by Amelia Autin
Holly’s missionary parents had raised her to know right from wrong. And to believe that actions have consequences. Which meant that sometimes—like now—her conscience uncomfortably reminded her that if she hadn’t done what she’d done...maybe things would have been different. Maybe she wouldn’t be running for her life.
Grant’s death wasn’t her fault. No way was she responsible for that. But the McCays? If she’d never gotten pregnant, if she’d never married Grant, then the McCays would have inherited Grant’s wealth when he died, and they would have no reason to want her out of the picture.
“That’s stupid,” she told herself sternly. “You’re not responsible because they’re so mercenary they’re willing to kill to get you out of the way.”
But...
Friends to lovers was a popular theme in romance novels, but it didn’t always work out that way in real life. Best friends Holly and Grant had attended the University of Texas at Austin together and had both earned software engineering degrees. Then Holly had landed that plum job at NASA, while Grant—always more adventuresome than she—went out on his own, starting his own software company.
They’d seen each other often, at least once a week. Holly had known about the women Grant was dating but had consoled herself that as long as he was playing the field she didn’t really have to worry he was getting serious about any one woman, the same way he’d been in high school and college. And she’d done everything she could to remain a key part of his life.
One mistake on Grant’s part on a night when he’d had too much to drink, and Holly had soon discovered to her secret joy she was pregnant. Grant had done the honorable thing and proposed when she’d told him. After all, he’d reasoned, they’d been best friends forever, so what better basis for a strong marriage? Especially since they’d eventually learned Holly was expecting not one but two babies.
I should have known better, Holly told herself now. Loving Grant secretly the way she had, she’d agreed to his proposal, hoping their babies would bring them together. Hoping that someday he’d realize he loved her, too, the way she loved him.
It hadn’t happened. And while they’d both loved Ian and Jamie, their marriage had been...shaky...threatening to destroy their lifelong friendship. My fault, she acknowledged now. I thought I could make Grant love me. But you can’t make someone love you. Either they do, or they don’t.
Grant’s breakthrough software design had hit the market at just the right time, and suddenly his company was raking in millions when Holly took a maternity leave of absence from her job. Holly had intended to return to work when the twins were three months old, but found she just couldn’t leave them when the time came. And since Grant had certainly been able to afford it, Grant and Holly had decided she would be a stay-at-home mom until the boys were older.
Then Grant was killed in a car crash when the twins were six months old, leaving Holly mourning what had never come to be, and now never would.
Grant had left Holly comfortably well-off but had left the bulk of his estate in a trust for his sons—something Holly had known about and approved of when they’d both made their wills a month after the babies were born. No provision had been made for Grant’s parents, who had first fought the will, then fought to gain custody of the twins from Holly so they could get their hands on the income from the trust. But Holly’s in-laws hadn’t been willing to wait for the court’s final ruling...
Holly sighed and turned over again. Rehashing old history in her mind was no way to fall asleep. She could never resolve the past. Couldn’t change it, either. She just had to live with it, accept that she’d made mistakes and move on.
But thinking about moving on was dangerous, too, especially when the man she was interested in moving on with was Chris Colton. So much emotional baggage, Holly thought. Holy cow, I thought my past was troubled.
She started listing all the reasons getting involved with Chris was a bad, bad idea, but soon gave up...because she didn’t care. Because the reasons for getting involved with him far outweighed the reasons not to, starting with the way he was with her boys. Not to mention the way he’d looked at her when he’d seen her without the wig for the first time...and her reaction.
Holly sighed again as she saw him in her mind’s eye—so tall and impressively male, with muscles that rippled beneath the black T-shirt that fit him like a glove, the same way his jeans did. “Not helping,” she muttered.
After ten more sleepless minutes she gave up. She tossed off the covers and rose from the bed, wrapped her robe around her and belted it tightly, then crept barefoot out of the bedroom and headed quietly for the kitchen. She’d tossed a box of her favorite herbal tea with oranges and lemons in their shopping cart this morning, and if that didn’t help her sleep nothing would.
The tea bags and a mug were easy to find. Holly thought she might have to boil water in a pot—she didn’t care for microwaved tea—but when she looked for a pot in the cabinet beside the stove, there was a brand-new teakettle. As she filled it with water and put it on the stove to boil, she couldn’t help wondering about this house furnished with everything anyone could reasonably want...standing vacant. Uninhabited. Chris had told her Peg looked after it for him, so she wasn’t surprised everything was spotless—as if the house’s loving owners had merely stepped out and would return momentarily.
But it wasn’t just that the house was well tended. Someone had loved this house once, even if Chris had never lived here. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out that someone had to be Chris’s deceased wife, Laura. But if Chris had never lived here, that meant Laura probably hadn’t, either. And Holly’s heart ached for the woman she never knew, the woman who had put so much time and effort into creating a home for the man she loved...and then died. A home her husband couldn’t bear to live in without her...but couldn’t bear to get rid of, either, because it had been hers.
Tears sprang to Holly’s eyes as empathy and a kind of envy converged in her heart. What would it be like to be loved that much? she wondered with bittersweet intensity. And she knew in that instant she would sacrifice anything except Ian and Jamie to be loved like that.
The teakettle chose that moment to start whistling, and Holly dashed the tears from her eyes. Then she turned the flame off, grabbed a pot holder and poured hot water over the tea bag in her mug.
A deep voice from the doorway said, “Holly?” and she whirled around, almost dropping the teakettle in startled panic.
Chapter 7
Chris hadn’t been to bed yet. After he’d left Holly singing her sons to sleep, he’d tried to do some work, but the memories evoked by Holly’s lullabies were too sharp, too poignant. Though he tried to focus, his mind kept sliding back to his childhood. To his mother, of course. But also to his father.
Saralee had been a near-perfect mother, but Matthew hadn’t been a bad father. Stern. Harsh on occasion. Busy, as a man would be trying to support such a large family on what a handyman could earn, and trying to keep the ramshackle Colton farmhouse from falling to pieces around them. But...he’d taken Chris fishing sometimes, had taught him how to ride a bike. Had even taught him how to handle a rifle and a shotgun and not blow his own damn fool head off.
Chris would also never forget the day he’d turned six and Matthew had given him the best birthday present a boy could ever have—his golden retriever, Bouncer. Chris hadn’t known then that Bouncer was the partial payoff Matthew had received for a job he’d done for a rancher who couldn’t pay him in cash. Chris also hadn’t known money was so tight for the Coltons that year that Saralee had despaired of where the money would come from for birthday presents for Chris and Annabel. All Chris knew back then was that Bouncer was his, and he’d loved that dog almost as much as he’d loved Saralee and Annabel. Almost as much as he’d loved Trevor.
Bouncer had been his constant companion for more than five years. Losing
his dog had cut a gaping hole in Chris’s heart. If he’d had Bouncer, the other losses—his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters—wouldn’t have hit him so hard. But the foster parents who’d taken Chris into their home for the money the state paid them weren’t willing to take on a dog as well—not without compensation. Bouncer had been sent to an animal shelter...and euthanized.
The boy he’d been had never recovered.
Now Chris stood in the kitchen, staring at the woman who’d opened the door to so many painful memories from his past he almost resented her for it. But then he realized she wasn’t to blame—it wasn’t her fault his father was a serial killer, had made Chris’s mother his last victim and set in motion a chain of events no one could have predicted. And he couldn’t blame Holly for being a good mother to her sons, either, for singing the bedtime songs Saralee had sung to her own children more than twenty years ago.
No, the only one to blame in all of this was Matthew Colton...whose murderous blood ran in Chris’s veins.
“Sorry,” he told Holly. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
She shook her head. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s my own fault—I shouldn’t be so jumpy. It’s just that I wasn’t paying attention, because I was thinking about—” She stopped abruptly.
“Thinking about the McCays?”
She shook her head again, then turned and put the teakettle down. “No. I was thinking about this house. About...” She hesitated. “About Laura. About how much you must have loved her. And I was thinking I would give anything to be loved that much.”
Chris moved into the room until he stood right in front of Holly, staring down at her. So clean and wholesome. So sweet and desirable. “Yes, I loved Laura...but not enough,” he said roughly. Holly’s face took on a questioning mien, but all he said was “You don’t want to know, Holly. But don’t have any illusions about me. Laura wasn’t a saint, but she was far and away too good for the likes of me.”
The ache in Chris’s heart grew until it threatened to overwhelm him. The urge to touch Holly, to kiss her, to lose himself in her arms was so great he almost did just that. And something in her soft brown eyes—a yearning empathy—told him she wouldn’t stop him if he did try to kiss her. But if he touched her, it wouldn’t end with kisses. It wouldn’t end until he’d disillusioned her, until he’d proved to her she’d been wrong to trust him. Because he would hurt her...just as he’d hurt Laura. Not physically—he would never do that—but emotionally. And hurting Holly...hurting any woman ever again...would destroy him.
He took a step backward, putting distance between himself and temptation. “Don’t look at me like that. And for God’s sake, don’t pity me.” It hadn’t been pity he’d seen in her eyes, but...
“Not pity,” she told him quietly. “You’re wrong if you think that. And you’re wrong if you think anything your father did is a reflection on you, or that you could turn out like him,” she added, unerringly going right to the heart of Chris’s deepest fear. “Grant was a wonderful man—nothing like his parents. Should I not have loved Grant because his parents are the way they are?” Her voice dropped a notch. “Ian and Jamie are McCays, too. Should I blame them because their grandparents tried to kill me?”
Holly turned around and picked up her mug. She fished the tea bag out of it with a spoon, threw the tea bag in the trash, then turned back to Chris. “Think about it,” she said. “Good night, Chris.”
Chris stared at the doorway through which Holly had disappeared as he acknowledged she was right—his father’s sins were his alone. Chris didn’t need to atone for them. Just because a killer’s blood ran through his veins didn’t mean he was a killer. Chris had always known that deep down, but...but what? He’d let society’s scorn for a serial killer’s son color his perception of himself? He’d let the people of his hometown judge him for actions not his own?
Saralee’s blood also ran through his veins, and she’d never hurt anyone. The people of Granite Gulch hadn’t focused on that, though, just on what Matthew had done, and all the Colton children had paid the price to a greater or lesser extent. But Chris wasn’t Saralee any more than he was Matthew. He was his own person. His character had been forged by the life he’d lived, and the sense of right and wrong his mother had inculcated in him.
A few people in Granite Gulch outside his family had seen beyond the stigma he’d carried. Laura and Peg, of course. Peg’s husband, Joe, who’d been Chris’s best friend in high school. And when Chris had escaped Granite Gulch, when he’d gone to college in Arlington, no one had known who he was. No one had judged him except by his own actions. It had been a refreshing change, so refreshing he’d been tempted not to return to Granite Gulch after graduation.
But Laura had persuaded him to come back. Laura hadn’t wanted to move to Fort Worth, even though that was where Chris had started his PI business, using connections he’d made in college. Laura had wanted to stay in Granite Gulch, near her parents and her sister. And because he’d loved her, Chris had compromised. He and Laura had lived in Granite Gulch and he’d commuted the forty miles each way to and from Fort Worth. But there’d been a price to pay for that compromise, a price Laura had increasingly resented. She’d never voiced that resentment to Chris...but deep down he’d known. He just hadn’t been able to—
Chris stopped himself. He wasn’t going there. Not tonight. Too many painful memories had already been dragged out into the light from the dark place Chris had stored them, and it was after midnight. He was going to have enough trouble sleeping without adding any more.
* * *
Holly woke to the smell of frying bacon. She hadn’t had bacon in forever—it wasn’t all that healthy for you, especially the kind sold in the United States—but she hadn’t stopped Chris when he’d added a package to their grocery cart yesterday, because she secretly loved it. Bacon, eggs, toast and grits had been a Sunday-morning staple in her home growing up.
She glanced at the clock and realized it was early, just past six, which was why Ian and Jamie hadn’t been what woke her up. If Holly slept past seven, the twins invariably woke her by banging on the sides of their cribs and calling “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma!”
She dressed swiftly, brushed her teeth and washed her face, then decided to dispense with the wig. She wasn’t planning to go anywhere, and besides, Chris had seen her without it. And liked what he saw, said a little voice in her head she tried to ignore.
Holly checked that the twins were still soundly sleeping before she headed for the kitchen, where she knew she’d find Chris. She’d thought about him last night as she’d drunk her tea, replaying that scene in the kitchen in her mind. Each time she’d thought of something different to say to him. Each time she’d wished she hadn’t made it so obvious she was attracted to him. But he was attracted to you, too, her secret self reminded her now. And that gave her courage to face him without the shield of her twins.
“Good morning,” she said as she walked into the sunny kitchen and saw the table set for two adults, with the two high chairs also set up.
Chris turned around from the stove. “Morning.” He brought his attention back to his task and stirred something in a pot. “I should have asked you yesterday, but what do Ian and Jamie have for breakfast? I’ve got oatmeal here, do they eat that?”
Holly laughed. “They eat anything I’ll let them eat, but they love oatmeal with a little milk.”
“No sugar?”
She shook her head. “I’m trying to keep them from getting my sweet tooth,” she confessed. “So no added sugar, no processed cereal except plain Cheerios.”
“Good for you.” He turned the stove off. “How do you feel about bacon and eggs?”
“I love them.” She grimaced. “I shouldn’t, I know. Nitrites and cholesterol.”
Chris shook his head, his lips quirking into a grin as he leaned one jeans-clad hip against the c
ounter. “Guess you haven’t read the latest studies. The cholesterol in eggs is the good kind of cholesterol, not the bad. As for nitrites in bacon being bad for you, that myth has been debunked. The vast majority of the scientific studies suggest that not only are nitrates and nitrites not bad for you, but they may even be beneficial to your health.”
“Really?” Holly could hardly believe it.
“Yeah. Doesn’t mean you should eat them every day, but a couple times a week won’t hurt you.” He took a carton of eggs out of the fridge as he said this. “Bacon’s already cooked—it’s in the oven keeping warm. So how do you like your eggs?”
“I prefer them over easy, but salmonella is an issue.” Her eyes sought his. “Or am I wrong about that, too?”
“No, it’s a concern. I’m like you—I prefer them over easy, but I fry them hard for that reason.”
“Then fry mine hard, too.”
Chris’s smile deepened, and all at once Holly couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his face, either. Just like last night, sexual attraction tugged at her. Chris was so uncompromisingly male standing there in jeans and a white T-shirt, with a day’s scruff on his chin—he practically oozed testosterone. And yet, he was comfortable in his masculinity. He didn’t need to thump his chest in the “me Tarzan, you Jane” approach so many men thought made them seem more macho. There was something particularly appealing about a Texan who didn’t think cooking was women’s work. Who didn’t look on child rearing as women’s work, too.
But it wasn’t just that. What Holly couldn’t reconcile in her mind was her reaction to him on a sexual level. Just like last night, he made her think of things she had no business thinking about. Of cool sheets and hot kisses. Very hot kisses.
A plaintive wail floated into the kitchen, breaking the spell. “That’s Jamie,” she managed from a throat that had gone uncustomarily dry.
