by Abby Gaines
“Thanks a lot.”
She ignored him. “I’m saying she doesn’t know you love her.”
“A fine distinction,” he observed. “Some would say it’s no distinction at all.”
“Come on, Kyle. For years, you’ve been hung up on the idea Daisy might not be your daughter—don’t you think there’s a chance that might have colored your responses to her?”
“No,” he growled. What kind of jerk would do that to an innocent kid?
“Do you ever tell Daisy you love her?” she demanded.
“Of course I do.” Probably. Maybe not in those exact words...
“Do you ever show her?”
“Damn straight I do,” he said. “I work hard to support her, I’m building a new home for her—”
“Both those things mean you leave her with other people, mostly your dad, a lot.”
“Dad adores Daisy,” Kyle said.
“Maybe. But he can’t help trying to ‘improve’ her, and for a girl who’s already insecure, that makes her feel she’s not good enough.”
He’d had that thought himself...which meant he didn’t need Jane telling him. “Dad’s not perfect, but he’s a good grandfather,” he said.
She smacked her forehead. “Why am I bothering, when you won’t listen to a word I say?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “Maybe you should stop now.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I should have said this a week ago. It’s as much my fault as yours that nothing will change when I’m gone.”
“But as you said, it’s my problem. I suggest you go back to Denver and put us out of your mind.”
She folded her arms beneath her breasts. “Daisy told me Lissa used to come into her bedroom at nights and cry.”
The news jolted Kyle. Raised all kinds of suspicions, old and new. Would he never be free of them? “Do you have any idea why?”
Jane shook her head. “I think you need some professional help.”
“Take Daisy to a shrink?” Word would be all over town in five minutes—he could just imagine what his dad would say to that.
“Actually,” she said, “I meant you should see a shrink.”
He barked a laugh.
Her face didn’t flicker. “I know a dysfunctional family when I see one,” she said. “And I know all about feeling as if no one wants you.”
She made him sound like a monster, when he was just a regular guy—a good guy—doing his imperfect best. Her criticism pierced him, slid deep to the bone.
Kyle tried to summon examples he could fling at Jane—good times he’d had with Daisy, things he’d said, moments when his daughter had acknowledged the bond between them...
Nothing. Crap.
This barrage of accusations had befuddled him, that’s all. He didn’t need her criticism, he needed some time with his daughter—Jane was right about that much. They would fix this the way his family always fixed things, by pulling together. Without Jane.
He strode to the door and opened it. “Thanks for stopping by. You can go now.”
“No.” She spoke so quietly, he almost missed it.
He opened the door wider. “In fact, you can go all the way back to Denver. Forget staying until tomorrow, you’re no longer welcome here.”
“As if I ever was,” she muttered. “I’m not going, Kyle.” She uncrossed her ankles and planted her feet squarely on the floor. “Not without being sure things will change around here. You’ll change.”
“Dammit, Jane, I love my daughter. Now get out.”
In the hallway, a clerk turned at the sound of his raised voice, forcing Kyle to close the door again.
“One of the first rules of dealing with kids is not to promise what you can’t deliver,” Jane said. “I told Daisy I won’t leave until I’ve proved you love her.” She curled her hands over the edge of his desk, as if she thought he might physically remove her. He was tempted.
“How do you expect to prove that?” he demanded. “Love isn’t something you prove with a...a birthday present or by saying ‘I love you.’ It’s a lifetime thing.”
Her lips parted, and he hated that his gaze was drawn to her mouth.
“You’re right.” She sounded amazed. “It’s not going to be that straightforward. I guess I’ll know it when I see it. And so will Daisy.”
“This is nuts,” he said.
“I make a living out of helping women change the way other people see them. If they can project confidence and competence, even when they don’t feel those things, other people believe they possess those qualities. Over time, the confidence and competence become natural.”
“Is this credentials pitch going somewhere?” he demanded.
“Showing Daisy you love her in a way that she understands doesn’t come naturally to you. So I’ll coach you.”
“You will not,” he said grimly.
“You need to make a new impression on your daughter,” she said. “I’m going to help you. I won’t leave until you do it, so it’s in your interest to work with me.”
“You have some nerve, thinking you can tell me how to be a parent,” he said, aggravated beyond measure. “Lissa told me you were jealous of her having a husband and a baby—I’m starting to think that’s true.”
As tactics went, it was brutal. A part of him felt like a jerk. Yet, from the moment Jane had walked into the wrong end of the church during Lissa’s funeral, he’d had a sense of her strength. That any battle between them would be between equals.
It was oddly freeing. With Lissa, he’d been hamstrung in their fights by her extreme reactions to any argument. As if in disagreeing, he was attacking her very core.
Jane’s face had paled at his sally, but she didn’t back down, not one inch. “Lissa would never say that.”
She had to know it was exactly the kind of thing Lissa would say, if only for dramatic effect.
“My family’s not perfect, but it’s solid, strong,” he said, “and that’s something you’ve never had. So you’ve decided—maybe subconsciously,” he conceded, “that a few hiccups between me and Daisy are a sign of a fundamental flaw.”
“There is a fundamental flaw if your daughter feels unloved.” Her voice shook.
“Daisy’s in a rough patch, but deep down she knows I love her. Or she did, until you started planting doubts.”
“I didn’t!”
“How did she end up telling you about Lissa crying at nights if you weren’t digging into this stuff?” Kyle didn’t wait for an answer. “Leave, Jane. Leave tonight. What’s best for Daisy is that she and I have some time together, just the two of us.”
Momentarily, she looked torn—he suspected that in some ways the last thing she wanted was to stay on in Pinyon Ridge. He pushed home his point. “I’ll go home with you now, and I’ll take Daisy to Dad’s while you pack your bags. It’s better for everyone if you don’t spend any more time with her.”
Damn, he’d overplayed that. Two red spots in her cheeks suggested gathering fury.
“You can email Daisy if you want to keep in touch,” he said quickly. “Send your emails to me, and I’ll read them to her.”
Jane dipped her head. Her walnut hair slid forward, a silken screen that hid her face.
Hell, was she crying? Had he totally misread her?
“Jane?” He reached out, touched her shoulder.
She shot out of the chair, startling him. Her eyes blazed. But when she spoke, she was very, very calm. “My first night here, I
told you that you’re Daisy’s father, remember?”
The balance of power shifted between them in an instant. Something cold ran down Kyle’s spine; his mouth seemed suddenly paralyzed. “I remember,” he managed to respond.
Was she about to say that was a lie?
“It’s true,” she said.
Before he could sag in relief, or wonder why she’d brought the subject up, she continued, “It’s true, inasmuch as it was your sperm that the clinic used. Even if emotionally you’re not much of a dad.”
Ah, she wanted to land one more punch before she left. Kyle didn’t bother to fight back; he didn’t care about her assessment of him emotionally.
“But, Kyle...” Her voice turned so serious, he found his gaze riveted on her. “Daisy wasn’t conceived using one of Lissa’s eggs—the egg was mine.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE RUSHING IN KYLE’S EARS drowned out Jane’s next words. Her lips moved, but he had no idea what she said.
“Your egg?” he barked, way too loud.
“Lissa told me that frozen eggs had a very low success rate, like you said, and she was worried this might be her last chance.” Jane spoke slowly and clearly, as if she were repeating herself. Which she probably was.
Lissa’s real worry had been that, with her marriage going downhill fast and Kyle having put any more fertility treatments on hold, this might be her last chance for a pregnancy.
“I’d been taking drugs to induce excess ovulation for a few weeks before Lissa came to town,” Jane said. “I donated an egg—several eggs.”
“Your egg,” he said again.
Jane eyed him with what looked like concern. “They harvested the eggs a few days before Lissa arrived. They created three embryos using your sperm and implanted the two most viable into Lissa.”
Kyle headed for the meeting table in the corner of his office. “Can we sit down?”
Too abrupt for courtesy, but she didn’t object. She pushed away from his desk and joined him at the table, sitting sedately, as if she hadn’t just dropped a two-ton bombshell.
Kyle sank into the other chair. “Is this true?” he demanded.
She didn’t answer, but her gaze didn’t waver.
Her story explained a lot. Everything. Lissa’s secretiveness, her guilt, the way she’d withdrawn from Kyle as the pregnancy progressed. Their already rocky marriage had stood no chance after that.
Anger at Lissa surged, bitter in his throat. Then it spread to encompass Jane, who was still alive, still here.
“I called you,” he accused her. “You told me I had nothing to worry about. You lied.”
“You think I owed you the truth?” She gripped the edge of the table, and her knuckles whitened. “You made it plain I wasn’t good enough to be Lissa’s friend, you did everything you could to discourage her contact with me—”
“That’s not true.” And even if there were a thread of truth, he had the moral high ground here.
“What about the blues festival?” she demanded.
Lissa had planned a weekend in Denver, he remembered, to attend the festival with Jane. Until Kyle had surprised her with tickets to New York and a Broadway show. “That wasn’t deliberate,” he retorted. But he was uncomfortably aware that he’d known about the date clash and yet had gone ahead with his surprise. “You think a grudge about a music festival gave you the right to get involved in this sham?” He scrambled back onto that moral high ground.
“Lissa was my friend,” she said, her cheeks pink. “My loyalty was to her.”
“That lie broke up our marriage,” he snapped. “If I’d known the truth—”
“You’d have forgiven her?”
Okay, it would have been hard to get past the deception. Maybe impossible. “I would have worked on it,” he muttered.
Something like sympathy crossed her face. “If it makes you feel better,” she said, “I lost my only friend.”
He snorted. “I happen to know you stayed friends for years after that.” Besides, compared to the loss of his marriage...
“At first Lissa was grateful,” Jane admitted. “She kept in touch constantly while she was pregnant, and I felt like a part of her life in a way I hadn’t been since you came along.” There was a poignancy in the words that Kyle refused to acknowledge.
“But after Daisy was born,” Jane said, “she was...afraid.”
“Of what?” he said impatiently.
“I know you didn’t want me at the christening, but even so, she—”
“Lissa said you wouldn’t come because she hadn’t asked you to be godmother,” he interrupted.
Jane drew in a breath. “She told me you refused to have me as godmother.”
Kyle winced. “And you believed her.”
She laced her fingers on the tabletop. “Why wouldn’t I? You’d made it plain you disapproved of me, of my family.”
“Like everybody else,” he pointed out.
“Except Lissa’s family,” she countered. She huffed out a breath. “Let’s not get bogged down with the details. Whatever really happened about the christening...”
“I’m telling the truth.”
To his irritation, she lifted one shoulder, as if the jury were out on his honesty. “Lissa said she thought it was best if I didn’t come at all, because I was bound to act guilty around you. She was afraid you’d guess the truth.”
“No one would guess something that outlandish,” he said.
“I think...” Jane bit her lip. “I’d been asking her lots of questions about Daisy, about how she was doing. Purely as a friend, but I suspect Lissa worried I might think of Daisy as mine.”
Hers? Every instinct screamed against the idea.
Then Kyle realized what this all meant.
He slammed back in his chair.
“That’s right,” Jane said. “I’m Daisy’s biological mother.”
Hell. How had that not occurred to him already? “You are not my daughter’s mother.” He would defend that position to the ends of the earth.
“I know. I’ve never, not once, thought that.” She sounded remote. “But the more Lissa thought about it, the more she worried, and the more distance she put between us.”
For a moment, he felt sorry for Jane—sorry, after all, for the loss of her friendship. But then the implications of her confession hit home.
Lissa had indeed lied to him all these years.
Jane Slater was Daisy’s biological mother.
Daisy was a Slater.
He cursed.
Jane’s chin jutted. “I’m sorry you have to suffer the horror of having my DNA present in your daughter.”
She’d read his thoughts, dammit. “You didn’t expect me to be pleased, did you?” he demanded.
“More pleased than discovering some random stranger had donated an egg, yeah.”
Uh, no. Wasn’t it common for prospective parents to specify that donors shouldn’t have a criminal record? Or, in her case, be from a criminal family? “Is there anything else?” he demanded. “Any more lies?”
She gave him a look of disdain. “Not that I know of. But I haven’t been Lissa’s confidante in years.”
Kyle knuckled his temples, where a headache was building. In the space of fifteen minutes, Jane had taken away what he knew to be his family. The life he’d constructed with Lissa, imperfect as it had been, had at least been real. Him and Lissa and their daughter, Daisy.
Or so he’d
thought.
Now, his family would be forever distorted by the intrusion of Jane.
No matter that the egg donation had been Lissa’s idea—and he believed that—Jane had inserted herself into his life in the most intimate of ways.
“This doesn’t have to change anything,” he said, mainly to himself. More out of hope than belief.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re about to leave town,” he said, thinking out loud. “No one else needs to know about this. You’ll be gone. Daisy and I will get on with our lives.”
“Have you forgotten where we started this conversation?” she asked.
Kyle racked his brain. The distance they’d traveled in the past few minutes felt like a lifetime.
“I told you I’m not leaving town,” she reminded him.
Oh, yeah, that. The threat seemed trifling in the context of his newer, bigger worries. “And I told you, Daisy’s my daughter, and you can’t stay.”
“She’s mine, too. Biologically.”
He didn’t miss the pause in what should have been one sentence. Revulsion slammed in his gut. Jane Slater—a liar and the product of the most deadbeat family he knew—was his daughter’s biological mother, and just now she’d been in no hurry to add the biological.
“She is not your daughter and she never will be.” He cudgeled his brain for the argument that would convince Jane to leave. “Do you need money? Running your own business is tough in the current economy.” He tried to sound sympathetic, but landed somewhere around smarmy. Still, money talked with the Slaters.
Maybe not this Slater. She stood so suddenly, her chair almost toppled over. With her hands planted on her hips, her expression ferocious, she looked like a warrior, ready to run him through with a sword.
“Since it seems your memory is faulty, I’ll tell you again,” she said. “I’m staying until you’ve learned to show Daisy you love her. Money won’t speed up the process. Letting me coach you will.”
He stood, too. “If you think what you just told me makes me more likely to take you up on your offer, you’re dead wrong. More than ever, I’m going to protect Daisy—and that means from you.”