A Second Chance at Love: A Hometown Hero Series Novel (15 page)

“Do what?”

She bit down on her lip. Her baby needed her to be strong. Where she was weak, and wanted to cry and beg, she knew the small life flourishing in her belly needed a mom who could take control of her life. “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. Is that what you want?”

“What I want?” He asked after a moment’s silence. “What I want is to love someone a little less screwed up. God, I wish I had loved Sally. Or anyone. Anyone other than you.”

He pulled the car to a stop outside the front door.

Madeline had never felt a greater sense of desperate despondency in her life. “This is it, then?”

Harrison scanned her face, and he knew a part of him was withering and dying. “I can’t see how we can make it work. Not with these huge holes in my understanding of what makes you tick. I can’t do it.”

She nodded. “Okay.” She paused, her hand on the door. “Goodbye, Harrison.”

She stepped out of his sedan, and walked towards the house without looking back. If she had, the sight of her tear stained face would have shaken even his resolve.

* * *

“It’s over.”

He ignored the way Diana was scowling at him.

“Over?”

“We’ve finally realised that we were just torturing each other.” He slid his plate into the dishwasher and slammed it shut with more force than he’d intended. “And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter.”

“Damn it, Harrison Samson, I didn’t raise you to be such a fool.”

Harrison paused, and turned to face his mother. “You’re the one who told me to steer clear of her, Diana. Why the change of heart?”

Her eyes dropped away guiltily.

“Diana?” He lowered his voice. Though Ivy had been in bed for an hour, she was sleeping lightly lately.

“Why didn’t it work out this time? She’s getting divorced…” She asked, pretending fascination in the pattern of the bench top.

He didn’t want to talk about it, but a sixth sense alerted him to keep the conversation going. His mother was acting strangely. Furtively. “Why do you think?” He prodded softly.

Diana sighed. “Oh, Harrison.” She surprised him by putting her hands on his chest and dipping her head forward, pressing it against his muscular strength. “I’m so sorry.”

He was very still for a moment. “Sorry? Why sorry, mother?”

“Because I did this. It’s my fault.”

Harrison tried to sound calm. But it was difficult to keep his emotions at bay. “How so?”

He listened, while Diana, between cries of shame, relayed the full story to him. His face drained of color, but he didn’t push his mother away. He’d pushed enough people away lately.

“And Kenneth threatened to turn you in?”

“Yes!”

“And Madeline knew you’d be convicted of a felony? And probably go to prison?”

“That’s what she said.”

He nodded. “So she left to save you from going to jail.”

“Yes. But she never stopped loving you! And as soon as Kenneth was gone, and it was safe to do so, she came back for you.”

Harrison stepped gently away from his mother, putting a hand on her shoulder so she’d understand that his need for space did not equate to an anger with her. “There must have been another way.”

“If there had been, Madeline would have taken it. I believe leaving you cost her dearly, and she did it because of stupid, idiotic me.”

“Nonsense,” Harrison said with a shake of his head.

Of all the possible explanations for Madeline’s defection that he’d imagined over the eyars, an altruistic option had never occurred to him. That Madeline had left
because
she loved him simply hadn’t seemed plausible. But hadn’t she told him as much? Hadn’t she used those exact words?

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.”