Second Chance Colton. Marie Ferrarella

their families knew about their relationship because they never made time for anyone else. It was as if somehow, subconsciously, they both understood that they were on a timetable. When he received word that he was being deployed overseas again, Susie had naturally been upset, but she’d promised to wait for him no matter how long it took.

      That had been the problem. The burden of having someone waiting for him, loving him and praying for his safe return, was just too much for him to carry into battle. The weight of that responsibility threatened to sap away his edge, to blur his focus, and survival depended heavily on focus.

      Besides, if he didn’t make it back, he knew how that could affect the rest of Susie’s life—how it could destroy the rest of her life. He couldn’t do anything about the way his family reacted to news like that, but he could do something about Susie.

      There was far too much guilt attached to their relationship for him, so he chose the simple way out. He broke things off between them—doing so in a letter rather than in person.

      In effect, he had chosen the coward’s way out. He never found out how she felt about the breakup because Susie never wrote back. Eventually, he convinced himself that that was for the best and that this was the way things were meant to be. He was meant to be alone.

      With that in mind, he struggled to move on, to move forward. After his honorable discharge, he wound up becoming a police detective. In the beginning, it all boiled down to a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. And somehow, while he wasn’t looking, six years managed to pass by.

      He’d assumed he would never see Susie again. It got a little easier dealing with that with each year that went by.

      The sight of Susie walking down the hall at the Tulsa police department one morning four years ago had completely knocked the air right out of him. But after a few seconds, he’d recovered and managed to push on.

      For the past four years, they had politely but determinedly ignored one another, pretending not to be aware of the other person’s existence whenever they found themselves in the same general vicinity. His cases were such that he found he didn’t need any help from the forensic department.

      But now, with the vandalism at the Lucky C amped up to a dangerous degree, Ryan resigned himself to the fact that he needed her help. Needed her training and her lab to help him solve this all-too-personal case he had taken on before things went from bad to fatal.

      And now the attractive blonde who still sometimes turned up in his dreams had given him an answer that had all but left him numb and speechless. Was this her way of getting even with him for breaking up with her?

      No, whatever else he might feel about Susie Howard, he knew that she had a great deal of integrity. He was allowing his imagination to run away with him, something that didn’t happen very often. He would be the first to admit that the situation had made him desperate.

      He forced himself to remember that Susie wasn’t the kind of person who would let her feelings get in the way of her work—and she certainly wasn’t the type to frame an innocent person, no matter how much she might want to because she was in effect jilted by that person’s older brother.

      That wasn’t the way Susie operated. Her sense of honor was something that he’d found admirable about her all those years ago.

      Since he knew that Susie wasn’t responsible for the results that were damning his sister, that left Ryan clinging to the only possible excuse he had left—that somehow, the periodically calibrated forensic equipment had malfunctioned.

      Susie looked as if she was going to continue staunchly refusing to rerun the test. He had to get her to reverse that position.

      “Do it for me,” he requested, his voice as devoid of emotion as he could possibly render it. “Run the test again.”

      “Oh, well, if it’s for you, sure, I’ll run it again.” There was more than a touch of sarcasm in Susie’s voice. “And if it wasn’t for you, I’d still run the test again, just because there seems to be some sort of doubt involved here,” she went on to add icily. “I can see why finding out that your sister vandalized the family stables might be upsetting to you, so yes, I’ll run the test again,” she informed him coldly. “Now, if you don’t mind getting out of my lab, I’ll get started on that second test.”

      She turned her back on him, pretending that he was already gone.

      She knew he wasn’t because she could see his distorted reflection on the surface of her mass spectrometer. The machine was facing her. Her parting words to Ryan were “I’ll have someone call you with the results once they’re in.”

      When Ryan’s reflection continued to remain exactly where it was, she asked in as disinterested a voice as she could summon, “Is there anything else?”

      This had to be said. He knew that. If the air wasn’t cleared between them, then she might be sorely tempted not to do her best job. He felt confident she wouldn’t manufacture evidence, but he wasn’t so sure that she’d bring her A game to the case.

      “Yes,” he said after a long moment, addressing the words to the back of Susie’s head since she wasn’t turning around again, “there’s something else. I want to apologize for treating you so badly when I broke it off between us. But I did it for you, for your own good.”

      She almost swung around then, almost fired at him with both barrels, calling him an idiot and a fool—and a liar. Calling him an egotist for using that pathetic excuse when the real reason he had pulled his emotional vanishing act on her was because he’d obviously been afraid of commitment.

      Any first-year psychology student would have been able to tell him that.

      But she didn’t swing around, didn’t give Ryan a tongue-lashing and didn’t tell him exactly what she thought. What would be the point? He had his lie, which he was holding on to for dear life, and she had moved on.

      Or told herself she had.

      So she remained facing her workbench, acting as if Ryan hadn’t said a single word to her about their past or its abrupt ending.

      “I’ll have someone call you the minute the second results are in,” she repeated.

      This time, she saw his reflection retreat and then disappear.

      Heard the door to the lab close again.

      Only then did she turn around on her stool. “You jerk,” Susie murmured, staring at the closed door. Her voice grew louder, more heated with every word she uttered. “You big, self-centered, blind, stupid, stupid jerk.”

      “Two degrees, six years in college and that’s the best you can come up with?” Harold Gould marveled as the tall, thin lab assistant stepped out from the computer tech area where he had been working.

      His white lab coat hung like a bland curtain about his all but emaciated frame, giving the impression that it would begin flapping wildly about that same frame at the first sign of a breeze.

      Startled, Susie’s eyes met those of her junior assistant, who was also a lab intern. The brown eyes continued looking back at her, the assistant never flinching.

      “I didn’t know anyone else was here,” Susie told the intern.

      “Obviously. When I saw him walk in I was going to clear my throat in case something private was going to be said. But Colton started talking right away and it sounded kind of personal from the get-go.” The look he gave her was sympathetic. “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

      “You just wanted to eavesdrop, hoping to score some juicy gossip,” Susie countered.

      She knew how the man operated. Harold Gould knew more about what was going on in the precinct after being here for a little more than three months than some of the twenty-year veterans did. It wasn’t only lab procedures that he absorbed faster than a sponge.

      The painfully thin shoulders rose and fell quickly, indicating that Harold had no intention of even attempting