Page 54 of Matched By Mistake
“Maybe. Thanks for the information. I’ll have a talk with her,” Sheriff Battle said. “I’m going to send you out with a deputy. I’m not ready to face your mama again.”
Maggie smiled for the first time since she’d left Dallas. “Oh, I know she’s tough but she’s also fair. That video definitely looks like me.”
“It does, but I don’t think Gayle’s going to be giving me a pass because of that.”
Maggie nodded in agreement and said her goodbyes to the sheriff before following the deputy back into the waiting room, where her parents, Joseph and Jericho waited. Cecily was gone, which made Maggie worry that her family’s attorney might have been the one to do the breaking and entering.
“My alibi checked out,” she said.
“Officer Haddon informed us,” her mom said. “Ready to go home?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Maggie—” Jericho said her name.
She turned and gave him a long hard look and just shook her head no. Then she walked out of the sheriff’s office with her head held high. Her mom followed her out but her father stayed behind.
As soon as they were away from the doorway, her mom pulled her into her arms and Maggie wrapped her own around her. She put her head on her mom’s shoulder, knowing it was safe to cry, but there were no tears. She felt that icy coldness that had been so much a part of her for the last two years start to seep back in.
She knew that it was a protective thing and she realized that it was easier to feel nothing than to deal with the pain of heartbreak and disappointment.
Jericho knew from the moment that Maggie had walked into the sheriff’s office that he’d made a mistake. Sheriff Battle wanted to speak to both his father and Fernando, so Jericho told his dad goodbye and nodded at Fernando as he went outside. Maggie and her mom stood off to the side of the entrance.
Jericho knew that it would be better if he just went home and tried to talk to her later but that wasn’t his way where Maggie was concerned. He needed to talk to her. He wanted a chance to maybe explain, but more than anything he wanted to make sure that she knew...
What? he demanded of himself. Now that she had an alibi he believed her? Yeah, that wasn’t going to go over very well.
He should wait to talk to her.
He should.
“Maggie, could I speak to you for a minute?” he called out.
Fucking asshole.
Her mom gave him a hard look but just turned to her daughter. Maggie said something softly that Jericho couldn’t hear and then her mom walked past him without saying a word, going back inside.
She stood there, obviously not coming to him. So he walked over, his mind frantically going through words and rejecting them. He should have waited to do this.
“I know you’re ticked.”
“Oh, I’m more than that. How could you think I would do something like that?” she demanded.
“It looked like you,” he said, and as the words left his mouth, he knew they were a mistake. He heard them and wanted to pull them back.
Camille would have had his head for saying something like that. One of the things he liked best about his mom was the fact that she had raised him and his brothers to understand how to treat a woman. He knew she would be disappointed in him tonight. “I’m sorry I said that.”
Maggie nodded.
“Why would you believe that about me?”
That was the one question he hadn’t been able to answer to himself. Sure, he could say maybe it was because his mom had died when he was a kid or that his high school girlfriend had ended things when they’d both gone off to college. But the truth was more nuanced than that. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in love. He’d seen the evidence of it in his own home growing up between his dad and stepmom.
The truth was, he had never felt as deeply for anyone the way he did about Maggie. And that made him vulnerable, which he fucking hated. There was no two ways about that. So it had been easier to think he’d been wrong about her so he could just ignore those feelings. Easier was never the best path, his father had said more than once.
“I don’t know,” he said, even though that wasn’t the answer he knew he should give her.
“Well, I have an opinion,” she said.
