Page 29 of Rescued Dreams
“An outhouse?” He imagined the twins being told they had to pee outside.
“Camping toilet. Super clean. I made it cute, which I’m sure you’ll fail to appreciate.” She dragged a second chair from the little desk over to a tiny table in the corner, where the back of the chair leaned up against the edge of the bed.
“Why not just get a condo, or a house?”
“Can’t sell the house. But the government keeps reminding me that the taxes and fees for owning it are my responsibility, along with everything else I inherited. Like constant break-ins and the need to hide my original last name.”
He set the pizza down and took a seat. “Constant?”
She shrugged. “I’ve called the police a few times. They can’t do anything because I can’t ID the perpetrators. They say I should get cameras in the house, or a security system, but the one time I did that, someone ripped it all out. No one in town wants to work on this house. Even with the warranty I asked for on the cameras, they wouldn’t come back and install new ones.”
She slumped into the chair. “I don’t want to talk about this. I’m hungry and exhausted, and my side hurts.”
Ridge bowed his head for a second and said grace silently to himself, quickly asking for her pain to ease.
“I don’t want to be the sad tale. I don’t want pity. I just want to do my job and have people leave me alone.”
“I don’t pity you.” He’d rather help her. “My mom got remarried a few years ago.”
She frowned, her mouth full of hot and spicy pizza.
He continued. “Her new husband isn’t the kind of guy who wants to be tied down with kids. The twins, Maddie and Ella, were fifteen at the time. Gary—my mom’s husband—wanted to get an RV and hit the road. The girls were in their freshman year of high school, and Mom isn’t the, uh…homeschooling kind.”
Amelia swallowed her bite. “What did they do?”
“I moved from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-bedroom town house, and they moved in with me.” He shrugged. “It isn’t something I talk about much. They don’t need to be at a firehouse, and they have school. Homework. Jobs. They’re busy with their friends when they aren’t working. Now they’re seniors, and they turn eighteen after Christmas. I got a town house so they can have more space in a nicer place.” He was probably talking about them like a proud parent. “They’re great kids.”
She smiled. “Thanks, in a big part, to you.”
He ducked his head and grabbed a slice. “Maybe some. They make it easy. Most of the time, anyway.”
Amelia sat across the little round table from him. She wiped her hands on a napkin, tipped back on her chair, and opened the refrigerator in a move so smooth he knew she’d done it plenty of times before. She pulled two flavored soda waters out and handed him one.
She said, “Didn’t take long for my mom to realize what Dad was. You’d think him being the kind of man he was, he’d have put up more of a fight to keep her, but maybe she and I were cramping his style. Getting in the way.” She put her palms together, her hands between her knees. “She left and got her own place. As long as I can remember, she was dating other men on the side. I don’t know when she and Steven Hilden got divorced, but I was in elementary school when she married Matthew Patterson. After that she was a one-man woman, at least as far as I know. And I took his name as soon as I could.”
“They’re the ones who raised you?”
She nodded. “I always knew who my dad was, but she kept me away from him as much as she could. At least, until the court ordered I spend time with him in the summer and some holidays. Matthew was a firefighter.”
“He worked with Chief Hilden?”
Another nod. “Matthew died on the job. Hilden left him and another firefighter cut off from assistance, trapped so they had no way out. He waited until they were dead and then sent the others in to recover them. He never attempted to rescue them. He wanted them to die.”
Ridge’s heart squeezed in his chest. “I’m sorry you lost your dad, Amelia. That’s tragic.”
“Mom wasn’t ever the same. Eventually her heart gave out. I tried to honor Matthew’s memory by becoming a firefighter here in Last Chance County, but it was too hard. I transferred to Benson in the first year, and I figured it would be better there.”
He had a feeling the story didn’t end with her move. That there was more because it hadn’t necessarily been better.
She’d lost her family. Whatever the criminal actions of the former chief had cost others in town, it had cost Amelia far more.
Ridge said, “Are you okay back here, on your own?”
“I don’t need a guest. There’s no room.” She waited a beat, then smiled at him.
“Good, because the second the twins see this place and how adorable it is, they’re going to want to move in.”
Her smile widened and she laughed.
