This wasn’t fun to hear but I held him close, held his eyes, slid one of my hands up his back so I could sift my fingers through his messy hair, and stayed silent.

But I did it thinking the woman I’d met a few days ago still loved my man. Back then, she was young, stupid, selfish, and I didn’t understand her kind of love, why she did the things she did. I just understood in that moment with the sadness I read in her face, the gesture she’d made for Ham driving all the way out to Gnaw Bone, that she’d spent twenty years paying a big price for doing them.

And the price she paid was losing Ham and, after doing that, knowing exactly how much she’d lost. But it was worse. She had to live with the fact that it was what she did that meant she hadn’t lost him. She’d actually thrown all that was Graham Reece away.

Ham broke into my thoughts to ask, “After what she did to me, I didn’t get it. How could you love someone and do that to them?”

“I don’t know,” I answered on a whisper.

“No,” he replied. “You wouldn’t.”

The way he said that, like he really believed it, meant the world to me.

Ham continued. “The two after her, cookie, same thing. I wasn’t stupid, though I was still young. But I’d learned. With them, I didn’t lay it bare, open myself, but we eventually got to the discussion and they told me they wanted the same things as I did out of life. They also told me they loved me. Swore it. Said it over and over. Then they showed how they felt, who they were, and it was not that.”

“No,” I agreed.

“And after the third, I really learned. After the third, I knew those words were empty. You can say anything but it’s what you do that says it all.”

My hand in his hair clenched as where he was going with all this finally dawned on me.

“Never said those words again, cookie,” he told me. “Women said them to me, didn’t believe it. Those words had lost their meaning.”

Yes, I now knew where this was going.

“Darlin’,” I murmured.

“Then you said it.”

I closed my eyes as beauty scored through me.

Because when he said those four words, his voice was jagged.

“Baby, come back to me,” Ham urged.

I opened my eyes and his fingers still drifting over my face stopped as he cupped my cheek.

“Suddenly, those words again had meaning,” he said.

“They totally do,” I replied, my voice throaty.

“Only ’cause you show they do,” he returned. “With all her bullshit, the way she burned me, time and again gutting me, Rachel taught me, and f**k but I learned, love is a show, it’s not a tell.”

I nodded, swallowing, fighting the emotion that was building inside me.

“All the time, people say one thing, but they do another. You feel somethin’ for them, you wanna believe what they say but you gotta learn to read what they do. I think, the other night, you got what I meant when I asked you to pay attention. But now, I’m sayin’ all this because I want you to know why that man is me. Why I couldn’t give you what you needed, say the words you needed to hear.”

“I understand, baby,” I told him.

“I love you, Zara.”

My breath caught loudly in my throat even as my body bucked under his with the force of emotion that had built so high, it exploded inside me.

Unthinking, overwhelmed, holding on to him tightly, I lifted my head, shoved it in his neck, and mumbled brokenly, “Ham.”

His lips against my ear, his hand at the back of my neck squeezing, he whispered, “You get those words because you give them. You say them and you mean them. No bullshit. No lies. Not tellin’ me what I wanna hear to get my dick, my money, my protection, whatever the f**k it was that they wanted outta me. Nine years ago, you let me go so I could be the man I was. You took me only as I could give because you knew that was the way it needed to be for me. You gave me that because you love me. And I took it, f**kin’ up huge. But now, baby, you get it all back. Now’s your time where you get everything you need.”

I loved all that, adored it.

But part of it made me uneasy.

So I dropped my head to the pillow, Ham lifted his, and when I caught his eyes, I asked, “You f**ked up huge?”

“Left you,” he answered.

“Ham—”

He shook his head and his hand came back to my face so he could press his thumb to my lips.

“No. No, cookie. None of this shit woulda happened to you if I didn’t have my head so far up my ass back then.”

“Ham—” I tried again but his thumb smushing my lips made it come out “Humm,” and he talked right over me.

“I f**ked up. We lost near on a decade. You endured some serious shit. You lost nine years of Zander—”

I moved my hand to his wrist, pulling it slightly away, and told him, “You probably wouldn’t have known about Zander either. Dad went to great lengths to keep that from me.”

His brows rose. “You think I stood by your side where I should have been, I wouldn’t have kept my eye on that ass**le?”

No, I didn’t think that. New, awesomer Ham, if he’d been able to be that Ham back then, would have definitely kept his eye on Dad if only to make certain Dad didn’t screw with me.

“It’s done now,” I decided to say to let him know all was cool.

“Babe, you lost your home. You lost your shop. You lost nine years of your nephew. You been sittin’ on millions of dollars you didn’t know you had for nearly three years. You got married to a guy you cared about but you picked him for safety, figured out you f**ked up, cut those ties, and moved on but did it torturing yourself because you picked wrong even though he did too. None of that shit would have happened if I’d been where I knew when I f**kin’ drove away nine years ago I should have stuck. At your side.”

My belly warmed at his words and my hand still wrapped around his wrist gave him a squeeze as I replied, “Okay, Ham, maybe all that’s true and I love it that you think that but don’t you think that even if you were here, other shit might have happened? You can’t protect me from everything. You can’t stop life from happening.”

“You got love, you got someone at your back, when life happens, it’s a f**kuva lot easier to deal and move on and you know that, cookie.”

He was not wrong. I did know that, having Ham these past months, and before that, having him look after me in the times when we were together (but weren’t), riding into town to come to my rescue when I most needed him.