Sandy was no threat to what they had.
He stepped around Sandy, but she grabbed his arm, and when he turned around, she was waiting. She leaned forward quickly, her lips pressing against his, but Colt reacted immediately, pushing her away as forcefully as he dared. She stumbled back a few steps before righting herself.
“I said I’m not available,” he growled softly.
Sandy looked over his shoulder, toward the doorway of the barn, raising her voice considerably to be heard from several yards away. “Looking for someone, honey?”
Colt whipped around just in time to see Verity’s face contort, her sweet lips falling open, her chest heaving with short, shallow breaths.
“I . . . I’m just . . . I . . . no!” she said in a broken voice before turning and disappearing from sight.
“Verity!” he yelled, starting after her.
“Looks like you might be available after all,” said Sandy from behind him, grasping his arm.
He stopped and turned slowly to face her, yanking his arm away and forcing his fisted hands to stay curled and motionless by his sides. “Stay the fuck away from me.”
Then he turned around and ran after Verity.
***
Tears tumbling down her cheeks, Verity ran through the employee hallway, stopping at the gift shop to grab her purse from under the counter and continuing to the double doors where the evening audience would be lining up in about an hour. She ignored Beverly’s calls and could barely see through her tears, but she didn’t stop running until she got to Colton’s car. She unlocked it, opened the door, sat down, and put the key in the ignition. She didn’t know where she was going. She just knew she had to get as far away from The Legend of Camelot as possible.
Putting the car in gear, she floored it into reverse, then forward, beelining for the exit and pulling out onto Peachtree Road. Her tears wouldn’t stop, blinding her as she raced through a red light, almost getting sideswiped before she realized that she’d kill herself if she didn’t slow down.
It was too good to be true . . . too good to be true . . . too good to be true, she repeated over and over in her head, finally pulling into the parking lot of a Walmart. I should have known my bad luck wasn’t gone.
Tears cascaded down her face in streams as she rested her forehead on the crest of the steering wheel, letting herself have a long cry. Eventually, after quite a while, the tears subsided a little, and she decided to try to make sense of what she’d just seen.
Was there any chance they hadn’t been kissing? She shook her head, more tears falling. No. His lips were scarlet from Sandy’s lipstick.
Verity gulped, sniffling as more tears wove their way down her cheeks.
It didn’t look like a passionate kiss, whispered her heart.
“But it was still a kiss,” she said aloud in a pitiful voice.
He didn’t have his arms around her.
“But her hand was on his arm. He was letting her touch him.”
He broke off the kiss quickly.
“Probably because Sandy noticed me standing there, and they wanted more privacy.”
He yelled your name as you were running away.
“Did he?” she said, thinking back. She didn’t remember him yelling her name, but she’d been so upset, maybe only her subconscious had registered it. Everything was becoming jumbled and mixed-up in her mind.
Whether or not he’d yelled her name became an important part of the equation as afternoon turned into evening and she still sat in his car, dressed in a princess dress, her beautiful memories of last night mixing with the horror of watching him kiss another woman today.
It took so much strength and effort for her to try to see Colton and Sandy’s kiss in any light other than mutual desire, but after she calmed down and stopped crying, she concentrated hard and forced herself to re-create exactly what she’d seen.
She’d turned the corner of the barn as Colton was heading out, but suddenly he whipped around and kissed Sandy. It was a quick kiss, ending with Sandy stumbling back several steps as though pushed away. Colton mumbled something Verity couldn’t hear. While Sandy asked if she was looking for someone, Colton also turned around, and yes, she could see it in her mind: the sheer horror on his face. And yes, as she ran away, he called her name. She remembered.
But she still couldn’t make sense of it.
Why was Colton’s shirt off? Who had initiated