Page 17 of Home to You
I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly bone dry. “I know.”
Colt turned back to me with his eyes narrowed, brows drawn, and his mouth pulled into a tight line. He didn’t look angry necessarily. Just … guarded. Wary. Like someone who’d seen too much hurt and wasn’t about to let it happen again on his watch.
“Do you?” he asked, his voice quieter now, but no less firm.
I nodded. “Yes. I do. Jake told me what happened with Jenna. I swear, I would never do anything to hurt them. Either of them.”
Colt stared at me a beat longer, like he was trying to decide whether or not to believe me. Then, finally, he exhaled through his nose and gave a short, reluctant nod. “Okay then,” he said, stepping back. “Just be careful, Eden. Because whether you mean to or not, you’ve got the power to break my brother and my nephew.”
He turned like he was going to walk away, then paused.
“For what it’s worth.” He glanced back at me over his shoulder. “Cole likes you—a lot. Jake does too. That’s probably what scares me the most.” And with that, he headed for the truck, climbed in, and pulled the door shut behind him, ruffling his nephew’s hair before pulling away from the curb.
I stood there long after the taillights disappeared down the road until I eventually made my way to my car on unsteady legs. I drove home in a daze, Colt’s words hanging over me like a storm cloud, and spent the evening going through the motions—dinner with Aunt Mags, grading papers, pretending everything was normal. Later, once the house was blissfully quiet, I sat curled up in bed with my phone in my lap, my conversation with Colt replaying in my mind.
Only this time, I heard it differently.
You’ve got the power to break my brother and my nephew.
At the time, I’d assumed he was simply being protective of his family. Dramatic even. But now, I couldn’t help picking that statement apart.
Break Jake? That didn’t track. Not when he still hadn’t reached out to me. Fucking someone and then ignoring them wasn’t the sign of a man with delicate feelings, especially considering the first night I met Jake Mercer all we had done was kiss—with a little dry humping in the front seat of his truck thrown in for good measure—and even then he’d called me the next morning to check in. If anything, yesterday’s … encounter felt a little too much like revenge, or something revenge adjacent.
If anyone was going to break, it was me.
But Colt’s voice had held certainty. Like he knew something I didn’t. And then there was that parting comment: Jake likes you, too.
How did he know that? Had Jake said something? Had the brothers talked about me … about what happened in that barn? God, had Jake bragged? Had I misread everything?
I sat with those thoughts for a long time, the knot in my chest pulling tighter with each question I couldn’t seem to answer … until finally, I tapped Jake’s name on my screen and brought the phone to my ear.
When he answered on the third ring, his voice was rough, cautious. “Eden?”
The sound of my name on his lips sent a shiver running through me, but I pushed past it. “Hey,” I said softly. “We need to talk.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I couldn’t feelmy fingers. The wind cut down off the ridge like a blade, sharp and frigid, turning my breath into clouds and numbing the skin around my eyes. Late September in Montana was always unpredictable—cold enough in the morning that the frost lingered on the pasture until the sun finally cleared the trees, but eighty degrees by mid-afternoon, and then freezing again at night.
“Goddamn,” Gage muttered beside me, blowing into his hands as we crested the rise on horseback. “You’d think the calendar skipped straight to November.”
“It’s just the elevation,” I said, patting Bandit’s neck. “Once we get down past the ridge, we’ll warm up.”
“Or I’ll lose my dick to frostbite before then,” he grumbled, but there was a hint of a smile behind it.
We were out near the boundary of our land, checking fence lines and moving a few scattered heads toward their winter pasture. A couple of ranch hands were behind us, driving the cattle steadily down the slope. It was quiet out here—just the sound of our horse’s hoofbeats, the occasional call out between the crew, and the mournful sounding lowing of cattle.
Gage reined his horse in beside mine and gave me a long look, brows raised like he was waiting for something. “You’ve been real quiet this morning.”
I adjusted my grip on the reins, shifting slightly in the saddle to ease the ache settling into my thighs. I gave him a noncommittalhmphin reply, mostly because I didn’t know how to put into words the shit storm swirling around in my head—Eden, the barn … what we did in the barn and the way she’d breathed out my name like it was the answer to a prayer she didn’t know she’d made.
“Yeah,” I said finally when he just kept staring at the side of my head. “Just working through some things.”
“Shit. That’s never good.”
I snorted, casting him a sideways glance. “Ha ha. Very funny.”
He chuckled under his breath and adjusted his grip on the reins, his gaze sweeping across the wide stretch of land ahead of us. We were following an old cattle trail up toward the tree line, where the terrain turned rougher. The wind had knocked over a few fence posts, and one of the gates was hanging off its hinges.
