Pop had loved her. He had to have.

He had slipped her candy when she was little and Grandmother Maddox had forbidden it. Momma had laughed at the rule, but she didn’t slip Kenni the good stuff. That had been Pop. Chocolate bars, chocolate milk, and decadent candies whenever he went into Nashville.

He’d been firm, but he’d loved her. That had to have been love in his eyes when he watched her momma, too. And when Kenni would run to him and throw her arms around him for a hug, he’d always wrapped his around her and hugged her like he was terrified he would break her.

And her brothers?

Jazz …

She’d lost them all.

The sob that tore from her shocked her. The ragged, lost sound was one she hadn’t heard in so long she barely recognized it.

A cry.

She hadn’t cried in seven years, and God help her if the tears she’d held inside broke free now they would never stop.

“Poppy, hold me now!” Pushing past her father’s office door by the simple means of rushing around the two men posted to keep others out, she’d invaded the meeting he was in and rushed to his desk. “Please, Poppy, I hurt me. I hurt me.”

Stopping, she pointed to the skinned knee, lips trembling, tears spilling from her eyes as she stared up at her surprised poppy.

“I hurt me, Poppy,” she told him again, breath hitching. “And Cord won’t let me play on the swing no more, ’cause I hurt me.”

He’d swept her into his arms, but not to rush her from the meeting. No, he’d sent the men to wait for him in another room while he cleaned her knee, put the pretty princess Band-Aids on it, then smacked a kiss to it to make it get better faster. And when Cord had entered the office Poppy had told him firmly to take his Kenni outside and let her swing. “Sometimes a princess has to skin her knee, son,” he’d told her concerned brother. “It’s the only way she’ll learn how not to break it later.”

She couldn’t keep doing this to herself.

She couldn’t let herself remember how her life had been before her mother’s death. She had to remember what it had been like after. Cousins hunting her, mercilessly tracking her down only to shoot at her—and more than once the bullets had actually struck her.

They were men she’d been raised knowing. Friends of her brothers, close confidants to them. Men she would have trusted with her life before the night three of them had killed her mother and tried to kill her.

They weren’t playing.

They weren’t pretending.

They would have killed her. And she still didn’t know why.

She didn’t know why …

What had she done? What had her mother done?

What crime could they have committed to cause an order to go out to hurt them?

Another of those dry, horrible-sounding cries tore from her chest again as she gripped the towel wrapped around her and sank to the floor. Wrapping her arms around her knees Kenni buried her head against them as she fought back the tears, fought back the agonizing howls of loss that wanted to escape. The screams of injustice, of ten years running away only to find herself back where she began and being forced to see everything she’d lost.

Everything she’d ever loved.

She’d lost everything.

Even the man she hadn’t known loved her.

CHAPTER 11

How long she sat in the bathroom floor, drawn into herself, Kenni wasn’t certain. The waves of pain sweeping through her seemed never ending, ripping through her soul with a power she’d never before experienced.

There was no relief from the emotions breaking free inside her. Her eyes burned, her throat ached, and a band of agony tightened further around her chest.

It hurt to just breathe.

“Kenni…?”

The sound of Jazz’s voice, soft, so very gentle, had her freezing. Tightening her fingers in her hair, she tried to tell herself it was okay. It really was. She wasn’t crying. He wouldn’t walk away from her and leave her to hurt alone.

“Look at me, darlin’,” he ordered, his large hands framing the sides of her head to lift it, to reveal her face as he stared down at her, his expression gentling. “What’s wrong, Kenni?”

How could she tell him? How could she describe the agony racking her? The knowledge she’d lost his heart before she even knew she had it? The realization that even after all these years, she still had no idea how to save herself?

And the pain was destroying her.

She knew men didn’t handle tears well, and God help her, she couldn’t bear it if he walked away from her because of them.

“I’m not crying,” she whispered, hoping the lack of moisture would convince him.

She refused to let herself cry.

His expression immediately turned brooding and dark. He frowned down at her, those sapphire eyes darkening as heavy, inky lashes surrounded the most outrageous blue she’d ever seen for eyes.

“Maybe you should cry, Kenni.” The heavy sigh came as his arms went around her back and beneath her knees. A heartbeat later he straightened, holding her close to his chest and moving into the bedroom.

“Big girls don’t cry,” she whispered, repeating Gunny’s words as Jazz sat down in the large chair a few feet from the bed. “When it can’t be fixed, tears won’t help. If it can be fixed, tears aren’t needed. Right?”

He stilled against her so completely for a second that he didn’t even breathe.

“God, Kenni.” Pressing her head to his chest a second later, his arms tightened around her, holding her to him as a feeling of complete security washed over her.

She could feel his heart beneath her ear, the bare flesh of his chest warming the side of her face.

“All I wanted to do was come home.” She remembered that, remembered all the silent tears she’d cried those first two years. “But every time we stopped long enough to try to figure out how I could do that, they found us.” Her fingers tightened on his lower arm. “And I always knew who they were.” Faces flashed across her memory. “Men I was raised with, Jazz. Men who were trying to kill me.”

“Your uncle killed them all?” he asked, his fingers stroking over the side of her head. “He wasn’t able to question them?”

Gunny didn’t question, he interrogated with merciless determination.

“Sure he did.” She shuddered, remembering the one time she’d watched one of those interrogations. “They said they were following Maddox orders.”

She’d never been able to completely believe it. The fear that drove her, the will to survive and make someone pay for her mother’s death had kept her from contacting her family. It had kept her from contacting anyone tied to the Maddox clan.

Especially Jazz. If she’d been wrong, if her brothers were involved and he’d died, the added grief would have done what the Kin had been trying to do. It would have killed her.

“I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt, Kenni,” he whispered. “Because if anything happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. But for the record, there’s no way in fucking way in hell your brothers are involved in this.”

This time, he didn’t mention her father. The exclusion would have been deliberate. For some reason, between his last defense of them and now, he wasn’t so certain of her father.

Poppy … A dry sob hitched her breath at the thought.

The weary resignation in his voice was another burden on her shoulders. He believed in her brothers, trusted them, and that was something Jazz didn’t do easily.

“Tell me, Kenni,” he asked as the throttled sound of the sob escaped. “How long has it been since you cried?”

What did it matter? How long since she’d lived, or how long since she’d had a single second of peace? Those questions made far more sense.

“Why?” Why would he care? Hell, what did it matter?

“Curiosity,” he answered smoothly. “Not many women I know that don’t cry.”