The Return of Caine O'Halloran: Hard Choices

by JoAnn Ross

  Logan swore and vaulted over the wall, prepared for anything.

  Annie had darted between the teens, pushing Kenny away from her niece with a none-too-gentle shove.

  Riley was crying. Her shoulders quaking.

  Logan had barely taken in the fact that—aside from the tears—she looked unharmed, when Annie turned on Kenny, grabbing him by the shirt. “What did you do to her?”

  The boy looked shocked. Several inches taller than Annie, he still stumbled back. “Whoa, hey—”

  She followed, looking fit to kill. “Damn you, Drago. What did you do?”

  Logan scooped his arm around her waist, hauling her back from Kenny. “He’s not Drago,” he whispered against her ear. He ached down to his gut. “He’s not Drago, baby.”

  He slanted a look toward Kenny when the boy started sidling away. “Don’t move.” His voice was deadly quiet as he contained Annie’s struggle to free herself. He didn’t like the kid, but he didn’t want Annie looking up the nose of an assault charge, either.

  Then he looked at Riley.

  She was staring at her aunt, openmouthed.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Her expression turned mutinous, and she started to look away. But she didn’t.

  She finally nodded.

  “Who the hell’s Drago?” Kenny’s subdued state had unfortunately been brief.

  Annie wasn’t listening to any of it. She scrabbled at Logan’s arm. “If you so much as breathed on her, I’ll take you apart.”

  Logan shifted his grip on her and stifled an oath when her foot connected with his shin. “Cut it out, I’m trying to help you, here.”

  “Then let me go!”

  “We were just talking!” Riley’s voice rose over Kenny’s grumbled, “Man, she is crazy.”

  “Talking! You were crying, Riley.”

  The girl’s eyes suddenly looked like wet sapphires. “Yes, talking! At least he wants to listen to me. You just want to send me back home so you can watch sunsets with him.” She gestured at Logan.

  Annie’s struggles abruptly ceased.

  “No.” She finally spoke after a long, taut moment. “Riley, that’s not—”

  “I saw you together.” Riley’s voice shook. “I came back ’cause I was finally ready to...to tell you that I knew...but you were with him.”

  “You came back. To the house?”

  Logan felt dismay rocket through Annie, along with every other emotion that seemed to pour from her shaking limbs. “When?” he asked.

  Riley’s gaze cut to him. “You left your clothes on the deck.” Her voice was flat. “You were in her room. It doesn’t take a genius.” Her lips twisted and she glared at her aunt again. “No wonder you said I could stay at the community center. You wanted me out of the way, more than anybody else ever did!”

  “I never wanted you out of my way.” Annie’s voice was hoarse.

  Riley took a step back and the sand shifted under her foot. She struggled to keep from falling. “Don’t lie to me! I’m sick of everybody lying to me!”

  Logan felt Annie leaning out to the girl, prepared to catch her, but she sagged back against Logan at the accusation. “Nobody’s lying.” Her voice was thick. “Riley, baby—”

  “Everybody’s been lying to me. My whole life! Nobody wants me around. You want me off the island. My parents want to send me off to some school so they can act like I don’t exist.”

  “Riley, you have to know that’s not true. They love you. They—”

  “They love their jobs,” Riley spat. “William Hess. Destined to be the new attorney general. Everybody’s always telling me what a great man he is. If he were great, he’d know that our home isn’t even a home anymore. He always said we were more important than anything, but he lied. Our house is like campaign central.”

  “It takes people to run an election.”

  “Yeah, well he’s never there. Mom’s always off getting some client sprung from jail. We don’t even...even see each other some days.” Her voice rocked. “Even when I warned him that he’d regret it, he didn’t care. He just goes around with his big campaign slogan... Truth rises. Well, I know better!”

  Realization settled. “You sent the letters,” Logan said. “Didn’t you, Riley?”

  Annie’s voice was faint. “What letters?”

  Riley looked at him. “And weren’t they effective,” she said sarcastically. The effect was ruined by the tears thickening her voice. “There I was right under his nose and they still didn’t notice. I used the stationery Mom keeps in their office at home. Cut the letters out of his magazines. Real observant, wouldn’t you say?”

  “He didn’t consider his own daughter a suspect,” Logan pointed out.

  “Suspect?” Bewilderment joined the other shadows in Annie’s eyes.

  “I’m not his daughter!” Riley’s voice rang out over the quiet beach. Then her eyes focused on Annie. Tears crawled down her young cheek. “I’m hers.”

  Chapter 14

  Annie’s legs nearly gave way.

  Riley knew.

  Dear Lord, she knew.

  She moved, vaguely aware that Logan had finally released his hold on her, and reached out to her niece.

  The daughter she could no longer claim.

  But Riley backed away again, and Annie’s fingers curled against her palm. Useless. “Oh, Riley.”

  “See? You lied.” Her face twisted. “They lied. Everybody lied.”

  How could she deny words that were true? They had lied. By omission at the very least. Annie closed her arms around herself. “How did you find out?”

  “Grandma Hess. She wanted to take me out for lunch for my fifteenth birthday, but my mom said no. So she came to my school, instead.” Riley’s head tilted. “Wasn’t that nice of her?”

  Lucia Hess had never done an unselfish thing in her entire, miserable life. It would be just like her to use righteousness for truth as a cloak for simple cruelty. She couldn’t lash out at Annie any longer for her transgressions, so she’d chosen the next best thing. The daughter she’d forbade Annie to even bear. Annie had never wanted to see her mother again, but just then she’d gladly have sought her out, just so she could find some way to hurt her the way she’d hurt Riley. “What did she tell you?” Her voice was careful.

  “Everything.” Riley looked over at Kenny, who was watching them all with the wary fascination of a bystander who had happened across a train wreck. “You want to know who Drago is?”

  Nausea suddenly rocked through Annie. No. No. No.

  “He’s my father,” she told him. “Grandma Hess thought I ought to know he was finally getting out of prison for dealing drugs.”

  Annie covered her mouth as Kenny tucked his arm over Riley’s shoulders and drew her away. She stumbled after them, but Logan stepped in her path. “Let her go.”

  “But he’s—”

  “Not Drago.” She turned to him to talk. “I don’t like the kid, either, but he’s the only one she’s not upset with right now.”

  “How could my mother do that? Hurt Riley? She never did anything to my parents, never embarrassed them, she was nothing but an innocent child! How?” She dropped to her knees in the sand, struggling not to retch. “Why?”

  Logan sat beside her, his bent knee behind her back. He didn’t try touching her, and for that Annie was grateful. He just seemed to surround her, keeping her from the ocean breeze. But there was really no protecting her now.

  Not anymore.

  “Riley can’t continue blaming Will and Noelle. No matter what Riley thinks, Logan, they love her.” She caught her lip between her teeth, and her eyes burned. “It’s the only thing that’s kept me going sometimes. Believing that.”

  “Riley’s smart,” he said quietly. “
She’s hurting. But when she found out the truth, she came here to you.”

  “And I failed her again.”

  “How? By not reading her mind? Come on, Annie.”

  “I knew there was something else. Something beyond her not wanting to go to Bendlemaier.”

  “She probably wanted to judge you for herself. If she’d believed whatever tripe Lucia fed her, she’d never have come here the way she did.”

  “And instead of disproving my mother’s words, Riley only found the truth of them.”

  “What she found were facts,” Logan said. “She doesn’t know anything about the truth. The circumstances surrounding the facts.”

  Annie thrust her shaking hands through her hair and pushed to her feet. A quartet of people rounded the seawall and headed toward the water’s edge, where the sand was hard-packed, and began jogging. Logan rose, also, but Annie couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

  What was the truth? He’d been with them only a few days. Already he’d gotten into her pores. But he would leave, and she’d be left with a loneliness she’d only realized because of his presence. She had been surviving the position she held in her daughter’s life for years. Maybe not well, but she’d done it, because she’d known Riley was okay. Only now it felt as though the veneer she’d managed to acquire had been wrenched away by a storm bearing Logan’s face.

  “The truth is that Will and Noelle adopted Riley when she was two years old. They couldn’t love her any more than if she’d been born to them.”

  “Why not tell her, though? Where was the harm in letting her know you’re her birth mother? She could have understood that you were little more than a kid yourself when you had her.” He moved around until he could see her face. “Eighteen?”

  His eyes had always seen too much. “And I was twenty when I finally admitted the truth.” Her voice was harsh. “That I was incapable of providing Riley with the kind of care she deserved. She got sick, Logan. Really sick. She had a respiratory virus that she could have died from, but I was too broke to afford a doctor for her and too proud to ask for public assistance. If it hadn’t been for Will and Noelle—” She pressed her lips together, unable to continue as the awful memories surged in her throat.

  “And your parents didn’t help.”

  “Are you kidding me?” She pulled out of his grasp. “They tried to force me into having an abortion when they found out I was pregnant. They didn’t want to pollute the Hess bloodline with Drago’s. And when I refused, they kicked me out.”

  She sank down on the edge of the seawall because she wasn’t sure her legs would hold her any longer. “I had no job. No money. I’m sure they thought I’d cave in and do whatever they said.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  She looked down at her hands. “I’d always lived down to their expectations, Logan. But for once, there was something that mattered more. I was pregnant. There was going to be a baby. A completely innocent baby.” Her hands lifted, then fell. “Yes, I know I was young. But my...behavior...caused that, and I had to be old enough to deal with the consequences. I refused to crawl back to them. The last thing my, my mother said to me was that I was so useless that I would be incapable of caring for a baby.”

  He made a rough sound. “What did you do?”

  It had been so long since she’d spoken of that time. But it was as clear as yesterday. “Will called in some favors and helped me get into a studio apartment without having to pay all the deposits and such. He and Noelle paid my rent for the first few months. I refused to depend on their charity forever, though. I was going to be a mom. Maybe we’d be poor, but I’d never be the kind of mother Lucia was. I tried to get a decent job. But nothing panned out. I had no high-school diploma because I’d finally managed to get myself kicked out of that infernal school. They didn’t want pregnant students on their campus. I had no references. So I...lied about my age and got in as a cocktail waitress at a bar near the university where the manager was more interested in how well you filled out the uniform than how well your job application checked out. I had to quit when my pregnancy started to show, of course, but by then I’d saved enough of my tips to pay the rent on my own. And I found another job where a sexy waistline didn’t matter.”

  “Sara knew all this was going on?”

  “Sara was...great.” Annie bit her lip. “I went into labor when she was supposed to be taking a final exam. But she’d promised to stay with me, and she didn’t budge from my side. Not until after Riley was born.”

  “Loyal Sara.” His voice was tight.

  “Riley was such a perfect baby, Logan. She did everything early. Walking. Talking.” Her throat ached. “I knew she deserved more than I could give her, but I just...couldn’t do that. I couldn’t give her up. I was too selfish.”

  “There’s not a selfish bone in your body.”

  She shook her head in denial. “I was. And then she got sick. And Will and Noelle were there, just as they’d always been. I was so jealous of Noelle when she married Will. Well, you remember.”

  He made a faint noise of assent.

  “I thought she was going to take away what little family I had. But I was wrong. She was decent. And nicer to me than I deserved. And I finally got it...how much Will loved her. She, um, she babysat for me sometimes when I had to work. She was trying to pass the bar exam, and you know how hard that is. But she was always willing to help with Riley no matter how busy she was.”

  “Yeah, they’re all saints.” Logan’s voice was short. He felt a strong desire to choke the life out of George and Lucia Hess, and...when it came to that, Will and Noelle weren’t so far behind. “Why didn’t they just help you keep Riley? Or at the very least, tell her the truth before she could find out the way she did? There’s no shame in adoption. She deserved to know.”

  “But I’m the one who begged them to take her!” She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. “I hadn’t realized how dangerously ill she was.” Her voice was muffled. “Not until it was nearly too late. She wasn’t safe with me! Everything my parents had warned about had come true. The only truly decent thing I did as a parent was to give Riley to people who were capable of caring for her. Noelle took one look at Riley and drove us both straight to the hospital. She knew how to be a mother.”

  “What about Drago?”

  She hunched, looking nauseous. “He was in jail. I...never told him. I never spoke to him again after that day. After Will’s wedding. Not even when we were both arrested the next day.”

  Logan’s world suddenly narrowed down to a pinpoint—Annie. Her head was lowered, her silky waves parting over the vulnerable skin at her nape. “You didn’t see Ivan Mondrago. Ever?”

  “He tried coming to the house a few days later. After he’d gotten released on bond. But my father had hired a guard to prevent that very thing. That, and to keep me in. I’m not sure if they were ever convinced that I hadn’t been in league with Drago’s drug ring.” She lifted her head. “Please, Logan, can we drop it? Surely you can see why we didn’t want Riley to know I was her mother. The next question she would have asked was who her natural father was. It was better that she never knew any of it, than to learn that he was a criminal.”

  He looked out over the ocean, but all his mind saw was Annie. Long rippling hair trailing over their bodies. Sleek, shapely legs sliding over his.

  And her gasp. The way she’d stiffened when he’d breached her tight body.

  He’d been certain she was a virgin.

  But if she’d been a virgin until that night, and she hadn’t seen Drago after the wedding, then how could she claim that Drago was Riley’s father?

  The bed that Annie had slept in that night hadn’t been anyone’s but Logan’s.

  And that was something that Annie didn’t even remember.

  “I have to go find her,” Annie said. She pushe
d to her feet. “Talk to her, tell her—”

  “What?”

  Her eyes were heavy, full of sorrow that ran deep, without hope of ceasing. “I don’t know. But I can’t let her continue believing that she doesn’t matter to her parents, Logan. That’s what I believed. And look what happened.”

  He watched her go.

  Then he sat down on the cold hard edge of the stone sea wall and stared blindly at the glimmering water.

  The truth?

  Even Annie didn’t know the entire truth.

  But he did.

  Riley was not only Annie’s daughter.

  She was Logan’s.

  And if Annie thought Drago was a bad prospect for a father, what would she think if she knew the truth about him?

  “Hey, there.” Seemingly out of nowhere, Sara sat down beside him. “You look like you lost your best friend.”

  “I don’t have friends.” Only people he’d hurt. Some more knowingly than others.

  She tsked. Tucked her arm through his and leaned her dark head against his shoulder. “I remember we used to sit on this wall before you left the island.”

  “You were just a kid.”

  “So? I still remember.” She lifted her long legs out in front of her, flexed her feet, then lowered them again. “We’d sit here and throw crumbs out for the birds. We had good times.”

  “Did we?” He barely remembered anything but his mother’s misery. And her biscuits had been inedible. More suited for bird feed than breakfast. “Why did you come back here, Sara? You graduated from college with honors. You could have gone anywhere you wanted.”

  She sighed a little and he saw her blue gaze rove over the seascape. A gaze nearly the same color as the glittering blue water. The same color as Riley’s.

  As his.

  How could he not have seen it? Now that he knew, there were a multitude of resemblances he could see. Her bouncing hair and ivory skin were all Annie’s. But the level brows, the sharp chin, the eyes.

  They were Drake, all the way.

  “Turnabout is an interesting place,” Sara finally said, her voice contemplative. She smiled a little. “Some things are so backward. But if we were really backward, we’d have been more prepared to live without power. Instead of depending on an ancient plant that isn’t even equipped to handle the load we do need, we’d have had alternative means. More generators, maybe. Solar power. Or even windmills. We’d have used the gifts this place does have, and the constant breeze is one of them. We’d have a decent emergency plan, instead of just depending on Sam to scramble around doing what he can.”