Then, to his horror, Brady saw Rachel standing in the shadow of the door to the clerk’s office.
How much had she heard?
He saw Rachel shivering and crying before she turned and fled.
“Rachel!” he shouted and ran after her.
He heard Hannah continuing to cackle as he rushed past her and out of the clerk’s office.
Every deputy clerk was stunned into silence. But CiCi was enraged.
“Why the hell did you do that?” CiCi demanded of Hannah, screaming into her face. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Hannah sneered at CiCi. “To quote you: so what? And did you notice he couldn’t bring himself to say he loved her? He just stood there in the middle of this office and said nothing!”
“That’s his business—and Rachel’s—not yours, Hannah Davenport,” CiCi flung back. “I know it might be hard for you to accept, but Brady Craft is a nice guy and Rachel is wonderful. But you’ve probably destroyed whatever they do—or did—have together. I hope you’re happy. There’s more than one way to be a homewrecker, you know!”
“I didn’t destroy anything, CiCi,” Hannah said. “They brought this on themselves. Can’t keep secrets in this town. Not many, anyway,” she added, suddenly looking very rattled.
“Yeah, especially if you’ve taken it upon yourself to act as the town crier of all things mildly naughty!” CiCi snapped, looking Hannah up and down with contempt. “What’s next, Hannah? Wanna try to put them in stocks out on the courthouse lawn for everyone to see and mock? Would that make you feel better? Or maybe they could wear a big capital S on their chests for a month—the S standing for stupid because that’s all they’ve been. They’re not liars!”
“That’d be too good for them,” Hannah said, and CiCi shook her head disgustedly. “Like I said, it’s hard to keep secrets in this town anyway. And…you especially shouldn’t hide the truth from your best friend—from someone you’re supposed to love.”
Hannah choked, began to tear up, and hurriedly left the clerk’s office.
Brady caught up with Rachel as she reached the stairwell, but she wouldn’t talk to him until they got back to chambers, and she marched past Sherry’s desk and went directly to her office, Brady following closely behind. Sherry already knew what had happened that morning; when Rachel had arrived at the courthouse after the disaster at the distillery, Rachel told Sherry what had gone down and then at once went in search of Brady.
Rachel fell into her desk chair and put her head on her desk, her arms covering her head.
“Rachel, talk to me, please,” Brady implored. “How did Hannah know? What happened at breakfast?”
“Didn’t you get my text?”
“No, I left my phone at home.”
No wonder Brady had looked like Hannah had ambushed him. That’s exactly what had happened.
She sat up, and her face was still wet with tears. “Someone saw us at Judicial College.”
“I bet I can guess who.”
Rachel nodded. “Yep, Judge Claiborne.”
He blew out a long breath. “What happened at the distillery?”
Rachel very briefly recounted the catastrophe, including the fact that the confrontation had had an audience. She stared mutely at him for a few seconds.
“Why didn’t you answer Hannah’s question?” Rachel asked in a weak and scratchy voice. Rachel’s throat burned from all the crying and attendant coughing she had suffered through over the past hour. “Why didn’t you tell her that you loved me? Why couldn’t you say that?” Tears started to again leak from the corners of Rachel’s eyes.
“Rachel, she cornered me downstairs. I tried to get her out of there, but it didn’t work. And what was I supposed to say to her? She was making all kinds of nasty statements about us.”
“What were you supposed to say?” Rachel repeated back to him and stood. Did he really not know? “How about the truth?”
“Rachel, I’m sorry,” he said, but she could tell he was angry. “But don’t get mad at me. You’re the one that had the idea to keep all this a secret,” he spat, and started pacing. “I might as well turn in my gavel right now. Maybe I’ll just have it delivered to Hannah today. If we’d gone public, I wouldn’t be in this mess. I’m probably going to have to take up Justice Nolan’s offer to help me get a job in the Attorney General’s office.”
First Hannah’s idiocy, now his.
All he was thinking about was himself.
It was his mess.
And apparently he couldn’t or didn’t want to publicly admit that he was in love with her.
She got it.
Rachel drew in a long breath.
“Maybe it was a bad idea, but you willingly went along with keeping it secret,” she said through clenched teeth. “Don’t you dare blame just me.”
Sherry appeared at Rachel’s door. “Sorry to interrupt, but you’ve got court,” Sherry said, looking at Rachel. “It’s ten past already.”
Rachel thanked her and Sherry quickly withdrew. Rachel walked past Brady, went to the coat rack, and put on her robe without another word as the questions burned in her brain.
Aren’t you going to answer Hannah’s question?
Why can’t you say it when someone else is around?
Rachel scooped up a legal pad, pen, and a reference book from the edge of Sherry’s desk and went into the courtroom wordlessly. She knew she looked like hell, but Rachel just wanted to get through the docket so she could go home and fix herself up.
Or go hide.
At least on the bench she could deal with the cases in front her and hopefully forget—for a little while—all the horrible things that had happened that morning.
It was civil motion hour, duller than the criminal work, but Rachel welcomed the mundane task. She robotically called the cases, made the necessary rulings, and took the more complicated matters under advisement to make a decision later. Her brain was addled and she didn’t trust herself enough to make a call on the more complex cases.
Halfway through the docket, Hannah entered the courtroom and the two former friends locked eyes momentarily. Grinning, Hannah sat down next to a few local attorneys and began whispering in their ears, causing them to squirm and give uncomfortable glances to Hannah and then up to Rachel on the bench. As Hannah enlightened every lawyer in the gallery with the news of Rachel’s personal life, Rachel had to sit there and watch the revenge unfold before her very eyes in her own courtroom. Some attorneys even laughed. Sickened, she rushed through the rest of her docket and retreated to chambers. Sherry was waiting for her, but Brady was gone.
“Looks like you’re psychic,” Rachel said. “I’ve lost both of them.”
“Rachel, go home,” Sherry advised.
“I’m going to do better than that,” Rachel said as she slipped out of her robe and hung it up.
Brady went home after Rachel went on the bench. He wanted to get away from the courthouse, eat lunch alone, and get his phone.
He didn’t understand why Rachel had gotten so angry with him. It had been her idea not to tell, and why couldn’t she see that he’d been trapped by Hannah in the clerk’s office? If someone had asked him his own name in the middle of that horrible confrontation, he would’ve struggled to respond. He knew he loved her; but now he wasn’t sure whether she felt the same. Had the events of the day been terrible enough to wipe out what she had ever felt for him?
He decided to go back to the courthouse. Maybe they could leave work early and go somewhere together to talk and recover.
“Is Rachel here?” Brady asked upon returning to chambers.
Sherry licked her lips and concentrated on her computer screen in front of her. “She’s gone,” was the answer.
“Where? Did she go home?”
“Yes.”
“Then I gotta get out there,” he said, turning to leave.
“She went home, but probably wasn’t there that long,” Sherry revealed.
“Do you know w
here she was going after going home?”
“Yes, but…”
“But what? Spit it out, Sherry,” Brady begged.
“I know where she went, but she told me not to tell you.”
It had officially been the worst day of Brady’s life.
Rachel wouldn’t return his calls or his texts and it had been absolutely no use getting any information out of Sherry. He’d even called Rachel’s parents looking for her, and it was the most excruciatingly awkward conversation he’d ever had. Rachel had told them everything that had happened, which meant that they’d only learned that day about their daughter’s secret affair with her fellow judge and how it had all fallen apart, and in the most mortifyingly public way possible.
Before that day, Brady had played out various scenarios in his mind where he and Rachel eventually had gotten busted. None of them had been pleasant and in each of them, everything ended in tears, accusations, and a lot of yelling. So he’d been right on the money how the revelation of their secret would unfold.
Tears? Check.
Accusations? Oh, yeah.
Yelling? Plenty.
But the version of events that had unfolded that day far outstripped his worst nightmares. In fact, Brady figured that it was the actual worst case scenario—outside someone getting physically injured, killed, arrested, or disbarred.
And any of those things could still happen in the aftermath of the day’s events.
He sat on his patio that evening, continuously replaying the day’s events in his weary mind and sucking down a warm beer. Now, in the calm of the too-warm evening, he thought of all the things he should’ve said. The rejoinders, the put downs, the comebacks for every nasty thing that Hannah had thrown at him.
He also had identified the things he shouldn’t have said. The first thing on that list was not blaming Rachel out of his misplaced anger. Because when he had thrown out the it was your idea thing, that’s exactly what he had done.
True, they had been in it together.
And that had been the point.
By blaming her, he’d put her aside and apart from him. It was a level of rejection.
And Rachel reacted by fleeing.
But the much worse thing was what he hadn’t done—he hadn’t admitted he loved her.
It stung to know Rachel hadn’t said the same thing to Hannah, and he realized that on some level he’d held back and hadn’t admitted his love out of a sense of wounded pride and sheer spite. But if he thought it would bring her back, Brady would go to every last person in Bourbon Springs and tell them he loved Rachel.
He didn’t know what he was going to do. He knew he needed to find her, fast, and before she worked up the will to come back to work. The longer she was gone, the more likely he was to lose her forever.
Although it would be nice to stay on the bench, he didn’t have any illusions about his chances to keep his seat after what had happened that day. Half of Bourbon Springs probably knew what had happened and Hannah would make sure that the other half found out, and fast.
But the truth was that he didn’t care any longer about being a judge. The job didn’t matter.
The most important thing to him was Rachel.
And he couldn’t even find her to tell her.
Chapter 25
“For the last time, no.”
“I’ll get on my knees, beg you, if that’s what it takes,” Brady said, and did exactly that right there next to Sherry’s desk.
“Don’t,” Sherry moaned. “What if someone comes in here?” Sherry asked, casting a cautious eye at the door to the courtroom. “Sheriff Sammons is right on the other side of that door, you know, waiting to open court for you. All it would take would be for him to pop his head in to check on you—and he’d see you like that,” she said, gesturing at the still-kneeling Brady. “You’d never hear the end of it.”
“Don’t care,” Brady replied.
It was Wednesday morning. Brady had spent most of the past two days begging Sherry to tell him Rachel’s whereabouts. He apparently had hoped that he might wear her down with the repeated requests for information, but Sherry was made of tougher stuff.
“I can’t break her confidence, Judge,” Sherry said. “She trusted me.”
Sherry knew she wasn’t going to tell him where Rachel was. She’d given Rachel her word.
When Rachel had revealed to her that Brady hadn’t answered Hannah’s question—do you love Rachel Richards?—Sherry’s feelings had hardened toward the judge. Before she fled, Rachel admitted to Sherry that she loved Brady—and that they’d told each other for the first time during Judicial College.
But when pointedly asked in front of witnesses (everyone in the clerk’s office!), the not-so-honorable Judge Craft had said nothing. In the face of accusations that their relationship was nothing more than physical, Brady hadn’t said a word to refute that. In Sherry's mind, Brady had abandoned Rachel.
And she wasn’t going to lift a finger (or open her mouth, as the case may be) to help someone like that.
With a pale face and dead eyes, Brady stood, put his robe on, and went into court without saying another word.
When Rachel had finished with court on that Miserable Monday (as Rachel had decided to call it), she had Sherry clear her calendar for the next week. She then went to her computer, found the website for the grand hotel at West Baden Springs, Indiana, and (overdoing it a bit) made a reservation for four nights. Rachel told Sherry where she was going and swore her secretary to secrecy. She went home, packed in fifteen minutes, and hit the road north.
It had taken only two hours to get to the place from Bourbon Springs. Rachel had never actually stayed at the fabulous, Old World-style hotel, but for whatever reason it was the first place that had popped into her head when she’d made the snap decision to get the hell out of Bourbon Springs for several days. She only knew about the hotel because once when she was returning from a conference she attended with Mira in Saint Louis, her then-boss insisted on making the detour. At first Rachel thought Mira daft to take the time to go and look at a hotel, but when they got there, she understood Mira’s curiosity about the site. To call the place monumental was not hyperbole. It was a huge structure, with hundreds of rooms ringing a massive domed atrium. It looked more like a state capital or a train station or a shrine than a hotel.
She specifically requested an interior room with a balcony. Rachel wanted to watch all the comings and goings: the guests dragging luggage across the colossal circular lobby; the sightseers lounging on overstuffed chairs and couches in small groupings; and the drinkers at the small bar near the front door. Rachel wanted to be distracted by the silly parade of humanity rather than her own sorrows.
She had reserved a four-night stay, but wondered whether she would stay that long. The rooms were very expensive, and would put a dent in her budget, even considering her bumped-up judicial salary. Even if she left early, she knew she wasn’t going to head back to Bourbon Springs. She wouldn’t be ready to face the town again that soon. Perhaps she could spend some nights in Louisville and get a hotel room with a view of the Ohio River and sit and watch the river traffic as craft moved up and down the water.
Rachel passed her first night (Miserable Monday) in West Baden Springs by mostly staying in bed and crying, interspersed with periods of fitful sleeping. Tuesday was spent much the same, except she did manage to check out the shops on the first level and take a walk on the beautifully landscaped grounds. She had started to relax just a little as she wandered amongst dozens of rose bushes in full bloom. But then Rachel rounded a corner and saw a bench which looked remarkably like the one in the woods at the state park. She was relieved that her reaction to this reminder of Brady didn’t send her into another crying jag (those were getting really old), but its appearance nonetheless put a big damper on what had otherwise been a pleasantly engaging walk.
By Wednesday morning she was in a deep funk of melancholy and missing Brady something fierce, to the point that her b
ody ached with an overwhelming sense of loss. At the end of that day, she was seriously considering checking out and leaving the next morning, but if she did that, Rachel wasn’t going back to Bourbon Springs just yet. While she missed Brady, she wasn’t ready to see him.
Wednesday evening found her sitting on the long porch that arced around at least one quarter of the hotel’s circumference. There was no one around. It was late, and all the lovers had already retreated inside for the night. The sense of her loneliness expanded as Rachel felt the evening breeze brush the hair from her face and she heard a lone dove cooing. She noticed a falling star, but didn’t bother to make a wish. She wrapped her jacket against herself more tightly and gazed out upon the hotel grounds. Illuminated paths crisscrossed through gardens. In the distance near the edge of a wood, Rachel saw a dimly lit gazebo near a pond and thought she could make out the silhouette of two people embracing.
She questioned why she had retreated to such a romantic place to attempt to heal a broken heart. But she knew it was better than being back in Bourbon Springs; Brady would be knocking on her door, or trying to call her, or whatever. She knew he had been trying to email her, but she’d deleted the messages without reading, and had done the same with his texts. He had stopped trying to reach her sometime yesterday.
Being alone really sucked, but at least she was unbothered in her loneliness at the hotel. Back home, she’d not only have to fend off the attempted contact by Brady, but by others, such as CiCi or Sherry or her parents. She knew all that awaited her when she returned, but for now, in the immediate aftermath of what had happened, she was satisfied to be left undisturbed.
Secret Blend (Bourbon Springs Book 1) Page 21