“He’s all set for you,” the woman said with a smile and more than a little curiosity written in her hazel eyes. Ben had known Arlene all his life. She’d worked for Jesse for years. It was doubtful that the reason for this meeting had slipped past her. But he kept his mouth shut and walked past her, pushing the door to Jesse’s office open.
Jesse Ball didn’t rise out of his leather chair, but leaned across the desk to shake his godson’s hand. Ben took a chance to do a once over of the man’s face, the shape of his mouth and nose, the graying hair that once was thick and dark brown. His eyes were gray, unlike Hayden’s, but that was the only difference. Ben’s gaze traveled to a silver frame on the shelf behind Jesse’s desk. It was Libby, Jesse’s daughter.
There could be no doubt as to Hayden’s lineage.
Jesse must have noticed the path Ben’s gaze had taken. “I know why you’re here,” he said grimly and sat back in his seat. “So let’s get it over with.”
“She just wants to meet you. She’s staying with me for a while, with Lu and Sally.”
“Iris knows all about her. I told her years ago.” Jesse had taken on a defensive stance, crossing his arms across his chest, his brows furrowed, and his jaw tensed.
“You don’t have to defend yourself to me,” Ben said quietly and settled down in the leather-bound chair opposite his godfather. “Whatever happened back in the past can stay there as far as I’m concerned. And if Iris knows then what else matters?”
Jesse chuckled grimly. “I have an image to keep up. Things like that die hard and there are lots of people around here who would love nothing better to see a scandal in my life.”
“Then talk to her, settle it. The more you try to hide it and avoid it the more people are going to talk.”
“I tried, Ben, I really did. When I first found out that Rosalyn was pregnant I tried to do what I could for her. But she wouldn’t have anything to do with me.
Ben nodded and stood again. “You don’t owe me an explanation. Never.”
“I’ll stop by tomorrow. Three-thirty.”
Ben nodded. He wondered how Hayden would react to such a speedy meeting. He hoped she wouldn’t suddenly get cold feet and take off. He’d tie her to the porch if he had to. “Okay. Thank you. I’m sure she’ll appreciate it.”
Jesse shrugged. “I guess I owe it to her as much as myself. And I hear ‘round town that you’ve taken a liking to her. She can’t be all that bad, can she?”
With a chuckle, Ben shook his head. “Now I can’t imagine how that got out. But between you and me, I’d like nothing more than to have her stay right where she is.”
“If she’s anything like her mother, son, than I can well understand that.” There was a smile on Jesse’s face, but it was a sad smile.
****
Hayden paced to the end of the long porch, her fingers twisting the tissue she held relentlessly until a small section fell off and drifted to the wooden floor. A blue sedan pulled into the stable area and parked next to Sally’s yellow Celica. The urge to turn around and flee into the house overwhelmed her, and she had to force herself to sit on the porch swing, dropping her hands onto her lap. The tissue had absorbed the clammy sweat of her palms, but did nothing to ease the tiny pinpricks of anxiety that attacked her.
With a deep breath, Hayden fought to control her breathing. Jesse Ball opened the door of his car. Sun and blue skies reflected off the windshield so she couldn’t get a good view of him just yet. Everything moved in slow motion except for her heartbeat that raced faster than a summer storm.
“You going to be okay?”
Hayden hadn’t even noticed Ben come out of the house. She’d been too focused on her unraveling nerves and the man who now stood next to the car, shutting the door. He hesitated next to the Cadillac, staring at her as hard as she stared back.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” she murmured. The tissue fell into two more pieces, landing on her lap.
“You can’t back down now.” Ben placed a hand on her shoulder and massaged it gently. The comforting gesture just grazed her frazzled nerves. He squeezed once then let go, leaving her side to go meet Jesse Ball, who walked with uncertainty toward the house. The two men shook hands and spoke briefly, allowing Hayden a chance to take in her father.
Jesse Ball wasn’t more than five foot ten with a slim build. Thick gray hair, with just a remnant of brown, was smoothed back neatly. She figured him to be just over fifty, and he wore his age very well, looking fit and wealthy. His clothes were pristine. He reminded Hayden of one of the rich tourists who came to Clarksport on summer weekends.
The only thing that jarred her was the pastiness of his skin. It was only slightly darker than the cream colored shirt he wore. For a moment, Hayden felt bad for the man. Apparently he was just as nervous about this meeting as she was.
The emotion passed quickly. After all, he was the one who deserted her. He should feel uncomfortable. He should be shaking in those over-priced leather shoes he wore.
She straightened her back and steeled her heart. Ben led Jesse to the porch, both sets of eyes fixed intently on her. Ben smiled gently as Hayden pushed herself to her feet.
“Hayden, this is Jesse Ball. Jesse, Hayden Merrick.”
And he nodded to Jesse and walked away, entering the house as quietly as he’d come out.
Don’t go! She could’ve used Ben’s strength at the moment, but she understood that he had his loyalties to this man, no matter what was developing between him and her. She couldn’t expect him to take sides in this.
Hayden gaze flicked back to her father and turned into a hardened stare. Two spots of red brightened his cheeks, but his face remained as white as sea foam. It surprised her. He was a lawyer and mayor, a powerful man. He couldn’t have gotten where he was today by being wracked by the same nerves that ripped her insides up. He certainly wasn’t what she expected. She’d pictured a sleazy looking snake of a man with a razor sharp smile bent on charming her with oozing slimy words. A horrible thought, no doubt, but the very truth. She hadn’t prepared herself for the soft gray eyes that seemed to drink her up.
Hayden’s mouth felt paper dry. She swallowed and tried to speak, but Jesse beat her to it.
“You’ve got Rosalyn’s eyes.”
“Apparently I got everything else from you,” Hayden countered. She lowered herself back onto the swing. If she hadn’t her legs would’ve given out, and the last thing she wanted was to be a puddle in front of this man.
Jesse nodded. “May I sit with you?”
Hayden shrugged, but slid over to the end to make room for him. She tucked the mutilated tissue into her pocket, but then regretted it. It left her fingers fidgeting with themselves. She kept her gaze pinned on the stable yard, which seemed uncommonly quiet. Maybe Ben had warned everyone away, so as not to disturb the sweet little reunion happening on the porch.
“Why did you desert my mother?”
The words were out before she really decided to speak them. No use beating around the bush, and there was no point testing the waters. She wanted answers. It was easiest just to plunge into freezing cold water than to tiptoe into it, one inch at a time.
Jesse nearly choked. The two red spots in his cheeks flamed brighter.
Hayden expected some smooth reply to come tripping off the man’s tongue, but nothing came. She focused on his eyes. They danced all over the place, shifted under her fixed glare. Finally they landed on hers and locked there. His lips tipped up, but it was a lousy excuse for a smile.
“Fear.”
“Fear,” Hayden repeated, tilting her head. She raised a brow. “You left a pregnant seventeen-year-old in a seedy hotel, outside Gary Indiana because you were scared.”
Hayden had never seen anyone’s complexion change so rapidly from a pale white to gray. “I didn’t know she was pregnant then.”
The anger that built inside Hayden’s chest thrust so hard that it should’ve broken bones. She pushed herself out of the swing so quickly
that it left the chains twisting, even under Jesse’s weight.
“Well, damn! I guess that makes everything all right then. Deserting a girl who isn’t pregnant is so much more acceptable. Thanks for the explanation, everything is much better now.”
Jesse’s face took on another transformation as he stood to face her. The gray disappeared. It was the most bizarre thing to watch, seeing the red almost swirl back into his cheeks. His eyes darkened and brows furrowed over them angrily. Quickly she turned away and paced down several yards, not wanting him to see her regain her composure and her own strength.
“I’m not here to make excuses, Hayden. I have none beyond the fact that I was a stupid, scared idiot who made an enormous mistake and didn’t know which way to turn.”
Hayden swung around back to him. At what point she lost her fear of this man, she wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just the anger that charged her. She stalked up to him and stood nearly toe-to-toe. She only had to look up a little to be able to meet the glare in his eyes.
“So now my mother was just a mistake? Well, if that’s how you saw her then dumping her off makes much more sense. Did you make her leave Burton? Was that your idea too? You were married then, weren’t you? You wanted to get your mistress as far away from your wife as possible?”
Frustration built in Jesse’s stance as much as in Hayden’s. He clenched his fists just as she did hers. His jaw set just as hard.
“Leaving was your mother’s idea. She wanted to get out of town, not me. I tried to talk her into staying. Really, I did. If I didn’t drive her out of Burton, she would have hitchhiked.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t she wouldn’t have left.”
Jesse laughed, a bitter sound. “Unless Rosalyn changed over the years, she would’ve found a way, Hell or high water. She hated Burton. Nothing would have kept her here.”
That declaration gave Hayden pause. Her mother had had the longest and widest stubborn streak in the world. She scraped and saved to buy the old home at the edge of town, even when everyone told her she was crazy. She fixed it up, mainly by herself, to turn it into the Widow’s Walk Inn.
There wouldn’t have been anything in the world that would’ve stopped her from making that place work.
If she had as much desire to leave Burton, as she had to start the inn, then Jesse probably told the truth.
Which didn’t let him off the hook, though.
“Fine, she was stubborn,” Hayden conceded gruffly. “But that’s only a minor fault, isn’t it?”
“As compared to deserting her, of course it is. I was a mean, unthinking bastard. If that’s what you want to think of me then I’m not going to convince you otherwise. But I’m sure as hell going to get my side of it out.”
“Ought to be good,” sneered Hayden, crossing her arms tightly across her chest. She looked her father up and down, sizing him up.
“I was in love with your mother, no matter what you think. But she was so young. I was a law student, from a very prominent family. I’d been married for two years, to the daughter of another very prominent family. We married for the connections, and nothing else.”
Jesse retreated to the railing, leaning against it heavily. The crimson had begun to subside from his cheeks again, but his gray eyes looked bloodshot, worn and sad, like a man who had known years of pain.
“Getting involved with Rosalyn, I couldn’t help it. I loved her, Hayden. No matter what my sins are, I loved her and it would have ruined everything else I wanted for my life. It would have destroyed my marriage, such as it was, my career, my parents.”
Jesse clenched his jaw defiantly. Hayden waited impatiently for him to finish his story. Her heart was torn between believing he actually anguished over her mother and the anger pent up for so long. “So, why in the world would you even leave town with her? Why make her promises you couldn’t keep?”
Jesse looked down toward the toes of his shiny shoes. “Because I thought I could throw it all away for her. To hell with everyone else. I wanted her and her suggestion to leave town, go east and start over again was the only thing I wanted to do. Everything she said made sense to me, all her plans for us.”
“Okay, and I know about the rest,” Hayden cut in bitterly. She walked up to her father and again met his eyes. “You got as far as that hotel outside Gary, Indiana. I guess somewhere along the way you got cold feet. Maybe it started slowly, maybe when you reached the border of South Dakota, you started doubting your decision. By the time you crossed over into Illinois you must have been squirming. Wanting to turn around so badly it was killing you. Why didn’t you? Why not just tell her it was a mistake and turn her around and take her back to her parents? What in God’s name made you leave her all alone in a hotel room hundreds of miles away from home?”
By the time she’d reached the end, her voice had risen to new heights. Someone peeked out of the barn and ducked his head back in quickly.
“I tried to talk her into going back,” Jesse claimed. “She’d have nothing to do with it. She was dead set against going anywhere near Burton again. She wanted the east coast. That night, the one before I left, she told me that if I wanted to go then fine, I could. But she wasn’t coming with me. We had a huge fight. I felt as low as a man could feel. I’d left a pregnant wife back in Burton, a career, my family. I left. I went back. My wife hadn’t even known what I’d done. If I could get back before she realized that I’d left her for Rosalyn then I could at least save that part of my life. She thought I was on a business trip.”
“So you dumped my mother and went on merrily with your perfect little life. While my mother hitchhiked the rest of the way to Massachusetts, working to feed herself. Struggling to try to start a life for herself and for me. And you didn’t even bother finding out what happened to her. She could’ve been murdered along the way and you didn’t give a care. As long as you had the life you planned for yourself.”
Ben had enough. The voices out on the porch had gone beyond raised. In all his thirty years, he’d never heard Jesse yell, and in their short acquaintance he hadn’t thought Hayden capable of it. But her ferocious voice beat against the thick log walls.
With all his force, Ben threw open the front door and stormed onto the deck. Hayden and Jesse were standing nearly nose to nose, both faces blotchy red, glaring at each other.
“That’s enough, both of you!” Ben bellowed. He grabbed Hayden’s shoulder in a firm grip and pulled her back. “You think this is productive? God Almighty, I swear they can hear you two clear to Burton.”
Both father and daughter breathed heavily, but Jesse had the good graces to look embarrassed and contrite.
Hayden, on the other hand, resembled a little spitfire, her fists clenched and unclenched, energy bristling from her as if she were ready to take flight, directly at Jesse.
Ben took her by her other shoulder and turned her to face him.
“I want you to go inside.”
“But—”
“Now! You’re not getting anywhere acting like this. You need to calm yourself. You know if Lu hears you it’s only going to upset her. You don’t want that, do you?”
Lips pursed, Hayden looked down at her toes and shook her head slowly.
“We’ll deal with this, honey. I know you’ve got years of pent-up anger, but this isn’t the way to rid yourself of it. Now go inside, get yourself something to drink and I’ll talk to Jesse for a while.”
Ben leaned down, placed a soft kiss on Hayden’s forehead and gave her shoulders a squeeze.
With a long glance at Jesse, Hayden turned and disappeared into the house.
Ben took a deep breath and turned to his godfather, who stared off toward Sky Butte.
“That’s a hell of a daughter you got there,” Ben commented lightly.
Jesse pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and took one out. The hands of the unflappable Mayor Ball shook like a leaf.
“Every inch her mother,” Jesse muttered, lighting the smoke with a tur
quoise encrusted silver Zippo.
“What you going to do?”
Jesse shrugged. He drew deeply on the cigarette and slowly released the smoke. The diaphanous cloud dangled in the air for a moment before being taken away in a dozen different directions by the light breeze.
“Don’t know what she wants from me. Besides my immortal soul burning in Hell for what I did.”
Ben chuckled, but it held little humor. He patted the older man on the back.
“No, I don’t believe that. I think once she lets your explanation sink in she’ll come to peace with it. She might not be inviting you to any father-daughter picnics, but I’m sure she’ll forgive you.”
“I don’t know. I hurt a lot of people, Ben. A lot of people I cared about, including Hayden’s mom. Maybe her most of all.”
“It’s water under the bridge now. Iris forgave you. Libby dealt with it a long time ago and she’s a well-adjusted young lady. You were honest with them from the start. That’s the best you could do.”
Jesse glared at Ben. Not that the anguish in his gray eyes was directed at Ben, but Ben felt the burden, nonetheless.
“And what about what was best for Rosalyn? When did I ever put her needs in front of my own? I was a selfish bastard for getting involved with her. A selfish, stupid bastard. And now I have a daughter I never had the chance to know and she’s suffering because of me and my choices.”
“A daughter who wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the choices you made,” Ben reminded him. “I don’t think she’s going to find much fault about that.”
“Well, that fact won’t bring her around,” Jesse countered angrily. “I tried my best to help, once I found out about her. But it wasn’t any good then and I doubt it will pull any weight with her now.”
Ben sighed. “You want me to try to get through to her? Maybe she needs some time to cool off. Why don’t you go home now, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Maybe we should just let it go,” Jesse said, his voice strained. “I have my doubts about her forgiving me.”
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