Chapter Two

      The moment she said the words, Anderson realized his mistake. He really needed to monitor his thoughts before he allowed them to escape his lips, Anderson upbraided himself. He could see that he’d inadvertently hurt the woman. He glanced down at the baby in the car seat. The baby’s father wasn’t in the picture for some reason and Ms. Laramie had obviously taken his words to heart as some sort of a rebuke when nothing could have been further from the truth.

      Anderson felt a shaft of guilt pierce his ordinarily tough hide. He didn’t want Jake’s teacher to think that he was criticizing her. That hadn’t been his intent when he’d stormed into her classroom. He’d only been trying to defend his son.

      “I’m sorry, Ms. Laramie,” Anderson said contritely. “I meant no disrespect.”

      Marina flushed. Of course he hadn’t. Why was she being so sensitive and overreacting this way? It was her job to think like a professional, not to turn everything around and focus exclusively on herself. Hormonal teenager girls did that, not state-licensed teachers.

      She had to remember that, Marina silently lectured herself.

      “None taken, Mr. Dalton,” she replied stoically.

      * * *

      “Anderson,” he prompted, correcting the petite redhead.

      Since they’d just been talking about the ideal parenting situation, the unexpected insertion of his given name threw her. Marina looked at him, puzzled. “Excuse me?”

      “Not Mr. Dalton,” Anderson told her. Mr. Dalton was his father, Ben Dalton, a respected lawyer. He was just plain Anderson, a rancher. “Call me Anderson.”

      She’d just met him today and she wasn’t accustomed to being so friendly with her students’ parents if she didn’t really know them outside the classroom.

      “I don’t think that’s appro—”

      “If we’re going to help Jake,” Anderson said, interrupting her, “I think we should be a team, not two polite strangers who sound as if they can’t wait to get away from one another.”

      Marina frowned slightly. Was that the message she was getting across to Jake’s father by addressing him formally? she wondered. That had definitely not been her intention.

      “All right,” she allowed, willing to do it his way. She resumed the point she’d been trying to make earlier. “Regarding what you said previously, Anderson, in a perfect world, every child would be raised by two loving parents.”

      Without meaning to, she glanced down at her daughter and felt a pang. Sydney was the perfect infant and she deserved to be loved by a mother and a father.

      I’m so sorry it didn’t work out, little one. But it’s not all bad. I grew up without a dad, too—mostly—and things worked out for me.

      “But the world, as we both know,” Marina continued telling Jake’s father, “is far from perfect. Very far.”

      He certainly couldn’t argue with that, Anderson thought.

      “True,” he agreed. “I’m very aware that not every relationship can work out.” Painfully aware, he thought. “But that isn’t an excuse not to be there for your kid. They weren’t asked to be born, but they were. The way I see it, the people who caused that birth to happen owe that kid something.” He was referring to himself, although he didn’t say it out loud.

      Marina found herself in complete agreement with Jake’s father. She also found herself wondering what had happened in Anderson Dalton’s relationship that was so traumatic that his girlfriend wouldn’t even notify him for ten whole years that they had had a child together.

      It was on the tip of Marina’s tongue to ask, but she knew that it wasn’t any of her business and it had no bearing on her teacher/student relationship with Jake.

      Besides, even if she was brash enough to ask Anderson about it, it might just put the man’s back up. She had to remember that the point of talking to Jake’s father in the first place was to get him to build a stronger relationship with his son, not satisfy her innate curiosity.

      Her whole supposition about the relationship—or lack thereof—between Anderson and Jake’s mother was truthfully based on her thinking that the former was a nice guy. At least, he seemed that way to her, but then she wasn’t exactly the reigning authority when it came to reading men. When she came right down to it, Marina silently admitted, she didn’t just have a poor track record with men, she had an absolutely horrible one.

      Gary Milton was a case in point.

      She’d been utterly, completely and madly in love with the man who was Sydney’s father, convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was The One despite the fact that they hadn’t been dating all that long. At twenty-seven, with all of her friends getting married and starting families, she was more than ready to take the plunge to happily-ever-after and she was certain that Gary was, too.

      Her own parents had long since been divorced, with her father hardly ever turning up in her life, but she was convinced it would be different for her and Gary.

      Vulnerable, eager, she’d felt that all the stars were perfectly aligned for something wonderful to happen that July Fourth night when she and Gary had attended Braden and Jennifer’s big bash of a wedding. Indeed, romance was in the air and, unbeknownst to her and most of the guests, a spiked glass of punch—thanks to party prankster Homer Gilmore—was in her hand.

      What came afterward seemed completely natural at the time—almost like destiny. She and Gary came together in every sense of the word that night.

      She’d expected, thanks to the night they’d spent together, to hear a proposal from Gary. But she didn’t. Holding her breath, she watched the weeks go by, but Gary was no closer to popping the question than he had been before their friends’ wedding celebration. And then she’d discovered that she was pregnant, and a small part of her had thought that now, finally, Gary would step up. But she was sadly mistaken.

      Gary not only didn’t step up, he stumbled backward and completely freaked out.

      Stunned by his initial reaction, Marina had been struck utterly speechless when Gary had actually accused her of engineering her pregnancy so that she could trap him into marrying her.

      Angry, Gary had loudly proclaimed that he was way too young to be “saddled” with a wife and kid. He’d broken off their relationship then and there.

      An entire spectrum of feelings had gone careening through her at Gary’s declaration of independence, but she’d gone positively numb when he had gone on to tactlessly suggest that she “take care of the problem.”

      The problem.

      As if the tiny being growing inside her was anything other than a miracle, she’d thought.

      That was when it had hit her with the force of a two-ton truck. She’d been wasting her time and her heart on a self-centered lowlife, foolishly thinking that this poor excuse for a human being was her Prince Charming. He didn’t even qualify to be a frog prince. She’d countered his suggestion by telling