by Barb Han
“I know.” He referred to being able to talk about his past.
“I haven’t been in love in a long time. And now I can’t,” he continued.
“You don’t have to explain it to me. I understand more than you realize.” There was only so far she could go with a man, any man, and they’d reached that wall. Hudson scared her even more because she could almost envision herself busting down that barrier with him. But shatter it and then what? Hudson wasn’t ready to let her in. They both had issues. Not to mention the fact that she had someone trying to run her out of town...possibly kill her.
All this emotion could be that they were two lost souls, searching for a temporary reprieve from almost constant pain.
“Being rejected by my father hurt. Losing my mother hurt. All I know is heartache,” she said, figuring that she was a magnet, drawing hurt toward her like the scent of honey draws bees. Let the swarm turn on her and it would be all over.
He lifted her chin until their gazes collided. “You deserve so much more than that.”
But he’d already admitted that he wasn’t the one who could give it to her. And her stubborn heart said it needed him.
She blinked up at him. “We should get back inside.”
There was no use trying to convince him that they might be able to give it a shot. She’d tried to make someone love her for her entire life. Granted, it was a whole different kind of love, but that didn’t seem important to her at the moment.
“We should tell them we’re leaving,” he said, letting go of her and taking a step back. The sharp breath he drew seemed meant to steel his strength.
Part of Madelyn wanted to get lost in him, to forget everything that had happened recently. She couldn’t do that any more than she could change her identity with a quick revelation from Maverick Mike Butler. No matter how much her heart protested.
As she started toward the door, it swung open. Ella Butler stood there, flanked by her brothers. They stood more relaxed now and almost seemed sympathetic.
“Ed is arranging the DNA test, unless you want to oversee it,” Ella said. “He’s planning to expedite the results. I’m sure you don’t want to be in limbo any longer than you have to be.”
No one mentioned how the result might change things for Madelyn—for all of them, actually. Instead, they all seemed poised to respect her privacy.
“I’m fine with Ed taking the lead,” Madelyn said. He had no vested interest in the outcome and seemed to genuinely care about Mike Butler’s wishes. There were other pressing questions she wanted to ask him but decided none of them mattered until she received confirmation of what she suspected, feared, to be true.
“He has a kit waiting in the kitchen. We’ve already been swabbed.” She twisted her face into a frown. “If you want us to do it again with you present, we can.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Madelyn needed to establish a little trust. It was tentative at best on both sides, but the family seemed to be making an effort and she should, too. Besides, there was a slight possibility that they would be connected for the rest of their lives and she couldn’t ignore it.
She followed Ella and the twins into the kitchen.
“Could I have a minute with Ed?” she asked.
Everyone nodded and left, except Hudson. She’d asked him to stay.
“You said you knew my mother,” Madelyn said to Ed.
He stood next to her at the grand wooden table positioned in the middle of the room. His body language was tense, his shoulders rigid and the lines on his face deep.
“Yes, ma’am. I had the pleasure of meeting her a couple of times,” he said, and there was so much respect in his voice.
“Can you tell me something about her?” Madelyn wanted—no, needed—to know, and Ed seemed the only one willing to talk about her mother even if his body language said he was reluctant.
“She had your hair and eyes,” he said. That, she could gain from a picture.
“What was she like?” Madelyn tried to quell the hope in her voice but was doing a lousy job, by all counts.
Ed gave her a shocked look.
“My father—” she flashed her eyes at him “—her husband never said much about her.”
“The loss was probably too difficult,” Ed said, but there wasn’t a lot of conviction in his tone.
“What was she like? Did she have a sense of humor?” she asked, guiding the discussion back on track.
Ed looked up and to the right, like he was searching deep for memories of her. His gaze shifted, landing on Madelyn. “You have her smile. I know that because she always wore hers. Her laugh could fill a room and she was so darn pretty that it was hard to catch your breath when she walked in.”
Madelyn had never considered herself to be that beautiful. Except in Hudson’s presence. There, she felt like the most beautiful woman in the room.
“Forgive my saying so, but she didn’t take life as seriously as you do,” he said.
Maybe her mother hadn’t been forced to. Madelyn, on the other hand, had lost her mother at birth and grown up with a father who was loving in his own way and unyielding. She’d learned to work hard at an early age and there’d been no silliness allowed. Coddling, according to her father, would spoil her. He was preparing her for adulthood. And it had begun as early as she could remember.
The contrast between Charles Kensington and her mother, Arabella, struck her. Didn’t people say that opposites attracted? If her mother was really that much of a free spirit, then she and Charles, with his rigid view of life, couldn’t be more contrary.
“Did she go to church?”
Ed laughed.
Madelyn wondered if that part had been made up so she would ask fewer questions. She’d viewed her mother as a saint and her father, Charles, had taken the easy road by delivering exactly what she’d wanted to hear. Madelyn had been beating herself up pretty hard for her mistakes. Somehow, knowing how imperfect her mother had been lifted some of the heavy weight on Madelyn’s shoulders.
“Sorry. I don’t mean any disrespect, but your mother wasn’t the religious type. She had a zest for life and church would’ve given her too many rules. She would’ve found that way too restrictive.” There was so much admiration in his eyes when he spoke about her mother.
“What about this? Why did Mike Butler give it to her?” She toyed with the dragonfly around her neck.
“Ah. I was wondering when you would ask about that,” he said with a smile, handing her a cotton swab.
Madelyn took the offering and rolled it around inside her cheek, careful to coat it well. She didn’t want the test to come back inconclusive.
Ed nodded toward the necklace as he opened a Ziploc-style baggie. She dropped in the specimen and he immediately sealed it.
“She loved collecting dragonflies,” he continued. “She’d go on and on about their magical qualities, something to do with them giving a deeper understanding of life, of self. She felt like they were powerful and graceful at the same time.” He blinked. “A bit like you, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Madelyn tried not to let that thought comfort her. It did. The thought that her mother wouldn’t see her as a disappointment let sunshine into dark places inside her heart.
“She’d light up when she talked about them,” he continued. “She’d talk about how fast they could move and it was something like thirty or forty miles an hour. But they could also hover like a helicopter and fly backward if they really wanted. But the thing she liked best about them was how simple and elegant they were, like a ballerina, she’d say. She thought they had some kind of mystical wisdom and would always bring light to her.”
“Guess it didn’t work out so well,” she said and instantly regretted it when the sad look crossed Ed’s worn features.
“From what I hear, she’d been forbidden to wear it while she gave birth,�
� he said.
“So, my father knew?” She couldn’t hide her shock.
“About the necklace? Yes. I assume he was told the rest.” Ed looked her in the eyes and she could see that he was being honest.
“What about Mike Butler? Did he know right away or find out later?” She might as well go for it.
“My guess, and this is only a guess, is that he knew.”
A fire lit inside her. A man like Mike Butler could afford a better hospital. Check that, could afford the best medical care. Her mother had died because of a negligent county hospital. She could be alive right now if he hadn’t abandoned her. He’d turned his back on his daughter, too. If the paternity test turned out positive, he’d left her to be brought up by a man who could never truly love her while his four legitimate children grew up with all this. She and her father had struggled to make ends meet. “So, he didn’t love my mother?”
“My friend was a complicated man. I believe that he did love your mother. He’d been talking about leaving MaryAnn, his wife.” His gaze shifted to the floor. “Their marriage had been on the rocks and, looking back, it was just as much his fault as hers. He liked to drink and still had wild oats to sow. MaryAnn turned up pregnant and I thought that’s why he stayed with her. The only thing my friend ever said when I asked about your mother was that she said she was in love with another man,” he said.
“And Mike Butler, a man used to getting everything he wanted, left it at that?” She didn’t believe that for a second. “He doesn’t sound like the kind of man who was used to letting someone else get his way.”
“She married Charles Kensington. What else could he do?” Ed said on a wistful-sounding sigh.
A man she didn’t love, would never love.
“But then she died and Mike just left his child for another man to bring up.” She couldn’t mask the hurt in her voice.
“He visited Charles, asking to see you. The two had words that I was never privileged to hear and Mike left it alone,” he stated.
Maverick Mike visited her father? She couldn’t imagine how that discussion had gone down. Her hope that her father, Charles, didn’t know that she was an illegitimate child was dying a slow death. The question was more like, how could he not have known? More questions joined. Why would he keep her? What did he have to gain by bringing up another man’s child? Had Maverick Mike bribed her father? Pawned her off on him?
And then she thought about Charles’s small business. He’d done okay for a small-time operation. But he hadn’t been able to save enough to pay for her college and they’d lived on a shoestring budget. It had taken him years to pay off the hospital bill and he’d insisted on paying every last penny. She’d worked her way through college and had the student loans to prove it.
Thinking about the picture in the dining room with the wealthy smiling family filled her with anger. She had Mike’s nose and even she couldn’t argue that he was most likely her father. There was absolutely no way she was ready to accept the fact just yet. But that didn’t make it less true.
The conversation she needed to have with Charles Kensington couldn’t wait.
“Are we done here?” she asked Ed.
He nodded.
She turned to Hudson. “Ready to go?”
“Yes.” He put his hand on the small of her back and she couldn’t allow the comfort his touch provided.
Ignoring the electricity pinging between them, she led him to his pickup truck parked out front. The grip she had on her cell phone should’ve cracked the protective case. She climbed into the passenger seat and stared at her contact list. Her finger hovered over the word Dad.
She pushed the button as Hudson took the driver’s seat.
The phone rang once, twice and then three times. She had no plans to let her father off the hook this time.
His voice-mail recording began and she pushed the button to bypass it.
“I know who my real father is.” Madelyn ended the call before her voice could break.
She waited thirty seconds and called again.
“Pull over,” Madelyn said to Hudson when her father picked up.
Chapter Fourteen
Hudson made a nosedive for an empty parking lot next to a field. As soon as the truck stopped, Madelyn hopped out and started pacing. She couldn’t sit still and take this call. She needed to be moving.
“I know everything, Father. Or should I say Charles?” she asked, not bothering to mask her bitterness. There’d been too many opportunities for him to tell her, to make this right over the years, and he’d chosen to keep her in the dark.
The line was silent.
“What? Don’t you have anything to say to me after all these years? Thirty years of flat-out lies?” Her body trembled with pent-up frustration—frustration that was seeking release with no outlet.
A quick glance at Hudson revealed he was leaning against the truck, arms folded, ankles crossed.
“Why don’t you come to Friday supper and we can talk about this?” her father said, his calm voice both comforting and infuriating at the same time. Charles Kensington was not an emotional man.
“First of all, someone’s after me because I’m a Butler, and the worst part about it all is that I didn’t even know I was a Butler. Ridiculous me thought I was a Kensington all this time,” she blurted out.
The line was so quiet that she thought her father had ended the call. She wanted to scream, to shout, to get something out of the man to show that he had a beating heart in that ice-cold chest of his.
“You don’t sound like you feel well. We should talk when you’re better,” he said, and she got a lot of pleasure out of a small fracture in his tone.
“How about after I’m dead, like my mother,” she shot back, unable to contain the fire in hers.
“It’s bad manners to talk derogatory about someone who has passed,” he said, regaining that tight lip.
“How so, Dad?” She was waving a red flag in the face of a determined bull. In her father’s case, the bull was determined not to show any emotion. Par for the course and more proof that he didn’t care.
“Should I set an extra place at the table?” he asked.
“Are you kidding me? Don’t bother. I won’t be coming home ever again. Because you’re not my father and I don’t want to have anything to do with lies.” That should get him riled up.
It didn’t.
“Have it your way. Call if you change your mind. Otherwise, there isn’t much more to say.”
The line died and her heart fisted as the crack of a bullet split the air.
It took a few seconds to register what had happened. A few more to come to grips with the reality someone had fired at them. All of which came too late because the shooter got off another round as Hudson tackled her, covering her with his considerable size as she flew to the hard concrete. Her head almost cracked against the pavement, but Hudson shielded it.
“Stay low,” Hudson said, popping up to all fours.
Madelyn rolled over onto her stomach and belly-crawled toward the truck. She barely registered the pain in her hands at clawing across the pavement filled with tiny jagged rocks. This wasn’t the time to worry about the ache shooting through her knees.
Hudson muttered the same curse she was thinking as another shot fired. The ping sound of a bullet hitting metal on the truck sent an icy chill racing up her spine. Fear gripped her as Hudson’s arm came around her, his hand on her stomach, and lifted her into the passenger seat.
“Keep your head down, eyes below the dashboard,” he said sharply. “Get into as small of a ball as you can on the floorboard.”
Madelyn did as he climbed over her and into the driver’s side. The door closed behind him and the next second he was gunning the motor. She remembered the shotgun tucked behind the seat. She could reach it and fire off a few shots, giving them the di
stance they needed to outrun the shooter, or she could hide.
“Do you know anyone who owns a rifle?” Hudson asked.
“Yes—more than half the state, according to statistics,” she said and then made her move.
“I told you to stay down,” Hudson shouted.
“You can’t drive and shoot. I’m not helpless. I won’t cower on the floorboard when I can make a difference,” she stated. “Where’s the ammunition?”
“There in the dash,” Hudson said.
She bounced around in the seat but managed to gain purchase on the butt of the shotgun. Next, she located a shell and loaded it. “Who am I shooting at?”
“White sedan. It’s the only vehicle behind us.”
Hands shaking from a burst of adrenaline, Madelyn opened the little window between the cab and the truck bed, took aim and fired.
The sedan swerved and the driver must’ve hit the brakes because the hood dipped as the car slowed. She loaded another shell and pumped the action, hoping to blow out a tire this time. From the looks of things, she missed entirely, but the main goal was to slow down the driver so that they could slip away, and that had been accomplished. He backed off and pulled onto the shoulder.
She kept her gaze focused on the sedan until it disappeared completely from view. “He’s gone.”
“Call the sheriff,” Hudson said with more than a hint of admiration in his voice. “Tell him to come to the ranch. Talking to your father will have to wait.”
By the time he parked in his garage, she’d given her statement to the sheriff. And it was probably because she’d almost died—again!—that her heart rate was jacked through the roof, or maybe it was the compassion he’d shown earlier and the constant reminders that someone wanted to kill her, but Madelyn climbed over the seat and onto Hudson’s lap.
