By the time Piper and Grace were nineteen, I’d been years into my prison sentence. Totally cut off from them, in part bymychoice. Furious at the world for everything that had been taken from me.
“There’s been a lot to catch up on,” I simply said. Most days since I’d returned to Silver Ridge, I tried not to think about all those missing years. Because when I did…
Fuck, it was a lot to even process.
“Grace and I hadwaytoo much fun.” Piper looked up at me, her eyes glossy in the firelight. “There we were, two small-town girls in Fort Collins. Which isn’t that big of a town anyway, but tous, it was a whole new world. She had this amazing scholarship covering all her tuition and expenses and felt like she had to study nonstop. So I had to drag her to all the frat parties. She wassucha good girl.”
“As any little sister should be,” I grunted. “I don’t want to hear otherwise.”
Piper laughed. “I was more the kind to dance on the tables. Made sure Gracie didn’t grow roots in the library with her nose in an accounting book.”
“You were the wild one, huh? I buy that.”
“I could get wild. On occasion.” Her chin angled as she looked at me through her lashes, downright sultry.
Hell. If I wasn’t in full view of her, I would’ve adjusted my cock in my jeans. I shifted around, trying to do it subtly.
She blinked, and the flirtation disappeared from her green eyes. “Until I met Danny my junior year. He was older, a dental student down in the Denver area. He was on campus visiting a former frat buddy. He seemed so polished.”
I didn’t like hearing about Piper with him, even if it had been over a decade ago. When I’d still been behind bars. But if she needed to talk about it, I’d listen.
“He fooled you. Can’t blame yourself for that.”
“In my defense, I didn’t have the chance to know him all that well before I got pregnant. Ollie was the best accident to ever happen to me. But I’ve always had this daydream of going back to school to finish my English Lit degree.”
“You could do it online. Same way I got my Bachelor of Fine Arts.”
She grinned. “You have a degree? When did that happen?”
“I finished it when I was in Seattle. But when I started on the credits, it was whenever I had privileges in the prison library, mostly.”
Piper’s expression faltered. “Exactly how long were you… Sorry, never mind.”
I lifted my hand to trace her jaw with my thumb. “It’s okay.I’ve told you before, I don’t mind talking about it. How long was I in prison? That’s what you were going to ask?”
She nodded.
“Ten years. My full sentence.”
Her body went totally still. As in, I could actually see the moment her exhale cut short.
“Ten years?” she said when she started breathing again. “I know it’s been fifteen since it all happened, but I didn’t think about it exactly. How much of it you were behind bars.”
“Time is weird like that. Those ten years felt like ten lifetimes when I was going through it, but looking back, it’s like this strange blip in my life story. Parallel universe or something.”
“Don’t people usually get out early, though? For good behavior or however that works?”
My hand dragged over my beard. “Good behavior, sure. Problem was, my behavior didn’t meet the US Army’s definition ofgood. I had a lot of anger in me, Piper. Not just after I got to prison.”
“Because of losing your mom? And your dad leaving?”
I gave her a soft smirk. “I’m not that hard to figure out, am I? I was an angry teenager, and an angry man when I joined the Army, hoping it would sort me out. Sometimes, I still am. To a lesser degree. You’ve seen it.”
“But you’ve never seemed that way to me. Not now, not then.”
I hadn’t wanted to get into this. But Piper wanted to talk about it, so I had to give her a truthful answer. “I hid it around you and Grace. Even Teller and my brothers, to some extent.”
When I’d been a soldier, being angry had sometimes been an asset. Lit a fire under my ass to be tougher, stronger, get shit done.
