Remember My Touch

“I can make coffee,” she offered.

“Don’t get up,” he said. He walked across the floor, his boot heels echoing on the hardwood. “Chase said for you to have breakfast ready when we get back.”

“‘Chase said,’” she teased.

“I thought you wouldn’t let your brother-in-law go hungry.”

“But I would let my husband,” she said.

“I hoped not, but I figure I’ll get better if you know we’re having company.”

She smiled at him, reaching up to catch his fingers in hers. She held them for a moment, still remembering last night.

“Chase sounded strange,” Mac said.

She looked up from his hand. “Strange how?”

He shook his head. “Just…strange. I don’t know. Different. He didn’t want me to go over there and pick him up. Said he’d come here. That’s when he said you could fix breakfast.”

“Ulterior motive,” she suggested, smiling at him.

“I guess.”

“Want anything special?”

“Uh-huh, but I don’t think I’ve got time for it before Chase gets here.” He put his knee down on the bed and the mattress dipped under his weight. He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.

“Sanchez ranch,” he said, his breath warm against her face. “In case anybody needs me.”

She nodded. She wanted to tell him to be careful, but she’d done enough nagging. Mac had promised, and if he told her he’d do something, he would.

“I’m going to wait out in the truck. Go back to sleep.”

He pulled the sheet and the quilt over her shoulders, tucking them around her. She listened to his footsteps fade away over the wooden floors and the sound the front door made as he closed it behind him.

She shrugged off the covers he’d tucked in and pulled his pillow into her body, resting her cheek against the soft cotton of its case. It smelled of Mac. He didn’t use cologne. This was soap. Shampoo. Always the same no-name-brand brands. Or maybe this was just the familiar, beloved scent of his skin.

She closed her eyes, willing herself not to think about anything but that. About last night. After the argument.

It was possible that she had gone back to sleep. She could never say for sure whether she had been awake or asleep when she heard the explosion. But she had known at once what it was. There had never been the least doubt in her mind, not from the first sound, exactly what she was hearing.

Chase would sometimes say that he could close his eyes and see Mac’s truck exploding, his brother’s burning body thrown out onto the ground. Jenny had no clear memory of any of that. The horror for her always began and ended with that sound.

The rest of it simply blended into the endless black nightmare she had always known living without Mac would be.

CHAPTER ONE

Five years later

“YOU GOING TO the wedding?” Chase McCullar asked his sister-in-law. His blue eyes were directed downward toward the coffee cup he held, rather than at Jenny, and his voice was almost innocent of inflection.

“Of course,” Jenny said, glancing at him over her shoulder. “Aren’t you?”

“You think I’ll get an invitation?”

“I think a better question might be, do you want one?”

“What makes you think I wouldn’t want an invitation?”

She laid the dishcloth she’d been using on the counter beside the sink and turned around to face him. Chase was sitting at her kitchen table, a table that had been in his family for three generations. He must have eaten tens of thousands of meals at its scarred wooden surface. Maybe that was why he looked so right sitting there, as if he still belonged here, living in this house instead of the one he had built on his half of the McCullar land.

Or maybe he looked so right, she acknowledged, because he always reminded her of Mac. They even had the same way of sitting, forearms on the table and broad shoulders slightly hunched, both hands wrapped around a mug, as if savoring against their fingers the warmth of the coffee it held.

She banished that memory as she had so many others in the past few weeks. She had even dreamed about Mac last night, dreamed about him making love to her, and that hadn’t happened in a very long time.

There had been too much upheaval lately, too many disturbances in her usually placid existence, she supposed. The kidnapping of Chase’s daughter and his belated marriage to her mother, Samantha Kincaid. Rio’s return from prison. Doc Horn’s brutal murder.

Apparently those things, as unlikely as it seemed, had somehow rekindled the memories of those nearly perfect days with Mac. Or maybe seeing Chase and Samantha finally together had made her remember her own marriage. Or perhaps that had been triggered by the way Rio looked at Anne Richardson, the two of them sitting at this very kitchen table, whatever had been in Rio’s black eyes so much like the way Mac used to look at her. Or, at least, she amended, the way she always remembered his look.

Most things were better replayed in memory than they had been in actuality. The reality of long-ago events faded, and the remembrance of them had a tendency to become more perfect with the passage of time, she reminded herself, trying to be fair to Trent. Anne Richardson’s brother, Trent, was the man she was fortunate enough to have in love with her now. A good man who wanted to marry her. A man who deserved not to have to fight against all those perfect memories.

Not that she minded having only good memories of her marriage, of course. However, she now admitted that savoring those had prevented her from moving on, from getting on with the business of living her life, and she was determined to change that. She had loved Mac McCullar with every fiber of her being, but Mac was dead. He had been dead for almost five years, and she knew it was time for her to begin living again.

She remembered that she had once accused Chase of doing that—of trying to crawl down into that grave with Mac. And instead she had discovered that she was the one who had been guilty of that sin. Once she had had the courage to make that admission, to face what her life had become, she had decided it was time to do something about it.

She realized suddenly that Chase was waiting for her answer, his blue eyes—eyes that were just like Mac’s—studying her face as she stood, lost in memory and regret.

“You and Rio haven’t exactly been…” She hesitated, searching for the right word, thinking about the strange relationship that existed between the half brothers.

“Not exactly bosom buddies,” Chase suggested caustically.

“Not exactly brothers,” she countered. “At least you haven’t acted like brothers.”

“I thought he killed Mac. At least had a part in Mac’s death. How did you want me to treat him?”

“You thought?” she asked, emphasizing the past tense, which was, to her, the pertinent part of that statement. “But you don’t think that anymore?”

“Hell, Jenny…” Chase began, and then he hesitated. “Sometimes even I don’t know what I believe anymore.” He shook his head, eyes lowering again to the steaming coffee. “It just doesn’t…” He shook his head again.

“Feel right to hate Rio any longer? Or to blame him for Mac’s death?” Jenny suggested.

Chase looked up. “You think I was wrong about that.”

“Yes,” she said simply.

Chase’s mouth tightened. It would be hard for him to make that admission, she knew. Almost as hard as it had been for her to make the unwanted one about her own life that she’d recently made.

“If that’s true,” Chase said, “then he probably hates me.”