B.J. Daniels - Hero's Return

But she didn’t reach for her glass. She could see that he had already put the pieces together. “Clay,” he said. “Clayton Rothschild III.”

She felt her cheeks warm with the anger that was always just below the surface. Her gaze rose to meet Tucker’s. “Madeline killed him just as surely as if she’d been the one to tie the noose around his neck.” Her voice broke and she had to fight tears. No, this was not at all the way she’d planned this so-called date.

“He knew Madeline?” he asked, frowning. “That was about the same time as...” He broke off, shifted his gaze to hers again and held it. “He killed himself because of her?” He was shaking his head. “The package. The only way you could have known...” His gray eyes widened in alarm. “She pulled the same thing on him that she did me with the...baby?”

Kate nodded, unable to speak around the lump in her throat. She looked away. After all the interviews she’d done since she’d begun her career, she’d never let anyone get to her like this. But sitting across from a man who had known her nemesis...intimately, who knew how she operated, who had been hurt by her almost as deeply as her brother...

Staring into his gray eyes, she thought that maybe there was little difference between this man and her brother. That thought made her angry at both of them. How could they have fallen for such a woman? Tucker had left behind everything for nineteen years—his family, his ranch, his life to that point—because of Madeline. Clay had just taken a more drastic route to run away from what that woman had put him through.

“You want to know where I got the doll?” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears as she tried to rein in her fury without much luck. “It’s the one Madeline sent my brother. At the time, I had no idea what it meant when it was found in the room where Clay...” Her voice broke again. “But I was determined to learn the truth about why my brother killed himself. I was thirteen. My brother was a senior in high school.”

Tucker was staring at her with so much sympathy that she had to look away for fear of breaking down again.

“How did you find out about her?” he asked after a moment.

“My brother. I found a letter he had written her. His suicide note. Unfortunately, when I went searching for her, I realized that Madeline Ross never existed. She’d lied about who she was, no big surprise.”

“Still, how could you know that the woman from the creek—”

“Clay said in the letter that he knew there was another man Madeline was seeing. A cowboy who lived in Gilt Edge with the last name Cahill. It didn’t take much to put it together in the years since. At first I thought it might be your brother Flint. But when you took off suddenly, I figured you’d run away with her. That maybe the two of you had been in it together.” She met his gaze. “Until I heard about the skeletal remains found in the creek near your ranch.”

“So you sent the package to me.”

“I’d hoped you were in contact with your family and that the package would get you home. I wasn’t sure the remains were Madeline’s let alone that you would return.”

He looked shocked.

“I figured if you were the other man my brother had written about, then the doll might resonate with you.”

Tucker let out a bark of laugh. “Oh, it resonated, all right. I’ve believed for nineteen years that I was the reason she killed herself and our son.”

She shook her head. “How could you let her fool you like that?”

“I wish I knew. So you’ve known about me and Madeline for—”

“Years. That’s how long I’ve been looking for you. You did a good job of hiding. Does your brother the sheriff know that you haven’t been going by Tucker Cahill all this time?”

Tucker was staring at her again. “I see what you meant about the two of us having a lot in common. And what exactly were you going to do when you found me?”

She shook her head, unable to speak for a moment around the lump in her throat. “It was Madeline I wanted. If you were with her... But when the bones were found, I had a feeling you’d be coming back alone.”

They both fell silent for a few minutes.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said. “I had no idea there were...others.”

“Yes, except with my brother Madeline obviously survived her leap into the river to be saved by whoever she was working with and continued to blackmail Clay until he couldn’t take the guilt anymore.”

“It wasn’t just the guilt. I would imagine he thought he loved her.”

Kate ground her teeth. “That makes it even worse.” She’d never understood how her brother could have taken his own life. “She was that good?”

“When you’re seventeen... But yes, she was good at making an inexperienced teenager fall for her.”

She felt all the anger leak from her like a pinprick to a tire. It left her simply tired and, again, close to tears. Not even her parents knew everything about Madeline. It felt good to finally say what had been bottled up inside her to someone who’d known the woman.

“There’s another reason I wanted to find you,” Kate said. “I need to know everything about Madeline so I can find her accomplice.”

The waiter tentatively came back to the table. “I don’t want to rush you.”

“No, it’s fine. Are you ready to order?” Tucker asked her.

She nodded. For the first time since her brother had died, she didn’t feel that hard knot in her chest. Finally, she would avenge his death. Tucker Cahill didn’t know it yet, but he was going to help her.

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