Читать книгу High-Stakes Homecoming - Suzanne Mcminn - Страница 10

They were both already soaked to the skin, and going back out into this wild storm was only going to make things worse. But there was no other choice. A dog bounded up behind her, barking.

“Get a jacket, Willa.”

She looked at him blankly, then turned, told the dog to hush and opened a closet near the front door to grab a rain slicker. She put it on, pulling the hood over her head, and moved past him to the door that was still standing open wide, the dog trotting right after her. She avoided meeting Penn’s eyes. She looked small in the oversize slicker. The short, wispy cut of her hair revealed every delicate line of her features, features that looked fragile now, like glass ready to shatter.

But she was tougher than she looked, he knew that.

He followed her out onto the wide, covered farmhouse porch. Old rocking chairs with peeling paint lined up in front of the house, the way they always had. A porch swing’s chains rattled in the wind at the far end.

“How old is your daughter?”

“She’s four.”

Four. God. This wild night was no place for a four-year-old child. No wonder Willa looked like she was about to go crazy.

“You’re positive she’s not in the house?”

“Of course I’m positive she’s not in the house!”

“Where’s the other one?” The other one that should be almost fourteen now.

“What other one?” she asked impatiently. Then…She now met his eyes. “There is no other one.”

She walked away from him.

“Birdie!” she shouted, her voice hopelessly lost in the wind and rain.

There is no other one. He shouldn’t even want to explore that, and now wasn’t the time to find out what had happened to the baby Willa had been carrying the day he’d walked away. It hadn’t been his baby, anyway. And this wasn’t the time to think about that betrayal, either.

He hurried after Willa and the stumpy-legged mutt that kept pace with her. She’d asked for his help, but he was damn sure she didn’t really want it. She loved her daughter—that was clear, too.

Loved her enough to ask him for help.

He caught up with her at the bottom of the porch steps, reached for her arm to stop her.

“It’s important right now not to race off in a hundred directions,” he said grimly. “Does she have any favorite places on the farm? Hiding spots? We’ll search there and the barn, then we go back and call the police if we don’t find her.”

“The phones are out already.”

“Then we go for help in your truck. Or one of us goes for help while the other one stays here,” he added, seeing the resistance on her face before she even opened her mouth. She didn’t want to leave Birdie alone, even if they didn’t know where the child was.

But it was just as obvious that they couldn’t search four hundred acres by themselves. The farm was massive and partly wild. Otto had abandoned any real farming years ago, and much of the land had grown up over time, turned back into woods. In the old days, Otto’s father before him had had all kinds of money, but not from farming. There was oil and gas under this farm, and at the turn of the last century, there’d been drilling everywhere. Most of those wells had been abandoned decades ago, leaving nothing but rusted well sheds and crumbling derricks, not to mention pipes running everywhere, some of them sticking out of the ground or jaggedly cut off.

There were plenty of ways for a child to run into trouble or to get hurt rambling around in the dark while panicked. Plenty of ways for Willa to get hurt, too.

He wondered what kind of name Birdie was, but he didn’t ask. Willa charged off and he kept up with her. In the bouncing flashlight beam, he spied the old herb garden to the side of the house, with its paving stone paths and geometric design, the huge stone sundial in the center. And he saw something new in the shadows beyond it.

Wooden playground equipment. What the hell?

Maybe she had been living at Limberlost for a year, after all. Eighty-two-year-old Otto Ramsey hadn’t put in a slide and swings for himself.

There was a barn on the hill and another below, in the meadow. As far as he was concerned, if they didn’t find her up here, there was no sense heading farther afield before getting help. But he’d have to convince Willa of that.

The wind ripped back Willa’s hood, baring her head as she ran toward the barn. He chased after her, helped her with the heavy wooden latch on the barn door. Inside, their flashlights swerved and crossed. She called Birdie’s name. The barn smelled earthy and like home, and he was stunned for a harsh instant. There were horse stalls up and down the barn, but only one horse poked its ebony head over a stall door.

Willa raced between the stalls, looking into every one. She whirled at the end of the barn, faced him. Raw emotion hit him again, this time with the appalling urge to take her into arms and promise her he’d find Birdie.

He shoved the thought away as he saw the steel under her painful fear.

“Where now?” he asked.

“She has a treehouse. That’s all I can think.”

“Let’s go.”

They left the barn. He latched the door while she tore ahead. He followed the erratic bounce of her flashlight beam in the wind and rain.

Willa climbed the wooden steps nailed to a huge cherry tree before he even got there, and nearly fell down into his arms as she barreled back down.

“She’s not there!” Her eyes flashed a near-hysteria that she was clearly working hard to control.

“Get me the keys to your truck.”

She didn’t hesitate. He raced after her toward the house, but she was back in the doorway with a set of keys before he reached it.

“Please.” Her eyes shone bright in the dark. “Please get help.” She was begging, and clearly past caring who was helping her.

She stood in the door, the light from her flashlight spilling at her feet. The truck was parked at the side of the house. He jumped in, gunned the engine to life, and started to back up when he realized abruptly what felt so strange about the way the vehicle sat.

He got out, slammed the door, and flashed his light down at the tires.

The rear passenger-side tire was flat.

His blood froze in his veins. He knelt down and studied the tire in the light. He couldn’t see any reason for it to be flat, though the rubber was thinning and hadn’t worn well. No obvious puncture, or at least not one he could see in this light. He went for the spare, soaked beyond belief at this point, and stood back, stomach hitting the ground when he pulled it out.

The spare was flat.

He’d never seen so many things go wrong in unison in his whole life—from the failed brakes on the Land Rover right up to Willa’s tires. Maybe that text message he’d gotten this morning had been from the Universe.

But if he hadn’t come to Haven tonight…

Willa would be alone right now. And no matter how he felt about her and the past, the thought of her being alone in these circumstances brought out every protective instinct in his body.

Stupid and incomprehensible and flat-out crazy as that was.

Penn turned, headed for the house, dreading giving her the news. Willa’s daughter was out there, and no matter what had happened in the past or how Willa had hurt him, or even what kind of mess they had in front of them over the will, there was a lost little girl, and that was all that mattered right now.

Willa yanked the door wide before he reached it. He could see the same dread in his gut on her face before he opened his mouth.

“The truck’s got a flat and the spare’s flat, too,” he told her.

“I just drove the truck!” She didn’t want to believe him. In fact, she pushed past him as if she thought he was lying.

He followed her back out into the rain. She ran to the truck, dropped to her knees in front of the tire, then was back up, wheeling to find the spare where he’d left it on the ground.

She looked up at him then.

Her face was so stricken, so pale in the shine of his flashlight, he couldn’t tell the difference between tears and raindrops on her cheeks; but he knew it was a combination of both that he saw.

“Did you do this?” she yelled at him over the storm.

“What?”

“What is going on? Did you flatten the tires?”

“Are you crazy?”

“I’m sorry.” She deflated, pressed shaking fingers to her mouth. She turned away, stared desperately out into the storm-dark woods.

He wanted to blame her for that bit of insanity, but he knew she was out of her mind with worry. Whatever else he didn’t believe about Willa, what he did believe was her love for her daughter. He didn’t know why it stunned him so. Even animals had mothering instincts. Willa didn’t have to be a perfect person to love her child.

Still, it rocked the cold, ugly image he had made up in his mind about Willa’s character.

“I have to find her,” she shouted now, wildly.

“Not alone.”

She stared at him for a long, awful moment. She was terrified, that was clear, and not just of the storm and her lost daughter.

Willa was terrified of him.

That rocked the cold, ugly image, too. She was vulnerable.

“I am alone,” she said with an achy honesty that seared him even deeper.

Again, he wanted to know what had happened to Jared. Why Willa would have been living with Otto. How she came to be alone.

“Not tonight,” he said. “You’re not alone tonight.”

Obviously, she wasn’t thinking clearly, though maybe if she wasn’t scared of him, a man she’d once betrayed, a man she hadn’t seen in fourteen years, she would be certifiable for sure.

“And you can’t just go charging out there,” he went on. “I know there’s a map of the property here somewhere. We’ll get extra batteries and we’ll organize our own grid search. It’s important that you don’t get lost as well. Birdie needs you.”

He saw her throat move in the wild darkness.

“I’m scared,” she finally said. “I don’t understand what’s happening, but something is really wrong. I’m scared!”

And he knew she hadn’t wanted to admit that out loud, knew she regretted it right away. She hated being vulnerable, hated it and wanted to hide it, and she couldn’t. She was too scared, teetering on full-blown panic.

And that’s why he didn’t tell her that he was scared, too. Something was wrong. This entire series of events was bizarre.

The spring wind whipped higher, colder, suddenly, and something hard struck his head, his arms. The hound yelped, hit.

Hail.

Huge, golf ball-sized hail. The kind of hail that could kill a person.

“Run!” he yelled, grabbing Willa’s arm, dragging her in the opposite direction of where he knew she wanted to go.

Penn gave her no choice, forced her into a dead run toward the house, and Willa was terrified her skull was going to be split in two by the hail at any second. And what good would she do Birdie then?

They reached the house and he yanked open the door. Willa ran inside, Flash whimpering at her heels, and she pivoted back to see Penn’s dark figure fill the doorway behind her.

The door shut, blocking the storm and the terrible night, leaving her wet and shaking and scared as he turned around.

“What about Birdie?” she half sobbed, and caught herself.

She was looking to him, Penn, to tell her what to do now. She was so far gone, it was ridiculous. How could so many things go wrong at once?

Penn’s gaze riveted beyond her.

“Willa—” he started.

She felt a prickle at the nape of her neck.

“Mommy.”

The scream that had been clawing its way up Willa’s throat came all the way out.

She dropped her flashlight and swung wildly. There Birdie stood, in her favorite Pooh Bear jammies. Her big hazel eyes gazed up at Willa, so big, so bright, without her glasses. Emotion smashed into Willa. She didn’t remember moving her feet across the short distance that separated them. She was just there, reaching for her daughter.

“Birdie, Birdie, Birdie.” She sobbed her daughter’s name over and over as she clutched her against her chest, dropping down, nearly falling crazily backward as she held her.

Birdie lifted her small face to her, her eyes wide and scared. Willa was scaring Birdie. She had to pull herself together.

“I was worried about you, sweetie. I couldn’t find you.”

“I was sleeping.”

“You weren’t in your bed!”

“I was in your bed, Mama. I was scared of the storm.”

Birdie hadn’t been in her bed! She’d checked! But right now she didn’t care, it was a senseless point. She couldn’t resist tugging Birdie tightly against her one more time. Wherever she had been, she was here now. In her arms.

“You’re wet, Mama,” she mumbled into Willa’s chest, wriggling in her mother’s arms.

“I know. I’m sorry.” She was soaked and she didn’t care. But she didn’t need to soak Birdie, too. She forced herself to let Birdie draw back.

Emotion still shot her pulse off the scale. Birdie was alive, in her arms. She wanted to just sit down and cry and hold her precious daughter.

“Who’s that man, Mama?”

Willa scrambled to her feet, controlling the sudden, silly—she knew it was silly—this urge to push Birdie behind her to keep her safe. As if she needed to protect her from Penn. Penn had been helping her to search for Birdie.

But he was also the one who was here to threaten the very foundation of her and Birdie’s lives, take this farm away from them.

Penn’s gaze, stark in the shadows cast by the flashlight he held directed low, struck her tightly, intensely. Even from several feet away, she felt as if he loomed over her, making her feel short despite her five feet, seven inches. He was…Big was the only word that came to mind.

Yeah. Big and bad. Good-looking and arrogant. A city slicker here to smash her like a bug beneath his steely boot.

That was difficult to remember when she was also grateful to him. And way too emotional.