“Looking for a bathroom.”
“Oh. Well. There’s one right behind you.” He pointed over my shoulder. “And there’s three that way. And four that way. And if you make it out to the main hall, I mean, I can’t even count them anymore. This house is the most ridiculously awesome piece of work that my father ever brought to life.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That was a dig at his writing career, wasn’t it?”
Preston smiled. “You catch on pretty quick, don’t you?”
I nodded, feeling bolder than I had in a long time. “You know, Preston, you’re not the only one who can spot a wall from a mile away. Ever gonna let yours down? Find ‘the one’?”
He shook his head and laughed a little. “I don’t believe in that bullshit, Anne. My father does. Penn does. Payden does. And Pierce used to.” Preston’s face went somber. “But not me.”
Sadly, I believed him. Sadder still, I could see that he fully believed himself.
“That’s kind of...” I searched for the right word.
“Depressing?” Preston offered.
I nodded. That’s exactly what it was.
“Meh. It’s not depressing for me. I’m wired different than most people.”
We were both silent then, and I started to walk back to Penn’s wing of the house in what I thought was the right direction.
“Anne?”
I whipped my head back around. “Yeah?”
“Don’t forget what I said. It’s true. And you know it.”
After using one of the eight million bathrooms that apparently existed inside of the Hardick home, I’d carefully crawled back into bed between Penn and Murphy.
They both had immediately burrowed into me on either side, and I bit my tongue until it bled to keep from sobbing.
It was too beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that it hurt. My heart ached and I hadn’t even left yet.
Preston’s words were tumbling around in my head like kamikaze pilots. I didn’t know how much of what he had said should be taken seriously.
But that was a lie, and there was no point in lying to myself on top of everybody else. Everything he had said should be taken seriously.
Preston seemed to be a lot of questionable things, but he wasn’t a liar. I sensed that clearly, even though I didn’t want to.
When he said that he hadn’t been attacking me, I knew he had meant it. He was literally telling me how things would go. And as much as I wanted his whole “wall theory” to be complete bullshit, it wasn’t.
I did have walls up. Maybe Penn sensed them, but in his own sweet and naïve way, I knew he thought he could break through them eventually. The problem was that he didn’t quite know just what he was trying to break through.
My walls weren’t about just not wanting to get heartbroken. They were about not wanting to get actually broken by Tim. As far away as I had tried to go, I knew – I knew he was coming.
Randall probably would have given up by now. Randall had loved himself entirely too much to go trampling across the country looking for two people he didn’t even love. He might have started off and tried for a while, but he would have given up – happily – and gone back.
Tim. Was. Coming.
And then, when it was possible for me to put aside the actual life and death part of my predicament, the shame was more than ready to flood me.
Let alone the incident with my ex dying in a mountain gorge, I had a glorious, shameful past to completely ruin any speck of decency that might have been left to my name.
Poor. Orphaned. Trash. Unwanted. Abandoned. Alone.
Aside from Murphy, and of course, now, Kate, there wasn’t a single human being on the whole entire planet who would or even could stick up for me. No one was going to attest as to my good character or delightful personality.
My past was a giant black hole that swallowed every good thing I could have ever possibly had in life. It just sucked everything and everyone in and destroyed all hope.
Murphy was truly all I had, when it came down to the bare wire. Kate was wonderful, but I wasn’t her actual family, and at some point, she would probably think about that long and hard.
Eventually, Murphy and I would become a burden to her as well. We already were, she was just too good of a person to see it. But when she did...
Then what?
I thought of Penn’s dad and his kind eyes. I knew he meant me no harm, but I also had seen the spark in his eye that clearly flashed a warning signal. Paul Hardick knew something was off with Anne Johnson.
They all did.
And Pierce... was he going to unleash a private investigator on me? Was that even necessary? My foster care records were sealed, but the fact that I had been in foster care was publicly available.
Penn might have felt sorry enough for me to overlook that less than worthy part of my life, but Pierce wouldn’t. If Pierce was even half as over-protective as Preston had made him out to be, I was going to seem like a little, unnecessary liability once everything was out in the open.
Pierce had children to protect, and he would do just that.
I knew the feeling. It was inspired by an instinct that was utterly unbreakable.
Pierce had seemed like a good, kind person, just like the rest of the Hardicks. That didn’t for a moment mean that he’d allow any type of threat to his children’s safety and wellbeing to infiltrate his home.
And the thought that I could bring danger upon such a nice family – a nice family who’d been through their own major losses not that long ago – was the worst possibility of all.
The Hardicks were famous. They had their own paparazzi following. Paparazzi meant pictures. Pictures meant publicity. Publicity meant that even a hillbilly asshole moron could find me, were I to accidentally make it into one of those pictures.
And as much as I wanted to believe that Tim was a moron, he was actually much smarter than Randall. He wouldn’t just stumble upon a picture of me. He’d home in on it like a jet missal.
Then he would home in on Murphy and me.
And possibly the Hardicks, just to get to me.
They lived deep in the Colorado woods, but they weren’t unreachable. For Christ’s sake, they owned a ranch that catered to visitors. In their own way, they welcomed the public.
Tim could just show up, rent a cabin, and take us all out one by one. I wouldn’t put it past him to even harm the horses.
He’s ruthless.
Sweet Payden, happy-go-lucky Jessie... Literally every person here was in danger if I became associated with the Hardicks.
I looked at Penn, still fast asleep. I couldn’t imagine there ever being a more perfect man in my life. He was gorgeous and smart and funny and just so incredibly good.
I didn’t want to leave him ever.
But I’d never actually deserved to find him in the first place, had I? Penn had found me and mistaken me for something I wasn’t.
He’d mistaken me for something I never could be.
I rolled away from him until Murphy was the only thing I could see. I hadn’t deserved such a perfect little boy either, but here he was. He was mine – my responsibility and my heart all rolled into one tiny, chubby little body.
It hit me then that they would judge Murphy as well. My perfect boy would somehow become tainted in their eyes once the Hardicks knew what a piece of shit I was.