Page 17 of Colt
“This is moving really fast.”
“Damned right, it is.”
“Don’t you want to get to know me some more, like date, before I meet your family?” I paused, panicked. “Your parents aren’t in there, are they?”
He didn’t seem fazed by my hesitations. “Nah, doubtful. But they’d understand what’s between us. Pops knew Ma was the one for him at a wedding. Did I mention that Trig met Ellie last week and they’re married now?”
No, he did not. “Last week? That’s crazy!”
He shrugged. Today, he had on a dark blue plaidflannel and jeans. Stetson on the console between us. How could he be so… confident about us? About me? If he knew the extent of my troubles, he’d probably run away. No, I knew he would when he learned the full extent of Missy’s madness.
“I saw you at the rodeo and that was it,” he explained. “I crooked my finger and you came to me.”
I blushed, remembering how bold I’d been. He was right, I’d been right there with him. Always seemed to be.
I glanced down and watched his thumb move. “It’s just… I’m not close with my family.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Holidays. We talk on the phone then.”
“They still in that place with the palm tree out front?” He grinned.
“Yeah, no. They, um… moved.” They’d had to get a new house because Missy burned it down. All their belongings, everything, gone. Because Dad wouldn’t let her bring a guy home for dinner one night. She’d been seventeen and the guy had been a drug dealer she’d met when she pretty much dropped out of twelfth grade. When she’d showed up with the twenty-five year old anyway, Dad had called the cops and had him arrested for statutory rape.
That hadn’t gone over well. At all. Missy lost hershit and decided that no one was going to come to dinner ever again.
I’d been at a friend’s sleepover and when I came home, found the street blocked with emergency vehicles and only a smoking shell of a house. My parents had been in their pajamas out front, black soot and ash on them. Investigators discovered the fire started from the battery of my mom’s electric car, but we all knew it had been Missy. When I graduated and went off to college in Maryland a few months later, I rarely returned. They couldn’t blame me and they’d been forced to cut her from their life and put a restraining order on Missy after all that.
“You said you had a sister. You’re not close, either?”
I didn’t want to tell him anything about Missy because I tried so fucking hard to outrun her and her craziness. I’d had to enable her through medical school and residency so she didn’t fuck with it all. But after, I’d stopped. And she’d been relentless in messing with my life. That was why I was here in Devil’s Ditch and not Cheyenne. “No. Definitely not.”
His hand came up and stroked my cheek. “I’ve got enough family for both of us then. Come on, they’re gonna love you.”
When he climbed out of the truck and came around the hood to open my door, his feet crunchingin the compacted snow, I had a moment to wonder if that was a good thing or not. No one was really safe from Missy, not even a county sheriff or her own family.
Getting too close to them meant I was the one who could be putting them in danger.
When he took my hand to help me down from his huge truck, I had to wonder if it was finally time to stop running and stick. Because I liked looking at Colt. Liked fucking Colt. I just plain liked him.
13
MOLLY
I had drivenby the diner before, but hadn’t eaten at it yet. It was a standalone building with windows all along the front. A sign was at the curb with the name Sip N’ Serv and a large coffee cup, with neon that blinked on and off to mimic rising steam. It screamed vintage.
So did the rotating refrigerated pie display and the booths with green leather. The interior was warm with the scent of bacon and coffee lingering in the air.
Colt looked around and gave a chin lift indicating he’d spotted his brother. I looked that way and with a hand at my back, he guided me betweenthe center tables and the booths beneath the windows.
We stopped at the back corner, where the booth was a large semicircle and doing a quick count, had five occupants, not just the two I expected. A man, taller than Colt, stood. Definitely a brother in a similar rugged, handsome way.
The men slapped backs in a quick hug, then Colt tugged me into his side. “Trig, Ellie, this is Molly.”
The woman who was beside Trig’s now vacant spot smiled up at me. Her hair was dark like mine, but her eyes were a gorgeous icy blue. She had on a knit cap and a heavy plaid shirt over a white tank top. I couldn’t see the rest of her beneath the table. “Hi, Molly! Finally, some more estrogen to balance out the testosterone.”
Trig took my hand and gave it a vigorous shake. “Glad to meet you. Heard all about you,” he said as he slid into his spot and slung his arm around Ellie’s back. He leaned in and murmured, not too quietly, “Sugar, you like all my testosterone. In fact, you seemed to like it when I woke you up with–”
