Colton's Lethal Reunion

He’d made his choice. But…

“Payne Colton’s a powerful man.” She gave him what little leeway she’d been able to find for him over the years. For the young Rafe, that was. “You were a kid with no other family. It would have been suicide to challenge him over a girl at that age,” she said.

He swallowed so hard she noticed his Adam’s apple bobbing.

And she thought of the eighteen years after he’d no longer been a kid and still hadn’t even bothered to call. To send her a card. To acknowledge she existed.

“You were right to stay away,” she said then. Because clarity was a wonderful thing when it came loaded in truth. And a total bitch, too, with the pain it brought. “It would have hurt too badly to be in touch with our lives so completely different.”

They might inhabit the same twenty-mile radius of the universe, but their worlds were so distant they’d done so without ever running into each other. Stone-cold truth.

“Tonight…when that shot rang out…when I thought at first that you’d been shot…” She looked at him. She should never have looked at him. “You’re in my heart, Kerry. You’re there. Exactly where you’ve always been. As much as you’ve always been. I just need you to know that.”

For a brief second, her spirit soared. She was young again. With a heart filled with hope and possibility. With plans. With a heart that knew how to dream. And then reality hit. Him standing there in his expensive clothes, in front of a wall filled with her brother’s murder details.

She wasn’t the only one who’d been hurt by Rafe’s defection. And he hadn’t said a word about coming back, either. About being friends in the future.

Because he couldn’t. She got that. He’d been a Colton for too long. His family depended on him, and he on them, too, she figured: whether he liked that or not.

She wanted to tell him that he was in her heart, too, but that door wasn’t open. Not even a little bit. Her secrets had been shut away for so long, she wasn’t even sure what was in there anymore.

Didn’t really want to know.

“When I got back from college, I moved out of the mansion,” he told her. “I built a house…”

“You don’t live in the mansion?”

But that’s where she’d been picturing him. In the present. But in the past, too. All those years, every time she’d driven out that way, she’d always looked out in the distance and pictured him up on the third floor, in a corner room separate from his other siblings. He’d used to describe the place to her: all the bathrooms, the carpeting so thick you don’t hear steps when you walk…

“I built my own place…” he was saying again, and she stopped him.

“Had it built, you mean.”

He wasn’t in the mansion. She had no idea where he lived. Couldn’t picture his home, but it shouldn’t matter.

She just didn’t like that kind of surprise. Some things were meant to stay neatly in their place.

“I hired help, yes, but I did as much of the work myself as I could,” he told her, surprising her. “It took me over a year.” He stood there, meeting her gaze, holding on to her with it, like he needed her to see inside him.

She wasn’t going to look. Didn’t he get that? He’d taken away that right, once. She wasn’t going to let him take it from her again.

And couldn’t live with it and not live with him.

“I built it on our land, Kerry. Our spot on the other side of the hill behind the barn.”

No. He. Did. Not.

He was living on the one acre in the world that was sacred to her? The one that had sustained her during her years with him, allowing them to be friends unseen, and the ones after him, too. The one place in the world where she’d always been able to find solace?

She’d cried more tears in that dust and dirt than she’d cried since. Ever.

Not at her father’s funeral. And not at Tyler’s, either.

She’d cried more for Rafe than for either of the men who were family to her.

And she couldn’t do this. She wasn’t that girl anymore. He’d killed her.

“You broke my heart, Rafe.”

Chapter 6 (#u77d6010c-28a7-581c-bd9d-514e726300e5)

Rafe might have killed the girl she’d been, but she wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a grown woman with a life that satisfied her. She could risk her life saving others because she didn’t have anyone who was counting on her, anyone who’d be devastated, if she was killed.

Not that there was usually all that much danger in Mustang Valley. Lately, though… First with the murder of a bodyguard hired to protect the president of Robertson Renewable Energy Corporation, Bowie Robertson. Then attempts made on the lives of Bowie and Rafe’s sister Marlowe, and then Payne Colton’s shooting, and now a ranger killed and someone shooting at her and Rafe…

“How come you never married?” Kerry plopped down to one of the six chairs tucked into her dining room table—an antique she’d restored. After everything that had happened in the past few hours, she needed a moment to regroup. To be the woman she was, not the young girl she’d once been.

She needed to see Rafe Colton as the man he was now, not the boy he’d been.

He sat, too, leaving a chair between them. “Never found a woman I wanted to live with for the rest of my life. How about you?”

She’d brought that on, she supposed. Don’t ask if you don’t want to be asked. Being a detective, one who spent her days asking questions of others with it understood that her own thoughts didn’t come to play in the interaction, she’d maybe become a little rusty at the personal stuff.

“I’m not all that fond of men,” she said. “I just don’t believe they’re wired to be what I need in a relationship.”

She saw the verbal bullet hit him. Hurt for him. And couldn’t lie about what his choices had done to her. Not just his, of course. Her father—he’d tried his best but most definitely had not been a man she could rely on, other than to be able to trust that if he wasn’t drunk, he would be soon.

And Tyler—he’d fallen down that same rabbit hole.

“Then you haven’t known the right men,” Rafe finally said.

She shrugged. Maybe.

“There are a lot of happily married women in the world. And men who’ve risked everything for their families. For their country. For…”

Holding up a hand, Kerry smiled. “I get it,” she said. “I actually work with several of them.”

And at home, she had trust issues.

“I’ve found that my life is happier, I’m more at peace inside, when I have no expectations where men are concerned,” she said, giving him more than she’d ever admitted aloud.

Because he was Rafe?

She hoped not. She wanted to believe that she was just a bit more open—a smidge vulnerable—because they’d just been shot at and she had a cop stationed outside her door.