Page 104 of Nine Month Contract
I shrug casually. “This is just a sexuationship. We didn’t really talk about exclusivity.”
“The hell we didn’t,” Wyatt thunders, pressing his hand to the gate beside me, caging me in. “You haven’t slept with anyone else, have you?”
“Oh, in all my free time?” I laugh, but it sounds weird and hyenic.
“If you had free time, you would have?” His tone is full of rage, and his body seems to grow a few inches taller as he bows over me, blanketing me in his scent.
Or maybe I’m just shrinking in his presence, begging the world to swallow me whole so I can get out of having this conversation.
“I don’t know, Wyatt,” I reply with a huff and duck under his arm to go tend to Handsome.
I feel him watching me as I move through Handsome’s stall, trying desperately to figure out what to say next to a man clearly looking for something from me.
“Did I do something to hurt you?” Wyatt asks, his tone soft and uncertain.
There’s something horrifyingly painful about weakening a strong man. Especially one who has only ever been good to me.
My eyes soften on him. “No, Wyatt. You’re perfect. You’re the perfect man.”Just not perfect for me.
“Then tell me not to go,” Wyatt croaks, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his thick neck. “Tell me to tell Calder to fuck off. Tell me that it would make you fucking crazy to think about me seeing another woman’s body because it makes me want to violently hurt someone when I think about you just having coffee with Avery.”
“That’s insane!”
“That’s me,” he thunders unapologetically. “Am I going to hurt him?No. Am I going to stop you from going? No. But are the feelings I have for you real? Fuck yes, they are.”
“Wyatt, we need to calm things down here,” I state firmly, my throat feeling tight as I step out of Handsome’s pen.
“Calm things down?”
“Yes. This is all moving too fast.”
“What do you mean fast? I think it’s moving fucking slow.”
I laugh as I recall him in my bed the other morning, telling me I could stay in the barn another year or two if I wanted.
Stay in the barn.
Like an animal.
Like a concubine.
Like a whore.
Fast…slow. It doesn’t matter. This whole thing is moving in a direction I do not like, and I need to get control of the wheel.
He stops me in the alleyway of the barn, his hand braced on Millie’s pen as his eyes bore into my soul. “Are you really trying to act like you don’t have feelings for me, Trista?”
“What difference does it make?” I ask with a shrug. “What you and I have has an end date anyway. And if I’m being honest, Wyatt, I don’t think you even really like me. You just have a pregnancy fetish or a breeding fetish or a big-girl fetish. You want a thing about me…you don’t want me. This baby inside me is just confusing your mountain-man brain.”
His eyes blink rapidly as he steps back, lips parted, face full of betrayal. “How could you think that?”
“Because you don’t even know me,” I snap, my temper boiling over at the whipped-puppy-dog look he’s giving me right now. “You think you have real feelings for me because of what I shared with you and your brothers? That was only a glimpse of it. You offered for me to live in this barn for another year, having no idea that this place…a fucking apartment above a barn where animals shit…is ten times nicer than anything I’ve ever stepped foot in.”
“I don’t care about that—”
“Do you know that I used to stand on a street corner with mymother, holding a sign that said, ‘Need money for diapers.’ I was mortified because I was eight and clearly not wearing diapers anymore, but my mom forced me to stand there with her to get sympathy cash.”
“Trista, I—” He reaches for me, and I hold my hands out, cutting him off.
