Loving Evangeline Read online

He landed the plane and taxied it close to the vehicle. As he cut the engine, he could see the two lively little boys bouncing in the cargo area, and a rueful smile touched his eyes. He had missed the little hooligans. He wanted some of his own.

  As he crossed the pavement, Madelyn came to meet him, her lazy stroll fluid and provocative. “Thank God you’re here,” she said. “The imps of Satan have been driving me crazy since I told them you were coming. Did you know that when a one-year-old says Uncle Robert, it sounds remarkably like Ali Baba? I’ve heard it fifteen thousand times in the past hour, so I’m an expert.”

  “Dear God,” he murmured, looking past her to where the two imps of Satan were shrieking what was undoubtedly their version of his name.

  She went up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek and he hugged her to him. Something guarded inside him always relaxed when he set foot on the ranch. The sense of nature was much closer here, just as it had been in Alabama.

  Madelyn waited until after lunch before broaching the subject he knew had been eating her alive with curiosity. The boys had been put down for their afternoon naps, and he and Reese were sitting at the table, relaxing over coffee. Madelyn came back into the dining room, sat down and said, “All right, what’s wrong?”

  He gave her a wry smile. “I knew you couldn’t wait much longer. You’ve always been as curious as a cat.”

  “Agreed. Talk.”

  So he did. It felt strange. He couldn’t remember ever needing help before in deciding what to do. He concisely outlined the situation with Mercer, explaining Evie’s suspected involvement and the method he had used to force them into action. He described Evie, unaware of the aching hunger in his eyes as he did so. He told them everything—how Evie had sold her house to stop the foreclosure on the marina, how she had discovered that he was behind it all, and how Mercer had been caught. And how she had turned down his marriage proposal.

  He was aware that Madelyn had stiffened during his recital of events, but she was looking down at the table, and he couldn’t read her expression. When he finished, however, she lifted her head, and he was startled to see the molten fury in her eyes.

  “Are you that dense?” she shouted, jumping to her feet with a force that overturned her chair. “I don’t blame her for not marrying you! I wouldn’t have, either!” Infuriated, she stomped out of the dining room.

  Bemused, Robert turned to stare after her. “I didn’t know she could move that fast,” he murmured.

  Reese gave a startled shout of laughter. “I know. It took me by surprise the first time I made her lose her temper, too.”

  Robert turned back to his brother-in-law, a big, tough rancher as tall as himself, with dark hair and hazel-green eyes, coloring that he had passed on to his two sons.

  “What set her off?”

  “Probably the same thing that set her off when I was being that dense, too,” Reese explained, amusement in his eyes.

  “Would someone please explain it to me?” Robert asked with strained politeness. On the surface he was still in complete control, but inside he was dying by inches. He didn’t know what to do, and that had never happened to him before. He was at a complete loss.

  Reese leaned back in his chair, toying with the handle of his cup. “I almost lost Madelyn once,” he said abruptly, looking down. “She probably never told you, but she left me. She didn’t go far, just into town, but it might as well have been a million miles, the way I felt.”

  “When was this?” Robert asked, his eyes narrowing. He didn’t like knowing that Madelyn had had problems and hadn’t told him about them.

  “When she was pregnant with Ty. I tried everything I could think of to convince her to come back, but I was too stupid to give her the one reason that mattered.”

  Reese was going somewhere with this, Robert realized. He was a private man and not normally this talkative. “Which reason was that?”

  Reese lifted his gaze to meet Robert’s, and hazel-green eyes met ice-green ones, both stark with emotion.

  “It isn’t easy to give someone else that kind of power over you,” Reese said abruptly. “Hell, it wasn’t easy to even admit it to myself, and you’re twice as bad as I ever was. You’re a tough son of a bitch, more dangerous than you want people to know, so you keep it all under control. You’re used to controlling everything around you, but you can’t control this, can you? You probably don’t even know what it is. I practically had to be hit in the head before I saw the light. You love her, don’t you?”

  Robert froze, and his eyes went blank with shock. Love? He’d never even thought the word. He wanted Evie, wanted to marry her, wanted to have children with her. God, he wanted all of that with a fierce passion that threatened to destory him if he didn’t get it. But everything in him rebelled at the thought of being in love. It would mean a terrible helplessness; he wouldn’t be able to hold himself apart from her, to keep uncompromised the basic invulnerability that was at the core of him. He was well aware of his true nature, knew the savage inside. He didn’t want to unleash that kind of raw passion, didn’t want anyone to even know it existed.

  But Evie knew, anyway, he realized, and felt another shock. She had seen through him right from the beginning. With that maddening intuition of hers, she sometimes went straight into his thoughts. He could shut everyone else out, but he had never been able to shut out Evie, and he had spent the entire time they were together trying to regain control over himself, over the situation, over her. She knew him for what he was, and she loved him, anyway.

  He swore, running a shaking hand over his face, blinding truth staring him in the eye. Evie wouldn’t have loved him if that savage intensity hadn’t been there. She had known real love with Matt, and lost it; only something incredibly powerful could take her beyond that. Loving Evangeline couldn’t be a civilized, controlled affair; she would want him heart and soul, nothing held back.

  The house hadn’t been the issue. Neither had suspecting her of a crime. He could offer her a hundred houses, all the power his wealth could bring, and none of that would tempt her. What she wanted was the one thing he hadn’t offered: his love.

  “It was that simple,” Reese said softly. “I told Maddie that I love her. More importantly, I admitted it to myself.”

  Robert was still stunned, still turned inward. “How do you know?” he murmured.

  Reese made a low, harsh sound. “Do you feel as if you can never get enough of her? Do you want to make love to her so much that the ache never quite leaves your gut? Do you want to protect her, carry her around on a satin cushion, give her everything in the world? Are you content just being with her, listening to her, smelling her, touching her hand? Do you feel as if someone’s torn your guts out, you miss her so much? When Maddie left me, it hurt so damn bad I could barely function. There was a big empty hole in me, and it ached so much I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. The only thing that could make it better was seeing her. Is that the way it feels?”

  Robert’s green eyes were stark. “Like I’m bleeding to death inside.”

  “Yep, that’s love,” Reese said, shaking his head in sympathy.

  Robert got to his feet, his lean face setting in lines of determination. “Kiss Madelyn goodbye for me. Tell her I’ll call her.”

  “You can’t wait for morning?”

  “No,” Robert said as he took the stairs two at a time. He couldn’t wait another minute. He was on his way to Alabama.

  Evie didn’t like her new home. She felt hemmed in, though she had a corner apartment and neighbors on only one side. When she looked out the window, she saw another apartment building, rather than the river sweeping endlessly past. She could hear her neighbors through the thin walls, hear them arguing, hear their two small children whining and crying. They were out until all hours, children in tow, and came dragging the poor little tykes in at one or two in the morning. The commotion inevitably woke her, and she would lie in bed staring at the dark ceiling for hours.

  She could look for another place, she kne