Playing pro ball would have kept him from home for the majority of the year. There was spring training camp. There was the entire football season and the playoffs if the team made it to postseason play. There was no doubt her father could have been one of the greats, but instead, he’d taken a high school coaching job in Kentucky, where he and her mother had chosen to live and raise their family.

It was a small town in Kentucky, not so northern that it came too close to the line between north and south. It had the hallmark of every southern town. Open, friendly and welcoming. Small enough that everyone knew everyone else and as a result, everyone’s business was also known.

Honor and her siblings had grown up and thrived under the love and affection their parents had bestowed on them. Her brothers, every single one of them, excelled in one sport or another. As had her older sister. Her oldest brother had also played football in college and showed promise of being recruited by a pro team. He, like their father, hadn’t entered the draft and no one had questioned that decision. But then their father knew well that some decisions were simply too personal to be discussed. They just were.

But where his father had gone into coaching, an adequate substitute for not playing the sport he loved, her older brother had chosen law enforcement and was the sheriff of their county.

Her second oldest brother had chosen a professional career in sports. Unlike his father and older brother, he wasn’t a football fanatic. His entire childhood had been devoted to baseball and he was a natural. Even now he was playing with a pro team and had just signed another long-term lucrative contract before Honor had departed that last time.

The two younger brothers were both businessmen and partnered in several ventures. But that didn’t mean they didn’t carry the same abiding love—and gift—for sports.

Even her sister, the second to youngest and only other daughter in a sea of sons, was athletic and as graceful and fast as a gazelle. She too had gone into coaching after a brief stint playing professional softball in Italy after attending Kentucky State on a softball scholarship. Honor was very proud of her sister, who was the youngest head coach of the softball team in the history of the small university where she worked.

In the two years since her sister, Miranda, or Mandie as she’d been affectionately nicknamed, had taken over the program, the team had made postseason for the first time in the program’s history. Her job was definitely secure. The university had seen to that. And she was very happy there because she was already being heavily recruited by other larger, more prestigious universities with much larger programs and that had long-heralded legacies in college sports.

But Mandie was a homebody at heart, while Honor was the complete opposite. Mandie liked her job. Liked getting her hands dirty and rebuilding a program from the ground up. She had no desire to walk into a program that was already well established and be a veritable figurehead. She wanted to make a difference in every aspect of the game.

Honor briefly closed her eyes, going back to the fact that her brother had signed another contract with his team right before she’d left. Her going-away party had been mixed with joy and celebration but also with heartbreak and worry. None of them liked what she did. They didn’t understand it. They didn’t try to understand it. Each of them had gone their own way and no one ever questioned them for it. No one questioned Brad, who had simply walked away from pro football with no explanation. Or why his burning desire to become a police officer had never been known to his family.

They only questioned her. And she knew it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in her—they did. They loved her. She never doubted that for a moment. They just didn’t understand her. Didn’t understand why her calling took her so far from the people who loved her when all her other siblings’ paths had kept them close to home.

How could she explain the restless drive to make a difference in places that seldom received anything at all except death and violence? Brad should understand her better than anyone. He was a protector. The sheriff. He was responsible for a lot of lives. He was perhaps the only sibling she believed she had a kinship with. A shared burden. Surely their need to protect and save others had to come from somewhere.

“Honor, are you in pain?”

Hancock’s low voice, laced with concern, drifted through her melancholy and brought her gaze to his; she saw him intently studying her face as though he were privy to her every thought.

She sucked in her breath and impulsively slid her fingers through his where they rested on the edge of the bed at her side and linked them together with a gentle tug. He flinched as though he’d received an electric shock, but he didn’t remove his hand or pry hers away, a fact she was grateful for.

For this one brief moment, she needed the touch of another. Comfort. The promise of soon being held and surrounded by the love and support of her family. Every minute she was away was the worst sort of hell for them all. They likely thought she was dead, and if they were not certain of her death, then worse, they feared what her fate was. What she was enduring even now.

She prayed they thought she was dead until she could prove to them she wasn’t. It was kinder than them torturing themselves with the endless possibilities of what could be happening to her. Besides, that wasn’t going to happen. Hancock had her. He wouldn’t let anyone hurt her.

It was foolish to think of anyone being invincible, impervious to the reach of A New Era, but she absolutely believed that Hancock could and would destroy anything in his path and would never let harm come to her. She knew it as surely as the sun rose in the east and slid into sleep in the west.

“What’s wrong, Honor?” Hancock demanded bluntly, his eyes narrowing further as he searched her face for any sign of what was causing her distress.

She wasn’t distressed.

She needed.

Heat crept up her neck and into her cheeks and she could only pray that the remnants of the dye as well as being in the sun for so long prevented him from seeing the evidence of the guilty blush.

She licked her dry, cracked lips and hesitantly, shyly, looked up at him from beneath lowered lashes.

“Kiss me, Hancock,” she said in a quivery voice that could be construed as fearful. But she knew better. And judging by the look on Hancock’s face, he also knew she wasn’t afraid of him. Or of what she was asking.

His eyes flashed with uncertainty, a rarity for him. She knew that without questioning how. She just knew. But there was also a spark of something else altogether.

Answering need. Want. Desire.

It was gone almost before she registered it happening, but the eyes never lied. They were the door to a person’s soul, or so the poets always said.

And just as she knew that Hancock was rarely if ever uncertain about anything, she also knew that it was even more rare for him to allow anyone to see what she’d just witnessed in his eyes.

She’d gotten to him and she knew it. Was stunned by it.

Good God, was she happy about it? What the hell was wrong with her? She didn’t know this man and it was presumptuous on her part, not to mention arrogant, to think that she could discern anything about him when others certainly couldn’t.

But she was already headed down a hazardous path that gave her a euphoric rush. Alive. She felt alive. Gloriously alive when death had been a suffocating fog surrounding her at every turn.