Wolf Creek Homecoming. Penny Richards

harsh laughter was back. “You understand nothing!” she said in a tone of deadly quiet. “Nothing. But you’re a man, and men get to walk away. Women are the ones who pay, and I’ll pay for my folly the rest of my life.”

      She swiped at her tears with her fingertips. “Thanks to you, I learned never to trust anything a man says.” Empty of words, she felt the heat of anger drain away and turned to leave the room.

      Gabe’s voice followed her. “You must have trusted at least one man.”

      She turned back to him with a blank expression.

      “You must have trusted one other man,” he repeated. “You must have trusted Danny’s father.”

      She paled, and turning left him standing near the fire.

      He closed his eyes against the pain.

      She’d loved him.

      Was it possible that he’d loved her but had been too immature and wrapped up in himself to realize it? He didn’t know. All he knew was that staying would have meant putting an end to his roaming ways, and he hadn’t been ready to do that. So he had moved on. He had walked away from the one bit of goodness in his sordid past, possibly the best thing to ever happen to him, and, he suspected, the one person who might have saved him from himself.

      She’d moved on, too. She’d found someone who wasn’t afraid to settle down. Someone who would cherish her enough to make her his wife.

      Someone who had fathered her son.

      That indisputable fact, more than anything she’d said to him, brought the most grief. The love he’d tossed away so carelessly, another had gained. Staying in Wolf Creek wouldn’t be easy, for a lot of reasons.

      * * *

      When Rachel entered the kitchen, she was greeted by two pairs of questioning eyes. She wondered if either of them had heard the actual words of the argument, or if they’d just heard her voice raised in anger.