Forsaken

Her past is back to haunt her—and this time, it’s got a gun.

When Gage Lawton finds his brother shot to death on his back porch, every shred of evidence points to one person: Gage’s ex-lover, Riley Beckett. The only gun in town that fires a bullet of that caliber belongs to her.

Certain the shooting is payback for his part in the loss of her parents, he abandons his promise to stay out of her life and confronts her, his rage backed up with a revolver. Yet when she steps through the door, all thoughts of revenge burn to ashes.

A year after Riley unwillingly walked away from Gage, she enters her home to find him sitting in the dark, gun pointed at her head. One look into those achingly familiar blue eyes reminds her how wrong she was to let him go. But now there’s more standing between them than their heated past.

A twist of fate—and a hail of sniper bullets—puts them in the cross hairs of a killer, leaving Riley with just two slim options: trust her greatest betrayer, or face a murderer alone.

This book has been previously published.

Warning: Prepare to get caught in a crossfire of profanity, danger, and desire. Intense violence may trigger the desire to wear body armor…and take it off. Very, very slowly.

Forsaken

Sarah Ballance

Dedication

For everyone who believes in second chances.

Prologue

Just a test.

It was a bullshit excuse, and he knew it. But he fired anyway, relishing the power unleashed in his grip. The bullet zinged past the trunk of a possumwood tree, barely missing the coarse silver bark providing his cover.

Perfect.

He drew the barrel of the old Sharps rifle skyward and set the butt on the toe of his boot. His muscles ached from supporting the heft of the weapon, but lugging the fifteen-pound relic across the mountainous Oklahoma Cookson terrain had its perks. The heavy gun absorbed most of its recoil, something his battered body appreciated more than pride would allow him to admit. Fleeing the scene in slow motion wouldn’t be a problem, but if the kickback set him on his ass, he’d be lucky to move from the spot before the sheriff arrived. And that would ruin everything.

He tipped his gaze toward the crystalline blue sky and let the smell of gun smoke coax long-buried memories to life. The gun held aching familiarity, and a fleeting encounter with his conscience threatened to bring the whole plan to a roaring stop. But the bitter ache spread from his heart to his bones, and the pain he lived with every day of his life splintered like hot shards through his body.

No regrets. Not today.

The homestead sprawled before him, picturesque. Harboring a killer.

He set another bullet in the chamber and then filled the dead space with black powder. With a practiced hand, he turned the gun to the ground and tapped the barrel before righting it and capping the rifle. Every motion was automatic, rehearsed. Ingrained.

He had one shot. The pain couldn’t stop him, and neither could the law. Only one person in the vicinity of Barefoot, Oklahoma was known to own an old Sharps 50-90.

And it wasn’t him.

Motion from the back of the house roused his attention. A silhouette passed the gritty window, and the rusted screen door screeched to life.

He lifted the weapon and took aim. Only adrenaline and a thirst for vengeance kept his body from giving up. A mere fraction of the rifle’s thirteen hundred yard killing range stood between him and his target, and he’d come too far to miss.

He allowed Gage Lawton a final breath of fresh air. Then a bullet pierced his skull, and justice was served.

Chapter One

Something was wrong. Was the dark playing tricks on her? Riley Beckett froze, arm outstretched, hand poised to toss her keys on the table just inside her front door. But she didn’t let go. Instead of dropping them in their usual spot, she feathered pieces of the makeshift weapon between her knuckles. Heart pounding, she pressed the keys in a silent, white-knuckle grip and prayed her concerns were her imagination, that the paranoia of coming home alone to a dark house was getting the better of her.

One, two steps in. Wood planks echoed underfoot. She fought to breathe air that grew thinner with every tense second.

Three steps.

Then it hit her. The scent.
His
scent. And with it a flush of memories. The burn of hot grass on her bare skin. Rough hands, a tender touch. Love so sweet she ached for it, her dreams raging, and her body drenched with need.

“Gage?” Her voice broke on the single syllable. Riley’s grip on the keys tightened, her blood raging hot and cold all at once.

A creak sounded from the corner chair. Her eyes refused to adjust in the darkness, but not even the faint light kept the blond streaks in his russet hair from giving him away. Like rays of sunshine, she used to tease, and her words never failed to draw a scowl across his rugged face.

“Riley.”

God help her, her name on his lips sounded as it always had. Coarse. Dangerous. Forbidden. Even before… The memory surged, hot and vivid, leaving a metallic taste in her mouth. White heat assaulted her from every corner of the room.

The keys fell to the floor with a dull clink.

“An eye for an eye, is it?” His voice sounded unpracticed, as if he hadn’t spoken in a long while.

She couldn’t see his face, but she knew his expression. Flat and humorless. Broken. She remembered the day he stopped smiling. Every part of her wanted to flee, but she stood frozen to the spot.

“What do you mean?” Riley wondered if the words, whispered and weak, had the strength to make it across the room. Hadn’t she always known she’d shatter the next time she saw him? Hadn’t she dreamed of seeing him anyway?

“You have to ask?” Gage laughed, cold and hollow. “Billy’s dead. Hell of a thing to come home to. My brother blown to bits on my back porch.”

“Oh God.” She swayed. The room filled with a distant buzzing. She took one unsteady step to the side and stumbled.

When she found his gaze, it was over the business end of a revolver.

He leveled the gun in her direction. Everything else in her world trembled, but his aim held rock steady. Unyielding.

His eyes burned blue and bright. “What I want to know,
sweetheart
, is why you did it.”

He worked his finger over the trigger, and a veil of blackness threatened her last discerning thought.

He hadn’t even pulled the trigger, yet Riley hit the hardwood in a crumpled heap. That was a first.

Without taking his attention from her, Gage Lawton climbed out of the chair, cursing when he realized his foot was asleep. He tucked the .38 in the waistband of his pants and limped through the pins-and-needles sensation wreaking havoc in his left boot.

Hell of a time to feel ticklish
, he thought, staring at Riley’s wild mane of dark waves sprawled over the floorboards. Not the stark contrast he’d seen over a crisp white pillowcase. His mind played flashbacks. Memories of dragging his lips over her heaving, sweat-slicked skin threatened his plans…and his resolve.

The flood of emotions shouldn’t have surprised him. He was as stoic as a block of granite when it came to everything—and everyone—except Riley Beckett. He never could put the feeling into words, but just being around her made him feel free, like standing in the middle of the prairie with the sun, and the breeze, and the vastness…and the promise of something he didn’t dare believe.

And he didn’t. Gage knew good things didn’t happen to him. But she’d captured a piece of his soul with her laughing eyes and damning innocence.

The purest woman he’d ever known and he’d destroyed her.

Twice
.

He eyed the glass of whiskey he’d poured to keep himself company while he waited. He hadn’t touched it yet. The amber liquid represented a line Gage couldn’t cross, but he’d given himself too much credit where Riley was concerned. The moment her sky blue eyes found his, she’d broken him all over again.

With a weary sigh, he knelt at her side, irony forcing him to suppress the urge to laugh. How many times had she brought him to his knees? He thought of his kid brother sprawled on his porch and promised himself this would be the last time. Rage and guilt made for strange bedfellows, but he knew one thing: if Riley Beckett
had
pulled that damned trigger, she had cleared his heart of the latter.

An eye for an eye
.

The evidence had been right in front of him. He didn’t want to believe it, but he couldn’t deny it either. Not until he saw her reaction for himself, and he wasn’t going to do that unarmed. He reached for her, feeling the charge of their connection long before his fingers grazed her skin. A hint of blue peering from beneath her thick lashes caught his attention. She was watching him.

Frozen by her beauty—by all she meant to him and everything he tried to tell himself she didn’t—his thoughts left him. He fell closer, his hand dipping to her jaw line. Tracing the familiar contours of her face with a fingertip came as naturally as breathing.

“Riley…” The tangle of emotions in his chest loosened. The evidence was unmistakable, but she couldn’t have done it. Not the Riley he knew.

Contentment drifted behind those thick lashes. For a single moment the last twelve months of hell wasted away, and she was his again. His name spilled from her lips, soft and sweet, like no time had passed. God help him, he wanted it to be true. He’d give anything to go back to the day he lost her and change it all.

She reached for him, and when she drew him in he didn’t—couldn’t—resist. Her arms circled his neck, her fingers tangling in the hair she always said was too long, and every bit of the fight fled his traitorous heart. He forgot the cold, hard floor. He forgot why he had waited in her living room, untouched whiskey taunting him, tempering his rage.

He forgot murder.

Her lips were so close he could feel the heat of her mouth. But Gage couldn’t bring himself to kiss her any more than he could bring his brother back. Kissing her would make this all too real—would kill the fantasy.

Instead, he nearly drowned in it.

She balled the front of his shirt in one hand, tugging him closer. It didn’t feel real, being sprawled on top of her, nestled between her thighs—straddling the line between heaven and hell, grateful for the clothing keeping him from plunging headfirst into both. God knows if he’d fathomed any of this he’d have kept his distance. Let the law deal with her.

The proof was at the scene—the bullet now lodged in his doorframe could only have come from the old Sharps—and she was the only one who had access to the gun.
But Riley didn’t do it
. Facts didn’t lie. The chances of someone else passing through town and killing his brother with a rifle just like hers were astronomical, but everything he knew about Riley screamed her innocence. And, dammit,
that
was why he was here—to save her. Not for
this
. He couldn’t save himself from this.

The fingers of her right hand traipsed the length of his spine, just like they always had. She murmured his name, her breath hot and full of wanting. The promise of danger he brought with him dissolved into lust. He could have torn straight through his denim when she drew her knees to the vicinity of his shoulders, leaving his pelvis pressed against hers in bittersweet agony. That was one position he’d yet to forget.

“Riley—”

“There’s something…I need…to say.” Little pants punctuated every word. Her fingers splayed across the small of his back tracing lazy, intimate circles.

Anything. Say anything.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” she whispered, shoving hard against his chest.

Her boots hit him before the words did. Somewhere between his chest and his gut, at that. His next breath was in the shadow of an overturned table—the untouched drink toppled over his head, and his own revolver pointed at him.

Whiskey dripped from his nose. The glass rolled in a noisy, awkward arc across the floor.

Gage eyed the gun in her hand, fast deciding he preferred the view from the butt end. Most of his conscious thought still pulsed in his jeans, but it was obvious the conversation had moved on without him.

“My brother”—the bitterness of the words helped choke back his desire—“he was shot.”

Blue eyes flashed behind the glint of the weapon. “I would have been happy to offer my condolences before you aimed your gun at me. At this point, sending a card seems a bit moot.”

He rubbed the back of his head where it had hit the table and winced. “You cheated,” he said, giving his gun a stiff nod.

Riley didn’t flinch. “You kill people. Cheating is also moot.”

He didn’t know if she’d shoot him or not—for all he knew, she’d spent the last year dreaming of it—but he wasn’t going to put anything past her. They’d both changed. At some point, she’d stopped crying, and his instincts surrounding her had clearly gone in the toilet. Neither turn of events begged his favor.

“Put the gun down,” he said.

She snorted. “Think again, Gage Lawton. I was your victim once. Not happening a second time.”

He held out his hands, fingers spread, and drew himself to his feet. This was a definite low point in his career. “Riley, you know there’s no way I would have pulled that trigger.”

To his relief, she lowered the weapon a notch. “I’m pretty sure that line is in the ‘You Got Played’ recovery handbook.” The threat of a smile played at her lips, but the revolver didn’t leave its mark. “I’d be a little disappointed if you didn’t ask for your gun so you could finish the job.”

Gage reached for the weapon.

“Nuh-uh.” Riley adjusted her aim. Straight for the chest.

The time for small talk had clearly passed.

Gage swallowed. He’d gone to her for an answer, and the least he could do was get it before she used him for target practice. “Did you shoot Billy?”

She took a step back. “Why would you ask me that?”

He met her glare. “There was a bullet lodged in the wall. There’s only one gun anyone knows of around here that fires that rare caliber, and the amount of damage it does to soft tissue makes it twice as hard to miss. It was either a huge coincidence, or it’s the Sharps.”

In retrospect, the accusatory tone might have been a bad idea. Mentioning her daddy’s prized rifle didn’t win him any favor, either, but the information mattered. Everyone in the county knew of Oren Beckett’s gun. And when he died, everyone knew exactly who inherited it. It wouldn’t take long for Riley to make the top of the suspect list once the authorities discovered Billy’s body.

You bastard. You left him there to rot.

Riley flinched. He read her anguish like a book, but the words were measured, deliberate. “That’s impossible. No one—”

“No one has access to the gun but you.” He figured as much.

The gun wavered, and not even the semi-darkness could hide her pallor. He said a small prayer with about as much enthusiasm as a damned man could muster, hoping her finger would part ways with the trigger before the unsteadiness in her expression spread to her limbs.

Her bottom lip disappeared between her teeth. Several long seconds of silence stood between them before she asked, “You think I killed your brother?”

“Everything points to you. If anyone else around here has one of those guns in firing condition, no one knows about it. And this town is too small for anyone not to know anything.” They both knew that all too well, and he couldn’t keep the bitter taste in his mouth from tainting his words.

The gun sank past horizontal. “So this whole breaking and entering thing is some kind of favor?”

“I entered. Didn’t break. I have a key, remember? Returning it wasn’t exactly part of the conversation when we parted ways.” As if either of them needed to be reminded of that night.

The memory of Riley giving him that key brought a small smile to his face. She had been wearing his T-shirt and nothing else when she pressed it into his palm. She had followed the gesture with a kiss that landed them right back in the tangled piles of her plush, vanilla-scented bedding. It wasn’t his first time. Hell, it hadn’t even been
their
first time. But it was the first time he’d ever trembled at any woman’s touch. Her faith had done that to him, and he’d cupped her face and said he loved her before he could stop the words from coming. Worse, he’d meant it. And when he sank between her thighs, it was all he could do not to ransack her with his need, so he nestled there, rocking gently, and was rewarded with the most intense moments of his life.

Moments that irrevocably belonged to the woman who held his life in the bend of her trigger finger. And she was a hell of a shot.

“You can’t find that caliber at the mini-mart. Whoever did this left plenty of evidence behind.” His voice softened to a near whisper. “He…or
she
wanted them to know where to look.”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink.

“Where’s the Sharps?” He took a step toward her, and from the new angle, the dim light venturing through the window from the porch washed over her face.

She was crying.

The bullet would have hurt less.

She met his step and raised him one, closing the distance between them. His trusty revolver again met its traitorous mark. “We had a deal. All I asked was for you to stay away from me and to do it sober. Fail”—she angled her head in the direction of the whiskey glass on the floor—“and fail again.”

Her accusation filled him with indignation that was quickly tempered with remorse. He hadn’t spent the last year sober facing the hell he had made for nothing. He knew he hadn’t done himself any favors pouring that glass, but he had kept his word. He’d done it for her, and he’d rather die at her hand than have her think otherwise.