* * *
Kerry didn’t look happy to see him. He didn’t blame her. Hadn’t expected any different.
“Can I come in?”
“No.”
He nodded. “I’m more ashamed than I can say that it took Payne’s attempted murder to bring me to the point of seeking you out,” he said. She wasn’t likely to give him a second chance to explain. Or much time, either. “I’ve known for years, ever since you got back, that I had to speak to you, to explain...”
Her brows rose, her long, auburn hair trailing down around her shoulders, just as he remembered it. When he was twelve, he’d worked up the guts to tell her he liked it that way. That had been a tough year for him—noticing her as a girl, not just a friend. Wanting to be more than just friends, but having no clue what that even meant in any practical sense.
“I didn’t expect you’d have noticed,” she said. He paid close attention to the words. They didn’t say a whole lot—and yet, they said so much more than he deserved.
There were chinks in her armor. He’d hoped, for a second that morning, that he’d witnessed one of those chinks, but she’d recovered so quickly he hadn’t been sure.
“I have always noticed everything about you,” he said. Like the fact that she’d just looked past his shoulder toward the street. He’d heard a car go by. Someone she knew?
“You shouldn’t have parked that fancy truck of yours out front,” she said. “People will talk.”
“More so if we’re standing out here on your porch,” he told her, a weak attempt to get into her house. To see her space, to be able to picture it, to have a real conversation with her.
Nodding, she stood back, held open the door. “But you aren’t staying, Rafe,” she told him. “You can say whatever it is you feel compelled to say, but then you go. And you don’t come back.”
“You’re the one with the weapon, Detective,” he said. “I left my rifle in its case on the floor of my truck...” He was pretty sure there’d been some pithy follow-up on the tip of his tongue, but all thought vanished as he caught his first scent of her space. His first view.
And felt like he’d come home.
* * *
“I’d apologize for furniture that comes from a discount home store, and rugs that are polyester blend, instead of the real wool you’re used to,” Kerry said, standing on the four-by-six area of tile that led from the front door into her living room. “But I’m sure you knew what to expect when you came slumming.” Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
She felt like a gutter rat, standing there with him consuming her house just by stepping in the door.
“And hey, I give you credit...you didn’t waste much time seeking me out once Payne was safely in a coma and so unlikely to catch you mixing with the help.”
The Help. She imagined it with a capital H. Like it was a name. God, she hated those words. The Help. Had heard it far too many times, in her own head, as she’d cried herself to sleep, night after night. Year after year. Not every night. Not all year. But far too often.
She’d hadn’t been on the ranch to help anyone. She’d been a kid. Growing up, like any other kid had a right to do.
She hated him for abiding by those social rules, letting those words destroy the most valuable thing in her life.
“If I was going to stop hanging out with you because I thought you were beneath me, I’d have done it when I was five,” he said. “Or six, or seven, or eight.”
Did he think she hadn’t already tried to give him that benefit of the doubt? That she hadn’t spent years trying to understand?
“You didn’t yet know what Colton money could buy you.”
“Of course I did,” he said. “I knew that the first night I slept in the mansion. Even at five, my pajamas were silk and the sheets were softer than anything I’d ever felt before. I had a huge bed, and a room full of new toys waiting for me.”
He’d never told her that. “You said the pajamas were cold.”
“They were. But I liked how they felt. I never felt like you were beneath me, Kerry. Not ever. To the contrary, I felt like I was a lowlife, ditching you like I did.”
She might have believed that ten—twenty—years before. Back when she’d still been foolish enough to hope that adulthood would free them to be together.
But if telling her his fanciful version of the truth got him out of her house, of her life, quicker, then she was all ears. “So why did you? Ditch me?”
“Because I was madly in love with you. And thirteen. When Payne caught us kissing... I was...hard...and embarrassed and I freaked out. How could I be in love? I was only thirteen. But you...you were like a siren or something, calling me to you. The strength of those feelings scared me. It wasn’t like I had anyone to talk to about it. But Payne had plenty to say about the kinds of boys who fooled around with the help. And what that did to the girls they fooled around with, too...”