Bane. BRENDA JACKSON

or in our private place. Our family thought all those times the sheriff found us that we were making out in your truck or something. And all we’d been doing was talking. I tried telling my parents that but they wouldn’t listen. You were a Westmoreland and they wanted to think the worst. They believed I was sexually active when I wasn’t.”

      He recalled those times. Yes, they had been caught parking, and cutting school had become almost the norm, but all they’d done was spend time together talking. He’d refused to go all the way with her until she was older. The first time they’d had sex was when she’d turned seventeen. By then they’d been together almost two years.

      At least Dillon had believed Bane when he’d told his brother he hadn’t touched her. However, given their relationship, it would have been crazy to think they wouldn’t get around to making love one day, and Dillon had had the common sense to know that. Instead of giving Bane grief about it, his older brother had lectured him about being responsible and taking precautions.

      Bane would never forget the night they’d finally made love. And it hadn’t been in the backseat of his truck. He had taken her to the cabin he’d built as a gift for her seventeenth birthday. He’d constructed it on the land he was to inherit, Bane’s Ponderosa.

      It was a night he would never forget. Waiting had almost done them in, but in the end they’d known they’d done the right thing. That night had been so unbelievably special and he’d known she would be his forever. He knew on that night that one day he would make her his wife.

      In fact it had been that night when he’d asked her to marry him once she finished school, and she’d agreed. And that had been the plan until her parents made things even worse for them after she’d turned seventeen.

      Crystal had retaliated by refusing to go to school. And when her parents had threatened to have him put in jail if he came on their property, he and Crystal had eloped. He hadn’t counted on her parents sending her away the moment Sheriff Harper found them.

      Bane had come close to telling everyone they’d gotten married; no one had the right to separate them. But something Dillon had said about the future had given him pause.