AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“He did save you,” Hunt assured her.
She leaned over and kissed Marcus’s head. “I’m sorry.” So sorry she hadn’t loved him the way he deserved to be loved. Sorry she’d approached her apartment without thinking someone could still be in there. Sorry that their last moments together were about her not trying to be more for him.
Hunt pulled her back again. “How bad are you hurt? Can you stand up?”
She couldn’t really feel anything but deep, overwhelming grief and regret. So she shifted her weight, planted one foot, and let Hunt help her to her feet. The room spun and she tilted off her axis and would have gone down if Hunt hadn’t wrapped an arm around her shoulders to hold her up. He scooped her into his arms and walked her out the door, just as two paramedics showed up with a gurney.
“I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not,” Hunt grumbled. “You’re bleeding like crazy.” He set her on the gurney and she caught aglimpse of the blood all over his shirt before the paramedic pressed a gauze pad to her head. She closed her eyes and winced at the lightning bolt of pain shooting through her scalp. “Ouch.”
“Take her to the hospital. Get her checked out.” Hunt squatted beside her. “I’ll be there after I check out your apartment to talk to you about what happened tonight.”
She could barely focus on him, let alone nod.
“Do you want me to call someone for you?”
She frowned, another wave of tears coming. “Kyle left town. Mom and Dad are...” She couldn’t quite remember where they’d gone, only that they were away for a week or something. “I don’t have anybody to call.” She covered her eyes with her hands, not caring that the paramedic was trying to take her blood pressure, and let out a fresh wave of tears.
Hunt’s hand settled on her shoulder. “I’ll come and see you as soon as the doctor checks you out, okay?”
“’K.” That’s about all she could manage to say, then her mind went back to Marcus. “You have to call his family. Oh God. His family. He’s gone.” Her mind still didn’t want to believe it, but her heart felt the pain sharply.
“Take her now.” The urgency in Hunt’s voice set off an alarm in her that maybe she wasn’t really all right.
God, that voice. So close. But not his. Not the one she desperately wanted to hear right now. Not the man she wished she’d never lost.
Poor Marcus.
Why would someone kill him? Who was that man? And what did he want from her?
Chapter Three
Max was lying in bed. Alone. Not sleeping—again—but listening to the achingly quiet night, feeling every empty centimeter of space beside him, doing another mental deep dive on his so-called life.
It seemed that every night before his brother Chase went home to his wife and daughter, he took a second to ask Max, “How are you?” leaving a pregnant pause, while Chase waited to see if Max would say something other than, “Fine.”
Max didn’t think he’d actually been fine in a long time. Overworked, tired, restless, bored, angry, lonely—those were all things he’d been and more lately. The last one really got to him, especially as he’d watched his two brothers fall in love and live the kind of happy he used to have before everything went to shit with Kenna.
His brothers had been on his case for a while now to stop all the late-night drinking at the bar and using women to pretend he wasn’t really alone.
Without those distractions, all he really had left was the ranch and his regrets.
His older brother Chase had been the golden child. The one who would succeed their dad and run the ranch, but Chase ran off to join the military several years back in order to save the failing ranch with an influx of cash from Chase’s signing bonus. Max took over the ranch and ran things just fine for all those years. Thank you very much.
But Chase came back broken and different.
He finally got his shit together this past year and now they ran the ranch together, but Max took the lead role because he’d earned it.
Chase was a good partner. He didn’t mind following Max’s lead. Chase had his wife Shelby and daughter Eliza to fill the nonwork hours of the day.
Max had work and recently traded his late nights at the bar for sunset rides and time to think about what he wanted for his future. He thought he’d have what his brothers found with their wives. In fact, there was a time he’d thought he’d be the first of them to get married even though he was the youngest.
But that all fell apart.
No good deed goes unpunished.
He’d learned that the hard way and lost Kenna and the trust and love he thought they’d shared until she called him a liar.
