Page 18 of Hero for the Holidays

Fia couldn’t let her go, never again.

“In,” she said. “Let’s go talk to her right now.”

“No. Let’s not ambush the kid in the middle of the day. How about that?”

“No one is suggesting an ambush. But you’re the one saying it needs to happen fast, and I’m agreeing with you.”

Her heart was pounding. She needed to see Lila. She couldn’t stand not having her in her line of sight. Couldn’t stand not being with her.

“Let’s think about this. She’s been here for a few weeks, and I’ve been trying to help her get adjusted. Hell, Fia, I didn’t even know if she would want to stay.”

That didn’t help. It made her angrier if anything.

“You were going to bring my daughter here, and if she didn’t want to stay, you were just going to let her go, and I was never going to know?”

“You didn’t want her.”

The swirl of feelings inside her, the emotional mist, collected like a hurricane then. And exploded.

“Thirteen yearsof living since I had that baby, of growing, aging, seeing more of the world, seeing more of yourself, and that’s still how you see it?Fuck you.”

She went storming out of the barn and he grabbed her arm. “Meet me. Tonight.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you. I’ll get a lawyer. I’ll do—”

“You don’t need a lawyer. Come on. I want to do what’s best for the kid, Fia. That’s it. Maybe I’m doing a shitty job of it... I expected to be able tomeetthe kid someday, I didn’t expect to ever be a father. She needs a father. Hell, she could use a mother too.”

His words were like poison, and she wanted to spit them back at him. And that was the biggest thing that kept her from running toward Lila now.

That she felt poisonous.

That she felt so angry and wounded.

That she wanted to kill Landry King with her own hands.

They needed to have it out. They needed to have the conversation they had been waiting thirteen years to have. And then they would see what was on the other side of it. But one thing Fia knew, and that was now that she’d found her daughter, she was never going to let her go again.

She hadn’t been looking for her. Because she’d made a choice. She had made a choice to give that child the best life she could, and at the time it had felt like that had to be far away from Four Corners. Far away from her, far away from Landry. From their family drama, from their own toxicity.

Shehadwanted her baby.

It was one of the things that had made her hate Landry the very most. That he had offered her a dream. Spun a fairy-tale story where they could run away together and it would work. Make a little home, with their little family. Where they would just be two destitute dysfunctional idiots.

She’d wanted to take it.

She’d known she couldn’t. She’d done her best to make the right choice and he’d spent years punishing her for it.

He thought she hadn’twantedLila enough.

She hated him for that. It was the thing she would never forgive him for, of all the things. That he had no idea how much she’d wanted it. And how hard she’d fought to choose the right thing in the face of it.

“Tonight,” she said. “Six. We’ll make a plan.”

But she knew it was more than that. There was so much hard emotion between them, and the truth was, they needed to be able to say it. In the interest of keeping her secret, she’d pushed it down. They’d been civil to each other, even if barely.

Even if barely.

When she drove away from King’s Crest this time, she knew she cut her heart out and left it behind.

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