Wicked Need (The Wicked Horse Series Book 3) (29 page)

For a split second,
I think about ignoring it because if it is Rand, then I’ll
be forced to make a decision on how I choose to view myself and what
I believe I’m entitled to. Scary prospect, and I’m not
sure I’m ready.

But then I decide to
go for it because it could be a courier delivering papers from
Richard regarding the transfer of monies, or it could be Detective
Blanton with an update on the case.

Instead, when I open
the door, I’m
greeted by the smiling face of Callie Hayes.

The woman who hired
me out of the goodness of her heart, only to have me quit on her
after three days on the job. Yes, the day after my run in with Rand
at The Silo, I went into campaign headquarters and told Callie I
couldn’t
work for her anymore.

She asked why and I
told her the truth.

That I now had quite
a bit of money coming my way and didn’t
need the job.

She just smiled at
me and nodded politely, not buying for one second that was the reason
I was quitting. But because she’s
a professional, she wished me well and told me I’d be welcome
back if I wanted.

I felt like shit
leaving her like that, but the truth is, at that point, I had figured
my life in Jackson, Wyoming was over. I felt like a fraud, and Rand
had left. There was no reason for me to stay and continue to
cultivate friendships. In fact, I had intended to hightail it back to
Vegas. Even though there’s
no one there I love, it’s still my hometown.

Yet four days later,
I’m
still here and watching as Callie pushes past me into my home. She
looks around as she shrugs out of her jean jacket. It’s late
afternoon and the temps really start to dip at this time of year, but
not enough to warrant a big coat.

“Nice place,”
she says conversationally.

“Um…
thanks,” I respond as I follow her into the living room.

She turns, smiling
at me brightly.

I smile back, not so
bright and with mostly confusion. “What
are you doing here?”

“Checking in
on you, silly,” she says with a wave of her hand. “I
didn’t buy that shit about you having all kinds of money now
and moving on with your life. Well, I totally bought the money thing…
I mean, hello… your husband was a gazillionaire or something,
but I refused to believe you were bailing on Rand.”

“Rand bailed
on me,” I say quietly. I realize for the first time I’m a
little hurt he left without any true resolution between us. The way
he’s left me wondering, mulling, and stewing over my life has
me in knots, and I’m doing nothing but obsessing on how to
untie those so I can have peace.

Huh?

Maybe that’s
what Rand intended all along to happen to me?

Shaking my head, I
look at Callie. With my most confident voice, I say, “I
appreciate you checking on me, but as you can see, I’m fine.”

And she snorts at me
with a major eye roll, and then just levels one cocked eyebrow at me.

I get a little
miffed. “You
don’t know me so just level that look somewhere else.”

“I know what
it’s like to love someone but they don’t give you the
same back in return, mainly because they’re too stupid to
realize it,” she murmurs, her head tilted and eyes sympathetic.
“I know because Woolf did it to me, and I know how that made me
feel. You’re running away from Rand, and I can tell you…
it’s going to hurt him deeply.”

My shoulders
immediately sag and any thought I had of fighting her on this seeps
out of me. I don’t
want to cause Rand pain. I don’t want to be stupid and lose
something that could be very good for me. I just don’t know how
to accept my own worthiness.

I look at Callie
with misery-filled eyes. “I
don’t know how to do this.”

“Do what?”
she asks, taking a step toward me with hands coming out to grasp
mine.

“Accept
happiness—feel worthy—trust that Rand is really crazy for
me. I don’t know how to give credence to all of these amazing
things I’ve never had before. It doesn’t feel right…
or genuine to me. I feel like a fraud.”

“Why?”
she asks, her eyes wide with curiosity. “Why would you ever
feel that way?”

“Because I’m
not the type of woman anyone respects. I sold out. Sold my own
fucking self-respect and worth for the almighty dollar. I let myself
be treated abominably because I didn’t have the fortitude to
demand better for myself. And here Rand Bishop is before me, almost
perfect in every way a human can be, and he wants me to step off into
a happily ever after with him that I’m sure is going to come
crumbling down when he realizes the type of person I really am.”

Callie stares at me
and says, “Phew.
That was a mouthful.”

“He’s
too good for me,” I say bitterly, pulling my hands from her.

“Does Rand
know all your dirty secrets?” she asks me point blank.

“Well…
yeah… I’ve told him everything.”

“And how does
he feel about all of that?” she asks, but before I can reply,
she says, “I mean… does he berate you for your choices?
Look down his nose at you? Mock you? Make you feel inferior? Does he
constantly rub your nose in your mistakes and make you feel ashamed
of yourself?”

I pull up straight,
incensed on Rand’s
behalf. “Of course he doesn’t. He’s done nothing
but call me a survivor. He’s said my past doesn’t
matter.”

“Then why the
fuck are you letting it matter?” Callie asks sarcastically, and
I feel like she’d love to add a thump onto my forehead for
being so dense. “If you trust Rand, then you must believe what
he says. If you believe what he says, then your past doesn’t
have shit to do with your future with him.”

I have no words.

No comeback.

Certainly no
argument.

My gaze drops to the
floor as I can’t
bear to have Callie see my own mortification at being so stupid.

I do trust Rand.
Clearly trust his reasoning better than my own, since my head seems
pretty fucked up these days. But more importantly, if I just let go
of my notions of inferiority, and for the briefest of moments,
suspend my own self-doubt, I can admit to myself that Rand seems to
think I’m
pretty great as is.

So why shouldn’t
I?

My eyes snaps up,
pinning Callie, who’s
looking at me expectantly. “I’m a fucking idiot.”

She bursts out
laughing, throwing her head back and revealing beautifully straight,
white teeth. I can’t
help it… I laugh too. We stare at each other in amusement as
our laughs turn to chuckles, and then finally recede into a sheepish
smile from me and a happy smile from Callie.

“Okay, my job
here is done,” she says proudly, leaning in to kiss my cheek.
“I expect to hear all the nitty-gritty details about how you
and Rand make up, and you can’t spare any of the sexy stuff
either.”

I snort. “He’s
got to show back up in town for that to happen.”

“I’m
sure he’ll be back soon,” she says, and something about
the look on her face makes me do a double take.

“Wait a
minute… do you know where he is?” I ask suspiciously.

She doesn’t
say anything for a moment, and I think she might deny it, but then
she sighs and shrugs her shoulders at me. “Actually, I do know
where he is, I do know when he’s coming back and no, I won’t
tell you. That’s for him.”

“But—”

“Now, I really
have to go. Lots of stuff to do today,” she chirps at me,
brushing by me to the front door.

“But—”

“Later, Cat.”

The door opens and
then closes behind her quickly, and I realize that Callie just came
over here to help pave the way for Rand’s
return. She was gauging the situation and was bound and determined to
do her damndest to make sure my head was on straight when he showed
up on my doorstep.

Shaking my head and
smiling to myself, I walk up to the front door and peek outside the
rectangular pane of glass that sits to the side. Callie gets in her
car, a sassy little BMW, and pulls out of my driveway.

Damn, I’m
glad she came by.

I start to turn
away, but movement catches my eye. I watch as another vehicle pulls
in. I don’t
recognize it… a nondescript black four door with a Wyoming
plate on the front. The late afternoon sun hits the windshield at
just such an angle that I can’t see who it is. My gut tells me
it’s Detective Blanton, and I get excited that he may have news
for me.

I’m
surprised when after the car comes to a stop, the passenger door
opens first. A man gets out and takes a look around the front yard.
He’s probably in his mid-forties with dark brown hair, tall,
fit, and reasonably attractive. The driver’s door opens and my
jaw drops open when I see Rand get out. He says something to the
other man across the top of the car, who nods in return.

Both men close their
doors and start walking up to the house, and for the life of me, I
have no clue what’s
going on.

Rand walks up the
porch steps first, and just as his foot hits the top landing, I open
the door. His gaze snaps to mine and lights up with joy to see me
standing there. I have a flood of warmth and happiness course through
me as I realize how much I’ve
missed him in the past few days, and how much I just want to throw
myself into his arms.

But he brought
company and that holds me back.

I look to the older
man again, and note he
has brown eyes and olive-toned skin. He gives me a cautious smile,
and when he does, I note he only has one dimple popping on the left
side.

Huh, just like me…
only one dimple working.

Just. Like. Me.

I tilt my head,
looking at him closer.

It can’t
be.

It just can’t.

I turn my head
slowly back to Rand and look at him…
my eyes pleading with him to tell me who this man is.

“Cat,”
Rand says quietly as he nods to the stranger. “I found your
father.”

Rand

Goddamn, she looks
gorgeous. Wearing a pair of faded jeans ripped at the knee, a
sweatshirt, and fuzzy socks. Hair pulled up in a ponytail and not a
lick of makeup on her face.

And now she looks
woozy, her legs buckling slightly when I reveal that I found her dad.

I step forward
quickly, put my arm around her waist, and hold her tightly. Turning
her toward Allen, I watch as her eyes roam all over his face.

Slowly…
taking in every detail. Probably comparing the arch of her eyebrows
to his, or the way their noses tilt slightly upward at the end. I
took one look at Allen Henning when I tracked him down to
Fayetteville, North Carolina, and I had no doubt he was Cat’s
father.

That was three days
ago. Bridger worked his magic and found out that Sergeant Major Allen
Henning retired from the Army just this year after twenty-five years
of active duty. He never returned to Green Bay, instead settling in
Fayetteville as he’d
spent almost as much time there as he had growing up in Wisconsin.
Allen had married a local girl and they had two children, a boy age
fifteen and a girl, age eleven.

I left my Suburban
in Vegas and caught a flight to Raleigh, North Carolina. Once there,
I rented a car and drove the hour and a half to Fayetteville. I had
no clue how Allen would receive me because I knew very little about
the character of this man, but I didn’t
let that hold me back. I made it to his house at dinnertime as he was
just setting down with his family to eat.

He was gracious but
didn’t
invite me in. Instead, he stepped out onto the front porch into the
air that was still quite warm and humid in early September.

I didn’t
hold any punches because I knew I’d found the right man. “Mr.
Henning… I’m in love with a woman who I believe is your
daughter.”

He blinked at me in
surprise, but he wasn’t
pissed, and that started to clue me in to the man’s character.
“Excuse me?”

“Back in 1990,
you briefly dated a woman named Trish Lyons.”

His eyebrows
furrowed inward as he flipped backward in time and then his nose
wrinkled slightly. “Yeah…
we were together a few months. She sort of dumped me with no
explanation. Hadn’t thought about her in years actually.”

“Well…
she was pregnant when she left and didn’t tell you about it.
Went back to Vegas and had the baby. A girl named Catherine.”

To give the man
credit, he stayed upright although his face went ghostly white. “I
have a daughter?”

“Yes,” I
told him with a smile. “She’s twenty-four. She’s
also sweet, amazing, and gorgeous. She had a shitty life. Yet, she
still turned out amazing. She had no one her entire life who she
could count on, and her mother always told her you abandoned them. I
sought you out to see if that was true, and if it wasn’t, to
give Cat a little piece of her heritage.”

“I never would
have abandoned her if I’d known,” he whispered roughly.

“I know,”
I told him. “I can just tell you wouldn’t.”

Allen then invited
me in. He called his wife, Marsha, into the living room where he
recounted to her what I’d
just told him in a quiet voice so the kids wouldn’t hear. She
had the same stunned look, but then she immediately became concerned
about Catherine the way Allen had.

I then got invited
to dinner, but we agreed not to say anything to the kids. Allen felt
that was a conversation he and Marsha needed to have with them after
they learned more about Cat.

So I sat at the
dinner table with the Henning family, and I learned all about them.

And they are fucking
phenomenal. Cat is getting ready to inherit a dad who is
eager to make up for lost time and a stepmother who is ready to dote
on her. Allen told me this morning when I picked him up at his house
to make the trip here with me that the kids were over the moon to
learn they have a sibling.