She blinked a couple of times, but he didn’t disappear.
Not a dream, then. Crap.
“Sorry,” he said without a smidgeon of regret. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
Kendra straightened and glanced toward the open doorway of the cottage, looking for Madison. There was no sign of either the child or the dog, but Kendra went inside to check on them anyway. They were both sleeping, curled up together on Daisy’s cloud-soft bed.
Quietly, Kendra went back outside to face Hutch.
How could she not have heard him arrive? His truck was parked right there in the driveway, a stone’s throw from where she’d been sitting. At the very least, she should have heard the tires in the gravel or the closing of the driver’s door.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, too rattled to be polite.
Hutch spread his hands wide, grinning. “I’m unarmed,” he said, sidestepping the question. He was, she recalled, a master at sidestepping any topic he didn’t want to discuss. “Don’t shoot.”
Kendra huffed out a sigh, picked up her book, which she’d dropped in the grass when she’d woken up to an eyeful of Hutch, and held it tightly against her side. “What. Are. You. Doing. Here?” she repeated.
He gestured for her to sit down, and since her knees were weak, she dropped back into her lawn chair. He drew another one up alongside hers and sat. They were both gazing straight ahead, like two strangers in the same row on an airplane, intent on the seat belt/oxygen mask lecture from an invisible flight attendant.
“Tell me about your little girl,” Hutch finally said.
“Why should I?” Kendra asked reasonably, proud of her calm tone.
“I guess because she could have been ours,” he replied.
For a moment, Kendra felt as if he’d elbowed her, hard, or even punched her in the stomach. Once the adrenaline rush subsided, though, she knew there was no point in withholding the information.
A person could practically throw a rock from one end of Parable to the other and juicy stories got around fast.
“You’ll hear about it soon enough,” she conceded, though ungraciously, keeping her voice down in case Madison woke up and somehow homed in on the conversation, “so I might as well tell you.”
Hutch gave a long-suffering sigh and she felt him looking in her direction now, though she was careful not to meet his gaze. “Might as well,” he agreed quietly.
“Not that it’s any of your business,” Kendra pointed out.
He simply waited.
Distractedly, Kendra wondered if the man thought she’d given birth to Madison herself and kept her existence hidden from everyone in Parable all this time.
“Madison is adopted,” she said. It was a simple statement, but it left her feeling as though she’d spilled her guts on some ludicrous tell-all TV show.
“Why do I think there’s more to the story?” Hutch asked after a pause. His very patience galled Kendra—what right did he have to be patient? This was a courtesy explanation—she didn’t owe it to him. She didn’t owe him anything except maybe a broken heart.
“Madison’s father was my ex-husband,” Kendra said. Suddenly, she wanted to cry and it had nothing to do with her previous hesitation to talk about something so bruising and private. Why couldn’t Madison have been born to her, as she should have been?
“And her mother?”
Once again, Kendra looked to make sure Madison hadn’t turned up in the cottage doorway, all ears. “She was one of Jeffrey’s girlfriends.”
Hutch swore under his breath. “That rat bastard,” he added a moment later.
Kendra stiffened her spine, squared her shoulders, jutted out her chin a little way. “I beg your pardon?” she said in a tone meant to point out the sheer irony, not to mention the audacity, of the pot calling the kettle black.
“Could we not argue, just this once?” Hutch asked hoarsely.
“Just this once,” Kendra said, and one corner of her mouth twitched with a strange urge to smile. Probably some form of hysteria, she decided.
“I’m sorry I called your ex-husband a rat bastard,” Hutch offered.
“You are not,” Kendra challenged, still without looking at him. Except out of the corner of one eye, that is.
“All right,” Hutch ground out, “fine.” He sighed and shoved a hand through his hair. “Let me rephrase that. I’m sorry I didn’t keep my opinion to myself.”
A brief, sputtering laugh escaped Kendra then. “Since when have you ever been known to keep your opinion to yourself?”
“You’re determined to turn this into a shouting match, aren’t you?”
“No,” Kendra said pointedly, bristling. “I am not planning on arguing with you, Hutch Carmody. Not ever again.”
“Kendra,” Hutch said, “you can hedge and stall all you want, but eventually we’re going to have this conversation, so we might as well just go ahead and get it done.”
She made a swatting motion in his general direction, as though trying to chase away a fly. Now she was digging in her heels again and she couldn’t seem to help it. “Madison is my daughter now, and that’s all that matters.”
“You’re an amazing woman, Kendra,” Hutch told her, and he sounded so serious that she swiveled on the seat of her lawn chair to look at him with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
“I mean it,” he said with a gruff chuckle, the sound gentle and yet innately masculine. “Some people couldn’t handle raising another woman’s child—under those circumstances, anyhow.”
“It isn’t Madison’s fault that Jeffrey Chamberlain was a—”
Hutch’s mouth crooked up at one corner and sad mischief danced in his eyes. “Rat bastard?” he finished for her.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s about the size of it.”
He grinned full-out, which put him at an unfair advantage because when he did that, her bones turned to jelly and her IQ plummeted at least twenty points. “Well now,” he said. “We finally agree on something.”
“Go figure,” Kendra remarked, going for a snippy tone but not quite getting there.
“We’re on a roll.”
“Or not.”
He laughed, shook his head. “I’m about to say something you’ll have to agree with, whether you want to or not,” he warned.
She felt a weird little thrill and could have shaken herself for it. “Is that so?”
Hutch nodded toward the cottage doorway, where Madison finally stood, rubbing her eyes and yawning, Daisy at her side. “You’re lucky to have that little girl in your life, however it came about, and the reverse is true, too. You were born to be a mother, Kendra—and a good one.”
“Damn it,” Kendra muttered, at a loss for a comeback.
Hutch grinned as Madison’s eyes widened—she was slowly waking up—and a glorious smile lit her face. She scrambled toward them.
“Hello, cowboy man!” she whooped, feet still bare, curls rumpled, cheeks flushed.
Hutch laughed again. “I guess you might as well call me that as anything else,” he said. He exuded the kind of quiet, wholesome approval little girls crave from daddy-types.
Not that Hutch was any such thing.