Colton's Lethal Reunion (Coltons of Mustang Valley)

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 w

asn’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.