His eyes turn mercurial. “Why do you care where I’m livin’? Seems you gave up any say you had in that the second you left town.”
“Are you chasin’ Daisy-Mae?”
He dang nearly chokes on his beer. “Daisy-Mae?”
“She said you’d never dated anyone after, well … me.”
“Daisy needs to learn to keep her mouth shut, but it’s sweet you were asking about me.”
“I wasn’t asking. She volunteered the information, just like she mentioned you maybe have somewhere else you can go besides my parents’ bed-and-breakfast.” I get closer, climbing up his porch steps so he has no choice but to retreat or meet me head on.
Colt doesn’t move. “Can I show you something?”
“I’ve already seen whatever you want to show me, Colton Hayes.”
He laughs humorlessly and leans into my ear. “Come on, Lemonade. Let’s you and me go for a ride. No funny business. Or do you suddenly not trust yourself with me?”
I swallow hard, glaring into his eyes so full of anger and indignation. I also see a challenge in them too, and he knows I don’t ever back down from those. “Fine.”
He pulls a set of keys from the pocket of his jeans and gestures for me to go first. I stomp my way over to the faded blue truck and climb in without being told twice. Colt slams his door harder than necessary, but I don’t give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his temper.
He pulls out of the lot and joins the main road. Five minutes later, we’re cruising the edge of my family’s property around the perimeter of the west pasture when he takes an unmarked dirt road I don’t ever remember being there. The road cuts through the pasture and over the rise. A two-story contemporary home comes into view. That definitely wasn’t here before, but if this is the house that Daisy-Mae was talking about, then why the hell would my daddy let Colt build on Winchester land? None of this makes any sense.
Colt cuts the engine and looks down at the keys in his lap. He doesn’t make any attempt to get out, but I scramble from the cab and run across the yard to the front door. I glance back at the man sitting in that blue truck which holds too many memories, and he climbs out of the car, torturously slow, and eats up the ground between us with his long strides. Colt slides the key in the lock and pushes the door open, gesturing for me to go first. I enter the space and walk through to the open-plan kitchen and dining. It’s beautiful—sleek, modern surfaces that I can’t imagine Colt picking out. Beyond the kitchen sits a spacious living room. The house is fully furnished and unused appliances sit on the countertop still wrapped in their plastic. “What is this place?”
“Yours.” His voice cracks over the word and he clears his throat, his tongue darting out to wet his lips. “It’s yours.”
I turn and stare at him. “What?”
“I built it.” He drums his fingers on the counter beside him while he studies my reaction. “With help from your daddy and West.”
“When?”
“It was gonna be my wedding gift to you.”
I run my hands over the hewn oak mantle and say quietly, “You never asked me to marry you.”
“I didn’t get the chance.”
I swallow hard and glance around the room, my eye catching the familiar painting on the far wall. Unease prickles down my spine. “How do you have that painting?”
“I bought it.”
“No.” I shake my head and walk from the lounge into the hall. Several more canvases decorate the walls, and as I pass, every room holds more and more of my art. I come to the master suite and open the door, and there above the bed is my painting of this ranch, one I almost couldn’t part with. “You’re the private collector?”
He shrugs, but there’s one missing. One I simply titled Cowboy. One that holds Colt’s likeness. That one really did break my heart to sell. I walk past the en suite and walk-in closets to another door and turn the handle.
Natural light filters in through the huge doors opening out onto the deck. There are easels of all sizes lining the walls, and cabinets filled to bursting with paints and brushes, but on the one wall hangs my painting, my Colt. I absently reach out to touch it, and think better of it. Not just because the oil from my hands will destroy the paint, but because he’s here, watching me, waiting for me to say something. Out the window, there’s a clear view of our red oak, and the sight of that tree and the graves that rest beneath it cause my heart to shatter completely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Colt
Waiting on her reaction are some of the longest seconds of my life. Will she be angry? Call me a stalker? I’m suddenly not so sure I should have brought her here. What fucking good does it do either of us except rub more salt in the wound.
Lemon turns to me and her eyes are bright with tears. Well, hell. Here’s a reaction I didn’t anticipate.
“You did all of this?” Her voice is shaky as her eyes meet mine. “You made me a studio off our bedroom, bought this land? Off my father?”
“Not right away. He was letting me work it off.”
“For how long?”
“The last twelve years.”
“Colt. Why? He would have let you out of that deal.”
“I know, but I don’t break my promises.” I clench my jaw and stare up at the ceiling, exhaling slowly. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She shakes her head. “It’s not like it ain’t true.”
“I don’t know how to be around you anymore without being mad.”
“Once upon a time you were just madly in love with me.” I swallow, and when it’s clear I don’t know how to respond to that, she says, “I don’t understand. If y’all built this house, finished it beautifully, then why are you still living in that run-down cabin by the B and B?”
“I thought about it. I come by every few weeks to clean it up, but I couldn’t move in here, not without …”
“Me?”
I glance at her baby blue eyes and look away just as fast. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You should live here, Colt. It makes no sense to have this big old house that you worked so hard for sitting here empty.”
“I’m already livin’ with the ghost of you everywhere I go. I don’t need it haunting these empty halls too.” I have no fucking clue what more there is to say, and it’s clear she’s speechless too, so I set the keys on the counter. “I don’t know how long you’re home for, if you’re stayin’ for good or heading back to the city, but these keys belong to you.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t accept this.”
“You do whatever you have to. Keep it, sell it, hire it out for holidays as an Airbnb. Move in if that’s what you want. I don’t care what you do with it, but it’s yours now. It always was.”
“Colt.” She walks toward me and pulls me into her arms. I’m stiff as a board. I don’t embrace her back. I can’t. If I do, I’ll never let her go, and we both know I can’t give her what she wants. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too,” I grunt, my voice tight.
She releases me, and I walk out before I can do anything else that I’ll spend my life regretting. I don’t count on Lemon following me.
“Colt, wait.”
“We don’t have nothin’ else to say to one another, Lemon.”
“So, what? You’re just going to ignore me forever?”
“That depends.”
“On what?” she shouts.
“You stayin’ forever?”
Before she can grasp what I’m doing, I stalk toward her. I cup her face and I press my lips to hers, because I’m a man dying of thirst—I’ve been dying of thirst for twelve goddamn years, and she’s my oasis. She always has been. I drive my tongue into her mouth and she opens to me, kissing me back with a fervor that matches my own. I back her up toward the pillar at the front porch and her hands on my chest turn from grasping me closer to pushing me away. “Wait, Colt.”
“That’s what I thought. You wanna know why I can’t live in that house, why I can’t be a
round you, why I got nothin’ left to give you? It’s because I’m always gonna be in love with you, Lemon. There’s never been another woman for me, and it fucking tears me up inside. I hate this. I can’t be friends with you. I can’t pretend to see you, to sit next to you every day and not want to sweep everything off your mama’s breakfast table and fuck you right there to show you exactly what you’re missin’.”
She blinks up at me, startled by the brutality in my words.
“Not such a gentleman now, am I?” I shake my head and walk away, furious with myself for losing my temper. Pissed that I brought her here and that I just laid it all on the line for her like a fucking chump, and she still can’t meet me halfway. I climb in the cab of my truck and I start the engine, peeling out of the drive. I can’t sit beside her right now. I can’t share the cab of my truck with a woman I can’t trust myself to be a gentleman with. There’s too much hurt and history between us.
I pull over once I’m on the main road and I call West.
He answers on the third ring. “Yello?”
“I need you to go get your sister.”
“She ain’t here. She hasn’t come back from the B and B yet.”
“She’s at the house.”
“Wha—”
“Her house. Jesus, West, keep up.”
He laughs. “Let me guess, you showed my little sister the house you built for her and she didn’t take it well.”
“Just go get her, please?”
“So help me, Colt, if you hurt her.”
“Of course I fucking hurt her. I showed her a glimpse of the future we might have had if she’d just stuck around. She may not love me anymore, but you don’t dig up history like that without feeling something.”
“Well, if there’s one thing I know about my sister, it’s that she has a killer poker face—even when she’s dyin’ inside, she’ll never show you.”
“Are you gonna go get her or not?”
“Yeah, I’ll get her. You’re gonna owe me though.”
“What is it with you Winchesters riding my ass today?”
West chuckles. “At least someone’s gettin’ ridden.”
Fucking Winchesters. They’re all gonna be the death of me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lemon
The sound of an engine roars through the late evening, and I wipe the tears from my cheeks and stare in surprise at West’s shiny red truck coming up the drive and kicking up dust in his wake.
Great. Of course Colt would call the brother who hates me.
I evaluate my options—walking all the way through the west pasture back to the house, or enduring a five-minute car ride with my brother while having to listen to yet another lecture. I don’t make a move toward the truck, but West surprises me by cutting the engine and climbing out.
His long strides eat away the distance between us and he sits beside me on the front porch steps. “So, he finally had the balls to show you the house.”
“I think I kind of forced his hand.” I laugh and close my eyes. Everything I’ve ever done when it came to Colt was push. Maybe that’s been our problem all along. “Did you and Daddy really help him build it?”
West doesn’t answer for a beat, and then he looks out over the front yard. “You remember when Colt, Daddy, and I were gone for those three days camping out on the property to check on those longhorns that’d gone missing?”
“I remember being not so thrilled that he was leaving me.”
“We poured the slab and built the frame that weekend. I put up that tire swing in that oak tree there, hoping my niece or nephew would play in it someday.”
My eyes prick with tears and I blink them back, but they fall anyway. Aside from Daddy’s funeral and that fateful week when I lost everything, I don’t think West has ever seen me cry. And it’s clear from the muscle popping in his jaw and the way he shifts on the stoop that he’s not real comfortable witnessing it now.
“You two had the odds stacked against you from the very beginning. I know I’ve never told you that I don’t blame you for leaving, but I don’t.”
I frown at him.
“And I haven’t given you a lotta reason to believe that, but it’s true. My whole life I knew I was gonna be married to this ranch. There was nothing else in my blood, but you ain’t like that, Lemon. You were born with fire in your veins, a light nothing and no one could smother. I knew you weren’t gonna stay forever. It broke my heart when you left, not just for Mama and Daddy or Colt. Not because I was never getting out, but because I knew this place would be darker once that light of yours was gone.”
“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
He laughs and bumps his shoulder to mine. “Don’t get too used to it.”
“It broke me to leave all of you too, you know?”
“I know, and I get why you had to go.”
“Then why were you such an asshole when I came back?”
He chews his lip and angles his body, looking at the house behind us. “Because I wasn’t sure we’d survive you coming back and then leaving us all again. I don’t know if you belong in New York. I won’t pretend to know anything about your life there, but I do know you and Colt were meant to be forever, at least that’s what I thought. He would’ve followed you to that big city, but it would have broken him to be away from all of this. And it might’ve broken you if you’d stayed.”
“You know this isn’t really helping.”
“I’m not sure this is supposed to be an easy decision to make.”
“Well, Colt made it clear he had nothin’ more to say, so I guess he made the decision for me, now didn’t he?”
“Darlin’, you could put Colt through just about anything—torture, humiliation, cheatin’—and he’d still rip the heart from his chest just to keep yours beating. He’s hurtin’. He’s been hurtin’ since the day you left, but he ain’t ever gonna stop lovin’ you.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Look around you, Lemonade. He finished this house, furnished it just the way you would have, and he did it all for you. He did it all knowing that one day you’d come back, and he’d finally get to show you that he never gave up on the two of you.”
I draw my knees in tight and lean my chin against them. “You didn’t see his face when he drove away.”
“Nope, I didn’t. But I heard the panic in his voice when he phoned me to come pick you up. That man ain’t done lovin’ you. He’s never gonna be done lovin’ you.”
I stare at the first stars flirting with the evening sky and wipe away my tears as West stands and holds out a hand to me. “Now come on. Mama made cobbler, and I got a feeling Wade’s gonna be claiming yours and mine if we don’t get on back.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lemon
Eighteen years old
Four days after I left the hospital, I’m sitting in my room alone when Mama comes to get me cleaned up. I haven’t moved from my bed since I came home. It isn’t the pain of my salpingectomy keeping me here. I have no desire to do anything. I’m lethargic—and while my body aches—on the inside, I’m numb. Yet, I can’t stop crying. I didn’t even know it was possible for one person to produce so many tears.
Daddy’s been good about giving Colt time off to grieve and take care of me, but I don’t know what to say to him, so I push him away by telling him I’m tired. It’s not a lie. I am exhausted. We should be grieving the loss of our baby, but I’m grieving the loss of so much more than that. With one surgery I’ve more than halved my possibility of ever falling pregnant again and the truth is, I felt both relieved and saddened by that news. I’m eighteen years old. I’m not ready for a baby, yet one was coming whether I was ready or not. Now that I’m no longer pregnant, I have so much guilt, so much pain, and so much anger.
What kind of person is relieved when her pregnancy is ectopic? What kind of person cries for the baby she lost one minute and is grateful for the weight that was lifted off her shoulders t
he next?
And Colt? Colt is so broken, so unsure. I’ve never seen him this way, and I realize things were so different for him. Sure, he wasn’t expecting to be a dad at twenty-two, but he took it in his stride. I could see his love for me and our unborn child growing by the second, and all I could think was that I was never going to get off this ranch. I was never going to see the world and go to school in New York. I was never going to amount to anything more than someone’s wife, someone’s mother.
I let my mother fuss and preen over me as she helps me shower and blows out my hair. The truth is, it’s nice to have someone pamper me when I’m still so fragile. “Mama?”
“What, baby girl?”
“Am I a bad person?”
“Honey, no. Why would you say that?”
“Because, as much as I would have loved that little baby, a part of me felt relieved when I realized I was losing it,” I admit on a sob. “I wasn’t ready to be a mama. I could never be what you are to me and the boys.”
Mama squeezes my shoulder tightly. “Oh, honey. No mother has it all figured out ever, and you’re barely eighteen. No one would blame you for not being ready.”
“Colt was ready, and now I don’t know if I can ever give him that again. I don’t want to try again, at least not now, maybe not until I’m thirty.”
“Sweetheart, Colt loves you.” She gives me a wistful smile. “You didn’t see him when they rushed you into surgery. He was terrified for you. No one is expecting you to want to try again. Maybe someday, when the two of you are married, there’s still a chance you could get pregnant without medical intervention. If that’s what you want.”
“What if I can’t ever give him that?”
“Lemon Emersyn,” she coos as she tucks my hair behind my ear. “The only things certain in life are taxes and death, but I do know this one thing—you and Colt are forever. Whether you choose to have children down the road or not, that boy would follow you into the fires of hell if he thought it would make you happy.”
Sweet and Wild (Winchester Wild Book 1) Page 11