Page 4 of Rufus

He dreaded to think how Molly would feel if she ever guessed how attracted he was to her…

The phrase “old perv” came to mind. His mind, at least. Molly was still looking at him with stars in those beautiful blue eyes.

“I’m not looking for her,” he told Molly bluntly.

The color receded from her cheeks, and once again, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, meet his gaze. “Because you’ve already had, and lost, the love of your life.” She nodded her understanding of what she probably considered was a brush-off on his part.

Maybe it was, but not for the reason Molly seemed to assume it was.

Rufus was sure he had cared for Beth, and there was no doubting that he still remembered her with affection. She had been his wife and the mother of his daughter, after all.

But their marriage had been so long ago, almost half his lifetime, and they hadn’t even managed to reach their first wedding anniversary before she died. Even so, he didn’t think Beth had been the love of his life, no matter how grateful he was for their beloved daughter.

Rufus had joined the army at eighteen, becoming a lieutenant by the time he was twenty-one, and had been home on leave for a few weeks to celebrate his promotion before shipping overseas. He and Beth had met at a club the second night of that leave and then spent the rest of that time together.

They kept in touch after that through sporadic texts and emails, with the intention of maybe meeting up again the next time he came back to England.

Then had come Beth’s phone call two months later, telling him she was pregnant and the baby was undoubtedly his.

It had been the most natural thing in the world for the two of them to marry when he was next home on leave. They’d liked each other enough initially to spend a whole week together, and as far as Rufus was concerned, expecting a child together made marriage inevitable.

They’d been happy, he recalled, as they painted and changed the spare bedroom in the apartment they now rented into a nursery. They had been happier still when their beautiful daughter was born five months after their wedding.

Only for all that happiness to turn to unending grief after he was informed Beth and Emily had both been killed in a car crash when his daughter was just three months old.

At least, he’d thought they had.

He had only learned two years ago that twenty-year-old Emily was alive and that her name was now Mia.

Despite all of Rufus’s investigations into how his daughter could have survived the crash, then been found abandoned in a church in Cornwall three months later, and subsequently grown up in an orphanage until she was eighteen, he still had no idea where she had been for those missing three months.

But someone had to know the truth, and Rufus had no doubt those missing months were the answer to the whole puzzle of how Emily could have survived the car crash that had killed her mother.

Rufus had no intention of ever stopping his search to discover that truth.

There was certainly no place in his life for a beautiful young woman like Molly Harper. With an emphasis on young.

“I don’t believe my feelings for my deceased wife to be any of your business,” he bit out coldly.

He instantly regretted that harsh put-down when Molly’s face leeched of all color and unshed tears made her beautiful sky-blue eyes glisten.

CHAPTER TWO

You always want to know too much about other people’s lives and emotions, Molly inwardly rebuked herself as she stared across the desk in dismay at the now stony-faced Rufus Wynter.

Even if she knew the reason she did was because those families and their emotions for each other fascinated her. Because she’d never experienced those things for herself.

She’d never known her father or any grandparents. Instead she’d grown up in an apartment with only her less than attentive mother until she was ten years old. Which was when her mother had sent her off to school one day and then just disappeared.

It wasn’t the first time her mother had left her alone overnight, or even for several nights, so at first, Molly hadn’t been too concerned. But when that disappearance stretched into five days and nights with no word from her mother or any sign of her coming back, she’d known this wasn’t one of those times.

Molly had tried to give the outward impression that all was normal in her world, mostly by taking herself to school as usual. But on the fifth day, her teacher had asked about her mother and why Molly’s appearance was becoming more and more unkempt.

At that point, Molly had no choice but to admit her mother had disappeared almost a week earlier. Her teacher had immediately called in the police.

They had assessed the situation before speaking to the neighbors in their apartment building. None of them were particularly friendly with Sarah Harper, or her daughter, nor did they have any idea where Sarah might have gone. That information had been enough for Molly to be taken into care.

She’d missed her mother, but at least the orphanage gave her three meals a day and ensured she was never left to fend for herself. Something that hadn’t always been true before then, even though her mother hadn’t gone out to work.

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