She was so close that he could make out the scent of her perfume, and he could see the soft flutter of her pulse at the base of her neck. A strand of hair fell across her forehead. Without thinking, he lifted his free hand to brush it aside, but as his fingers touched her skin, his gaze flickered down to those pink lips. She opened her mouth as if about to say something but she didn’t; he found himself transfixed by her mouth, and a deep instinct inside him was tugging him closer.
She was both beautiful and sad, and he longed to comfort her somehow. He wanted to tug her into his arms and hold her close... But his gaze kept dropping down to her lips, and it was like the rest of the room had evaporated around them, leaving just the two of them, the soft flutter of her pulse and this yearning to cover those lips with his own.
A clatter from the kitchen made them both start, and Colt dropped her hand and took a step back. He cleared his throat.
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “My problems with Josh are still private—”
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “You have to talk to someone. And I’m okay if that’s me. I can handle it. Of anyone, I understand where Josh came from.”
“But now he’s gone,” she said, her voice shaking. “It isn’t right to tell our secrets now. He deserves to be remembered better than that.”
“And he is,” Colt said quietly. “I promise you that.”
Colt had had a whole childhood with Josh, an adolescence. They’d shared everything growing up, built a tree house together, and in that tree house he’d heard about the girls Josh had crushes on, he’d known about Josh’s hopes to join the army before anyone else had. Josh and Colt had come from the same fractured family, and Colt understood.
“We were happy,” Jane said firmly. Trying to convince him? He wasn’t sure. But if a woman was so tired after a marriage that she didn’t want love again, then he was willing to guess that she wasn’t as happy as she declared.
“Pretending things were better than they were isn’t going to comfort him. He’s past our fumbling attempts to fix it, isn’t he? I know you loved him with all you had, Jane. And that’s all you could give. You did your best.”
“It wasn’t enough,” she said, and tears misted her eyes.
Love never seemed to be quite enough to keep two well-meaning people together...or at least to keep them happy, and that knowledge had settled into his own heart years ago.
“We’re kind of a mess here,” he said, his voice tight with repressed emotion. “I was honest about that from the start.”
Jane shrugged. “Apparently, so am I.”
If nothing else, she was in good company.
“I’d better get back to work,” he said quickly.
“Yeah, of course.”
He met her gaze one last time, then turned for the door. Colt had idealized his aunt and uncle’s relationship because they were married still—unlike his own parents. But the more he saw of their actual relationship, the warier he felt about a marriage of his own one day. So far, he’d experienced a dad who walked away, and an aunt and uncle who made each other miserable. It had made him suspicious of the other married relationships he saw in the family at a greater distance. People hid their worst. Colt wasn’t so different from Josh. He’d just realized how messed up he was earlier than his cousin had. But they both came from the same family, had been raised with the same issues, and running away hadn’t helped Josh as much as he’d thought.
But Colt didn’t want to think about any of that right now. Sometimes it was easier to just push it aside and get back out to the field where his problems seemed smaller under the wide, cloudless sky.
Chapter Seven
Jane stood in the empty office, staring at the doorway. She held a stray piece of paper in her hand, and when she realized it she dropped it into the box.
What had just happened here? She’d opened up much more than she’d intended. She hadn’t meant to say so much, it had just been stewing around inside her and with Colt looking down into her eyes like that, she’d found herself wanting to talk. It had been a long time since she’d had someone who cared like that.
Maybe it was that he could understand better than anyone else...but there had been a look in his eye that Jane recognized. She’d been married, after all. She knew what it looked like when a man was thinking about closing the distance between them. He’d been intense and focused, and even remembering it made her legs feel a little weak.
Colt had been thinking of kissing her.
She licked her lips, and her fingers fluttered up to her mouth. Why was she even entertaining this thought? Obviously, she couldn’t kiss him. That would be ridiculous, but that moment couldn’t be dismissed quite so easily, either. There was obviously some attraction between them. She’d have to be careful. The worst thing she could do right now would be to allow her loneliness to direct her steps. That was God’s job.
That evening, Jane tried to help Peg in the kitchen but the older woman kept brushing her off.
“I know what Colt likes,” Peg said. “You’re a guest here, anyway. Your girls need you. I can do this on autopilot.”
So Jane did as Peg asked and left her alone in the kitchen. She got the girls into the bath and cleaned them up. Micha got loose and ran naked around the house shrieking in delight until Jane caught her, dried
