Rescued by the Woodsman

by M. S. Parker

  But the doors, already closing in front of me, offered no answer. I turned, ready to make my goodbyes and leave, but came up short when I realized that Diamond was standing right there, glaring up at me.

  “I see you took my advice and asked her.”

  Paisley stood next to her, her face pale and strained.

  “What's this all about?” I demanded roughly.

  Several people were eyeing us, and Diamond raised her chin, apparently having had enough of us making a public spectacle of ourselves because she looked around before shaking her head. With a sniff, she turned on her heel and beckoned for me to follow.

  “If you want to know, you’ll have to come with me. Paisley and I do not believe in airing our dirty laundry in public. Unlike some people.”

  That certainly hadn't stopped you earlier, I thought sourly. But I went to Paisley’s side. I needed answers.

  After Diamond failed to find any private place on her own, I flagged down one of the staff helping out with the event and spoke to them. Within a few moments, we were escorted into a small, private room.

  Diamond shot the tuxedoed server a dirty look. “Did you really have to make me wander around for five minutes before you showed us a private room?” she demanded.

  I stepped between them. “The staff can’t read minds, Diamond, and you barely looked for two minutes,” I said before he even had a chance to offer some unnecessary apology. I turned to him. “Thanks for your time.” I pulled a bill from my pocket and pushed it into his hand. It was more to make up for her rudeness than anything else, and I suspected he knew that.

  A faint smile tipped up one corner of his mouth. “No trouble at all, Mr. Lindstrom. Please let me know if you need anything else.”

  Once he left, I walked straight to the mini bar. I’d been in here earlier when I'd gone over last minute details with my assistant, the head event planner, and the heads of the foundation. I hoped to hell they hadn’t removed the alcohol yet.

  I was in luck.

  Splashing some scotch into a glass, I swirled it around before turning to face Paisley. She wasn’t looking at me, or her mother, but rather staring at the far wall as she twisted her engagement ring around her finger. I'd never seen her like this before, and for a moment, I felt a pang of guilt for what I'd done. What I was doing.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” she said quietly.

  I wanted to ask what she meant, but before I had a chance, Diamond moved to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Paisley stiffened. If I hadn’t been watching them so closely, I wouldn’t have noticed. But I saw it. It lasted only a second, and when Diamond leaned in, murmured to her softly, Paisley nodded.

  I took a sip of my scotch, waiting for one of them to fill me in on whatever the hell was going on.

  When, after a minute, neither of them did, I plopped down into the closest chair. Focusing on Diamond since she seemed to want to run the show, I leaned back. She was entirely too much like my own mother, and if I let her set the rules, then I’d have to play by them. I wasn’t in the mood to have her lead me around by the nose.

  “I’d like an explanation,” I said quietly, hoping the calm control in my voice hid the riot that was going on inside. “Allie said that she’s…” I glanced at Paisley, but she was still looking away. “She said Paisley is her sister. Is that true?”

  “Don’t you dare imply there’s a relationship between that miserable little tramp and my daughters,” Diamond said, her face screwing up like she’d had a lemon shoved in her mouth. “That bastard is not a part of my family.”

  I curled my hands into fists even though, if what Allie had said was right, the term was actually applied correctly. I had a feeling, however, that Diamond wasn't using it because it was accurate.

  “Just because her whore of a mother seduced my husband one night doesn’t mean she can claim any sort of relationship with my girls.” Diamond stared down her nose at me, as if daring me to contradict her.

  I swirled my scotch in my glass, a hundred things running through my mind. The very foremost thought was the plain and simple fact that Diamond was wrong. Whether she liked it or not, if Kendrick Hedges was Allie’s biological father, then Paisley and Mallory Hedges were half-sisters.

  My next gut response was that Allie wasn’t responsible for what her parents had done. Before I could say any of that, Diamond was forging on ahead.

  “And that girl is no better. Even as a child, she manipulated Kendrick, luring him away from his children, stealing his love, stealing his devotion. She was a threat to my marriage from the moment she was conceived.” Diamond lifted a hand as if she needed a moment to continue. “You’d think it would be impossible, wouldn’t you? And I didn’t blame a child for my husband’s indiscretion, not really. How could I? I wanted him to be a father to her even though it hurt so much that he'd been unfaithful. But seeing him as often as she did wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She wanted everything…”

  Diamond started to sniffle as she sat down on the divan and reached into her small evening bag. Someone else might've been moved, but I was too used to the theatrics of women like her.

  Finally, she continued, dabbing at her eyes, “Even then, though, I couldn’t blame her. Her mother was…” She reached over and cupped Paisley’s cheek. “Not much of a mother. Malla had so many chances to better herself, to offer her daughter a better life, but she was more interested in trying to get back into my husband's bed. She didn’t even love her own daughter. I often suspected that she'd planned to get pregnant to try to convince my husband to leave his family, and when that didn't work, she didn't have any use for the poor child after that. It's no wonder the girl latched onto Kendrick. But she was driving us apart – all of us.”

  I felt like I was going to be sick. Was what Diamond was saying really true? Had Allie really been the product of an affair intended to drive a family apart? Had she been raised to think that was how to get what she wanted? To scheme?

  Now Diamond looked at me again. “Can you imagine how humiliating it is to beg you own husband for attention? To beg him to pay attention to the children you gave him? But he’d rather give money to that girl. Rather spend time with her than his own flesh and blood.”

  I wanted to argue that Allie was as much Kendrick's flesh and blood as the daughters he'd conceived with Diamond, but I knew if I did, I'd never hear the end of the story, and right now, I needed to hear it all.

  “Mallory and Paisley were lost. And there I was, struggling for him to notice me while he had his whore and their child living under my own roof.”

  Confused, I shook my head. “Wait, what? They lived there?”

  Diamond scowled, as if my question was something untoward.

  “Allie’s mother, Malla, was my nanny.” Paisley stared at her hands, as if this was part of some shameful secret of hers. “I loved her. I thought she loved me. But things started to change, and she spent more and more time with my father, less and less time with me. She hardly ever spent any time with Mallory at all. Then she had her baby, and everything changed. I felt like she’d abandoned me. I had no idea what was going on or who the baby was.” She laughed and reached up to wipe at her eyes. “She was supposed to take care of me, and all of a sudden, I just didn’t matter!”

  “Hush, darling,” Diamond murmured.

  Paisley rested her head on her mother’s shoulder.

  It was the most emotion I had ever seen from the two of them, but I still wasn't sure if I should trust it. I got the feeling that Paisley was trying to use what had happened in her childhood to garner sympathy, playing up things that had barely been there.

  I felt like a heel for even thinking it, but there it was.

  When Paisley looked back at me, her eyes were wet and bright. “I suspected, you know, that Allie might be my sister. That’s not the sort of thing you discuss, of course. And I didn’t want to ask. It was horrible in our home for so long, but it got better when Malla started dating some other man. She wasn’t the
re all the time, and Mom and Daddy began to reconnect. I thought it was all behind us.”

  “Allie didn’t like not having Kendrick there to wrap around her little finger. She’s just as much a money-mongering tramp.”

  “Mama,” Paisley said, turning her gaze from me to her mother.

  “Hush. You always try to see the best in people, darling.” Diamond patted Paisley’s cheek, leaning in to kiss her daughter on the forehead. Then she rose and turned, facing me. The lingering grief I had seen in her eyes was gone, replaced by the ice I had come to associate with Diamond Hedges.

  “They left our household for good when Allie was sixteen. I finally insisted. The girl would come over after school and stay there while her mother worked. Kendrick would make time in his schedule to see her. Never our daughters, of course, but he’d visit with her two or three times a week. She’d demand he give her money, more and more of it as time went on. Anything that Paisley and Mallory had…” Diamond narrowed her eyes, hesitating just a moment.

  Paisley flicked a look my way, and I pretended not to notice. I still wasn't sure how much I believed.

  Diamond continued, “If they had it, she wanted it. Boys from high school and college would come over to visit Paisley and Allie would make a spectacle of herself. She was an embarrassment and a bad influence. She was younger than my two girls but there she was, flirting with boys who were far too old for her. Then, one day, we…well, I had to come down hard on her after a particular incident, and that night, I told Kendrick he would have to decide who mattered most – the family who loved him or the girl who only wanted to use him.”

  Her description of Allie left a bad taste in my mouth. Guilt and anger and mistrust churned inside me. Shaking my head, I rose and started to pace, sipping my scotch as I turned things over in my head.

  I had to say something.

  “Look, I certainly haven’t known her for as long as you guys, and I know nothing of the history, but the woman I've gotten to know isn't anything like that.”

  “Of course she isn't,” Diamond said softly, her tone almost understanding. “Allie is adept at presenting the face she wants people to see. A poor, sweet girl, abandoned by her father. Whatever will get her the most sympathy. To be fair, I think she had to become that way, what with her mother being the way she was. If she didn’t learn to manipulate, she never would have survived.”

  Frowning into my scotch, I waited for her to continue.

  “She’ll show you a face that is just fun and laughter – make no mistake, Jal. She’s very intelligent, and she knows how to read people. She won’t make any sort of move until she decides whether a person may be of use to her or not. But she’s not what she makes herself out to be.”

  I wanted to argue, to stand up for Allie, and I even turned to do so.

  But then I saw Paisley sitting there, looking lost and hurt, and I couldn't bring myself to do it.

  “Jal,” Paisley said, her voice far more hesitant than I'd ever heard from her. “I’m almost afraid to ask, but the two of you…I saw you dancing. Was she the woman you were dancing with at the last event you went to? I saw the pictures in the paper. The woman was wearing a dress…” She laughed bleakly. “I wanted that dress. I recognized it immediately. It was from the designer I used to use. I no longer use her, of course. She was very…vulgar. But I saw that dress – the client who’d ordered it couldn’t use it and I offered an…well, it was almost embarrassing, really. But the designer wouldn’t sell it to me. The woman who was wearing it, the woman with you before...was it Allie?”

  Now the guilt was about ready to choke me because I was forced to remember what had happened after that event. Even so, I couldn’t help but wonder how Allie had gotten the kind of money to get a dress that Paisley hadn’t been able to buy? It made Diamond's story more believable.

  I couldn't lie to Paisley, not again. “Yes.”

  Her soft intake of breath was another punch of guilt, and she closed her eyes. “And you…you two, are you just friends? Or are you attracted to her?”

  “Paisley, I…”

  Her soft, strained laugh kept me from saying anything else. If I'd any decency at all, I would’ve confessed everything, right then right there. I would've told Paisley that I'd slept with Allie. That I wasn’t only attracted to Allie, I wanted her so badly that it hurt, even now.

  But I couldn't do that, couldn't tell Paisley any of that, not when she already hated Allie so much. The betrayal of my having slept with Allie would be so much worse than if it'd been with anyone else. I couldn't do that to Paisley.

  And if I was honest, I couldn't do it to Allie, no matter what Paisley and Diamond said about her.

  “When did you meet her? Was it before or after we announced our engagement?” Paisley’s voice had risen, and I could hear the sharp note of accusation in her voice.

  I answered those questions honestly, “She and I met right before the engagement. She had no idea that you and I were involved.” I wasn't sure why I felt the need to make it clear that Allie hadn't been trying to get to her.

  Diamond was quick to butt in. “And this event, where Allie was wearing the dress...” She let the words trail off. “Was it after the engagement was announced?”

  “Yes.”

  Paisley made a sound, but I didn't look at her. I kept my eyes on Diamond. The expression on her face told me that while Paisley hadn’t yet figured it out, Diamond had. She knew that Allie and I had been intimate.

  Diamond arched one perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Is that a fact?”

  “Yes.” Refusing to look away, I held her gaze. “I invited her to the event as a friend.” That, too, was the truth. I'd been attracted, yes, but I hadn’t planned for anything to happen. I continued, “As you’re well aware, Diamond, there are a number of functions that I attend that Paisley doesn’t like, and I don’t care to go alone. We agreed quite some time ago that I could invite a friend to go with me. So that’s what I did.”

  “Yes. She and I have talked about that at length.” Diamond still had that pinched look on her face, as though this whole thing was distasteful. “And I’ve made my feelings clear. As your fiancée, Paisley should be the only one attending functions with you from here on out. Perhaps that’s something else the two of you should discuss. And might I add, it’s funny how you invited this friend, but she says nothing about her connection to Paisley or our family.”

  Paisley made a pained noise in her throat, her hands moving over her stomach, as if cradling our unborn child.

  I still didn't know how much of this was real, but the guilt over what I'd done was eating me up. I knelt down next to her, resting a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Paisley,” I murmured. Then I looked up at her mother. “You’ve already made it clear you don’t believe there's a connection to your family. From where I’m standing, you view your husband's part in Allie's conception to be more of a…biological donation.”

  Paisley flinched, and I could have hit myself for my crudeness. I hoped she didn't think that I thought of our child that way. No matter how complex this situation was, our child would always be a part of us both.

  Her shoulders hitched, and she sounded like she was about ready to start crying. Awkward with this kind of emotion from her, I smoothed a hand down her back.

  “Paisley, I’m sorry. If I had known…”

  “I know, Jal, I know.” She nodded, but she didn’t look at me.

  “Perhaps you should take your fiancée home,” Diamond said. “I think you’ve upset her enough, and I highly doubt she wants to return to the gala.”

  Rising, I met Diamond’s hard gaze. “I think I can handle this myself.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, but I glared at her. “I’m not one of your little minions, Diamond. Don’t get it into your head that I am.”

  Then, without saying anything else, I offered my hand to Paisley.

  There were a lot of things I didn't know, that I still had questions about. There was,
however, one thing I did know. I'd done enough damage. It was time to start making things right.

  8

  Jal

  “Come inside, baby.”

  Paisley had curled up against me for the entire drive home, her head pressed against my chest, and now, as the driver came to a stop in front of her townhouse, she looked up at me, her light gray eyes wide.

  “I can’t bear to be alone tonight.”

  I wasn’t sure I was up to not being alone, but since it was my own damn fault she was this upset, I couldn’t be even more of an asshole and leave. “All right.”

  I left her in the back as I stepped out to speak with my driver. After a word, he moved to the trunk to grab the bag I kept there for occasions like this. Then I reached down and held out my hand to Paisley. She gave me a wan smile as she climbed out, staring up at the townhouse for a long moment before looking up at me.

  “You’ll stay all night, won’t you?”

  The beseeching look on her face had me nodding without thinking about it, and she turned into me.

  “Thank you. I know you like your time to yourself, but I…I just can’t bear the thought of being alone right now. I’ve spent so much of my life feeling alone and isolated.”

  “Come on.” I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her against my side. “Let’s get you inside.”

  Leading her to the front door, I cursed every step I’d taken that had led to this.

  Switching stylists – yeah, big mistake.

  Flirting with Allie, bigger mistake.

  Flying her to New York…

  Every choice I’d made lately seemed to be one wrong choice after another. Now that I was here with my fiancée, it should seem like I was doing the right thing. So why didn’t it feel right?

  Why did I feel like I was in the wrong place? Doing the wrong thing.

  Being with the wrong person.

  “Come on.”

  Paisley took my hand and tugged me along behind her, into a room of soft blues, greens, and whites. It was her favorite room, but I always felt like a drowning fish in there. She kept the lights off but turned on the fireplace to take the chill out of the air. She'd gone on a tear when the designer had told her the building wasn’t up to code for a real fireplace. She'd fired that one and two others before she finally realized that the only way to get the fireplace would be to tear the building down and buy a new one. Since some of the other tenants hadn't wanted to sell, she'd tried every trick in her book.