His for the Taking

“My mother? You talked to my mother that night?”

She nodded.

“I don’t believe you! There’s no way she could have resisted throwing such a call from you in my face!”

“I don’t care what you believe. Do you deny that when I called you again, a year and a half later, you were even less receptive than she’d been that night? If you do, let me refresh your memory. You answered the phone and told me you never wanted to talk to me again! Then you slammed the phone down. At least your mother had the guts to talk to me!”

Her beautiful violet eyes shimmered with remembered pain, making a muscle in his gut pull. Her accusation about his mother didn’t play. His mother, who had rigid views of social order, would have skinned him alive if she’d found out he had anything to do with Jesse Ray’s daughter.

“The truth is—you waited a whole year and a half after you’d run off to call. Like I said, it was too late.”

“Well, then let’s leave it at that! You got married to a nice, respectable girl. Maybe I moved on, too. Okay?”

But it wasn’t okay. Why were feelings that he’d suppressed for years suddenly so important to him?

“I told myself to leave it at that! And I did, as long as Lizzie was alive—for her sake. But now that she’s gone and you’re here, damn it, I want to know why you left me for Vernon without any explanation. All I knew was what your mother told everybody—that you’d flaunted yourself around Vernon to spite her and had run off with him for the same reason.”

She whitened. Although she tried to hide her fear, he saw that her hands were shaking. What was she so scared of?

Then she drew herself up straighter, and her beautiful lips thinned with determination. It was as if she found some inner strength that enabled her to face him down.

“I—I wasn’t myself when I left. After talking to your mother, I believed you were relieved to be rid of me.”

Relieved? He’d been in so much agony he’d thought he was dying. When he couldn’t get in touch with her, he’d been wild to find her, to talk to her. Wanting to hurt her now, as she’d hurt him then, he said, “I should have been relieved. Any sane guy would’ve been. You were your mother’s daughter, in the end.”

“Well, there you go,” she whispered in a small voice. “Lucky you…to escape my clutches.”

Her casually tossed comment pushed him over the edge. “Well, damn it, what if I wasn’t smart enough to be relieved?” he growled, hating himself for not hiding that she’d held such power over him. Hell, she still held power over him as she stood there looking pretty and wounded and sexy as hell in the wet T-shirt that clung to her breasts. “When you ran off, I was worried sick about you.”

“You were?” She bit her lip and looked away in confusion, as if what he’d said made no sense.

“I thought about you all the time. I didn’t want to believe what your mother was saying without hearing your side,” he said. “Every night I’d come out here and wonder how you could just disappear like that. I missed you, damn it! I wanted to know you were okay, at least, even if you were with Turner.”

“Did you ever try to find me?”

“I wanted to. But, hell, my father got sick a week after you left. I was forced to take over the family businesses. On his deathbed he confessed to having another son…Adam. Mother couldn’t accept him. I had a lot on my plate, too.”

Something in his low tone got through to her because she whispered in a raspy, broken voice, “I’m sorry about your father. I didn’t know. I was upset when I left…and too ashamed to call you again after your mother had so soundly rejected me.”

“You sure as hell should have been ashamed.”

“It took me a while to get over…what happened.” Her eyes darkened with pain. “But when I finally called you again, you didn’t want to talk to me. No—you were cold and arrogant.”

Because he’d been afraid he’d break if he spoke to her, because he’d been trying to be faithful to Lizzie, damn it.

“I don’t see why you’re dredging all this up now, Cole.”

Maybe because nearly a year had passed since Lizzie’s death, and he finally felt free to pursue whatever the hell he wanted. Because Maddie was here, looking even lovelier and more vulnerable than before. His reaction wasn’t logical. He knew that. But somehow his involvement with Maddie wasn’t over. Seeing her again had thoroughly convinced him of that.

“So, what was in those letters you wrote me after I refused to talk to you?” he asked. He remembered too well signing for those two certified envelopes and then angrily tossing them in a drawer and telling himself he had to forget them.

Maddie gasped and lost even more color. “Didn’t you read my letters?”

“No. I signed for them, but I couldn’t read them, for the same reason I couldn’t talk to you on the phone—because of Lizzie. Maybe someone like you can’t understand this—but I would have felt like I was cheating on her if anything you said tempted me. Then she died, and I couldn’t read them out of loyalty to her. She’d been my wife. What had you ever done—except jilt me for Turner?”

Maddie drew in a sharp, anguished breath. Licking her lips, she swallowed hard. “Okay,” she finally said. “You just signed for them…. Well, whatever I said in those letters can’t matter now,” she said. “You owe me nothing. And I owe you nothing.”

“I’m beginning to see they’re a piece in a puzzle I need to explore in more depth.”

“No! The past, which includes you, doesn’t matter now!” But her voice shook. “I—I was nothing to you.”

“How can you say that and act like I mistreated you—when you ran off with Turner?”

“You should thank me. I set you free so you could marry your precious Lizzie and have everyone in Yella think the best of you. And that’s exactly what happened.”

He remembered resenting how anxious his mother had been to push Lizzie on him after Maddie ran off and his father died. Maybe marrying Lizzie because he’d been sad and lonely and overwhelmed, and because his mother and the whole town had thought they’d make a perfect couple, hadn’t been the smartest thing he’d ever done. Not that he could tell Maddie that he’d made bigger mistakes than sleeping with her.

“What did you write in those damn letters?” he demanded, really curious.

“Nothing that could possibly matter now,” she said, too casually. “I was young and foolish. Money was tight. My girlhood fantasy got the best of my better judgment. You know, poor girl wins rich boyfriend after all…lives happily ever after with him in his big, white, legendary ranch house…and then everybody in Yella looks up to her. Some foolishness like that.”

“I think it’s high time I finally read them. I’ll be the judge of what’s foolish.”

Her brows flew together. “You still have them?”

“I threw them in a desk drawer, in my office, up at my big, white house, as you put it. They should be there…that is, if Lizzie put them back.”

“Lizzie?”

“On her deathbed, Lizzie confessed she’d found them when she was tidying up in my office and had steamed them open and read them. She said she resealed them and put them back. She made me promise to read them after she was gone, said I owed you that. And then she said she was sorry, truly sorry, she hadn’t told me about reading them before…but that she’d been too jealous to do so, too afraid of losing me. Imagine what a heel I felt like for having made her jealous over someone like you. Out of respect for her, I haven’t looked for them since her death.”

Maddie’s gaze was fixed on Cinnamon. “Well, there’s no need to read them now,” she said softly. “I’ll go….”

“I’m not finished,” he said. “I told Lizzie those letters didn’t matter, that they never had mattered, because I’d married her, and she’d been the most wonderful wife a man could wish for.”

“You were lucky then,” Maddie said wistfully. “I hope to be as lucky…someday soon.”

He hadn’t felt lucky. He’d felt guilt-stricken and low for never having loved Lizzie as she’d deserved because of Maddie.

“She always loved you. From the time she first saw you,” Maddie said softly.

“Yes,” he muttered, familiar guilt washing over him. He’d broken Lizzie’s heart to pursue Maddie in secret. After that first kiss in the barn, he’d burned for the town’s bad girl so fiercely, he hadn’t been able to help himself.

And now Maddie was back, as beautiful as ever. He still wanted her.

“Maybe it’s good we saw each other today, so we can face the fact that the past is over,” she said. “I’m sorry I ran off without saying goodbye. I was young, immature…” Her voice was even and polite, the voice she would use to console or dismiss a stranger. “It’s nice knowing you had a wonderful marriage, and I’m truly sorry for your loss. It can’t be easy…even now. Cole, I wish you well. I truly want you to be happy.”

“Thank you,” he muttered ungraciously.