Ever Hopeful

by Lori Ryan

Cade and Shane hadn’t been kidding when they said the ranch would be a safe place for Laura. It seemed the whole town somehow knew who she was, but they also seemed to know she couldn't go back to the Kensingtons. For whatever reason, everyone was willing to protect her, though no one knew all of the facts surrounding her decision to hide.

  Joelle cut Laura’s hair into a shoulder-length, windblown style and used a dye that turned Laura’s almost white-blond hair brown. With the changes, it made it much harder to recognize Laura’s face as Patrick Kensington’s infamous wife, now plastered on every news channel and in every newspaper.

  Yesterday, Nancy Wills and Tammy Cash—two women from town that were Laura’s age and friends with Cade and Shane—came over with two boxes of old clothes for Laura. They brought some that would fit now and some things that would fit as she got further along in her pregnancy, which was a relief given that she’d been wearing the few things Josh had bought for her over and over.

  She promised the women she’d have coffee with them sometime soon. Of course, that meant she’d have to leave the cloister of the ranch where she felt relatively safe. Opening herself up to the exposure of the outside world might take awhile, and Laura was still undecided about staying. One day, she thought she could stay and hide and feel secure on the ranch. The next, she panicked and felt the need to keep moving, to avoid settling any one place for too long.

  For now, she followed the path down to the barn to help Cade with the animals, wanting to feel as though she were contributing something instead of just freeloading. As usual, Red came out of the barn and ran to greet Laura before she got halfway there. Cade appeared next and raised his hand in greeting but let her walk to him.

  Cade was the exact opposite of Patrick, from looks to personality. He was dark haired where Patrick’s had been light. Laura had thought Patrick was so good looking when she met him. She’d been swept away by the blond hair and blue eyes, the dimpled smile and GQ style that seemed to come so easily to him. It had amazed her how ugly his face could turn when he twisted it up with anger, or to sneer at her when he thought she was “showing her background” as he was so fond of telling her.

  Cade’s face was handsome in a rugged sort of way. He always seemed to have a day’s worth of growth on his jaw, and his green eyes never stopped smiling. He was relaxed and so at ease with himself. Laura wondered if that came from working with the animals. If all the unconditional love he was surrounded by all day fed his soul in a way others didn’t get to experience.

  She had been a horribly bad judge of character with Patrick, but she didn’t think she was being fooled by Cade. There was something about him that told her she would never need to cower around him, never need to run in fear or walk on eggshells, or wonder when the next blow would come. He’d never throw her down a flight of stairs or step on her hand when she finally fell from the battering—just to see how long it would take to make her cry out in pain. He’d never drag her by the hair out to the back shed and lock her in, when she didn’t give him the answer he’d wanted to some inane question about something she couldn't even remember now.

  Laura knew deep down that Cade’s hands had never been raised in anger against someone weaker than him or used as weapons to hurt or lash out.

  “Hey, wanna see something really cool?” Cade asked as he leaned against the door and smiled at her.

  Laura nodded and followed Cade into the barn and down the center aisle to the tack room at the end. He opened the door and stood back to let her look inside. She tipped her head and leaned in to look. In the back corner lay a white cat. She had patches of tiger-patterned fur across her back and over one eye, but what was most noticeable was her very large bulging stomach.

  Laura gasped and turned to Cade. “Is she pregnant?”

  “Yup,” Cade said, his grin huge as they stood and watched the future mother from a distance. “We should have kittens soon. She wandered in here and made herself a bed out of some old blankets. She doesn’t want me near her yet, but hopefully that’ll change over time.”

  He withdrew and sat on one of the bales of hay in the center aisle. Red climbed into his lap and snuggled in for ear scratches while Laura perched on a tack trunk across the aisle.

  “She may always be feral, but if we feed her and care for her, maybe she’ll let us near the kittens so we can socialize them. We’ll get her spayed and then let her stay as a barn cat if she wants to,” Cade said, smiling at Red as he spoke.

  “How do you do that?” Laura asked, nodding at Red. “I mean, how do you teach them to trust you?”

  Cade shrugged. “Just patience and time.”

  Laura watched as he rubbed Red’s belly with long, slow strokes that put the dog to sleep in his lap. She was a big dog, so sleeping in his lap really amounted to trying to get as much of her body across him as she could. She hung off on both sides, head lolling happily, while her back half stretched across the hay bale on the other side.

  Cade didn’t seem to mind her size as he continued to rub her and Laura found herself jealous of the dog for a split second. He looked up at Laura and continued. “You back off when she tells you to back off. You wait patiently, give her the space she needs when it becomes more than she can handle. And you always make sure she has a way to get out, to end the interaction if she wants to.” Cade lifted his hands for a few seconds, giving Red the option to move. She snuggled deeper, so his hands went back to work.

  “I don’t sneak up on her. I say her name before I touch her, let her come to me instead of reaching for her. Little things like that.” Cade shrugged, like it was nothing to gain the trust of a dog that had been mistreated.

  Laura felt her eyes go wide as she realized he did the same things around her.

  “What’s that look for?” Cade asked on a laugh.

  “You do the same thing with me, don’t you? You always say something from far enough away that I know you’re coming. You stay still until I come toward you.” Laura could see it easily now and she shook her head. “You’ve been training me! Like a dog.”

  He just laughed. “It’s just a habit, Laura. It’s not something I do on purpose now.” He raised his hand up as if swearing an oath and grinned at her. “I promise. I haven’t at any point thought of you as a dog or set out to treat you like one. Scout’s honor.”

  Laura smiled, but Cade’s comment sent her thoughts in a completely different direction. She was suddenly painfully aware that she wanted him to see her as a woman. How totally inappropriate was that? She was pregnant with her dead husband’s child and running from his family. She might be a grown woman but the fact was, she’d never been independent. She’d always been tied to a man—first her father and then her husband. This was the time in her life when she needed to take charge, learn to support herself, and be independent. Yet, here she was thinking about how gorgeous the man sitting across from her was, and wondering if he liked what he saw when he looked at her.

  Cade frowned at her. “What are you thinking? You seem like you took a little trip in your head for a minute.”

  If only you knew.

  Laura shook her head. She needed to figure out how she was going to take care of her baby when it came, how she would support them both. How she was going to get away from the Kensingtons and their powerful, seemingly endless, reach. How she’d fight them if they tracked her down and tried to take the baby from her. The last thing she should be thinking was what it would be like to be in Cade’s arms, to touch him and feel his mouth on her skin....

  “I was just thinking that I need to find a way to support myself and the baby. I can’t live off you guys forever.”

  “Try telling that to Mama. I think she’s planning to adopt you,” said Cade.

  Laura felt a sharp pain at his joke and had a feeling she probably grimaced. What would it have been like to be born to May Bishop? To have been raised in a place like this by someone who loved her? To receive the unconditional love that a parent is supposed to have for their child?

/>   Fairy tales…. She’d given up on things like that a long time ago. It wasn’t useful to sit and pity herself and cry about her circumstances. But, being so close to a family like the Bishops...made her want to go back in time and rewrite her story. If not rewrite who she was born to, at least change her decision to marry Patrick.

  “Well, I’ll have to come up with something,” Laura said, but in all honesty waiting tables was about the only thing she was qualified to do.

  She forced a smile. She may not have ever had a mother like May Bishop, but she’d make damn sure her child did. Her baby would know she was loved no matter what. That nothing could ever take her mother’s love away. If Laura was sure of one thing in her life, she was sure of that. She would love this child with all her heart and all that she was.

  “What do you like to do?” Cade asked, as if the answer to her problems was as simple as that.

  She huffed out a little laugh but frowned. Her life had revolved around feeding her father and keeping his house, and then keeping Patrick’s schedule and meeting the social demands of being one of the Kensingtons. She had no real skills she could use to get a job.

  My greenhouse.

  “I like to grow things. I like the way you can tell how healthy and alive the plants are in a greenhouse by how much chatter you can hear from them when you walk in. If they’re healthy and well cared for, they talk to you the second you walk in and the hum is almost deafening.” Laura glanced at Cade and was surprised to see he actually looked like he understood, like he didn’t think she was crazy or stupid for thinking her plants had spoken to her.

  “Then that’s what you should do. We’ll come up with a way for you to make a living growing things,” he said and shoved himself up off the bale. “Let’s go see if Mama has lunch ready yet. I’m starved.”

  Laura felt a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. One thing she’d noticed around here was Cade sure didn’t miss a meal.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “It’s been almost two weeks, damn it. How the hell can one woman evade you for two weeks? She’s got to be here somewhere!” Alec yelled into the phone after Mark finished his report. They’d found nothing. Not a damn thing.

  The same not-a-damn-thing Alec had found when he’d searched Patrick and Laura’s house. If Patrick had collected evidence of Alec’s creative accounting measures and the bribes he’d paid to win the contracts they’d been awarded over the years, it wasn’t anywhere in the house. That only left Laura. She had to have it.

  “Go see that doctor again. Press him. There must be something there. And pay whatever the hell you have to for the damn security tapes from the hospital. Someone will sell them to you. There’s a price for everything. Find their price!”

  Alec slammed down the phone. Where the hell was Laura Kensington hiding? He threw his coffee mug across the office where it hit the wall, leaving a gouge in the plaster he’d have to find some way to cover. Great. One more thing to take care of.

  ***

  Laura leaned the basket of vegetables on her hip and carried them into the house. Helping May in her garden was turning out to be as relaxing as working in her greenhouse. More so, in fact, since she and May could now cook what they had grown together. She’d never seen a Japanese eggplant, but May assured her she would love the way it thickened the pasta sauce they would make with it.

  “Those look beautiful, Laura,” May said as she picked up the tomatoes and green beans and placed them by the sink to wash. “We’ll have to can some of these tomatoes. Have you ever canned fruits and vegetables?”

  Laura shook her head as she got out the cutting board and a knife.

  “It’s actually silly that we call it canning, since we’ll use jars, but I’ll teach you how to do it.” May leveled Laura with a look. “Before you move on, I mean.”

  This time Laura nodded, not quite knowing what to say. She knew May didn’t want her to leave, and part of her was beginning to wonder if perhaps she could stay. No, wonder wasn’t the right word.

  Hope.

  But she’d learned hope hurts.

  Hope. Hurt. Hope. Hurt. Hope. Hurt. It was like a singsong cadence in Laura’s head that wouldn’t stop. Hope leads to hurt and Laura didn’t want to hurt anymore. She’d hurt enough.

  “You know, Laura. It occurred to me that before you leave it might be a good idea for you to talk to me about what happened to you.” May said it casually, as if she were asking about the weather outside.

  Laura’s hands stilled but she didn’t reply. She stood frozen; the idea of talking about what Patrick had done to her was absolutely mortifying. How could she tell anyone what had happened? How could she ever share those details?

  “You’ll be moving on soon, I suppose, so it would be like having a get-out-of-jail-free card. You get to tell someone about your time with your husband, but you don’t have to worry about the repercussions. You don’t have to worry about what I might think or how I’ll view you because of what you tell me. You can just get it off your chest before you go.”

  May went on washing vegetables and handing them to Laura to cut up as if she hadn’t just opened an enormous can of worms. She talked about the way she had prepped the raised beds for the lettuce she grew, and told Laura she’d show her where the composter was to put the scraps in.

  Before Laura knew what had happened, she had tears running down her face and she’d stopped cutting. She moved blindly to the kitchen table and sank into a chair. May just waited, chopping and stirring and adding things to a pot on the stove. She handed Laura a dish towel for her tears, before she turned back to the stove once more.

  “I didn’t love him. Not even before I knew what he was, I mean. He was older than me, but he was attractive and paid so much attention to me. He seemed sweet and caring and he was going to take me away from my dad, which, well—that was a good thing.” Laura dabbed at her cheeks with the towel, but the tears were replaced with fresh ones so quickly, it had no real effect.

  “My brother saw what Patrick really was. He knew somehow and tried to tell me. He tried to convince me to move in with him and we’d share a house together, but neither one of us had a job that paid much. I was waitressing and he was working at a hardware store stocking shelves. Neither of us had gone to college. I thought if I didn’t weigh him down with trying to take care of me he might put himself through community college someday. I thought Patrick might send me.... But I shouldn’t have married a man I didn’t love.”

  She blew out a deep breath, and it felt as though some of the humiliation and pain of her marriage left her with it. “My dad threatened to disown me if I married Patrick, although I’ve never really been sure why. He used to tell me how worthless I was, how useless a girl was to him. But, I think he didn’t want me to marry Patrick because it meant he’d need someone else to cook and clean for him—or he’d have to learn to do it himself. Of course, his threat only made the thought of marrying Patrick all the more appealing.”

  May came and sat with Laura at the table and held her hand while she talked. “I was so stupid,” Laura all but whispered.

  “When did it start?” May prompted, not addressing whether Laura had been stupid or foolish or just naive. Laura looked at her through the tears. She never thought she’d tell the details of her life with Patrick to anyone. It was too humiliating. She didn’t want people to see her as the kind of woman who would let someone do that to her, even though that’s exactly what she was.

  “On our honeymoon. He couldn’t, um...when we tried to....” Laura waved her hands, “You know. When we tried, well, he couldn’t. He flew into a rage. I’d never seen anything like it. He told me it was my fault, that it was me. I was a virgin. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You know that, don’t you?” May asked.

  Laura nodded. “He hit me.” Laura’s hand went to her neck at the memory of that night. “Choked me.”

  Laura wasn’t crying any longer. She stared at a scrat
ch on the big oak table in the kitchen, remembering the way hitting her had gotten Patrick excited, the way he’d raped her as dark spots swam at the corner of her eyes. “Raped me,” she whispered to herself.

  She looked up at May. “The funny thing is, not all abusive husbands apologize the next day. You always read that, don’t you? It’s not true. Patrick didn’t care. He wasn’t sorry. He never sent flowers or tried to make it up to me. It was just who he was.”

  As she spoke, the stories began to flow, coming more and more easily.

  “In the beginning, he was very careful not to hit me in the face. He didn’t leave marks I couldn’t cover with long sleeves or a turtleneck. As time went on, his anger seemed to spiral and he wasn’t able to keep things as controlled any longer. There were times when I couldn’t leave the house for days.”

  May listened while Laura told her more than she ever thought she’d share with anyone. Her brother’s death, and the resulting beating when she wanted to cancel a business dinner to go to the funeral. The way Patrick would drag her down the steps by her hair or throw her against the wall so hard the house shook. What it felt like to have a hot pan held against her skin when she didn’t cook the right thing for dinner.

  She told about the sick games he’d play where she’d have to go get whatever it was he wanted to hit her with. She’d have to get him his belt or the length of hose he was fond of using. And the sick thing was, she’d know whether he would rape her after or not. When she had to get something he’d use to hit her with, it always ended with sex. As if the beating was foreplay.

  Sitting at May’s kitchen table, Laura let out years of grief and anger and guilt and self-doubt. Everything came pouring out of her. Her plan to run. Her hope to keep her baby safe. It all came pouring out until there were no more words. There was nothing more to do than let May hold her and rock her, and as she sat there in May’s arms she began to let go of three years of fear.

  Chapter Fourteen