we can change that. Tell me who took advantage of you that makes you so skittish about accepting help.”
She opened her mouth, but no words came out. A second later, she bit her bottom lip. Max waited while she grappled with what story to tell him and how much to tell. Letting her sort it out without prompting tested his patience, but he kept silent. At last, she seemed to come to some sort of decision. Her breath puffed out.
“Aunt Jesse.” She closed her eyes. “My dad’s sister.”
“What happened?”
Instead of forcing intimacy by sitting in the chair next to her, Max gave her space by keeping his big executive desk between them.
“I was eighteen when my dad died and still in my senior year of high school. Hailey was two years younger. Since our mom left when we were both young, I’d always thought of Hailey as my responsibility. She was diagnosed with asthma when she turned six. The first time she collapsed and turned blue, I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life. After that, I watched her like a hawk, making sure she had her inhaler with her at all times. She was my baby sister. I couldn’t lose her, too.”
Too? Max wondered if she knew what she’d given away with that one word. Her mother had disappeared when she was four. Rachel had felt the loss no matter what she was willing to admit to herself. And then her father died. Max suspected protecting herself against loss had become second nature. Pity the man who tried to break down those walls.
“Who took you in after your dad died?”
Rachel stared at her hands. “No one. I dropped out of school and went to work full-time to make ends meet until we received the money from Dad’s insurance policy. He took it out because you can be as careful as anything when you’re out on the gulf, but accidents happen. No one expected he’d be shot during a convenience-store robbery twenty minutes from home.”
“You never graduated?”
She shook her head. “I got my GED. I needed to take care of Hailey. Only it was a lot more expensive than I was expecting. And I was working all the time. By the time we got the insurance money, I was exhausted and worried about how I was going to handle everything. We had no medical insurance and Hailey’s asthma had been flaring up a lot more since Dad died. The medication was expensive. That’s when I called Aunt Jesse.”
“Was she able to help?”
“She told us to come live with her in Biloxi. We’d have a place to stay while Hailey finished high school. I could work and maybe go to a community college. The rest of the money could go toward a real college for Hailey. She was always the smarter one.”
“So, what happened?”
“For a while everything seemed okay. Then one day Aunt Jesse came home and asked if she could borrow Dad’s life insurance money for a couple days.”
“And you gave it to her.”
“It was supposed to be a loan until she got paid at the end of the week. I probably should have said no, but she took us in when we needed help and she was family.” Rachel’s bitter smile said more than her expression. “She took the money and disappeared. We were stuck in Biloxi with no money, no friends and no family.”
Her story would have wrung sympathy out of the most jaded heart.
“Did you call the cops?”
“And tell them what? That I’d lent money to our aunt and she’d disappeared?”
“Did you look for her?”
Rachel shook her head. “For all she was our closest living relative, we knew nothing about her life or her friends. Or, we didn’t until people showed up looking for her. That’s when we found out she was dealing drugs and had some rather scary acquaintances.”
“Did any of them hurt you?”
“No. After the first guy came knocking, we didn’t stick around.”
“What happened?”
“I had a waitressing job. I picked up more hours. We found a small studio apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood and scraped by.” Rachel downplayed what must have been a scary time for her with a single shoulder shrug and a self-deprecating smile.
Max’s admiration for her went up several dozen notches. “I’m sorry you had such a tough time of it.”
Rachel’s eyes hardened into sapphire chips. “It was my fault we were in the mess.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Hailey begged me to stay in Gulf Shores. She wanted to finish high school with her friends. But I was too scared about being solely responsible for her to listen. I wasn’t ready to be an adult. Don’t you get it? I screwed up. If we’d stayed put, Aunt Jesse wouldn’t have stolen the insurance money. It would have been so much easier.”
“You were eighteen. Cut yourself some slack.”
“Life doesn’t cut you slack,” she said. “Life comes at you hard and fast and you either meet it head-on, duck, or get blindsided. I’ve promised myself not to get blindsided again.”
Yet Max had the sense that something had blindsided her recently. Something that wasn’t him. Something she wouldn’t let him help her with.
“You said people helped you.”
“What?”
“Last night. You said people. That’s plural. Who else took advantage of you?”
She offered him a sad smile. “Sorry. I only reveal one major mistake from my past at a time. Tune in next week for the continuing saga of Rachel Lansing’s journey into bad judgment.”
“Don’t shut me out. I want to know everything about you.” Max hated the way she kept deflecting his questions. It created a chasm between them when all he wanted was to get close to her. “You know you can trust me.”
“Of course I do. It’s just that I get depressed when I think about all the mistakes I’ve made. Can’t we talk about something else?”
As much as he wanted to push harder, he recognized the stubborn set of her mouth and knew they would only end up fighting if he bullied her for answers.
He tossed a file across the desk toward her. “Take a look at the Williamsburg numbers in their strat plan. They don’t add up. I didn’t have time to check it over this weekend and I’m supposed to be on a conference call with them at eleven.”
Her relief at being back on professional footing was so palpable she might have stood up and given a double fist pump. Max watched her head out of his office, a slim silhouette in her long pencil skirt and fitted jacket. He wanted to take her in his arms and promise he wouldn’t let her down the way others in her life had. But was that something she’d believe when he wasn’t sure himself if it was something he could deliver?
