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surpassed the way he made her feel when he touched her.
    Lacey let her face fall into her hands. His disappearance had set off a chain of events she didn’t want to relive. She lifted her head and stared at Bryan’s message then shut her eyes. The words imprinted against her eyelids, and the shock was still too fresh in her mind. Just thinking about them brought the bitter pain back with the details.
    Old man Cauldwell tried blaming her when Bryan, his oldest son, didn’t return home from college. Tory, Bryan’s half brother, the little son of a bitch, accused her of chasing him to ground until he couldn’t stand the thought of returning. When she’d been too wounded emotionally to deal with them, her father stood up to the Cauldwells and took the heat for her. In the end, she believed her weakness cost her father his job and his life.
    The sheriff claimed it was a wild animal attack, but Lacey believed otherwise. Bryan’s father, the wealthiest rancher in the state, fired her dad the day before they found his body. To this day, Lacey was sure the Cauldwells were involved. If not Bryan, then his father had a part in her father’s death or the cover-up. All the money in the world couldn’t persuade her otherwise.
    There was nothing she could have done back then. Knowing the older man’s volatile relationship with Bryan made her suspect he had something to do with his own son’s disappearance.
    All those questions changed with this one email.
    Date some ?
    Hardly. His father never let his son date his foreman’s daughter. Fucking? Oh yeah! Fucking her was a different matter totally. That he might have accepted if he knew about it. Probably even would have preferred it. To that elitist S-O-B, she was okay to do in the dark or in the hills, but not good enough to bring out in public. He didn’t want any negative attention brought to the family or his country club set.
    It took years before she came to the realization that she and Bryan spent time together at school and sneaked off when they could. She believed those passionate I-love-you’s he declared in moments of heated embraces because her own desperation wanted to. Now she recognized them for what they were to Bryan—a way to get in her pants. Over the last few years she’d grown to believe he wasn’t any different from his father.
    She looked out the window to the hills, the ones where she and Bryan went, where he’d lied to her, fucked her, and forgotten her.
    Her eyes blurred, but she blinked away the self-pity.
    There’d been nothing more in the email, nothing that mattered, anyway. Blah, blah, blah. No explanation. No apology. Merely statements that broached more questions.
    Don’t believe for a minute that leaving wasn’t as painful for me…
    She closed her eyes and swore she could hear his deep, rich voice murmuring the words in her head the way he once had.
    More lies. And why now?
    Even the prospect that he remembered her fondly made her wonder if he thought about her when he crawled under the sheets stark naked, the way he always slept. If he ran his hands down his tight abs, lowered them to his groin, and thought of her. Had he thought of her when he buried himself inside all those other women these last few years? Had he ever dreamed of her the way she had about him every night since the day they’d met?
    Nothing hinted at an answer to the one burning question she would never ask. How could you have loved me and done this to me?
    The only explanation she could come up with was that he’d lied, then and now. The knot in her throat threatened to choke her, making it hard to swallow. Her skin tingled, her eyes burned, and she glanced back at the computer, aching for more, for something she couldn’t quite grasp.
    The truth.
    What happened to keep him away? And what happened to her father? If he didn’t have the answers, she was sure he knew where to find them.
    Blinking through the watery haze, she pressed delete , and closed her laptop. She