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 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.
And she couldn’t do this. She wasn’t that girl anymore. He’d killed her.
“You broke my heart, Rafe.”
Rafe might have killed the girl she’d been, but she wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a grown woman with a life that satisfied her. She could risk her life saving others because she didn’t have anyone who was counting on her, anyone who’d be devastated, if she was killed.
Not that there was usually all that much danger in Mustang Valley. Lately, though… First with the murder of a bodyguard hired to protect the president of Robertson Renewable Energy Corporation, Bowie Robertson. Then attempts made on the lives of Bowie and Rafe’s sister Marlowe, and then Payne Colton’s shooting, and now a ranger killed and someone shooting at her and Rafe…
“How come you never married?” Kerry plopped down to one of the six chairs tucked into her dining room table—an antique she’d restored. After everything that had happened in the past few hours, she needed a moment to regroup. To be the woman she was, not the young girl she’d once been.
She needed to see Rafe Colton as the man he was now, not the boy he’d been.
He sat, too, leaving a chair between them. “Never found a woman I wanted to live with for the rest of my life. How about you?”
She’d brought that on, she supposed. Don’t ask if you don’t want to be asked. Being a detective, one who spent her days asking questions of others with it understood that her own thoughts didn’t come to play in the interaction, she’d maybe become a little rusty at the personal stuff.
“I’m not all that fond of men,” she said. “I just don’t believe they’re wired to be what I need in a relationship.”
She saw the verbal bullet hit him. Hurt for him. And couldn’t lie about what his choices had done to her. Not just his, of course. Her father—he’d tried his best but most definitely had not been a man she could rely on, other than to be able to trust that if he wasn’t drunk, he would be soon.
And Tyler—he’d fallen down that same rabbit hole.
“Then you haven’t known the right men,” Rafe finally said.
She shrugged. Maybe.
“There are a lot of happily married women in the world. And men who’ve risked everything for their families. For their country. For…”
Holding up a hand, Kerry smiled. “I get it,” she said. “I actually work with several of them.”
And at home, she had trust issues.
“I’ve found that my life is happier, I’m more at peace inside, when I have no expectations where men are concerned,” she said, giving him more than she’d ever admitted aloud.
Because he was Rafe?
She hoped not. She wanted to believe that she was just a bit more open—a smidge vulnerable—because they’d just been shot at and she had a cop stationed outside her door.
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