The Bad Boy's Redemption (8 page)

He turned back to the fight in time to avoid a sneak attack from Tucker and sacrificed one of the snow monster’s heads in order to make sure his big brother got it good.

The battle waged on for another twenty minutes before the younger boys started to get whiny and Seth called for a ceasefire. While Seth and Tucker herded the boys toward the garage to strip off as much of their wet clothes as possible before entering the house, Colt swung by the Jeep to grab the present he’d hidden under his seat and headed for the barn to check on Olivia’s surprise.

As promised, Tucker had left several sprigs of mistletoe and the spare key to Colt’s cabin on a table near the last stall. All Colt had to do was hang the mistletoe, tie the key onto the ribbon on Olivia’s present—a box filled with twenty pairs of lace panties—and the stage was set.

After, he stood back, admiring the simplicity of it.

He’d never gone out of his way to introduce romance into a relationship, but he thought this was a pretty good first attempt. He knew Olivia would get a laugh out of his gift and he hoped she would understand that the key to his house meant more than an invitation to come stay over whenever she wanted.

It was an invitation into his life, where he wanted her to feel at home.

Hell, he wanted her to feel more than at home. He wanted her to consider something more permanent than seeing where things go. Time and circumstance were pushing him to make big decisions faster than he was usually comfortable with, but Olivia was worth it.

Now he could only hope she felt the same way come the day after Christmas when he planned to spill the beans and ask her to help him figure out what came next.

As he made his way through the trampled yard toward the house, fresh snow began to fall and thunder rumbled gently in the distance. Thunder snow was an odd occurrence, but usually happened about once or twice every winter, and usually spelled ugly driving conditions.

It made Colt wonder if he and Olivia should head out right after dinner instead of sticking around for caroling. As much as he loved his family, he didn’t want to be stuck staying over at his parents’ house tonight. He wanted Olivia all to himself, and no one around to hear the sounds she made when they were making love.

Making love
. The phrase always seemed cheesy before, but now it was simply…accurate.

The thought made him smile as he pushed into the kitchen, stopping to knock the snow off of his boots on the mat by the door. But instead of interrupting the chaos of post-snowball fight cocoa making, he stepped into a tense silence.

Across the room, Daisy sat beside his mother at the kitchen table, while his father stared out the back window into the field behind the house.

“What’s up?” Colt asked, taking off his sock cap and shaking it out onto the rug. “Is everything okay?”

“No, everything isn’t okay,” Daisy said, rubbing at her temple. “Olivia’s gone.”

Colt froze. “What?”

“She’s gone,” Daisy repeated. “And we don’t know where she went and we can’t call her because she left her cell here. She said she was going to take a walk, but that was thirty minutes ago and now it’s starting to storm and I’m afraid she’s so upset that she’ll wander too far and get lost in it.”

Colt shook his head. “Why is she upset?” One look at his sister’s guilty, but stubbornly self-righteous, expression and he had his answer. “You told her? Daisy you promised you wouldn’t!”

“I didn’t tell her,” Daisy snapped. “I told Mom and Olivia walked in while Mom was crying and wanted to know what was wrong. Sorry, but I didn’t feel like lying for you anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Colt,” his mom said, wiping at her tear-streaked cheeks. “It’s my fault.”

“It isn’t your fault, Mom. And I wasn’t asking you to lie for me, Daisy,” Colt said, pulling his hat back onto his head. “I was asking you to keep your nose out of my life. It’s
my
life and Olivia is my…”

He faltered but didn’t feel like dancing around the subject with Olivia missing and upset. “Olivia and I are the ones starting a relationship and I deserved the right to tell her about the letter myself.”

“Yeah, after you led her on for another week,” Daisy said, tears rising in her eyes. “Seriously, it’s disgusting Colt. The way you’re acting makes me ashamed to call you my brother.”

Colt’s jaw clenched, his body fighting to keep words he knew he would regret from finding their way out of his mouth.

Finally, after two deep, harsh breaths, he managed to say in a rough, but controlled, voice, “You have no idea what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling, or what my plans are, Daisy. Despite what you may think, you don’t know shit about love. If you did, you would know that I’m crazy about Olivia and I would never hurt her. Never.”

Daisy’s jaw dropped, but Colt didn’t have time to waste appreciating the novelty of seeing his little sister speechless. He turned to Tucker, who was lurking in the doorway to the kitchen, pretending not to be eavesdropping.

“Tucker, you want to take a four-wheeler and check the back field?” Colt asked. “I can take the snowmobile up onto the ridge and see if I can get an idea where she went.”

“Sounds good,” Tucker said. “Take your cell. I’ll call as soon as I see anything.”

“I’ll go with Tucker,” his dad said. “And help keep an eye out for her.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Colt said, grateful for the support. “And don’t worry, Mom. I’ll find Olivia, make sure everything is okay, and we’ll be back in time for dinner.”

Not bothering with any parting words for Daisy, he headed back out into the snow and started toward the barn, where his dad kept the snowmobile parked beneath the eaves during the winter.

He hurried across the yard, trying not to think about how swiftly the snow was concealing the evidence of their snowball fight or how quickly it would cover Olivia’s trail if he were lucky enough to find it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Olivia

Olivia tromped up the trail leading to the ridge, ignoring the progressively insistent snow filtering through the trees to coat her hair in a veil of frigid white.

She was already halfway across the Brodys’ property. If she kept going straight, in about ten miles—not that far and it was still light—she would emerge onto the Newmans’ ranch, where she would be able to ask sweet old Mr. Newman for a ride home. He wouldn’t mind interrupting his Christmas Eve celebration to give a girl he hadn’t seen in almost a decade a ride back to town. He was one of the nicest men in the world.

Unlike Colt.

Colt, who had lied to her and deceived her and made her believe he was falling in love with her, when really he was just killing time—and getting his rocks off—until he left town in nine days.

Nine days
. He would be gone in
nine days
and who knows when—or if—she would ever see him again. Daisy had said he was going back into the marines as part of the ground force, the troops in the most danger and the most likely to get killed in action.

Fresh tears filled her eyes, welling up until they spilled down her cold cheeks. She knew she should hate him, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel anything except scared for him, ashamed of herself for being so gullible, and breathlessly, hopelessly sad.

She had stupidly believed she would be the one who would help Colt put his bad boy days behind him for good. A part of her still wanted to believe that this was all some big misunderstanding and that he would be able to explain the pain away.

But Daisy had seen the letter telling Colt to report to his old base on January second herself. There was no confusion. There was just black and white and one very naïve woman with a knack for getting herself in bad situations. Back in Chicago, she had been a failed nerd gone wild, embarrassed in front of her coworkers and shamed by an idiot she never should have dated, let alone slept with.

She had assumed she’d seen rock bottom, but this was so much worse.

Because she loved Colt.

She had always loved him and the past few days had transformed that simple, earnest, childlike love into a passionate torch of emotion. She’d thought she’d found the end of the road, the arms that would never let her down, the One who could be trusted.

She had bounced back from Clarence’s betrayal in a month or two, but after this she would never be the same again. She couldn’t imagine looking into another man’s eyes and letting all her defenses fall away. Not that she’d had a choice with Colt. From the first time he’d touched her, she’d been helpless to control her emotions. She’d been a goner that first afternoon, no matter how hard she’d tried to convince herself that she could have a casual relationship.

She should never have given in to temptation. She’d been aware of Colt’s reputation and seen him break one heart after another when they were growing up. She should have trusted the facts and common sense, not that voice in her head whispering that love could work miracles.

Once again, she had been the architect of her own misfortune and had no one to blame but herself. She’d known better. She really had, but she’d let herself fall head over heels for Colt anyway.

Olivia was halfway to another epic sob fest—not caring if her tears were turning to tear-sicles on her cheeks—when she heard the first distant howl.

She froze, ears straining and anxiety prickling across her skin. For a long moment, there was nothing but the soft hush of snowflakes falling to the already drifted forest floor. And then, like a message from the universe assuring Olivia that things can always get worse, a second howl echoed through the trees, significantly closer than the first. It was followed by a third and a fourth, one to her right and one to her left.

This wasn’t a lone wolf, it was a pack, and from the sound of it, they were quickly closing in on her location.

At this rate, she would be surrounded in a matter of minutes.

“Oh no,” Olivia whispered, trembling with a mixture of terror and adrenaline. She tried to tell herself that she had never heard of a hiker being attacked by wolves this close to town and that this time of year the animals wouldn’t be hungry enough to risk messing with anything but their usual prey.

But she’d had enough bad luck to know that the odds were not in her favor—especially this week. If there were going to be a freak wolf attack, she was going to be the one in a million hiker torn to bits.

Which meant she had to pull her teary self together and figure out a way to avert certain disaster. This time, there would be no one coming to her rescue. She had to rescue herself or take her chances with the wolves.

As another round of howls keened through the increasingly dark and ominous forest, Olivia hurried to a tree with a bottom limb low enough for her to reach from the ground and began to climb.

She was nearly ten feet up when the branch beneath her foot bent in half, sending her sliding back down the way she’d come. She clutched at the trunk, managing to slow her fall and find a foothold before she tumbled all the way to the ground. But she lost a glove in the process, the waterproof fabric slipping off her hand, leaving her skin exposed to the rough bark.

By the time she recovered her balance, she was bleeding from an abrasion on her right palm, sending drops of bright red dripping down to stain the snow as the graceful gray shadow of a wolf glided into view beneath her.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Colton

Not far from the barn, Colt spotted what he thought were fresh footprints headed toward the ridge. He called Tucker, but his brother said there were prints headed toward the rear of the property as well. Unsure which belonged to Olivia, they decided to stick with their original plan to split up.

A few minutes later Colton aimed the snowmobile toward the ridge and gunned it up the trail, silently praying that he would be the one to find her. He had to get to her and explain. He couldn’t stomach the thought of Olivia in pain because of him. He had to find her and make this right before she decided to hate him forever.

It wasn’t long before the swiftly falling snow covered any sign of the tracks on the trail, but Colton kept to the path, pressing deeper into the woods. If Olivia had turned back, he would have run into her. That meant, if she’d taken this trail, she was still on it.

He guided the snowmobile through the drifts for a mile and then two, but paused when he reached the lightning-scarred tree that marked the three-mile point on the trail. Most people wouldn’t have been able to get this far in the limited head start Olivia had on him. But Olivia wasn’t most people. She was incredibly fast, in amazing shape, and probably righteously pissed off.

All of those factors could have combined to give her the speed to cover ground quickly.

Colt thumbed the gas, sending the vehicle surging back up the trail. He’d give it another half mile. If he didn’t see some sign of her by then, he’d stop and call Tucker and regroup.

It could be that she’d walked up the driveway to hitch a ride on the main road leading back toward town. It would make sense. His gut told him that Olivia would want to be alone when she was upset and that despite her newly developed wild side she was way too much of a rule follower to risk hitching a ride, but he could be wrong.

Colt was second- and third-guessing himself, so desperate to find Olivia he’d completely lost the level head he had always been known for. He was about to call the house and ask his mom to take a drive toward town to see if she spotted Olivia on the way, when he topped the next rise and his heart jerked hard in his chest.