Bengal's Heart (50 page)

Zeke rose to his feet and turned back to her. “I’m heading out Mina. Take care.”

This relationship was over. He could barely manage civility now. Mina had always seemed like a kindhearted woman. She had a ready smile, compassionate hazel eyes, a gentle face. And a mean streak a mile wide. He’d learned that over the past few months. When it came to other women, younger women, anyone she considered a threat to what she might want at the time, then she turned viperous.

“And you’re not coming back.” Her expression lost its amusement now. “Did you think I didn’t know your attention was waning, Zeke?”

“We had an understanding, Mina.” He’d made certain of it before the relationship began.

She sat up in the bed, unashamedly naked, her short brown hair mussed attractively around her face.

“Your attention hasn’t been worth shit since you met that girl,” she accused him snidely. “You go through the motions but I don’t doubt you’re thinking of her when you’re fucking me.”

His brow lifted. “Jealousy doesn’t become you, Mina, and it’s not a part of what we had. In this case, you’re wrong. There’s nothing between me and Miss Walker.”

And there never could be. She was too young, too tender. Zeke didn’t mess with women whose innocence lit their eyes like stars in the sky. Caitlyn Walker was the forever kind, and Zeke simply didn’t have that to give her. Forever required the truth. It required parts of himself being revealed, and he’d learned at a young age that the truth wasn’t always acceptable.

“There’s nothing between the two of you because you’re a closed-mouthed bastard intent on making certain you never give so much as an ounce of yourself,” she snapped. “What’s wrong, Zeke, can’t anyone match the memory of that paragon you were married to? Or did you simply spend too much time in Los Angeles partying with all the gay boys?”

Zeke stared back at her silently. Prejudice in the mountains was still alive and thriving, he’d known that before he’d come home.

“Goodbye, Mina.”

He turned and left the room. He’d be damned if he’d let himself be drawn into an argument with her, especially one she could use against him at any time in the future.

Zeke had a lot friends that still lived in L.A., and yeah, a few of them were gay. He and his past wife, Elaina, hadn’t felt that sense of prejudice that thrived here. He didn’t give a damn what a man or woman’s sexual preference was. He hadn’t cared then, and he didn’t care now.

As he left Mina’s little house outside town, he reminded himself that he was here to do a job, not to make friends or to find another wife. He’d been born and bred in these mountains. He knew every cliff and hollow, every breath of breeze and sigh of the wind. And he’d missed it like hell when he’d been forced to leave. Not that he’d had a choice at the time. It was leave with his mother or face the further destruction of his soul.

At fourteen, his life had changed forever. One moment in time had cursed him, and had caused his parents’ divorce. Moving to L.A. with his mother and meeting Elaina, the woman he’d married, had changed it further. At seventeen he’d become a father himself, and through the years he had learned the hard way that he couldn’t run from his past. It had found him, and his wife had died because of it.

He was back in Kentucky because of it. Because he was tired of running, tired of fighting to forget what couldn’t be forgotten.

Damn, he loved these mountains though, he thought as he started his truck and pulled out of Mina’s back drive. The sun was rising over the peaks of pine, oak and elm that filled the rolling hills. There was a mist in the air that drifted off the nearby lake, and the scent of summer filled his senses.

The vision of Rogue—he just couldn’t see her as Caitlyn—filled his head, no matter how hard he tried to push it back. He was thirty-two years old, a grown man next to her tender twenty-one. She was so damned tiny she made a man second guess his own strength, and so damned innocent that all a man could think about was being the one to teach her how to sin.

Someone else would have to teach her, he thought, if someone hadn’t already. He was staying just as far away from that land mine as possible. She would be the one woman that would tempt him, he thought. If he dared to touch her, if he even considered taking her, he’d never be able to give her only a part of himself. And because of that, he could never have her. There wasn’t enough of him left to give. Sometimes he felt as though he had never completely found himself, and never would until the demons of his past were destroyed.

Securing that end wouldn’t be easy, he had known that from the beginning. Navigating the waters of deceit could come with a very high price. It was hard enough protecting his young son from it, he couldn’t deal with protecting a woman as well.

Vanquishing those enemies meant doing the job alone. And until one little school teacher with violet eyes, he hadn’t minded paying the price.