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At fourteen, his life had changed forever. One moment in time had cursed him and had caused his parents’ divorce. Moving to L. A. with his mother and meeting Elaina, the woman he’d married, had changed it further. At seventeen he’d become a father himself, and through the years he had learned the hard way that he couldn’t run from his past. It had found him, and his wife had died because of it.
He was back in Kentucky because of it. Because he was tired of running, tired of fighting to forget what couldn’t be forgotten.
Damn, he loved these mountains though, he thought as he started his truck and pulled out of Mina’s back drive. The sun was rising over the peaks of pine, oak, and elm that filled the rolling hills. There was a mist in the air that drifted off the nearby lake, and the scent of summer filled his senses.
The vision of Rogue—he just couldn’t see her as Caitlyn—filled his head, no matter how hard he tried to push it back. He was thirty-two years old, a grown man next to her tender twenty-one. She was so damned tiny she made a man second think his own strength and so damned innocent that all a man could think about was being the one to teach her how to sin.
Someone else would have to teach her, he thought, if someone hadn’t already. He was staying just as far away from that land mine as possible. She would be the one woman that would tempt him. If he dared to touch her, if he even considered taking her, he’d never be able to give her only a part of himself. And because of that, he could never have her. There wasn’t enough left of him to give, sometimes he felt as though he had never completely found himself and never would until the demons of his past were destroyed.
Securing that end wouldn’t be easy, he had known that from the beginning. Navigating the waters of deceit could come with a very high price. It was hard enough protecting his young son from it; he couldn’t deal with protecting a woman as well.
Vanquishing those enemies meant doing the job alone. And until one little schoolteacher with violet eyes, he hadn’t minded paying the price.
ONE
Present day
Sheriff Zeke Mayes stepped into the squalid mobilehome and grimaced at the scent of blood and death that filled it. The rusted metal of the mobile home outside gave only a hint of the depressing interior. No more than twelve by forty, the tiny home was littered with refuse, old dishes, old food, stale whisky and tobacco, and congealing blood and brain matter scattered across the walls and threadbare, dingy carpets.
Old beer, food, and vomit stains spotted the floors where used newspapers, dishes, and dirty clothes hadn’t been thrown. It was a damned mess. And right in the middle of it was the bigger mess.
“Hell. ” He stepped farther in, careful to steer well clear of the body laid out on the floor.
“Get forensics in here, Gene, and call the coroner. ”
Deputy Gene Maynard looked around the room with a confused frown. From the gun still clenched in one of the dead men’s hands to the brain matter splattered around the floor.
“Forensics? Hell, Zeke, this ain’t no homicide. These boys done done themselves in,” he spat in disgust. “You pull forensics out here and Alex Jansen is gonna piss down his leg for you tying up his boys that way. ”
Zeke turned and stared at the deputy. Some days, Gene liked to think he knew Zeke’s job better than Zeke did. Zeke stared back at him silently, daring him not to do as he was told. It would be a simple matter at this point to suspend him. Hell, it might speed things up, even if it would garner more suspicion than Zeke needed.
Gene sighed, gave a quick nod of his dark-haired head, then left the trailer and loped back to the cruiser he’d arrived in to make the call. Zeke turned back and stared at the mess once again. Yeah, it looked like just what it could have been. One brother killing the other, then killing himself, but maybe that was the problem, it looked too much like it. And the Walker boys might have been trouble more often than not, but this just didn’t sit right in his gut. It resembled too closely several other unsolved crimes over the past ten years and pinched his gut with warning.
Hell, he hadn’t expected this when he’d answered the call earlier from the sister of these two men, asking if the sheriff would check up on them. Lisa Walker was stuck in Louisville looking after their grandmother in the hospital and needed some things from the old woman’s house. She was trying to get hold of Joe or Jaime to bring them to her and the phone here had stayed busy through the weekend.
Zeke stared around the room, found the phone by the recliner, and narrowed his eyes at the old-fashioned base. The receiver was off the hook, barely showing beneath the newspaper laying over it.
Joe and Jaime Walker weren’t exactly scions of the community. They were irritants sometimes, normally harmless, fun-loving country boys. Joe worked at a lube and oil in town and Jaime worked whenever the mood hit him, wherever he could get a job at the time. And for the past few years they’d been supplying Zeke with information pertinent to a group of homeland terrorists that had been disbanded the year before.
This wasn’t a murder-suicide, and Zeke knew it; he could feel it.
Jaime was sprawled in a dilapidated easy chair in front of the silent television set, a neat little hole in the center of his head. Dark hair feathered over his brow and framed his handsome face. Once bright, laughing blue eyes were blank and cold in death, but his expression seemed surprised.
His muscular arms rested on the chair, blood stained his white T-shirt. He was still dressed in jeans and boots; he hadn’t settled in for the night, perhaps preparing to leave later.
The television was turned off. Zeke stared at it, then at the television remote laying on the floor by the recliner. There was a half-empty bottle of beer there, too.
Joe Walker was crumbled to the floor, the back of his head blown to bits. His face was in profile, and horror seemed to crease it.
He, too, was dressed in well-pressed jeans and a white shirt, boots on his feet. The boys had meant to go out, Zeke thought. They were dressed for a Saturday night on the town.
They hadn’t made it out last night though. For some reason, it appeared one brother had killed the other, then himself. Gray matter and blood stained the floor and walls and the reek of death was stifling.
Son of a bitch.
“They finally offed each other. ” Gene stepped back into the doorway and stared at the wasted corpses. “They were fighting at the Walker bar just outside of town Thursday night over some woman. Rogue had a few of the bouncers toss them out and send them on their way. ”
Zeke turned to stare at the deputy coolly. “Does offing each other fit either man’s personality, Gene?”
