15. Alone at Last

ALONE AT LAST

ANDREW

I gaze at Madeline. She is bent over, her head resting on her knees. This whole thing must seem like the worst sort of nightmare to her.

I wasn't exactly enjoying it, myself. Sure, I had survived helping my older brother, Leland, get his family, friends, and employees airlifted out of Mountain Hold. I'd engineered making it look as if the village elders had blown themselves up so they could testify that he was not a murderer. On the contrary, he and his people had been victims of the worst sort of persecution.

I had not expected to come home to a situation that might easily be just as bad, if not worse. It is pretty hard to take when your own family are the baddies.

But I have something else to fix first.

I kneel down beside her. "Madeline," I say, coaxingly.

When that gets no response, I say, "Maddy, please look at me."

She sits up enough to rest her elbows on her knees. Her face is tear-streaked, and her eyes are wild. She looks as if she might run at any minute. Running would put her and the boy in even more danger than they are in now. If she hides, I might not know where she is to protect her.

"There are not enough words to say how sorry I am," I say. "I was an irresponsible ass. I'll be honest enough to say that I deeply enjoyed the send-off you gave me. I never thought that the result would be a baby. No, a handsome young man that you're doing a hell of a great job raising."

"Thank you," she says. "I'm pretty impressed with him, myself. No, it has not been easy. I have no idea what I would have done if Kate and her family had not taken me in. Spindizzy was scarcely more than an idea ten years ago, and the Baileys were not rich by any means. I needed a job and some way to stay below the radar. They helped me to find both."

"I am beyond grateful to them," I say. This conversation isn't going quite where I had hoped, but at least she is talking to me. "What happened back then? Can you tell me?"

She sighs, slides off the footstool to sit on the floor beside me. "I looked for you," she said. "I tried to call, but the number said ‘out of service'. When I knew I was pregnant, I knew I needed help with the medical bills. Family services couldn't seem to find anyone except your grandfather." She gives a little shudder.

I lay my hand tentatively on her shoulder, hoping that she won't shrug me off. To my amazement, she turns to me, scoots over, and leans against my shoulder.

"And then?" I prompted.

"I called him. He invited me to his office. He was all smiles, and sugar sweetness. He said not to worry. He would take care of all my medical bills, and see to it that I had the best of care. All I had to do was to let him adopt the baby when it arrived. Then I could turn my back on the child and get on with my life."

She sucks in a breath at the memory. She is shaking. Gently, so very gently, I tighten my arm around her and stroke the hair on the back of her head. If the old man wasn't already dying in a way that would torment him more than anything I could possibly do, I would kill him for this.

"What did you do?" I ask.

"I said I needed to think about it. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I think I told him that my friends knew where I was, and were expecting me for dinner. No one was expecting me, but he didn't need to know that. As soon as I got out of the building, I called Kate, and James came to pick me up. We drove to Kansas, to Spindizzy. In those days, it was a dying town with a bunch of windmills. It didn't become a corporation until Kate met and married Charles."

"You did the right thing," I say. "Getting away from him. My father called me about six months after I left and said I needed to come home. But I thought it was just so they could get hold of me and make me part of the family business again. No one told me I had a kid on the way. No one mentioned you. Now that you are telling me all this, I'm guessing my father knew, and chose to disassociate himself from it."

"Would you have come home if you had known?" she asks.

"Yes," I say. "I might have tried to persuade you to go back with me. At the very least, I would have sent money and I would have stayed in touch. My parents weren't what you would call attentive, but we knew who they were and what they looked like."

"That's something, I guess," Madeline says. Her voice sounds lost and forlorn.

"Oh, Maddy," I murmur into her hair, "I dreamed of you. I just wasn't sure if you were real. If I'd had any idea, I would have come back for you. Would you have gone to Africa with me?"

"I don't know," she says, honestly, tipping her head back, and looking up at me.

Her eyelashes are damp from crying, and the end of her nose is red. Her skin is pale, as if all the color had been bleached from it. A spray of freckles is scattered across her nose and cheeks, like tiny flecks of cinnamon. Her eyes…I could fall into them and drown. The limbal ring is dark grey. The crypts and ridges of her irises are a delicate, pale green, lightly flecked with specks of gold. Her pupils contract, and she squints against the bright central light of the room.

"I looked for you. He said you were dead. Then he threatened me, and all I could think about was getting away from him."

"I should have looked for you," I say. "If I'd had any sense, I would have."

She sniffs, rubs her nose with the back of her hand, and looks around for something better. I long arm a box of facial tissues off a nearby end table, and hand them to her.

"Thanks," she says. "I guess you were just a little bit busy. Why did you go to Africa, anyway?"

"To distance myself from Grandfather, and from Father. I worked for one week in an Aims Corp clinic. The staff were trained to over-charge and to turn a blind eye to gunshot wounds, gonorrhea, syphilis, and other STDs."

"That stopped you?" Maddy asked.

I closed my eyes, for a moment reliving that ugly day. "I thought I could change that eventually, but when they brought in a woman who had been beaten and raped, the head of staff said she was a "working girl" and had got what was coming to her. I brought it up with Father, and then with Grandfather. They both told me I was too soft, that I needed to toughen up. That one day, I would marry a princess and that I would take over Aims Corp, grandfather's ‘kingdom', as it were."

"Did you?" she asks. "Toughen up?"

"Not their way," I reply. "I got toughened up. Between poachers, little bush wars, and epidemics, I learned to focus and do my work. But I've never developed their kind of blind eye."

"Good," she says. "Good for you. But one other thing…the princess?"

"An arranged marriage between my father's oldest son and the heir apparent to Ildogis. I was both shocked and delighted when about six years ago, Richard found an envelope of pictures and a birth certificate showing that I am not Albert Lane's oldest son."

"Leland?" she guesses, smiling through her tears. It was like the sun coming up after a rainfall. "And Catriona?"

"Yes, indeed, Leland and Catriona. It was perfect timing because Mountain Hold was being hammered by three neighboring villages, and Leland needed somewhere to go."

"Are you sorry you didn't marry the princess?"

"Catriona? Not in the least. She's way too bossy for my taste. Leland has her wrapped around his little finger, and she has him all wrapped up in return."

"I think I'm insulted," she says. "I'm not a pushover."

"No," I agree, "You are not. You are a different kind of princess. You are a professional, a self-made woman who has made it through hard times on your own merit. The way you managed that tent clinic, wow. I'm glad I wasn't stuck with it on my own."

"You did get kind of commandeered," she says. "Did you know they were going to DNA test the kids?"

"Not until Richard brought them into the clinic. And the family tree thing seemed perfectly logical. Would you have told me about Paul without it?" I hold my breath, hoping that the answer would be yes.

"Maybe. I mean, you weren't an asshole, like I thought you would be to work with," she says. "Maybe eventually, but not so soon. And that might have been bad, with your grandfather getting into the act."

"Yep," I say, "my kind of princess. Honest and magnificent."

She blushes, giving her cheeks color and her whole face a glow. I wanted to grab her, run off to the bedroom, either bedroom, and have my way with her right then and there. But I know one wrong move, and I will lose her — handfasted or not.

Then she says something surprising, "Thank you for giving me credit. Did I really keep you out of trouble these last ten years?"

"By giving me a standard by which to measure all women? Giving me something to dream about when I fell into my cot? Oh, Maddy, you are my woman made of flowers, the only thing that felt happy and pure for so long. Sometimes I wasn't even sure you were real, but even so, you kept me out of a lot of trouble."

"And you are LLew Llaw Gyffs or whatever his name was?" I had to smile at her mangling of the name.

"Here's a news bulletin for you: I don't have a secret lover. I've been too busy for romance. Now that Paul is old enough to amuse himself in the evenings, I've been thinking about finally going back to school so I can meet my goal of becoming a doctor."

"That is awesome," I say, hugging her. "How can I help?"

"Start by letting me breathe," she squeaks.

"Sorry," I say, loosening my hold. "It's just…I think I was part of delaying your education, so to speak. I would like to support you if you want to make up for lost time."

I expect her to go off on me, to push me away. Instead, she says, "We can talk about that later. Right now I just want one thing."

"What's that?" I ask.

"Kiss me," she says. "Kiss me like you did all those years ago. I want to know if it is as good as I remember."

I gather her in my arms, and I kiss her. I don't know how it was for her but for me it was even better than the memory. She smells of salty tears and honeysuckle. Her mouth tastes like the cinnamon apple tarts we'd had for dessert. She's warm and solid, not an ethereal memory. Best of all, she's kissing me back, like she means it.

I say huskily, "If you do that again, maybe we'd better go into the bedroom. Just in case Paul comes out?"

I feel her smile against my lips, just as I remember her doing before. "That might be a good idea," she says. "Just let me check on him."

We untangle ourselves. I reach down to give her a hand up, even though she doesn't need it. I follow her down the hall. She pauses at the door of Paul's room, smiles, and beckons to me.

I look in. Paul is curled up in the center of his bed, wearing a worn set of Old Navy plaid pajamas. He is sound asleep, his head on Angel's side. Tucked against his chest is Carousel, the rescue kitten.

I put my arms around Maddy and whisper in her ear, "My room or yours?"

"Yours," she whispers back, "I've got to be up at six tomorrow."

We hug each other and stand for just a minute, watching Paul and the kitten sleep, pillowed against the giant guard dog. Then we go across the hall, and quietly close the door behind us.