In a flash, he saw a montage of her faces, from the day he’d proposed, to this most recent visit to Whitegate. She’d come to farewell her father, and he’d tormented and tortured her and used her body for his own satisfaction. He kicked his foot against the wall, shouting a curse when his toe shuddered with violent pain.
If you stop this car at the ranch, and I get out, that’s it. That’s the door closing on any hope of a relationship between us. Whatever might happen… whatever you might discover… there is no hope for us.
He’d stopped the car. He’d let her walk away. And she’d made it clear that it had been for the last time.
CHAPTER TEN
Harrison’s eyes were loaded with disgust. “Mitchell Harrison?” He asked the man who had the same autocratic nose as he.
“That’s me.” The older man straightened in his seat, looking quizzically at the woman to his left. His wife, Harrison would guess, going by the enormous diamond ring and jewelled necklace. Curiously, he let his gaze drift further left, to a younger woman with ice blue eyes just like his.
“I’d like a word, thanks. In private.”
Mitchell looked down at his half eaten chateaubriand. “Can it wait?”
“No. It’s about a common acquaintance of ours. Diana Samson?”
The old man stiffened, his expression furious. “Fine. Darling, I’ll just be a moment.”
He rose and fell into step behind Harrison. And, as Harrison opened the door out onto the street, he knew. “You’re him.”
Not a question. Mitchell Harrison was looking at a mirror image of his younger self.
“Yes. The son you didn’t want.”
Mitchell, to his credit, began to shake. “Hell.”
“Yeah. Bet you never thought I’d rear my head in your life.”
“What do you want?”
“We have a problem, and I’m going to need your help to solve it.”
“My help?”
“Yes, your help.”
“Why would I help you?” Mitchell asked disbelievingly, but his eyes were staring at Harrison’s face, as though he’d seen a ghost.
“Because, Mitchell, if you don’t, I’m going to have a merry old time ordering paternity tests and not taking much care to keep the court order suppressed. In fact, I’ll happily send the results to every press outlet in the continental US.”
Mitchell gripped the wall behind himself. “And I’m sure I’m not the only bastard you’ve got running around out there, so it’ll probably just open the door to any other children who might want a slice of daddy’s big old pie.”
Mitchell’s eyes were glazed over. “What do you want?” He asked finally, bitterly.
“My mother needs to answer for what she did to your home.”
Mitchell shook his head. His expression showed his revulsion at the very idea. “I don’t want that. I don’t need it.”
“I know, but she’s got herself into a flap worrying that the axe is going to drop any day. She wants to clear her conscience.”
“It was years ago. She was a child throwing a tantrum. I got over it.”
“Yes. And that brings me to another interesting point. My mom was fifteen when you were, what? Mid thirties? There is a little sticky point of the age of consent to consider. Obviously it’s in no one’s best interests for this to become a messy, drawn out proceeding.”
Mitchell looked like he was about to be sick. “No, no, no one wants that.”
“So, I need you to come with me, and make a statement. Outline everything. What you did. How you turned my fifteen year old mother away, and threw it in her face that you were married with kids. How you told her you wouldn’t support her. How you told her she’d never get a dime from you. I really need to you to go into detail about how your behaviour would have affected her state of mind. Then, you’re going to pay for the best lawyer money can buy, and make sure mom gets what she deserves.”
“Which is?” Mitchell asked breathlessly.
“I want her tried for wilful destruction of property rather than arson, and for her age at the time of the crime to be factored in. It’s a misdemeanour. No judge in their right mind will want to pursue this.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because I believe in justice, and fairness, and so does Diana. She deserves to put this whole sorry mess in the past.”
“Fine. I’ll do it. But that’s it. I want to put this whole sorry mess in the past, too.”
Harrison actually laughed, for the old man was so pathetic. “You’re just a Good Samaritan, aren’t you, Mitchell?”
* * *
Madeline stretched her legs out in front of her, trying to catch the weak winter sunshine. Her feet were bare, coated in the gritty sand from the beach, and her hair was long about her shoulders, falling down her back. She’d dressed in the first things she could find – a pair of jeans and an old sweater of KB’s. Of course, it hadn’t been enough for a brutally frozen December morning, and she was chilled to the bone.
Beneath the sweater, her slender waist was showing the first signs of the life that she was nurturing inside of her. She put her hands on it and stared out to sea. So many questions needed answering, but principal amongst them was where she should live.
The essence of Harrison was growing inside of her, and no matter how mad he made her, she couldn’t take that baby away from him. She’d seen him with Ivy. She knew he was a great father.
The publicity storm that was raging around Dean was almost completely contained to DC. She’d somehow managed to escape fairly unscathed. Just a few reporters when the news had first broken, and then the focus had shifted back to Dean, and David. David was the darling of the story, and deservedly so.
It might not always be so calm, but for the moment, Madeline was able to hold her broken heart in peace.
“Madeline!” Harrison’s walk was purposeful, his expression harsh in his handsome face. Her stomach ached at the first sight she’d had of him in weeks. He stopped, a few steps from her, and stared. “You look like… a ghost.” He laughed ruefully and shook his head. “I mean, you look like yourself.”
The first sighting had made her body sag, but she quickly recovered herself. Somehow, she was going to have to get used to this. They were going to be parents to the same little person. They couldn’t do that if they weren’t even capable of being in the same room.
“Hello, Harrison,” she said stiffly, pulling her sunglasses down over her face, despite the grey gloom of the winter’s morning.
He deserved no more. She had every right to want to freeze him out. He sat beside her, careful not to touch her. Sex was where they got confused. He needed to talk. To think clearly. He stared out at the horizon, focussing on a bobbing bouy far in the distance.
“I’m glad you’re still in Whitegate,” he said, after an uncomfortable moment in which neither spoke or dared to breathe.
She swallowed. “I don’t know where else to go.”
His heart ached for the sadness he heard in her tone. She was lost at sea, adrift on the current of life. “Whitegate’s not so bad,” he said, then inwardly cursed. What an idiotic thing to say. She’d grown up in the town. She knew what it had to offer.
“If I go back to DC, I’ll get hounded by the press. And that’s the last thing I feel like.”
“I read about Dean. He did well. It was very brave of him to confront the questions as he did.”
“Yeah.” Her smile was small, but it conveyed her pride. “He did great. He’s very relieved to be able to live out in the open.”
“It’s hard to carry around such a big secret.”
Her heart turned over. She knew a lot about that. “Harrison, I need to talk to you,” she said quietly, not daring to move her head towards him.
He studied her profile, and realised that, yet again, she’d come out in an outfit more appropriate for a Spring afternoon than a winter’s morning. He shrugged out of his coat and wrapped it around her. “So do I. Need to talk to you, I mean
.”
She didn’t react. “I don’t know what you’ve got to say, and I don’t think I want to hear it.” She bit down on her lip, uncertainly. “I meant what I said. That day you dropped me back to the ranch, I said that if you left me, it would be the end of us. And as far as I’m concerned, we’re over.”
His Adam’s Apple bobbed up and down in his stubbled throat, but he didn’t say anything.
“It’s important that you understand that, before I say what I’ve got to say. This is not a precursor to me trying to get you to reconsider. Things will be a lot simpler if we remember all the reasons we don’t make sense.”
His knuckles were white, gripped in fists by his side. “Go on,” he urged, his tone flat.
She nodded, and kept staring out to the swirling ocean. “I’m pregnant.”
Harrison had the sense that he was falling through a crack in time. His body seemed to burn with fever, and then shake with coldness. True shock descended upon him.
“You’re the only man I’ve ever been with. The baby’s yours.”
Harrison’s face was white. His eyes were wide with surprise. “You’re… sure?”
“Yeah.”
He closed his eyes. “When did you find out?”
Her smile was without humour. “Just before you came to the ranch that day. The last time we saw each other.”
“Jesus,” he dragged his hands roughly through his hair.
“The day you made love to me, then told me you wished you loved anyone but me,” she said quietly.
“Maddie,” he groaned desperately, staring it in complete horror. “Oh, Maddie.” He put a hand on her knee, and she violently pulled away from him.
“Don’t.” Then, when she spun around to face him, and lifted her glasses up, he saw the full force of her wild emotional state. “Don’t you dare touch me!”
He felt numb all over. The problem they faced just got a whole lot bigger. He thought of the baby, and grimaced. “What are you going to do?’
“Do?” She turned back to the ocean, trying desperately to bring her emotions under control. “What do you mean, what am I going to do?”
“You can’t have this baby, Madeline.”
Her head spun, as though she’d just been slapped. “What?”
“No. Absolutely not. You need to get rid of it. Now. Or as soon as it can be humanly arranged.”
She was shocked out of her own emotions to stare at him in complete confusion. Her hands instinctively went to her mid-section. “How can you say that?” Her face was torn apart by hurt. “Is the thought of me having your baby so terrible to you?”
“No!” He got up so that he could kneel before her. When he put his hands on her knees now, she didn’t pull away. “The thought of losing you is, though. It’s the worst thing I can imagine.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve seen it. I held Sal while she died in my arms. I held her while the blood drained from her body. I love Ivy, with all my heart, but I can’t go through this again.”
Madeline hated him. She wanted to, anyway. But she loved him more. She clutched her hands together to stop herself from physically comforting him. “You said it yourself. What happened to Sally was rare. There’s no reason to think it’s going to happen to me.”
“I’m not prepared to take that risk.”
“It’s not your decision,” she said, finally, wriggling away from him and standing. As she moved off the bench, her sweater lifted, and he caught the briefest glimpse of her skin beneath the over-sized top.
He closed his eyes for a moment. “You’re pregnant.”
“Yes.” She glared at him angrily. “And I hate you for thinking I would get rid of this baby.”
He nodded. The certainty that he was making everything even worse clawed at him. “That was wrong of me. It was my first reaction. It’s just… if anything happened to you, I would never recover.”
She hardened her heart. She had to end this cycle they were in. There was no happy ending for them. They weren’t capable of it. “Our child will be well provided for,” she said coldly. “And you have parenting experience. If anything happens to me, you’ll cope.”
“Madeline,” he said thickly, grabbing for her hand and pulling her back to him. “I love you. Please wait.”
“No.” She squeezed her eyes shut. The tears that were never far away anymore were cloying at her throat. “I can’t look at you. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, Harrison.”
“Then don’t let it be. Make it easy. Marry me.”
Her laugh was loaded with anger. “No.”
“Not because of the baby.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a velvet pouch. He upended her palm and tipped the contents into it. She looked down, and gasped, at the beautiful ring. It was not the one he’d proposed with eight years earlier. This was a perfect circlet of diamonds, dainty but spectacular. She shook her head and passed it back to him.
“I brought this ring here, looking for you. Before I even knew about the baby. Madeline, I have been so wrong about us. About you. About everything. And I need to start making it right. Right now.”
She swallowed. It was what she had desperately longed to hear, but weeks too late. What had changed his mind? Why now? She lifted her gaze to his, her eyes were accusing. “You know about Diana.”
He looked out to the swirling waters and then focussed his gaze back on her face. “Yes.”
Madeline took a step backwards. “How?”
“Diana told me.”
Madeline groaned softly. “I asked her not to do that.”
“Why? Even now, why did you do that?”
“Because I knew you’d feel compelled to turn her in. That it would put you in an impossible situation.”
He nodded. “Yes. It did, but not for that reason. The impossible situation I find myself in is wanting to shout at you for being so dense, at the same time that I know I can’t bear to fight with you anymore.” He let out an expletive and closed the distance between them. “Why didn’t you tell me this at the time?’
“You know why,” she said quietly.
“It’s fixed, Madeline. Or, at least, it will be. These things take time, but my mother will not be going to prison. She won’t even be charged with a felony. Wyoming PD is looking at her for a misdemeanour. She won’t even have to go to court.”
Madeline reached for something to hold onto, and connected with his arms. Relief, crushing and vital slammed into her. “Oh, Harrison. I’m so pleased. For Diana. She deserves to know that the whole thing is behind her.”
“Yes.”
“How did you do that?”
“I put a little pressure on my father,” he shook his head. “Complete jerk, but at least his self-serving desire to keep out of the tabloids made him extremely obliging, in this instance.”
“I was beginning to lose hope. Diana gave me the contract he’d had her sign, but there was nothing in it that would help her. And I so badly wanted to help her.”
“I know. And if I’d known about this eight years ago, I would have been able to help fix it then. You should have been honest with me. She should have been honest with me. When I think of what we lost, because you both wanted to protect a secret like that… A secret that could be fixed….” He risked reaching up and running his hand through her hair. The unspoken regret swarmed between them. Eight years had been lost, and for nothing.
She sucked in a deep breath. It tasted of the salty sea and heartbreak. For eight years had passed, and they were different people now. She had to stay strong. “I’ll let you know when my first appointment is booked. In case you’d like to come.”
“Madeline, stop.” He said firmly, surprised that in the midst of the most important conversation of his life, he managed to sound authoritative.
“Why? We’ve done this so many times. I can’t go through life with you always needing someone else to explain my actions to you. My actions… are… I mean… Nothing should matter except
how we feel. That I love you should be all you need to know.”
He shrugged. “Yes. You love me. But you loved me then, and you left me.”
“Yeah. I left you to save your mother. To save your career. Because I didn’t want you to end up hating me for my father’s actions.”
“I know that now. But all I had, at the time, was the certainty that you’d very quickly moved on to greener pastures.”
He put his hands under her elbows, holding her close enough to him that he could see the flecks of color in her ice blue eyes. “Madeline, I never stopped loving you. I am ashamed of how I’ve treated you, since you came back. My only excuse, and I know it’s not a great one, is that I’ve been driven completely crazy by how you make me feel.” He shook his head. “That’s not right. Let me start again. Whenever I’m with you, I just want to fall to your feet and beg you to never leave me again. I don’t have any pride with you. I just have love. And that scares me. It terrifies me. Especially because you seem to be able to flick a switch and walk away.”
Her expression was forlorn. “I walked away, but I never flicked a switch.”
“I know.” He ran a finger over her cheek, and then slowly, lowered himself to the ground. He kept his hands on hers. “Madeline May, I should have come after you eight years ago. I should have never let you go. I should have welcomed you back without questions or recriminations, when you came home. I have hurt you and I don’t deserve you, but I need you. I love you, and I know you love me. And finally I get it. You’re right. That’s all that matters.”
She stared down at him, her heart and head at war over the best course of action.
“Please,” he smiled his lopsided smile, and her heart burst through her mind with a resounding thud.
She nodded wordlessly, her smile shining with true happiness for the first time in years.
He let out a cry of relief and slipped the ring on to her finger. He spun her around, in a moment just slightly more perfect than when he’d proposed to her eight years earlier.
A Second Chance at Love: A Hometown Hero Series Novel Page 12