Click.
He’s got his revolver pressed to my neck.
“Say that again,” he breathes, inches from my face. “Louder.”
The taste of his cum is still on my tongue. Now, it’s edged with fear.
“Leland Caudill.”
The words hang between us. The dark kitchen was cozy a moment ago. It feels so grim now, all shadows and the sober glitter of his eyes.
“How?” he spits softly.
“How?” I whisper.
“How’d he knock you up? One night stand?”
I shake my head, swallowing. It’s hard past the cold barrel of the gun. “He married me.”
“Hemarriedyou?”
He stands, pacing the length of the kitchen, then turning. It’s a relief to not be at gunpoint, but he’s still standing over me, well over six feet of muscle and anger and betrayal.
“You know Leland?” I whisper.
That wasn’t made clear to me prior to coming to Montana. All I was told was that Jensen had family problems with the Caudills, that he was uniquely situated to help me. Apparently, he’s a talent when it comes to figuring tough situations out. The best of the best.
“I know the Caudills,” he says flatly. “I don’t know Leland well, but I’m pretty goddamn aware of who he is. I just didn’t know he had a wife and a son.”
Silence.
“And I didn’t know I was fucking his wife, a Caudill woman,” he spits.
“I’m not his wife,” I interject.
He turns, gesturing with the gun. “Explain yourself then.”
“Can I stand?”
“No. You keep your ass right where it is, thanks.”
Cowed, I press my back hard to the cabinets. “I divorced Leland, but he won’t let me have my boy. Nobody goes against the Caudills, so he got full custody, no questions.”
My voice breaks. Inside my chest, it’s like I’m peeling back the skin on a newly healed wound. Every time I think about it, I want to sob. Not cry, but curl up in a ball and just sob my insides out.
Landis is my baby.
He needs to be with me.
I bite the inside of my cheek. My thumbnail aches—I’m tearing the skin on it again. His eyes flick down, then up to my face again.
“And Leland Caudill just…let you walk out?” he says.
“I had help,” I say.
He comes close, crouching to get eye level with me. “Who helped you?”
The only set of instructions I was given was to never answer that question. At least, not until I got him back to Kentucky. But that was before I fell right into his beautiful mountain eyes, his arms, and then his bed. Back when he was just a name and a face in a photograph.
