Page 7 of Hero's Prize

The cold, the wind, the speed… It would chase out everything he was feeling now, only leaving room for thethrill.

Retirement would be nowhere near his mind then.

CHAPTER

THREE

Ten hours after the minister—aka, Kendrick “Blaze” Foster, who’d gotten himself ordained through multiple channels on the Internet just to be sure—pronounced them husband and wife, Theo and Eva were still beaming at each other.

Everyone could almost tangibly feel the protectiveness Theo felt toward Eva. And from what Colton had heard about her ex, Theo had every reason to feel that way. Eva seemed to bask in it, as happy to relax into Theo’s protection as he was to provide it. It was like the two were connected—an invisible string joining them, causing them to orbit around each other.

Colton wasn’t one to wax poetic—he’d always been much better with action than words—but he could appreciate the bond between the newly married couple.

He’d seen that bond his whole life between his mother and father. Yeah, they’d sometimes fought passionately, but that tie between them had never once been severed.

Colton leaned his elbow against the cocktail table and watched the bride and groom as they danced—laughing and chatting with the people around them, but their eyes constantly remeeting each other’s.

Thatconnection was what he wanted. Not the empty, hollowinterlude of a hundred different nights with a hundred different women.

Not that he’d ever really lived that way, despite the trappings his wealth and fame afforded him. But even a hundred nights with a dozen different women didn’t hold much appeal.

He wanted somethingreal.

“You’re not dancing?” Lincoln Bollinger, his and Bear’s cousin, came over to stand with Colton at the cocktail table. “Theo and Eva specifically chose this location so that everyone could dance the night away.”

The wedding had been in Oak Creek this afternoon, followed by a small reception just for the bride and groom’s family. Then the party had moved here to Jackson, at the base of the Tetons.

“Just taking a break. Not as young as I used to be. Do you dance, Linc?”

He couldn’t recall if he’d ever seen the other man on the dance floor. Although surely if he’d seen Lincoln Bollinger, prodigious savant, out cutting a rug, Colton would remember.

Lincoln tilted his head, watching everyone on the dance floor, as if he were solving a complex equation.

Complex equationwas pretty much how Lincoln saw everything.

“Their movements and steps are in time to the music. Music, at its rhythmic core, is a series of mathematical formulas. Given that, yes, I can dance.”

Colton had no doubt that was true. Hell, he could see Linc’s eyes moving and knew the other man’s giant brain was calculating speed, trajectory, angles of the dancers out on the floor…not unlike what Colton did when he was researching and performing a stunt.

“You going to go out there and put your academic knowledge of the physics of dancing to use, Linc?”

“No.”

Colton slapped the other man good-naturedly on the back. “Afraid your calculations will be wrong?”

Lincoln scoffed. “Of course not. But I’m also aware that dancing and my inside voice may not meld together well.”

Inside voice. It was the term the Bollinger brothers had created for Lincoln as kids when their cousin sometimes didn’t realize that what he was saying was coming across as jarring or offensive.

Even as a child, Lincoln had been a genius with most anything to do with facts, data, or computers. But with people…not so much. So, telling Lincoln to use his inside voice had become code for letting him know that other people were finding his words or actions unsettling.

“I’m sure you’d do fine, man. Your other cousins are out there. They’ll stomp on your toes if you get out of hand.”

“They could just tell me. They wouldn’t need to apply contact force to my foot.”

Colton looked over at Lincoln with one eyebrow raised. “Didn’t mean it literally, Linc.”

The man nodded, not offended, taking in the data. “Right. Missed that cue. I’ll consider the dancing. Why aren’t you out there? You’re normally in the center of the crowd.”

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