Page 12 of Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

When I woke, I could feel Colt’s chest pressed to my back, his arm wrapped around my front, the smell of his shampoo filling me with calm reassurance that everything was right in my world simply because he was there.

“I missed you,” I murmured, pulling his arm tighter.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Sorry that I overreacted earlier and was short with you.”

“You didn’t overreact, Mags,” he said with a sigh. “You were stalked by that woman, and I obviously didn’t handle it well. I’m sorry.”

I rolled onto my back and looked up at him. The bathroom light was on, as usual, and it spilled out of the cracked-open door, casting shadows over his face. “You had every right to be angry, Colt.”

“I wish I could protect you, Mags. I wish I’d stood up to your father sooner. I wish I’d come clean weeks earlier. I wish…”

His voice trailed off. Wishing was a pointless activity, and we both knew it.

“We both wish we’d done things differently,” I said softly. “But this is where we are, so we need to focus on that and move on.”

“Did Dr. Norton tell you that?” he asked with a grin.

“It’s good advice, don’t you think?”

“It’s great advice,” he said, leaning in to kiss me.

I wrapped a hand around the back of his neck, holding him close as I deepened the kiss. I loved this man to death, andsometimes it felt like I couldn’t get close enough to him, but part of me worried I’d become too dependent on him. That maybe I was mistaking dependency for love.

We made love and Colt kissed my scars, assuring me I was still the most beautiful woman in the world. He seemed to believe it with all his heart, and basking in the warmth of his conviction, I believed it too.

Afterward, I lay in his arms, feeling warm and the closest thing to happy I’d felt since that awful night in April.

In moments like this, I let myself believe this was a healthy relationship. That he wasn’t with me out of pity. That I wasn’t dangerously codependent. That we really could last forever.

As he traced lazy figure eights on my arm, I looked up at him. “I opened that envelope tonight.”

He arched his brow. “What made you decide to do that?”

“I’m tired of being scared about everything, so I decided to just open it.”

He froze. “Are you scared of everything, Mags?”

“No,” I lied, “not everything.”

I figured he might buy it. After all, I’d been doing relatively well a couple of months ago. Before that stupid podcast made me into a paranoid wreck again.

The look on his face suggested he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t call me on it. “What was it?”

“Momma still owned her family farm down in Sweet Briar. My name must be on the deed, because the attorney said he has someone who wants to buy it.”

“You’re going to sell it?” he asked in surprise.

“What use do I have for a two-hundred-acre farm in Alabama?”

“For all you know, it’s been in your family for generations,” he insisted. “Aren’t you curious about it? Don’t you want to check it out first?”

“How do you know I’ve never seen it?” I asked.

“Lila wasn’t shy about the fact that she’d left Sweet Briar and had no intention of ever going back,” he said. “But it’s yours now, so you should at least see it.”

“Momma left that town as soon as she graduated for a reason, Colt. She was wise about many things. Maybe this is one of them.”

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