Long Hard Road (Crestwood Valley)

23. Madison

“Are you married?” I lurched back a step until my back hit the counter.

“I was. Briefly. It was annulled.” Nate didn’t break eye contact even after Ellison had flipped to a new picture in the folder.

“This is Fiona Sullivan with her five-year-old daughter and two-year-old son.” He was keeping his eyes on Nate, waiting for a reaction.

I didn’t want to look at that picture and have my heart shattered, but I couldn’t stop myself. The girl was a spitting image of her mother, with red hair and a dusting of freckles across her nose. She had bright green eyes and missing front teeth. The boy had dark hair, a shade that was only a hint lighter than Nate’s.

“Are they…” Yours. I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It’s a long story, Madison.”

“At least five years long from the looks of it.” I kept my head down so he wouldn’t see the tears filling my eyes.

“Angel…” His hand hovered over my arm, but he stopped short of touching me. Probably because he was afraid that I would jerk away from him.

“Look, I know this is shocking news for you, Madi, but I need you to keep it together until I can get some information from Nate.”

I nodded and picked up my coffee, taking a long sip and enjoying the warmth. “I’m fine,” I said.

I doubted either of them believed me, but Ellison wasn’t one to linger on discussing feelings. “I think I’d like to start with why your ex-wife would shred Madison’s tires.”

“Because she’s crazy. I know that sounds like a thing a guy says about his ex-wife so he doesn’t have to take any blame for a relationship falling apart, but that’s not what I’m doing. Fiona has a lot of issues. Our marriage has been over for two years and she has been reluctant to move on.”

“Did you know that she was in town?” Ellison asked.

“No.” He exhaled hard. “Up until a few weeks ago, I didn’t even know that she knew I’d moved back to Crestwood.”

“What happened a few weeks ago?”

“I got mail from her.”

My head snapped up. “What kind of mail?”

“Just a picture of Cassidy. The little girl.” The spark in Nate’s eyes was gone. He had retreated behind the wall I had so carefully torn down over the last two weeks.

“Why didn’t you tell me about her when I started getting the threats?”

“It never occurred to me that Fiona might have something to do with them. Those threats were focused on you and Fiona’s interest has always been singular. Me.”

“I gotta admit, if I had a crazy ex in my life, she would be my first suspect if my girlfriend started receiving threats,” Ellison said.

“Even if your girlfriend is wildly famous and has tons of known stalkers?” Nate looked at Ellison with pure hostility.

Under almost any other circumstance, I would have melted at hearing Nate call me his girlfriend. I would’ve started picturing our wedding and future babies. But it was the last thing I wanted to hear now.

“I want to press charges,” I said, tapping the picture of the gorgeous redhead. “Do whatever you have to do, but now we know who she is and she needs to be locked up.”

“You got a problem with that?” Ellison asked Nate.

He shook his head. “No. Do you know where she’s been staying?”

“She has a room at a hotel outside of town. I’ll go to the police station when I leave here and have them make the arrest.”

“What about the kids? Did she bring them with her?” The crack in Nate’s voice was deep and his eyes flashed with concern.

“I’m not sure.” Ellison scooped up the pictures and slid them into the folder. “If they are with her when the police make the arrest, I’ll have the officers call you.”

“Thanks.”

Ellison caught my eye and nodded toward the door. I followed him reluctantly, not wanting to hear his lecture. “Thanks for getting to the bottom of this,” I said when he stopped at the door.

“Do you know what you’re doing with that guy?” he asked, putting a hand on my shoulder. “He seemed like a good guy, but this is a huge lie, Madi.”

“I know.” I couldn’t say more than that because I didn’t have an answer to his question. I had thought that I knew exactly what I was doing with Nate, but now everything had changed.

“Talk to him. Maybe it’s not what it seems like.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze and offered a kind smile. “And then call me if you need me to come back and kick his ass.”

“You’ll be my first call,” I promised.

Once Ellison was gone, I had to force myself to return to the kitchen to face Nate. I would’ve preferred to hide in my room for the next few days, but we had too many things that needed to be discussed.

“You were married,” I said, stopping right in front of him and looking hard into his eyes. “Long story?”

“Long, painful story.”

“Your marriage was over two years ago.” I knew that his secret marriage wasn’t the secret that had stung the most. It was those other two faces in the pictures. “That little boy is about two.”

“Yeah.” Nate rubbed the back of his neck while staring at the spot where that picture had been. “I want to tell you everything, Madison, but it’s going to be hard for me. I’ve never told anyone. My brother, Brent, is the only one who knows about Fiona and I never told him the full story.”

I went over to the cabinet next to the fridge and opened the door, grabbing the whiskey bottle inside. “How do you feel about a little Irish in your coffee?” I asked.

“I’m going to need more than a little.” He sounded so broken that I had to fight the urge to drop everything and hug him.

I grabbed a glass and poured an inch of whiskey into it. Nate’s eyes widened when I tossed it back in one swig and then poured another inch and handed it to him. “Seems like this might help.” Then I poured more whiskey into our coffee mugs and topped them off with hot coffee. “Let’s go into the living room so we can sit while we have this conversation.”

That seemed like a good suggestion until I saw the chaotic remains of our night together still on the floor. “I should probably throw those blankets in the washer,” I said, thinking about the way Nate had used one of them to clean me before bundling me under another blanket with our skin still slick with sweat. He had been so gentle and caring with every aspect of our night together.

“It can wait,” Nate said, gesturing to the sofa for me to sit. “Let’s talk. I really want to explain everything.”

He waited until I was seated and then made sure to leave a couple of feet between us before taking his own seat on the sofa. The coffee mug looked small cupped between his two large hands. Those same hands had cupped my breasts just a few hours ago.

“I joined the army right after college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I just knew I wasn’t ready to come back to the ranch.” He took a sip and continued. “The first four or five years were hectic. I was deployed a bunch and saw a lot of things that changed me. On my last tour in Iraq, I got injured. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it took me out of commission for a while. I tore pretty much everything in my shoulder and had a couple of surgeries to get it fixed. When I was in the hospital, I met a woman. She was my nurse.”

His nose scrunched the same way it had when he stared at that picture of Fiona. “I was in a bad headspace. The injury and PTSD were messing with me big time. I should’ve found a therapist but instead, I found Fiona. We went on a couple of dates and then she took me home one night.” He glanced at me. “To meet her daughter, Cassidy. She was barely one at the time and I fell hard for her. Fiona worked a lot of night shifts and I started staying over to watch Cassidy. Maybe that should’ve been a red flag. I’d known Fiona less than a month before she was leaving me alone with her kid. But I didn’t care. I wanted an escape from my shitty life and I thought Fiona and Cassidy could provide that.”

“We were together for a year and a half when Fiona told me she was pregnant. She was freaked, but I was excited. Our relationship wasn’t great, but I loved little Cassidy and I was so excited to have a baby of my own. I wanted to do things right for my family, so I asked Fiona to marry me. She said yes but she didn’t want to make a big deal of it. We just went to the courthouse and had a quick wedding there.”

My stomach churned at the thought of Nate married to another woman. Having a baby with someone who wasn’t me.

“When Fiona was about seven months along, I was out of town leading a training. After my injury, I switched roles with the army and stopped being deployed out of the country. I still traveled quite a bit in the US, though. I got home from a trip to Seattle and found Cassidy in our living room watching cartoons. It was almost midnight and she should’ve been in bed for hours at that point. I asked where her mom was and she said in our bedroom with her friend.” Nate let out a humorless chuckle. “I didn’t even bother to break it up. I picked up Cassidy and took her to bed. Read her a bedtime story and then waited for Fiona and her ‘friend’ to finish fucking.”

Now, my heart was breaking for Nate. I couldn’t imagine how hard that must’ve been, to keep his control because of the little girl asleep in the house.

“The guy who came stumbling out of our bedroom wasn’t a random hookup. He was Cassidy’s biological father. She didn’t know, but Fiona had pointed him out to me once. The guy was such a piece of shit that he had never spent any time with Cassidy. Never paid any child support. But Fiona had known him since she was a teenager and she went crawling back to him while she was married to me.” He took another sip of coffee, this one much longer. “That night, she admitted that the baby she was carrying wasn’t mine. She lied and told me she was seven months along when she was actually in her eighth month because she had to make the conception line up with when I’d actually been in town. I probably should’ve suspected something when all of her doctor appointments just happened to coincide with dates I was out of town for work.”

“Oh my god. That bitch.” I never called any woman that word, but Fiona deserved it.

“I had been planning to adopt Cassidy. Had the paperwork all filled out and just needed to file it. God, I loved that little girl so much.” His head tipped back, eyes closed as his jaw moved slowly back and forth. “I found out that Fiona had taken all my money from my savings account. She gave it to her fuck buddy. He was the one who had convinced her to marry me because then she could later get a divorce and take half my money.”

I wiped away the tears that were streaming down my cheeks. How could that woman have been so cruel to a man like Nate? A man who had loved and cared for her little girl like she was his own?

“I didn’t know what to do. I had told my family I was seeing a woman with a kid, but I never told them about the marriage and the baby. I knew they wouldn’t like how fast I moved with the marriage. When it all fell apart, I couldn’t imagine the shame I would feel admitting how stupid I had been.”

“You were not stupid, Nate.” I hated that Fiona had so completely broken his view of the kind of man he was. “You are a good man and she took advantage of that.”

“I should’ve paid closer attention. There were warning signs the whole time we were together but I ignored them. I wanted it to work so badly that I refused to acknowledge that Fiona was a liar and a cheat.”

I slid across the space between us and put my hand on his leg. “Don’t ever be ashamed of trusting someone you should be able to trust. She’s the fool who didn’t see that she’d hit the jackpot when she met you.”

“I hate that I gave her that piece of my heart.” His eyes fixed on mine and I could see the grief hiding behind a sheen of unshed tears.

“I have an idea. I’ll give you a piece of mine to patch it up.” I put my hand on his chest. “We’ll make it whole again.”

“You already have, angel.” He put his hand on top of mine. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to let anyone into my life like that again. But then you smiled at me in that café and my whole damn axis tilted.”

“Like getting hit by an asteroid,” I joked. Then, because I was afraid he would shut down and I would never get him to tell me the rest of his Fiona trauma, I asked, “What did you do when you found out about Fiona’s cheating?”

“Nothing at first. She and Cassidy had moved into my house and as pissed as I was, I couldn’t kick Fiona out not knowing if Cassidy would have a safe place to go. I stayed in a hotel for a week until I knew I could deal with Fiona without losing it. Met her at the house and told her she had two weeks to find another place to live.” He removed my hand from his heart but kept it wrapped inside his. “Then I said goodbye to Cassidy. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I was the only father she’d ever known. She even called me Dad. I tried to explain that she hadn’t done anything wrong and that I loved her, but she wouldn’t stop crying.”

I couldn’t imagine how much that had hurt both of them. I knew from first-hand experience that Nate was the kind of guy you wanted in your life forever.

“I returned to the hotel for the next two weeks and only went back to make sure Fiona had moved out. The house was so damn empty without them and I couldn’t stay there. Got a ticket to D.C. and went to stay with my brother, Brent, for a while. Eventually, I spilled everything to him after I had too much whiskey one night. He helped me get a good lawyer who was able to work the system and get the marriage annulled quickly.”

“This all happened two years ago?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t hear from Fiona at all for the first few months, but then she started calling me and leaving these long apology messages. Got some emails from her with pictures of Cassidy. I went back to my house about six months after everything went down to pack up my stuff and I ran into one of her friends while I was in town. She told me that Fiona had the baby and about a month later, her loser baby daddy took off again. That was right around the time I started getting her calls.”

“I’ve never hated someone I’ve never met so much.” I couldn’t believe that woman had the nerve to reach out to Nate after what she’d done to him. “If we run into her in Crestwood, I might have to break her stupid perfect nose.”

“Your nose is better,” he said with a soft smile. Then he pressed a light kiss to it. “You are better.”

“Why do you think she came here?” I had a suspicion she’d come to attempt to win Nate back, but that seemed extreme given that they hadn’t been together in over two years.

“She probably somehow sensed that I was finally happy again,” he said with a dry laugh. “Had to come here and ruin it.”

“Is it ruined?”

His head tilted down and he studied our locked hands. “You tell me.”

“Nothing you’ve told me has changed how I feel about you, Nate. You’re a good man. Maybe the best I’ve ever known. My life is better with you in it.”

He let out a shuddering breath. “I feel the same way about you, Madison.”

“Good. Then we can keep hanging out and having lots of hot sex.” His deep chuckle brought a smile to my face. I leaned in and captured his lips for a slow, purposeful kiss. “I intend to enjoy every last second of my time in Crestwood with you.”