“Yeah.” He wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
“These pictures—” She pulled out an envelope and handed them over. “The wedding photo. That could be Josh!”
“He looked like his dad.” Colt squinted at her. “It happens in families.”
“I know...” She sighed. “It’s nothing. I’m just—”
She didn’t finish, but she seemed to visibly rally herself and she smiled quickly at him. She was covering up whatever had rattled her, and he wished she wouldn’t.
“What was bugging you?” he asked. He flipped through the photos of his aunt and uncle, then looked over at her quizzically. “Josh put these together for his parents one year for their anniversary. I think it was the year before his mom died.”
“That might explain why Beau kept them close,” she said quietly and when Colt continued to look at her she added, “He wasn’t a great husband, from what I’ve heard, but he must have loved her in his own way, I guess.”
So she was seeing the family problem, was she? Colt sucked in a breath. “Neither of us got a great example of how a functional marriage worked.”
“I was talking with Peg earlier,” she observed. “And she said she didn’t know why Sandra stuck it out. And I look at those photos, and I wonder if I wouldn’t have been in Sandra’s shoes in twenty years.”
“They were a...unique couple,” Colt said carefully.
“They started out happy—” She reached for the pictures and pulled out the wedding photo. “Josh and I had one almost identical to this one. This could be Josh—the exact same expression.”
Colt looked down at the photo, and he could see what Jane was talking about. They’d started out looking pretty happy. Wasn’t that the fear, though? That whatever seemed to dog the Marshall marriages would cling to the next generation?
“I’ve been hearing about Sandra from Peg,” Jane said. “She stuck it out. She wouldn’t leave him, and it sounds like he wasn’t very good to her.”
Colt nodded. “True.”
“But sticking around—that didn’t help, did it? Peg suggested that maybe they got married for the wrong reasons. Maybe Beau didn’t love her enough, or something like that. But how was Sandra supposed to know that?”
This had really upset her, and Colt wasn’t sure what to say. This had been the problem all along for him—seeing marriages go sour before his eyes.
“I know,” he said at last. “I don’t know what to say. But you’re right.”
“That could have been me,” she said, then she licked her lips and looked away.
Jane—unloved and resentful. It seemed impossible looking at how beautiful and vulnerable she was standing there. Could any red-blooded male turn off his heart with her? But relationships weren’t so simple, and Sandra had been young and beautiful once, too. The men in this family seemed to have a track record of messing things up with women who didn’t deserve them.
“I guess that’s what we’re all a little scared of,” he said after a beat or two of silence.
“The more I hear about Beau, the more he sounds like Josh,” she said quietly. “Josh was hard to be close to. He pulled back, didn’t share easily. And hearing about his parents’ marriage, I guess it makes sense that he’d have a few trust issues. But I’m sure Beau had his own reasons for becoming the bitter man he was, too.”
“Hey, Josh loved you enough to keep you away from this place,” Colt said, stepping closer to her and catching her hand with his. “And maybe he didn’t know how to have a functional relationship, but the fact that he kept you away from here says that he was at least trying to keep all of this from affecting what he had with you.”
“And I’m here because I want that family for my girls...” Jane looked up at him, and she didn’t pull her hand back. Sadness swam in her eyes. “I was hoping to find some family connection, not some foreshadowing of a miserable future together had he lived...”
“You wanted some memories,” he said. “Some insights into why he hated strawberry ice cream. Some stories to tell your daughters.”
“Why did he hate strawberry ice cream?” she asked.
Colt smiled sorrowfully. “He ate it one year when he got the flu and threw it up. Never could eat it again.”
“Oh...” She smiled sadly. “Yeah, that was the kind of thing I wanted to know. What else?”
“I don’t know...” He cast about in his memories for something she might like. “We built a tree house together as kids. It was a good one—like really solid and respectable. We used to hang out in it all the way into our teens. We could talk there, open up.”
“What did you talk about?” she asked.
“Our hopes for the future,” he said with a shrug. “Josh would talk it out when he was mad at his dad. Which was often. I went there and cried when my mom left. She’d told me it was better for my future if I stayed and kept working with Beau. I’d wanted her to tell me to come with her, leave it all behind... And she’d told me it was a smarter choice to stay. I was only sixteen. I felt so grown-up right up until my mom drove away, and then I felt like a kid and cried my heart out in that tree house. It was Josh who eventually came out to find me.”
“Why didn’t you go with her?” Jane asked.
“Because Beau had already mentioned leaving me a part of the ranch,” Colt admitted, his throat tight. “You have no idea how much I sacrificed for this place.”
They were silent for a few beats, then Jane heaved a sigh.
“Josh talked about that tree house,” she said. “He’d been proud of the workmanship. It meant a lot to him, too, but there was so much he left out when he told me stories... He held back a lot. Even from me.”
“I’m sorry,” Colt said, and he moved his fingers over hers, wishing
