she regrouped.
“Of course you can stay here, little girl,” Mac had told her when she’d turned up on his doorstep. “Stay for as long as you want. My home is your home. Hell, it wouldn’t even be my home if it hadn’t been for you,” he reminded her.
He’d displayed no embarrassment over that admission, only extreme gratitude.
Mac picked up her suitcase as he talked, doing it effortlessly as if finding her there when he opened his front door was no big deal.
“Oh, Mac,” she cried as he put his large, still-muscular arm protectively about her shoulders and ushered her in, “I’ve made such a mess of things.”
There was nothing but sympathy in his eyes and in his manner toward her.
Even though she was going to be staying in the apartment over the stable, Mac led Livia’s daughter to the wide leather sofa in his living room and sat her down. Seeing the tears in her eyes, he pulled out his handkerchief from his back pocket and offered it to her.
“There’s nothing but death that can’t be undone,” he told Leonor matter-of-factly. “You didn’t kill anyone, did you?”
“No,” she’d said, quietly sobbing.
She wiped away her tears, but it was futile. More tears came to take their place. She felt as if she was completely made up of water.
“Then it can be fixed,” Mac had assured her. Studying her face quietly, he’d asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
At first, Leonor had remained silent.
Mac wasn’t the kind of person to press.
But then, after a few minutes, he’d heard her say, “I trusted the wrong man.”
“Hardly anyone alive hasn’t done that at least once in their lives,” Mac told her, making it sound like a common occurrence. After a beat, Mac ventured a question. “How bad is it?”
She pressed her lips together in an effort to keep a fresh onslaught of tears back. “Bad,” she’d finally answered.
He’d smiled at her kindly. He had always viewed her first and foremost as a daughter, even if they didn’t share the same blood.
“Would it help any if I tracked this guy down and beat the living daylights out of him?”
“No.” She thought about the blog. The story, done in several vivid, lurid installments, had already been run. The rest of her siblings had probably already seen it. And probably hated her for it. Only traveling back in time could change that. “The damage has already been done.”
“Oh,” Mac had said. His deep voice rumbled out the single word, putting a huge amount of meaning behind it. “You’re talking about that internet story, aren’t you?”
Leonor’s eyes had widened as she looked at the man who had patiently taught her how to ride. The man she had always regarded as more than just her mother’s foreman, or even Thorne’s father. He had always been the single stable force in her life.
Had she disappointed him?
“You saw that?” she asked in a small, ashamed voice.
Mac had surprised her by laughing. “I’m not quite as backward as you might think. I own a laptop and sometimes, I even turn it on.”
Leonor flushed. “I didn’t mean to insult you—”
His smile was wide and all encompassing, as well as very kind. “You didn’t, little girl. I’m just teasing you. But I did see the articles,” he said, referring to the tell-all that went into great detail about not just Livia before her empire had crumbled and she’d been sent to prison, but also about each of the woman’s six children and their lives, “and I thought to myself that whoever wrote it had to have a lot of inside information about the Coltons from someone.” The look on his face registered surprise, but not condemnation. “I just never thought that the ‘someone’ was you.”
She was desperate to make Mac understand that she hadn’t revealed any of it for personal gain or, heaven forbid, for any sort of monetary reward. “He tricked me, Mac. He made me think that he cared about me. I would have never said a single word if I’d known that he was going to use it to spread it all over the internet.”
Mac nodded understandingly. “I kinda figured that,” he told her.
There was absolutely not a single iota of judgment in the man’s deep voice.
Leonor pressed her lips together, and then raised her tear-filled eyes to his. “I thought he loved me,” she confessed, her voice almost trembling. “I thought I could tell him anything. He told me I could tell him anything.”
“I just bet he did,” Mac replied, doing his best to keep his anger in check. “You sure you don’t want me to track him down and beat him up for you?” This time, as Mac clenched his hands into fists beside him on the sofa, he was only half kidding.
“I don’t want you getting into trouble on my account,” Leonor told him.
“Might do us both some good,” he pointed out, coaxing her just the tiniest bit.
Leonor looked up at him quizzically. She knew why he thought it would do her some good, but Mac? She didn’t quite understand why he would say that.
“Why you?”
“Because I don’t like anyone hurting you,” he told her simply.
She felt her heart swell. She really needed to hear that, she thought.
“Thank you, Mac.” She returned his smile, wondering how she could possibly convey to the man how grateful she was to have him in her life. “Letting me stay here for a while is all I need.”
She sighed and put her arms around Mac—or tried to. There was more of the big man than her arms could possibly encompass.
Mac laughed softly—she’d always thought of his laugh as such a comforting sound—and embraced her.
“Like I said, stay as long as you like. I want you to think of this as your home,” he told her again without any fanfare.
That had been four days ago. So, here she was, Leonor thought, hiding out at Mac’s ranch, doing her best to pull herself together and regroup enough to be able to face each of her siblings, preferably individually, so she could field their questions and get them to hear her out and see her side.
She needed to have them forgive her, if not today, then eventually. Forgive her and see that she was as much of a victim in all this as they were, because they might be resentful to see their names and their lives shockingly dramatized online in a cheap effort at sensationalism. But David had used her to do this to them and she was not only suffering the same fate as they were, she was also suffering because someone she loved and believed loved her had done this, using her as a means to an end. And in the bargain, making her family look at her as a traitor. She’d reported him to the police, but he had hidden the money well and it was a case of her word against his. Things looked rather bleak from every standpoint.
She
