Stolen Chances (27 page)

“Patrick never mentioned—”

“No,” she said quickly. “He wouldn’t have. I asked him not to tell you.”

“Why?” he asked in bewilderment.

“Oh God.” She closed her eyes again and tried to settle her quaking stomach. It didn’t work. “This isn’t how I envisioned this going.”

“Envisioned what going?” he asked cautiously.

Moment of truth. In a minute, everything would change.

On a deep breath, Maren dropped her arms. The questions brewing in his eyes only exacerbated the sickness in her belly, but she knew she couldn’t stop now. “I tried to find you. I left dozens of messages with your parents. I even had my father look for you, but he didn’t know where you’d gone. I…” She closed her eyes again and steeled herself for what she knew was coming. “I didn’t know I was pregnant until I got home from Mexico, and by the time I found out, you’d all but vanished.”

Silence. Then very quietly, he said, “What did you just say?”

That knot in her stomach twisted so hard she knew it was leaving scars. Big ones. And she deserved them. Opening her eyes, she faced him, head-on, knowing he deserved this much at least. “I said... I have a daughter. And so do you.”

The color drained from his cheeks. And the confident, always-in-control man she knew so well stepped back and braced a hand against the wall behind him as if the floor had just rocked right out from under his feet.

“You were pregnant?” he whispered.

“Oh, Thad.” Guilt consumed her. “You didn’t call me back. If you’d just called, even once—”

“You never said what it was about.”

Reality dawned. “You got my messages.”

“You never—”

She closed her eyes. It didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered but the truth. “I wanted you to call me back because you wanted to, not because you felt obligated.”

He didn’t say anything, just stood there staring at her with those shocked and disbelieving eyes, and she couldn’t sit still anymore.

She pushed out of her chair and crossed the room. It all seemed like a lifetime ago now. “I didn’t know what to do. I kept holding on to the crazy idea you’d eventually come looking for me. But you didn’t, so I had to make a choice.”

She turned to face him and drew in a steadying breath, wanting to give him at least this one little thing. “She was born in February. She’s eight, though you’d think she’s thirteen by the way she talks. That’s my mother’s doing. She’s grown up with three fiercely independent women and no other kids.”

He still didn’t say anything, so she kept going, hoping this helped in some small way. “She loves all things science related. She’s bright, and she’s constantly bombarding me with questions, hounding me when I don’t give her a legitimate reason for not doing something she really wants to do, like learning to scuba dive, which is her personal crusade right now. ‘Because I said so’ has never been an answer she’s willing to accept.”

Guilt consumed her as she watched emotions she couldn’t define flicker over his features. She’d been wrong, so wrong to keep Isabel from him.

Swallowing around the growing lump in her throat, she crossed her arms and tried to rub the chill from her skin. “Her name is Isabel. She loves archaeology. She’s been on digs with me since the time she was a baby. She’s got the stupidest-looking leather hat she wears whenever she’s digging. It makes her look just like Indiana Jones, who I point out to her all the time isn’t a real person, but she doesn’t care. The day I got the call to come here, she’d set up a dig in the sand trap of the eighth fairway.” She shrugged. “You would have been proud, she had the grid cordoned off with rope and stakes and was bossing a couple of vacationing boys around like they were regular shovel bums.”

“Does she know about me?”

He was still leaning his back against the wall, but now his hands rested on his thighs and somewhere along the way his eyes had closed. And the heartache across his face was like a searing knife straight through Maren’s heart.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I’ve never lied to her. She knows who you are. She knows what you do. She knows we met in Mexico, that I fell in love with you, that things didn’t work out between us. She knows I tried to find you both before and after she was born.”

“Does she…does she look like you?”

The question floored her. Of all the things she’d expected him to ask or say, that wasn’t one of them. “She’s got my temper and my stubborn chin. Otherwise, no, she doesn’t look like me.” With legs that threatened to give out, she stepped to her backpack, drew out the small photo she kept in her wallet, and handed it to him. “She looks like you.”

Hesitantly, he took the picture, then looked down at the smiling face with his eyes and his hair and his olive coloring that turned golden brown in the sun. And the remaining bit of color in his cheeks paled.

He studied the picture for a long time in silence. And then finally, he said, “You weren’t going to tell me about her.”

The sadness in his voice almost sent her to her knees “I was,” she said softly. “After we found
La Malinche
.”

His gaze met hers. “Why not when you first saw me? And don’t tell me it’s because you didn’t think I’d want to know. You know me. You know I would have cared.”

“I...” The words lodged in her throat. She couldn’t explain without telling him everything. And telling him everything meant destroying what they’d built between them.

She closed her eyes on a wave of misery and sank onto the end of the bed. It didn’t much matter anymore, did it? Drumming up her courage, she opened her eyes. “I couldn’t tell you then, because I was worried about her safety.”

He pushed away from the wall. “Tell me what’s going on, Maren. From the beginning, don’t leave anything out. Tell me how what happened to you relates to
our
daughter.”

She’d seen him livid. She’d seen him hurt. But she’d never been afraid of him. In this moment, though, as she watched the fire brewing in his eyes, she was scared. Scared of what he’d say and do when he learned the whole truth.

If he didn’t already hate her, he would in a few minutes.

She drew in a steadying breath and braced her hands on her thighs. “About four years ago, I was in South America. I was doing research for an article I was working on with another professor. It was a two-to-three-week project, max. I left Isabel at the hotel because the conditions down there were pretty minimal. I-I got a frantic call from my mother after I’d been there for about two weeks. Isabel was missing and no one knew where she was. I panicked.”

She shook the image from her brain. Just thinking about it brought back all the pain and fear she’d felt that day. “I flew straight home. When I landed in Seattle and was about to hop the commuter out to the islands, I was stopped by this big brawny guy who said if I wanted to see Isabel again, I’d go with him. He had her necklace—an amethyst my father had brought back for her from one of his digs. I didn’t know what to do, so I went. He put me on a helicopter and we flew out over the Pacific to this enormous yacht. I had no clue what was going on until I stepped onto the landing pad and saw him.”

“Who?”

She swallowed hard. “Evan Declan.”

“
What?
” Pure rage flashed in his eyes.

She looked away, avoiding those dark, hate-filled eyes, afraid if she looked at him again, she wouldn’t be able to get it out. “He’s been watching us for years. All of us—you, me, Lisa, Patrick. Waiting until we went after
La Malinche
again. He knew we would. He knew we’d never let it go. I guess he got antsy and he went up to the hotel to find me, only I wasn’t there, I was on that dig. And he took one look at Isabel and knew she was my daughter. He knew she was
our
daughter.”

Her chest pinched tight. “Thad, he took her. He had her for three days before I got there. I don’t think he hurt her. She’s never said if he did. In fact, when I arrived, she was having the time of her life, calling him ‘Uncle Evan’ and laughing like he was an old family friend. He can be charming when he wants, and he charmed the pants off our four-year-old.”

“What happened?”

His voice was set and icy. Knowing what he was seeing in her now made her stomach pitch. Knowing what he’d think of her in a minute cut through what was left of her heart.

“He wanted information,” she said in a shaky voice. “A business partnership. If I promised to keep him posted, if and when we went after the relic again, he’d leave us alone. If I didn’t, well, this was only a sampling.”

“And you agreed.”

She finally looked over at him. His arms were crossed over his chest, his jaw set and rigid. And her back went up. “What else could I do? I was trapped in the middle of the Pacific on his yacht. On a yacht I voluntarily went to. If it had just been me, I never would have agreed, but I had to think about Isabel.”

“Did he hurt you then? Did he...”

When his voice trailed off and his eyes raked her bruised face, she knew what he was asking. The fact he was showing an ounce of concern for her after what she’d just told him only made her heart ache more.

“Did he rape me?” she asked quietly. “No, he didn’t. Rape is beneath him. He doesn’t get any pleasure out of the act unless you’re a willing participant.”

“Jesus Christ, Maren. You didn’t.”

She took a long breath, steeling herself against the repulsion in his voice. “Yes, I did. I’d have done anything to get out of there.” She rid her mind of the memory of Evan’s hands on her body, the feel of his skin sliding along hers. It was the only way she could finish this. “And it worked, because he let us go. Isabel was safe, and we went home. And I thought that was it, but it wasn’t.”

Needing space, she crossed to the windows and gazed out at the city lights blinking on in the early evening light. Cancun looked peaceful in the setting sun, even fun. Nothing like the horror churning inside her.

She didn’t want to go on, but knew she needed to finish it. “He shows up once or twice a year, wanting an update, wanting a ‘weekend.’ I tried to fight it the first couple of times he came around, but he sent his goons up to threaten me. So I cooperated. He made it clear there would be consequences for Isabel if I told anyone what had happened. I thought about confiding in my mother, but I didn’t want to put her in danger as well. Lisa was dealing with her own issues, Patrick would have disowned me, and you...”

A clock ticked somewhere behind her. His slow breaths sounded from across the room, but the silence was almost worse than the revulsion she knew was brewing inside him.

She sighed. “I didn’t even know where you were.”

“I haven’t been missing for nine years. You could have found me. You stopped looking.”

She couldn’t blame him for hating her, but it still hurt, more than she wanted to admit. She turned to face him. “He made it clear if I told you, he’d go right for Isabel.”

“He wouldn’t have known.”

He would. Evan knew everything. She closed her eyes, knowing Thad would never understand. Men had different options. “What would you have done if I’d told you about Isabel? You’d have gone right up to see her. If I had confessed what had happened with Declan, you’d have gone looking for him too. Thad, don’t you get it? He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t care about Isabel. All he cares about is getting that damn statue, and no one stands in his way. He wouldn’t think twice about killing you the way he did Colin, because for him, that just puts him one step closer to attaining his goal.”

“He wouldn’t have had the chance, because I’d have slit his throat first.”

She’d never heard that kind of hatred from him. And for a moment, the sheer force of it stopped her cold.

“You called him when you got here, didn’t you?” he asked in an icy voice.

“I didn’t have to,” she said quietly. “He watches the hotel all the time, and he knew Patrick had called me, that my mother had rushed home so I could come here, that Lisa had met me in Cancun. He put two and two together before I even got here. The first night I got to the camp, he called my cell, and he made it perfectly clear if I didn’t cooperate, he’d go for Isabel.”

“What happened the other day on the boat? Why did you run?”

He wasn’t worried about her anymore. She could feel it in his harsh words. Wrapping her arms around her middle, she tried to brush away the chill prickling her skin, but it didn’t help. “I-I got a call from the hotel. My secretary, Candace. He’d been there. He’d told her if I didn’t get in contact with him within twenty-four hours, he’d come back for Isabel. So I left, came here, called him, and went to meet him.”

“Then what?” His eyes locked on hers, but she couldn’t read his expression.

“Then…” An unbelievable ache filled her chest. “I agreed to give him weekly updates. If I don’t contact within seven days, he’ll get antsy.”

“And?”

“And then…” She drew a deep breath. “Then I told him I wouldn’t sleep with him, and he hit me. I fell into a glass table. He only hit me once, but it was enough to make his point. Then he calmly told me the next time I see him I’d better have a different answer. And he let me go, and I came here.”

“I can’t believe any of this.” He turned away from her and stared at a watercolor on the wall. But she knew from the vacant look in his eyes that he wasn’t seeing it. “Where is she?”

“I…” This time Maren had to fight back the hitch in her voice. This time she couldn’t say the words without a stabbing pain repeatedly pummeling her chest. “I sent her away. I should have done it a long time ago, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.”

He turned fully to face her “
What?
”

She swiped at the stupid tears starting to fall. “He’s never going to stop. He’s never going to leave us alone. I’m not going to give him
La Malinche
when we find it because it won’t stop him. I realized that when he hit me. I thought it would. For so long I thought that’s all he was after, but it’s not.”

She brushed away the tears so they wouldn’t fall. “She’s with Candace. I trust her implicitly. She adores Isabel. They have a special relationship. In two weeks, I’ll wire-transfer money into an account in the Caymans. They’ll take it and go. And Declan will never know where they went.”