Her Forgotten Betrayal(41)

“Your father?” That was a misfire Cole hadn’t expected. “No. You were waiting for your brother that day. And I wasn’t going to let the little freak be alone with you.”

“Sebastian?” She jerked her hand from its ice bath. She let him push it back down. Her fingers curled around his, trapping them. “The brother who died in the barn fire?”

“Yeah. The one your dad accused me of murdering.”

“Because Bastian didn’t want us together, and he’d caught us in the barn.” The nickname only Shaw had ever used for the slime who’d tormented her had tumbled from her memory with no recognition on her part. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why didn’t I tell my former lover, who can’t remember me but needs my help, that I’d once been accused and then cleared of killing her older brother?”

Cole laughed at his rhetorical question, some of the bitterness returning. He distracted himself by tracing her frigid skin with his thumb. She deserved to know the rest, even if he’d sworn never to think of that time again.

“Even though I was released from jail almost immediately,” he said, “and cleared of the charges just as quickly, it didn’t matter to a goddamn soul. My affair with you was exposed. The town drunk’s son had slept with the princess of the manor. My father sure as hell didn’t want me back. Yours threatened to fire his drunken ass if he let me back on the mountain. When I came home, he’d already packed my bags. He tossed them to me in the front yard. And you? Your dad said he’d kill me if I came near you again.”

While Shaw, the girl who’d sworn to love him forever, hadn’t done a single thing to challenge Matthew Cassidy. She hadn’t come to the hospital to visit Cole. She hadn’t communicated with him in any way since the fire. Not once. He’d never seen her in person again, not until that night at Atlanta Memorial Hospital.

Would she remember why she’d rejected him so thoroughly? Reasons that, to this day, Cole didn’t know. And when she did remember, would she blame him all over again, call Dawson, and toss Cole’s ass out of her life for good?

“Why?” Her expression had softened. “Why didn’t you tell me you were making it your job to save my life, even back then?”

“Would it have made a difference?”

Cole slid away from her touch. He told himself to steer clear of the hero worship shining in her eyes. This was going to end badly enough as it was, when the rest of his secrets were revealed. She’d hate him for manipulating her feelings and emotions to do his job, even if the two of them could somehow find a way to leave behind the troubled past between them.

Evidently, she hadn’t recalled anything more than a single argument with her father. Cole needed to understand how she could have loved him one minute and believed he’d intentionally killed her brother the next. But he had no business pushing her to remember for his own benefit. Just as he had no business allowing himself to put his hands on her again, in any other manner than to care for her latest injury.

“Of course it would have made a difference.”

He shook his head. “Your life didn’t need saving back then.”

To distract himself he walked to the stove and grabbed the kettle, filled it with water, and set it to boil. Employees interviewed for her FBI file said she made a lot of tea, that it soothed her. So he’d make her the best damn tea he could. When he resettled in the chair across from her, she reached for him again.

“You got me out of the barn when it was burning,” she said. “I needed you then. And I don’t care what my father said, you were there for me, not to hurt my brother.”

“Okay, other than that.” The warm, dry palm of her free hand smoothed up his chest. Caressing. Tempting. Seducing. The shocking feel of her needing him was as stunning now as it had been in the office. So was her easy confidence that he’d never intended Sebastian to die.

“I saw it mixed up in the dream I was having after you found me in the woods,” she said. “The flashes of memory since then have been trying to tell me the truth, even when I’m awake. Flames and screams and me running from… Cole, I thought you were chasing me. It’s why I ran from you in the office tonight. Not the fight with my father, or me believing what he was saying. Not really. It was all too much, and for some reason the chaos in my mind keeps circling back to you and the fire. I calmed down upstairs, you have to know that. I wasn’t afraid of you. You saved me. I believe you got me out of that fire. You’d never hurt me or anyone else. Including my brother.”