The Heiress. Cathy Gillen Thacker
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if you want. I told them you were the father and you might be coming by.”
Still struggling to absorb the fact that he was going to be a father—that he was going to have a baby with Daisy—never mind figure out what this was going to mean to him, his life and everyone around them, Jack handed back the receipt. “That’s not necessary,” he said stiffly, guilt—and his own sense of failed responsibility—along with the news of his impending fatherhood, combining to hit him with the force of a sledgehammer. He forced the words through numb lips. “I believe you.” Just as he now believed they were in one hell of a mess, that was likely only going to get worse as time went on.
Daisy tilted her head as she studied him with narrowed eyes. After a moment, she noted softly, “You haven’t asked if the baby is yours.”
No. He hadn’t. And why hadn’t he? Jack couldn’t say why he was so sure. He only knew his gut was saying it was his kid. And his street smarts about people, whether they were good, bad or somewhere in between, were never wrong. Daisy might act out wildly, but she would never lie to him about something like this, especially given the way she had grown up, not knowing to whom she had been born. “I’m sure because I know you,” he stated firmly, more sure of that with every second that passed.
For reasons Jack couldn’t understand, his faith in Daisy’s honor upset rather than reassured her. “And how do you know?” she retorted, the deeply cynical look returning to her face. “Oh!” She snapped her fingers as if something just hit her with amazing insight. “I forgot. You and my biological father have been tracing my movements ever since I decided to try and find my real parents a few months ago.” She trod closer, bristling with a mixture of indignation and contempt. “That’s kind of ironic, too, don’t you think? That I hired the same private investigator my biological father hired to keep me from finding out what the Templeton and Deveraux families would’ve preferred I not ever know?”
Yeah, it had been a sticky situation, all right. Hardest on the top-notch P.I. who had unexpectedly found himself at the center of the quandary, being asked to represent both sides. But that was neither here nor there now, Jack thought. He shrugged. “It’s not surprising you both hired Harlan. He’s the best private investigator in the city.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t refuse to help me, given the fact that Tom had signed him first,” Daisy said sulkily.
“Harlan did go to Tom. Told Tom that you wanted to hire him and why and wanted to know what Tom wanted him to do. Harlan said he could refer you elsewhere or help you himself, but he wouldn’t lie to you or take your money or try and stonewall you—do anything else unethical or underhanded.”
“Good for Harlan. If it weren’t for him finding out I had been born in a little convent in the Swiss Alps, instead of Norway as I had always been told, I still wouldn’t know the truth.”
Jack nodded, glad they agreed on this much. “Harlan Decker’s a good guy, all right. Although for the record—” Jack gave Daisy a stern look, letting her know she wasn’t completely off the hook for her actions, either “—Harlan thought I should’ve turned you in for stealing.”
Daisy shrugged. “What can you expect from a former cop?” she volleyed back. Silence fell between them, less tense this time.
Jack studied Daisy knowing he already had his own thoughts on the matter, but wondering where she wanted to go from here. “So what now?” he asked her casually.
Daisy bit her lower lip and regarded Jack uncertainly as her printer finally sputtered to a halt. “You’re really going to take me at my word on this pregnancy?” Clearly, Jack thought, she wasn’t used to being trusted.
Jack watched as Daisy went over, picked up the stack of finished photos from the tray and began thumbing through them. “I don’t have any reason not to believe you.”
Daisy went back to her computer and typed in another series of commands. “Nevertheless,” she said as calmly as if they were discussing the terms of a new photo shoot instead of the permanent interlinking of their lives, “I’d feel better if we went over to the clinic and let you see the results, and maybe have you take a paternity test or whatever it is they do these days to establish paternity.”
Jack pulled up a chair next to her and sat down. “I’d feel better if we just got married and got it over with,” he stated, wondering how long Daisy was going to be able to keep her cool, act as if this hardly mattered, when in reality it was the most earth-shattering revelation of both their lives.
Daisy continued typing in commands until her printer started going again. She turned to him, as yet another series of tourist pictures began spitting out into the tray, the only indication of her heightening emotions the tensing of her jaw. “And why would we want to do that?” she asked steadily.
That, Jack thought, was easy. Letting her know with a look that she and their baby would be able to count on him the way she had apparently never been able to count on anyone else in her life, he said, “So the baby you’re carrying will be born legitimate, and have a mother and a father.”
Once again, Daisy’s teeth raked across her soft, bare lower lip. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Tom Deveraux, would it? Because I don’t have to tell him we slept together. At least not yet,” Daisy amended hastily before Jack could get a word in edgewise. “When my baby is born, of course I’ll make his or her paternity a matter of public record—there’s no way I’ll ever lie to my child the way my parents lied to me all these years. But until then—I mean, no one has to know. We don’t have to put ourselves in a position where we’re both going to be getting a lot of grief.”
Jack supposed that was true, but he saw no reason in putting off the inevitable, either. “The worst thing we could do is let our kid think we’re ashamed of him or her,” Jack said. He had grown up that way, feeling the slings and arrows surrounding the scandal of his birth. There was no way he was doing it to his own child. Frowning, Jack continued humorlessly, “Tom already knows we slept together.”
Daisy did a double take. “You told him?”
“Not exactly.” Because it was clear she wasn’t going to just let this go, Jack continued reluctantly, “He figured it out when you disappeared the way you did.”
“Because you were acting so guilty, I bet.”
Knowing where she was going with this, Jack pushed the words through his teeth. “I’m not sorry we made love.” Especially now that they had a baby on the way because of it. He gave her a level look. “I’m just sorry about how and why and when it happened.”
The wall around Daisy’s feelings only became stronger and more inaccessible as Daisy scoffed in a cynical tone. “You would have preferred recreational sex, is that it?”
“It was more than that, and you know it.” Jack knew Daisy was trying to shock and turn him off. He wasn’t going to allow her to do it. Especially not now, when they had a child they were going to be responsible for.
“Exercise?”
“It was raw emotion and need—and you know it.”
“I don’t need anyone.”
Yes, Jack thought. You do. They all did. Maybe what he and Daisy had shared wasn’t love. Maybe it would never be love. But they could be there for each other and their child in other equally important ways. And whether she wanted that or not, he was going to see that it happened, because the two of them had more than just themselves to think about now. They had a baby to consider. A baby who would need the love and care and cooperation of both parents.
“But back to Tom Deveraux.” Daisy changed the subject to something safer. She studied Jack curiously. “What did he say when you told him about us?”
Jack recalled the punch that had landed him in the dirt and left his jaw aching for days, and decided Daisy didn’t need to know that Tom was still so angry he was barely speaking to Jack. “Nothing that bears repeating,” Jack finally said.
She