“Enter Mabel Adams,” Hutch said tonelessly.
“Yeah.One thing you can say, when she’s ready to cut the weight that’s holding her down, she’s all in.New name.Left Orlando for Misted Pines.Trucked her ass all the way across the country.If she wants someone to know where she is, or what she’s called now, she has to tell them.Her mom, her uncle, or that fuck who made her the other woman, they’d have to find someone like me to find her.And just to say, that fuck is now divorced, predictably, so he might come looking.Not exactly hard, but as I’m sure you’ve discovered, you can’t do a couple of Google searches and find anything about her.Even the house she rents and the shop she runs in town is buried under an LLC that has three directors, and it’s in her new name.”
“So at least, for that, she’s safe.But she went through all that shit, and now she’s living next to a cult.”
“There’s something else.”
Hutch blew out a sigh and decided it was a bourbon night.
“What?”he asked.
“Turns out, she was Frank Groove’s biological kid.Man was loaded, all this went down, he let her swing.Until he died recently, with a lot of his fortune used up in legal fees and just from blowing it by partying, still, he had some money, and that mansion.Mabel only learned he was her father after he died, because she inherited it all.”
Hutch steadfastly ignored the chill that swept over his skin at the familiar feeling of this story and instead focused on the fact this was good for Mabel.
But bad if Lars Enstrom ever heard of it.
Lee kept going.
“She instructed the executors to liquidate everything, and after his debts were paid, death duties, attorneys’ fees, she walked away with a little over a million dollars.”
“That guy was known as a hitmaker,” Hutch noted.“And that was all he died with?”
“That’s it.He owed everybody, including a bank who held his hefty home equity loan.But at least she’s got a healthy safety net, not to mention, his royalties and residuals.”
“Or a huge chunk of money some fucked-in-the-head asshole who trusses his women up inLittle House on the Prairiedresses, without the flower prints, and puts them to work making pies can get his hands on through brainwashing.”He couldn’t imagine Mabel would ever fall to that.“Or intimidation.”
“Maybe you need to sit on her,” Lee suggested.
This idea held merit.
The thing was, the more he was around her, the closer he came to caving.
He’d learned his lesson with Bree.
At least he hadn’t loved her like he had the other two.
But fuck, the woman put him through four months of hell.
It was always good in the beginning.
Until it turned bad.
That said, Mabel could move house.Duck out of their line of sight.Find a place in town that was populated.
But that felt shit, Mabel having to do something as major as that when she should be able to live free.
However, she had a shop.She had to have made friends in the area.
She couldn’t just disappear from that cabin.
Someone would go looking.
Namely…Hutch.
“Handle her with care,” Lee warned.
He hadn’t been doing that, not even slightly.
