Colton's Folly (Native American contemporary romance) by Renee Simons

first.”
    She turned back to the window. “Maybe you need to talk. I don’t.”
    “All right, then. Just listen.” He came and stood beside her. “There’s no easy way to say this but straight out. I misjudged you, and I’m sorry. We’ve been tricked and cheated so often that it was easier to believe it was happening again than to trust you. But everything was exactly as you told me.”
    Abby stared out at the darkness for a long time before facing him once more. “It obviously never occurred to you--any of you--that if I were interested in money I wouldn’t have come here in the first place.” Her voice sounded tired and bitter, even to her own ears.
    “Not until after Arthur nearly burned my ear off,” he answered.
    “Did he say why he had earmarked some of that money for me?”
    Obviously embarrassed, Cat cleared his throat, and Abby took pleasure in his discomfort. “He said it was to pay you back for what you laid out of your own pocket on those trips, and to have some for the ones coming up.”
    “What about the jerk who wrote the letter?”
    “Arthur didn’t use all his ammo on me,” he said with a small laugh. “That guy’ll get his.”
    “I’m glad you’re satisfied.”
    Her sarcasm pricked his hide. He hated being wrong, and somehow, her knowing made it worse. He just wanted to put the whole thing, and her, out of his mind. “Look,” he retorted, “let’s call a truce, okay?”
    Abby’s voice lashed out at him. “A truce? After the things you implied about me? That you accused me of doing? The way you... manhandled me?” She shook her head in the darkness, and her short, bitter laugh echoed in the space between them. “You’ve got nerve, I’ll say that for you.” She walked over to him and faced him nose to nose. “Get out of here. Now.”
    The next day, over Martha’s protestations, Abby gathered together her belongings and moved into the teacher’s house.
     
    Chapter 6
     
    Benjamin came to school one day in a drunken stupor, and Abby was forced to eject two of his friends who’d invaded her classroom while providing an escort for him. She and Richie manhandled him into her shower, where they doused him in cold water, and then Abby filled him with enough coffee to keep a sober person awake for a week.
    As she offered him another cup of coffee he pushed her hand aside and dropped his head back on the edge of the sofa. His skin was sallow, and dark shadows rimmed his eyes.
    “Do you do this a lot?” she asked.
    He stared at her through half-opened eyes. “Don’t start on me. You don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”
    She reached down and picked up a container of household disinfectant, holding it where he could see it. “If you mean mixing this stuff with soda and killing my insides with eighty-percent alcohol poison, you’re right. But there are other ways. Your generation doesn’t hold the patent on self- destruction.”
    They talked for hours. Through Abby’s patient urging and calm acceptance of what he was saying, Benjamin discarded his sullen mask and was for the first time just a kid in trouble and in need of understanding and love. He seemed to have gotten some of what he craved and, as if in return for the help she’d given him, he said, “You shouldn’t have took on them guys back at school. They’re mean suckers.”
    “Then why do you hang around with them?”
    “One of them, the tall, thin one, he’s my cousin. He lives down in Hungry Dog with a whole bunch of other dudes. The two of us, we grew up together, but his mother died and he moved down there, and we don’t see each other much anymore.”
    “Why did he come to the school today?”
    The boy shrugged. “Just messin’ around.”
    Just then the door opened and Cat stepped inside. “I came to take a look at Benjamin.” He nodded to Abby. “Is that all right with you?”
    “Of course,” she said coolly.
    After a brief examination he pronounced Benjamin alive, if not well. “I want