His for the Taking - By Ann Major Page 0,10
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