While they ate, Rafe loosened his tie, talked about all the exotic foods he’d eaten, most of which he’d enjoyed. If he’d set out to remind Kerry of the vast differences between them, he needn’t have bothered. His being a Colton was something she was never, ever going to forget.
And while he did the dishes he insisted on taking care of, she went to the restroom. She’d been holding it for a while, and hadn’t wanted to go with him in the house. Seemed way too…personal, too intimate, for what she needed him to be. Everyone peed. She just didn’t want to go do it with him there.
“You should call the hospital, check on your father,” she told him as she came back down the hall and found him standing in the dining room, glancing at her wall. She’d deliberately used the parental designation rather than Payne’s name.
“I just did,” he told her. “No change.”
She wondered who he talked to… Ace? Another sibling? Payne’s third wife, Genevieve? The spouse was always the first suspect when someone was shot, but both Genevieve and Payne’s second wife, Selina Barnes Colton, had airtight alibis: security footage from the RRR during the time of the shooting. Genevieve in the mansion, Selina walking from her car to her smaller house on the property, carrying in bags of shopping from someplace farther than Mustang Valley, based on the bags’ logos.
Weird that Selina would have gone shopping while the rest of the family dealt with the shock of Ace Colton’s surprise heritage, the knowledge that the eldest heir had been switched at birth and subsequently been stripped of his position as CEO of Colton Oil…
Her mental switch to her current case was a coping mechanism, she knew. Recognized it. Anytime things started to rattle her emotional ground, she focused on a case. Made her great at her job. And still single at thirty-six.
“I made another call, too,” Rafe said, still facing the wall plastered with the last ten years of Tyler’s life. “To a government attorney who works with the Forest Service. I asked for a fast track on any warrant or request that may come through for Grant Alvin’s employment record, or for anything else pertaining to anyone working that mountain.”
To show her how powerful he was? To push his weight around?
He turned and her gaze hooked up with the depth of emotion in those so-familiar blue eyes of his. He’d called because he cared.
Because he was committed to helping her find out what had happened to Tyler. She got the message. He was going to help and then he’d be going back to his real life—the one where he could pick up the phone and call a US attorney after eight o’clock at night.
She made a note of that, too.
“I had no idea it was going to be so hard, seeing you again.” The longing in his words, barely above a whisper, shot through her with the force of a blast.
She couldn’t go down that road again. “It’s a little weird, yeah, but fine, too,” she said, arranging folders on the table.
“I used to watch you.” He’d put his hands in his pockets and was standing there not bothering to hide the glistening in his eyes. “After you’d get home from school, you’d get on Annabelle and ride out to our hill. Every day, when you’d disappear out of sight, I’d pretend I was out there with you…”
“Don’t, Rafe.” He’d watched her? It could be creepy. But it was Rafe. Needing her.
Just as she’d needed him.
Even in their separation they’d been together? The idea soothed her.
And nothing had changed.
“I’d sit up in my room and picture you out there with someone else. Someone who would love you as much as I did, and not leave you…”
Picturing the thirteen-year-old man-child he’d been, all alone in his room at the mansion—she even knew which window to picture since she’d looked up to it often enough over the years—she didn’t want to care.
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