Never Too Late. RaeAnne Thayne
supposed that was another of the reasons he was driving through the sparse Sunday-morning traffic heading south on I-15. He owed Taylor and Wyatt everything for all they had risked. Maybe by turning around and helping Kate—someone both of them cared about—he could start to check off a little of that debt.
“You’re not taking I-80?” Kate asked as he passed the interchange—the Spaghetti Bowl, as the locals called it, for the various lanes twisting off in every direction like pasta in a dish.
He shook his head. “The weather report said that light snow we had last night gathered strength as it headed east and was due to hit Wyoming with a vengeance today. I figured if we head south now, down through Albuquerque and Amarillo, we’ll escape the worst of it.”
“Good thinking.”
They encountered no delays traveling south across the Salt Lake Valley and, all too soon, they reached Bluffdale where the Point of the Mountain state prison sprawled out to the west of the highway, its buildings squat and depressing.
This was the first time he’d been this way since his release, Hunter realized. Perhaps he had made a point of staying north of the area without even realizing it.
If he had come this way before, he might have been prepared for the rush of anger and hatred rising like bile in his throat.
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. Sunday mornings were relatively quiet at the prison. Many prisoners chose to sleep the day away, while others attended the various religious services offered.
Hunter had quite deliberately chosen to stay in his cell reading. By the time he’d found himself on death row, he had lost whatever faith might have lingered in his soul.
He had been less than nothing in prison. Inhuman, like a dog locked up in a cage at the pound. He had been out for six weeks and he wondered if that feeling would ever go away.
“It’s hard for you to see the prison, isn’t it?”
It seemed a sign of weakness to admit the truth. It was just a cluster of buildings, after all. A part of his life that was over forever.
He opened his mouth to deny he was at all affected by the sight but somehow the lie caught in his throat.
“I lost two and a half years of my life to that bastard Martin James. Three lives were lost while he tried to protect his web of lies and deceit. Who knows how many more he would have taken? It’s a little hard to get past that.”
Her blue eyes softened with understanding and she reached a hand across the width of the SUV and touched his arm with gentle fingers. “I’m so sorry, Hunter.”
Despite his grim thoughts, heat scorched him where she touched his arm and he was suddenly aware of a wild, terrible hunger to drown in that heat and softness, to lose some of this rage always seething just under the surface.
He jerked his arm away, just firmly enough to be obvious. “I’m sorry enough for myself. I don’t need your pity, too.”
She paled as if he had slapped her—which he guessed he had done, verbally at least—and quickly pulled her hand away.
“Right. Of course you don’t.”
He opened his mouth to apologize for his rudeness, then closed it again. Maybe it was better this way. They weren’t buddies. It was going to be tough enough for him to stay away from her on this journey without having to endure shared confidences and these casual touches that would destroy him.
He had been without any kind of physical affection since his arrest and he hungered for gentleness and softness as much as for sex.
It was a grim realization, one that certainly didn’t make their situation any easier.
She had two choices here, Kate thought as his blatant rejection burned through her like hydrochloric acid. She could let herself be hurt and pout for the rest of the day. That was the course that appealed to her most, but what would that accomplish?
Yes, her feelings had been hurt. All she had been trying to do was offer comfort and he had slapped her down like she was one of those inflatable punching bags she used to beat the heck out of when she was in foster care, angry at the world and unsure of her place in it.
But she decided not to let herself be offended. Hunter was a proud man who had seen his entire world crash down around him. He had lost friends, his job, his standing in the community.
It must have been agony for him to know the whole world believed him capable of murdering a pregnant woman and her dying mother.
He had a right to be prickly about it, to deal with his wrongful conviction and everything else that had happened in his own way. If that way included being surly and hostile when an unsuspecting soul tried to offer comfort, she couldn’t blame him.
His bitterness and anger must be eating him up from the inside and she could certainly understand all about that.
She would take the higher road, she decided. Instead of snapping back or sulking all day, she would swallow her hurt feelings and pretend nothing had happened.
She decided a change of subject was in order. “I brought music if you’re interested,” she said, then risked a joke. “I figured your CD collection might be a few years out of date.”
He sent her one of those dark, inscrutable looks she could only imagine must have been torture for any crime suspect he was questioning. He said nothing, but she thought she registered a vague surprise in those dark-blue eyes at her mild reaction to his rudeness, and she was immensely grateful she hadn’t gone with her first instincts and thrown a hissy fit.
“What are you in the mood for?” she asked. “Jazz? Rock? Country? Christmas music? I’ve got a little of everything.”
“I don’t care. Anything.”
“Okay. I’ll pick first and then you can find something.”
She chose Norah Jones and felt her own stress level immediately lower as soon as the music started.
They drove without speaking for several moments, Belle’s snoring in the back and the peaceful music the only sound in the vehicle, then Kate reached into her bag again and pulled out Wyatt’s latest bestseller that had come out a few months earlier.
“You don’t mind if I read, do you?”
“Go ahead. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us. I imagine we’re going to run out of small talk by the time we hit Spanish Fork.”
She laughed. “You might. I never seem to run out of things to say. But I’ll take pity on you and pace myself.”
To her delight, that earned her a tiny, reluctant smile, but it was more than she’d seen since his release. It was a start, she thought. Maybe by the time this journey was through, he would be smiling and laughing like the man she had met five years ago with Taylor in that all-night diner.
She picked up her book, one of only a few of Wyatt’s she hadn’t had time to read yet. She had actually discovered his books long before she ever knew he was her brother, and had read each one with fascination.
He wrote true-crime books—usually not one of her favorite genres—but Wyatt had a way of crawling inside the heads of both the victims and the killers he wrote about, and she found his work absorbing and compelling.
This one was no different, and she was surprised by the warm contentment stealing over her as she rode along with Hunter’s sexy male scent drifting around her senses and the tires spinning on the highway while the windshield wipers beat back a light snow spitting from the sky.
Combined with the peaceful music, Kate felt herself begin to relax and slip further into that warm, cozy place where she didn’t have to worry about the family waiting patiently for her love—or the man beside her who wouldn’t want it, if he ever guessed it might be his for the taking.
She must have drifted off to sleep. One moment she was reading the introduction