“Come on, Mrs. Redmond. Let him help you. I’m sorry I haven’t thought to arrange someone else to take care of that for you.”
“I don’t want his help. He’s rotten to the core, that one. You know he knocked up my granddaughter, don’t you? Ruined her, that’s what he did. She was a good girl until he came along. Then he gets her pregnant and drops her the minute he found out.”
Oh, heavens. Claire had completely forgotten Riley’s high school girlfriend was Mrs. Redmond’s granddaughter. She knew the old scandal, even though she’d been away at college at the time. Alex had been livid with her brother for the whole thing, for hurting his mother and being stupid enough in the first place not to wear a condom.
“Not true,” Riley said now to Mrs. Redmond, his voice tense. “I never dropped Lisa. You and everybody else knew I wanted to do the right thing and marry her. Even after she had a miscarriage, I would have married her.”
Lisa Redmond had been a cheerleader, popular, pretty. She’d been sixteen, Riley seventeen, when she’d gotten pregnant. Claire knew from Alex the girl had miscarried just a few months into the pregnancy, while their families were still trying to sort through their options.
“I was ready to marry her regardless,” Riley said again. “But your son and daughter-in-law sent her away.”
Mrs. Redmond made a disparaging sound. “To get away from you. You think they wanted her to marry someone like you if she didn’t have to? Being married to you would have been a misery for that girl. You would have ruined her life even more than you already had. A clean break, I told my son. Like yanking off a bandage, do it fast and sure. That’s the only way. And I was right. You left town the minute you could, didn’t you?”
“Right.”
Claire couldn’t see his features, but she heard the grim tightness in his voice and her heart ached for him. She could tell he hated this. For the first time, she had a glimpse into how difficult things must be for him here in Hope’s Crossing, how there were still plenty of people who would never see beyond the hellion he’d been once.
*
Riley refused to allow the words of an angry, bitter old woman to wound him, especially when he had earned every ounce of her vitriol. It was difficult, though, especially on the heels of their visit with Maura.
“Mrs. Redmond, please let him help you with your garbage can,” Claire said in that soft, persuasive voice. “This is silly. That was all nearly twenty years ago. Lisa is happy now. She married a very nice man, a pharmacist from Highlands Ranch. I went to their wedding. They have a son, right?”
“A lucky escape from him.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Riley said, layering the same thin veneer of calm over his underlying tension he used in difficult police situations. “All I want right now is help you take your garbage to the curb. That’s what I’m going to do. You can still hate me all you want—after this moment, if you never want to speak to me again, you don’t have to. But like it or not, I’m taking your garbage to the curb.”
She blustered as he grabbed the can from her. “I don’t want your help. I’ll have you arrested for trespassing!” she said, her voice querulous.
“You can try, but I am the chief of police, so you might have a hard time convincing anyone in my department to take me in for the terrible crime of wanting to help you.”
She followed him out to the curb, blustering the whole way. Riley would have liked to just dump the can on the grass and walk away from the old bat, but he knew he couldn’t do that with Claire looking on. Okay, he probably would have stopped to help her anyway, even if Claire hadn’t been with him. A month in Hope’s Crossing must be rubbing off on him.
When he finished, he turned back to the thin old lady, her features now the same shade as her pink housedress.
“For what it’s worth, Mrs. Redmond,” he said quietly, hoping Claire was too far away on the sidewalk to overhear, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I’ll be the first to admit that. But what happened with Lisa is one I regret the most. I was seventeen and stupid, but that’s no excuse for what happened.”
“You’re damn right it’s not. You took advantage of a naive girl’s hopes and dreams.”
He bit his tongue to keep from responding that he hadn’t been Lisa’s first boyfriend or sexual partner—or that she had actually done most of the pursuing in their relationship.
“I hope you’re not doing the same with Claire, taking advantage of her,” the old woman’s voice was pitched just as low as his own, thank the Lord. “She’s a good girl who’s had a hard time of it, just like my Lisa. She doesn’t need the likes of you ruining her life.”