Page 5 of Colt’s Betrayal

Something in her voice puts me on my feet.

“Has something happened? Are you okay?”

“I... I just need to talk to you.”

“Tell me.”

“Not on the phone, not like this.”

I’m already reaching for my keys before she finishes the sentence. Kane’s eyes are on me now. So is everybody else’s.

“Are you hurt?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Did somebody touch you?”

Another tiny pause.

“No. Colt, I’m okay. I just need to see you. Meet me at the diner?”

“Twenty minutes, I'll be there.” I end the call.

Kane lifts an eyebrow. “Jayne?” The fact he knows exactly who she is shouldn’t surprise me. Chains talked about his daughter enough over the years, even if she stopped coming around long before Kane took the gavel.

“Yeah.”

Wilder straightens in his chair. I don’t give any of them time to ask another question.

“She says she needs to talk to me. I’m going.”

Kane nods once. “Call me if it touches the club.” I’m out the door before Judge can tell me what my face is apparently giving away. The ride into Ransom should clear my head, but it doesn’t. It's been twelve years. I’ve fucked women since Jayne. Plenty of them. I’ve slept beside women whose last names I couldn’t have given you the next morning and walked out without wondering whether I’d ever see them again.

But not one single one of them made me forget the girl who cried when she told me she couldn’t live with me in the club. Not one ever came even close. I pull into the parking lot behind the diner. Neutral ground is sensible, maybe, and it means something. I just don’t know what yet.

Jayne is already waiting beside her car when I pull in. I see her before I kill the engine. And for one stupid fucking second, I’m twenty-two again. Then she turns fully toward me and there’s nothing nineteen about her anymore. She’s thirty-one.

Older in all the ways she should be. Curves that weren’t there when she was a girl. Hair falling loose around her shoulders. A face I would have known anywhere, changed enough to make staring dangerous. Her eyes hit me just as hard. They move over my cut, my arms, my face. The tattoos she never saw because half of them came after her. Then back to my eyes.

“Hi,” she says as I swing off my bike.

“Just hi after all this time?”

One corner of her mouth twitches, and fuck me, I remember that smile too.

“I didn’t exactly prepare an opening line.”

“You called me after twelve years. You’re allowed a bad one.”

Her almost-smile disappears and that gets my attention back where it belongs.

“What happened?”

She glances toward the diner. “Can we sit somewhere?”

“No.”

Her eyebrows lift.