“Hello?”
“You’re there! Oh thank heavens!”
Kate heard Lynn McKinnon’s soft, cultured voice on the other end and let out a long breath, wishing she had followed her instincts and ignored the call.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Oh Charlotte.” Lynn paused slightly and Kate could picture her mother’s fair skin turning rosy with embarrassment. “I’m sorry—Kate. Drat. I keep trying to think of you as Kate but it’s hard after so many years of you being our Charley. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. I know who you mean.”
“Thank you, darling. Anyway, I’m so glad I finally caught you. I’ve been worried sick! I’ve been trying to reach you for days!”
Kate lay back on the bed and closed her eyes, unused to the guilt that pinched at her with sharp aggravating fingers.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “My cell phone has been off for a few days and I only realized it this afternoon. I haven’t had time to check messages. Is everything okay?”
“Yes. Everything’s fine. Now I feel silly for worrying about you. It’s just that I was in the city Monday for a little last-minute Christmas shopping and stopped by your apartment to see if you might like to have lunch since you weren’t working.”
“Oh?”
“Your car was in the parking lot but your next-door neighbor said she hadn’t seen you around for a few days.”
Lynn fell silent, obviously waiting for some kind of explanation for the anomaly. She should have told her family what she was doing, Kate realized. She was embarrassed and a little ashamed that the idea of vetting her travel plans past them had never even occurred to her.
“I’m not trying to crowd you or anything,” Lynn said after an awkward pause. “You don’t have to report your every move to me. I suppose I’m a little paranoid. We’ve only just found you and I can’t bear the thought of losing you again.”
Thick emotion rose in her throat as Kate heard the concern in Lynn’s voice. She wanted so much to be able to accept the love this woman and the rest of her family stood ready to embrace her with. But she felt as if her hate and bitterness formed a heavy magnetic shield around her like something out of a science-fiction movie, repelling any of the McKinnons’ attempts to reach out to her.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you where I was going. I’m in Florida.”
“Florida!” Lynn’s voice sounded as shocked as if Kate had announced she was trapped deep in the Congo. “My goodness! You didn’t say anything about a trip Saturday night at the wedding. Or did I just miss it somehow?”
“You didn’t miss anything. This was a spur-of-the-moment thing.” She hesitated to tell Lynn the reason for the trip, then decided there was no reason to prevaricate. “I’m looking for answers to my past. I’m hoping to find Brenda Golightly, the woman I thought was my mother until six weeks ago when Wyatt and Gage found me.”
There was dead silence on the other end, stretching out so long Kate wondered if she’d lost the connection. She was afraid she had hurt the other woman by her announcement, but when Lynn spoke, all Kate could hear in her voice was concern and a love so clear and pure, her eyes started to burn.
“Oh sweetheart. Are you sure this is something you want to do?”
Kate blinked away the tears that threatened but her eyes still stung. “I don’t want to. Not really. Until a month ago, I would have been happy never seeing her again.”
Lynn made a distressed kind of sound. Kate hadn’t told the McKinnons much about her life with Brenda, only that she had been taken away from her and put into foster care when she was seven.
She thought the grim reality would be too painful for them to hear. Most parents want their children to have lovely, shiny-bright childhoods, free of darkness or despair. Hers was tarnished and grim and she hadn’t wanted to burden the McKinnons with any of the details.
She had the unsettling thought as she lay on that hotel bed with the cell phone to her ear that maybe that was one of the ways she kept them at arm’s length. If they didn’t know what she’d lived through, they didn’t really know
her.
“I have so much anger inside me,” she confessed to Lynn, with an odd feeling that she had just stretched out a bridge of sorts. “I need to know why me. And right now Brenda is the only person who might have the answer to that.”
Lynn was quiet for a long moment. “I wish you had told me were going. Maybe I could have come with you. Or Sam or one of your brothers. You have endured so much alone. I hate the idea of you going through this by yourself too.”
“I’m not alone,” she assured her. She rose and wandered to the window, restless suddenly. “Hunter came with me.”
“Taylor’s brother? That Hunter?”
“Yes.”
There was another awkward silence then a long, drawn out “Ohhhh.”
Kate flushed at the speculation she heard in Lynn’s voice but didn’t correct her.
“Have you spoken to her yet? To this Brenda person?”
Kate gazed out at the courtyard below. Her room faced the swimming pool and the pool lights glowed green in the night.
“No. We’re only in Jacksonville. The last I heard of Brenda, she was in Miami so that’s where we’ve decided to start. We should be there tomorrow. I believe she had a sister there we’re going to try to contact but for all I know, this is a wild goose chase. She’s probably halfway across the country.”
Wouldn’t she feel horrible if, after all this effort and energy, they couldn’t find Brenda at all? She would be mortified if she’d dragged Hunter all this way for nothing.
“Did you talk to Gage about what you’re doing?” Lynn asked.
Kate thought of her oldest brother, the FBI agent. Of all the members of her newly discovered family, she found Gage hardest to read. Sam, her father, seemed quiet and steady. He worked with his hands but he still had a bright mind and a deep calmness about him.
Lynn was open and sincere, eager for Kate to love her.
She knew it wouldn’t be hard to care for Wyatt—he was her best friend’s husband now and she would have loved him for that alone, but he had earned a special place in her heart for helping to free Hunter.
Gage, though, was still a mystery to her. He was abrupt to the point of reticence but he obviously adored his new wife and daughters, and Kate had seen moments of great sweetness between the four of them.
Kate knew Gage and Wyatt had never given up finding her and she had learned enough about the FBI agent in the past month to guess that her disappearance probably contributed at least in part to his career choice.
“No,” she said now to Lynn. “I didn’t talk to anyone but Hunter.”
“Your case is still technically open. Gage may have some information on this woman’s whereabouts.”
Of all the members of her family, he had been the one most interested in details about her childhood as Katie Golightly and the woman she had believed to be her mother.
“Do you think he’s still working the case?”
Her mother sighed. “If I know my oldest son, I have no doubt whatsoever. Even though we’ve found you again, Gage won’t be able to rest until he finds out why you were taken and by whom.”
Maybe she was more like her brother than she thought. “I need that too. That’s why we’re here.”
“I’ll talk to Gage. He may have some information that could be helpful to you.”
“Thank you.”
Kate didn’t know what to say after that. She hated this distance, this awkwardness she always felt when talking to Lynn, and wondered if it would ever ease.
“I’m so glad I finally reached you,” Lynn said after moment. “I know it’s silly but I’ll sleep easier tonight. Will you forgive me for panicking?”
“Of course.”
They said their goodbyes, with Lynn’s repeated promise to talk to Gage, then Kate hung up her phone. She set it carefully on the dresser, then opened the sliding doors to the small terrace of her room, suddenly desperate for air.
The night was lovely, clear and comfortable. Kate wandered to the railing, gazing out at the garden around the pool. Though still just off the freeway, this was a better scale of hotel than they’d stayed in yet on this journey, with an extravagant pool and lush landscaping, complete with twinkling little Christmas lights in the palm trees.
She and Brenda never would have stayed in a place like this. Their accommodations were usually the kind of scary, hole-in-the-wall motel that had shifty-eyed clerks, cardboard-thin walls and bedsprings that creaked.
Kate would usually make a bed for herself on the bathroom floor and curl up while Brenda entertained a gentleman friend in the other room or would pass out on the bed.
Most of the time, she doubted whether Brenda knew—or cared—that Kate was even there.
Kate thought of Lynn McKinnon’s loving concern, and the stark contrast between what should have been and what was brought those tears she had been fighting to the surface again. This time she couldn’t stop them and they burst free.
She stood there for a long time with the moist breeze eddying around her and tears trickling down her cheeks.
She didn’t realize she was no longer alone until Hunter spoke from the balcony next to hers.
“In prison, nights were the worst. During the day you could wear a facade of indifference. But at night we were all locked into our cells, alone with only the guilt to taunt and torment us. Those of us who didn’t have guilt had nothing left but our fear.”
“I’m sorry.” She sniffled, embarrassed at herself for letting her emotions out.
“Don’t be. Nothing wrong with crying.”
“It’s either cry or scream right now. And I’m afraid if I start screaming, I won’t stop. I don’t know what to do with this anger. I can lock it away for long stretches of time but sometimes no matter how hard I try to keep it contained my hate and bitterness bursts free and I can’t think about anything else.”
“Are you angry? Or are you just hurting?”
She gave a ragged-sounding laugh. “Both.”
Only about two feet separated their terraces. Before Kate realized what he intended, Hunter grabbed his railing and swung his body over to her terrace with an agility that left her blinking.
It was a crazy thing to do, he thought, but he couldn’t bear her crying over there by herself. He leaned with her on the railing, gazing out at the twinkling palm trees and the bougainvillea and the deep green of the pool lights.
The cool breeze lifted his hair and Hunter thought how odd it was that three days earlier they had stood together on the deck of his canyon home while he’d watched her catch snowflakes on her tongue.
“What let it out this time?” he asked quietly. “Your hurt or anger or whatever it is?”
In the moonlight, he saw her chin quiver a little but she quickly straightened it out again.
“Lynn McKinnon just called me. My mother.” Her laugh was short and bitter. “My
mother.
I can’t even say the word. The woman has loved me for twenty-six years—never gave up hope of finding me again—and I can’t even do her the courtesy of calling her by her rightful title. She’s a stranger to me. A stranger I seem to be doing my damnedest to keep at arm’s length.”
“Give yourself time. You can’t expect to love the McKinnons as if you spent your whole life with them. They understand that. From what I’ve seen of them, they’re decent people. I’m sure they’ll give you whatever space you need until you’re comfortable with them.”
“What if that day never comes?”
He couldn’t bear the murky pain in her eyes, the heartache threading through her voice. Though he knew it wasn’t the wisest of ideas, he reached for her.
She was stiff with surprise for just a moment before she sighed and settled against him, small and fragile.
“It will,” he murmured. “And if you can never love the McKinnons as the daughter and sister they lost, you can at least learn to care about them as good, kind people with your best interests at heart.”
She said nothing, only settled closer against him. Hunter’s arms tightened and he was stunned by the tenderness welling up inside him.
He cleared his throat and continued. “You didn’t have them for a big part of your life and that really stinks. But you have them now. That has to count for something, doesn’t it? It’s more than you had two months ago, more than a lot of people will ever have.”
She rested her cheek against his chest, where he was certain she could hear his heart pounding away. “You’re right. Intellectually I know you’re right. I feel horribly guilty that I can’t just lighten up and accept that my life has suddenly taken a bizarre turn. Just be grateful for what I have. But my time with Brenda and…and what came after was awful. Something no child should have to live through. Talking with Lynn just made me contrast what those early years should have been like with the ugly reality.”
“I’m sorry, Kate. I wish I could change it for you.”
“Contrary to what you must think right now after I just blubbered all over you, this trip is helping. Even if we never find Brenda, being away from the situation has given me a little perspective.”
She lifted her face, tearstained but heartbreakingly beautiful in the moonlight. “I think you’ve got a brilliant future in the damsel-rescuing business.”
He mustered a smile, even though it took every ounce of strength he possessed not to kiss her.
Though he was definitely rusty at it, he tried a joke. “Thanks. We’re a full-service operation. Finder of lost souls, chauffeur of stranded crime victims, and shoulder to cry on. It’s all part of the package.”
She smiled and hugged him tighter and Hunter had to clamp his teeth together to hold in his moan of sheer wonder at how good it felt to hold this warm, soft woman.
“Thank you, on all counts,” she murmured. “You’re very good at what you do.”
The pay might be lousy but the benefits sure as hell rocked, he thought.
After a moment, he tried to carefully extricate himself from her arms before he embarrassed both of them by enjoying her touch a little
too
much, but it was like trying to slip out of a warm feather bed on a cold January morning.
He managed to pull one arm away but the other one, curved around her shoulders, refused to budge. While he was trying to remind it who was boss, Kate lifted her face to his again.