COLIN LEFT MERLIN’S Farm and his friends reluctantly. He’d wanted to drive Gemma home, but she’d declined his offer. He knew what she meant, that he was to clear things with Jean before Gemma would be alone with him.
He knew that Gemma was right, but that didn’t keep him from dreading the confrontation with Jean. He parked behind the sheriff’s office and started to get out, but instead, he sat in his car and looked up at his apartment windows. Gemma said she wanted him to tell her about his life, but he didn’t want to do that. For so many years, he’d gone in the wrong direction, trying to be what he wasn’t. His lifelong obsession with wanting to help people had, at times, made him almost forget himself.
Obligations to his family, to people he’d grown up with, to his hometown, and especially to a woman he’d once loved with his whole heart, had nearly overwhelmed him. These weren’t things he wanted to tell a woman he thought he might have a future with.
As he looked up at the windows of the dreary apartment he hated, he envisioned what was coming. Jean loved drama and scenes—which was why she was so good in a courtroom—and he didn’t know which way she was going to play this particular episode. Would it be tears, which would end up with Colin comforting her? Or would it be anger and her shouting at him and saying that he’d betrayed her?
Back when he was younger, her scenes had been something he needed. A rip-roaring good argument with Jean—who could give as good as she got—helped release some of his own rage at the way his life was going.
After one of their fights—and the following makeup sex—he’d be able to stand working at his father’s car dealership for another six weeks or so. When the pressure inside him had built until he’d been ready to explode, he knew just how to push Jean’s buttons to make her angry enough that they could have a fight.
But all that had ended long ago, Colin thought, as he leaned back against the seat of his Jeep. He had walked out just as she’d taken a job in D.C.
Closing his eyes, he let himself remember those first days with Jean.
When Colin was in his last year of school—University of Virginia—his father was begging him to join his car business.
“I’ll give you anything you want,” his dad said. “Have a lawyer draw up a contract. You want fifty percent—eighty percent—whatever, you got it. You want me to retire and turn everything over to you and your brothers, I will.”
The only thing Colin wanted, had ever wanted, was to be the sheriff of Edilean. The fact that the town didn’t have a sheriff didn’t bother him at all.
His father, in an attempt to “reason” with him—meaning to make his eldest son see things his way—said, “You need a job that pays you, one you can make money at. It’s a matter of pride.”
He’d added the last because he knew his son didn’t need money. When Colin was sixteen, his father had complained about the software that kept track of all the cars his dealership sold. Peregrine Frazier had ranted and raved about it in detail, saying that the program was made for one dealership and about a hundred cars. “It gets confused when I put more than that in it,” he said in derision.
At the time, Colin was a senior in high school and taking a computer course. The next morning he talked to his teacher about the problem, and together they wrote a new program.
Colin presented it to his father on the day he graduated.
“I’m supposed to give you a gift, boy,” Mr. Frazier said, looking at the four CDs in puzzlement. “Is this music?”
“Stick it in a computer and see,” Colin said.
When Mr. Frazier saw what the software could do, he copyrighted it, paid a lot to have some IT guys smooth it out, then marketed it. Every penny in royalties that came in was split between Colin and his teacher. The money was enough that both of them never had to work again.
When Colin graduated from college he didn’t want to sell cars, but he hated to see his father beg. Worse, he couldn’t bear to tell him no. And too, there was the weight on him that his ancestors had always worked with anything with wheels. To not do so was letting down generations of Fraziers. So Colin had agreed to try it. He’d gone to work in the Richmond dealership and done his best to sell cars.
But he’d hated it. Selling was not something he liked and he was very, very bad at it. His sales were so low the other sale
speople laughed at him.
It was Jean who changed everything.
Colin had been out of college for only a few weeks, was just twenty-one years old, and working for his dad. Jean came in to buy a car and she was so beautiful that all Colin could do was stare at her. His brother ended up making the sale.
Colin thought that was the end of the meeting, but she called him later and invited him out. They ended up in bed together, and two months later, they were living together in her apartment.
Like Colin’s father, Jean encouraged him to stay in the car business, and for four years they were a couple. He was pulled into her life of candlelit dinners and nights out. He was fascinated by her law cases, and they often stayed up all night working on them. It was the closest Colin had come to real work in the world of law enforcement he so loved. Jean’s world became his, but that was all right because being involved so deeply with her helped block out his unhappiness at his job. And besides, he was so young and inexperienced that everything about her was dazzling.
In college he’d been so involved in his studies—which consisted of anything that came close to pertaining to criminology—and sports that he didn’t have time for much else. There’d been girls, but none of them held his attention for very long. He wanted a woman who was interesting, and who was more involved in life than in just wondering what she should wear.
Jean, six years older than he was, a lawyer and well traveled, had fulfilled that need in him, and for those years their life together had been good.
Colin didn’t realize it, but he’d always assumed that someday they’d quit going out so often, quit flying to Napa for the weekend, and quit having their raucous fights. He thought they would become serious, and when they did, they’d move to Edilean. They’d live in a real house with a big backyard, not a terrace that looked out over a city. They’d have kids and attend church together.
Everything changed one evening when Jean came home and excitedly told him that she’d had a job offer in Washington, D.C.
“Of course I haven’t accepted yet,” she said.