Lone Star Homecoming by Justine Davis

Author:Justine Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance
ISBN: 9781951786892
Publisher: Tule Publishing Group, LLC
Published: 2020-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

Lark watched him as he looked around the main room of his wing of the ranch house, clearly shocked.

“Does it seem different?” she asked.

She already knew the true answer; the Highwaters hadn’t done much of anything here, in Kane’s wing, except keep it clean. She suspected Sage spent some time in here, when she got to missing her youngest brother. And because it was a sign of their hope, because nothing had changed, down to his beloved guitar on the rack beside the rather elaborate sound system.

“No.”

“You looked surprised. What did you expect?”

He gave her a look that was nothing less than incredulous. “I expected it to be gutted. Burned down. Bulldozed. Something.”

He meant it. Down to the bone, he meant it. And this was why she’d come back here with him, alone, although she knew it was difficult for his family to let him out of their sight again.

It took some effort to ask simply and without inflection, “Why?”

“Because they hate me. They must hate me.”

“Keeping this wing of the house exactly as you left it doesn’t seem like hatred to me. More like…hopeful.” She went for a quick switch. “Why did you do the bucket list?”

She saw his eyes widen, saw him take in a quick breath. His mouth tightened, as if fighting to hold back words. But they came out anyway. “So I could live with myself.”

It was her turn to be surprised; she hadn’t expected him to admit that. Had he still been that kid he’d been then, she wouldn’t have expected him to have even realized it. Clearly Kane Highwater—and she still thought of him that way, never mind his insistence the name was no longer his—had done a lot of growing and thinking and learning since that long-ago day.

Again she worked for that matter-of-fact tone, sensing that any pushing or prodding would be a mistake. “Which infers that you know the truth. That the reason you expected them to hate you is because you hate yourself.”

“I expect them to hate me because I killed their father!”

He’d snapped it out with a no-guardrails kind anger she had seen before. It burst from him as if under pressure, and she guessed it was a kind of pressure she couldn’t even begin to imagine. But then it was gone, and she knew that somewhere along the line he’d learned to reel it in. She chose her next words carefully.

“If it had been, say, Shane showing Poke in Oklahoma City, would you have come?”

His brow furrowed, whether in thought about what she’d asked or that she’d asked it at all she didn’t know. The answer came quickly enough that she suspected it was the latter. “No.”

“So it was Sage who drew you.”

“I…she…I knew what it meant to her, to accomplish that dream. I couldn’t not come.”

“So you could cut off your brothers, but you couldn’t cut off Sage.” He frowned, as if he didn’t like the way she’d put that. Tough, Texas boy. Because you still are one, no matter how hard, fast, or far you run.

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