Bengal's Heart

by Lora Leigh

  He turned and left the room. He’d be damned if he’d let himself be drawn into an argument with her, especially one she could use against him at any time in the future.

  Zeke had a lot friends that still lived in L.A., and yeah, a few of them were gay. He and his past wife, Elaina, hadn’t felt that sense of prejudice that thrived here. He didn’t give a damn what a man or woman’s sexual preference was. He hadn’t cared then, and he didn’t care now.

  As he left Mina’s little house outside town, he reminded himself that he was here to do a job, not to make friends or to find another wife. He’d been born and bred in these mountains. He knew every cliff and hollow, every breath of breeze and sigh of the wind. And he’d missed it like hell when he’d been forced to leave. Not that he’d had a choice at the time. It was leave with his mother or face the further destruction of his soul.

  At fourteen, his life had changed forever. One moment in time had cursed him, and had caused his parents’ divorce. Moving to L.A. with his mother and meeting Elaina, the woman he’d married, had changed it further. At seventeen he’d become a father himself, and through the years he had learned the hard way that he couldn’t run from his past. It had found him, and his wife had died because of it.

  He was back in Kentucky because of it. Because he was tired of running, tired of fighting to forget what couldn’t be forgotten.

  Damn, he loved these mountains though, he thought as he started his truck and pulled out of Mina’s back drive. The sun was rising over the peaks of pine, oak and elm that filled the rolling hills. There was a mist in the air that drifted off the nearby lake, and the scent of summer filled his senses.

  The vision of Rogue—he just couldn’t see her as Caitlyn—filled his head, no matter how hard he tried to push it back. He was thirty-two years old, a grown man next to her tender twenty-one. She was so damned tiny she made a man second guess his own strength, and so damned innocent that all a man could think about was being the one to teach her how to sin.

  Someone else would have to teach her, he thought, if someone hadn’t already. He was staying just as far away from that land mine as possible. She would be the one woman that would tempt him, he thought. If he dared to touch her, if he even considered taking her, he’d never be able to give her only a part of himself. And because of that, he could never have her. There wasn’t enough of him left to give. Sometimes he felt as though he had never completely found himself, and never would until the demons of his past were destroyed.

  Securing that end wouldn’t be easy, he had known that from the beginning. Navigating the waters of deceit could come with a very high price. It was hard enough protecting his young son from it, he couldn’t deal with protecting a woman as well.

  Vanquishing those enemies meant doing the job alone. And until one little school teacher with violet eyes, he hadn’t minded paying the price.