The Heiress (19 page)

“So what’s going on?” she asked as casually as if she hadn’t noticed anything amiss as the outside air hit her like a blast of heat. To her dismay, moving even slightly caused her pain that started in her abdomen and
spread throughout her body, and she winced and swore and swayed a little on her feet. Jack and Tom both rushed for her, one on each side, helping her into one of the Adirondack chaises on the deck overlooking the beach.

“I just came by to bring you some flowers and see how you were doing,” Tom said, settling into a chair opposite her.

Daisy wanted to believe Tom Deveraux was sincerely interested in her, that he could and would one day love her in the same way that he loved his other children. But the cynical side of her said it just wasn’t so, that he was doing what he had to now to silence her and avert a scandal. She feared, in the final analysis, Tom would be no better than the Templeton family, that he would always find her lacking in both big and little ways. And because of that, would eventually turn his back on her and disavow her, too. “A little late to be playing the father act, isn’t it?” Daisy said contentiously as she tried unsuccessfully to get comfortable. She tensed as the next thought hit. “Or did you come by to tell me the results of the DNA test?”

Tom shook his head. “They’re not in yet.”

“More’s the pity,” Daisy said, trying not to think of it as a reprieve, albeit a temporary one. She stretched out on the chaise until she finally found a position that didn’t hurt quite so much.

“But I think I know the results,” Tom continued firmly. “I think you’re my child.”

Daisy studied him, refusing to let him raise her hopes only to dash them again. “Like I said,” she answered tiredly, wishing her head didn’t feel so fuzzy from all the pain medicine, “it’s a little late for all this, isn’t it?”

Tom regarded her with enough kindness to make her cry. “It doesn’t have to be.”

Daisy felt tears pricking at the back of her eyelids again. Looking as if he didn’t want to interfere, Jack stood awkwardly. “Maybe I should let you two talk this over alone,” he said.

“No.” Desperate not to be alone with the man who had abandoned her, Daisy caught Jack’s hand before he could move away. She tugged him closer, and lifting her knees, motioned for Jack to sit beside her on the chaise so that Jack was between her and Tom. Reluctantly, Jack did.

“Mr. Deveraux and I,” Daisy concluded coldly, “have said all there is to say.”

Silence fell between the three of them, broken only by the sounds of children playing farther down the beach. As the moments wore on, Tom looked less like the successful executive and more like a person struggling with failure. Daisy didn’t want to identify with the man who had ignored her her whole life, but she knew how he felt. Her heart was heavy, too, with all the opportunities lost, the hurts that would probably never heal.

“I’m sorry,” she said eventually. “I know I opened this Pandora’s box, but now I want to shut it.” She angled her chin at him stubbornly, letting Tom know there was still a little kick-butt ’tude in her despite her fragile condition. “I don’t want you acting like my father,” she warned him stonily.

“Too bad.” Tom finished what was left of his beer and put the bottle aside. “Because I’ve begun to feel like your father.”

Daisy wrapped her hand around Jack’s bicep and clung tight. “I want you to go away and leave me
alone,” she repeated. She knew she was hiding behind Jack; she couldn’t help it.

Tom stood reluctantly. “All right, I will—for right now. But only until those tests come back and prove what you and I both already know in our hearts to be true.” Tom regarded her sternly. “Then we have some making up to do, Daisy. And whether you like it or not, we’re going to do just that.”

“T
HAT BASTARD
,” Daisy said as Tom walked around the deck and disappeared from sight. Unwelcome tears stung her eyes as they heard a car door open and close, then an engine start, his vehicle backing away. “How can he think he can just undo everything with an apology and a request to move on?” she demanded, her voice quivering despite her attempt to appear cool, calm and collected.

Jack scooted back on the chaise and laced a comforting arm around her shoulders. “Maybe because that’s the only way this situation is ever going to get any better,” Jack said gently.

“Of course you would say that,” Daisy fumed as she struggled to her feet. “You idolize the man. Oh, don’t even bother to look surprised,” she said, beginning to pace, as swiftly as her still-sore body would allow. She eased down on the weathered wooden bench that rimmed the edge of the deck. “It’s clear every time you look at Tom Deveraux,” Daisy said, rubbing a hand lightly across her aching middle. “You have this hero-worship thing going.”

Jack clamped his lips together, his resentment about what she had just alleged clear. He swung his legs over the side of the chaise. “Tom Deveraux is my boss, Daisy.”

“He’s more than that.” Daisy let her mouth run on ahead of her common sense. “He’s a…”

“Mentor,” Jack supplied calmly when Daisy’s mental search failed to yield the right word.

“But you wish he was even more than that,” Daisy accused.

Jack grew, if possible, even more exasperated, as he rested both his forearms on his thighs. “I admit I strive to earn his respect,” he said after a moment.

Daisy tilted her head as she continued to study him. “Is it going to be possible to get it back—after what happened between you and me?”

Jack gestured in a way that let Daisy know he had his own lingering doubts about that. “I think the two of us have made a good start in mending fences.” He looked at Daisy steadily. “I advise you to do the same with him.”

Daisy felt her mood turn even more belligerent. “Why should I?” she demanded contentiously.

“Because you started this and that gives you a certain responsibility to see it through to the end,” Jack lectured Daisy grimly. “You can’t just stir things up the way you have and then walk away.”

Daisy folded her arms in front of her defiantly. She hoped Jack would have realized by now he couldn’t make her see her father through his eyes. Because their experiences with Tom just weren’t the same. “I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started my search for my biological parents.” If she had…well, she would have backed off before she had gotten even more hurt than she had been by her abandonment years before.

Jack regarded her speculatively. “What did you think it would be like?”

Something wonderful and heartwarming enough to
appear in a family movie, Daisy thought. “I don’t know.” Daisy shrugged. “I always figured my father never knew about me.”

“Tom didn’t.”

“But he guessed I was the result of his one-night stand with Iris! He certainly knew how nuts Richard and Charlotte were about the blue blood running through their veins and the exclusive ancestry of the Templeton family that they would never willingly just let one of their own go to be raised by persons of unacceptable lineage! He just didn’t care enough to find out if I was his!”

“Tom told you why he didn’t pursue it—the Templetons said it was all untrue and threatened to sue for defamation if he didn’t back off immediately.”

“I also know that if push came to shove, Charlotte and Richard would’ve avoided a scandal at all costs. Any blood or paternity tests required would have been done on the Q.T. If the results had indeed confirmed what Tom suspected, something would have been worked out so Tom could acknowledge me.”

Jack sighed and shoved both his hands through his sandy-brown hair. “Grace and Tom probably would have divorced had that happened.”

Daisy knew Grace wouldn’t have wanted her around—Daisy would simply have reminded Grace of Tom’s infidelity and betrayal. “They divorced anyway,” Daisy said resentfully, taking a deep, bracing breath of sea air.

“A decade later.”

“That wasn’t my problem back then.” And as far as Daisy was concerned, it wasn’t a real excuse now.

“But it was Tom’s,” Jack pointed out with exaggerated patience. His eyes still on hers, he rolled to his
feet and closed the distance between them. “He had four other children.”

“Whom he would have walked through fire for, and probably still would. I, on the other hand, was expendable,” Daisy said, unable to contain her bitterness over that devastating truth one second longer. Her heart aching with the rejection she had suffered, Daisy glared at Jack. “And now that I know all that, I have no interest in spending time with Tom, period. So don’t think you can talk me into it,” she warned, her voice shaking, “because you can’t!”

Jack propped a foot on the bench beside her. Forearm on his knee, he leaned down. “I still think you should give Tom a chance to make it up to you,” Jack insisted.

Daisy stubbornly ignored her husband’s advice. It was clear Jack’s feelings about Tom were muddled by all Tom had done for Jack over the years. And while she appreciated and understood Jack’s affection and respect for the man, she simply did not share it, and probably never would. “Is that the only thing you talked about with Tom?” Daisy asked, wanting and needing to change the subject to something less painful to her.

Jack tensed in a way that let Daisy know she had inadvertently hit on something yet again. He put his foot back on the deck and moved away from her once more.

Not about to let him off the hook when he had gone to so much trouble to analyze her actions, she pressed on resolutely, stating what she had observed. “The two of you were out here an awfully long time.” When she had finally gotten out of bed and made it to the patio door, it had looked—to her dismay—like one of those man-to-man or father-son talks. And Jack had been
every bit as into whatever was being discussed as Tom had been. “So what else did you two talk about?”

“Business.”

Sensing Jack was suddenly withholding every bit as much as he was telling her, Daisy regarded Jack skeptically. “Then why were you talking out here in this heat, when you could have been inside in the study or the living room in air-conditioned comfort?” she asked a great deal more pleasantly than she felt.

Jack sighed heavily and said, “Because we didn’t want to disturb you.”

Daisy lifted an eyebrow, moved to stand.

Jack put his hand on the middle of her back and led her back inside the house. “If you must know,” he continued explaining, “I think your father came over here because he’s concerned about the prospect of me taking care of you.”

“Why would Tom be worried about that?” Daisy shot Jack a bemused look as he reluctantly let go of her and walked into the kitchen.

“Because he probably doesn’t even know if I can cook,” Jack retorted, checking out the contents of the refrigerator and freezer.

Daisy leaned against the counter, watching him. “Can you?” Thus far, all they had done was eat out or order in.

Jack nodded. “Learned when I was ten.”

“You’re kidding.”

Jack shook his head, the expression in his eyes turning unexpectedly grim. “It was either that or eat bacon and eggs and sausage and biscuits every night for dinner. They were the only two things my grandfather knew how to cook. And the only two things he wanted to learn how to cook.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a balanced diet,” Daisy observed quietly.

“It wasn’t, which is why he died of heart disease at age fifty-five. Anyway, if I wanted to eat anything else, I had to get on my bicycle, go to the corner market, buy it and fix it for us myself.”

“So did you?”

Jack nodded as he pulled a package of boneless chicken breasts from the freezer and put it into the microwave to defrost. “At first it was just stuff like packaged macaroni and cheese, beans and hot dogs, and if I was really daring, a hamburger and oven French fries. But eventually I branched out, and by the time I was twelve I was doing all the cooking for both of us.”

“What about your mother?” Daisy asked as Jack got out the makings for a salad.

“I know she left when you were three but…”

Daisy sank into one of the chairs in the breakfast nook. “You’ve never seen her since?”

“I’ve seen her.”

A wealth of pain in those words. “She came back?”

Jack shook his head. “I tracked her down.”

Daisy could see he didn’t want to talk about it now anymore than he had before. Still, she had to know. “What happened?”

Jack shrugged, his broad shoulders pushing against the soft cotton of his sport shirt. “She still didn’t want me around. And she didn’t want anyone else to know about me, either.” His gaze flicked back to her. “Apparently, she’d made this new life for herself in Cleveland—told everyone her family was dead. Her husband and three kids didn’t know she’d had a baby out of wedlock years before, or that she had abandoned me.
She didn’t think they would understand. So she asked me to leave and never come back or contact her again.”

Daisy studied the sadness in his golden-brown eyes. “And you did.”

“Yes,” Jack replied calmly. “Because she was right. There was just no way we could fix what had been broken years ago. So we both went on with our lives.”

Prior to the last five weeks of her life, Daisy would have encouraged Jack to keep trying, keep struggling to somehow make things work with his mother. Now Daisy wondered if he hadn’t been the smart one, if they all wouldn’t have been better off if she, too, had just been able to walk away after finding out the truth. Instead, she had needed to come back to confront everyone who had lied to her; she’d taunted Jack, seduced, and slept with him just to get even with Tom Deveraux, Iris, Charlotte and Richard. That hotheaded mistake had resulted in a forced marriage and a miscarriage, and a loss and a grief she would never fully recover from.

Now Jack wanted to believe they had married for all the right reasons. He wanted to take something that was all wrong and make it into something real, if not exactly wonderful.

Only, their life together wasn’t that simple and never would be because she couldn’t have the kind of life she had always wanted if she remained trapped in a marriage neither of them had planned on or wanted in the first place. So there was only one thing for her to do, Daisy realized with a mixture of sadness and defiance. And Jack wasn’t going to like it.