Colt Woods stood in the cooling night air of Clean Slate Ranch and stared into the lit windows of the cabin next to his. His two best friends in the world were having an intense conversation and it could only be about Colt’s major fuckup. Mack Garrett punctuated his words with sharp hand gestures, his face still the picture of naked rage, and it made Colt’s stomach sour. He’d never seen anyone that furious before and Mack’s anger hadn’t lessened in the hours since their confrontation in the barn. Colt’s other friend, Reyes Caldero, was keeping a cooler head, but Colt couldn’t read lips. He had no idea if he’d lost Reyes’s friendship, too.
All because Colt had chosen to keep a terrible secret for five long, shameful years.
He wanted to walk into that cabin Mack shared with Reyes, drop to his knees, and beg for forgiveness. So many things raced through his mind, but above all, deep-seated regret for his lies and grief for the friendship he’d lost.
“I’m so sorry, Mack,” Colt whispered to the man who didn’t know Colt was watching him. Talking made his split lip throb, but going into that cabin risked a second punch to the mouth, and one per day was his limit. “I’m an idiot, and I should have told you the truth when I got the ballistics report. I didn’t know how to tell you I killed your boyfriend during that bank robbery our SWAT team responded to five years ago. How do you tell your brother in blue that your friendly fire killed the man he loved? I was too scared to lose you.”
Colt snorted. “Joke’s on me, because I’ve lost you, anyway, huh?”
The darkness had no answers to soothe his ravaged soul.
His lip throbbed again. He needed something for his mouth. His own mini-fridge was empty, and knocking on the cabin doors of his fellow ranch hands would only result in a lot of questions he didn’t feel like answering, so he walked the long, worn path up to the guesthouse. Patrice always left the back door to the kitchen unlocked for the staff. It was late enough that she probably had cleaned up and retired to her own cabin for the night, which was just as well. He didn’t need her fussing.
He opened the back door and stepped inside, but he wasn’t alone. And the man seated at the kitchen table was the very last person on earth Colt wanted to see right now.
Avery Hendrix gaped at him over the edge of his tablet, nighttime glasses down on the tip of his narrow nose, eyes wide like someone who’d been caught mid-crime, even though Colt was the only guilty one in the room. Still, he allowed himself a moment to drink in the man he’d briefly loved, years ago in Los Angeles, but hadn’t seen up close since their breakup five years ago. Avery’s shiny brown hair was shorter than the waist-length ponytail he remembered, but still hung in loose waves nearly to his shoulders. New laugh lines bracketed his dark eyes, but he was still as beautiful as ever.
His heart pounded, skin prickling with the need to feel Avery’s practiced hands on his skin. The bite of his whip. The taste of his sweet lips. The way Colt felt alive and electrified from the simplest of praise.
My Sir.
Nope. As much as it tortured Colt, Avery was no longer his Sir.
Didn’t stop Colt’s immediate need to drop to his knees for the younger man—which he did not do.
Barely.
“Your face.” Avery’s soft voice broke the spell of the moment.
“Need ice,” Colt replied dumbly.
He didn’t ask for Avery’s help, but Avery rose from his chair and snagged a hand towel from the bar by the sink, then went straight for the freezer. Colt watched him move around the kitchen like he’d been here for years, rather than a few hours, wrapping ice in the towel, and then directing Colt to his abandoned chair. Colt sat and held the ice to his face, months of practice kicking in.
Theirs hadn’t been a traditional D/s relationship, but he’d gotten very good at doing whatever Avery’s soothing, rational voice told him to do.
“I don’t suppose I have to ask if Mack did this,” Avery said. “Tea?”
“I’m fine.” Colt glanced at a steaming mug of what was probably chamomile tea. Avery’s second favorite, and Patrice didn’t stock Earl Grey.
“Your lip is cut and swollen, you aren’t fine.” Avery dropped into the chair next to him with an unhappy frown on his face. “This is my fault.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because if I’d kept my mouth shut, Mack wouldn’t have gotten suspicious in the first place.”
“If I’d told the truth five years ago, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“True. Except if you’d told the truth back then, I may never have had the chance to work on this project.”
Colt wanted to roll his eyes, but he didn’t have the energy. “You don’t know that for sure.”
“Sure I do. Everything we say and do affects the future. Every choice we make creates an alternate path, a different road than the one we’re on. It all changes.”
“You need to stop watching The Flash.”
Avery chuckled, the familiar sound rolling down Colt’s spine. “Maybe I do. You know I’m a sucker for superhero shows. All I mean is we both made choices back in Los Angeles, Colt, and we are the people we are today because of those choices. It’s not as if we can run fast enough to change the past. Life doesn’t work that way.”
“Yeah.” Colt wasn’t sure how he felt about seeing Avery again after so many years. Conflicted, for sure, and it was a familiar feeling. He’d never really understood why Avery wanted to be with him—a cop who’d barely passed high school and never went to college.
“So you and Mack spoke this evening?” Avery asked.
“Yeah. He cornered me in the barn, asking questions. I could hear you in my head, like all those years ago, urging me to tell him the truth. So I did. I told him about calling in favors to get a copy of the sealed ballistics report. Finding out I’d done it. I even told him part of the reason you and I broke up was because I couldn’t admit the truth back then.” And for a few moments, Colt had been genuinely afraid of his friend. Afraid of Mack’s rage and hard-punching fist. If he’d hit a fraction harder, he could have broken Colt’s jaw.
“That must have been difficult after all these years.”
“It was.”
“I meant hard for Mack to hear.” Avery picked up his tea mug. “But hard for you to say, too, I imagine.”
“In some ways, it was a relief. I finally said something that’s been eating at me for years.” Colt hazarded a look at Avery’s face and immediately wished he hadn’t. Avery’s sad doe eyes still spoke to that protective part of Colt that hated seeing Avery sad or upset. It demanded he make it better, make Avery feel better. But they weren’t a couple anymore. They weren’t even friends.
Avery held his gaze, seemingly unable to look away, either. His eyes flitted to Colt’s mouth a few times, but it was probably just friendly concern about Colt’s fat lip. Didn’t mean anything else.
“Why are you here?” Colt asked.
“Um…because you gave Mack my number and he called me. You know ghost towns are my catnip. Did you really think I wouldn’t fly up here and take a look when you guys discovered one on the ranch property?”
“No, not that. I mean, still here. You guys drove up to the site hours ago. I figured you’d head straight home.”
Avery’s eyes narrowed. “You were watching for me?”
“Maybe. I was curious if you’d changed since I last saw you.”
“Changed as in gotten a tattoo? Gained fifty pounds? Dyed my hair blue?”
“All of the above, I guess. I’ve missed you.” Damn it, Colt could have smacked himself for letting that confession loose.
“You missed me?” Avery’s eyes were nearly slits, which meant his temper was simmering. “I left for a six-week job, and when I came back you’d moved out of your apartment. All the way to northern California, apparently, but back then I had no idea. You’d simply vanished.”
Colt’s own temper flared. “We broke up. Where I moved to after wasn’t your business.”
“You’re right, it wasn’t. I mean, breaking up magically made all my feelings for you simply dry up and disappear. No way I could have possibly worried over you vanishing into thin air after learning you’d killed your best friend’s boyfriend.”
Avery didn’t get mad the way most guys Colt knew got mad. He didn’t raise his voice, rage, or lash out with physical violence. Avery got quiet, hard looking, and every word he spoke was coated in boiling acid. The whole thing was more intimidating than even Mack had been back in the barn when he took one swing at Colt, and then came in for another.
Colt hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about Avery’s feelings over their breakup, because his own were such a tangled mess. Anger, resignation, grief, and regret—not only over losing Avery, but also trying to accept he’d killed an innocent man—battled it out for a long time, even after he had left the city for Clean Slate Ranch and its wide-open spaces. He’d wanted to forget Avery, not dwell on him, because whenever he thought about Avery, he remembered the dark secret he was keeping from Mack. A secret that was a huge part of his breakup with Avery.
Avery had urged Colt at every turn to tell Mack the truth about killing Geoff, to accept the consequences and hope he could rebuild his friendship with Mack. But Colt hadn’t done that. Mack and Reyes were his two best friends, the only family Colt had left after losing his own, and he couldn’t risk it.
Except he’d probably lost Mack for good tonight. Reyes was a wait-and-see.
“I needed to get away from Los Angeles,” Colt said. “Away from you, away from what I’d done. I spent some time in the mountains, in between visiting Reyes in the hospital while he healed from those burns he got during that industrial fire. After Reyes decided to quit being a fireman and move to the ranch, I thought long and hard about it, and then came here, too. I know horses, and I know handyman work. No more life and death decisions.”
“I’m still pissed at you for disappearing on me,” Avery said with a grunt. “For all I knew, you were dead all these years.”
“Sorry.” And he was, because the hurt etched all over Avery’s face was killing Colt inside. “So you’re still at Berkeley, huh?”
“Yes, I’m quite content there.”
“Same apartment?”
“No, I moved to a new place about three years ago.”
“Really? You had a pretty sweet setup there.”
Avery’s cheeks darkened. “I no longer see clients, so I didn’t need the extra space.”
“Oh.” Something deep inside Colt ached, knowing Avery had given up something that had been a huge part of his life. “So you don’t practice anymore?”
“No.” His scowl deepened, and he took his glasses off to momentarily pinch his nose in a familiar stalling technique. “After you left, I couldn’t stand doing it anymore. Shibari was too tied up with my feelings for you.”
“No pun intended?”
Avery flat-out glared. “This isn’t a joke, Colt.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I was making fun of you. I know what the lifestyle meant to you, and I’m sorry you quit.”
“It meant something to you, too. You find someone new?”
“Hell no.” He didn’t mind anonymous sexual encounters, but Colt would never trust another man to tie him up the way he trusted Avery. And like Avery, rope work was all tied up in Colt’s lingering feelings for the other man. Colt wanted to reach out—to touch and kiss and taste Avery again. He could practically feel Avery’s body heat, even though they were several feet apart and not touching at all.
No, Colt was down for hookups and the occasional ménage, but no more BDSM.
But he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Anyone at home missing you right now?”
Avery snorted. “That was unsubtle, and quite frankly, none of your business.”
Probably no, then, which shouldn’t make Colt as happy as it did. Avery had been twenty-eight when they first met and began their Dom/sub arrangement. Once their relationship became sexual, Avery had admitted Colt was his first boyfriend and first real sex partner. Colt had been shocked and honored to be Avery’s first, and he’d had a lot of fun teaching Avery new things in bed.
“You know me,” Colt said, trying to play it off. “Not a subtle bone in my body.”
Avery’s annoyed gaze lowered, and holy hell, Avery was cruising him. Briefly, but he had done it. Colt fought back a blast of arousal. Perving on his ex was a very, very bad idea, especially if they were going to work together on the ghost town restoration.
Except no way in hell would Mack still want Colt to run electrical for him, not after tonight. No, it was best Colt hand in his resignation letter to Arthur tomorrow and be done with it. He put the melting ice pack on the table and sighed.
“What?” Avery asked.
“Just thinking you won’t have to worry about running into me while working on the ghost town. Gonna resign tomorrow, find some other work.”
“Resign? But don’t you love it here?”
“Yeah, and my best friend, whose grandfather owns this joint, hates my guts and probably wishes he’d beaten my ass into the ground.”
“What stopped him?”
“Reyes.”
“Good thing he was there, then. Mack looks like he’d be good in a brawl.”
“He is.” He knocked me on my ass with one punch, didn’t he? “How long are you staying?”
“Only overnight,” Avery replied. “Judson is driving me back to the airport in the morning, so I can take care of some things at home and prepare to come back long term.”
“So you officially took the job?” A job Colt had practically dropped into Avery’s lap. He knew Avery’s qualifications, and with the ghost town newly discovered, there was so much Mack needed to know in order to properly restore it. Avery was the best person for the job, period. Giving Mack his number hadn’t had anything to do with Colt missing Avery. Not a thing.
“Of course I took it,” Avery replied. “This is a dream job for me, and I can’t wait to start designing the new buildings with Mack.”
Colt wilted a bit at all the time Avery would get to spend with his former best friend. An hour ago, Colt had been at work and only mildly worried what Avery might let slip to Mack. Now Colt needed a new home and a new job. He had police experience, and he had horse experience. Handyman experience. He could get all kinds of jobs.
But I want to stay here. I love this ranch, damn it.
He loved it, but he loved Mack more, and if Colt leaving made this easier on Mack, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
“I have an early flight, so I’m going up to my bunk,” Avery said. “I’m sorry you’re leaving the ranch, Colt. And for what it’s worth, I’m even sorrier this is straining your relationship with your friends.”
“Thanks.” The gentle words rippled over Colt’s skin like water, like it had when he received praise from his former Sir. “Good luck with the ghost town.”
“Thank you. Good night, Colt.”
Three words never sounded so much like goodbye, but it was for the best. “Night.”
He watched Avery deposit his mug in the sink, then leave the kitchen through the main dining room doors. Heart heavy, Colt left the damp towel and remaining ice in the sink and slunk out the back door. Back to his cabin to write his resignation letter, and then try to plan a life somewhere other than here.
So much for his second chance at Clean Slate Ranch.