by Robin Wells
CHAPTER THREE
Katie turned and stared as the girl flounced out of the café. My daughter. That’s my daughter. The thought reverberated in her head as the door closed behind Gracie.
The daughter who had been in her prayers every day for the last seventeen years, the daughter she thought about every time she passed a young girl on the street, the daughter she’d mourned and missed like a lost piece of her soul. Katie rose from her chair to go after her, her pulse thudding in her ears.
Zack laid a hand on her wrist. His palm seemed wired with electrodes.
“Let her be,” he said gently. “She needs to cool down.”
“But…” He had no idea how Katie had yearned to see her child, how she’d ached to hold her, how she’d wondered if she’d ever get to meet her. Now that she had, she couldn’t just let her walk away. “I need to go talk to her.” She pulled her hand out from under his.
Zack gently took it again. “Later. Give her a little space.”
A little space? She hadn’t seen Grace since the nurse had taken her from her arms in the delivery room. Seventeen years was more than enough space.
“She’ll be a lot more receptive in a few minutes,” Zack said.
How the hell did he know so much about Grace? Irritation tumbled into the twisted stream of emotion roaring through her veins.
“Sit back down, Kate.” His fingers caressed the back of her hand, sending disturbing prickles up her skin. “We need to talk.”
Katie sank back into the chair, her stomach feeling like she was riding a roller coaster. Oh, they needed to talk, all right. Irritation flared into outrage. She welcomed its heat, welcomed the way it burned some clarity through the fog of shock.
She looked over to see Cindy watching her, her eyes rapt. The men at the counter were watching, too, the bills of their caps pointed toward them, looking for all the world like a gaggle of big-eared geese. Katie twisted around to view the rest of the café. Nellie and the gray-haired ladies were craned forward, primed to catch every word.
Katie turned back to Zack. “Not here,” she said tersely.
“Okay.” He pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his wallet, placed it on the table, then picked up Katie’s umbrella. “In my car, then.”
Katie headed to the door, her back stiff, her legs wobbly, her thoughts flailing about like a kite tail in the wind.
“Good-bye, y’all!” Cindy called gaily. “Have a nice day.”
Katie couldn’t even muster the wherewithal to respond as Zack opened the door. The warm, humid air enshrouded her. He opened the umbrella and held it over her head, then took her arm and led her across the street to a black Volvo parked at the curb. Something about his touch left her feeling raw and unsettled. He opened the car door, holding the umbrella over her as she ducked and slid into the passenger seat. He rounded the car, closed the umbrella, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Water dripped from his hair as he slammed the door. He’d made sure she was dry, but he hadn’t used the umbrella himself.
He should have been so concerned with her protection seventeen years ago. The thought shot through her, hot as a flaming arrow—and then, just as quickly, another thought followed: If he had, the beautiful, vibrant young girl she’d just met wouldn’t be here.
Katie’s stomach got that loop-de-loop roller-coaster feeling again. Questions raced up and down hills and valleys of her mind so fast they blurred together. The words coming out of her mouth were the same weird litany of questions she’d recited when she’d first met Gracie. “Where… how… when…”
Zack drew a deep breath, swiped a raindrop off his forehead, and decided to start with the easiest question. “I met her about two weeks ago. I was participating in a Monte Carlo–themed charity benefit in Dallas, and she just showed up.”
Katie’s eyes were dark in her pale face, like coals in snow. “How did she find you?”
“She googled me and found an article in the Dallas Morning News. The charity was auctioning off the opportunity to play poker with me, so my name was in the prepublicity.” It never ceased to amaze him that people would pony up three thousand dollars for the privilege of playing a hand of poker with him, but he got requests from charities all the time. He’d agreed to do the one in Dallas because an old friend had asked him to.
“What do you mean, ‘She just showed up’?”
“She ran away from her aunt’s, bought a Greyhound bus ticket, and rode twenty-seven hours to Dallas. A woman she met on the bus gave her a ride to the Four Seasons Hotel.”
“And she just walked up and said, ‘Hello, I’m your daughter’?”
“More or less.”
Gracie being Gracie, of course, she’d done it in a far more dramatic fashion. He’d been playing a boring game of Texas Hold’em with three rank amateurs—and holding a straight flush, jack high—when a scuffle had drawn his attention. He’d looked up to see a scruffy young girl straddling the burgundy velvet rope that cordoned off the poker section of the casino-decorated ballroom.
A thick-waisted matron in pink chiffon held the edge of her shirt, trying to restrain her. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I need to talk to Zack Ferguson,” he’d heard the girl say, brushing the old woman’s hand off her clothes. The girl looked straight at him, a determined expression on her heart-shaped face. Something about her looked oddly familiar, but then Zack was used to seeing familiar faces in the crowds around him. Thanks to televised poker, the popularity of his poker-playing CDs, and the fact he used to date movie stars, Zack was accustomed to fans and groupies. They usually weren’t this young, though. The girl looked barely old enough to have cut her twelve-year molars.
“He’s in the middle of a game,” the older woman said, “and he’s our special guest. You can’t bother him.”
Gracie continued to climb over the red velvet rope, a crocheted purse dangling in front of her. The pink-clad woman grabbed her arm.
Gracie wrested away from her grip. “Get your hands off me, you pervert!”
The woman’s mouth formed a shocked “O.” Zack grinned. The evening had just gotten a lot more interesting.
The matron’s face reddened like a boiled lobster’s. “Who are you, and what are you doing here? This is a private event.”
The girl’s chin tilted up to a combative angle. Something about the set of it gave him a strange sense of déjà vu. “Yeah, well, I’m a private citizen.”
“You clearly don’t belong here.”
“How do you know?”
“You’re too young, and you’re not even dressed.”
Gracie looked down at her baggy top and jeans in mock horror. “Don’t tell me I’m wearing my invisible clothes again.”
Zack laughed. The woman’s face grew even redder. “Do you have a ticket?”
“I got one for jaywalking once.”
If the woman were a cartoon character, steam would have blown out her ears. “I’m going to get Security.” She whipped around and stormed off.
The girl wasted no time scrambling over the rope and heading straight to Zack. He set his cards facedown on the table as she approached.
She stopped in front of him, clutching that monstrous bag in front of her stomach. “You’re Zack Ferguson, right?”
“Right.”
A gold stud glinted in her nose as she stuck out her hand. “Well, I’m Gracie Whitstone, and I’m your daughter.”
Katie’s lips, so similar to Gracie’s, pressed into an angry line now as he finished relating the story. “You met her two weeks ago, and you didn’t call me?”
A nerve twitched in Zack’s jaw. “That’s kind of the pot calling the kettle black, don’t you think? Nine months of pregnancy and seventeen intervening years, and you couldn’t let me know you’d had my child?”
Katie’s chin tilted up in exactly the same way Gracie’s had. No wonder Gracie had looked so familiar. “How was I supposed to do that? You disappeared.” The heat in her eyes practically scorched him. She tur
ned and stared out the windshield. “Besides, I did try to contact you.”
“You did?”
She nodded. “When I found out I was pregnant, I went to your cousin. He just blew me off. He said you’d gotten bored in Chartreuse and decided to go back to Chicago—that you didn’t want anything to do with a small-town skank like me. He refused to give me your address or your phone number.” The rain drummed down harder. “I tried to find you on my own. I called every Ferguson in Chicago.”
Self-loathing, bitter as bile, balled in his throat. “We didn’t live in Chicago proper. We lived in Berwyn—a suburb about ten miles out.”
“It would have been nice to know that.” Her brown eyes flashed. “Do you have any idea how much long-distance cost back then?”
Hell. Could he possibly feel any worse? “Kate—I’m sorry. For leaving, and for…”
For losing control. He prided himself on his self-discipline, but he’d completely lost it that night. The hell of it was, he’d known better. All summer long, he’d been fighting his attraction to her, but he liked her too much to do what he should have done, which was just leave her the hell alone.
He’d told himself that taking her for a nighttime sail in his uncle’s boat would be harmless. After all, he sometimes saw her at night—he often drove her home from work—and they’d sailed together a few afternoons when they’d both been off work. They would just be combining two things they’d already done. He was sure he handle it.
Yeah, right. It had been like sitting in a pool of lighter fluid and playing with matches.
It was a gorgeous summer evening, clear and bright. The sky was heavy with stars, like a fruit-laden branch bending toward the earth. Katie wore cutoffs and a blue T-shirt that the wind molded against her body, outlining her breasts in a way that made it hard for him to breathe. The breeze was soft but steady, and they were a couple of miles from shore in no time at all.
She stretched out on the deck and gazed up. “Look at that sky!”
Zack dropped anchor, then stretched out on the deck beside her. The varnished wood was warm against his shirtless back. The boat rocked beneath them. He was careful not to touch her, but his hand was milimeters from hers, and he swore that her body heat jumped the space between them.
“The light from those stars is millions of years old by the time it reaches the earth,” she said. “They might not even still be there.”
“That’s kind of a sad thought.”
“Yeah. Makes you want to seize the day, doesn’t it? Carpe diem and all that.”
The movie Dead Poets Society had come out the preceding year. “Yeah. What part would you want to seize?”
She turned her head and looked at him. Her eyes held everything he was feeling—all the tenderness, all the yearning, all the emotion, all the need. “You,” she whispered. “I’d seize you.”
“Kate…” He meant to say her name in a cautionary way, but it came out as more of a groan.
She raised up on her elbows and leaned over him, her eyes brighter than any of the stars behind her. His last conscious thought was that he shouldn’t kiss her, but when she lowered her lips to his, God help him, he kissed her back—and then he was kissing every inch of her, and doing all the things he’d dreamed about all summer, and she was doing them to him, and they were adrift on a sea of fire.
He realized he’d closed his eyes. He opened them and glanced over at her. “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m totally to blame.”
She glanced away. “No, you’re not.”
“What?”
“Well, you’re to blame for not contacting me afterward, but I don’t blame you for what happened between us.” She knotted her hands in her lap and stared down at them. “I mean, I kissed you.”
“I sure didn’t put up a fight.” The wind blew an oak leaf against the windshield, plastering it to the wet glass. “I’d been dying to kiss you all summer.”
“So why didn’t you?”
He glanced at her, and the air inside the car suddenly seemed charged with enough electricity to generate a lightning strike. He broke eye contact and studied the oak leaf. “Because you’d told me how you believed in love and all that white knight, Prince Charming stuff. I was afraid that if we started something, you’d think I was the love of your life.”
“I already did.”
“Yeah, well, that’s exactly why I didn’t make a move. Until that night, I mean.”
He heard her inhale and blow out a deep breath. A silver SUV sloshed by, slinging water against his car. He saw a “Baby on Board” triangle in the back window. “How long was it before you found out you were pregnant?”
“About a month later. I was two weeks late, so I bought a test. I told my mother, and…” Her throat moved as she swallowed. “She wanted me to end the pregnancy. I couldn’t. But I couldn’t stay here and face things, either. It was already bad enough, just being my mother’s daughter.”
She told him how hard it was—how she’d been ostracized and taunted and lied about at school. How she didn’t have any friends, because no one wanted their child associating with the daughter of the town trollop. How everyone thought she was just like her mother. Being pregnant under those circumstances would have been a nightmare.
“I didn’t want my baby growing up like I did. I wanted her to have a real home. A minister at a local church referred me to a place in Wichita where I could live and take classes, and they said they’d make sure my baby was adopted by good parents.” She stared out the passenger window. “Putting her up for adoption was the hardest thing I ever did, but I thought…” Her voice broke. “I really thought it was for the best.”
A tear dribbled from the corner of her eye. His throat grew tight as she wiped it away. “From everything I’ve heard, Gracie had a great home. She adored her parents.”
“They died last year?”
“Actually, sixteen months ago. In a car accident.”
“Oh, the poor girl.”
“Yeah. Her aunt said it really hit her hard.”
“Well, of course it would!”
“After Gracie moved to Pittsburgh to live with her aunt, she really went off the rails. She started cutting class and sneaking out at night and drinking and just generally acting out.”
Katie turned her eyes to him. “You met the aunt?”
Zack nodded. “She flew out to Dallas. She’d had the police looking everywhere for Gracie.
“What’s she like? The aunt, I mean.”
“She means well, but she’s pretty clueless about how to deal with a teenager.”
“Gracie called her a nazi.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but she does seem to subscribe to the rule-with-an-iron-hand philosophy, which didn’t go over too well with Gracie.” Zack watched the oak leaf slide down the windshield, pushed by a rivulet of water. “When Gracie ended up pregnant, well, the aunt just didn’t know how to deal.”
“Poor kid.”
“Poor aunt.” He gave a rueful smile. “Gracie’s a handful.” He stared back out at the rain. “Gracie had a scheme all worked out. She wanted me to get custody of her, have her declared an emancipated minor, and give her a big wad of cash.”
“She’s too young to be on her own.”
“She’s too young to be a mother. She’s just seventeen.” Which was the same age Katie had been when she’d had Gracie. The realization made him swallow.
“She sounded pretty adamant about not wanting to give up her baby.”
“Yeah. But she’s going to need some help caring for it.” Zack turned to her. “She’s going to need a mother.”
The rain softened. So did Katie’s eyes. “The baby, or Gracie?”
“Both.”
She worried her bottom lip. “She didn’t sound like she wanted anything to do with me.”
“We can change that.”
“We?”
“Yeah. The aunt will give us joint custody of Gracie.”
Katie stared at him. “I can’t believe you
made all these arrangements without even talking to me.”
“It wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have over the phone. And I couldn’t leave Gracie by herself while I came down here to talk to you.” Besides, I had to see you. He squelched the words before they came out of his mouth. When he’d set out on this course of action, he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t say anything or do anything that could be misinterpreted. The last thing he wanted was to hurt her again. “It just seemed more expedient.”
“You must have been awfully sure of my answer if you bought a house before you even got here.”
“I was pretty sure the girl who wrote that letter wouldn’t turn away her own daughter.”
Katie dropped her gaze, but not before her eyes verified that he was right. “So how do you envision this working?”
“I’ll temporarily work out of Chartreuse. My job involves some travel, but I’ll try to schedule things for your convenience. She’ll live half the time with you, the other half with me.”
“How long do you see this arrrangement lasting?”
“Until she has the baby and turns eighteen.”
“And afterward?”
He lifted his shoulders. “We’ll see how things go and what she wants to do. Hopefully you two will have bonded by then, and you can figure out where you want to take things from there.”
“Why are you doing this?”
The question made him freeze. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you never wanted any attachments or strings or commitment. You could have just sent Gracie back home with her aunt.”
I had to give you a chance to get to know your daughter. But Zack couldn’t tell Katie that. If he did, she’d think there was more to him than met the eye. She’d think he was sensitive and caring, and she’d probably end up getting hurt all over again.
“No, I couldn’t. You’ve met Gracie. She’s like a force of nature.”
“But you never wanted children. Or any kind of commitment, for that matter.”