And watching.

But why hadn’t she done more to find out who had given the order to kill her mother, Gunny, and herself? Sometimes it had felt as though she were just drifting in a sea of questions and fears with no idea how to solve the problem.

“Why do I have a feeling you would have preferred being left alone to do just that?” The accusation struck home. The guilt, the anger, ten years of betrayal. Cousins who had shot her, tried to knife her. Years of running from the very people who should have been protecting her.

Ten years.

Ten years of fear and loss, and did he think that didn’t bother her? That she didn’t realize what had been taken from her?

“And how did it affect you, Jazz?” she demanded, swinging around and staring back at him in outrage. “You would have still managed to seduce me. I couldn’t have held out for longer and we both know it. What did it matter if it was Annie’s or Kenni’s name you whispered as long as you achieved the end result?”

His jaw hardened, the muscle there ticking like a time bomb waiting to go off.

“You think the only thing that concerns me was whether or not I could get you in my bed? That was never a question, Kenni. I knew damned good and well you were going to end up in my bed. Keeping your ass alive does concern me, though,” he informed her, his voice sharper than normal.

The ominous hardening of his tone had her watching him warily now. It wasn’t just his voice. His expression looked carved from marble. It was his eyes that were truly disconcerting, though. They blazed, the sapphire blue roiling with an emotion she couldn’t quite define.

Perhaps now, that wasn’t all that concerned him. But had she just been some normal, run-of-the-mill kindergarten teacher?

“I think that’s all you wanted from Annie Mayes,” she whispered, rubbing at the chill chasing over her arms now. “What does it matter, Jazz? As you said, what you felt for me then was then. It’s not now. I’m here now.” Waving her hand to the house to indicate his life, she kept her gaze locked with his. “I’m endangering everyone I love, everyone I wanted to keep safe, and you think that doesn’t bother me? That I could ever survive if anything happened to you because of me?” The bitterness she tried to keep banked thickened in her own voice now. “Do you think I ran for eight fucking years just to willingly let you take over and stand in front of me as though I were some simpering child?”

“I never accused you of being a child.” Shooting her a withering look he let his arms drop, his hand lifting to stab a finger furiously in her direction. “But you’ve by God bitten off more than you can chew alone and you’re too damned stubborn to see it.”

Too stubborn to see it? Amazement lashed at her as she threw back her head and placed her hands on her hips, the confrontation she’d been trying to avoid exploding within her.

“Why do you think I stayed hidden?” She clenched her teeth, her lips pulled back in furious contempt. “Why do you think I’ve fought you every damned inch since you learned who I was? Because I knew years ago what I was facing. But I didn’t bite this chunk off, as you so charmingly call it. Someone’s been force-feeding it to me and I’ve chewed it the best friggin’ way possible. And by God I didn’t just hide. I did my best.”

She was yelling by time she finished.

Her temper, always unpredictable and hard to control, suddenly broke free of the restraints she kept on it.

How dare he? How dare he believe that because she hadn’t known how to investigate who wanted her dead, she hadn’t tried? That she hadn’t cared?

“Here.” Twisting around and grabbing the pictures she’d taken over the past two years, matched with those taken in the eight before, she threw them at him. “I matched killers sent after me in the past with faces from the present. Here.” Picking up the flash cards she’d filled with notes, rumors, and gossip, she threw those at him as well. “That’s all I have for two years of investigating the only way I knew how while keeping your fucking ass out of it. Keeping my brothers out of it. Keeping you alive because if I died, then—well hell. Fuck it. You already believed I was dead, what did it fucking matter?”

She was screaming.

She never screamed.

Rage was tearing at her senses.

“Ten years.” She could barely speak now for the rioting fury ripping through every corner of her mind. “Ten years.” A swipe of her arm and the laptop went flying from the table to crash to the floor. “You built my house, my pond, and my gazebo and I didn’t even know.” Holding her arms out toward the windows she fought to breathe, to pull back, to stop the flow of bitter rage. “You gave a dead girl her dream and then you let yourself die with her. Do you think that was what I wanted?”

Swinging to him once again she realized how much that had hurt as well.

“You let yourself die with me,” she repeated. “My brothers get drunk every year on the date of Momma’s funeral and Poppy grieves to the point that he calls Luce by Momma’s name and her daughter by mine. And all that was supposed to make me suddenly stand up and declare to you I lived when I could be dead again in the next second? Oh-fuck-you-yes, I wanted to cause every damned one of you more pain. I wanted you, Slade, Jessie, Zack, and my brothers buried with me the second time around as well. Let’s just make it a fucking party, why don’t we?” Her eyes widened, sarcasm filling the rage. “Oh yeah, right, we’d all be fucking dead. Kinda hard to party then, isn’t it?”

The sob that escaped her lips shocked her, but not enough to still the enraged agony washing through her.

Not that a single damned thing she said was making a difference. He was staring over her shoulder, his expression closed, distant.

“And every word I’m saying is going through one bullheaded ear and out the other,” she flung out contemptuously.

“No, he’s trying to figure out how he’s going to save his own ass now that I know exactly what he’s been hiding from us.” The voice was steel-hard but vibrating with such agony, it dug hollow furrows of pain straight through her heart. “Turn around, let me see your eyes. You wouldn’t let me see them earlier.”

Kenni froze.

She could feel the blood leave her face as Jazz’s gaze moved to hers, regret and resignation filling it as he stared down at her with a gentleness she simply couldn’t comprehend.

“You should have known better than to try to fool your brothers, Kenni. They knew you far too well,” he told her with weary resignation. “I think that’s something we both forgot somehow.”

She had forgotten.

She’d forgotten it wasn’t possible for her to lie to her brothers in any way. Even by avoidance.

Her stomach began cramping with panic, a useless feeling she told herself. Panic wasn’t going to aid her in any way.

Shooting Jazz a look that promised retaliation, Kenni turned slowly to meet the gazes of the three men she’d known not to reveal herself to.

“They’ll just ground you for a few years. Well, a few decades maybe,” Jazz murmured behind her. “They’ll actually kill me.”

He was kidding, right?

Her heart was ready to jump out of her chest, her stomach roiling and threatening to push its way past her throat, and he wanted to make jokes?

“Kenni…” Sawyer whispered her name, desperate, disbelieving, as she stared at the floor and tried to tell herself there had to be a way to salvage the situation. To continue to hide.

“It doesn’t surprise me that you can’t look at us,” Deacon said contemptuously. “Hell, there’s no way you’re Kenni. She knew how to face her own stupidity. And even she would have known how fucking stupid it was to try to hide from us, right here in Loudoun.” He turned to Jazz then. “And you have the nerve to help her attempt it? Are you fucking crazy?”

She almost winced at the contempt in her brother’s voice.