been two years…”
“But maybe something up there will trigger an idea…a possibility you haven’t yet thought of. I really want to help, Kerry. If you never speak to me again after this, fine, I deserve that. But let me at least help you find justice for Tyler.”
He knew he had her before she opened her mouth. He recognized the look in her eyes before she glanced away.
If he’d needed proof that what had once been sacred between them wasn’t dead yet, he’d just had it.
And knew, just as he had twenty-three years before, that he was going to have to walk away from it.
Because sometimes the heart didn’t win.
“It’s still going to be light for another hour. Can you go now?” Kerry knew better than to let Rafe Colton back into her personal sphere—knew he’d be heading right back out again—but if he was willing to help her find justice for Tyler, she wanted to use him quickly and be done.
While she had to have dealings with him anyway because she’d been assigned his father’s case.
No one else wanted anything to do with investigating Tyler’s death. His case was done. Closed. They thought her paranoid, needing to get over it, at worst. And a grieving sister who was struggling to accept the truth, at best. Which was why the case files were at home, not work. Why her dining room wall had become an investigation board.
“I’m not really dressed for a trek up the mountain…” He looked at her and finished, “But, yeah, let’s go now.”
Whether he still had the talent to read her, or she’d just been obvious in her thoughts of “now or never,” she didn’t care to guess. But after locking up, she holstered her gun at her waist and headed out of her house through the door off the kitchen that led to a two-car garage.
Rafe offered to drive. To take his truck. She wasn’t riding anywhere with him. The control was all hers or she wasn’t going.
Not that she said as much aloud. She just got in her Jeep and pushed the button to raise the garage door. He climbed in beside her without pressing the matter.
Smart man.
“One of the last times that Tyler talked about having changed his life around…he was telling me how good he was doing, loved working as a cowboy, actually out on the range for a week at a time, moving herds, running down strays and assisting with difficult births. He’d been thinking about riding in an amateur rodeo during the county fair…and then he let something slip,” she said, doing everything she could to remain fully focused on the case at hand, and not getting distracting by the man at her side.
“He said that he was staying away from the ‘Big B.’ He paled right afterward and when I questioned him on it, he just shook his head.”
“The Big B? Is that a person?”
“I have no idea, but I assume so. It kind of sounded like it, like it was someone he had to avoid, not a place he just didn’t go to anymore. I’ve looked all over the county and can’t find any establishment that would go by the name Big B.”
“Odin Rogers doesn’t have a B,” Rafe said, almost as though she hadn’t already figured that out.
“And his middle name is Paul,” she let him know she’d done her homework. And could spell enough to know there was no B in that, either.
“I’m thinking that someone who works for Rogers is the Big B. Maybe one of his hired thugs. Or, I suppose, it could be some kind of moniker for a substance cocktail, but not one that’s on any radar.”
The entrance to the drive up the mountain was several miles outside of town, in the opposite direction from the RRR. The well-worn, if little used one-lane road had been carved into the mountain back in the early days of gold and copper mining. Her Jeep bounced up it just fine, taking the sometimes harrowing turns slowly when she couldn’t see ahead to know if she’d need to yield to oncoming vehicles.
“You’ve obviously done this a few times,” Rafe said, holding on to the handle just above the door frame. He didn’t look nervous though. He was smiling.
And she almost missed the next turn.
Being up on the mountain with Rafe, away from the world, with only more mountains, higher peaks, and the gulch below in sight, threw her. They’d spent most of their hours together out in the middle of nowhere, out of view, out of sight, so they wouldn’t be caught together. In the vast Arizona landscape, she’d felt so free.
Free from her father’s drinking. From worry. From little Tyler needing things from her.
Free to love Rafe Kay.
Free to love Rafe Colton.
Standing up on that mountain with him, even several feet apart, watching him look over an area she pretty much knew by heart, she felt her whole being suffused with a sense of rightness, followed by a stream of longing that almost brought her to her knees. Everything about him was familiar in that moment. The way a few strands of his thick blond hair picked up when a breeze blew over them. The set of his shoulders. The intent focus he gave to whatever had his attention.
How could twenty-three years make no difference at all? Especially when it made all the difference in the world?
“This is where he went over,” he said, apparently not as affected by being alone in the wilderness with her as she was with him. And why would he be? He’d probably taken a lot of girls back to their old hiding places. And why not? They were a known way to get past Payne.
Those old hiding places were all part of his family’s land.
“Yes.” She gave herself a strong mental shake and focused on why she was up on that mountain. On why she was talking to Rafe Colton at all.
“And there was no scuffle? No sign of struggle?”
She shook her head. Another fact that Chief Barco had taken into consideration before ruling her brother’s death accidental.
“But if he was facing the gully down below, thinking he was alone, or if he was up here with someone he trusted, he could easily have been taken off guard.”
Tyler could have been making out with someone. Not that she’d ever considered that before, but she definitely knew how lost you could get in a kiss when you were out in the middle of nowhere…
“He hadn’t been expecting to be in a fight. Hadn’t had a chance to defend himself,” she said, bringing her thoughts firmly back to current ground.
Rafe turned slowly, glancing all around them. He didn’t walk far, didn’t venture too close to the cliff’s edge.
Glancing at the slick-bottomed, expensive leather dress shoes he was wearing, she didn’t blame him.
“What’s over there?” He motioned to a cliff side that tilted downward, toward another shallower gully off to the left of where Tyler had been pushed.
Shrugging,
