Colton's Lethal Reunion. Tara Quinn Taylor
Rafe. She wasn’t the only one who’d suffered when Rafe deserted them. Tyler had idolized his older sister’s friend. Had been bereft without Rafe’s support, and what he’d viewed as Rafe’s protection.
“The school year after that last…summer, he was starting fourth grade,” she said aloud. Maybe for Tyler. Maybe because it just had to be said. “Being little for his age hadn’t been an issue in third grade. A lot of guys were still small. But by fourth grade, kids started picking on him. He came home all bloodied up one day and just kept saying, ‘I gotta tell Rafe, he’ll make ’em stop.’”
She could hear the words as clearly that night as the day they’d been said. “I had to physically hold him back from running up to the mansion to find you.”
She’d never been sure what Tyler thought Rafe could have done, even if he’d still been their friend. Since Rafe was older, it wasn’t like he was ever on Tyler’s elementary school campus.
But that had been the year that changed her little brother. He might not have been as big as the other boys, but he’d been smart. And he’d toughened up. By seventh grade he’d been running with the troublemakers who’d once made fun of him. Running them.
By the time she’d come home from college in Phoenix, he’d been running drugs, too, though she never got him to admit that. And he’d never been caught. She saw the money in his room, though.
And saw him getting high and drunk every night.
She’d been away getting an education, attending the police academy to make their little world a safer place for people without Rafes to protect them, and while she’d been gone, he’d turned into her father.
“He fell off a cliff, right?” Rafe was going through photos, having opened the folder without seeking permission first. So Colton-ish.
“He was driven up there and pushed off.”
He looked at her—studied her, more like it. “You sound sure about that.”
“I am sure. I just don’t have the evidence to prove it. Yet.”
“He was pulled off the mountain drunk more than once,” Rafe said softly, compassion in his gaze.
“How do you know that?”
“Because while you were gone…he was in high school…I made sure that he got back to the ranch, to your cabin, without Payne ever hearing about it.”
She’d wondered how Tyler had been so wild without being kicked off the ranch. He’d left on his own. After he’d graduated from high school.
“I made sure he stayed until he graduated,” Rafe added.
“I don’t believe that. Tyler would have said something…”
“He didn’t know. I…had a talk with one of the guys in your department, Spencer… The police made a deal with Tyler that he wouldn’t be charged with underage drinking as long as he stayed in school. And they watched over him, just happening to show up wherever he might be getting himself into trouble.”
Wow. Just… Wow.
What did you do with that piece of information?
How did you hate a guy who…
Not that you liked him, again, too much else had happened…
He’d looked after Tyler while she’d been gone. Had made sure her brother got his education.
She just couldn’t believe it.
Wished she’d known. And it still wasn’t enough. Didn’t make up for ditching them in the first place. For choosing wealth over love.
Because even if, as a kid, he’d felt he had no choice, five years after that last ultimatum, he’d been an adult. And yet he’d waited twenty-three years…
Seriously, what did you do with something like that?
Rafe studied the information about Tyler’s death so he didn’t have to look at Kerry. Or feel her home around him, reminding him of everything he’d once had and never found again. Not the room. Or the furnishings. It was a sense of being fully and completely alive.
She hadn’t said a word since he’d broken his promise to himself and told her what he’d done for Tyler while she’d been at the police academy. He’d gone away to college, too, but he’d had a helicopter that brought him home for three days every weekend. Payne’s insistence. His way to keep control, Rafe had figured. “Why are you so certain that this wasn’t an accident?” he finally asked, closing the folder when he couldn’t bear to look at the pictures any longer. The cliff face. The tire tracks and footprints in the dust.
The funeral he’d missed because he’d been at an international oil summit in Washington with a couple of his siblings—or the biological Colton heirs, as he sometimes thought of them. Although, why she had a picture of the people gathered at the grave site…
He glanced again. Noticed the man standing in the back of the small gathering. And then looked at the wall again. And through another file. “You think Odin Rogers had something to do with this?”
The man was little more than a scumbag with no morals, no class, who lived like a member of royalty—thinking his word and desires carried the weight of a king. He’d tried to take on Rafe once—when Rafe had been looking out for Tyler. Not face-to-face, of course. But word got around that the Coltons couldn’t save Tyler if the punk didn’t finish some job for which he’d been paid. No job that was on any record, of course. It hadn’t ended well for Rogers. And yet, the hefty white man continued to live well. And free.
Rogers’s one success was that he had enough minions willing to do his dirty work so that his hands were clean when it came to actual proof of dealing drugs.
“I know he’s behind it,” Kerry said, standing to join him by the wall. “I know Tyler got into trouble, that he made some horrible choices there for a while…” She paused and Rafe felt the sting of guilt, whether she’d intended it or not. “But he was on the straight and narrow for almost a year before he was murdered. I know that he’d been running with some of Odin’s people. I saw him downtown, talking to Odin once, but when I asked him about it, he denied knowing the guy. Kept trying to convince me that I’d seen it wrong. Then something went down that either scared him, or opened his eyes to what he was becoming, because he came to me and apologized for all the worry and trouble he’d brought me over the years. He told me that he knew how much I’d done for him, that I was always there for him. Told me how much that meant to him. And he swore that he was going to make it all up to me…”
She’d been sounding all police-like…until she didn’t. Her voice didn’t break, it just trailed off. And she stared unmoving at the wall.
Collecting herself, Rafe knew. Not because it was anything she’d ever done around him before; on the contrary, she’d always shown him everything she was feeling, when they were kids. But he knew she wasn’t going to let herself show him anything, anymore.
The practical adult man he’d grown into was glad about that. Because if Payne lived, and Rafe truly hoped he did, the old man would likely still carry through on his threats to a thirteen-year-old Rafe. Back then all he’d have had to do was fire her father. Which would have been akin to sending Kerry and Tyler straight into hell. With Tyler Sr.’s drinking, the kids would likely have been left to fend for themselves. Or become wards of the state, and risk being split up. At least on the ranch they were always looked after by the other cowboys’ wives. And Tyler was looked after, too, by the men who trusted him to work hard come morning. At the RRR they could be together as a family. And one thing Rafe had always known was how much Kerry loved her little brother. And her father, too.
But even now that Rafe and Kerry were adults, Payne