Chapter 20

Sara

I sat in my kitchen on Tuesday morning, staring down at my coffee. I looked up out the back window and put my chin on my hand, sighing deeply. I already missed Ryan, and he had just dropped me off the night before. He had some really crazy phone conferences in the morning, so he thought it better not to stay the night, and with Janson back in the picture, I had reluctantly agreed. Things were getting serious really fast between the two of us, and I couldn’t seem to find the willpower to slow it down at all. It was too perfect in each moment. I found myself thinking about him pretty much during every minute of the day and night.

I had gone to bed the night before thinking about him and the weekend that we’d had. I dreamed about him during the night, waking up and wishing he was there beside me. In the morning, he was the first thing that popped into my head, and the butterflies in my chest got me moving with a little extra pep in my step. Still, having him on my mind was not nearly enough to satisfy me. I needed him to be close, to feel those big, strong arms wrapped around me. I had never felt so safe than I did when I was with Ryan, especially after he’d saved me more times than I could count at that point. He was like the white knight who stuck around because I was a bit of a damsel in distress.

When I had broken up with Janson, I’d put the idea and thought of a man in my life completely out of the picture. I focused on my future, on making the practice bigger and better, and of taking care of those horses at the stables. I wanted to not think about love or relationships or men at all, especially after I’d gone through what I had gone through with Janson. It didn’t come to be a hard task, though. Before Janson, I had been asked out on a regular basis, but after him, not a single man came around looking for a date. I really hadn’t even noticed until right then when I started to think about it. In fact, Ryan was the first guy who had pursued me since Janson. Part of my ego was a little bruised by that revelation, but at the same time, it didn’t really make sense. It had to be connected.

Janson hadn’t wanted to break up, but he was too stubborn and too cocky to ever say that to me. From what it looked like with Ryan in my life, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out the sheriff had been scaring off any man who was in the least bit interested in getting to know me better. Now that I realized it, I was shocked anyone had bid on me at all during the auction, especially with Janson lurking around. Ryan had, though. He’d stood right up and saw the worry in my eyes, saw the awkwardness that ensued when the sheriff was bullying everyone out of bidding. He didn’t take Janson’s shit, and he didn’t fold to the pressure of it all. He knew what he wanted, and no one was going to talk him out of it, not even the mega-asshole Sheriff Janson.

It was crazy how I felt when I thought about Ryan. It was like I already knew him, like I had known him all my life. It was the strangest feeling, especially since he had only been around a little over a week. I felt more comfortable around him than I ever had with Janson, and I knew everything about that man. There was one thing about Ryan, though, that I could tell from the first time I met him. He had a really good heart. He cared for people, and he wanted to protect people, protect me from the dangers of the world. He wanted to help people and make the world a better place. He was a billionaire, sure, but he was a man, a human being, first and that was really what drew me to him.

On top of that, his personality was to die for. I had never met someone over the age of ten who I could sit at the breakfast table with and crack corny and terrible jokes, but that was exactly what we had done at the vineyard. He was playful with me, not taking things too seriously, and his sense of humor was perfectly matched to mine. Most billionaires, not that I knew more than one, who happened to be Ryan, but most, I would assume would be pretentious, rude, and snobbish. Not Ryan. He was more down-to-earth than most of the people in that town. He never turned his nose up at anything, and he was happy with fancy dinners or barbecue with plastic tablecloths. He never made me feel like I wasn’t enough or like what I had wasn’t enough.

I picked up my coffee and took a big gulp, shaking my head and laughing at myself. I was sitting in my kitchen all alone, talking to myself about how amazing Ryan was. I definitely liked him way more than I ever thought would be possible. In the beginning, I’d assumed it would be a fling of sorts with him, something fun, not too heavy, but I had long since spiraled past that level. Either way, it was what it was, and if I didn’t get back to reality, I was going to be late for work. I stood up and took my coffee cup to the sink to rinse it out. I went back upstairs and started puttering around my room, getting dressed, and putting my things together for work. As I turned toward the bed to pull the covers up, I heard my phone ring by the bed.

“Good morning, best friend,” I said, seeing Alison’s name on the screen.

“Oh. My. God,” Alison said in a panic. “I cannot believe what is going on. Did you look at the news today? Do you know what this means? Sara, holy shit, you need to say something. I am totally freaking out over here.”

“What?” I said, shaking my head.

Alison was talking so fast that I could barely understand anything she was saying. She was in a complete tizzy over something, but what that was, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me. She started all over again, going on a complete rampage, saying something about the news.

“Alison,” I shouted to calm her down. “You have got to take a deep breath and slow down. I cannot understand you.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, breathing heavily. “I’m sorry. I’m just so excited. I could barely believe my eyes.”

“What happened?”

“So, I woke up this morning and made my coffee and sat down to peruse the internet like I always do,” she said. “I looked through Instagram, and it was boring as usual, and then Facebook, but that was boring too. I completely ignored the trending stuff on the right, which probably would have led me to the discovery much sooner.”

“What discovery?” I said annoyed.

“Sara, just go check out the news, Twitter, Facebook, whatever,” she said. “You, my friend, are freaking famous.”

“You’ve really lost it,” I sighed, grabbing my laptop off the shelf and opening it up on my bed.

I signed into my Facebook and started slowly scrolling through, realizing my inbox was full of messages. I opened another tab and did the same with Twitter and with Google News. It turned out that the media was filled with stories about a billionaire bad boy’s new girl toy. I was completely mortified as I pulled up one of the pictures and blinked at it. There must have been a photographer somewhere around the vineyard because splashed across every page was a photo of Ryan kissing me in front of the bed and breakfast. It was right before we were leaving, when he took me in his arms and kissed me passionately.

“I’ll call you back,” I said in a monotone voice before hanging up the phone and dropping it in my lap.

I sat there on the bed just staring at the picture, the colors, the way he was holding me tightly around my waist. For god’s sake, even my leg was bent, and my foot was in the air like some romance novel cover. It immediately brought back a very visceral reminder of that amazing kiss. I could almost feel his lips pressed to mine. I shuddered, bringing my hands to my mouth and gasping. It had been an amazing kiss, one that almost everyone in the world had probably seen by that point. One that showed my face perfectly, and there was no mistaking that it was me. Anyone who looked at it, anyone in the town would see it was me being kissed by Ryan.

I opened the story all the way and started reading it, trying to cringe at every savory word the author of the article had used to describe me. The story itself hinted that Ryan was a lady’s man, one who found a girl at every port, one who had picked me as his next girl du jour. I was being painted as nothing more than the flavor of the week or month or, maybe worse, the flavor of the day. I slowly shut my laptop and sat there with one hand across my chest and one touching my lips. I felt shattered, broken, exposed, even from that story and that picture. I felt like everything I had thought to be true was nothing more than a love affair while he was off playing in Oregon. I felt completely and utterly shamed by the people who’d written the articles. They had no idea who I was or what Ryan and I had.

Not only did it make me look like a joke, it splattered my private life throughout the public eye. I had even had a conversation with Ryan about that, about how I could never deal with being pulled apart and judged by everyone out there. I saw the comments on social media. They were not kind, and they definitely weren’t defending me in any way. If that was the way the media immediately portrayed Ryan’s relationship with me, then maybe I was wrong about everything. They didn’t report that he had a girlfriend or that he was seeing someone. They reported that I was just one in a steady, revolving door of women. Maybe things weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Maybe what we had wasn’t what I’d thought in the first place, and I really was just another girl in the line. Maybe, just maybe, I let love blind me to the point where I didn’t know Ryan as well as I thought I did.

I shook my head and took a deep breath, figuring the best thing to do was to get to work and get my mind off things. But as I pulled into the parking lot of the practice, things went from bad to even worse. The sheriff’s car was parked out from, and Janson was waiting for me outside. I got out of the car and tried to keep myself calm, but he cornered me, a look of anger on his face.

“What the hell are you doing with your life?” he said. “I wake up and find that my ex’s face is splashed all over the tabloids like some common whore.”

“I have to go,” I said, pushing past him into the clinic.

I felt like total shit, like I had been completely humiliated. My day was terrible, and it had only just begun. I was starting to think I should have stayed in my bed.