Tempted by the Texan

“Oh, my God,” she gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. “Did you witness the murder?”

Shaking his head, he explained, “Her body was never found because nobody knew to look for her. He told everyone, including me, that she took off. I didn’t find out what happened to her until I was thirteen. He got pissed off about something, and while he was taking out his anger on me, he let it slip that he should kill me and do away with my body the same way he had done with my mother.”

Mariah’s eyes widened in horror and he hated having to share the ugliness of his life with her. But they couldn’t move forward until she knew it all.

“I knew that it was only a matter of time before he carried through on it and I disappeared the way my mom did.” He reached up to rub the tension building at the back of his neck. “I was the one who turned him in to the police.”

“That’s why he’s in prison, isn’t it?” she asked as tears filled her eyes. “Because he killed your mother.”

“Yes and no,” he admitted, opening the box of tissues Sam had given him.

She looked confused as she accepted the tissue he handed her. “You want to explain that?”

He released a heavy sigh. “At first, the cops thought I was just a kid with a grudge against my father. After I showed them the scars on my back, they picked him up for child abuse.” He shook his head. “I kept trying to tell them about my mom, but they focused on the abuse that I had suffered instead of what had happened to her. When they arrested him and brought him in to police headquarters, he saw me and all hell broke loose.”

“What did he do?” Unable to bear the horrified expression on her pretty face, Jaron trained his gaze on a picture of her and Bria when they were little girls hanging on the wall across the room.

“He went into a tirade and without thinking repeated his regrets that he hadn’t killed me the way he’d done my mom.” Jaron shook his head. “During the investigations, they weren’t able to find any evidence that he killed her, but they found enough to tie him to a few other murders and suspect him of several more. Along with the charges of child abuse, they had enough to put him away for life.”

“Dear God, he...”

When her voice trailed off, Jaron finished for her. “He was a serial killer.”

To his relief, instead of Mariah looking at him with suspicion the way some people had, tears streamed down her cheeks when she got up from the bed and came over to sit down beside him on the window seat, then put her arms around him. “I hate that you had to go through all that, Jaron.”

He wrapped his arms around her, and for the first time in three days felt the sense of contentment that he only experienced with Mariah. “Don’t cry, darlin’. I survived.”

“But why were you so reluctant to tell me about all of this?” she asked.

“When Simon was arrested, I was put into foster care,” he explained. “You’d be amazed at the number of foster families who refuse to take in the kid of a serial killer. And the ones who did open their homes to me acted as if they thought I might be a danger to them.”

She looked puzzled. “Why would they do that?”

“I guess they were afraid that I would turn out to have tendencies like the old man,” Jaron said, shrugging.

“That’s why you wanted to keep everything about your past hidden, isn’t it?” she guessed. “You didn’t trust that I wouldn’t do the same thing.”

He nodded. “It wasn’t until I was sent to the Last Chance Ranch that I felt accepted for who I was—just a kid caught up in a bad situation.”

“But I thought only boys who were in trouble with the law were sent to live with Hank Calvert,” she said, frowning.

He smiled. “I had a bad habit of running away from foster homes when I got tired of them looking at me as though they were afraid I’d kill them in their sleep.”

“That was unfair,” she said indignantly. “You had nothing to do with your father’s crimes.”

“Unfair or not, I learned that if I wanted to be treated like everyone else, I kept my mouth shut and didn’t let anyone know whose kid I was.” Unable to stop himself, he kissed her forehead. “I was afraid if you knew what had happened, you might look at me that way, too.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t stand the thought of that.”

“I suppose I can understand how you felt. But I’ve known all along that your past was sketchy and I didn’t care,” she reminded him.