Harlequin Intrigue March 2021--Box Set 2 of 2

by Nichole Severn

  A ding announced the soup was ready, and he delivered it to the table in front of her and then added the plate of crackers. “Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

  “No, thanks, I’m good. Are you going to sit with me while I eat?”

  He sank down in the chair opposite her and looked at a place just over her head. “Did anything happen while I was sleeping?” she asked. She’d hoped somehow a miracle would have happened while she was out and Peter had been caught.

  “Nothing, although everyone is looking for Peter,” he replied.

  He finally looked at her, and in the depths of his eyes she saw not only distrust, but pain...pain that she knew she’d put there.

  “Hunter, it was all real for me,” she said softly. “I might have lied about my name and where I came from, but I didn’t lie about how I feel for you. I’m in love with you, Hunter.”

  Her words hung in the air for what felt like an eternity. She had hoped she’d see a happy smile curve his lips, a warmth fill his eyes, but neither happened.

  He studied her as if she were a scientific specimen he’d never seen before, and then he sighed. “Were you ever going to tell me the truth?” he finally asked.

  “Of course I was. I almost told you the night we made love, but then I decided I’d wait until we figured out who was doing the terrible things to me. I was going to tell you, Hunter. I swear I was going to tell you.” She realized he had no reason to believe her now.

  He sighed once again. “Eat your soup before it gets cold. I’m going to make a phone call to check in with Nick.” He got up, let Zeus back into the house, and then he and the dog left the room.

  She stared down into her soup, her eyes filling with tears. She should have known this would happen, but someplace in her heart she’d hoped for it to be different. She’d hoped that love conquered all, but she now knew that sometimes love just wasn’t enough.

  When this was all over, when he remembered her, she would just be another woman who had lied to him. She hated that. She’d managed to do exactly what Juanita had asked her not to do—she’d broken his heart.

  Although she no longer felt hungry, she ate the soup and crackers because she knew she needed to put something in her stomach. Tears continued to burn her eyes, but she managed not to cry.

  She’d hoped that she and Hunter would share a future together. Now she didn’t know what would happen next with her life.

  Even if they caught Peter and managed to make charges stick, she didn’t think she could stay in Dusty Gulch if she and Hunter weren’t together. It would just be too painful to see him every day, to love him every day and know that he no longer felt the same way about her.

  When she finished eating, she carried the bowl and saucer to the sink, rinsed them off and then loaded them into the dishwasher.

  She left the kitchen and found Hunter seated in his recliner with Zeus next to him. She sat on the sofa and looked at him. “Did you check in with Nick?”

  “I did, but so far there is nothing new to report.”

  “I suppose you hate me right now,” she said.

  “Ainsley...Colette...I could never hate you.” A whisper of warmth filled his eyes. It was there for only a moment and then was gone. A frown cut across his forehead. “Right now the only thing I’m focused on is getting your ex-husband behind bars.”

  “And once that happens?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked down at Zeus and stroked his fur, then returned his gaze to her. “To be perfectly honest, I’m kind of numb right now where you’re concerned. I haven’t really had time to process everything you’ve told me today.”

  “Do you think time will help you to forgive me?” Her heart raced in her chest as she waited for his answer. Was there any hope at all that they would be together when this was all over?

  “I don’t know how to answer that right now. All I want at the moment is for you to be safe.” He held her gaze for a long moment and then looked back down at Zeus. “I need time, Ains...Colette. I just need time.”

  “I understand,” she replied. And she did. She knew all the lies she’d told him had come out of left field. She hated that it had all unfolded the way it had.

  She drew in a deep breath and winced as her ribs protested. “Would it be easier if I moved back to my apartment or someplace else?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied sharply. “You need to be here.” His gaze softened. “This is the best place for you right now. Even though I have to work in the morning, I’ve already instructed drive-bys by my fellow officers at regular intervals to make sure nothing happens here. Besides, your ex would be foolish to try something now. He’s got to know by now that he’s on the hot seat. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already hours away from here.”

  “I hope he isn’t hours away. I hope this time he’s overplayed his hand and believed in his own invulnerability and has stuck around. If he goes into the wind, then I’ll never find peace. He tried to kill me last night, and he’ll never stop trying until he’s succeeded.”

  “I thought he’d killed you last night.” Pain leaped into his eyes. “Some of the longest hours of my life were waiting to hear from the doctor after you’d been taken to the hospital.”

  She was so damned selfish, she realized. She’d been caught up in her own drama and hadn’t realized what Hunter had been through in the last twenty-four hours.

  She now saw the lines of exhaustion on his face. How late had he been up the night before...waiting to hear from the doctor...and then worrying about her recovery?

  “Did you manage to get any rest while I was sleeping?” she asked.

  “No, I’m not much of a daytime napper. I’ll sleep tonight,” he replied.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to sleep in the bedroom and let me have the sofa?” she asked.

  “I’ll be fine on the sofa,” he replied firmly. “So, you mentioned that your mother is alive and you have a sister. Was that the imaginary sister you spoke about?”

  “Everything I said about her was true except the part about her being imaginary.” She sighed, and tears once again began to burn in her eyes as she thought of her mother and her sister.

  “We’ve always been very close. When I first went on the run from Peter, I was communicating with them regularly, but then Peter appeared in the small town we were staying in and I realized he had to have been tapping their phones. We managed to leave town before he found where we were staying, and after that I realized I had to never contact my mom and sister again.”

  She swallowed hard against her tears. “I needed to do whatever I could to keep Melinda away from Peter. If he gets his hands on her, he’ll eventually destroy her.”

  “I’m sorry you’ve had to make the choices that you have,” he said. His eyes filled with compassion. “That’s no way for a woman, for a child to live.”

  “I thought I was finally safe here,” she said with a touch of bitterness. “Melinda loves it here, and we were hoping to make it our forever home.”

  “If we catch Peter, you could still make this your forever home,” he said. Once again he looked down at the dog, making it impossible for her to read any emotion that might emanate from his beautiful eyes.

  She released another sigh. “We’ll see.”

  She couldn’t see into the future, and Hunter wasn’t giving any clue as to whether there was any hope for them to come out of this as a couple. Right now it felt unlikely that they would come out of it together. That thought made her want to leave, to run from all the memories of him and love that were in this small town.

  But she had Melinda to think about. Melinda loved it here. She’d made good friends and loved school, and it was difficult to contemplate tearing her away from all those good things just because Colette couldn’t suck it up and figure out how to live here without Hunter in her life.

  She c
ould only hope that with time, Hunter would forgive her and love her once again.

  * * *

  HUNTER BREATHED A deep sigh of relief once Colette finally left the living room to unpack and go to bed. Their conversations had been difficult, and he knew she wanted something from him that he just couldn’t give her right now.

  Everything he’d learned about her was just too new. She’d lied to him about so many things—how was he to trust that what she was saying to him now was true?

  This wasn’t over with yet, and it was in her best interest to keep him emotionally close to her. If they got Peter behind bars, then would she confess that she’d lied about loving Hunter? Would she then admit that she’d only been using him?

  God, he was so confused. But one thing he wasn’t confused about—he wanted Peter Waverly behind bars and facing attempted murder charges for what he’d done to her last night.

  He grabbed a blanket and a spare bed pillow from his hallway closet. He tossed them on the sofa and then turned out all the lights except for the light above the stove. If she got up in the middle of the night for a drink of water, at least she’d be able to see what she was doing.

  With his gun on the coffee table, he finally got out of his clothes except for his boxers and then stretched out on the sofa with Zeus at his feet.

  He was utterly exhausted and yet sleep remained elusive. He found himself thinking about his marriage to Emily. She’d been his high school sweetheart and as far as he was concerned one of the prettiest girls in town.

  He’d thought he knew her inside and out. The one thing he hadn’t known was just how duplicitous she was. Lies had fallen so easily from her lips, lies that he’d believed because he wanted to so badly.

  When she’d left their marriage, he’d walled up his heart, built sturdy fences inside him so that nobody could ever hurt him like that again.

  And then he’d met Ainsley Meadows, a woman he’d believed was open and honest, a woman he believed would be his future. And she’d shattered his trust all over again.

  He understood the reasons she’d chosen to live undercover, and he recognized why she’d lied to him. But emotionally he was having trouble wrapping his head around things.

  Right now he was afraid to tap back into the love he’d had for her. He was afraid to feel at all. All he wanted to focus on for the moment was finding Peter. He wanted to make sure that from this point on Colette and Melinda would be safe from the man who was obviously a brutal monster.

  He finally fell asleep and into nightmares of Peter chasing Colette down a dark street. Peter wielded a long knife that glittered in a streetlamp. Hunter held his gun in his hand. He fired it at Peter, only to discover his gun held no bullets.

  Knowing he needed to get to Peter before the man could kill Colette, Hunter tried to run, but his feet and legs refused to move. He jerked awake covered in a cold sweat and panting as if he’d just run a marathon.

  He swung his feet over the edge of the sofa, aware that the first stir of morning was peeking over the horizon. Zeus sat up and yawned and then jumped down from the sofa.

  Hunter got up and let him out the back door and then started a pot of coffee. He was up about an hour earlier than he usually got up on workdays, but there was no way he wanted to doze off again and fall back into the nightmares that had chased him all night long.

  Once he got the coffee working, he then went into the office where he’d hung several of his uniforms before Colette had taken over his room. He grabbed one of them and then headed for the shower.

  After washing off he remained standing beneath a hot spray of water as if it had the power to unjumble his thoughts. Unfortunately it didn’t help.

  Once he was finished showering and then dressing, he returned to the kitchen. He let Zeus back inside, poured himself a cup of coffee and sank down at the kitchen table.

  He hated having to go in to work today, but one more deputy on the streets made the odds of them finding Peter that much better. However, he believed the man had probably left town. He’d be stupid to stay knowing that everyone in the area was looking for him.

  If he had left town and wasn’t captured in the next day or two, then Colette would remain at risk. He frowned and sipped his coffee, the idea unsettling to him. How could she live with the threat of him killing her continuing to hang over her head?

  How had she lived for the past three years? The mental, the emotional pressure on her had to have been so intense. Had she gone to bed every night with terror on her mind? Had that terror ever released its grip on her?

  Compassion for her situation, for what she’d been through and what she might still have to endure, fluttered through him. God, he wished it could end for her here, but there was no guarantee it would.

  And then what?

  That’s the part he couldn’t think about right now.

  He’d just poured his second cup of coffee when Colette came into the kitchen. She was already dressed in a pair of pink jogging pants and a matching sweatshirt. Her long dark hair was damp, letting him know she’d already showered in the master bath.

  The bruise on her lower jaw appeared even more livid this morning. The sight of it made him want to slam his fist into Peter Waverly’s face.

  “Hmm, that coffee smells wonderful,” she said.

  “Have a seat and I’ll pour you a cup.”

  “Nonsense, just tell me where the cups are and I can get it.”

  “Right cabinet above the sink,” he replied.

  As she walked by him, he caught a whiff of her scent...a clean smell coupled with the hint of her perfume. His stomach tightened with tension in response. Even knowing all the lies she’d told him, his body still yearned for hers. It was his mind that was having problems sorting his emotions out.

  She got her coffee and then joined him at the table. “Did you sleep well?” she asked.

  “I slept okay.” He wasn’t about to share with her the nightmares he’d suffered. “What about you?”

  “I slept all right.”

  “You’re up early.”

  “I’m used to being up early to open the café. What time do you go in to work this morning?” She took a sip of the coffee. Above the cup her beguiling eyes begged him to let her back into his thoughts...his heart.

  He steeled himself against them. He wasn’t ready to untangle his emotions where she was concerned. “I need to leave here around seven thirty or so.”

  “There’s enough time for me to make you some breakfast,” she said. “I mean, if I’m not overstepping kitchen privileges.”

  He couldn’t help but smile. “For as long as you’re here, you have full kitchen privileges. And while I appreciate the offer, I’m not much of a breakfast eater. Feel free to help yourself to whatever you want.”

  “I’m not much of a breakfast eater, either. Coffee is good enough for me.” She raised the cup for another drink.

  “Do you know how to shoot a gun?”

  Her eyes widened in surprise, and she lowered the cup to the table. “Point and pull the trigger. That’s all I know about guns. Why?”

  “I’ve got a nine millimeter that’s for my personal use. I’m going to leave it here for you. Could you actually shoot your ex-husband?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Absolutely. I know his only goal is to kill me, so I could absolutely shoot him to save myself.”

  He believed her. Her eyes burned with determination. “I’ll be right back.” He got up from the table and went into the room he used as an office.

  He grabbed his keys and unlocked the right top drawer. Inside was the spare gun he kept for security purposes. He took the gun out of the drawer, checked it to make sure the safety was on, and then he carried it back into the kitchen.

  As he set it on the table with the barrel facing the wall, she looked at it soberly and then looked up at him. “I can’t belie
ve it’s come to this,” she said softly.

  “To be perfectly honest, my gut instinct is he’s left town. I think they would have caught him by now if he was still in Dusty Gulch. However, just in case I’m wrong, I want you to be able to protect yourself while you’re here alone. Before I leave to go to work, I’ll take the safety off so all you have to do is point and pull the trigger.”

  She nodded. “Aim for center mass, right?”

  “Right,” he replied, surprised she knew the term.

  She grinned at him. “I picked that up while watching police shows on television.”

  Her grin caught him off guard, and a well of love for her rose up inside him. He stared down into his coffee cup. Damn her for ruining things. Damn her for not telling him the truth as soon as they started seriously dating each other. Damn her for twisting and tangling his emotions to the point where he didn’t know what to feel.

  “Center mass is right,” he now replied. For a moment they sipped their coffee in silence. Then she looked at him, and all her features softened. A soft pleading filled her eyes.

  “Hunter...” she began.

  He held up his hand. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  It would be so easy to fall into the blue depths of her winsome eyes, but he couldn’t allow himself. “Colette, I don’t want any heart-to-heart discussions right now. I can’t think about us right now.”

  He saw the pain that dimmed the brightness in her eyes, and he hated himself for putting it there. But at the moment, he didn’t know if they had a path forward or not. The last thing he wanted to do was give her any false hope about what might happen between them in the future.

  “I just want to tell you thank-you for letting me stay here and for keeping me safe,” she finally replied.

  “Protect and serve, that’s our motto.”

  “We both know you’re going way above your duty,” she replied. “You’re a great deputy, and you’re a wonderful, good man.”

  He didn’t feel like a good man right now. He still felt numb. Once again they fell into an uncomfortable silence. She looked at the clock over the stove and got up from the table. “I’m just going to go back and call Juanita’s to check in on Melinda before school.”