Until You Loved Me (Silver Springs #3)(109)

He wasn’t sure he should tell her. He didn’t want to bring her down when they were both feeling so euphoric. “Nothing.”

“Tell me,” she insisted.

He sighed. “My mother.” They’d known for the past two months that the pizza deliveryman—Stan Hinkle—who “found” him had also left him in the first place. After Matisson’s attempted blackmail hit the news, the police confronted Hinkle once again, at which point he admitted that he’d left Hudson under that hedge because his wife had gotten pregnant by another man, and he couldn’t face the prospect of looking at someone else’s child every day. He was leaving to deliver a pizza when she called to tell him she’d given birth in the bathroom. She’d wanted him to take her to the hospital, but he’d refused. He took the baby and left him at a neighboring house before driving down the street to drop off the pizza.

Hudson might’ve died under that hedge, except Hinkle forgot to deliver the bread sticks that were supposed to go with the pizza. When his manager sent him back, his conscience finally got the better of him. He’d picked up Hudson and turned him in to the authorities, claiming someone had abandoned him. Why Hinkle’s wife—Hudson’s mother—never stepped forward, Hudson didn’t know. Once she and Hinkle had broken up three years later, she got involved with someone else, started doing drugs and was killed in a motorcycle accident. “I wish she wasn’t gone—that you could meet her,” Ellie said.

“So do I,” Hudson said, but Stan Hinkle had denied him that possibility. Hudson thought he might be able to find his father if he hired another private investigator, but Stan knew only his first name, and after what Hudson had been through, he’d decided not to even look. He was happy with his life, happy with Ellie and Garrison. He didn’t want to bring in an unknown element, especially when there was no guarantee about the kind of man his father would be.

“What Hinkle did was so grossly unfair,” Ellie complained. “I hope he gets several years in prison.”

“I doubt he’ll wind up serving any time.”

“What? Last I heard, the police were going to try to get him on something.”

“I talked to the detective on the case a few days ago. It’s been thirty-two years—a bit long to prosecute him for child endangerment. And because he rescued me in the end, they won’t be able to make an attempted murder charge stick.”

“There’s always kidnapping!”

“But that would be tough to prove. With my mother gone, no one can say if she allowed him to do what he did or not. It doesn’t appear she did much to stop him. She didn’t even look for me after they broke up.” Which made him pretty certain she wouldn’t have been much of a mother in the first place...

“Still, it’s hard to believe he can do that to a baby and suffer no repercussions.”

Hudson ran a finger over the soft, downy cheek of his brand-new son. “What it comes down to is that my mother chose him over me. That’s how most people will see it. So I went into the system. At least Matisson and Jones will be serving time.”

She scowled. “Two years isn’t nearly long enough in my book.”

“You don’t get a lot for a failed attempt at blackmail, especially when there were no threats of physical violence. Either way, they can’t hurt us anymore.”

She tucked her hands under her pillow. “So, are you really going to be able to leave your past behind you?”

“I don’t want to hang on to that. I have too much to look forward to.” Hudson smiled as Garrison opened his eyes and stared up at him with a somber expression—one that gave Hudson the feeling he was trying to make sense of his new surroundings. “Hi, son. It’s your daddy,” he said.

*

Read on for an extract from RIGHT WHERE WE BELONG by Brenda Novak.





Right Where We Belong

by Brenda Novak





1


“You knew! You had to have known!”

The vitriol in those words caused the hair on the back of Savanna Gray’s neck to stand on end. She was just trying to pick up a gallon of milk at the supermarket with her kids, had never dreamed she might be accosted—although, since her husband’s arrest, it felt like everyone in town was staring daggers at her. The crimes Abe committed had shaken the small, insular town of Nephi, Utah, to the core.

“Don’t you dare run off! I know you heard me.”

Savanna froze. She had been about to flee. Her emotions were so raw she could barely make herself leave the house these days. She wished she could hole up with the curtains drawn and never face her neighbors again. But she had two children who were depending on her, and she was all they had left. Those children now looked up at her expectantly, and her son, Branson, who was eight, said, “Mommy, I think that lady’s talking to you.”

Gripping her shopping cart that much tighter, Savanna swung it around. She was determined to do a better job of defending herself against this type of thing than she had in the past. But then she recognized Meredith Caine. A video of Meredith—clothes torn, mascara smeared and lip bleeding as the same sister who was with her now tried to comfort her—had played on the news several times while police searched for the man who’d attacked her as she carried a load of laundry down to the basement of her apartment building.