by Skye Jordan
“Why?” she repeated. Panic trickled in. “You don’t even need to know if you’re the father to—”
“That’s the point,” he said with so much vehemence, she leaned away. “You’re expecting me to sign papers giving her away when I don’t even know if she’s mine to give away. And I hate talking about her like she’s a piece of property.”
“All that matters is that your name is on the birth certificate. That makes her your responsibility even if she’s not yours biologically. Just sign the release papers, and you won’t have to think about this again. Like I said, no responsibilities, no ties, no tricks.”
He took one step toward her. A deliberate step with fire in his eyes. Tessa was used to working in a field around powerful men who liked to get their way, so the approach didn’t shake her. It was the hours of tossing and turning she could see in the lines around his mouth, the stress of fatigue in his eyes that scared the hell out of her.
“I know you think the worst of me,” he said, “and I know you think I’m lying, but I don’t give a shit. I didn’t know about her, I didn’t pay Corinne to get lost, and I’m not signing anything until I know whether or not she’s mine.”
Tessa gripped his forearms. “Stop, Zach. Stop and think about what you’re saying. Step outside yourself and think about Sophia. She’s a baby. Three years old. She’s not even fully potty trained. You travel all over the world, spend long days on-site. Her nanny and I are her bedrock. She was born and raised in DC. You can’t just—”
“Don’t.” He pulled back and put a hand up. “When I know whether or not she’s mine, we can—” He stopped abruptly. His eyes darted behind her and lowered to hip level.
Even before Sophia spoke, Tessa knew her daughter had come to the door. “Mommy, I’m done.”
Tessa closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. She was a perfect Gerber baby, and people instantly fell in love with her everywhere they went. Tessa didn’t need that happening with Zach. But there was no way to make Zach unsee the adorable cherub, so she turned and held her hand out to Sophia.
“Are you all squeaky clean?”
“Uh-huh.” Her gaze was glued to Zach. “Who are you?”
Tessa cut a look at Zach and found him staring at Sophia, part shock, part terror. “Sophia, this is a friend of mine. His name is Zach.”
Zach didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Didn’t take his eyes off Sophia.
Sophia held her book up to Zach. “Mommy’s gonna read Little Bear to me.”
When Zach still didn’t respond, Tessa asked, “Zach? Are you—”
“I—I—have to go.” He tore his gaze away from Sophia but kept them downcast, avoiding Tessa’s eyes as he curled a death grip around the stairs’ iron railing and swayed a little, as if his knees were about to buckle. “I—can’t— Have to— I’ll call you.”
And he turned for the stairs. But he didn’t take them one at a time, he jumped them in twos and threes and was gone before Tessa even understood what happened.
She called down the stairs. “Zach?”
No answer.
“Where’d he go?” Sophia asked, peering down the stairs.
“I don’t know, honey.” But whatever had just happened might be in Tessa and Sophia’s best interest, even if it didn’t feel that way right now. She turned Sophia back toward the condo. “Time to read Little Bear.”
Zach’s life just got real.
Extremely real.
Terrifyingly real.
Wondering and witnessing were two very different phenomena. And now that he’d seen Sophia, there was no going back. The shock lingered, giving rise to an even more troubling emotion: panic. Panic that ate at his nerve endings. He’d learned early on that fear was okay, but panic…panic killed.
He’d thought sitting out here on the beach alone at night would have brought some semblance of calm or acceptance or wisdom, but the waves kept hitting the shore, and Zach kept coming up empty.
He pulled his knees up, hooked his elbows around them, and let the bottle of Jim Beam dangle from his fingertips. He had no goddamned idea what he was going to do about this. Tessa was right—he didn’t have a lifestyle fit to raise a child. Which intensified the importance of this role on Hawaiian Heat. Now it wasn’t just a boost for his career but a necessity in his life. And he’d gone and fucking fired the agent who might have been his ticket onto the show.
When he tried to think beyond the role, he kept hitting walls. What to do about Tessa? What to do about Sophia? For the first time, Zach realized he didn’t know how to live a life based around other people’s needs. And he sure as shit didn’t know the first thing about raising a child. But she was his child. Zach’s own parents had turned away from him when he couldn’t, wouldn’t, meet their expectations. And he knew how badly that had hurt him. How deeply it had affected him. He sure as hell wasn’t going to walk away from his own kid and leave her with the same wounds.
God, he was so fucked.
Movement nearby dragged his attention right.
“Hey.” Tessa’s soft voice touched his ear over the waves. She was still wearing the sexy cut-offs and white tank. Her gaze jumped to the bottle of Jim Beam. “Are you okay?”
“How’d you find me?”
“You weren’t in your room, so I took a chance you’d be where you love to be most.”
He didn’t respond.
“I wanted to tell you that I’ve already had Sophia’s DNA processed. I have the results back at the condo. It should reduce the wait time—”
“I don’t need it.”
She fell silent for a second. “What do you mean you don’t need it?”
“I know she’s mi—” His throat closed. He had to force the last word out. “Mine.”
Tessa dropped to her knees. The moonlight lit her shocked face in cool blue-white hues. “How?”
“Her eyes.”
“Her— Oh.”
Zach nodded.
“Then you know it’s not a defect or anything.”
He nodded again. “I know. What color are they? Blue and brown?”
Tessa exhaled and went silent. Zach followed her lead. This was so overwhelming, so life altering, he didn’t know where to start or what to do.
“Blue and hazel,” she said softly. Her posture eased, shoulders slumped. “I don’t even see it anymore. She doesn’t get teased about it yet. Right now we just get the ‘Why are her eyes different colors?’ question. Blue and hazel isn’t as bad as blue and brown. And if you look closely, the colors in her left eye are sort of split up like shards, so her whole iris isn’t hazel, it’s a mix of blue and hazel. It’s blue enough that in some lighting, you can’t even tell they’re different. I figure if it bothers her as she gets older, she can wear—”
“Colored contacts,” he finished.
“How’d you know?”
“Heterochromia runs in my family. My sister has it. She wears blue contacts.” He huffed a laugh and shook his head. “But even aside from that, Sophia looks a lot like my sister as a baby.”
They fell silent. The surf filled the quiet. A soft breeze caressed his skin.
“You’re killing me, Zach,” she finally said. “What’s going on?”
He dropped the whiskey bottle to the sand and brought his hands to his face, rubbing at the fatigue. “I’m trying to get my mind around this.” He stared out at the ocean. “In the last couple of days”—he lifted one hand and ticked off fingers with the other—“I’ve discovered I got someone pregnant, that she tried to reach out to me, that my fucker of an agent paid her off, and that he didn’t tell me about it because he thought she was lying. I’ve discovered she suffered through cancer, that she died, and that I’ve missed out on the first three years of my daughter’s life.” He dropped his hands and met her gaze. “And just half an hour ago, I looked into her eyes for the first time. You’re not the only one dying here.”
Pain and fear etched her pretty face. Her gaze dropped to the sand. “I’m
sorry.”
“And that’s another thing,” he told her, frustrated. “You.”
Her head came up. “What about me?”
“I know you love her, and I know you want her. Hell, you’ve earned her. She calls you Mommy, for God’s sake. You’ve been with her, with them, through this whole ordeal, while they never crossed my mind, because I didn’t know. But I know now, and I can’t just unlearn that I have a daughter. That changes my whole world.” He rubbed his face again, using a lighter tone when he said, “And stop saying you’re sorry. None of this is your fault.”
“It’s starting to sound like none of it was your fault either.”
The pain in her voice cut at Zach, but he couldn’t address it. Couldn’t talk about it. He was already overwhelmed. He kept hearing Josh’s “One problem at a time” in his head. And “Do what you have to do to keep your kid, dude. If you don’t, you’ll spend your whole life regretting it.”
Only, everywhere he looked, he saw problems. Especially when he looked at Tessa. Before all this, he’d wanted more sex, sure. Now, he still wanted sex—and maybe even more. Because everything she’d done for Sophia and Sophia’s mother proved without a doubt she had the kind of character he admired, and the kind of heart he could love. Even now, while they were at odds, it felt good to have her there. Her presence settled him. Gave him something to hang on to, like a buoy in a hurricane.
He’d never had that before. Never realized how important it was. He kept thinking about Josh and how he’d described Grace as a grounding force. He replayed the moment when Sophia had appeared in the doorway. To the jolt of his heart and the rip of terror when he’d first seen her. Then she’d spoken, and his heart clenched. And when she sidled up next to Tessa with complete and utter love and trust, everything inside Zach tumbled and tangled.
He dropped to his back on the sand, still holding the day’s heat, and looked up at the stars.
Tessa sat back and rolled her knees to the side. “What happened with your agent?”
“I fired the fucker,” he bit out before he caught his anger and toned it down. “Can’t believe he did that. I just can’t. And I filed a fraud complaint with the attorney general’s office in California. I also hired someone to audit every single contract he’s ever written for me and compare it to the documents from the companies I worked for. Judging by how he handled Corinne, I can just about guarantee they’ll find all kinds of backdoor deals I didn’t know about. He’s going to prison if I have anything to say about it.”
He would also have beat the shit out of the guy last night if Josh hadn’t been there to intervene.
Tessa didn’t speak. She doodled patterns in the sand with one finger.
“What’s she like?” he asked, just one of the million questions swimming in his head and heart but was afraid to ask.
“Sophia?” Tessa’s mouth tipped in a soft smile. “Smart. She’s really smart. Too smart, sometimes. And loving. She’s like this unfathomable bottomless pit of love. She’s also got a solid stubborn streak. She can be a real handful sometimes.”
Zach smiled.
Tessa went quiet again, her expression troubled.
Guilt pulled in Zach’s gut. “How did you meet Corinne?”
“We grew up together in the Pittsburgh area. We were best friends as kids. Both raised by our grandmothers. She didn’t have as much emotional support as I did, so when it came time for college, I got student loans, and she turned blue collar, but we kept in touch, like sisters would. I took the conservative road—I know, I’m sure you’re shocked, right?”
He grinned.
“She was always the wild one. The extrovert, a real people person. I ended up in DC for law school, and she was already living there. She got me a job waiting tables where she worked because I was paying my own way through school. We moved in together. While she was out partying, I was working crazy-long days. So when she came home after that trip to LA and told me about the hot surfer she’d spent a night with, it didn’t surprise me. To be honest, I was envious of her freedom and her confidence. There were so many times when I wished I had her…fearlessness…toward life.”
That reminded Zach of something Tessa had said earlier. “What did you mean when you said Corinne gave up her life for Sophia?”
Tessa drew her knees into her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and rested her chin on her knee. The breeze played with loose strands of her dark hair.
“She found out she was pregnant with Sophia early, at about five or six weeks. She thought her morning sickness was the flu. After two weeks, I made her go to the doctor, which is when she found out she was pregnant. But when they did the ultrasound to check on the pregnancy, they also found ovarian cancer.”
Even though he knew the news was coming, it still sucker punched him.
“I didn’t know about this until later, and even though she’s been gone almost four months, I still haven’t forgiven her for waiting so long to tell me. Initially, the doctors evaluated the cancer at stage one. And while no cancer is good, they felt they’d found it early enough to treat successfully. But to do that, they needed to go at it aggressively, which meant immediate surgery and heavy-duty chemo. They said the surgery wouldn’t harm the baby, but that there was an extremely high probability that the chemo would either kill the baby or produce severe birth defects.”
She swiveled and lay down on the sand beside him. With her gaze on the sky, she said, “Corinne had the surgery. She told me it was for a cyst. But she wouldn’t agree to undergo chemo until after the baby was fully developed, when the chemo wouldn’t harm her. But by the time Corinne reached the third trimester and started the chemo, the cancer had spread and was at stage three. That’s when I found out.” She huffed and shook her head. “Every time I think about it, I get so angry.”
“Why didn’t she tell you?”
“She said she didn’t want me to worry. Said she wanted me to live my own life and knew I’d let go of all my plans to support her in treatment. I think some of that might be true, but I think it had more to do with denial. Denial and fear I’d disagree with her plans.” She shook her head. “She should have told me. By the time I found out, all I could do was react. From that day on, all I’ve done is put out one fire after another. It wasn’t fair. She had all kinds of warning. I had none. But the trust, that’s what I’m still angry about. She should have trusted me.”
She paused, and Zach saw the pain of all she’d suffered in her drawn expression. He wanted to reach out to her. Wanted to comfort her.
“She told me later that she’d planned to contact you after she’d cleared the first trimester,” Tessa went on. “She knew it would mess with your life, and she didn’t want to do that unless she had to. But you turned out to be harder to find than she thought, and by the time she located your agent, she’d been undergoing chemo. Life as she knew it stopped. She had to stop working. She spent her days either barfing or sleeping. She contacted your agent, but he never returned her calls. After she’d had Sophia, Corinne went through another round of even more intense treatment, hoping to control the spread, but it wasn’t looking good. When she went to see your agent in person, he told her you didn’t want anything to do with a kid and offered her cash to go away. So she took it because she didn’t want her daughter growing up with a father who didn’t want her, and I swore to her that Sophia would never know what that felt like. Through various treatments, experimental and conventional, she lasted another two years, but it was two years of hell.”
Zach turned his gaze back to the sky, his gut aching. “I’m going to hell.”
To his surprise, Tessa laughed.
“I am,” he confirmed. “Nothing I do now could make up for all that.”
In a quieter voice, she said, “You didn’t cause her cancer.”
“But if I’d known, I could have supported her through it.”
“I was there.”
He turned his head to look at her again. Her profile was soft in the moonli
ght. “You’re pretty amazing.”
“I didn’t do anything she wouldn’t have done for me—except I would have told her about it. I wouldn’t have blindsided her.” She shook her head. “She was the sister I never had and my best friend all rolled into one. I miss her every day.”
And he now posed a threat to the only thing she had left—Sophia.
He rolled up on his side, rested on his elbow, and propped his head on his hand. With the other hand, he reached out and covered hers where it lay on her belly. He threaded their fingers, encouraged when she didn’t pull away. “Tell me about your job.”
She cut a look at him. “Abrupt subject change.”
“More of a segue.”
“I’m not mobile, if that’s what you’re asking. I need to be in DC, on the Hill, close to the headquarters for the special interest groups and lobbyists.”
He sighed. “Right.”
“And I don’t have a lot of time left here. I have a huge health care bill hitting Congress soon. I have to be back to tie up loose ends before it goes in, and on call to put out fires during the process.” She paused. “I can provide a really beautiful, stable, happy life for Sophia.”
“Without her father,” he said, wondering if that was such a bad thing.
“Tell me about your job,” she said.
“It’s about to change,” he said, even though he hadn’t gotten the part yet. “I’m talking to the studio to take over Ian’s role next season. It’s a huge shift in my career. Professional surfing is hard on a body. As soon as I start dropping in the competition circuit, my endorsements vanish, and I’m back to eating peanut butter and jelly three times a day.”
She laughed. “Sounds familiar.”
He released her hand and cupped her cheek, then slid his thumb across her cheekbone. Her skin was so soft. Her lips so kissable. Maybe it wouldn’t be as hard as he’d thought to stay close to her. Hardly a chore. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”