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She nodded and looked at her hands. “My grandma got sick. She needed help.”
“Not many teenagers would take on the duty of a sick grandparent.”
“It wasn’t a duty. I loved her. Grandma raised me. There’s a big question mark on my birth certificate under father, and my mama liked to move fast. Much faster than she could with a baby clinging to her.” She absently attacked the cuticle of her thumb with her fingernail. “Too fast, as it turned out, because she died before I turned two.”
His so-called rough start paled next to hers. He laid a hand over hers to still her restless fingers. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re sweet. But Grandma pretty much took responsibility for me from the start, so honestly, I barely noticed the loss.”
She might tell herself that, but in his observations of life, a person could miss something she’d never had. He threaded his fingers through hers. “So what’s a nice girl from Shallow Pond doing in big bad Atlanta?”
“Screwing up. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed?”
He gave her hand a tug. “The little person right over there says different. Try again.”
She inhaled deeply and let the breath out on a sigh. “Grandma died just after Thanksgiving last year.” Another less deep, less steady breath followed the statement. “God, I can’t believe it’s already been a year. Then again, sometimes it feels like she’s been gone forever.”
“I’m sorry.”
She blinked rapidly, and he mentally kicked himself for not fetching a box of tissues before he’d led her into this emotional minefield. Lack of preparation on his part. He’d known damn well this wasn’t going to be a happy story.
“Me, too.” Tears welled in her eyes, but she wiped them away with the heel of her hand. “At first I distracted myself from how sorry I was with the busy work of planning the funeral and settling her affairs, but eventually I couldn’t outrun all the sorry and lonely stored up inside me. And then this sweet, cute guy hit town and aimed his shy smile my way. I fell like a late August peach.”
Cute guy better pray they never crossed paths. He wouldn’t walk away so cute once Hunter finished with him.
“A few months later, he told me a friend had set him up with a job in Atlanta, and he asked me to come with him. I couldn’t say yes fast enough. I didn’t even realize I was pregnant at that point. Things had gotten so out of whack with me, and I wasn’t paying any attention.” She gave a hollow laugh. “No proposal. No ring. Grandma would not have approved.” A strangled sob hijacked the next laugh. “She’d be so d-d-disappointed in me.”
The tears flowed faster than she could staunch them. He grabbed the baby blanket from the diaper bag and handed it to her, clean end first. “Here.”
She buried her face in it. He waited her out, slowly smoothing back her dark curtain of hair. Eventually she straightened and mopped her cheeks.
“Bet she’d love her great-granddaughter.”
Madison wiped her nose and gave her daughter a watery smile. “She’d adore her. She just wouldn’t think much of the circumstances.”
“Maybe. Or maybe she’d cut you some slack. You didn’t get pregnant all by yourself. Where’s ‘cute guy’ now?”
“Out of my life, which is exactly where he needs to stay.” She folded the baby blanket into a compact rectangle.
“Sweetheart, he’s got obligations to Joy—”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “He denies he’s the father, but even if he owned up, he’s never going to be able to meet his obligations. He takes. He doesn’t give, and the path he’s on leads to an ugly end in an early grave. I can’t put Joy anywhere near that path.”
Shit. “Drugs?”
“A grab bag of addictions, and a place like Atlanta feeds every single one of them, but the gambling is what’s going to take him all the way down. The debts he owes, and the people he owes them to”—she shivered—“he gets desperate and nothing’s off limits. I gave him money until I flat out couldn’t afford to help him anymore, and then he waited until I went to work, broke into my apartment, and took everything he could carry. Some cash and all the baby supplies I’d just bought.”
A hot surge of completely useless temper burned through him. “You called the police?”
“I did. They took a report. They asked around the complex, but nobody knew anything.”
“Did they dust for prints? Pick up the asshole and question him? You need to keep on them, Madison.” He knew he sounded terse and critical. He couldn’t help it. A whole host of unpleasant “what ifs” where working their way through his mind. What if she’d come home in the middle of the break-in? What if “cute guy” brought friends to help?
“I can’t keep on them, Hunter,” she replied in a similarly terse tone. “Because in the midst of transferring to a new job and moving my shit across town to someplace he wouldn’t look for me, I went into labor. I had a baby three weeks early. I’ve been kind of busy.”
And this was where letting his temper off the leash landed him. Barking at the person he was trying to help. He waited until he was sure he had himself under control then looked up and gave her what he hoped was an apologetic smile. “You have a job?”
She drew herself up. “I do. I’m a shift manager for The Daily Grind & Unwind, it’s a coffee chain—”
