“Dad, Lori is twenty years old,” Shelby pointed out. “You aren’t really putting her on a curfew, are you? Not unless you want her to move out.”
“We don’t want her to move out,” Sarah insisted with a hard look at her husband. “We’d just like to know when to expect her so we know when we should worry. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.”
“It’s not, Mom,” Steven agreed from the bar. “Lori’s being a brat. I blame that Webber jerk. Bad influence.”
Shelby groaned. “Let’s not rehash this again. Where were you planning to trail ride, Maggie?”
Maggie took her seat at the bar next to her cousin while the others, seated at the table, began to pass dishes family style. “Rough Rock Stables. You want to go even if Lori doesn’t decide to join us?”
“Sure. Aaron’s going to be busy all day tomorrow anyway, installing the security barriers with your dad.”
Bryan nodded, then glanced at Aaron. “You still want to do that tomorrow, right? I mean, you can take off and go riding with the girls if you want.”
“No, that’s okay. I’d rather get the security measures in place,” Aaron assured him.
Spearing a slice of brisket, Mimi asked, “Do you ride, Aaron?”
Andrew and Aaron shared an amused glance.
“Yes,” Aaron said for them both. “We ride. There’s really not a lot of choice in our family.”
“Your folks own horses?” Pop asked, scooping potatoes onto his plate.
Seated across the table from Pop, Andrew explained. “Our uncle owns a ranch outside of Dallas. He raises horses, a few heads of cattle and boys.”
“Boys?” Linda inquired with a quizzical smile.
“The ranch is a home for at-risk foster boys. Has been for years. Our uncle and aunt take them in, give them affection, attention, discipline, education, therapy if necessary. Most of them turn their lives around there, going on to college and/or successful careers afterward, though there have been a very few they just couldn’t get through to, who didn’t turn out so well. There was a big reunion at the ranch a few years ago with quite a few of the guys who spent time there, and most of them still consider our uncle Jared a surrogate father.”
“Well, isn’t that nice,” Mimi marveled. “Your family really likes children, don’t they, Andrew?”
“You could say that,” he agreed, carefully avoiding Hannah’s gaze. “Our dad is one of seven siblings, all of whom had kids of their own.”
He wasn’t sure if Aaron had told them about their dad’s unconventional background: Ryan Walker and his twin brother, Joe, had been separated from their brothers and sisters as children when their parents died. It had taken them some twenty-five years to find each other again, with the exception of one brother who’d died as a teenager, leaving a pregnant girlfriend as his only known survivor. The Walkers valued family because they all knew what it was like to be separated from each other, and had learned not to take their loved ones for granted afterward. They’d raised their children with that same pro-family ethic.
He’d mishandled that brief conversation with Hannah before dinner. He’d been mentally kicking himself ever since for his awkward broaching of the possibility of marriage. He knew how skittish Hannah was about the subject, especially after overhearing part of her conversation with her sister earlier that week. Rather than just blurting it out as a possibility, he should have made more of an effort to convince her of what a practical, reasonable solution it could be to their situation.
Yes, there were other options, and they should certainly consider them all, but marriage did seem like one of the more logical actions they could take, especially because her job here could rather easily convert to a telecommuting position. To be honest, the more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of having Hannah and their daughter with him all the time. He would just have to find a way to discuss it with her without having her bolt in panic because of her previous marriage’s bitter end.
“I think it’s wonderful that your aunt and uncle take in children,” Mimi continued with all the subtlety of a freight train. “It just goes to show that it takes more than biology to make a family. Plenty of men adopt children and grow to love them as their own.”
“Stop it, Mom,” Bryan warned in a grumble, his graying brows drawing into a frown.
The older woman widened her eyes in exaggerated bewilderment. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. Eat your dinner.”
She sighed gustily and sliced into her meat. Andrew focused intently on his own plate, ignoring the snort of muffled laughter that might have come from his twin.
Ever the gracious hostess, Linda immediately launched into a conversation about an interesting article she’d read online, drawing several others into a discussion with her. Shelby and Maggie continued to plan their riding outing, while Aaron and Steven talked baseball stats. Andrew noted that Hannah was rather subdued as she ate, probably mentally composing the announcement she planned to make after the meal. He had to confess he was having trouble making airy small talk himself.
Shelby gave a sudden gasp, drawing everyone’s eyes to her in curiosity. Andrew saw that she was staring down at the screen of her phone, which must have been on vibrate-only mode because he hadn’t heard a sound from it. Her face had gone pale, he noted in concern.
“Shelby?” Aaron reached out to touch her arm. “Is something wrong?”
She looked toward her parents with hesitation, looking as though she almost dreaded her next words. “Lori sent me a text. She wants me to tell you that she isn’t coming back tonight.”
C.J. scowled. “I guess she told you she’s staying with ‘friends’?”
“No, Dad.” Shelby swallowed visibly before saying, “Lori and Zach have eloped. They were married this afternoon.”
* * *
General chaos erupted after Shelby’s shocking announcement. The mostly finished meal forgotten, everyone rose, milling around the room as if trying to decide what they should do in response to this unexpected announcement. Shelby tried texting questions to her sister but received no response.
“That just can’t be true,” Sarah insisted somewhat frantically. “How could she just elope?”
“You said you didn’t see her leave this morning,” Andrew said, going immediately into work mode. “So you don’t know if she took any of her things?”
“No,” Sarah admitted.
“I can go check,” Shelby volunteered, looking eager to have something specific to do. “I’ll be right back.”
Offering to accompany her, Maggie was right behind Shelby as she dashed out the door.
His expression grim, C.J. comforted his tearful wife while Sarah tended to Mimi, who’d gone uncharacteristically quiet with shock, and Bryan hovered near Pop, both looking worried about the impulsive youngest member of the family. Aaron moved closer to Andrew. “Should we try to do something?” he asked. “We could probably track her down.”
“And then what?” Andrew asked with a slight shrug. He understood why Aaron felt compelled to make the suggestion, but they had to be reasonable. “Lori’s twenty and Webber’s twenty-one. That’s a legal age to marry in every state. All they had to do was drive to Arkansas, where there’s no waiting period, and find a justice of the peace. It’s probable they had this planned ahead so they knew exactly what to do.”
“She took bags,” Shelby reported upon her return with Maggie. “Quite a few of her clothes and shoes are missing, along with toiletries and a few other things I noticed with a quick look around her room.”
“So she really did it,” Sarah said, sinking slowly into a chair. “She’s run off and gotten married.”
“To a barely employed musician with a juvenile record,” C.J. muttered angrily. “And she’s got another year of college to go. Does anyone believe she’ll finish now?”
Steven rose to balance on his crutches. “Okay, look, I know you’re disappointed, but this isn’t the end of the world. Lori’s an adult, and she’s going to have to make her own decisions. If this marriage works out, that’s great for her. If not, well, she’ll handle that, too.”
Andrew noted that Hannah nodded solemnly. “It won’t do any good to yell at her now,” she assured them. “She’ll just avoid coming around with him. Even if she suspects she made a mistake, she’ll need to try to make it work for a while just because she’ll have a hard time admitting she should have listened to her parents’ advice. My advice would be to try to get to know him, let Lori know you’re here for her if you need her—and keep Zach away from the resort finances, just in case,” she added with a hint of bitterness.
“No question about that,” C.J. muttered. He didn’t respond to the rest of her advice, but Andrew figured he’d heard it all and would consider it.
Perhaps needing to return to a semblance of normalcy, Linda began to clear the table. After a moment, the others pitched in to help. Several had tried to contact Lori, but their calls were not being answered for now.
A few minutes later, Hannah moved to Andrew’s side in the main living room. He’d been standing in front of a large front window that looked out into the clear summer evening, the view of the resort lights and the distant glimmer of the lake unimpeded by the open drapes.
“What do you see out there?” she asked.
He glanced down at her with a faint smile. “Peace.”
Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she chuckled softly. “As opposed to in here?”
Half turning away from the window, he glanced toward her family, who mingled through the kitchen and living room conducting low-voiced conversations, probably fretting about Lori. “They seem to have calmed down for the moment.”
Hannah sighed. “Yeah, and I’m about to stir them up again.”
He felt his left eyebrow rise. “You’re still going to tell them tonight? After all this?”
“You’re still leaving tomorrow, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid so. I really have to.”
“Then we should tell them tonight, so you can prepare your own parents.”
“I’m still hoping you’ll go with me tomorrow for that.”
She shook her head, and her expression was hard to read. “I was considering it, but now I really can’t. Without Lori here to work and because we haven’t hired extra help yet, I’m going to be needed here.”
He told himself he understood. Tried to convince himself he wasn’t terribly disappointed. He would be back, he assured himself. Soon.
“And it’s not as if this is going to be a hugely dramatic announcement,” she continued in a low voice when he remained silent. “I mean, they already know I’m pregnant. They’ve surely figured out how I got that way. All I’ll be doing is filling in a name. I expect they’ll approve of the baby’s parentage.”
He wasn’t so sure, nor did he know if she was as prepared as she thought for the pressure that would be put on them after she’d filled in the name, as she’d termed it. But she was probably right that the family wouldn’t react as radically as they had to Lori’s elopement. He would not be entirely surprised if other members of the family had already figured it out for themselves.
He took her hand and gave it a light squeeze. No matter how confident she tried to sound, he could see the nerves in her eyes. He was a little nervous himself actually. About what her family would say, and about how Hannah would deflect questions about their future intentions. As badly as he’d mishandled the mention of a possible marriage, he had been unable to sufficiently gauge her reaction. It had seemed that her first reaction had been immediate rejection—but had that been because of the awkward way he’d brought up the subject, or because she was completely opposed to the idea?
“I’ll back you up on whatever you want to tell them tonight,” he assured her. “But I still want a chance soon to have a long talk just between us.”
He thought he saw her swallow as she nodded. “I know.”
Still holding her hand, he began to turn with her toward the center of the room.
He heard the loud crash at the same time the window shattered inward behind him. He felt several sharp tingles on his cheek, the back of his neck and his left arm beneath the short sleeve of his shirt. Something heavy slammed to the floor at his feet amid the rain of glass. Without taking time to examine it, he threw himself at Hannah, wrapping himself around her and pushing her away from the object, bracing himself for a possible blast.
Chapter Nine
H
er face almost smothered in Andrew’s chest, Hannah heard the shocked gasps and cries from around the room. Almost as if from a distance, she felt the sting of myriad cuts on her face, neck and arms, but there was no real pain. She was aware of someone dashing past her, throwing open the front door and bolting outside. Aaron? Followed by C.J., she realized, lifting her head in time to see her uncle disappear outside.
Loosening his grip on her, Andrew looked around cautiously. “A rock,” he said in disgust. “It’s a big damn rock.”
Shakily, she drew away from him, staring in confusion at the grapefruit-size rock sitting on her mother’s floor, surrounded by broken glass. “What did you think it was?”
“A grenade. A Molotov cocktail,” he admitted grimly. “I didn’t take time to pick it up and study it.”
No, he hadn’t taken that time, she realized in a daze. Instead, he’d put himself between her and the object, covering her with as much of his own body as possible, instinctively protecting her and their child. If she hadn’t already been hopelessly in love with him, she’d surely have tumbled then.
“Hannah? Baby, are you all right?” Her father hovered beside her, patting her shoulder, brushing a shard of glass from her hair.
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“You’re bleeding,” her mother fretted from her other side, touching her face. Her fingers came away smeared with red.
Hannah lifted her own hand tentatively, deciding the cuts were superficial. Andrew’s lightning-fast reaction might well have prevented her from being sliced by flying glass. She looked at him, seeing minor cuts scattered beneath the bandage from yesterday. None of them appeared deep, to her great relief.
She looked down at the rock and the larger shards of broken glass. Had she and Andrew not been walking away from the window, had they still been standing there in conversation, they could both have been badly injured. As it was, the large rock had missed them both by scant inches, and the larger pieces of glass had fallen just behind them.
“Who could have done this?” Mimi asked plaintively, drawing Hannah’s attention in that direction. She saw that her shaken grandmother had been urged into a seat and was being tended to by Sarah and Shelby, while Steven and Maggie stood on either side of their grandfather, who looked more angry than distressed.
“You’re okay?” Andrew asked her intently.
Flanked by her parents, she nodded, knowing what he wanted to do. “Go with your brother, but be careful.”
He was out the door almost before she finished speaking.
Maggie rushed to get a broom and dustpan to start cleaning up glass. Steven insisted on taking photos with his phone first, and warned Maggie not to touch the rock with her bare hands. “Fingerprints,” he explained. “By the way, did anyone notify the police about this?”
Saying he would take care of that, Hannah’s dad moved to a phone, while Steven examined the window damage. “We can tape a tarp over this tonight and replace the glass tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll have to notify your insurance agent of course, if you make a claim for it.”
Hannah’s mom insisted that Hannah should sit down. She rushed to get a damp washcloth to clean up the thankfully minor cuts Hannah had suffered.
“I really don’t understand what’s going on around here lately,” Mimi bemoaned, wringing her hands. “Shelby was kidnapped, Lori’s run off to get married and now someone does this. Has the whole world just gone crazy?”
“Sometimes it seems like it, Mimi,” Shelby said, her expression a bit worried as she watched the door for the men to return. “But everyone’s okay. We’ll face whatever it is together, just like we always do.”
Mimi sighed wistfully. “But still, Lori’s left, and Steven’s leaving soon. Things are changing.”
“Things always change in a family, Mimi,” Hannah’s mother replied, looking meaningfully toward Hannah and the soon-to-be next generation as she approached with the washcloth. “As Shelby said, we’ll handle it together. Those who leave will always come back, even if only to visit. And whoever did this will be caught and punished. Everything will be fine.”
Hannah figured her mother was trying to reassure herself as well as her mother-in-law. Like everyone else, her mom was still shaken, but staying busy and positive was her way of dealing with it.
The front door opened, and everyone turned quickly to look that way. C.J. entered first, his expression somber but satisfied. Andrew and Aaron entered with someone else gripped between them.
Hannah gasped. “Patricia?”
The habitually morose motel guest shot her a glare of such intense hatred that Hannah instinctively recoiled. What had she done to this woman except try to be a gracious host? Sitting beside her on the couch, her mom gripped her hand in support.
“Caught her running through the woods,” Aaron said. Hannah wondered if he’d gotten the scratch on his cheek from a low-hanging tree branch or if Patricia had fought him. “She denies throwing the rock, but it’s pretty obvious, considering.”
“No one touched the rock, right?” Andrew asked, nodding toward where it still lay.
“No,” Steven said, looking pleased with himself for seeing to that.
“Then I think we can prove quite definitively whether she threw the rock. Note that she’s not wearing gloves.”
Patricia seemed to struggle for a moment between continuing her denials and defiantly claiming her action. She settled on the latter, almost spitting at Hannah, “I wish it had hit you. If you hadn’t moved when you did, it would have.”
On her feet now, Hannah stared at the other woman in bafflement. “Why? What on earth did I do to you?”
“You took him from me!” she shrieked. “You all did. And I hate you all. I wish that rock had been a bottle full of burning gasoline.”
Hannah looked at her mother, her sister, her cousins, trying to see if anyone understood what this woman was ranting about. “Took who from you?”
“Wade! You took Wade!” Patricia was weeping openly now.
Hannah felt her knees give way. She sank to the couch again in shock, realizing she’d been very slow in catching on. “You were one of Wade’s women,” she said dully.
That, of course, only set Patricia off more. She babbled almost incoherently about how she’d been the only woman Wade had truly loved, how he was now so bitter and unhappy that he wouldn’t answer her letters or accept her calls or visits to him in prison, how the stress of his arrest had caused her to have a miscarriage of his child.
“It isn’t fair that you have everything now and I have nothing,” she concluded, sobbing as she sagged between Andrew and Aaron’s rather helpless support. “You’re pretty and you live in a great place. Your family spoils you rotten. Now you’ve got a good-looking new man who’s obviously crazy about you and you’re going to have his baby—the very man who helped you send Wade away. You have everything, and you left me with nothing.”
Steven looked out the broken window during the silence that followed Patricia’s outburst while everyone struggled to understand her twisted reasoning. “A police car is turning into the drive. Someone should go out to greet them.”
Patricia wailed even louder.
“Maybe we shouldn’t press charges,” Hannah said, looking at Andrew. “She certainly isn’t the only woman who was taken in by Wade’s lies. Heaven only knows what he told her.”
Several in the room objected to Hannah’s attempt at leniency, but Andrew spoke clearly over them. “We’ll tell the police exactly what happened,” he said implacably. “She slashed your tires, sabotaged your porch and barely missed hitting you with that rock. The latter is the only one we can prove, but it’s an assault and she’ll be charged for her crime.”
“Seriously, Hannah, you’d let her go so she can come back and attack you again?” Maggie demanded. “You heard her, next time she’ll throw a Molotov cocktail.”
“I never want to see this place or any of you again,” Patricia fervently assured them, her plain, tear-streaked face set in a hard expression.
C.J. escorted two uniformed officers into the room. Her heart heavy, Hannah fell mostly quiet then, except to give brief responses to the questions that were asked of her. Watching her family trying to clean up the damage to their home, and her grandmother sipping tea in an attempt to settle her nerves, she wondered just how much more distress her past mistakes would end up costing the ones she loved.
* * *
“That woman was truly delusional,” Sarah said when Patricia Gibson had been taken away. “To think that she blamed Hannah—blamed all of us—for Wade going to jail, when it was his own greed and dishonesty that sent him there.”
Andrew wasn’t particularly surprised. In the course of his investigations, he’d heard too many women make too many excuses for badly behaving men.
He blamed himself for not even considering one of Wade’s cast-off women as Hannah’s stalker. He’d found evidence of the affairs, but his investigation had focused on finances, so he hadn’t bothered to follow up on specific names. Especially because Wade hadn’t trusted any of those women enough to partner with him in his crimes. Andrew doubted that Wade had considered his probably brief affair with Patricia to be the great romance she’d envisioned it.
Hannah, he noted, had become very quiet since Patricia was escorted away. He imagined she was tired, stressed. A little sad, perhaps, that another woman had been taken in by her ex. She was very carefully not meeting his eyes—not meeting anyone’s eyes really, but she seemed to be avoiding him in particular. He wished he knew what she was thinking.
“That girl is just flat-out crazy as a Bessie bug,” Pop pronounced flatly. “Believing all those lies Wade told. Saying Andrew is the father of Hannah’s baby.”
Andrew sensed that Maggie, Shelby and Aaron all shifted their weight or cleared their throats uncomfortably, probably wondering how Hannah would respond to that. Truth be told, he was curious about that himself.
With all eyes upon her, Hannah drew a deep breath and stood, one hand resting lightly at her middle. She was a bit pale, making the fresh scratches stand out against her skin, but her chin was high and her voice steady when she said, “No, Pop. Whatever other delusions Patricia suffers from, she wasn’t wrong about that. Andrew is my daughter’s father.”
There was a moment of silence—stunned in the case of those who hadn’t already known, expectant for those who had.
“I’m sorry, Mom, Dad,” Hannah said. “I should have told you sooner. And don’t blame Andrew that I didn’t. I asked him not to say anything.”
“Andrew is the baby’s father?” Bryan looked bewildered as he studied both Hannah and Andrew in turn. Andrew moved to stand beside Hannah, close but not touching, offering moral support. “You mean, you two have been seeing each other since he left here last summer? But— When?”
“You don’t need to know all the details,” Hannah said firmly, making it very clear she had no intention of answering questions about the how and when—though at least part of the when was obvious, Andrew thought with a glance at her belly. “Just suffice it to say that Andrew is the father, and that he plans to be an active part of the baby’s life. I hope you’ll all respect our privacy and accept whatever decisions we make on our daughter’s behalf.”
Pop was the one to ask the question both Andrew and Hannah had expected, probably beating his wife to it by only seconds. “Does this mean y’all are getting married?”
“No, Pop, we aren’t getting married.” Again, Hannah’s tone brooked no argument. “That’s one of the decisions you’re going to have to accept and respect.”
Andrew bit his tongue. This wasn’t the time for him to speak up, he reminded himself. That would wait until he and Hannah were alone.
“Humph,” Pop grumbled beneath his breath, but just loud enough for the rest to hear. “Aaron’s moved in with Shelby, Andrew’s having a baby with Hannah. Doesn’t seem like the Walker twins are the marrying kind.”
Andrew bit down so hard on his tongue he almost tasted blood. He suspected his brother did the same. Their own family would have been in shock at the very suggestion that any Walker did not believe in the sanctity of marriage. Aaron and Shelby were only in their early stages of their romance—which, granted, was proceeding very swiftly—and Hannah wouldn’t even discuss the possibility with him, so Pop was being a bit unfair to make such a sweeping statement.
Now that Linda had taken a moment to recover from her initial surprise, she didn’t seem as startled by hearing about Hannah and him. Perhaps she had sensed the undercurrents between them, or maybe something they had said or done had given her pause. She looked at him and he searched for disapproval in her eyes but found none. “Have you told your parents yet?”
He shook his head. “We wanted to tell you first. I’ll tell them when I go back to Dallas tomorrow.”
Linda turned her attention to her daughter. “Are you going with him to talk to them?”
“No,” Hannah replied. “He invited me, but that was before we knew Lori wouldn’t be here to fill in for me while I was gone. With the holiday coming up, I’m needed here.”
“We can manage if you want to go with him to talk to his family,” Shelby insisted. “I can man the desk and still work on the books.”
Hannah shook her head stubbornly. “That would add at least two hours a day to your work. I won’t put you or anyone else in that bind. After everything that’s happened here lately, we need to get back to normal. I intend to start working on that immediately.”
She could cling as hard as she liked to her old “normal,” but that wouldn’t stop change from coming, Andrew thought privately. He understood why the events of the past few months had left her unsettled, anxious, worried about the future. But everything
had
changed and the sooner she acknowledged that, the better.
He felt someone take his arm, and he glanced down to find Shelby leaning companionably against him, smiling up at him with her usual warmth. “So, you’re my niece’s daddy. Welcome to the Bell family, Andrew.”
He wasn’t sure if he was more startled by hearing himself called “daddy” or by the implicit acknowledgment that his connection with Hannah and their child automatically meant this family would be a significant part of his life from here on out. Looking around the room, he decided he had no complaints about that.