Page 45 of Sweet and Wild

“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 around 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—”

“Herhouse. 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.

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