Her Secret, His Child

So maybe her biggest mistake had been believing in fairy tales. Not running as fast and as far as she could when Prince Charming bowled her over in the lobby of his office building. Prince Charming, alias successful business entrepreneur Tom Webber. She’d been standing there looking at a watercolor she didn’t understand, waiting to be interviewed for a job she knew she’d never get, and he’d knocked her right on her butt as he’d come barreling through the revolving door on his way up to the penthouse office.

He’d not only picked her up but insisted on buying her lunch. A meal she’d have turned down flat if she hadn’t been so hungry. As it was, she’d needed the meal even more when she met him at the restaurant an hour later, as he’d instructed. She’d had her interview—and lost the job—in the interim. And over the first real meal she’d had in days, she’d told him the whole sorry tale. She hadn’t been able to resist. He’d been kind, sympathetic, showing her more compassion during that long lunch than she’d known her entire life.

Maybe she should have said no when he’d offered to help her, no strings attached. But he’d said almost plaintively that he had more money than he knew what to do with. He’d offered to set her up in a small unit in one of his many apartment buildings, support her while she finished high school, send her to college. He’d begged her not to say no—and she hadn’t. Should she have denied him the opportunity to be the Good Samaritan he wanted to be? Denied herself the miraculous help that had finally fallen her way?

After growing up under John’s damaging influence, she’d soaked up Tom’s kindness. And he had been kind, if not as altruistic as he’d seemed. He’d been true to his word, too. For a while. Long enough for her to grow fond of him, feel indebted to him. He’d helped her—no strings attached, just as he’d said—right up until she turned eighteen.

He’d been there at her high-school graduation. And had come immediately the day he’d received the news that John was dead. He’d apparently hired a detective agency to keep track of John and had told her as soon as he’d heard. John Archer had been killed by an unidentified hit-and-run driver.

John was dead. If there was anything in her life, besides Ashley, for which Jamie was thankful, it was the death of her stepfather. Which was probably just another immoral decision she’d made. To be happy that a man had lost his life.

Jamie stood and took her exhausted body to bed, her mind finally quieting with fatigue. She had no more answers now than she’d ever had, and she was beginning to suspect that she’d never have them—that, in fact, her questions were unanswerable. Maybe it didn’t matter how she’d become the woman she used to be, the woman she’d renounced.

Maybe there’d been choices and maybe there hadn’t.

But she’d been wrong to think she could escape that woman.

“ASHLEY ASKED ME yesterday if her daddy died fighting for our country.”

Jamie’s stomach, already queasy, protested as she glanced across at Karen. The two were sharing a cup of coffee during Jamie’s morning break before Karen left to get the girls from school.

She said the first thing that jumped into her mind. “Why didn’t she come to me?”

Karen shrugged, paying unnecessary attention to the sugar she was stirring into her coffee. “I asked her the same thing.”

“And?”

“She said you might get sadder at her.”

“Sadder at her?”

Karen shrugged again. And continued to stir.

“She thinks she makes me sad?”

Karen glanced up, her blue eyes warm with compassion. “Kids are pretty perceptive.”

“But Ashley hasn’t made me sad a single day of her life!”

“Apparently, she doesn’t think so.”

“She hardly even makes me mad.”

“You do have amazing patience with her.”

Jamie pushed her coffee away, sick at the thought that Ashley might be growing up the way she had, shouldering the blame for everything that happened, or might happen, in the lives around her.

“Obviously I need to be more careful, as well.” Jamie flipped the spoon she’d used to stir her abandoned coffee. “She must read my moods like a book.”

“She’s one smart little girl. Imagine, a four-year-old figuring that her father was a war hero.”

And suddenly they were back to where the conversation had begun, Ashley inventing excuses for the absence of her father. And Karen wondering how true they were.

Funny how life had a way of regurgitating on you all at once. First yesterday’s phone call. And now this.

“I thought I’d have a few more years before she started asking questions.”

“Wished was more like it, huh?” Karen asked with understanding, in spite of the fact that Kayla’s father was very much a part of their lives. A software consultant, he traveled frequently, but when he was home, he belonged one-hundred percent to Karen and Kayla.

“Ashley’s father isn’t dead.”

The bald words fell into Karen’s sunny kitchen to lie, completely exposed, on the table between them. Karen had never asked about Jamie’s past. Jamie had never offered a word. This particular silence was an understood part of their friendship. A pact Jamie had needed in order for the friendship to exist-a pact she’d just broken.

And she had no idea why. She couldn’t tell Karen about that time in her life. Not if she wanted to hang on to the life she’d made for herself since.

“He didn’t want her?” Karen stirred furiously, staring at the coffee sloshing over her cup.

“He doesn’t know about her.”

“Oh.”

“We were only...together...once.”

Karen laid her spoon in her saucer and looked up at Jamie, her eyes still glowing with tenderness. Not with the condemnation Jamie knew she deserved.

“The baby that resulted simply wasn’t an issue. Wasn’t part of that night.”

“How can you say that if he didn’t have the opportunity to make her a part of that night?” Karen asked softly.

Jamie remembered, very clearly, the wad of bills on the nightstand.

“Let’s just say it was an unspoken rule. Any consequences were mine alone.”

“The bastard!”

“I went with him willingly.”

“And I know you well enough to be absolutely sure that he’d touched your heart. You cared for him and thought he cared back. You never would’ve done it otherwise.”

Ironically, concerning that one time, Karen was right. But Karen’s loving support was like bitter ashes in Jamie’s mouth. Because there’d been other nights, lots of them, when Karen would have been dead wrong.

PUSHING his wire-rimmed glasses onto the bridge of his nose, Kyle Radcliff took the cement steps two at a time. The Archer woman was meeting him in his office in five minutes. And he wasn’t there yet. The semester was just starting, and already his resolution to stay on top of things had vanished. The one thing he could never seem to get right was time management. He bought planners—every kind known to man—he made schedules, he wrote lists. And he still ended up chasing his tail.

But could he help it that a couple of his students got into a debate about Twain’s obvious disdain for the pseudoaristocratic antebellum South, as demonstrated in the thoroughly adult classic, Huckleberry . Finn? The relationship between biography and literature, between a writer’s life and time and his or her work, had always fascinated him. Kyle could no more have walked out on that discussion than burned his original copy of the novel. Some things just took priority.

But he needed Jamie Archer’s help. With the move to Larkspur and now into his new home, some numbers needed to be crunched. Fast. He certainly didn’t have time for a battle with the IRS any time in the near future.

Practically skidding around the corner on the second floor of the English building, Kyle slowed when he noticed the empty hallway outside his locked office door. He’d beaten her there.