Page 118 of Rocky Mountain Home

Jesse shot to his feet and paced to the window, staring into the beautiful blue sky as he wondered at the irony. It was a perfect day and his world had to fall apart. “You know that moment when you want to kill me? It’s here.”

“You’re not telling me anything,” she pointed out.

He really didn’t want to do this, but he had to say something. “Because it’s history, and it’s stupid.”

“Try starting at the beginning,” she suggested.

The beginning. Fine. That he could do.

“I didn’t like it much when Joel started seeing Vicki. She had a bad reputation back then, although to be honest, Joel and I weren’t much better. It had only been a few months earlier that we stopped sharing girls. Joel didn’t want to anymore, but—” He broke off and dragged his gaze to meet hers. “God, I don’t want to tell you this.”

“Why?”

The honest truth spilled from his lips. “I don’t want you to hate me. I can’t stand to think of you kicking me out of your life.” The truth seared into his belly. When had Dare become this important? Although, it made sense. Buckaroo meant they had a connection that would tie them together for a long time. “I don’t want to tell you that I did something terrible.”

Her face had gone white, and she looked scared to death. “How long ago?”

“A couple of years.”

“Would you do it again? Right now?”

“My God, of course not.”

The tension in her shoulders relaxed and she sucked in a breath of air. “Okay. Is it terrible, or just moderately awful?”

What kind of question was that? “How the hell do I know? Bad enough I was willing to leave my family.”

The expression in her eyes softened again, and she spoke in a soothing voice that stroked him even across the distance of the room. “I can’t guarantee that I won’t be shocked, but I can say that I won’t hate you, or want to kill you. Jesse, we all make mistakes and I can tell from how you’ve been acting you honestly wish you’d never done whatever it is you did.”

Her face—she was as nervous as he was, and that gave him the courage to go on.

“I’ll start at the end. Nothing happened. Nothing bad.”

Her lips twisted. “I will come over there and put you in a sleeper hold if you don’t start talking.”

Jesse paced to the side of the bed, dropping into the chair hard enough that he groaned. “Turned out, Vicki’s nothing like her family, but at the time, none of us knew that. Or maybe Joel did, but when they started hanging out together, I just about flipped. I was sure she was using him to get herself out of a bad situation.”

“So you were worried about Joel. Did you warn him off?”

“Yeah.” Jesse had thought over those days so often it was if he was watching reruns of his most haunting dreams. “He told me she was fine, and to trust him. But I didn’t. I was so sure she was faking being good that I thought I would just hand her a chance to be bad on a silver platter.”

Dare had curled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them, and now her fingers tightened until they turned white. “Oh, Jesse.”

“It was stupid, and too far, but I was sure she was playing Joel. I picked a night I knew he’d be late, and I went to the place they were sharing.”

“And she turned you down.”

If he could walk out of the room right that moment, he would have. Hell, he’d run, but that would mean giving up on everything that he’d started to care about deeply.

“This is killing me, Dare,” he admitted.

“Me too. Can you just tell me? Because my imagination is working overtime, and I’m far too creative. I know you, Jesse. I know you didn’t do anything wrong to Vicki that night, but you’re scaring me.”

She was right. He had to get the words out quick, like pulling off a Band-Aid.

“She didn’t get a chance to turn down my proposal because she was in bed already, sound sleep. I had the brilliant idea to crawl in with her.”

“Oh, damn.”