Called her names, ignored her, let her know her company wasn’t welcome.
For all the good it did him.
Just entering her teens, Sophie had been skinny as a Popsicle stick and just as physically two-dimensional. Bright silver braces on her teeth. Silly pigtails in her hair. With a curiosity that drove him nearly insane as she tagged after him asking “Why?” and “How’dya do that?” and “Can I ride him next, huh, huh, can I?”
He longed to strangle her, because she wouldn’t give up. Her tenacity infuriated him, right up until the moment he realized that Sophie Colton was special. All the Coltons were special, but Sophie was extraordinary. She had a heart so big it included the whole world, even him. She wore him down, wormed her way through his defenses, and the two of them became friends, more than friends. Inseparable.
And then she had to ruin it all and grow up, start seeing him as her boyfriend, her first love. God, that had been hard. Especially since River felt like her boyfriend, wanted to be the one who awakened Sophie to love, then held her in his arms forever.
He’d been a fool to agree to escort her to her senior prom, more of a fool to kiss her.
And then she’d gone away, and his last sight of her had been the tears in those huge brown eyes when he’d told her to go away, to grow up, to leave him alone.
He should have left then, left the ranch, left the Coltons. He was old enough to be on his own, legally free to leave. But then there was that mess with Meredith, the marital separation that had so unsettled everyone, and Joe’s unhappiness over these past nine years.
How could River leave the man who had given him so much? Even as word of River’s expertise with horses traveled far enough to have ranchers from Colorado to Texas making him offers, River had stayed with Joe and built up the Colton stud.
He had stayed with Joe and waited for Sophie to come home, knowing she never would. Not with her successful career in San Francisco. Not with that damned ring on her finger. And most especially not to revisit the strained unhappiness that hung over the ranch.
“River? You back there?”
River walked out of the tack room, toward Joe Colton, who was standing in the stables, looking lost and defeated. “Senator? Is everything all right? I saw you drive up a while ago with Sophie.”
River retrieved two soda cans from a small refrigerator and handed one to Joe, motioning for them to step outside, sit down on the bench against the wall, just to the left of the huge doors. “Joe? Everything is all right, isn’t it? I mean, you told me she was fine—”
Joe gave a slight wave of his hand. “No, no, it’s nothing like that. Sophie’s doctors are over the moon with her progress, just as I told you. All of them. And they’re satisfied that you’ll make sure she gets to physical therapy in Prosperino three times a week. So, no, nothing’s wrong there. It’s just…it’s just…”
“Meredith?” River asked, his jaw tight. “Tell me. What did she do?”
Joe, unable to sit still, got up and began to pace. “It’s more like what she didn’t do. She does nothing, and it hurts Sophie. Then she finally does do something, and it hurts Sophie. The poor kid’s in her room, crying her eyes out.”
“Sophie’s crying? Why?” River crushed the soda can, its contents spilling over his fingers, so that he tossed it into the garbage container beside the bench.
Joe sat down once more, his shoulders slumped, his hands locked together between his spread knees. “Meredith didn’t even watch for us, or come into the house when Inez told her we’d arrived. Inez took me to one side and told me she’d let Meredith know we’d arrived. But Meredith just stayed out at the pool, sunning herself, and then let Sophie know that her cane was ugly, her scar even more ugly. She told her…she told her she shouldn’t have tossed Chet over because now she’ll never get a man, not with that scar.”
River muttered a few choice words under his breath, then sighed. That was Meredith. Always saying the wrong thing, never concerned for anyone except herself, and Joe Junior, and Teddy. Nobody else mattered to her anymore. She only seemed to use the other members of the Colton family to sharpen her claws on. “Now what?”
Joe shrugged. “I don’t know, son. Sophie was already pretty shaky about that scar, but I figured she’d get over it now that she’s here, with us. I never expected Meredith to— Aw, hell, River. What happened? What in hell happened to us?”
Four
S ophie had fled Meredith Colton’s presence and run to her room—hobbled to her old bedroom—and thrown herself on her bed to cry. It had been a veritable storm of weeping, as she’d cried with huge gulping sobs, the sort she hadn’t cried since her teenage years.
Since the night River had rejected her.
She’d come apart after Meredith’s cold, cutting comments that had sliced at her, injuring her as much as the knife had done, possibly more. There was no pretty way to say it, no rationalization that could explain how thoroughly Sophie fell apart, how completely she finally gave in, gave herself up to her grief as everything that was wrong in her life came together at once, threatening to destroy her.
Sophie had held it together, held everything in, since the first days after the mugging, once the painkillers had been stopped and she had more control over her thoughts, her reactions. She couldn’t let her father see how frightened she was, how defeated she felt. How violated. How used.
Because she’d known how nearly homicidal Joe had been, sitting beside her hospital bed as the police asked her for details of the attack, how impotent he still felt that he couldn’t protect his child, keep her from all harm. He had stayed with her for two weeks, the first spent in the hospital, the second as she got settled back into her apartment, hovering over her, fussing over her, worrying about her, playing mother and father to her in his wife’s absence.
She’d held back her tears as she slowly realized that Chet had taken her at her word. He didn’t phone. He didn’t come pounding on her door, demanding to see her. Yes, he had sent a note stuffed inside a soppy Get Well card, telling her that he loved her and he’d wait for her to “come to her senses.”
That had hurt. Come to her senses? Is that what he thought? That she’d lost her senses? Didn’t he understand? Didn’t anyone understand?
She’d lost a lot more than her “senses.”
When her dad had come into the room and gathered her into his arms, Sophie had told him what Meredith had said. She shouldn’t have done that, really, she shouldn’t have. But the loss she felt was so great, the hurt so overwhelming, that she hadn’t been able to keep the truth from her father—the truth that her mother, her own mother, now considered her disfigured and a total loss.
“She’s sick, baby,” Joe had said to her, his words sounding sad and tired and eerily hollow. “Ever since the accident. Something happened. Something changed her. You just have to remember how she was, baby. We all have to remember that, remember how she once loved us.”
That was when Sophie had gotten herself back under control. She couldn’t bear to hear the defeat in her father’s voice, the deep sadness that had to have been slowly destroying him these past nine years.
Sophie had hugged him, kissed him and promised to remember, to hold on to the memories of the good days. She listened as he discussed the physical therapy she’d begin in Prosperino in a few days, the surgery she’d have in less than five months, to minimize her scar.
She’d agreed with him on everything, assured him she was all right, and watched after him as he left her room, his large frame stooped, his feet dragging.
Her impulsively formed plan to leave the ranch the next morning embarrassed her as she watched her father. How could she leave him? How could she have stayed away so long? Why had she stayed away so long? Because of Meredith? Perhaps.
But there was another reason,