Her Secret, His Child

“Okay, Mommy.” Ashley’s feet swung back and forth, her heels kicking the front of her booster chair.

Smiling, choking back tears, Jamie leaned forward and kissed Ashley’s cheek.

“Love you, Mommy,” Ashley said, pushing her cheek into the kiss without relinquishing her thumb.

“Love you, too, baby.”

Jamie fled.

LEAVING ASHLEY BEHIND in Karen’s kitchen was hard. But not as hard as growing up with a man who’d given her nothing—except bruises. Not as hard as being homeless at seventeen. She could do this.

She was only going next door. Yet as she walked into her house, as she picked up the piece of paper she’d left lying on her counter, the distance that separated her from her innocent little girl seemed suddenly insurmountable.

What did he want?

What could he possibly want?

He was new in town. Lonely. And somehow he knew that Jamie lived in Larkspur Grove.

He could go to hell.

She was already there.

By the time she got to the tiny bedroom she used as an office, Jamie was almost completely transformed. Encased in a hard shell of numbness her daughter wouldn’t recognize, she wondered how far the word had spread. How many more of them knew where she lived?

The phone seemed to jump out at her, threatening to pull her away, back to the life she’d left behind five years ago.

Even now, even here, Ashley was all that mattered. Her daughter was everything Jamie was not. Sweet. Unsoiled. Innocent. She was the part of Jamie that had never been given a chance to live. Not since the devil himself had moved in with Jamie and her mother, just after Jamie’s fourth birthday.

Jamie would do what she had to do, anything she had to do, to protect Ashley’s right to a childhood. Her right to grow up decently.

And if that meant facing down the demons from her past—one or all of them—she’d do it. There was simply no alternative.

PHONE IN HAND, she punched in the number. His number. Only the shaking of her finger testified to the trauma playing itself out inside her. At seventeen, she’d survived her stepfather’s debilitating advances. She’d survive this, too.

She pushed the last button. Lifted the mobile phone to her ear. Heard it ring...

The phone dropped to the floor, the ringing muffled by the plush gray carpet as Jamie flew to the bathroom and vomited. She hung over the toilet for another few minutes, just in case.

She could do this. She could do this.

It was just going to take a minute.

Wringing a washcloth under cold water from the basin faucet, Jamie fought the monsters she’d been fighting for as long as she could remember. Why had she ever thought she could outrun her past? She should have realized it would eventually catch up with her—destroy the present she’d so painstakingly created.

She buried her face in the cloth, welcoming its coolness against her hot skin. How had she ever been stupid enough to believe she could get away with these deceptions? That they wouldn’t always be part of her?

And then she met her eyes in the mirror. Big gray eyes, just like Ashley’s. Except that Jamie’s had seen too much. Way too much. More than any woman ever should. The eyes that stared back at her weren’t innocent like her daughter’s. They were knowing. They knew just the right look to promise a man anything.

They made her sick. So did the woman they belonged to. She’d made her choices. And had to be accountable for them.

Turning away from the mirror before she threw up again, Jamie wadded the cloth in her fist. The thought of Ashley being tarnished by her sins was killing her as surely as her stepfather would have done if he’d managed to catch up with her all those years ago.

He was dead now. But the effects of his having lived would never die.

The anniversary clock in the living room chimed the hour. She’d been gone from Karen’s for more than twenty minutes. Ashley was going to start wondering where she was.

Concentrating on the child, Jamie found the strength to enter her office a second time. To pick up the phone. To dial again. She’d been facing her problems head-on her entire life, even when it meant putting her own body between her stepfather’s fist and her mother’s weaker frame. Her strength was the only reason she’d survived this far.

She had one focus, one goal: doing what was best for Ashley. Life on the run, hiding, wasn’t it. Reaching for a recent photo of her daughter laughing at her from Santa’s lap, Jamie kept her eyes glued to the image as Kyle Radcliff answered his phone.

“Yes, Ms. Archer, thanks for getting back to me so promptly....”

His voice was just as she remembered it. When she remembered it. It was so warm, almost as if he were in the room with her. She could see him sitting there on the end of the hotel bed, hunched over, his head in his hands as he told her about his mother’s death. “...so I’d like to hire your services.”

He wanted to hire her services. She hadn’t gotten to that part of the memory yet. The part where he’d turned out to be just like all the rest. Her voice stuck in her throat.

He wanted to hire her services.

She wanted to die. Right then. Right there. What was the point of fighting anymore? She was who she was. Who she’d always been. Who she’d always be. The floor started to spin and she almost gave in, almost let that feeling of vertigo swallow her up. Almost.

And then her vision cleared again. And she could see the image she held of her laughing little girl. The trusting eyes. She couldn’t let Ashley be a part of this. Panicking, she tried to think of something to say. Did he know she’d had a child?

She concentrated on the red velvet dress she and Ashley had picked out together for the muchanticipated visit with Santa.

“Ms. Archer? Are you there?” He’d called her “Jamie” before.

“Yes. I’m here.” She didn’t know what else to say. How to keep him away from Ashley. How to keep the woman she’d been away from her child.

“So do you think you’ll be able to squeeze me in?,

Would he go away if she did?

“What exactly did you have in mind?” She hated the words, hated herself for saying them. But she was afraid that if she turned him down, he’d figure she was playing with him, would take it as a challenge, a come-on. That he wouldn’t go away. After all, men like him weren’t used to hearing “no” from women like her. Probably because women like her never said that particular word to men like him.

“You’re the professional, you tell me.” His voice was pleasant, calm, detached.

“You’re the one paying the bill.” The words practically choked her. But she had to gain some time, figure out what to do, how to get rid of him without making him suspicious—or even curious. Her daughter’s entire future depended on making this man nonexistent immediately. Forever.

She not only didn’t want him to call her again, she didn’t want him to think of her again.

“But I’ve never hired an accountant before—”

What?

“An accountant?”

“I’m sorry, I assumed you were an accountant,” he said.