obviously been nervous, searching for common ground. Yet all her chatter did was to emphasize the differences between them. Surprisingly the attraction remained.
“I wanted to kiss you,” she admitted.
“The physical pull was strong.”
“Though I liked the kissing,” she said slowly as if choosing her words carefully, “I thought our relationship went beyond the physical.”
He’d thought there was more to it, too. When he told her he loved her, he’d meant it.
Cole wasn’t quite sure why she was acting as if she’d cared for him back then. Thanks to her good friend Ed Rice, he knew what she’d really thought of him. Intellectually, Cole had been judged and found wanting.
“I had no complaints with the sex,” he said, swinging his legs to the side of the bed.
What puzzled him most was how he could still desire someone who had no respect for him.
“Why did you quit calling? Was there another girl? You could have simply told me if there was someone else. I know all the girls liked you.”
Uh-oh. Cole recognized the rapid speech and run-together sentences. Though Meg wasn’t normally a big talker, the floodgates had been opened and he was going to get an earful.
“Even Janae.” Meg gave a humorless laugh at his startled look. “Yep, my best friend had it bad for you. She never admitted it, at least not to me, but I could tell.”
Janae. She was bringing up Janae? And here he’d thought the conversation couldn’t get any worse.
“Travis suspected that you and I had been involved.” Meg picked at a piece of lint from her shirt. “But I never told him I slept with you.”
Thank God for small favors. Her older brother had never been a violent guy, but all the boys knew that nobody messed with the Fisher girls.
“Travis was surprised you didn’t come to our parents’ funeral, seeing as how you’d played ball together all those years,” Meg continued. “You were the only one on the team not there.”
It would be so easy to dismiss those feelings, but Cole remembered how he’d felt when his friends had shown up for his dad’s funeral.
“Sorry about that.” He bent over and tightened a strap on his brace. “Something came up.”
“What could have been so important, Cole?” She spat his name as if it tasted bitter on her tongue. “So important that you couldn’t have shown my family—and me—a little respect?”
The car accident that had claimed the lives of her parents had occurred in late spring. One more year. That’s all Cole had to make it through before he would graduate. Then he’d take his brother and get the hell out of Jackson Hole.
The wrong person seeing that black eye could have ruined those plans. If they’d gone into foster care, all bets would have been off.
Cole jumped to his feet, stifling a curse when his knee revolted at the sudden movement. He gritted his teeth and rounded the bed to where she stood, her arms tightly crossed and clasped to her chest.
After what she’d done, she didn’t deserve an explanation from him. Well, she was going to get one anyway.
“Do you want to know why I didn’t come to the funeral?”
“Yes. I would like to know.”
Perhaps another man would have held back the truth. Some might even say he’d be justified after what she’d done to him. But in his mind two wrongs never equaled a right.
“I had a black eye,” he said. “I knew it’d raise questions if I came to the funeral with the side of my face looking like it’d been run through a meat grinder.”
Surprise mixed with puzzlement in her gaze. “How were you injured?”
“My stepdad used me for a punching bag,” he said in the same tone he might use to describe what he’d had for supper. He ignored the shock skittering across Meg’s face and continued. “It only happened when he drank. That was pretty much all the time.”
“Oh, Cole.” Meg gasped, bringing two fingers to her lips. “I never knew.”
“A couple of teachers suspected. I denied it.” He turned and walked to the window, gazing unseeingly out over the pine trees blanketed with snow.
“Why didn’t you tell them the truth? They could have—”
“What could they have done?” He turned and faced her, his back against the windowsill. It seemed oddly symbolic since he’d felt as if his back had been against the wall from the moment his mother had left him and his brother behind. “They’d have turned Cade and me over to social services. We’d likely have