Texas Redeemed (33 page)

Valerie moaned his name, her fingernails digging into his shoulders like talons as she grew hotter and wetter, and he drove his fingers deeper.

He lifted her onto the buffet, and she leaned forward to kiss him as he shed his clothes. And then he was naked in front of her, bringing her to the edge of the buffet, nudging her legs open wider for him.

Valerie raised her arms and braced her palms on the wall behind her, and she groaned with closed-eyed abandon as he filled her with one hard thrust to the hilt.

“Watch,” he said to her, the word firm, his voice husky with his own arousal. When she opened her heavy-lidded eyes, he withdrew almost to the tip of his erection, then thrust again to be rewarded with a throaty whimper.

“Trust this.” He pushed relentlessly, faster, and the force of their bodies had the buffet striking the wall in tempo with their movements. “Trust me.”

“I want … I want you out of my system.” Her back arched and her thighs tensed as she let go. Then he took what she offered, bracing his hands on her knees and plunging deeper … closer … until he groaned into her mouth.

They stayed locked in that position, her on the buffet with her legs wrapped around his waist and her hands cradling his head to her shoulder, for several minutes—not speaking but breathing heavily.

Peyton’s tongue wicked away a droplet of sweat from her throat, then his mouth took hers in a deep, dark kiss. “I’ll never be out of your system.”

Valerie’s hands dropped to his shoulders. “But I’m out of yours? Remember, you don’t love me anymore.”

He didn’t want to go there, didn’t want this to be about anything more than instinct, simple need … and maybe weakness. Sex was what they got right together. But the consequences of it—expectations, children, love—tripped them up. “I didn’t say you were out of my system, Valerie.”

When his phone rang inside his discarded pants, he stepped away from her with a pang of regret and hunted for the phone. A glance at the screen had him grabbing the pants off the floor and pulling them on quickly.

“Grandpa,” he greeted with every effort to hold his voice steady, and, hearing that one word, Valerie sprang down from the buffet and gathered her own strewn clothes. “Is everything all right with Lucy?”

“It’s not,” Nathaniel said. “She’s been stealing from the house. Your ink pen, that old antique of Estella’s that went missing after one of her visits. Today I put your pocket watch in the study, left her there alone, and when I came back it was in her bag.”

Peyton stopped halfway through zipping up. “Why the hell would she steal anything—”

“Steal?” Valerie repeated with alarm, rushing to him.

Nathaniel said something inaudible and Peyton held the phone between Valerie and himself. “Say that again, Grandpa. We couldn’t hear.”

“For Marin. She’s been stealing for your mother.”

P
EYTON EASED HIS
SUV to a stop in front of the rundown apartment complex, turned off the headlights and in dark silence scanned the rows of grime-and-grit-covered windows along the upper floors. Which one of them offered a view into his mother’s apartment—the place where she had routinely taken his daughter without anyone being the wiser?

A shout and the crash of shattering glass came from inside an apartment on the ground level, and Peyton momentarily shut his eyes in barely controlled anger. The thought of his teenager spending time here on a daily basis—many instances with his mother passed out on a futon, according to Lucy—was a fresh welt on an age-old wound that had never really healed.

Marin had used his daughter as a minion, a thief to do her bidding. But it wouldn’t happen again.

Engaging the security lock on the SUV, he strode to the complex’s outer door and found that it lacked a doorknob. Its replacement was a crowbar affixed to the inside of the door, with its curved, pointed end protruding out of the hole in the door meant for a knob. He gripped it and pulled, and was inside the dingy building.

Apartment 3E, his daughter had told him after he and Valerie had arrived at his grandfather’s house. They’d driven their respective vehicles; despite the passion that had drawn them together earlier, tension remained.

As he ascended the stairwell to the third floor, he remembered Lucy’s stricken face and how her shoulders shook when she apologized for what she’d done. And he remembered that Valerie had been ready to hold her own, was hungry for a confrontation with the woman who’d manipulated an innocent child even as she agreed to just take Lucy to the ranch.

In the beginning, and in the end, this was his war with his mother, and he didn’t need anyone to fight it for him.

He found 3E and knocked—hard.

The door swung open to reveal a woman he barely recognized. One of his father’s trademarks was his taste for high-caliber women; a beautiful face, graceful body and luscious hair could always turn his head. It was a story Peyton had known almost his whole life but hated to recall—how his mother, a young waitress, had bent over his father’s table showing cleavage and a smile while serving his entrée, and had ended up as Anthony Turner’s hotel room companion by the end of the night.

He couldn’t reconcile that woman, or the one who’d found him at Memorial and said all the right things to make him believe in her again, with the drunk Marin Beck in front of him. “Peyton … hi,” she said, opening the door farther.

At her unspoken invitation he entered the threadbare apartment, storing the details of the place that his daughter had frequented for months. Utilitarian furniture, opened cupboards that revealed emptiness, a half-full bottle of Absolut on the counter and next to it a plastic cup brimming with the stuff.

“Three guesses why I’m here.”

Marin dropped the smile. “Want your Turner heirlooms back? Want to throw a fit because I spent a little time with my granddaughter?”

Peyton had already been informed that both the pen from his grandfather and his grandmother’s antique were gone, though Nathaniel was still working to trace the items. “You took her from school without her parents’ permission. You took her to places in Meridien you know damn well a thirteen-year-old girl shouldn’t be!”

“Grandparents have rights.”

“Not the right to have her buy alcohol and cigarettes. Not the right to mess with her head just to feed your damn addictions.” He spat a humorless laugh. “If you hunted down Lucy, then no doubt you found out about Anna. Too bad you couldn’t use them both to steal for you.”

“Shut up, goddamn you!” Marin pounded her fist on the ancient Formica counter, making the vodka bottle wobble. “It hurts every day to know Anna died. How can you think I don’t even care? She was my family!
My
fucking family.”

“What does family mean to you?”

“Ohhh,” she said, curling her lip the way he’d seen his daughter do, “there’s that Turner self-righteousness. Here’s the story. Your father used me, left me with a child I had no idea how to raise or support.”

“You used each other. He got a good-looking woman and you got a meal ticket.”

Marin came forward, stabbed her finger into his chest. “I deserved my cut. And you’re a success now—a doctor. Thank me for that.”

A hollow feeling expanded inside him. “Thank you,” he said slowly, “for showing me that this is over.”

“Lucy was
willing
to help me, just like her mother was. Why persecute me but not that con artist bitch Valerie, when we’re actually cut from the same cloth?” Marin took the cup of vodka to the sink and poured its contents down the drain. “Know what? I feel so good I don’t even need a drink.”

Peyton studied her, unable to find even a trace of the mother he’d loved despite her neglect and lies. “Why didn’t you tell me that she’d bribed you to leave?”

“To see her squirm, to make her crazy wondering how long I’d keep her secret.” Marin saw the flash of primitive rage pass over his face, but it seemed only to goad her. “She was a stranger but Estella just took her right in, while I got the cold shoulder. Valerie knew she’d struck gold with you, that’s all.”

She placed her hands along his cheeks, and searched his eyes. “I’ve got to know—did she at least give her boyfriend his walking papers before dropping her drawers for you? Or did you two just keep doing it behind his back?”

“Enough.” He removed her hands from his face, but held them. “I’ve got to let you go.” And it hurt like hell to do it, because he’d loved her even when he hadn’t wanted to.

“Peyton. No.”

“For years you’ve popped in and out of my life. Part of that’s my fault, since I never made you choose. Now
I’m
choosing for you. You’re out.” He released her hands and it physically hurt to finally let his mother go.

Peyton didn’t storm out of the apartment, just shut the door calmly behind him and headed to the stairs. But halfway there he bent his head and rubbed at the burn of tears.

“A young man shouldn’t be so upset,” an elderly woman said, sharing a kind smile as she hobbled past him to an apartment with a welcome mat on the hallway floor in front of her door. “Nothing can be that bad.”

It was though. And all he could think about was escape.

V
ALERIE LOST HER
daughter at the hospital. She’d stepped away from the waiting area near Helene-Ming Fish’s office for only all of ten minutes to freshen up in the restroom, and then returned to discover Lucy missing.

After searching the mental health ward and the children’s library, she went to the emergency room.

Beyond the sliding doors was Lucy in her shorts and cap-sleeved top, sporting a careless topknot and a Bohemian handbag. Perched on the bumper of an ambulance, she looked to be in deep conversation with the young man seated beside her who had longish blond hair and a cleft chin, wore scrubs and was hunched over with a cigarette in one hand and a foam coffee cup in the other.

“Sawyer Reed,” a nurse offered as Valerie waited near the doors, observing. “Emilia Webber’s boy.”

“Isn’t her son with the fire department?”

“That would be Axle, the older one. Not to gossip, but neither one is well liked. Even Emilia Webber deserved better sons. Surely you’ve heard that though—and what I’m telling you isn’t gossip if you’ve already heard it elsewhere.” The nurse followed Valerie’s gaze to the ambulance. “Sawyer’s not one to let folks disturb his bumper-coffee-and-cigarettes, but your girl was nosing around and decided to find out for herself just why he smokes so much.”

Valerie went out, ignoring how similar this moment felt. She’d been sitting on an ambulance bumper when she’d told Peyton the truth that had ended them. “Two seconds to get back inside and into an elevator, Lucy. We’re late.”

Frowning, her daughter scooted closer to Sawyer. “Good, ’cause I don’t want to go.”

“’Mornin’,” the doctor greeted stiltedly, as if he’d appreciate it if they hashed this out as far away from him as possible.

“Our health class had a lesson on nicotine,” Lucy went on. “I was telling Doctor Reed all about it.”

“Info I’m sure he already knows,” Valerie said neutrally. This was the doctor who’d gone AWOL, and his choice to sit in a parking lot smoking his way to sanity wasn’t her business.

When Lucy stomped into the hospital, Valerie offered a short nod to Sawyer, who silently saluted her with his coffee cup and bent his head to take a deep draw from the cigarette.

Outside Helene-Ming Fish’s office, the girl launched into whispered protests against therapy since the whole school would be calling her “Freakazoid Jordan” in a week flat on account of nobody in Night Sky knew when to shut up and mind their own beeswax.

“Lucy, the nightmares, cutting your hair … they’re real problems. I don’t even know what else you’ve done, or what you’ve
thought
about doing.”

“Maybe I’ll do what you and Dad do. Ignore what’s wrong, bottle it up—poof! Everything’s cool.” She rolled her eyes. “Except it’s not. Are we ever going to be all right again, and stop being mad and just be a family? You’re sad all the time and Dad’s …”

“How is he?” She craved to know if he was also sleep-deprived and on edge and missing what they’d found in each other.

“Find out for yourself.”

Before she could press further, Doctor Fish ushered Lucy in, and Valerie headed for the row of cushioned chairs in the outer office’s waiting area and closed her eyes. “Please help my daughter. I can’t lose her, too.”

Someone cleared their throat and her eyes shot open. “What’re you doing here?”

Though his jaw was dusky with stubble and his hair damp, as if he’d rushed to get out the door, Peyton looked well for a man who was living out of a suitcase in a hotel room. “Lucy called me.”

“She’s with Doctor Fish.”

He hesitated, then claimed the chair farthest from her. “I can wait.” A thick silence followed with the faint background noise of footsteps down the hall and pages over the intercom. Finally he broke it. “What were you doing just now?”

“Praying.”

“Thought you didn’t go for any of that. Choose your own destiny, right?”

She sighed, the sound coming out wearier than she’d wanted. “I …” she turned to find him watching her intently “… needed something to believe in.”

Peyton’s eyes widened slightly, recognizing the very words he’d told her once. “Understood.”

I can’t fix this without you. Meet me halfway.
“Peyton—”

He leapt up from the chair, jamming a hand into his front pocket and jingling coins. “I’m gonna get a Coke or coffee or something. Want anything?”

How about our lives back, for starters? I want our daughter to be safe with both of us in her life forever. I want the impossible.

“Nothing,” she said.

In just a few strides he was down the hall and around the corner, out of her reach again.

And there she was, avoiding again.

Valerie stood and followed the path he’d taken, and found him inserting a dollar into a soda vending machine. The machine whined and, finding the bill to be not crisp enough, spat it back out.

“Damn,” he said softly. “Not enough coins.”

Valerie plucked a dollar from her purse and fed it to the machine. When a Coke tumbled down, she grabbed it and held it upright for a moment before giving it to him. “A soda for your thoughts?”

Peyton took the soda but didn’t pull the tab. Instead he went to the windows overlooking the courtyard. “I didn’t expect to see you. Lucy said you’d dropped her off here, and I didn’t want her to go through this alone. Guess she hasn’t gotten the hang of that ‘lying is bad’ thing yet.”

She stood beside him watching people mill about the courtyard chatting on cell phones and gathering at tables illuminated in sunlight. “It’ll be a tough habit to break—lying. It’s easy to lie, especially to ourselves.”

Peyton turned his face toward her. “I got the message you left the other day, about the DNA results being ready. The lab called me, too.”

“Have you gotten a report, then? I thought you’d be all over it.” She’d hated having to subject Lucy to a “checkup” in San Antonio that consisted of a doctor swabbing the inside of her cheek.

“Valerie, I don’t need a lab report to tell me what I already know. Lucy’s my daughter, and Anna was, too.” Peyton moved closer and she relished the masculine, familiar scent of him. There was raw pain in his eyes. “I shouldn’t have put you and Lucy through that. I’m so sorry.”

One step forward and he was close enough to lean on. But she couldn’t, not when he was still wandering at rock bottom. He hadn’t brought a sledgehammer to the cemetery and gotten himself thrown in jail again, but she could hear the conflict in his voice. “Thanks for helping me file the restraining order against Marin. I bet that was difficult to do.”

“Protecting my daughter?”

“Saying goodbye to your mother.”

A muscle twitched in his neck, but he said only “Where’s the ‘I told you so’?”

“You gave her another chance, is all, just like I’d given you. Despite all the crap Uncle Rhys put me through, I never really hated him. I wouldn’t have taken the ranch if I had. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”