Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

Rufus knew from the way Molly's gaze shifted from meeting his and the forced smile that now curved her lips, while the expression in her eyes remained guarded, that she was about to lie to him.

Just as he had guessed the cloying perfume he'd smelled the moment he entered the building to be one that the sophisticated Serena Jenkins would wear.

Telling him that he was too late to break the news gently to Molly regarding her mother still being alive and currently in London.

Serena Jenkins had already been here and announced her own presence.

Why she should have done so now, when it seemed she'd had no interest in contacting her daughter during the past seventeen years, he had no idea.

Rufus only knew, without a doubt, that seeing her mother again was now the reason for the pallor of Molly's cheeks.

The fact she appeared to be reluctant to share that meeting with him, or its reason, but was instead doing everything she could to push him away, was what puzzled him. Yes, they were still new together, but surely last night meant they could talk to each other?—

"Last night was a mistake," Molly bit out as if reading some of his thoughts. "I agree with you now. You're far too old for me."

"Really?" Rufus wasn't going to lie to himself, that hurt.

It also alerted him to the fact Molly was being deliberately cruel in what seemed to be an effort to put a distance between them.

Again, he had no idea why.

She gave an abrupt nod. "I need someone who is at the same stage in their life as me and wants the same things I do. To travel, perhaps." She shrugged. "Also, someone who isn't afraid of romance, something you've already told me you aren't interested in."

"I don't recall saying I was afraid of romance…"

She glared at him. "I'm trying to be kind about this."

"Is that so?" he debated skeptically. "Because you sound as if you're being deliberately fucking insulting to me."

"You see?" She threw up her hands in exasperation. "No matter how I broach this, you're going to be difficult."

He huffed a derisive laugh. "Deliberately inciting an argument with me isn't going to work either."

"I'm not?—"

"Yes, you most certainly are." Rufus now stood only inches away from Molly. Close enough he could breathe in her much more delicate perfume and see the shadows in her eyes. "Your mother came to the shelter this morning." He made it a statement, not a question.

Molly recoiled as if he had struck her, even more color draining from her cheeks. "How did you— How could you possibly know that?"

"Because… Ah, Megan," Rufus greeted the dark-haired young woman as she came through the doorway from the kennels. "Could you possibly take over here for a while, and keep Angus with you too, so that Molly and I can go up to her apartment and talk privately for a few minutes?"

"No problem." Megan grinned as she made herself comfortable behind the desk. "Today has been just awesome. Busy, but awesome."

"I'll tell Mia," Rufus promised. "Molly?" He held her gaze as he opened the door for her to precede him.

He could clearly see the indecision as to whether she should go with him warring inside her.

Because she had to know that if she refused, Rufus was capable of causing a scene in front of her coworker.

Just as she also had to know, from the things Rufus had already said, that he was going to ask her questions she obviously didn't want to answer.

* * *

Molly had no idea what to do.

She had intended to leave behind a note to explain her sudden disappearance. In it, she had intended to explain at least some of what she knew about the past.

Then, when Rufus arrived at the shelter so unexpectedly a few minutes ago, she'd felt as if she had no choice but to verbally alienate him instead.

But from the determination in Rufus's expression as he patiently waited for her to accompany him, she could see that her efforts so far hadn't been successful.

Then she would have to try harder!

Except…

How did Rufus know that her mother was not only in England, but that she had also come to the animal shelter earlier to talk to Molly?

Talk?

Her mother hadn't talked. She'd threatened.

"If you don't do as I ask and leave here immediately—or worse, try to claim you know nothing about the situation that necessitated me coming here at all—I'll make sure no one believes a word you have to say in your defense. Especially when it's obvious to me that you deliberately chose to come here and work for Mia Kingston. That's going to look very suspicious, don't you think? Better for you if you cut your losses and simply leave. The sooner, the better. Otherwise, I swear I'll make it so that Rufus Wynter and his daughter both have reason to hate you. Do you understand me?"

Of course, Molly understood. She wasn't stupid.

It had been totally surreal to recognize the red-haired woman, dressed so impeccably and who had greeted her so confidently, as the same blonde-haired one who had been her mother for ten years.

One glance at the other woman's expensive clothing and her obvious lack of apology for that or abandoning her own child, and Molly had refused, either mentally or verbally, to think of or address the other woman as anything at all during the conversation that followed.

Conversation?

Molly wouldn't exactly call Serena Jenkins's—as she now insisted on being called—demands as being any more of a conversation than her previous threats. No, they had been more of a monologue. The older woman certainly hadn't wanted an answer from Molly, just her compliance.

In truth, once Molly's initial shock had worn off, she hadn't been able to think of a single thing she wanted to say to the other woman.

Except one.

She had asked to know Ronan's whereabouts.

A question Serena had dismissed as being unnecessary, stating an adult Molly must know what had happened to him.

That was the problem. Molly didn't know for certain what had happened to Ronan, which was the reason she had asked Rufus to see if he could find him.

It seemed Serena Jenkins wasn't about to confirm or deny Molly's suspicions as she continued.

"I've taken an interest in and received a monthly report on Mia Kingston's life since her much-publicized reunion with her birth father two years ago," she had said dismissively with a curl of her glossy top lip. "I could hardly believe my eyes when the report from a month ago included an article and photographs from a magazine featuring the animal shelter Mia Kingston owns. Because there, in full color, was a grown-up you, standing in the background of one of those photographs. I suppose they ran the article because Mia became something of a celebrity in her own right when the news broke that she's actually Emily Wynter, the daughter of the millionaire Rufus Wynter and his deceased wife, Elizabeth," she added disinterestedly.

Molly had wanted to hit her mother then, to scream and shout at her obvious callousness in regard to a situation that had caused Rufus and Mia so much suffering.

Instead, she'd remained quiet and allowed her mother to continue confirming things that Molly hadn't known as a child and had only been able to guess at as an adult, but never had any way of confirming.

Until now.

"It was just too good an opportunity to resist that day when the two of us returned to the car park where I'd left the car while we went shopping, and I saw the woman I later learned was Elizabeth Wynter. She hadn't as yet strapped her baby's seat into the back of her car. I started a conversation with her, asked if she needed any help, which she refused. But you always were such a cute little thing. So tiny, almost doll-like, with those bright blue eyes and glossy black hair. You always succeeded in distracting the mothers."

No! Molly had inwardly protested in horror.

"While the mother was cooing over how cute you were in your pretty blue dress that matched the color of your eyes, it took me mere seconds to remove the baby in the seat from her vehicle and strap it into the back of my own. Unfortunately, once the mother had watched to make sure you made the walk safely back to our car, she then realized her baby was missing. She immediately tried to stop our car from leaving, but when she realized that wasn't happening, she then gave chase in her own car. I hadn't had time to strap you in, so you bounced around in the back seat for a while until you managed to secure the seat belt yourself. Such a pity the mother was then killed in the terrible fiery pile-up of vehicles on the motorway. I was just ahead of her and missed it, thank God. But photographs of both her and her baby appeared in the newspapers for days, weeks, after the tragedy, along with ones of the poor, devastated widower."

Serena had given a disgusted tusk .

"That amount of publicity meant I was stuck with the baby until the heat died down on the tragic story, because there was always the possibility of Emily being recognized. I know you did your bit to look after her, but you were only five, and there were limits to how much you could do. Three months of tolerating the demands of a stinky crying baby and I couldn't take it anymore. I drove down to Cornwall, far away from London, and abandoned her in a church there."

She gave a triumphant smile, as if it hadn't broken Molly's heart that day to realize the baby she had been caring for—who she now knew to have been Mia Kingston—was no longer living with them and wouldn't be coming back.

"Ironically, no one made the connection between the Wynter baby and the abandoned one, so I could have sold her on after all," Serena dismissed. "I've since learned she remained in an orphanage until she aged out of the system at eighteen. As you did. It would have been the height of fucking irony if the two of you had ended up in the same orphanage five years later," she had added callously.

By this time, the tears were cascading unchecked down Molly's cheeks.

The other woman had confirmed what Molly had long suspected. Primarily that her mother was a monster, one who felt no remorse for the fact Beth Wynter had died while trying to rescue her baby. Her comment about Molly's cuteness "always distracting the mothers" implied Sarah Harper had taken more babies than Emily and Ronan.

Worse, it seemed Serena had deliberately used Molly to help her in that endeavor.

"I had to give the money back on that occasion. No baby, no sale. It was always wealthy couples requesting babies, of course, ones who didn't meet the adoption criteria or simply weren't willing to wait for a baby to become available. All the same to me, as long as they paid me generously for the privilege."

Molly doubted that her mother had ever cared to find out specifically why those couples didn't meet the adoption agency's high standards.

Before now, she'd never had any way of confirming her suspicions about Ronan and Emily, but she'd begun to seriously question them when she'd seen the reunion between Rufus Wynter and his daughter in the newspapers two years ago. She'd realized from the timing of when Emily was supposed to have died, plus her age then and now, that it could all be connected to her own past.

Because Emily/Mia Wynter, née Kingston, was a beautiful red-haired woman, with the most beautiful eyes, green with a surrounding ring of turquoise.

Exactly the same hair and eye color as the baby Molly's mother had brought home twenty years previously, whom Molly had doted on and believed to be her sister, before that baby was just as suddenly taken away from her.

As a young child, Molly hadn't been able to gauge how many weeks Mia had been with them. It was only as an adult that she had learned it must have been the three months unaccounted for in Mia's life.

"You should have stayed away from Mia and her family, Molly," Serena Jenkins had chided her. "If you had, I wouldn't need to be paying you a visit now."

It hadn't initially been Molly's intention to seek out Mia or Rufus. At least, she didn't think it had…

For almost two years after the reunion of father and daughter, and despite the aching in her chest to do so, Molly had resisted going anywhere near the newly reunited father and daughter. But it seemed that each step she took, each job offer she accepted, brought her ever closer to London. To where she knew Mia now owned and ran an animal shelter.

Seeing the vacancy in a job agency window had been too much of a temptation for Molly to be able to resist. Nor could she bring herself to say no when Mia had offered her the job and use of the apartment above the main building.

Because she had known with absolute certainty, just from that one meeting, that Mia Kingston was the same person Molly had once believed to be her baby sister. The reason she was so sure of that was because the moment she had met Mia again, she had been filled with the same wave of sibling love as she had felt for that baby twenty-two years previously.

The woman who now called herself Serena Jenkins had today confirmed every horrific suspicion, and more, that Molly had ever had regarding those events in her childhood.

The more being that the other woman had now revealed she'd used Molly's looks and innocence as a distraction to enable her to carry out those despicable crimes.

"Such a pity you had to grow up and lose some of that doll-like cuteness," Serena then said in a bored voice. "You didn't eat very much, and you were a quiet little thing, but there was simply no point in keeping you with me any longer when you could be of no further use to me."

Looking at the other woman, her makeup perfect, her clothes expensively tailored, and wearing those damned red-soled high-heeled shoes, had only confirmed for Molly that Sarah had simply walked away seventeen years ago to take on this other persona. That she had done so without so much as a second thought for the daughter she had left behind. The daughter who was no longer cute enough to assist her in her illegal endeavors.

How much of this did Rufus already know?

Because it was obvious from his guarded behavior since his arrival earlier that he knew something .