Angel Mine (4 page)

“That’s only part of it,” she said.

“And the rest?”

“I want you,” she said. What had ever made her think she would savor this moment? Instead, she found she was getting precious-little enjoyment out of the stunned disbelief on his face.

“Just like that?” he asked incredulously. “After four years apart, after refusing to return any of my calls, you show up and claim you want me? Sorry, babe, but it just doesn’t ring true. You’ll have to work on your delivery if you expect me to buy that.”

“It’s true,” she insisted.

He returned her steady gaze with blatant skepticism. “What’s the matter, Heather? Can’t you cope with being a single mom, after all? Obviously you thought you could or you would have done the honorable, sensible thing and told me about our daughter a long time ago. Instead, you chose to cut me out of her life. Obviously you thought you’d both be better off without me.”

The fact that he’d hit the nail on the head grated. He shouldn’t be able to read her so well, especially not after all this time. She was supposed to be the unpredictable one, the one who kept everyone guessing.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, not for me,” she snapped. “For Angel. She needs her daddy.”

His gaze narrowed. “What do you mean, she needs her daddy?”

“She’s a little girl. She needs you to be in her life, to know that there’s somebody besides me she can count on. Over the last three years, I’ve realized how important that kind of stability is for a child.”

Todd’s complexion paled. “No,” he said with a ferocity that stunned her. “Never. Get that idea right out of your head, Heather. You want money, okay. If Angel’s mine, we’ll work something out. As for the rest, forget it. It will never,
never
happen.”

And before she could react, before she could challenge him, he simply turned and walked away. Fled, really, without once looking back.

“Well, that was interesting,” she murmured as he disappeared from view.

It looked as if she’d finally found the one thing that could rattle Todd’s almost scary composure. Obviously this was precisely the reaction that Jake had anticipated. The only question was why the most self-possessed man she’d ever known would be so terrified of one little three-year-old who was his spitting image.

4

T
odd headed home in a complete daze. Heather’s words echoed in his head, over and over in a deafening refrain.

I thought it was time you met your daughter.

Your daughter.

Your daughter…

At home, he tried to shut off the sound, but it was in vain. The words could even be heard over the music blasting through his small apartment. Not even work, which he’d become amazingly adept at using to block out emotional turmoil, helped this time the way it had when Heather had walked out on him in New York. The words on the papers he’d brought home blurred. The computer screen seemed far too bright, the blinking cursor an irritant, as if he was trying to view it with a blinding migraine.

She needs her daddy…she needs to know there’s somebody in her life besides me she can count on.

Count on.

Count on…

How could Heather not know that he was the last person in the world that little girl could count on? True, he had never told her about the tragedy in his past, couldn’t talk about it, in fact, but surely she should have seen how uneasy he was around the kids in the casts of the shows they’d done together. She should have known that he and any kid were a bad mix. But she’d either missed the signs or chosen to ignore them. The fact was, she was here and she had expectations.

For the first time in the four years he’d worked for Megan, Todd didn’t show up for work the morning after Heather had stunned him with her news. He couldn’t seem to make it out of bed. Not that he slept. Sleep eluded him like an artful puppy dodging its owner’s reach.

He was tormented by images of the woman he’d never expected to see again. Worse, he was plagued by images of a bright-eyed toddler reaching out her arms, expecting him to pick her up. He’d rejected her, turned away. He’d refused her simple request, his own daughter. Would it have been any different if he’d known? Probably not.

Even so, she’d accepted him as generously and unconditionally as her mother once had. A three-year-old with more kindness in her than
he’d
demonstrated.

Want Mama to give you a hug?

Her sympathetic words came back to haunt him. If only he’d known at the time who Mama was.

There had been a time not all that long ago when he’d craved hugs from Heather, when he’d responded to her free-spirited warmth and exuberance like a desert blossom suddenly exposed to a gentle shower. Now the arms that had once embraced him in passion seemed a lot more like a trap.

He should have known about the baby four years ago, when there were still options, he thought angrily. What would he have done if Heather had come to him then and told him she was carrying his child? He would have married her without hesitation, would have insisted on it, in fact. That was what a responsible man did under such circumstances, and he had spent most of the past thirteen years trying to prove how responsible he had become.

But he wouldn’t have been one bit happier about the prospect of fatherhood than he was now, he conceded with brutal honesty. Indeed, he would have been terrified. But obligations were more important than terror.

Of course, the marriage would have been a disaster, just as the relationship had been. Maybe Heather had been wise enough to see that. Maybe she’d sensed what he hadn’t been willing to admit, that he was lousy husband material and an even lousier candidate for fatherhood. Maybe it had all turned out for the best.

That was then, though. Now Heather was here, needing something from him that he was no more prepared to give than he would have been if he’d had the usual nine months to prepare for it. What the hell was he going to do? The right thing? He didn’t even know what that was. Based on his history rather than conventional wisdom, the right thing would be to steer clear of that little girl, protect her from the dangers of having him in her life.

Damn, this wasn’t getting him anywhere. Anger wasn’t solving anything. Recriminations were useless. He needed to sit down with a sheet of paper and methodically list all the options, then all the pros and cons for each. That was the way to tackle anything this complex—with cold logic and sound reasoning. He was a master of that. The prospect of breaking this down in such a familiar, practiced way reassured him, calmed him.

He showered, tugged on briefs and jeans, then headed for the kitchen and made a pot of very strong coffee to cut through the fog in his brain. He was seated at the kitchen table with a stack of paper, a neat row of sharp pencils and his coffee when the phone rang.

Grateful for the interruption, he grabbed it. “Yes?”

“Todd, are you okay?” Megan asked with the concern of a friend, rather than the anger of a boss whose employee had bailed out.

“I’m fine.”

“Then why aren’t you at work?”

Good question. An even better question was why he hadn’t bothered to call to let anyone know he wasn’t coming in. He didn’t do things like this. He was always focused, always on task. Responsible. Today that word grated in ways it never had before.

“Something came up,” he said finally.

“You’re working at home?”

“Not exactly.”

“Is everything all right?”

No!
he wanted to shout. Nothing is all right. Nothing will be all right until there are hundreds of miles between me and this child who’s apparently mine.

Instead, he said, “I needed a day off. If you have a problem with that, dock my pay.”

Silence greeted his curt words, then Megan said quietly, “I’m coming over.”

“Don’t,” he said, but he was talking to a dead phone line.

Terrific. Now he’d stirred up Megan’s protective instincts. She would be all over him until she found out what had happened to turn the world’s most reliable executive into an irresponsible, grouchy nutcase.

He should have hauled his sorry butt out of bed and gone to work as he had every other day. Even if it hadn’t been the answer last night, maybe work was exactly what he needed today. Maybe if he simply ignored this whole blasted mess, it would go away. Heather would tire of Whispering Wind and go back East. She would take her daughter with her. And he could go right on living his life the way he liked it, alone and unencumbered.

Fat chance, he thought with a resigned sigh. Heather had never backed down from a challenge. Hell, the woman wanted to be a Broadway actress. She was steadfast and blithely determined to fight the odds against success. After all these years, she hadn’t given up, even when he knew for a fact that she hadn’t had anything closely resembling a big break. If she wanted him in her daughter’s life, then she was going to make it happen or die trying. It was not a comforting thought.

Nor was it especially comforting that his front doorbell was ringing, suggesting that Megan had made it into town in record time. Before he could so much as budge, he heard her key turning in the lock. Giving her that key had obviously been a big mistake. It had been meant for emergencies, but it was apparent now that their definitions of that were at odds.

“Todd?” she shouted as if he might be either comatose or farther away than the next county, much less the next room.

“In here,” he replied with a resigned sigh.

She appeared in the kitchen doorway with a frantic expression. She surveyed him from head to toe—probably looking for cuts and bruises from some accident he’d failed to mention—then finally sank onto a chair opposite him.

“Don’t ever do that to me again,” she pleaded. “My heart’s still pounding.”

“What did I do?”

“You stayed home. You didn’t call in. And then,” she said as if this last was the worst, “you snapped at me.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t want your apology. You were past due. What I want to know is what has you in such a tizzy that you are behaving in such a totally uncharacteristic way?”

“Why do I have to be in a tizzy, as you put it? Why can’t I just be having a bad day? People have bad days all the time.”

“Because you don’t have bad days,” she retorted. “You see to it that every day runs smoothly.”

“Maybe I just see that
your
days run smoothly. Maybe mine are total chaos.”

“No way. You’d never allow it.”

He frowned at the suggestion that he was able to exert that much control over events, even though up until yesterday he had prided himself on doing just that. “In other words, I am totally predictable and boring.”

“No, you are a treasure,” she corrected him. “Twenty-four-carat gold. Solid as a rock. Dependable. That’s why not finding you at your desk today was such a shock.”

He wasn’t especially reassured by the praise. It merely served as a reminder that he was going to have to do the
right thing
in a situation that he wasn’t the least bit prepared to handle.

“Maybe I’m tired of being dependable,” he said. “Maybe I want to be the guy dressed in black, the dangerous man no woman would dare trust.”

“And the one every woman wants, anyway?” Megan suggested, gaze narrowing. “Is that what this is about? Are you in love? I didn’t realize you were dating anyone seriously.”

Now, there was a laugh. “Megan, the only women I’ve seen in the past year have been married, and I’m not about to tangle with the wife of some man who’s likely to own a shotgun.”

“Then what is this about?”

“It’s private.”

Megan laughed. “‘Private’ never stopped you from meddling in my life.”

“And now you intend to get even? I don’t think so. This is my problem. I’ll handle it.”

She gestured toward the wadded-up papers he’d tossed on the floor, evidence of his inability to make one single rational list of solutions to the situation.

“Is that your idea of handling it?”

“Yes.”

She reached for one of the scraps of paper, but he got to it first, crumpled it in his fist and kept it there.

“Stay out of this, Megan. You can’t help.”

“You don’t know that. Try me.”

“No,” he said flatly, his gaze locked with hers. “Now go away and let me think.”

She stood up with obvious reluctance. “Okay, I’ll go,” she told him. “But before I do, think about this. Not every problem can be solved by cold, hard logic. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut.”

True enough, Todd conceded as she left. Unfortunately right this second his gut was all but shouting for him to pack his bags and get out of Dodge—or in this case, Whispering Wind.

A few months ago, he might have heeded that instinct eagerly. He would have seized any sign that encouraged him to head back to New York to a world he understood, a place he’d belonged. Ironically, he realized that going there would only put him right back in Heather’s path, make it even easier for her to pursue this quest she had to involve him in his daughter’s life.

More important, to his amazement, he realized that Whispering Wind had started to feel like home. He wasn’t nearly as anxious as he once was to abandon not only his job, but his friends. Megan and Jake and Tess, Henrietta and Peggy, the people connected to Megan’s show—they were like family to him, closer than the parents he so rarely saw. He couldn’t see himself running out on them, not just because he was duty-bound to stay, but because he cared about them.

It was ironic, really. Thanks to this makeshift family—to say nothing of his deeply ingrained code of honor—it appeared he was going to have to stay right where he was and figure out how to deal with a
real
family, which until yesterday he hadn’t even known he had.

That didn’t mean he had to do it today, he thought as he grabbed a shirt and headed for his car. For once in his life he was going to be totally irresponsible and self-indulgent. He was going to run away—even if it was just for a day.

“What happened when you saw Todd yesterday?” Jake asked when Heather arrived in his office promptly at eleven. “I saw the two of you talking on the sidewalk. I imagine you told him.”

Heather sighed. “I didn’t see any way around it. He asked me point-blank what I was doing here. He’d already met Angel. I think he had a pretty good idea even before I said the words. You haven’t seen her up close, but she’s got her daddy’s coloring and her daddy’s eyes. Only a blind man would miss it. And believe me, Todd’s vision is twenty-twenty.”

“How did he take the news?”

“How do you think? He was stunned and angry. He didn’t believe me. He wants a paternity test. He didn’t come right out and ask for it, of course. He’s far too polite. But when I offered, he didn’t turn me down flat.”

“You can’t blame him for that.”

“No, I suppose not,” she conceded, though understanding that didn’t make it hurt any less.

“There isn’t any question about how it will turn out, is there?”

Heather stared at him, shocked that he even had to ask. “Absolutely not.”

Jake nodded. “Okay, then. We’ll do it right away. That’ll be one less obstacle down the road. Have you given any more thought to what you want besides child support?”

“Some sort of custody arrangement,” she told him. “Shared custody, joint custody, whatever you call it.”

“Not just visitation?”

“What’s the difference?”

“In one, the time would be pretty much equally divided. With visitation, Angel would only spend a set amount of time with Todd each year. The latter’s more practical, if you intend to go on living in New York. Otherwise, you’ll be completely separated from your daughter for half the year. She’ll be dividing her time between schools, unless you put her in a boarding school. Even though that’s down the road a couple of years, it’s something to think about.”

Heather shook her head. She didn’t want to spend that much time away from her daughter. Boarding school was out of the question for the same reason. She hadn’t even considered being separated from Angel when she’d started the process. She’d just wanted Todd to take over from time to time. If he’d been in New York still, this would have been simple, a matter of shuttling Angel from one part of the city to another.

“How would visitation work?”

“She’d fly out here at set times of the year. Summers, maybe. Certain holidays.”