Sitting with him in her kitchen, in the golden glow of the morning light spilling through the window, she recalled that conversation as if they’d had it mere days ago. She remembered thinking, as he’d told her about his evolution from small-town kid to professional actor, that he must have been type-cast as Romeo. He’d been so handsome, so charismatic. If she’d been a fourteen-year-old Juliet, she would have dumped her fiancé and swallowed poison for Dylan.
They’d talked, and they’d danced. She couldn’t recall what songs the jukebox had played that evening, although she was positive “Angel of the Morning” wasn’t among them. She and Dylan had danced fast and they’d danced slow. She’d drunk wine and he’d drunk beer, but neither of them got tipsy. Just...loose. Comfortable. Easy with each other.
She remembered one dance—not the song but the moment, the movement. Her arms had rested on his shoulders, his hands had curved around her waist. They’d looked into each other’s eyes and shared the same thought. And then they’d kissed. Just a light kiss, a friendly kiss. A kiss shimmering with promise.
She’d barely known him, but she’d known she wanted to be with him. He’d made her feel desirable again, after Adam had left her. He’d made her feel womanly. Sensual. Sexy.
She gazed at his hands, cupped around the mug. They were still big but graceful, his fingers long and strong. She could almost imagine their warm grip, one on each side of her waist, just above her hips, holding her as they danced. She’d lifted her hands to his cheeks that night, and drawn his mouth to hers on the dance floor in the Faulk Street Tavern. So many years ago.
That kiss had completely altered the course of Gwen’s life. It had led to Annie.
“She seems like a great kid,” Dylan said, yanking Gwen back to the present.
“Annie? Yes. She’s wonderful.”
“Smart. Happy. You must be a terrific mother.”
She shrugged. “I do my best.”
“All by yourself.” He shook his head. “Do you have any family around to help out?”
“They’re all still in Illinois,” she told him. “But I’ve got babysitters, and Annie’s in school now. Full-day kindergarten and an after-school program which she really enjoys.”
“And your boyfriend,” Dylan added. “I guess he helps out, too.”
Gwen shrugged again. Mike got along well enough with Annie, although Gwen believed Annie was more attached to him than he was to her. His affection for Annie seemed mostly about pleasing Gwen, doing what he knew she wanted him to do. She appreciated his effort, but that was what it was: an effort. It didn’t come naturally to him.
Before Dylan had appeared in Brogan’s Point, Mike’s effort had been enough. It probably still was enough.
But Dylan had come and disrupted everything. “What exactly do you want?” she asked him, then winced inwardly at how cold and demanding she sounded.
“I want to be Annie’s father,” he said.
Blunt, and in a way just as cold and demanding. “How do you propose to do that? She lives in Brogan’s Point. You live in California.”
“I’m thinking of buying a house here in town,” he told her.
That news stunned her into silence for a moment. “Really? You saw her and decided to uproot yourself and move here, just like that?”
“Actually, no.” He drank some coffee, then leaned back in his chair. Evidently, he was feeling more comfortable. Gwen wasn’t sure she liked that. “The reason I came here was to buy a house. I liked this town when we were filming Sea Glass. And I was getting restless in Los Angeles. It just wasn’t feeling right to me.”
She sensed there was more to his decision than things just not feeling right, but she didn’t press him. She didn’t want to know. His business was his business. She only wished he’d stay out of her business. Hers and Annie’s.
“I had good memories of Brogan’s Point,” he told her. “I loved the ocean, the town. The people.” His gaze grew more intense. “You were part of those memories, Gwen. Not that...I mean, it wasn’t like I’ve been, you know, dreaming about you all these years...”
Certainly not. She’d seen plenty of photos of him with this or that beautiful actress on the covers of the magazines at the supermarket checkout.
“It was a good time, that night,” he said.
She appreciated his unadorned honesty, and she couldn’t argue with him. The night they’d spent together had been pretty spectacular.
“It just didn’t...” He tapped his fingers against the surface of the table. “I didn’t know about the unintended consequences. We used condoms, didn’t we?”
“They aren’t fool-proof,” she pointed out.
“Obviously.” A wry laugh escaped him. “So. Look. I hope we can figure this out in a way that will work for both of us. I don’t want to screw up what you’ve got going here. But if I move into town, I want to be a part of Annie’s life. I feel like I’ve already missed so much.”
He’d missed the sleepless newborn nights. The messy diapers. The Terrible Two’s and the threenager year. The stomach viruses. The demands for round waffles and dogs and movies about singing kites. The nights when Gwen was bone-tired from a long day at work and all she wanted was a glass of wine and an hour of peace, and Annie was revved up and bouncing off the walls.
He’d also missed her giggles. Her hugs. Her sticky kisses. Her pride when she began to pick out words in the pages of her books and sound them out. “That says dog. That says car.” He’d missed the pictures she drew, of Mr. Snuffy and the oak tree in the back yard, and the birds at the feeder. He’d missed her preschool graduation ceremony, and the first time at the Community Center pool when she’d stuck her face in the water and blown bubbles, and then bobbed back up, smiling as if she’d conquered Mt. Everest. He’d missed her cuddling up in the crook of his arm and murmuring, “I love you.”
Gwen wasn’t sure she wanted to share Annie with Mike. She definitely wasn’t sure she wanted to share her with Dylan Scott.
But what was the alternative? To deny him access to Annie? She was his daughter. His blood.
Besides, he had money. He could hire a battalion of lawyers if Gwen tried to fight him.
She didn’t want to fight him, anyway. She had nothing against him. The night they’d spent together so long ago had been lovely.
“So, you’re going to move to town, and...what? Give up your film career? I can’t offer you a job in my store.”
He chuckled. “I’m still acting,” he said, his gaze drifting toward the window for a moment, as a second cardinal joined the first at the feeder. “I’m under contract to do three more Galaxy Force movies in the next three years, and who knows what else. But I don’t have to live in Hollywood to do that. I can get on a plane and fly wherever we’re filming.”
“Beyond the Milky Way?” she asked, quoting a tag line from the advertisements for the movies.
He laughed again. He had a disarming laugh, low and throaty. “Mostly on a massive sound stage in Vancouver.” His smile faded. “Does Annie know I’m her father?”
“No.”
“She must ask, though. Doesn’t she wonder who her father is?”
His voice was edged in doubt and suspicion. Did he think Gwen had lied to Annie about who her father was? “She’s never asked who,” she said. “She’s asked if she had a father, and I told her she did. She asked where he was, and I told her he lived far away. I told her that maybe she’d meet him someday. I guess it didn’t seem odd to her. Some of her classmates are in single-parent families. Some have step-parents. One of her closest friends has two mommies.”
He mulled over her words. “I guess you know better than me how to handle this.”
Oh, sure. Gwen had no idea how to handle it. But then, she’d had no idea how to handle single motherhood, until she’d been forced to. Somehow, she’d figured it out. She supposed she would figure out how to introduce Dylan into Annie’s life, too. One step, one day, one book at a time.
She’d figure it o
ut, because she had no choice.
Chapter Nine
Dylan might be a creature of the film industry, but children’s movies were not his area of expertise. He’d been approached once to do a voice in a Pixar film, but the job had conflicted with his Galaxy Force obligations, so he’d had to pass. He knew and admired folks who worked on animated features, but liking them didn’t mean he was obligated to sit through their movies, so he skipped them.
Sky High wasn’t bad, though. The story, which had something to do with a little girl who sailed through the air on a magic kite, was loud and colorful, with the sort of catchy songs that threatened to lodge permanently inside his skull. The theater in the multiplex was noisy with the babble of the dozens of children in the audience, and the air was dense with the cloying aroma of popcorn.
Gwen had allowed Annie to sit between Dylan and herself. Maybe he was reading too much into that, but he viewed the seating arrangement as an indication of trust. She wouldn’t stand between him and his daughter—or sit between them at the movies.
Annie clearly found the movie enthralling. He’d bought her a small popcorn—movie-theater small, which meant the tub was almost as big as her head and he’d wound up eating more than half. His tongue felt greasy, and salt caked the corners of his mouth. But sharing popcorn with Annie struck him as a very father-daughter thing to do.
He needed to remind himself that fatherhood was a lot more complicated, and a lot more challenging, than simply taking his daughter to a kiddie matinee and munching on popcorn with her. In the movie’s few scary scenes, she invariably leaned into Gwen’s shoulder and squeezed Gwen’s hand. Dylan was not the person she’d turn to when she was afraid.
Not yet.
Hell. What did he know about being a father, anyway? He’d watched enough sit-coms as a kid to know there were two kinds of fathers: the wise, steady fathers popular in the black-and-white shows from the fifties and sixties in perpetual reruns on TV Land, and the incompetent, goofball fathers popular in the shows from his own childhood. He would much rather be the first kind of father, but wise? Steady? Those weren’t exactly words he’d use to describe himself.
Gwen seemed to have the monopoly on wisdom and steadiness. Every now and then, he’d glance at her over Annie’s head. She kept her face forward, and the light from the screen outlined her profile. When he’d met her six years ago, he’d thought she was cute. Now she struck him as...
Beautiful. With her hair pulled back, he could see the elegant lines of her jaw and throat, the delicate hollows below her cheek bones. Her eyes were like blue topaz, clear and glittering, her lashes long and thick. Her body... She was as slender as he remembered, but more solid somehow. That body had carried his child.
He felt a sharp tug in his groin, totally inappropriate while watching a kiddie-flick with a five-year-old girl seated next to him. Totally inappropriate in any environment, he warned himself. Gwen had a lover, that guy he’d met on her front porch yesterday. Dylan was causing enough turmoil in her life without adding lust to the mix.
It had been good with her six years ago, though. Much, much better than good. What if they had another one-night-stand? Another touch-my-cheek-and-walk-away night? Could they do that without messing up Gwen’s relationship with her boyfriend? Could they do it without messing up Dylan’s relationship with Annie?
Was he sitting in this dark, cacophonous theater, watching a cartoon girl soar through the clouds on the back of a kite, because he wanted to be with Annie, or because he wanted to be with Gwen?
Not that Gwen particularly wanted to be with him. She was only tolerating him because he’d convinced her his disappearance from her life when she’d needed him all those years ago wasn’t his fault.
It was his fault, of course. He’d made love with her every way he knew how that night, and then he’d walked away. She’d let him walk away. She’d seemed to feel the same way he had. She’d touched his cheek as much as he’d touched hers.
But she’d borne the consequences. He hadn’t—until now.
The lights came up in the theater, startling him. One final ear-worm song blasted through the air as the credits rolled. Annie sprang from her seat and bellowed, “That was so good! Wasn’t it, Mommy? Wasn’t it so good?”
Gwen exchanged an amused look with Dylan over Annie’s head. Her cool gray eyes seemed to communicate that she didn’t think it was quite as good as Annie did, but that sitting through animated flicks about kites that sang and transported little girls through the sky was a parental duty and needed to be accepted with grace.
Gwen’s knowing glance affected Dylan as much as her casual beauty did. It was a moment shared, a brief mind-meld. For that one instant, they were partners.
Then she looked down at Annie, clasped the kid’s hand, and led her up the aisle, not even checking to see if Dylan was following them. He kept them in his sights as other children spilled into the aisle, bumping into him, squealing and shouting, jostling one another and tripping over the soda cups and candy wrappers littering the floor. The crowd dispersed once they entered the lobby. Dylan almost lost Gwen and Annie when he detoured to toss the empty popcorn tub in a trash can, but he spotted them near the exit and jogged past the food counter and the arcade to join them at the glass doors.
They were deep in conversation. “So you liked Maggie?” Gwen asked Annie. It took Dylan a second to remember that Maggie was the name of the movie’s heroine.
Annie nodded. “She was so cool.”
“What made her cool?” Gwen asked, pushing open the door. When Dylan reached behind her to hold it for them, she acknowledged him with a quick nod. At least she hadn’t totally forgotten about him.
“She was very brave,” Annie said. “She saved the kittens.”
“I found that interesting,” Gwen said, still holding Annie’s hand as they crossed the parking lot to her car. “Maggie struck me as more of a dog person than a cat person.”
“I’m a dog person,” Annie said.
“Believe me, I know.” Gwen laughed, and Dylan wondered what the joke was. “But she taught the kittens to sing.”
“No,” Annie corrected her. “The kite taught them to sing. She was just there.”
“You’re right. It was really the kite more than Maggie.”
“But she was brave. The kite made her brave.”
Gwen unlocked her car. Dylan had offered to drive to the theater, but Gwen had insisted on taking her car, since it had Annie’s booster seat already set up in the back. He watched as she helped Annie onto the booster. Annie fastened the belt herself. Then he and Gwen climbed into the front seat and she started the engine.
Their discussion excluded him, but he appreciated the opportunity to eavesdrop. He couldn’t imagine analyzing a simple children’s movie so thoroughly with a five-year-old. Yet this was what parents did—good parents, anyway. They asked questions. They listened. They respected the opinions of their children. They knew how to do this.
He didn’t. Sure, he talked to his nieces and his nephew, but not the way Gwen talked to Annie. Not with such deep, honest interest. He was an actor. Most of the time, when he talked to his sister’s kids, he had to pretend he really cared about their soccer games and their homework assignments.
What made him think he could do this? What in the whole freaking world made him think he could be a father to Annie?
Her wildly curling hair, so much like his. That was what. Her hair and her big brown eyes, and her intensity. She was his.
He eyed Gwen, her attention on the asphalt ahead of her as she maneuvered the car through the parking lot. He couldn’t hope she would ever open herself to him the way she had that one crazy night so long ago. But if he was lucky, maybe she’d teach him how to be a father.
Chapter Ten
Gwen’s cell phone rang while she was driving home. She clicked the Bluetooth on her steering wheel. “Hello?”
“Gwen? It’s Diana.”
Gwen shot Dylan a quick look, then focused back
on the road. Diana Simms was one of her good friends, even though she’d moved to Brogan’s Point only last spring. She was an antiques buyer, and she’d gotten to know Gwen from selling the Attic items she’d pick up at estate sales that the auction house she worked for in Boston didn’t want—downscale merchandise too new to qualify as antiques. It didn’t take long for Diana and Gwen to develop a friendship. Diana’s fiancé managed an assortment of programs at the community center, including the swimming lessons Annie took in the center’s pool, so Gwen had known and liked him even before Diana had entered her life.
Gwen would have to tell Diana about Dylan’s reappearance in her life. But she wasn’t ready to talk about that yet. She wasn’t even sure what there was to tell.
Unfortunately, the Bluetooth broadcast their phone conversation throughout the car. She couldn’t tell Diana anything right now. “Hey, Diana. I’m on my way home,” she said. “We just saw Sky High.”
“It’s a movie about a singing kite,” Annie hollered from the back seat. “And kittens. And a girl.”
“That’s Annie,” Gwen said unnecessarily. Dylan remained silent next to her. He clearly had no intention of divulging his presence, for which she was grateful.
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