Page 27 of Going Deep

“Why, because I’m calling it like it is?” Wade grabbed another low-hanging balloon and handed it over for its decimation.

Colt popped it with relish. “You’ve gotten smug in your old age. I don’t think I like it.”

“Not smug. I just know you. I wish you hadn’t gone there with—”

“Hold it.” Colt shoved the remnants of the balloons in his pocket. He didn’t litter, ever, no matter how annoyed he was. “Tell me you’re not warming up to a lecture. A bit hypocritical, dontcha think?”

Wade plucked a blade of grass and stuck it between his teeth, as he always had as a kid when he was mulling something over. Damn guy was always mulling. “I have no right to lecture you.”

“No, you do not.”

“Regardless of the fact that you deliberately overlooked what was between me and Charli when we were kids, and swooped right in and knocked her off her feet—”

“I didn’t knock her off her feet. I knocked her up. There’s a difference.” Wade’s wince made him feel guilty, but not guilty enough to shut up. “And I didn’t deliberately overlook anything. I was blind, okay? Fucking blind and self-absorbed. A cocky SOB who deserved for his wife to fall in love with his brother.”

Too late, he realized he’d called Charli his wife, not ex. Wade didn’t call him on it.

Wade never called him on anything, and it really brassed off his balls. They’d be fitting his little brother for a freaking halo soon.

“It wasn’t intentional,” he said softly.

Wade crossed his arms. “Let’s be real clear here, brother. You talking about last night or what happened with Charli?”

Colt faced his brother squarely. “Both. Goddammit, both. I never would’ve gotten in between you if I’d paid attention. I swear that to you.”

“I believe you.” Wade twisted that grass. “Paige…she’s vulnerable. I know that after just the past few months getting to know her. She plays tough, and I think she is in business. But it’s obvious she’s been burned before.”

Haven’t we all? But Colt didn’t speak.

Instead he stared off in the distance, across green fields dotted with last night’s party leftovers and a little ways off, the barn and outhouses. Chickens pecked their way around the small yard beside the barn, and their couple of goa

ts bucked against the fence that only penned them in when it suited them. Sunshine gilded the trees, the fields, the gulch that burbled a short distance away.

And he couldn’t enjoy any of it.

“You can’t say anything to me I didn’t say to myself,” he said into the silence. “I never expected last night to happen. I didn’t want it to. There are boundaries. What you did or didn’t do doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. I crossed a line.”

“I’m not talking about that anymore. What’s done is done. What I want to know is what you’re going to do about it now.”

Colt snapped a glance at his brother. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, are you going to just bang her and toss her aside?” Wade stepped closer. “Because I have to say, that doesn’t sit right with me.”

The laugh tore from Colt’s chest. “Wait a second. I screwed up by sleeping with her, so we should make it worse and keep doing it?”

Wade’s mouth flattened. “We?”

Colt heaved out a breath and tipped back his head to glare at the cloudless blue sky. Why wasn’t it storming to match his gray mood? “You drew the pictures in your head, but obviously missed one corner, huh?”

“Seriously? You leave my wedding and go enact a porno? That’s how you’re going to prove to the town that you’re not the same screw-anything-that-moves Bennett?” Wade shoved him hard in his chest. “Jesus Christ, man, sometimes I’d like to deck you.”

Colt’s anger and frustration banked rather than leaping higher. Maybe he needed to be punched, good and hard. If he ended up hurting Paige, intentionally or not, he deserved to be.

He’d welcome it.

“Go ahead.” He stretched out his arms to the side. “Take your best shot.”

“I don’t think so.”

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