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She followed Owen and Frankie into the open kitchen and winced when Owen opened the fridge. She knew he would find nothing in there except for some PBJ sandwiches and a milk carton.
Going home with Owen, having a family support system and living in a quaint, small town where Frankie could actually play outside and make friends, sounded like a dream too good to be true. It would definitely be the best for Frankie—if a ghost from her past hadn’t been chasing them down the country.
“You and I are goin’ to have a real good talk once Fluff passes out in the truck,” he said while closing the fridge.
As tired as Tara was from living in fear and giving it her all for years, she still had her pride. Owen had no idea what she’d done for him and his family by running away six years ago. She had suffered the consequences because she had kept the sweet Mills family in mind.
As his glare amplified, she wanted to scream from the top of her lungs that everything she’d done, she’d done out of love for him and his family. And if she needed to run again, she would do so. There was no way she would let her past hurt another soul ever again.
CHAPTER THREE
A little snore from the backseat drew Owen’s attention. The pink unicorn lamp on Frankie’s lap gave off enough soft light to check on his daughter through the rearview mirror.
Tara shifted in the passenger seat before rubbing her eyes, and he quickly returned his focus to the dark road in front of them.
“Where are we?” Tara asked around a cute yawn.
He gritted his teeth, as he shouldn’t be thinking about Tara Houston being cute in any way. She wasn’t cute. Or sweet. Or even beautiful, for that matter. She was the devil reincarnated.
How could Tara have kept his daughter from him for all these years? If his sister Lily hadn’t mis-dialed Tara’s phone number, he would have never found out about his little girl because Tara sure as hell wasn’t making any moves to fess up on what she’d done.
A few months ago, he sat at his parents’ kitchen table with his brother Mason and his sisters, when Lily started to play a stupid game with his phone. She ragged him about his casual hook-ups with random girls he didn’t remember by name. He had this thing about adding them to his phone with descriptive terms like Blonde ~ Concert ~ Rope so he knew she was the blonde he met at a concert and he had fun with tying up to his bed.
Lily had randomly pulled up contacts from Owen’s phone and dared him to name the first name of the contacts. What started out as a fun game—since she’d first picked their town’s doctor, Marv, quickly escalated when Lily pulled up a contact he wished he had deleted.
The contact name was: Don’t pick up ~ She broke your heart ~ Do NOT call her
He’d explained to his siblings that it had been years and he was over her, but just as he informed his younger sister that he was talking about Tara, Tara had somehow answered the phone and called out his name.
His sister Lily had dropped the phone in shock after she had dialed Tara by mistake. The phone skidded over the tabletop and halted in front of him. He had hovered over the phone with a trembling hand as Tara said, “Owen, is that you?”
Normally, one couldn’t get the Mills family to shut up for even a second. But as the Mills siblings stared at him in silence, one could hear a pin drop. His brother had nudged his shoulder to answer Tara and just when he leaned in to grab the phone, a sweet high-pitched voice on the other end of the line had said, “Mommy… is that my daddy?”
He’d demanded for Tara to answer her daughter and he asked Tara straight up if he was that little girl’s father. Instead of giving him an answer, she hung up on him. While sitting in stunned silence, a million questions had run through his head. He’d felt this intense rage boiling inside of him, as Tara couldn’t even find it in her heart to answer his question and put him out of his misery.
After all those years, she still chose to torture him. As much as he wanted to forget Tara, she came crashing back into his life like a freight train. He had known in his gut that this little kid was his. Because if he wasn’t that girl’s father, why did she ask her mother if he was after hearing his name? And why did Tara hang up the phone instead of simply denying he was the father? It had taken him months to come to terms with the fact that he could be the father of a five-year-old girl.
Owen had started his construction company two years ago and things had been hectic lately with the project of building a new hotel in the neighboring town of Almida. But even during his long workdays, his mind always wandered back to that little girl who asked if he was her daddy. He wondered what she looked like and if she knew it wasn’t his idea that they had been apart.
After Tara had hung up on him, Owen had been a mess for months. Tara had broken whatever was left of his heart. With all the tourists coming and going to their tourist mountain town, he tried to forget the bomb that had been dropped on his former life. Owen was a self-proclaimed bachelor and the idea of becoming a father and taking care of a little girl had spooked him.
Not any more, though. He was ready to step up and be the man his family could be proud of instead of this twenty-four-year-old running away from his responsibilities.
“Could you at least stop ignoring me?” Tara asked him.
He rubbed his forehead. “I’m not ignoring you. I was stuck in my head.”
He gave her a quick side-glance and saw her nod.
“Why Vegas?” he asked.
He’d much rather ask her: ‘Why did you run away from me six years ago?’ but he figured he needed to slowly build up to that.
She shifted in her seat so her knees pointed at him. He felt her eyes taking him in. Why did she still unnerve him? Just by looking at him, she made the back of his neck prickle.
“I… We’ve been at several places before Vegas.”
He furrowed his brows. That wasn’t exactly a real answer. Tara had always been an enigma. From the first day her mom and Tara moved to Winter Peaks, he’d tried to peel back all those layers that made Tara—without ever succeeding.
