Page 54 of Don't Call Me Sweetheart

“I think the Hart sisters are my cousins,” I blurted.

Chapter 17

Kate

I blinked through the orgasm-induced haze and tried to make sense of what Max was telling me. After the initial shock of him sharing anything personal with me that I didn’t have to drag from his mouth, I was consumed with curiosity.

“The Hart sisters are your cousins?” I asked. “Hannah, Violet, and Olivia? Those Hart sisters?”

“Are there other Hart sisters? Because if there are, that complicates things.”

I shook my head. “No, they’re the only Hart sisters I know of. Their dad, William Hart, was an only child. So they’re the last of the Hart name.”

“Not an only child. He had a sister. Allison. My mother.”

I pushed off his chest to stare at him. A thousand questions hovered on my tongue. Hadn’t he told me he didn’t have family? But he did have family—cousins—who happened to be women I was friendly with, right here in Hart’s Ridge. I would have been justified in saying something snippy, but the look on his face stopped me. Vulnerable. Unsure. Hopeful.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

When he let out a lungful of air in a relieved sigh, I realized he had been holding his breath. I laid my hand on his chest and felt the thump of his heart against it. Everything in me softened. Gentled. God, this man.

“I only know her side of things. Which isn’t much, to be honest. I never even knew her last name. Not as Hart, I mean. Her name on my birth certificate is Allison Darlington, but there’s no record of her marriage, so how she claimed that name is anyone’s guess. My father’s name was left blank. Maybe it was Darlington, maybe it wasn’t.”

As someone who knew my ancestors’ names over several generations spanning two hundred years—some of whom were now Hart’s Ridge legends—I couldn’t fathom not knowing something as inherent to my whole being as my parents’ names. I stroked through the sparse hair on his chest, wanting to comfort him but unsure of the right words.

“From what I could piece together from Allison, she left Hart’s Ridge at eighteen. Moved to California to be an actress.” He twisted a chunk of my hair around his finger. “Needless to say, it didn’t work out. She got hooked on heroin instead. I don’t know if they knew that. Her family in Hart’s Ridge, I mean. Maybe she was in and out of their lives the way she was in and out of mine. She never said much about them. I don’t know if they even know I exist.”

“How did you find out about them?” I asked.

His shoulder rose and fell beneath my head in a shrugging motion. “Curiosity got the better of me. I sent a tube of my spit to one of the DNA companies, and a few weeks later, I got the results. The funny thing was, it wasn’t at all what I expected. I thought, murderers and criminals, maybe. Something nefarious. Because she never even asked them for money, to my knowledge. She always said she would rather die than take anything from them. I figured that must mean they were terrible people, right?”

I thought about the Harts I knew. Some were more likable than others. Still, Locklear though I was, I wouldn’t say any of them were trash people.

“So imagine my surprise when I find out her relatives are all in a small Southern town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, living very normal lives like any other law-abiding citizens,” he said. “It was a shock, let me tell you.”

My stomach hollowed out, understanding what he didn’t say out loud. His mother had abandoned him to the state system rather than get her family involved. Why? What reason could she possibly have had, if the Harts weren’t abusive or criminals? Could she really have been so callous that she protected her pride at the expense of her own son?

“That’s why you’re here in Hart’s Ridge,” I said. “You have family here.”

“There are people related to my mother here,” he corrected. “It takes more than genes to make a family.”

I gave him a speaking glance.

He sighed. He knew me well enough now to understand that my look meant he had dodged the important part of my statement. “Okay, yes, that’s why I’m in Hart’s Ridge. About a year after I got the DNA results, I heard that Piedmont Latin was looking for a new principal. I applied for the job, and you know the rest.”

I cocked my head, studying him. “Huh.”

“What?” he asked.

“That’s…such a big thing to do. I mean, you uprooted your life. A new job, in a private school instead of an inner-city public school. A small town instead of a city. I mean…you could have sent an email. Made a phone call. Come by for a visit. But you didn’t do any of that. You just…changed everything. Why?”

“It wasn’t as big of a change as you think. I never stayed anywhere for more than three years. The biggest change is that this time, I mean to stay longer. Maybe.” He laughed. “This probably sounds stupid. But I just figured, what my mom did, I could do the opposite of that. I could make a home in the home she left. Maybe I could make a family with the family she left. And if I could do that, then maybe I could go even further. Maybe I could have a wife and children and the whole thing.”

“Oh,” I whispered.

Because he had told me that he wanted a wife and kids, but he didn’t know how to forge that kind of relationship. Which was where I came in.

Practice.

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