style="font-size:15px;"> “But I need to talk to you,” he said through teeth gritted with frustration and anger.
* * *
Elle reached for Pandora, extricating the little girl from Juliette’s arms. “Come here, sweetheart,” she said. “Let you, me, and Sasha get something to eat and drink...” She took the beagle’s leash from Juliette’s hand, too, and with a crook of her neck gestured at Blake. Since she’d learned he’d returned to town a couple of days ago, she’d been urging Juliette to talk to him.
But there really was no time. Not now...
Fear pounded in her heart as she watched her friend walk away with her daughter. She’d nearly lost her just a short time ago—at the park. If Juliette hadn’t shot the man in the shoulder...
If she hadn’t wounded him, he would have killed them both. She just had to convince her boss of the same. She had no time to deal with Blake Colton. But when she moved to follow Elle and Pandora, he caught her. Wrapping his big hand around her arm, he held her back.
Her skin tingled from his touch. It had been so long. But she could still remember how it felt...how he’d touched her that night...
She jerked her arm from his grasp. Just as he’d spoken through gritted teeth, she did the same. “I. Cannot. Do. This. Now.”
“We need to talk,” he insisted.
She knew it was true and not just because Elle had been badgering her to seek him out. She knew it was the right thing to do. But at the moment she needed to be with her daughter—needed to see for herself that her child stayed safe.
“She’s mine, isn’t she?” he asked, and his voice cracked slightly with the emotions making his green eyes dark.
Her reply stuck in her throat, choking her.
“She’s the right age,” he continued as if he was trying to convince himself. “And she looks like me...”
Juliette felt like she had when she’d stared into the barrel of the killer’s gun. Trapped. Terrified. Desperate...
* * *
Frustration gripped Blake, twisting his gut into tight knots. He wanted to shake her, but when he reached for her again, she flinched as if she expected him to hurt her. He wouldn’t have, of course—despite his feelings. But he dropped his hand back to his side.
“Tell me,” he said, badgering her like she was a reluctant witness on the stand. “Tell me if she’s mine.”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, as if her patience had snapped. Or perhaps it was her conscience. “She’s yours.”
He expelled a sharp breath, like she’d punched him in the gut. All these years he’d spent thinking about her and about that night, he had never once considered that she might have gotten pregnant—that they might have made a child together. He was a father.
Anger coursed through him now, replacing the shock. “How—how could...”
Her lips curved into a slight smile. “The usual way...”
He glared at her. “How could you keep her from me?”
Her face flushed now, but she just stared at him with those damn beautiful eyes of hers.
“How could you?” he asked. “For years?”
“I—I—” she stammered. “You left Red Ridge right after...”
“You could have found me,” he insisted. His family was in Red Ridge. They’d known where he was.
She tensed now and glared back at him. “You could have found me—even without knowing.”
“I tried,” he admitted. “You slipped out in the middle of the night, and I didn’t even know your last name. Hell, right now I’m not sure you gave me your right first name, Juliette.”
She flinched.
And he wondered. Had she told him anything that was the truth?
“Juliette is my real name,” she said.
Someone from inside the police department called it now. She glanced back toward the building. “I—I need to go,” she said. But when she started forward, he caught her arm again—stopping her.
“No—” He’d spent five years wondering what had happened to her. Where she was... He wasn’t just going to let her walk away from him again.
“She needs me,” Juliette said.
And he felt once again like she’d struck him. The child needed her mother. She didn’t even know she had a father. Unless Juliette had passed off another man as the little girl’s daddy. Blake glanced down at the hand of the arm he held—her left hand. Her fingers were bare of any rings. She wasn’t married or engaged now.
But a lot could have happened over the last nearly five years. She might have had a husband. Hell, he’d thought she might have on their night together, and that was why she’d slipped away like she had, so nobody would spot them together.
She hadn’t worn a ring then either, though. So maybe, as a cop, she’d just decided not to wear one.
How had she afforded that beautiful gown—those shoes and earrings—on a cop’s salary—if she’d even been a cop back then? She looked younger now, without makeup, than she’d looked that night.
“Let me go,” she said—once again through gritted teeth. She had beautiful teeth and lips and features...
He’d started to believe that he’d romanticized her and that night over the years. That she couldn’t have been nearly as beautiful as he’d thought she was. He’d been wrong—about romanticizing it.
She was also stressed and afraid, her face pale and eyes wide with fear.
“I will let you go,” he agreed because he had no choice. Her daughter—their daughter—needed her.
Before the little girl had hidden her face in her mother’s neck, Blake had noticed her tears and, worse than that, her fear. His gut churned again—with a sense of helplessness even worse than when Patience had told him about his sister Layla’s predicament.
“But you’re going to come to my suite later,” he told her.
Her eyes narrowed as if she thought he expected a repeat of that long-ago night. Of what had happened over and over that night...
His pulse leaped at the thought, but he was too angry with her to ever want her again. So he clarified, “Just to talk.”
Someone called her name a second time, and she tugged free of him. But as she stepped through those open doors to the lobby, she turned back and nodded.
“I’m staying in the same suite as I was that night,” he told her.
Color rushed back into her pale face, and she nodded again. She would
