“I hear eight men stopped by to check on Miss Jennie this mornin’.”
“For your information, I wasn’t ever who you thought I was or who they probably think I am. It’s taken me a long time to believe in myself…after…after the way you and the town treated me.”
“Oh, really? I find that surprising. For someone so sensitive and romantic, you sure as hell slept with me and then ran off with Turner without so much as a goodbye.”
When her skin went as pale as the bleached limestone bank, he felt as if someone had kicked him in the gut. But even as she began to tremble, her eyes blazed.
“Believe what you want about me!” she whispered as she hugged her arms around herself. “I’m glad I don’t have to care anymore.” But her eyes belied her indifference.
When he’d left the rig today he’d sworn he wouldn’t rehash the past, but now he had to ask. “Tell me why you ran off with him. You owe me an explanation.”
“Once…I foolishly thought…maybe I did owe you. So, before I left, I called you to explain, remember?”
Fury that she would lie so carelessly swelled inside him. “The hell you did! You called me eighteen months later—when it was a little late, since I was already married to Lizzie!”
“No! I called you the night I left. But your mother answered the phone. She told me exactly what you told her to tell me, that she didn’t want my kind in your life. So, excuse me if I didn’t call you back. I had a lot on my plate. But my problems then are none of your business now.”
“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