it is...we’ll accept it,” she said.
    “Accept less, you mean.”
    “Accept reality .”
    His troubled eyes met hers. “I should get checked out.”
    She’d wanted him to see a doctor—until she’d gone to a doctor herself and learned that it wasn’t her. “No.”
    He reared back. “Why not?”
    “Because it doesn’t matter.” She laced her fingers through his. “We’ll keep trying. You like that part, anyway,” she teased, but he didn’t let her levity distract him. He didn’t even smile; he was too intent on the conversation.
    “And if it doesn’t work?”
    “We’ll adopt.”
    “But thanks to your mother—or, rather, Anita— you’ve missed out on so much already. I want you to have your own baby. I want you to experience pregnancy and