The Secret Father
The Secret Father
Anna Adams
How is it possible to forget the love of your life?Zach Calvert has no memory of his last three years as a Navy pilot. And for the most part, he's resigned himself to that. He's content with his new life as the sheriff of his hometown, happy that his small daughter lives close by.But everything changes when he discovers he has a five-year-old son and a lover he can't remember.
“You must be Olivia Kendall.”
His voice was as thick as if he were thinking of making love to her. He clearly was not, but Zach’s low, I’ve-waited-for-you-all-my-life tone had seduced her when they’d met the first time.
She’d been unable to forget him. He obviously hadn’t bothered to remember.
Seeking composure, she crossed to his desk and offered her hand. “Call me Olivia.” For their son’s sake she had to feel out the situation and wait for the right moment to remind Zach of their past.
When he closed his fingers around hers, memories flooded back, images of his hand on her waist, at her breast, the scent of him as he lowered his head to kiss her. She gritted her teeth, recognizing the texture of his palm as if she were touching her own skin.
Why had this man remained such a part of her? As if what she wanted to feel didn’t matter. She backed up a step. He had to release her. Curiosity flickered in his gaze, but not recognition.
Her first love had forgotten her.
Dear Reader,
Welcome to Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, and to the Calvert family. You’re about to meet three cousins who find love in their own Smoky Mountain backyards.
Put yourself in Olivia Kendall’s shoes. You thought your son’s father, a Navy pilot, died five years ago during a training mission. Then you see him on the news, a small-town sheriff, foiling a bank robbery in Tennessee. You’ve gotten over him—or have you? You’ve made a life that doesn’t include him. You could even choose not to tell him about his son, but a man has a right to know he has a child.
And besides, where’s he been?
Now think about Zach. He lost one of his best friends and his memory in the crash that ended his Navy career. He lost his ability to believe he had a right to life or happiness. When Olivia comes to town he discovers he has a five-year-old son and a lover he doesn’t remember. Together, Olivia and Zach find love that heals the wounds of their past and forges the family that is their future.
I’d love to hear what you think. You can reach me at anna@annaadams.net. Come back to Bardill’s Ridge in November when Zach’s cousin Dr. Sophie Calvert abandons her bodyguard groom, Ian, at the altar.
Best wishes,
Anna Adams
The Secret Father
Anna Adams
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Debbie, my cousin, but much more—my sister
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
Six Years Ago
OLIVIA KENDALL HAD three problems. She was pregnant, she couldn’t find her baby’s father, and the moment her own father—James Kendall of Kendall Press—found out, he was bound to fire her to avoid the shame of her unwed motherhood.
Six months out of Columbia’s School of Journalism, she’d spent the summer and fall learning Kendall Press from the mail room up. She couldn’t afford to get fired. Even if she found Lieutenant Zach Calvert, she’d need a salary to support her unborn child.
Behind her the door opened, and every head in the room bent toward the monitors in front of them. After his daily management meeting, her dad always hunted her down to remind her she was wasting her time and his with her learn-it-all attitude. He crossed the quiet, equipment-filled room. “Any news today?”
Her job this week was her favorite—scanning the wires for good stories. “Plenty.” She clipped the word, tugging down the hem of her blouse. She couldn’t be more than seven weeks along, but James Kendall hadn’t reached the top of the media heap by ignoring other people’s secrets.
He stopped beside her desk and pulled up a chair. “You’re always defensive at work because I’m right.” Lowering his voice so that it was covered by the computer’s hum, he flicked the screen she was reading. “You shouldn’t distract yourself from your true job with these menial tasks.”
“Learning how Kendall Press runs is my job, Dad.”
“I’ll teach you. My father taught me.”
“The same father who suggested you park me with him and Grandma while you sowed more wild oats?” Her mother had died in childbirth. Her dad had never remarried.
“Father may have appreciated the value of a good nanny, but he left me a strong company and I’m passing you an empire. Who else can show you how to nourish it?”
He was in his CEO frame of mind. Olivia inched away from him, too stressed to deal with her dad or her curious co-workers. “I’m busy.” And their same old argument meant nothing compared to the fact that her child’s father had disappeared. A Naval pilot, Zach had embarked on a two-week training mission over a month ago.
The weeks had passed. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t shown up. She’d left countless messages on his cell phone. He’d never given her a number for his apartment or his office. She couldn’t even say where he worked for sure. They’d always arranged to meet somewhere neutral. He’d been in Chicago since the end of summer to train on some sort of equipment he’d avoided discussing. She’d seen his apartment once, and only because they’d been desperate for each other and her father had been home that night.
Zach had been more than reserved about his life. He’d been secretive.
Working on very little sleep and even less food, she felt queasy, frightened and idiotic for getting herself in this fix. She refused to leave one more message begging Zach to call her.
Suddenly her father took her arm and turned her to face him. “What’s really wrong with you, Olivia?”
“I don’t want to argue about work.” She avoided his dark brown eyes. “I understand how you feel about Kendall Press. I love knowing what’s going on in the world before anyone else. It’s a rush of power, but I have to learn the job my way.”
“Why don’t you trust my judgment anymore?”
She took refuge in the glowing screen in front of her. She’d changed because she was going to have Zach Calvert’s baby, and when her father knew he might force her out of her livelihood and her home.
Home. A place Zach had described with a softness so unlike him. He’d longed for the farmhouse and the relations he loved in Tennessee. His hunger for family felt foreign to the only child of an only child.
“Olivia, tell me what’s got you on edge.” Losing patience, her father spun her chair.
She stared at him, but her head was with Zach. What if he’d gone home? To Bardill’s Ridge and all those Calverts. The possibility tempted her to confess everything. If anyone could find a guy in a small Tennesseean town, her dad could.
“Good God.” Realization lit his eyes. “That pilot dumped you.” He’d always said Zach, at twenty-six, was too old for her, his job too dangerous. What he’d meant was he didn’t want her to love someone whose work could take her away from the family business. “Olivia?”
“Yeah.” She’d told James about the training mission. “Zach was supposed to come back weeks ago. If he’s home, he’s avoiding me.”
“Have you called? Did you go to his apartment building?”
“I only have a cell phone number he doesn’t answer and I’ve leaned on the buzzer at his building so many times I think his doorman’s about to set the police on me.”
Her father’s head went back as if she’d struck him. “How serious are you about this guy?”
She barely kept from touching her belly where their baby grew, but the truth—that she loved Zach—wouldn’t come out of her mouth either. Not even she trusted true love at twenty-one. She blinked back tears that seemed to stun her dad.
“Exactly where was he training? The address.”
“He couldn’t tell me.” Maybe he just wouldn’t.
“What do you know about his family?”
“I saw pictures at his apartment and I asked about everyone in them.” His grandparents, hugging each other in photos on his mantel and his cousins, Sophie and Molly, who’d been his surrogate sisters. His mom, Beth, he’d seemed anxious about. She’d also never remarried after his father’s death, and he thought she was lonely.
If his mother’s loneliness mattered to him, wouldn’t his lover’s?
“You believe he had the training assignment?”
She nodded. Except for the moments when he’d made love to her, his mission had occupied him as if he was already gone. She took a deep breath and applied some logic. “Maybe he took leave and went to Tennessee. He was homesick.”
“That’s where he’s from? I’d give you time off to go see him if you’d get over this guy and concentrate on work.”
“He didn’t invite me.” He’d made her want to know his “people.” He’d made her love the place. He’d needed the blue-and-green misty mountains that backed every photo on his wall and each memory in his love of home. The air and the soil and the Smoky Mountains that formed Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, ran in his blood like the blood of his family.
It wasn’t her way or her father’s. They cared for their North Shore entry in the National Historic Register, but it was entrusted to them. It owned no part of her soul. Zach was rooted in those Tennesseean hills.
She turned back to the monitor on her desk. A headline, something about a pilot caught her eye. She clicked to read it.
A photo took shape. Even though she was thinking of Zach, she never expected to see his face.
But there he was. The full headline burned itself in her mind. “Pilot Lost On Mission—U.S. Navy Refuses Comment.”
Loss slammed into her. Her muscles clenched. Olivia splayed her fingers across the picture. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe, praying she’d imagined his face. She made herself look again.
Zach. Dear God, Zach. “No.” Shaking her head, she sucked a breath out of dwindling oxygen.
“Hey.” Her dad caught her just in time to keep her head from slamming into the monitor.
In that second life changed. Forever.
She straightened, though her body felt ten times its normal weight. Tugging free of her father’s helping hands, she crossed both arms across her flat stomach. Her baby took precedence over a freefall into grief.
Zach was gone. She’d be their baby’s only parent, and she’d never know whether Zach had loved her even a little bit—enough to want their child.
“Dad.” His name broke in pieces in her mouth as she stared at her dead lover’s face. “I’m pregnant.”
CHAPTER ONE
A BLUNT FINGERNAIL PRODDED Sheriff Zach Calvert’s shoulder from behind. “You’re the law,” said a woman’s voice. “Can’t you order those tellers to speed up?”
Zach turned, and Tammy Henderson, who co-owned Henderson Seed and Feed with her husband, tucked a brown deposit envelope beneath her elbow.
“How many times have I asked you and Mike to call me before you bring that?”
She elbowed the zippered bag closer to her body. “We took your advice and started making three deposits a week.”
That was about the best he could hope for in a town where the citizens believed crime happened everywhere except here. He checked the clock above the gray granite counter. “Is that right?” It was two minutes slower than his watch. “This is my weekend to have Lily.”
Tammy twisted her own watch and then nodded at the clock. “Tennessee Standard Bank and I match. What time do you have to be at Helene’s?”
“Six o’clock.” Or his ex-wife would make a stink in front of their four-year-old daughter. Helene liked to punish him for imagined transgressions and she had an advantage. He’d do anything to keep from hurting his child.
“I’ve heard how Helene tries to keep Lil…”
Zach lifted his brows. Tammy stopped, her mouth open, her weathered face reddening. When she looked away, Zach felt like a bully, but gossip bred like kudzu in Bardill’s Ridge. Being the number-one topic over the Formica tables at the Train Depot Café didn’t sit well with him.
And how would Lily feel if she heard the talk?
Zach tapped his holstered gun as the long black arm on the clock swept each second away, and the guy in front of him, a hunter in camouflage, twitched from foot to foot.
Time to give up and eat the late fee on his car loan payment. But as he turned, the town librarian marched to the counter, her back ramrod straight with annoyance. The hunter took her place at the front of the line, yanking his jacket as if he couldn’t make it fit right over his shoulders. Three and a half minutes ran by before he crossed to the next teller.
Another time check. Helene would explode in exactly twenty-two minutes. Unless he made it. Which he just might do if another patron walked away right now.
The camo guy turned. Zach almost breathed a thanks heavenward, but the other man opened his field jacket and revealed the reason he was uncomfortable. A silver cannon—or a gun the size of one—rested on his hip.
“Nobody move, or I’ll kill you all.” Something—fear?—sent his voice into an unnaturally high pitch as he pulled the gun out.
Not good. If he was scared, he might shoot anyway.
“Damn.” The word slipped out of Zach’s mouth as he eased in front of Tammy Henderson and her deposit bag. Any chance of reaching Lily in less than twenty minutes had just gone down the barrel of that gun. At least he’d caught the armed thief’s wild gaze.
“I said no talking, and especially not you, Sheriff.” He used the back of his hand to wipe spit off the top of his lip. “I’m in charge here.” He swung the weapon, his finger tightening on the trigger. The gesture told Zach that pulling the trigger took pressure. A good thing or else half the customers would be dead now.
The guy turned to the nearest teller, his gun veering in a silver arc that made Zach clench his hands in two fists. What kind of a coward did this to innocent people?
“Don’t even breathe near the alarm. I can see all four sides of this building from the windows.”
He nudged the nearest young woman with the gun barrel, shaking so hard the metal bumped her chin. Her eyes sparkled with tears, and Zach actually pictured himself snapping the other guy’s spine.
“If a police car comes, you die. Anyone makes a move, you die.” The thief swept the other patrons with a scornful gaze and stamped his booted foot. “Put your damn faces on the floor!”
Zach took his time, sparing a glance for Tammy, who was obviously trying to hide a third of a week’s profits. Zach grabbed the bag and slid it over to the thief’s feet.
“Hey,” Tammy protested.
“You want him to think you’re stingy?”
“You got more, lady?” Camo guy scooped up the bag and then came over to kick the purse wrapped around Tammy’s arm. “Dump it.”
Zach focused on the weapon while the robber looked to see whether Tammy was hiding any more money. As if he were reviewing a schematic, Zach saw exactly how to part the man from his gun and put him on the floor unconscious and on his stomach—bonus points for ease of cuffing.
Noting that the citizens in his care had all reached the marble, Zach sank the rest of the way, calming his rage to prevent impairing his response. He angled his gaze to keep an eye on the gunman.
“What are you looking at?” the guy asked. “I’m happy to start killing now. With you.”
People cried out around him, but Zach waited, forcing a few more seconds to go by. Keep it low, non-confrontational. No need to get anyone killed.
“How do you plan to escape? The second you leave, the law will pour in from all the nearby towns where everyone knows everyone else. You’re going to stand out.”
“Stand out?” This time he jabbed the gun in the direction of Zach’s head. “I didn’t ask for advice, Andy Taylor. Why don’t you keep your mouth shut?” He nodded at the tellers. “Faster with the money—I want it now.”
Zach smiled as he willed his body into the air. A fraction of a second later his foot connected with Camo Guy’s cheekbone. The thief rose off his feet, flew about a yard and landed on his face. Out like a light.
And no one died in Bardill’s Ridge. But damned if he didn’t long to kick the punk lying at his feet for threatening his people.
Instead, he leaned over the gunman, grabbed the weapon and took it apart. He’d flown helicopters in the Navy until he’d been trained to kill with the nearest weapon—or with his bare hands. A crash and a head wound had stolen his memory of that time and the two years preceding it. He sometimes discovered secrets about himself. Skills he shouldn’t have.
Though he shouldn’t know squat about any gun except the one he’d fired to qualify on the range, he scattered the pieces of the cannon across the marble floor. Continuing on unnerving instincts, he picked up the gunman’s wrist to check his pulse.
Still fluttering. “When you get out of the prison hospital, you should consider a different line of work.” He glanced at the closest teller. “Hit the alarm. Then get me Leland Nash on the phone.”
Nash’s family owned Tennessee Standard Bank. He was also married to Zach’s ex-wife, a connection that had never seemed useful until today. With one phone call, Zach could arrange for Nash to inspect his property and also beg Helene to allow him to pick up Lily tomorrow.
He glanced at the unconscious man, his own actions disturbing him almost as much as his town’s close call.
Before now, he’d controlled the bursts of rage he’d felt toward lawbreaking idiots who occasionally came to Bardill’s Ridge. Throwing that guy headfirst onto the marble floor could have killed him, and vigilantism wasn’t part of Zach’s job description.
He didn’t want to be a killer.
AT THE CHICAGO HEADQUARTERS of Relevance magazine, Olivia Kendall’s office door burst open. Her assistant, Brian Minsky, skidded across the sand-colored carpet. “Picture this.” He waved a printout at her as he collapsed in the chair across from her desk.
They’d worked together from day one on Relevance. Since they never stood on boss-employee etiquette, she waited for him to continue, half her mind still on the competitor’s article she’d been reading.
Brian remained silent. At last she noticed and looked up, plucking off her glasses with two fingers.
Brian looked satisfied. “You’re with me now.”
“What’s up?”
“I want you to listen. This story has a twist.”
She’d learned to give Brian the time he required. “Okay.”
“You’ve been in line at the bank for thirty-eight minutes, waiting to pay your car loan.”
“Not that big a twist.”
He offered a sour grin, the equivalent of telling her to shut up. “The guy in front of you gets to the teller and opens his coat to show off his big gun. He orders you and everyone else in the bank to lie on the floor while the tellers collect the money. What do you do?”
“I lie down.” Her first thought went to her five-year-old son, Evan. Face to the floor, she’d be praying like crazy that she got home to him. “And if I survive, I arrange a payroll deduction for that loan.”
Brian cracked a real grin. “Funny. But I’m not finished. The guy sees you’re the local sheriff. You tell him he can’t go far. It’s a small town, and everyone will notice him. Instead of thanking you he asks who you think you are—Andy Taylor?”
She laughed.
Brian didn’t, and she erased her smile. This must be the good part.
“What do you do now?” he asked.
“I point my nose to the floor, and I curse myself for not taking advantage of that payroll deduction option my helpful loan officer suggested.” She paused. “And I propose to change my name to Andy. What do you do?”
“I do what this Andy—his real name is Zach—I do what he did. I kick the gunman’s ass all over that bank, and then I tell him to look for another line of work after he gets out of the jail hospital.”
“You’re kidding.” She sat back, trying to hide her Pavlovian response to the name Zach.
Old memories fluttered at the back of her mind. She pushed them back. This might be a good story. “Didn’t Andy-Zach realize his response put everyone else in danger?”
“He says not. Apparently, he took the guy out by acting purely on instinct. Instinct that told him how to overpower an armed man with one blow.”
“One blow…” She leaned forward, jamming her stomach into the glass desk’s blunt edge. “What are you talking about?”
“Now you’re on board.” Brian slid her a photograph. “You and I want to know what’s behind Andy-Zach’s story. So will our readers. They’re going to see the facts in brief paragraphs about stupid criminals in their Kendall newspapers, but they’ll want to know more, and we can give them a bigger picture in Kendall’s premiere news magazine. Is the sheriff an android or a man? He says he just reacted. A guy doesn’t react like that without training.” Brian leaned back. “Or I would have had a better time in high school.”
She put her glasses back on and turned the picture around. The man’s face made her breath catch.
Not again.
Her heart boomeranged painfully. He was older, his blond hair longer than a military cut, his eyes more cynical and his body leaner.
But once again, the man in the picture, the kick-ass sheriff, was Lieutenant Zach Calvert, looking pretty damn healthy for a man who’d died six years ago.
She scanned the brief column beneath the picture. After she’d told her dad everything, he’d gone to the Navy. He was perfect for the job; he could get to the truth about the Loch Ness monster.
He’d spoken to a Commander Gould, who’d explained that Zach’s crash had been bad luck in a routine training flight. Today’s article didn’t mention the flight or the Navy or the crash that had supposedly killed Zach.
Olivia stared at his face in the grainy photo. She wasn’t wrong. This was Evan’s father. “Your daddy’s in heaven” had become her mantra. She’d hoped a daddy somewhere would make Evan feel like the children he’d envied for having fathers at home.
Numb with shock, she didn’t know whether to be furious or relieved. At least this time she didn’t seem to be falling apart at the sight of a lousy photo. She’d grieved and recovered. For six years, Lieutenant Zach Calvert had been dead.
Did that make being a sheriff in Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee heaven? Or hell?
TWO DAYS AFTER Brian showed her Zach’s photo, Olivia’s plane drifted out of the clouds on approach to McGhee-Tyson Airport in Knoxville.
Her shock had dissipated and been replaced by pragmatism. Whatever Zach was playing at, he had a son. And her son deserved a chance to know and be loved by his father. She had to believe he could be kinder to his son than he’d been to her.
He’d gone to a lot of trouble to leave her. How had he persuaded his commanding officer to lie to her father? She’d barely stopped her dad from getting to the bottom of that question.
With any luck, looking after Evan would keep him too busy to hunt down Captain Kerwin Gould and pry the truth out of him. She wanted a word with Zach first.
After she’d called his office three times without being able to force a word out of her mouth, she’d asked Brian to set up the interview. She needed to see Zach’s face the first time he heard her voice. She’d believed him to be an honorable and loving man. She had to know who he really was before she invited him into her son’s life.
And she wondered why he’d agreed to let her interview him if he’d been so desperate to get away from her six years ago? Maybe he’d forgotten her.
Fine. He only had to remember enough to believe he might be Evan’s father.
As the plane drifted on descent, she opened Zach’s dossier. After his accident, he’d spent three months in a hospital outside San Diego. Four months after that, he’d married one of his nurses. Within eight months of their marriage, their daughter, Lily, had been born.
Which explained his silence. Had he been sleeping with Helene and her at the same time? Even six years later she felt like an idiot for trusting him.
Zach had been her first love. Tall and tough, unstoppable in his pursuit, he’d made her think she was all that mattered to him in the whole world. Combine that with his status as her father’s last choice, and she’d hardly known how to resist.
Looking back through newly opened eyes, she no longer believed in his passion or her own. She’d taken a stupid risk the night she’d forgotten her birth control. And after his supposed death, she’d made up a loving father for her son. The part where Zach had abandoned her never came into her stories.
Finally she’d tried not to remember Zach at all. But then a day would start when Evan woke with sleepy, is-it-morning eyes that reminded her of his father, or he startled her with the long capable fingers that looked too uncomfortably much like Zach’s.
She closed the folder and peered through the small window at the deep green forest flowing beneath the airplane. Dark and verdant, as mysterious as Zach’s true intentions. What had he wanted with her? Not that she’d expected forever, but a phone call to tell her she was no longer in the picture would have been nice.
Looking at mountains that seemed to have no border with flat land, she felt like an intruder. She’d once prayed Zach would ask her to meet his family. Now, possibly in front of them, she had to find out who he really was so she could decide whether to tell Evan he hadn’t died.
Olivia slipped the folder back into her soft briefcase and then fished out another clean, almost untouched file Brian had put together for her. She hadn’t told Evan or Brian the truth, so she had to go home with some kind of story.
The bank photo lay on top. Beneath were clippings from all the other stories Brian had gathered on the attempted robbery.
After the plane landed, Olivia collected her bags and packed them into her rental car. As soon as she left the airport, the road began to rise. The interstate, narrowing into two lanes, had been cut into red clay and granite hills spiked with evergreens, smoothed by icy-looking streams.
Like a bad omen, clouds covered the sun, dulling the red and gold leaves of the hardwoods. Rest stops and traffic came few and far between, and her ears began to pop at the higher elevation.
She fumbled in her purse and briefcase for gum, but Evan must have found her stash. Her boy was a fiend for gum. She gave up and yawned to clear the pressure.
As she passed the first mileage sign for Bardill’s Ridge, she breathed a sigh of relief. She ought to be able to find Sheriff Calvert’s office just in time for her appointment.
At her turnoff, she followed the long ramp away from the interstate. No sign of life stirred within the trees. Such a heavy dose of nature could make a city woman a little anxious.
At the end of the ramp a sign pointing to the left offered her the chance to turn back. To the right Bardill’s Ridge waited. Olivia opened her window and breathed in pine-laden air.
She could go home, continue the life she’d made with Evan and tell Brian the story on Zach hadn’t panned out. Her heart pounded in jackhammer fashion.
A right turn would change her life, but it might also bring her son a father who could love him. What choice did she have?
She turned right and the road inclined again. Soon a white church spire peeked out of the leaves. Just beyond the spire a redbrick cupola topped a black-shingled roof. Extremely Norman Rockwell. Olivia’s heart rate returned to normal. She could handle a Norman Rockwell town.
In front of her, a tractor turned off a dirt road onto the shoulder. The driver lifted his ball cap as she slowed to pass him.
That never happened in Chicago.
On the outskirts of Bardill’s Ridge, she passed a large blue clapboard feed store. The sign that clung to the roof of a wide veranda-cum-loading dock shouted Henderson’s in capital letters. Sticks of straw blew into the road from the bales on the porch. The men hoisting feed onto their trucks and into the backs of their SUVs looked up from their chores as she slowed to the speed limit.
Zach had been right when he’d warned the bank robber that people here noticed strangers. She passed a library, two small churches and too many curious faces.
Farther down the street, a sign painted with cartoon bears and rabbits and a bouncing typeface proclaimed the building behind it the ABC Daycare. Olivia missed Evan with a keen ache as the boys and girls spilled across the play yard.
Closer to the center of town, there were more office buildings. As she passed them the women and men who strode the surprisingly busy sidewalks watched her. No matter what he decided to do about Evan, Zach would have to explain about her after she left town.
Olivia glanced at her watch. Five past two.
At the next stop sign she glanced right and found the big white church. She turned, but had to stop again on the edge of a small square encircled by wrought iron. On one side stood the church. Beside her, a curlicued, Victorian theater promised the latest releases. Opposite, a high school looked buttoned up and busy, with papers on the windows and a teacher holding class outside as his students inspected a maple’s bright shedding leaves. The redbrick building across the square was the courthouse, Bardill’s county seat, according to a tall, black sign posted out front.
Olivia glanced at her briefcase, containing both folders and a photo vital to her plan. Zach had told Brian she’d find him in his office in the jail at the back of the courthouse.
She parked and grabbed her things. Fighting wind, she slipped into the square, via an iron gate. Her heels slid on the cobblestone path that crisscrossed the grass. At the other side of the park she exited through another gate and crossed the wide street. Breathing hard, she climbed the courthouse steps and scoured the map at the front door.
The jail was a left off the long, tall lower hall. Just beyond, a glass door led to a closer parking lot. Olivia swore and tried to tame her wild hair as her shoes clicked loudly on the marble.
Reaching Zach’s office door exactly on time, she twitched her skirt into place, tugged at her sweater’s neckline and then watched her right hand tremble on the doorknob.
If she’d known she was pregnant before Zach left, she would have told him. She was simply doing what she would have done then. If Zach didn’t want Evan, she could still say she’d done her best for her son.
She opened the door, anticipating a dispatcher. Instead, Zach looked up from paperwork spread on a wide, scarred oak desk.
His dark blue uniform emphasized lean muscles and the dark blond hair that nearly touched his collar. From ten feet away, a bleak shadow in his green eyes startled her. He was the same man, but he looked at the world from a different point of view. Something had drawn extra lines on his face and added more than six years of weariness to his eyes.
Olivia clung to the doorknob, rocking back on her high heels.
Zach stood and came around his desk. His gaze swept her, cataloging her head to toe. Not the way he had when they’d been lovers, but the way a stranger took stock of someone he might not entirely trust.
Olivia forgot how to breathe. How much had she changed? It didn’t seem to matter. Zach’s smile held no hint of recognition.
He held out his hand. “You must be Olivia Kendall.”
CHAPTER TWO
HIS VOICE WAS AS THICK as if he were thinking of making love to her. He clearly was not, but Zach’s low, husky, I’ve-waited-for-you-all-my-life tone had seduced her when they’d met the first time.
She’d been unable to forget him. He obviously hadn’t bothered to remember.
Seeking composure, she crossed to his desk and offered her hand. “Call me Olivia.” For Evan’s sake she had to feel out the situation and wait for the right moment to remind Zach of their past.
The moment he closed his fingers around hers, the past flooded back, images of his hand on her waist, at her breast, the male scent of him as he’d lowered his head to kiss her. She gritted her teeth, recognizing the texture of his palm as if she were touching her own skin.
Why had this man remained such a part of her? As if what she wanted to feel didn’t matter. She backed up a step. He had to release her. Curiosity flickered in his gaze, but not recognition. Her first love had forgotten her.
“Have a seat.” Zach gestured to two leather armchairs that flanked a low table in front of his desk. “Coffee?”
“Thanks.” A few moments’ distraction might remind her why she’d come. Sitting, she unzipped her briefcase.
“Cream? Sugar?”
“Both, please.”
With a pleasant, interested smile, he handed her a foam cup and then took the chair beside hers. He stretched his legs in front of him. “You’ve come a long way to talk about a bank robbery that didn’t come off.”
She busied herself with her briefcase zipper, covering her shock at his continued detachment. She’d made a child with this man, but she’d clearly had no idea who Zach Calvert was beneath his skin. She plucked a business card from her briefcase and passed it to him. “Let’s talk about your suspect.”
Without a glance at her card, he slid it inside his uniform pocket. “I’m not sure I can add to the stories you’ve already seen.”
Such a weak attempt to stall woke her share of Kendall determination. “I’d like to talk to the guy.”
Zach glanced toward the back where the cells probably were. “The FBI already picked him up.”
Olivia pulled out the robbery folder. “I read that he belongs to a local militia group?”
“Not local, from a town over the Kentucky border.”
Zach sounded defensive, protecting his town’s reputation. He still loved his home. What were his current feelings on family?
Olivia studied his knife-sharp collar, his gleaming black shoes, their high shine a hint of the Navy officer from Chicago. Addicted to danger and flight, he’d still been drawn to this rural mountain town, but he’d never mentioned a need to settle here for good.
Whatever had happened to him had made him focus on home and hearth. He’d quickly had a daughter. How would he feel about their son?
She gave herself a mental shake. “Did the guy want funds for a specific action?”
“He requested an attorney when he regained consciousness. By the time we found a public defender, the FBI showed up and took him to their office in—” He stopped as if he hadn’t meant to say so much. “The feds are investigating the robbery and the suspect’s affiliations.”
“So you disarmed him, but now you’re out?”
He frowned, interest turning into irritation. “I did my job when I kept him from killing any citizen of this town.”
She was searching for a sense of responsibility that belied the way he’d left her. “Weren’t you afraid the guy might kill someone when you attacked him?”
“I recognized his gun.” His matter-of-fact tone implied anyone would have, and anyone would have acted. “I just had to make sure he was unconscious before he applied enough pressure to the trigger to fire.”
“Your Navy training helped you do that?”
He narrowed his eyes. “How did you know I was in the Navy?” His tone had dropped another disquieting octave.
“I investigated your background before I came.”
His expression went protectively flat, but antagonism jerked a muscle tight in his jaw. “What do you want, Ms. Kendall? Why come all the way from Chicago to talk about a three-day-old story?”
He suspected ulterior motives. It was the moment she’d waited for, and she went blank. All she could think was how loudly the clock ticked on his desk.
Time to come clean. “Why are you pretending you don’t recognize me?”
His chiseled face hardened to stone. “I’m pretending?”
She licked dry lips. “Maybe not.” Her father would be appalled. No one forgot a Kendall. She’d cared so much for Zach, his response humiliated her, but Evan’s best interests made her go on. Finding out who Zach had become was worth some loss of face. “You and I met each other six years ago in Chicago while you were in the Navy.”
“Chicago?” He sounded as if he’d never heard of the city.
“This is ludicrous. Surely you remember Chicago even if you forgot me?”
“No.” He stood, his posture guarded, danger in his eyes.
She was probably seeing the same gaze the bank robber had just before he’d found himself unconscious. She rose on shaking legs and wiped her clammy palms down the sides of her skirt.
She could describe every sinew beneath Zach’s dark clothing. She could tell him he slept with one arm crooked beneath his head, the other flattened on his belly. She should have the advantage. Instead, she was trying desperately not to collapse at his feet.
He turned to his desk. “I was stationed in California until an accident forced me to resign my commission.” His mouth tightened. “Why are you here?”
Now they both understood she had the advantage, and Zach didn’t like it.
“I came to talk to you.” His stare accused her of setting an ambush. Maybe she should let him cool down before she told him about Evan.
“I have no information you’d want to print, Ms. Kendall.”
“You know my name is Olivia.”
He turned toward the door, his dismissive attitude suggesting she use it. “We’re done.”
She groped inside her briefcase for the framed picture she’d packed that morning. Zach shifted his hand to his holstered pistol. It wasn’t in the least funny, but Olivia wanted to smile. He didn’t trust easily either.
“I’m sorry to do it this way.” She hadn’t come here to be unkind. “But I don’t think you’ll believe me without proof.” She held the photo against her chest. “I met you in Chicago. You were taking some kind of a class. I believed we cared for each other.” She broke off. “I’m rambling because I’m nervous, but here’s what happened. You left for a training mission—it was supposed to last two weeks—but I didn’t hear from you for over a month, and then I saw a wire release that said you were dead.”
He stared. For a moment, time tunneled. She was trying to reach him, but he’d left her behind. “Zach, look at this photo.” She turned it, showing him his son’s face.
At first his eyes widened. His nostrils flared with each deep breath. When he opened his mouth, a sigh eased between his lips. “No.” Anguish added a syllable to the word.
Olivia held as still as she could, considering she was trembling. His “no” didn’t mean he’d denied Evan was his child. He could have trouble believing he’d forgotten his son.
“I would have told you I was pregnant, but you left before I knew.”
Without looking at her, Zach came back, his leather belt creaking in the thick silence. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He curled his fingers around the photo’s frame and her hand. Unable to bear the heat of his touch, she let the picture go.
“I’ve seen his face all over my mother’s house.”
She didn’t understand. “What?”
“In photos of me.” He looked up, his gaze soft, yet wounded. “He’s six?”
“Five.” What the hell was going on? “What happened to you?”
“I honestly don’t remember Chicago. I trained there for a mission in a place not many people know about. I was on a team no one talks about.” He met her gaze—no, he held hers with his intensity. “I was supposed to fly in and pick up an officer who was stuck in a place she shouldn’t have been. She was killed, and I suffered a head injury that destroyed part of my memory—the two years before the accident—and you were part of the time I lost.” A mixture of anger and despair fired his glance. He nudged the robbery file she’d dropped on the floor when she’d stood. “I also learned about weapons then.”
His story was hard to believe. “Why did the wires say you died? Why did the Navy tell my father you were dead?”
“The Navy?”
“My dad asked Captain Kerwin Gould, your commanding officer, what happened and he spouted the story about a failed training mission off San Diego.”
“Your dad?” Zach nodded in recognition. “James Kendall, I get it. Did he mention you when he talked to Admiral Gould?”
“Admiral?”
Zach shook his head. “That’s his rank now. Did your father tell him you were pregnant?”
“No. I only wanted to find out what happened.”
“But he would’ve told your father the truth if he’d known. He gave you the story we discussed. It kept me out of the media. I didn’t want the public mess any more than the Navy did.” Failure filled his eyes with heartrending emptiness. He lifted his hand to the back of his neck, striking her dumb as he twisted his head, a grown-up version of Evan under stress. “I came home—here—after I left the hospital.”
“What about your apartment in Chicago?” Having a place suddenly made no sense. “Why did you— Your things were all over those rooms, pictures of your family—were they even your family?”
“Yes.” He rubbed his neck again. “The apartment belonged to the government. We were advised to bring our own belongings and make ourselves look like full-time residents. They figured one Navy officer in uniform looked like any other.” He sat on the corner of his desk. “I’m not even sure who packed my stuff and sent it home. It was just waiting when I got here.”
“But what about your career? You were gung ho.”
His faint smile softened the lines in his face. “I resigned because the surgeons decided my injury made me unfit to fly.”
Six years he’d been gone, and he’d never remembered she existed. “How can I believe you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t blame you. I’ve had to ask Admiral Gould or other pilots about what happened.” Guilt thinned his features. “I’ve listened to the crash tapes.”
She couldn’t ask for those details. They were too personal to him, too horrible to her. “How big is this team?”
“I have two friends who also went through the training.” He angled the photo so they could both see Evan’s innocent, laughing face. “You came here because of him? Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? Why pretend you wanted to interview me?”
She didn’t sugarcoat her answer. “I couldn’t trust you. You were dead until you showed up foiling a bank robbery.”
“Why didn’t you look for my family?”
“You talked about them, but reluctantly.” Heat swept up her throat. “I thought you didn’t want to tell them about me.”
“Because of my job.” She shared the desolation in his eyes. “I could skim over the facts, but I wouldn’t have felt safe involving you in my life outside Chicago.” He stared at Evan, not realizing he was telling her he hadn’t shared the depth of her feelings. “They’d have loved my son.”
“At the time I was—” The agony of losing him swept back for a moment, but he’d never really been hers to lose. She shouldn’t have come here. She blinked, gripping reality. Her son still needed his father, and Zach deserved explanations as much as she. “My dad was disappointed in me and I was scared, and later the idea of telling your family became as difficult as telling you is now.”
“What about a funeral?”
She glanced at the nearest window, where orange and red leaves brushed the glass and shielded the rest of Bardill’s Ridge from her view. “My face was in the news because I’d graduated from college, and my father’s important. I didn’t think I could hide who I was in a town this small.” And she hadn’t been up to pretending indifference.
“The boy makes everything different.”
“Different, how?”
“I want to see him.”
Good. She’d been hoping for that. “His name is Evan. Evan Zachary Kendall.”
He stared at his son’s face, a smile curving his mouth slowly, as if smiling no longer came easy.
“I wanted him to have something of yours. Your name was the only thing I could give him.”
“Thank you.”
Zach’s simple gratitude touched her, but she couldn’t let down her guard yet. She lived in Chicago. Zach lived here. They both had rights to Evan if Zach wanted access.
She grimaced. Access. A sterile term for making a life with a child.
“You can have the picture.” She latched her briefcase and lifted it, comforted by its familiar heft in her hand. A touch of the cynicism she’d learned after Zach’s disappearance came back to her. “I’m not a big fan of amnesia stories.”
He didn’t seem to care. “It’s the only one I have, and it’s true.”
Subjects who lied usually put on a big defensive show. But sometimes not.
“What you do next is up to you. I read that you have a daughter with your ex-wife, so I know you’re facing complications. If you really want to see Evan, you have to make a decision you can live with the rest of your life.”
He nodded, but she reiterated to make sure he understood.
“I mean this is a lifetime commitment.”
He reached for her arm, but then stopped short of touching her. “I won’t let you take him away.”
She shrugged, her heart pounding in the back of her throat. He’d been twenty-six when they were together. She’d been more mature than most of her peers, but the balance of power had clearly lain with him. She didn’t intend to let that happen again.
“I won’t leave him alone with you until I’m sure you’re telling the truth. What if you aren’t good for him?”
His chest expanded beneath his shirt. Anger glittered in his eyes, but he controlled it so quickly she might have imagined it.
“I understand,” he said.
That seemed to be that. She headed for the door.
“Where are you going, Olivia?”
His use of her name stopped her. “To give you time to think.”
He set the photo on his desk, staking an unambiguous claim. “I share custody of my daughter Lily, but my ex-wife thinks I’m bad for her.”
Olivia’s stomach tightened, but she tried to look calm. At least he wasn’t going to hide anything from her. “You’re bad for Lily?”
“I should have said not good enough.” His bitter smile held no humor. “My bank account could use some more zeroes. Helene married up when she became Mrs. Leland Nash, and she thinks Lily would be better off without her ties to the common folk.”
“Leland Nash?” She’d read that name in Brian’s file. “She married the bank president?”
He nodded. “I love Lily, and I fight for time with her. I don’t want another troubled relationship with a child of mine, so I’m telling you what you’ll hear about me when you dig deeper.”
Again, her tongue felt tied. Was this his side of the story or a side? “I don’t understand about your ex-wife.” Money and social standing were the last thing Olivia cared about, but then again, she’d always had too much of both. “My first concern is Evan, and I’m giving you a chance to be his father.”
“I am his father.”
“You’re talking genetics. Evan needs baseball games, Band-Aids on his knees and to trust that you’ll show up at his door when you say you will. Don’t let an urge to do the right thing make this decision for you.”
“You’re talking shared custody?”
He was calm under fire, but the concept of sharing anything about Evan filled her with terror. “Maybe. Someday.”
His tension eased, but as he crossed the room and reached for the door, she moved out of his way. He simply held on to the doorknob, effectively keeping her in the room. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If I’d even been aware…”
“We’re way past apologies.” But his gentleness boded well for her son. “You don’t remember, and it all ended a long time ago for me. We’ve both made different lives. You just have to decide what you want to do about Evan before we talk again.” She patted her pocket. “I’m staying at a bed-and-breakfast.” She’d written the place’s name on a slip of paper that morning, a bit fearful the only accommodations she might find would be her old Girl Scout tent on the side of the road. “I found it on the Internet.”
“The Dogwood,” he said. “My uncle and aunt own it. Did you park in front of the courthouse?”
She nodded. “Beside the church.”
“Turn left when you leave the square. Go straight for about a block. It’s not that far from the bank, and you’ll see a sign in the yard.”
“The bank that was nearly robbed?” she asked.
“Tennessee Standard, the only bank in Bardill’s Ridge.” He stopped her again, taking a step nearer. “You really came because you saw my picture?”
She nodded at the stranger she’d loved. His story—reality—took some getting used to. “Because I never knew my mother. She died when I was a baby. I don’t want Evan to grow up without one of his parents if you’re a good man.”
“You have the resources and the skill to find out about me, so I’ll tell you I have a dead career, a broken marriage.” Wrath infused his tone with husky richness. “But I’m still Evan’s father.”
She’d loved his voice when it was thick with any flavor of passion, but being a Kendall, she restrained a shiver of awareness to ask a question. “No one’s ever figured out the truth? No one else who knew you in Chicago?”
“You were apparently the one mistake I made there.” A warning lit his eyes. “You’re not looking for a story, Olivia? I don’t think you’d want to write that kind of article about your son’s father.”
He was right.
STARING THROUGH the square panes of his kitchen window into the pitch-dark night, Zach reached for the phone. He had one thought, to tell Olivia he didn’t need time.
But he remembered the rest of his family and let the phone go. He had to talk to his daughter, to his mother and to his ex-wife. For Evan’s sake he needed to prepare Helene. He turned to the fridge, opening the cabinet on his right at the same time to take down a glass.
A bottle of Scotch on the top shelf tempted him, but he opted for a quart of milk and a brown plastic container of chocolate syrup from the fridge. Using the long spoon Lily favored, he mixed a big helping of her favorite elixir and wished she were here to share it with him. Ice-cold chocolate milk started their bedtime ritual on her weekends at his house.
What would she think of a brand-new older brother?
Zach sipped his chocolate. He could imagine Helene claiming he didn’t need Lily now that he had a son. And she’d blame their lousy marriage on his “subconscious” feelings for Olivia.
Olivia had said she’d made a mistake with birth control. Helene had made a plan, which she’d later admitted had been the worst mistake of her life. She’d thought she was marrying a military superhero who’d use his contacts and the medal he’d never taken out of its box to build a life she’d dreamed of as she’d worked in a hospital.
Her plan made no sense. Trusting her tender loving care, he’d shared his shame at being alive after losing the woman—whose life he was supposed to save.
His mission had been to fly into a restricted zone on a chopper so stripped he couldn’t even carry the weight of a copilot. He was to pick up Lieutenant Kimberly Salva, a dear friend from the Academy, and bring her out. He’d failed. He’d needed the penance of guilt. Since the crash, he’d dreamed with rage that he’d actually killed Salva, who’d died in his hands on the floor of his chopper.
As part of the therapy he’d soon quit, he’d listened to the tape of his radio calls. No matter who told him Salva’s death hadn’t been his fault, that he’d done his best to save her, he continued to relive the moments he’d listened to. His obvious despair, his refusal to give up on her, had never relieved the guilt or the nightmares that had painted pictures like memories in his mind.
Salva’s daughter, eight years old now, was growing up without her mother. How could he believe he had the right to survive?
Inexplicably, Helene had imagined he’d ride an unworthy hero’s welcome into fame and fortune. But Zach had made another plan.
Losing two years of his life, his identity as a pilot and, most of all, his faith in himself, he’d searched for respite in Bardill’s Ridge. Walking the woods he’d run as a youth, mending the barn he’d jumped off pretending he could fly, he’d come home because he’d needed the Calvert clan’s strength and the sustenance of the haze-covered, blue-and-green Smokies.
Maybe he and Helene had never loved each other. She’d thought he was someone he couldn’t be. He’d been grateful for the physical contact he’d needed to remind himself he was still alive.
After she’d become pregnant, he’d married her, and they’d come to Bardill’s Ridge where his new wife had quickly deemed her life pure hell. Zach had worked on his family’s farm for the first year. That had been bad enough in Helene’s eyes, but after he’d taken the sheriff’s position, she’d railed that “Andy Taylor” wasn’t good enough for her and their daughter.
He was starting to hate that TV show.
After his wife met Leland Nash and they’d fallen in love, Helene tried to convince Zach he had no right to his own child because he didn’t share Helene’s priorities for Lily’s future. He was just lucky Helene had found Nash and not some wealthy out-of-state tourist. Leland Nash’s money had made East Tennessee bearable for Helene. It had made short work of Zach’s marriage.
And even shorter work of his ability to trust a woman who’d borne his child. Olivia seemed different, but his ex-wife had shown him honesty could be a moving target.
After Olivia left his office, he’d researched her in every database he could access. She ran Relevance, a magazine positioned somewhere between U.S. News and People.
She was too young to be managing editor except her father owned the show and acted as the magazine’s editor in chief. To get a feel for her work, Zach had read stories from her earlier career, and then he’d scanned several recent issues. Olivia might have gone straight to the masthead because of her connections, but she was a good reporter.
What if she really was after a story? The possibility made him set his drink on the counter so hard the glass clanked. Could her job be the reason she’d come here?
Evan was his son. No doubt about that, but what if Olivia still believed he’d deserted her? What if her whole story was true—except that unlike Helene, she’d put two and two together?
Her flimsy rationale for not telling his family about Evan troubled him, and her father had built an empire breaking secrets wide-open. She might decide he made a good story—failed rescue mission, lost memory, secret son and all.
He dragged the back of his hand over his mouth. He was tired of dreams shot with light like tracer fire from a weapon, tired of waking sweat-covered and panicked as if he’d run through enemy battle lines in his bare feet and still managed to get his friend killed.
Staring at Evan’s photo, aching to see the boy, to hear his voice, Zach ran his finger over the cowlick his son would never be able to tame unless he got himself a military haircut. For Evan’s sake, he wanted to trust Olivia Kendall.
Closing his eyes, he saw her—tall, breezing into his office on the strength of her own self-confidence, her wavy black hair sliding over her shoulders, gray eyes splintered with ice that melted only a little beneath occasional warm concern. She wouldn’t research or write any story that would hurt Evan.
It wasn’t so hard to believe he’d loved her. Inconceivable that he’d forgotten her if he’d cared enough for her to make a child.
Zach glanced at his watch. Why waste any more time? He reached for the phone to call Olivia and tell her he knew exactly what he wanted.
Once she knew where he stood, he’d warn his family they were about to meet his son. He didn’t want Helene or anyone else to find out about Evan from a newspaper or TV.
CHAPTER THREE
“AMNESIA?” James Kendall’s mirthless laugh nearly deafened Olivia through her cell phone’s receiver. “He was never good enough for you, and this lame amnesia excuse just proves my point.”
“Why would he lie, Dad?” Despite her own doubts, she tried to soothe her father’s. At the first sign of weakness in her, he’d try running Zach out of the country. She stayed calm for several reasons. One, she didn’t want him all over Zach. Two, he’d stuck by her through a pregnancy that had shamed him. And three, he loved Evan.
“He dumped you and he doesn’t have the guts to be a man. Why are you willing to let him think about it? Evan deserves a father who simply wants him for a son.”
“I’m not holding a grudge.” Not much of one, and she’d fight every step of the way to make things right for Evan. “He couldn’t help what happened.”
“Why let him jerk you around?”
“I insisted Zach think about the obligations I’m asking him to take on.”
“Did he argue with you?”
“No, but he was stunned, and I don’t want him to do the right thing out of some knee-jerk response. What good would Zach’s sense of duty do my son?”
“I didn’t have to decide whether I wanted to be his grandfather.”
She could have argued. He’d conveniently forgotten the day he’d suggested he could help her “not have” the baby. He’d made up for it too many times to count since. She twitched the curtain away from her window. Dusk hovered over Bardill’s Ridge. In the street below, Victorian lamps glowed orange-yellow.
“You had seven and a half months to get used to the idea of Evan. I’m willing to give Zach a few hours, and I’ll stay with Evan and him when they’re together at first.”
“Thank God you’ve still got some sense. Calvert should have considered his actions back then. When a twenty-six-year-old man knows he can’t even be honest about his job with a twenty-one-year-old woman, the honorable thing is to abstain.”
“You like to forget I was there, too, and you’re still annoyed I didn’t hold out for a wedding ring. You and I aren’t selfless.”
“More so than the man who left you holding the diaper bag.”
“If Zach decides to become part of this family, I expect you to be civil to him.”
“If you hold a single doubt about this man, I say we start the paperwork to sue him for support.”
“Great idea, Dad. Evan will never need a dime from Zach, but he’s gone without a father’s care for five years. A lawsuit should fix all his problems.” She dropped the curtain and opened the nightstand drawer to find a laminated pizza menu. “I don’t think Zach’s going to duck out. Why can’t you give him the benefit of the doubt?”
“You are, and that’s more than he deserves.” Her dad went quiet. She hoped he was trying to find some restraint. The family counselor they’d seen when Evan was a baby had taught him to give Olivia room to parent her own child, but her dad was always happiest when he’d worked up a full head of steam. “When are you supposed to see Calvert again?”
“His name is Zach, and I’ll let you know when he calls.”
“Are we supposed to twiddle our thumbs while he decides? I should be there with you. In fact, I’m on my way.”
Olivia laughed to remind her father he was over-reacting. Suddenly, the phone at her bedside jangled. She eyed it with foreboding. “I have to go, Dad. You stay put in Chicago. Is Evan all right?”
“Sound asleep, or I’d let you talk to him.”
He’d already admitted to spoiling her son with dinner and the richest cheesecake in Chicago at Evan’s favorite “grown-up” restaurant. From there, her father swore Evan had hauled him to a batting cage. He’d exhausted the little guy.
The other phone rang for the third time. “I’ll call you,” Olivia said again. “Kiss him for me.”
“Get back here and kiss him yourself, or let me bring him to you.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“I’ll arrange a healthy meal for Evan tomorrow night.”
“I’m glad.” Her father was a man who showed his love through service rather than affectionate words. “Bye.”
She switched off her cell phone and lifted the other receiver. “Olivia Kendall.” Putting this conversation on business terms was like suiting up in her best armor.
“It’s Zach Calvert. I want to come by in the morning.”
“To talk?” Who cared if she sounded eager? “You can come now.”
“I’ll be ready to travel in the morning, but tonight I have to tell my own family.”
Her pulse tripped over a few beats. He was saying yes. He wanted to know Evan.
“Yes” terrified her. For her son—a little for herself. She’d once loved this man, and he was coming back into her life. She remembered desire and trust that had turned on her like Cleopatra’s asp. She couldn’t afford to get confused about long-dead feelings.
“Maybe it would be better if you didn’t mention Evan to your daughter until you meet him.”
“What?” The one word suggested she’d over-stepped.
“Until you make up your mind, why disrupt Evan’s life or Lily’s?”
“You have nothing to do with my daughter, Olivia. I take care of my family.”
His harshness hurt her feelings. She tried not to snap back. His anger might come from problems he’d had with Helene over custody of Lily.
“Bottom line,” she said, pretending to ignore his quick temper, “I don’t want my son hurt.” She threaded her voice with sharp steel, just in case he considered her soft. “If he ever thinks you’re sorry…”
Silence met her half threat. Seeing his expression would have been nice.
“Is eight o’clock too early to leave tomorrow?” he asked.
“Fine.” She probably wouldn’t sleep. “I’ll arrange our flight.”
“Let me.”
“Face it. I have more pull.” Zach could be in charge next time.
SHARING A GLASS of iced tea with her mother-in-law, Greta, Beth Calvert recognized her son’s car down-shifting to start the climb up her hill. Over a pot of chili, the two women had begun planning a party to celebrate Greta and her husband Seth’s fifty-fifth anniversary.
They’d planned very little party and talked more about Seth’s single anniversary request—more time with his wife. He wanted her to retire from her job as director of The Mom’s Place as she neared seventy-six years of age.
Beth smiled. Greta seemed to feel her husband asked too much. Already pregnant with Ned, Zach’s father, when she was in premed, Greta had worked nearly all her life, and pretty much all the time she or Seth could remember. Seventy-six wasn’t too young to retire by any means, but around here country doctors worked a lot longer than that.
“I’ve asked Sophie to join me,” Greta said. “At least to discuss it while she’s here for our anniversary, but she swears she’s happy delivering babies for those rich women in D.C. They have more OB/GYNs than they can choose from. I need her. My clients need her if Seth’s going to make me step down. We have plenty of time—you know my parents both lived until well into their nineties—but Seth refuses to discuss my work anymore.”
Watching for Zach’s car, Beth nodded in sympathy. “You started the clinic. You’ve helped a lot of young girls in these mountains.” Greta’s paying customers, women who craved some pampered time before their babies came, provided funding for young women who found themselves “in trouble” in Bardill’s Ridge and the surrounding towns. “You own the baby farm and you want to put it in hands you trust.”
Greta expressed disapproval with a tart look. “I hate when y’all call it the baby farm.”
“Sorry.” Beth knew that, but this late, unannounced visit from Zach had sidetracked her.
“I don’t believe Sophie’s happy. She and Molly and Zach were like siblings when they were kids, and she’s a Calvert just like the rest of us. She’ll be happier among family.”
“Maybe you should advertise for another physician just in case.” Beth craned her neck, waiting for Zach’s headlights to sweep the dusk-shadowed turn in her drive. Something had troubled him since that bank robbery. Who wouldn’t be upset to discover such violence in himself? “Sophie will come home when she’s ready. You can’t push children.” At last bright light feathered through the shrubbery that lined the gravel driveway. “Even when they’re grown up.”
“I’d expect Sophie to remember her loyalty to this side of her family as well as to that rogue mother of hers.”
“I don’t think she sees Nita too often.” Beth pointed to the car nosing around the bend. “Look—there’s Zach. Wonder what he’s after so late?”
Greta looked concerned. “Something wrong? Seth will be calling any second if I don’t start home, but I can stay and help you—”
“I’m sure Zach’s fine.” She wasn’t sure at all, but Greta had enough on her mind. The family had all assumed she’d work at the baby farm till she couldn’t work anymore. Seth must have been insistent if Greta was considering retirement. “Would you like more tea?”
“No.” Her mother-in-law stood, flexing her back. “I left my glasses at the office. Better get moving. Seth’s also nagging me to stop driving after dark.” She leaned down and aimed a swift kiss Beth’s way. “Now, if he asks, we talked about the party, not work, right?”
“He must be really upset this time.” Seth had retired from his seat on the county circuit court over ten years ago, and he’d expected his wife to join him in taking leisure.
“He’s serious.” Greta patted her hair. “So I’m paying attention. Good night, honey. I’m just going to wait by my car to speak to Zach.”
“’Night, Greta.”
The older woman floated down the stairs, reaching her car as Zach parked his. They spoke between their doors for a moment, and then Greta waved goodbye and drove off.
Zach headed toward the house, but trouble climbed the wooden porch steps with him. Beth stood, sniffing wood smoke on the crisp air.
“Smell that, son? Fall’s got us in its grip.”
“It’s your favorite time of year, isn’t it, Mom?” He turned at the top step and joined her in appreciation of the darkening ridge that rolled from beneath her house. Out here the rising moon provided scarce light. Beth’s nearest neighbor lived a stiff hike down the road.
Zach lived on his father’s farm now, in the house she’d loved during her marriage. But she’d hated the place after Ned died. A tree had fallen on him as he’d cleared a field during a storm’s early gusts. She and Zach, only eight at the time, had taken refuge from their loss on this lonely, untamable patch of ground that had once belonged to her family. She’d wanted no more farms.
“Tell me what’s wrong, son.”
He grinned. “How’d you know?” A little tired, a lot cagey, still wearing the uniform he usually took off the second he left the sheriff’s office behind, he pushed his hands into his pockets. “Never mind. You just know.”
“Better come inside. Want some coffee?”
She always had a pot on the warmer. Mr. Coffee had become her best friend the first day he’d shown up at the hardware store in town.
Her son towered over her as he ducked to cross the threshold into the small living room. Her grandfather had built this house, and every room formed a perfect square. Zach used to say the squares made him feel claustrophobic. He worked at the knot in his tie as she patted his shoulder.
“Come into the kitchen. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten.”
“Try not to mother me, Mom.”
“It’s still my job.”
He never gave her credit for the times she tried to let him alone. But she was a Southern woman—when she sensed a heavy load of dread on her son’s shoulders, she got the urge to throw something in a casserole. Feeding him was her only refuge when Zach turned as standoffish as the bushy gray cat that sprawled in front of her fireplace.
Spike and Zach shared the same views on comfort. They wanted to be in the room, but they preferred a minimum of human affection.
Zach followed her. “I have to tell you something.”
“How bad is it?” Since that day Seth had come up from the field to tell her about Ned, she tended to expect the worst. She tried not to, but she had to pray nothing worse than losing Ned ever happened to her while she had a son and a family who depended on her to be sane.
“It’s good in a way. In a lot of ways.” Zach opened the refrigerator and popped the top on a pale blue plastic bowl. “Chili? Smells great.”
Elbowing him aside, she took the bowl and dished a couple of Zach-sized servings into a saucepan. No microwaves in her house. She cooked the old-fashioned way. “I’m waiting.”
“I’m trying to think of a way to say it.” He opened the door to the back porch. “Let me bring in some wood for you. The weather forecast says we might have a freeze tonight.”
“Okay.” She plucked a sweet onion from the wire basket that hung above her counter. If he had to belly up to telling her, it couldn’t be that good.
While the screen door banged open and then shut each time Zach carried a load of wood from the pile out back, Beth peeled the onion.
Spike slinked in to investigate the racket. He hunkered down at her feet while she diced onion the way Zach liked, in small chunks. With the cat twining around her ankles, she cut a hunk of corn bread and set it on a bread plate at the table. She was stirring the steaming chili as Zach got his fill of loading the bin.
He came back in, sniffing the chili’s aroma. Again, like Spike. “I didn’t even know I was hungry.” He slapped on the faucet to wash his hands at the sink. “Aren’t you eating?”
“I ate with Gran, but I might have a bite of corn bread.”
“I hate to eat alone.”
He never admitted that to anyone else, but she knew. It pricked at her during the long two-week periods when Lily stayed at Helene’s. Zach’s discomfort with being alone had started after the accident, too.
He needed a family. Helene hadn’t been a good wife for him, but someday a woman would arrive sporting sense enough to value a guy who always did the right thing—even when it came to letting his wife go. Beth often wondered how much of Zach’s pain came from a suspicion that, as Helene alleged, he hadn’t been good enough for her.
“Mom, do you remember I was in Chicago before I took that last flight?”
It was an odd beginning, but she went with him. “How could I forget?” She could have bitten her tongue off.
With a look of forebearance, Zach went to the counter where she’d set out a bowl. He ladled chili from the saucepan and sprinkled onions over the top.
“I knew someone in Chicago—a woman named Olivia Kendall.”
“Olivia Kendall? I’ve heard that name.”
He lifted his head so sharply chili spilled over the edge of the ladle to splatter the stove. “How? Did she write me here?”
“Huh?” Beth circled the counter to the family room and plucked a magazine from the stack beside her favorite chair. “No one wrote to you here. I always wondered why. I thought you surely had friends.” She showed him last month’s issue of Relevance. “I know her from this. How did you meet a woman like her?” All he needed was another Helene type.
“I’m not sure.” He shook his head and then lifted his spoon for a bite. Normally, chili was the next best thing to nectar for Zach. He savored it like those folks on the food channel swilled choice wine. This bite, he swallowed almost without chewing, but then cringed and ran for the sink where he splashed water into his burned mouth.
“I’m sorry, son.” She got him a beer, twisted the top and put the bottle on the counter. “Now, tell me about Olivia Kendall. What does she want from you?”
His still-wary gaze reminded her of the little boy who’d once thought she knew everything. After all these years, some of that child’s vulnerability remained in Zach’s eyes. He’d hate it if he knew.
“I knew her well. I—” He broke off, his face tight. She couldn’t tell if the chili burn hurt him or if he was struggling with the words. “Apparently, I cared for her.” He looked almost ashamed. “We have a son. Olivia and I.”
While she stared, mouth literally agape, he took the bottle top from her hand and tossed it into the garbage beneath the sink. Then he maneuvered her into the nearest chair. He might be giving her time to take it in. More likely, he was embarrassed. He’d had Lily too quickly with Helene, too.
“How does a man forget a child?”
“Or the boy’s mother,” Zach said. “She was young. I know what kind of resources her family has, but I hate to think of what she went through, being a single mother because I disappeared.” He patted his pockets as if he were looking for something. “Olivia brought a picture, but I left it at home.” He pointed to the mantel in her living room. “He looks just like those.”
She turned her head slowly. She’d all but papered her house in photos of Ned and Zach. She hadn’t wanted her boy to forget his father. “He looks like you? Or your daddy?”
“So much like me you wouldn’t be able to tell our pictures apart.” He pointed toward the end of the table, at his kindergarten graduation photo above a dried-flower arrangement. “He’s that old.”
She stared at the picture, taking time to let Zach’s news sink in. Ned, as tall as Zach was now, but already more gray about the head than blond, had hoisted their son in miniature cap and gown to his shoulder. As proud as if their Zach had finished Harvard magna cum laude. Good thing, because he’d been gone twelve years by the time Zach finished college on the government’s dime.
She shook her head. “How’d you even meet someone like her? That family hardly keeps our kind of company.”
“After she told me about Evan I didn’t think to ask for details.” His haggard expression was painful to see, but he turned away, rejecting her concern for a swig of his beer. “I left on my last mission before she could tell me she was pregnant, and then she saw my picture in the news. Her father tried to get more information out of the Navy, but Kendall was the last person they wanted to see, and they didn’t know about Olivia—any more than she knew what I was really doing. She never heard I survived until she saw a report on the bank robbery.”
“My God.”
He took his chair again, his moving body pushing the heavy oak table away. “Yeah.”
“Is she looking for support?” A mother’s protectiveness sharpened her voice. For once, Zach didn’t seem to notice.
“Olivia Kendall,” he repeated, as if her name said it all.
It did.
“Still, I owe my son support.”
True. “What else does she want?”
“A father for Evan.” He stood again, his meal forgotten as he strode the creaking wooden floor. “That’s what she says.”
After Helene, it was a hard concept to follow. “Do you believe her?”
“I think so.” He lifted a troubled gaze. “I have to because I want to see him. I don’t know if Evan needs me, but I’m shocked that I’ve had a son for five years. He’s at an age where it must be obvious he’s different from other boys and girls.”
“Nonsense. We don’t live in that world anymore. People divorce now. Unwed mothers keep their children. He won’t have…”
“You see his life through an adult’s eyes. I’m trying to look through his.” He turned. “And I need to know if you can be his grandmother—if you can love him as much as you love Lily.”
“You have to ask?” He’d lost his ability to trust, along with those memories that had disappeared in his injuries. She worshiped her granddaughter. “I value every second with Lily, just as you do, and I’ll love your boy as much. Let’s ask Olivia and—” She broke off. “You said his name is Evan?” He nodded. “Let’s invite them to your gran and grandpa’s anniversary celebration.”
Seth and Greta Calvert had loved her like a daughter. They’d made her part of their family the day Ned had brought her to these mountains, and since then they’d all claimed countless other “marry-ins.” They’d claim Olivia and Evan, too, and make them welcome.
“I just hope we don’t overwhelm him.” Beth assumed Zach agreed with her plan, without giving him time to differ. “Does his mother have family I might not have read about?”
“Only her father.” Distraction distanced Zach’s voice. “She named Evan for me, Mom. His middle name is Zachary.”
Red-rimmed eyes described the gratitude he obviously couldn’t voice. He already knew how to love this child who’d appeared out of the past he couldn’t explain or defeat.
She went to him. “He’s in Chicago?”
Zach nodded.
“When do you go?” Since the day he’d come home to heal, she hated to see Zach leave the safety of Bardill’s Ridge.
“Tomorrow morning.” He looped his arm around her shoulders. “Warn the rest of the family to treat Evan and Olivia right? Remind them not to confuse her with Helene.”
“We’re all protective of you.” She hugged him briefly. He hardly ever allowed more. “If she’s good to you, we’ll love her.”
He let her go and scooped up Spike, who inexplicably began kneading his fellow loner’s shoulder. “No,” Zach said. “You’ll love her because Evan will feel more accepted if you do.” With a last pat for Spike as he set him on a padded kitchen chair, he headed for her door. “I’ll call you from Chicago.”
“Are you bringing him home?”
“Chicago is his home. I thought he’d have an easier time if we met where he’s comfortable, but while I’m there, I’ll arrange visitation with Olivia.”
“Another visitation agreement?”
He nodded, a frown creasing his forehead. “Or something like it. Olivia seems to believe we should take decisions slowly. I have no intention of losing contact with my son, now that she’s told me about him, but I figure we’ll fight the battle of how often I get to see him when it comes.”
Hardly good news, but she stomped down hard on her opinions. Zach stopped at the door.
“Everything will be fine, Mom.”
He offered the same reassurance every time he left town. He expected no answer. He was only promising he wouldn’t die when he left Bardill’s Ridge. Obviously, she knew something could happen, but he was a good son to try to persuade her not to worry.
She added some comfort of her own to her “I know” smile. When he came back they’d all find a way to live with another custody arrangement. She waved him off, and he tried to smile back, but his hard-edged face lingered in her mind after the door slammed at his back.
She slumped against the table. Apart from the fact that he’d clearly been reckless six years ago, he didn’t deserve all this. A past that wouldn’t let him alone and a child who’d been a secret from him. When would Fate let up on her son?
She reached for the phone to circle the family wagons for support.
THE MOON BARELY LIT his way as he got out of his car in front of the Dogwood, his uncle Patrick and aunt Eliza’s bed-and-breakfast. His cousin Molly erupted from the front door, flying as fast as one of her roguish kindergarten students. On seeing his truck she stopped short. As she waited for him to climb out her smile bent the other way into a frown.
“What’s up, Zach? Something bugging you?”
“Sort of.” He wrapped an arm around her waist, at ease with being Molly’s hero. No matter what he did, he’d maintained his status with her since Patrick and Eliza had made her their foster child. No small feat, considering the neglected life she’d endured until they rescued her. “Where are you headed in such a hurry?”
“Parent-teacher conferences at school tonight. I have to change clothes.” She slapped her jeans. Molly, the hellion Aunt Eliza had saved from reform school liked to appear demure in front of her students’ parents.
“You’d better go,” he said, laughing, “if you plan to reach your classroom before midnight.”
“Ha ha ha.” She caught his arm as he tried to pull away. “That was homage to your lousy sense of humor. Now explain your problem.”
“I have no problem.” He had to talk to Olivia. His mom would cover the family bases for him.
Molly’s smile faded again. “You’re scaring me.”
Calverts large and small had treated him as if he were on the verge of a breakdown since the accident. Maybe if he’d managed a happier marriage, maybe if he and Helene could be civil to each other… “I’m fine, but I have to talk to one of your mom’s guests before she goes to bed.”
“Ah.” She glanced at a second-floor window bordered with Victorian gingerbread that their cousin Sophie’s father had carved during Patrick and Eliza’s restoration of the old building. “Olivia. I just took her fresh towels and bath oil.” Molly slipped him a sidelong, sisterly glance. “Or was that for you, too?”
He looked away from her, as distracting, erotic pictures of Olivia formed in his head. “I hope the parents and the other teachers don’t know you talk like that.” He ruffled Molly’s hair, but she surprised him with a hug rather than the karate chop she usually dispensed for such a gesture.
“If you don’t explain, I’ll only ask your mom.” She headed for her car, waving goodbye over her head. “I’ll bet she needs firewood.”
“I already carried in enough for the whole winter.”
“I’ll paint her kitchen.”
“If you can persuade her to give up that classic wallpaper.”
Molly tossed a condescending glance over her shoulder, but he only grinned. Crazy Molly. Early on, trying to survive after her natural parents had pretty much abandoned her, she’d damn near destroyed the school where she taught now. Aunt Eliza and Uncle Patrick had transformed her from a dangerous punk into family. Still, it was a good thing his mom had plenty of leftovers. Molly could eat her weight in homemade chili.
Zach climbed the steps a few at a time and pushed through the B&B’s front door. His aunt looked up from the registration desk, sliding her hand through salt-and-pepper hair that brushed her shoulders.
“Evening, Zach. Beth said you were on your way.”
“That was fast work, even for Mom. Which room, Aunt Eliza?”
“Top of the stairs, immediate left.”
“Thanks.”
“Better hurry. Molly just took her some bath oil.”
He ran up the stairs. At Olivia’s door, he paused, his hand raised to knock. Even through the thick wood, he heard water running. He banged with extra force.
A moment later, Olivia opened the door, black hair flying, eyes wide. She opened her mouth in a throaty gasp. “Zach.” Her hands went to the pale pink lapels of her robe.
It was hardly sexy attire, but he found himself imagining the warm body that curved beneath the terry cloth. By the time he met her gaze, a glacier had formed in the icy gray eyes that were quickly becoming his obsession.
“I want to meet Evan,” he said.
The ice melted. She seemed to reach for him without lifting a finger. “Do you want to know Evan?”
“I’m his father. He’s my son.”
“That’s not good enough. I’ve kept him safe—and happy enough—for five years. I need to hear plain talk.”
“I want to be Evan’s father for the rest of my life. I want to hear him call me dad.”
Smiling, she let the robe go. He noticed the swell of lightly tanned flesh between the open lapels, but he was man enough to know their son mattered more than lust.
“We’re in this together,” he said. “I want to know Evan.”
She grabbed his hand—to shake it of all things. He stared at her small, strong fingers. It was an odd way to start a relationship with your son’s mother.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEXT MORNING, Zach followed Olivia back to the airport in Knoxville. All the way down the mountain road his heart hammered. Sweat beaded on his lip again and again. His body’s natural response to an unnatural fear was about to reveal one of his most humiliating secrets to Olivia. Zach Calvert, former Navy pilot, was terrified of flying.
Forcing himself to ignore the fact he had to get on a plane, he concentrated on Evan waiting at the other end of the flight. Meeting his son was worth a couple of hellish hours.
At the airport, Olivia veered off to return her rental car while Zach parked in a lot. They’d agreed to meet at the ticket counter. Tall and confident as ever, she was easy to spot. Too easy.
They checked in without talking to each other and then headed for their gate. Walking at her side, he noticed how the other travelers stared.
Her poise and her flawless face, an aristocratic, elegantly drawn nose, and her intelligent gaze vied with the tousled confusion of long black hair. She drew attention partly because she didn’t seem to know she was suck-the last-breath-from-your-lungs gorgeous.
Zach had nothing to set on the security conveyor belt, but he waited while Olivia pushed her briefcase and her purse through.
Her poise made him more aware of his Achilles’ heel. A smart guy would have rejected her offer to arrange for seats together. A smart guy wouldn’t let a self-assured woman who’d been in sole charge of his son for the past five years discover he was afraid of flying.
They cleared security with more than an hour to wait for their flight. Olivia was already fishing work out of her briefcase as they closed in on their gate. Zach held back. He couldn’t sit there for sixty minutes without throwing up.
“I’m going to look for a paper,” he said. “And a coffee. Want one?”
“Sure. With cream and sugar.” Sitting, she pushed a pen behind her ear. “Wait— Will you make that half-and-half?”
Nodding, he turned, breathing easier the more distance he put between them. How was he going to pretend to be normal on the plane?
He took his time and passed the coffee shop twice before he turned in. A teenager in a cap and acne came to the counter and threw him a look that asked for his order.
“A bottle of water.” Last thing he needed was caffeine. “And a large coffee. With half-and-half.”
“The milk and stuff’s over there,” the kid said. “That’ll be seven-fifty.”
“Thanks. Do you have newspapers?”
“Beside the milk and the stir sticks. You pay here. That’ll cost you another fifty cents.”
Zach paid and tucked the paper beneath his arm. He stirred sugar and half-and-half into Olivia’s coffee and started back to the gate. She didn’t look up until he sat beside her. Even then she just reached for the cup.
“Thanks.” She sipped. “Perfect. I thought you wanted coffee, too.” She might not be looking at him, but she saw too much for his peace of mind.
“I reconsidered.” He unscrewed his water bottle’s cap and guzzled half the contents. It didn’t help.
Olivia checked the time. “We’ll be boarding soon. Maybe we should discuss what we intend to tell Evan.”
“Discuss what?” He felt his face harden. “There’s no argument. We tell him who I am.”
“From the start? What if you change your mind?”
He stared at her. Who did she see when she looked at him? “Did you ever change your mind about wanting Evan?”
She let her mouth open slightly, showing surprise. The moisture on her full lower lip made breathing a little harder for Zach.
“You can’t appreciate what you just said.” The joy in her smile made him glad, whatever it was. “I’m never sure I’m the best mom Evan could have. I have to work. He spends time in day care. Even my father assumed I wouldn’t want to be a mother when I was so young, but you assumed I never considered an alternative.”
His throat went tight. For a moment, it was as if he could almost remember her, as if the feelings they’d shared were there, on the fringes of what felt real to him now. “Maybe I can’t imagine you not wanting to keep our son.”
She widened her gaze. “Well, you’d be right.” As if the subject had grown too personal, she busied herself with the pages in her lap.
“You’re uncomfortable discussing your pregnancy with me.”
She nodded. “It’s all still as real as if it just happened to me, but to you I’m a stranger. I loved being pregnant, feeling Evan grow, even though I—” She stopped, her face pink with a blush. “I missed you.”
“I was angry for a long time about what happened, but I thought I was getting over it.” He wiped his mouth, his resentment an old, no-longer-welcome partner.
“Why did they give you so much training for one mission?” She was thoughtful. He was surprised she hadn’t asked before.
He glanced at the empty seats around them. “I was assigned to do that kind of work from then on, but I was chosen for that flight because Kimberly Salva was a friend.” His whole body seemed to tighten as he pictured Kim, idealistic, smarter than he’d ever be, full of fire for her own career. “We went to the Academy together.”
Olivia drew back. “I don’t mean to pry, but you’re angry when you talk about her. You were just friends?”
He nodded. “She was a year behind me. I’m angry because I lost her. She had a husband and a two-year-old daughter, and she trusted me.”
“And you’re not over it yet?”
He considered lying. His own child’s mother deserved the truth. “Maybe I never will be. I get to meet my son. Her daughter will never see her again. It’s not fair that I lived when I couldn’t save her.” Olivia’s scratching pen drew his gaze. She was outlining the same abstract, many-pointed doodle so hard the page looked ready to tear. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“No.” But her glossy black hair hid her face from him.
“I’m not going to hurt Evan. I only lose control with people who want to kill the citizens I’m trying to protect.”
“You’re joking, but people don’t make jokes like that without a little bit of honesty.”
He curved his hand around her wrist, making sure to touch only where her black blazer covered her skin. “I’m telling you the truth. I wouldn’t hide anything that might affect Evan. I’ve explained my problems with Helene. I don’t want you and me to have difficulties. I’m a good father to Lily, and I’ll be a good father to Evan.”
“I should have seen you with her. Not seeing you together was a mistake.”
“I didn’t tell her,” he said.
“Thanks.” She sagged against her chair, clearly deep in thought about how much fathering a wounded man could do. He couldn’t keep assuring her of his reliable mental health. He’d start to sound crazy. A sudden thought brought Olivia upright again. “What if Lily or Helene find out about Evan through the papers?”
“They won’t. Helene doesn’t read them, and I never saw her watch the news.”
“What if someone else tells her?”
“Leland—her husband—is a reasonable guy. He’ll figure out the facts and hold Helene back until I get in touch. He won’t let her say something hurtful to Lily.”
“You trust her new husband more than you trust her?”
“We didn’t know each other when we got married.” How well had he known Olivia?
She turned away, leading him to believe she’d experienced broken trust. With a painful start, he realized he’d taught her that lesson. She’d trusted him.
“I didn’t mean to leave you,” he said.
“Your amnesia makes it no easier for me. I tell myself over and over that you won’t just abandon Evan, but if you’re not good to him, I’ll—”
Ahhh. He understood rage. Though she sputtered to a halt, her vehemence drew him closer.
The vulnerable curve of her lips fascinated him. He’d made love to her and yet he had no memory of her mouth’s firm, tempting texture. She knew secrets about him, about them together that he might never remember.
Her mouth twisted into a smile, and he dragged his gaze back to hers. “Can’t think of a threat?” he asked. When she looked serious, he regretted teasing her.
“I won’t need a threat if you hurt my son.”
“Our son.”
Her expression, stony, determined, and not in the least wary of him, was all too familiar. She like Helene did when she was about to announce he’d broken her rules and to hell with the ones in the custody agreement. He knocked back the rest of his water. They finished their wait in a troubled state of truce. It was almost a relief when the attendant began to call their flight.
He stayed behind Olivia as they handed over their boarding passes and entered the jetway’s gaping maw. His feet grew heavier, but he forced himself to keep walking.
Inside the narrow passage, his heart thudded in his ears. He felt as if he might plod right through the flimsy flooring. At last, the door of the aircraft came into view, along with a few precious inches of daylight around the gate’s edges. He could see himself pushing through the plastic material and jumping to the ground. A broken leg or two would be worth escape.
The flight attendant eyed him with concern, but passed him through. To first-class. Which he couldn’t afford.
He hung back when Olivia offered him the choice of aisle or window, with no idea he had a problem. Behind him, the rest of the first-class crowd began muttering at their unaccustomed delay.
“I can’t pay for this.” He grasped exactly how different their worlds were. How different they’d look to Evan.
“Fortunately, I can, so it’s not a problem for either of us.” She passed him her briefcase. “Could you put this…”
Before he answered, another attendant took her case. “May I take your jacket, sir?” she asked.
Olivia settled into the window seat. As if the cost of the ticket was no big deal. He’d bet on it being at least three of his car payments. He shrugged off his jacket and surrendered it. As he sat and latched on to the seat belt with sweating hands, Olivia nodded his way.
“You’re doing me a favor. Forget about the cost.”
“Being my son’s father isn’t a favor. I’m in this for good—you’d better get used to it.”
“I meant for now, coming with me when you don’t really know who I am. I probably would have asked for a DNA test.”
The idea startled him. “I didn’t think of it. The pictures… I can’t deny his face.” He rubbed his hands down the thighs of his jeans.
She smiled and he had the feeling he’d passed some test. Little did she know. She had no experience sharing custody. They both faced plenty of tests to come.
“I have videotapes we’ve been making since the day he was born, and a library full of photo albums.”
“I’d like to make copies.” As he spoke the plane rocked. He turned to the aisle, gripping the armrests to hide his shaking hands.
“Sure.” Olivia looked him up and down. “Are you all right?”
Grunting an affirmative, he managed to ease breath in and out at regular intervals. His humiliation was complete when the kid in front of him sat up on his knees to peer at Zach.
“You sick, mister? I always use that bag down there.” He slithered over the back of the seat to reach for the one in front of Zach. “You’ll be okay.”
The kid’s mom snatched him down so hard he seemed to disappear. Zach glanced at Olivia, whose close scrutiny made him feel weak.
He waved off an offer of wine and sensed Olivia doing the same. The floor rumbled beneath them as the engines powered up and then down. Flaps opened and closed as the pilots went through their preflight checks. Zach’s mouth dried like a desert in a drought.
He studied the stuff sticking out of the seat pocket. He might have to grab one of those bags.
At the first hint of movement he closed his eyes. When the jet jerked backward, his sweating palms slid off the armrests. A hand closed over his. He opened his eyes, biting back a shout.
It was Olivia, of course. She pulled his hand into her lap and deliberately threaded their fingers together. Her touch was more warmth and comfort than he’d known in six years. More than he had a right to know, considering.
“You don’t have to pretend.” Her low, liquid voice intoxicated more quickly than strong wine. “I know about being scared. When I heard you’d died, I tried to pretend I was strong, but I was terrified my dad would fire me and throw me out. He’s terribly proud of our name, and I knew he’d be ashamed of me. I’d always lived a spoiled, easy kind of life, but food and clothing and car seats and immunizations felt beyond my reach. Can you imagine Evan or Lily going to bed hungry because you’d been foolish?”
“Why are you telling me this?” She’d hardly been an adult herself when he’d left her pregnant and alone. Not having known didn’t seem to ease his guilt any more than it made her feel better.
“I told you because we don’t trust each other yet.” Each word came out under strain. “I can’t forget you disappeared, and you’ve had a bad time I can’t imagine and a bad marriage that makes you think a woman can’t share a child with his father. I just learned something about you that you’d rather I hadn’t, and I thought if I gave you something equally personal, we could skip a few steps learning about each other.” She squeezed his hand with a shrug that didn’t quite look casual. “And I know how it feels to believe every breath is the last one you’re going to squeeze past the boulder on your chest.”
He leaned toward her without turning his head. He didn’t want her to see the terror in his eyes. “Even if your father came through for you, what you faced makes my flying phobia trivial.”
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Anna Adams
How is it possible to forget the love of your life?Zach Calvert has no memory of his last three years as a Navy pilot. And for the most part, he's resigned himself to that. He's content with his new life as the sheriff of his hometown, happy that his small daughter lives close by.But everything changes when he discovers he has a five-year-old son and a lover he can't remember.
“You must be Olivia Kendall.”
His voice was as thick as if he were thinking of making love to her. He clearly was not, but Zach’s low, I’ve-waited-for-you-all-my-life tone had seduced her when they’d met the first time.
She’d been unable to forget him. He obviously hadn’t bothered to remember.
Seeking composure, she crossed to his desk and offered her hand. “Call me Olivia.” For their son’s sake she had to feel out the situation and wait for the right moment to remind Zach of their past.
When he closed his fingers around hers, memories flooded back, images of his hand on her waist, at her breast, the scent of him as he lowered his head to kiss her. She gritted her teeth, recognizing the texture of his palm as if she were touching her own skin.
Why had this man remained such a part of her? As if what she wanted to feel didn’t matter. She backed up a step. He had to release her. Curiosity flickered in his gaze, but not recognition.
Her first love had forgotten her.
Dear Reader,
Welcome to Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, and to the Calvert family. You’re about to meet three cousins who find love in their own Smoky Mountain backyards.
Put yourself in Olivia Kendall’s shoes. You thought your son’s father, a Navy pilot, died five years ago during a training mission. Then you see him on the news, a small-town sheriff, foiling a bank robbery in Tennessee. You’ve gotten over him—or have you? You’ve made a life that doesn’t include him. You could even choose not to tell him about his son, but a man has a right to know he has a child.
And besides, where’s he been?
Now think about Zach. He lost one of his best friends and his memory in the crash that ended his Navy career. He lost his ability to believe he had a right to life or happiness. When Olivia comes to town he discovers he has a five-year-old son and a lover he doesn’t remember. Together, Olivia and Zach find love that heals the wounds of their past and forges the family that is their future.
I’d love to hear what you think. You can reach me at anna@annaadams.net. Come back to Bardill’s Ridge in November when Zach’s cousin Dr. Sophie Calvert abandons her bodyguard groom, Ian, at the altar.
Best wishes,
Anna Adams
The Secret Father
Anna Adams
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Debbie, my cousin, but much more—my sister
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
Six Years Ago
OLIVIA KENDALL HAD three problems. She was pregnant, she couldn’t find her baby’s father, and the moment her own father—James Kendall of Kendall Press—found out, he was bound to fire her to avoid the shame of her unwed motherhood.
Six months out of Columbia’s School of Journalism, she’d spent the summer and fall learning Kendall Press from the mail room up. She couldn’t afford to get fired. Even if she found Lieutenant Zach Calvert, she’d need a salary to support her unborn child.
Behind her the door opened, and every head in the room bent toward the monitors in front of them. After his daily management meeting, her dad always hunted her down to remind her she was wasting her time and his with her learn-it-all attitude. He crossed the quiet, equipment-filled room. “Any news today?”
Her job this week was her favorite—scanning the wires for good stories. “Plenty.” She clipped the word, tugging down the hem of her blouse. She couldn’t be more than seven weeks along, but James Kendall hadn’t reached the top of the media heap by ignoring other people’s secrets.
He stopped beside her desk and pulled up a chair. “You’re always defensive at work because I’m right.” Lowering his voice so that it was covered by the computer’s hum, he flicked the screen she was reading. “You shouldn’t distract yourself from your true job with these menial tasks.”
“Learning how Kendall Press runs is my job, Dad.”
“I’ll teach you. My father taught me.”
“The same father who suggested you park me with him and Grandma while you sowed more wild oats?” Her mother had died in childbirth. Her dad had never remarried.
“Father may have appreciated the value of a good nanny, but he left me a strong company and I’m passing you an empire. Who else can show you how to nourish it?”
He was in his CEO frame of mind. Olivia inched away from him, too stressed to deal with her dad or her curious co-workers. “I’m busy.” And their same old argument meant nothing compared to the fact that her child’s father had disappeared. A Naval pilot, Zach had embarked on a two-week training mission over a month ago.
The weeks had passed. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t shown up. She’d left countless messages on his cell phone. He’d never given her a number for his apartment or his office. She couldn’t even say where he worked for sure. They’d always arranged to meet somewhere neutral. He’d been in Chicago since the end of summer to train on some sort of equipment he’d avoided discussing. She’d seen his apartment once, and only because they’d been desperate for each other and her father had been home that night.
Zach had been more than reserved about his life. He’d been secretive.
Working on very little sleep and even less food, she felt queasy, frightened and idiotic for getting herself in this fix. She refused to leave one more message begging Zach to call her.
Suddenly her father took her arm and turned her to face him. “What’s really wrong with you, Olivia?”
“I don’t want to argue about work.” She avoided his dark brown eyes. “I understand how you feel about Kendall Press. I love knowing what’s going on in the world before anyone else. It’s a rush of power, but I have to learn the job my way.”
“Why don’t you trust my judgment anymore?”
She took refuge in the glowing screen in front of her. She’d changed because she was going to have Zach Calvert’s baby, and when her father knew he might force her out of her livelihood and her home.
Home. A place Zach had described with a softness so unlike him. He’d longed for the farmhouse and the relations he loved in Tennessee. His hunger for family felt foreign to the only child of an only child.
“Olivia, tell me what’s got you on edge.” Losing patience, her father spun her chair.
She stared at him, but her head was with Zach. What if he’d gone home? To Bardill’s Ridge and all those Calverts. The possibility tempted her to confess everything. If anyone could find a guy in a small Tennesseean town, her dad could.
“Good God.” Realization lit his eyes. “That pilot dumped you.” He’d always said Zach, at twenty-six, was too old for her, his job too dangerous. What he’d meant was he didn’t want her to love someone whose work could take her away from the family business. “Olivia?”
“Yeah.” She’d told James about the training mission. “Zach was supposed to come back weeks ago. If he’s home, he’s avoiding me.”
“Have you called? Did you go to his apartment building?”
“I only have a cell phone number he doesn’t answer and I’ve leaned on the buzzer at his building so many times I think his doorman’s about to set the police on me.”
Her father’s head went back as if she’d struck him. “How serious are you about this guy?”
She barely kept from touching her belly where their baby grew, but the truth—that she loved Zach—wouldn’t come out of her mouth either. Not even she trusted true love at twenty-one. She blinked back tears that seemed to stun her dad.
“Exactly where was he training? The address.”
“He couldn’t tell me.” Maybe he just wouldn’t.
“What do you know about his family?”
“I saw pictures at his apartment and I asked about everyone in them.” His grandparents, hugging each other in photos on his mantel and his cousins, Sophie and Molly, who’d been his surrogate sisters. His mom, Beth, he’d seemed anxious about. She’d also never remarried after his father’s death, and he thought she was lonely.
If his mother’s loneliness mattered to him, wouldn’t his lover’s?
“You believe he had the training assignment?”
She nodded. Except for the moments when he’d made love to her, his mission had occupied him as if he was already gone. She took a deep breath and applied some logic. “Maybe he took leave and went to Tennessee. He was homesick.”
“That’s where he’s from? I’d give you time off to go see him if you’d get over this guy and concentrate on work.”
“He didn’t invite me.” He’d made her want to know his “people.” He’d made her love the place. He’d needed the blue-and-green misty mountains that backed every photo on his wall and each memory in his love of home. The air and the soil and the Smoky Mountains that formed Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, ran in his blood like the blood of his family.
It wasn’t her way or her father’s. They cared for their North Shore entry in the National Historic Register, but it was entrusted to them. It owned no part of her soul. Zach was rooted in those Tennesseean hills.
She turned back to the monitor on her desk. A headline, something about a pilot caught her eye. She clicked to read it.
A photo took shape. Even though she was thinking of Zach, she never expected to see his face.
But there he was. The full headline burned itself in her mind. “Pilot Lost On Mission—U.S. Navy Refuses Comment.”
Loss slammed into her. Her muscles clenched. Olivia splayed her fingers across the picture. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe, praying she’d imagined his face. She made herself look again.
Zach. Dear God, Zach. “No.” Shaking her head, she sucked a breath out of dwindling oxygen.
“Hey.” Her dad caught her just in time to keep her head from slamming into the monitor.
In that second life changed. Forever.
She straightened, though her body felt ten times its normal weight. Tugging free of her father’s helping hands, she crossed both arms across her flat stomach. Her baby took precedence over a freefall into grief.
Zach was gone. She’d be their baby’s only parent, and she’d never know whether Zach had loved her even a little bit—enough to want their child.
“Dad.” His name broke in pieces in her mouth as she stared at her dead lover’s face. “I’m pregnant.”
CHAPTER ONE
A BLUNT FINGERNAIL PRODDED Sheriff Zach Calvert’s shoulder from behind. “You’re the law,” said a woman’s voice. “Can’t you order those tellers to speed up?”
Zach turned, and Tammy Henderson, who co-owned Henderson Seed and Feed with her husband, tucked a brown deposit envelope beneath her elbow.
“How many times have I asked you and Mike to call me before you bring that?”
She elbowed the zippered bag closer to her body. “We took your advice and started making three deposits a week.”
That was about the best he could hope for in a town where the citizens believed crime happened everywhere except here. He checked the clock above the gray granite counter. “Is that right?” It was two minutes slower than his watch. “This is my weekend to have Lily.”
Tammy twisted her own watch and then nodded at the clock. “Tennessee Standard Bank and I match. What time do you have to be at Helene’s?”
“Six o’clock.” Or his ex-wife would make a stink in front of their four-year-old daughter. Helene liked to punish him for imagined transgressions and she had an advantage. He’d do anything to keep from hurting his child.
“I’ve heard how Helene tries to keep Lil…”
Zach lifted his brows. Tammy stopped, her mouth open, her weathered face reddening. When she looked away, Zach felt like a bully, but gossip bred like kudzu in Bardill’s Ridge. Being the number-one topic over the Formica tables at the Train Depot Café didn’t sit well with him.
And how would Lily feel if she heard the talk?
Zach tapped his holstered gun as the long black arm on the clock swept each second away, and the guy in front of him, a hunter in camouflage, twitched from foot to foot.
Time to give up and eat the late fee on his car loan payment. But as he turned, the town librarian marched to the counter, her back ramrod straight with annoyance. The hunter took her place at the front of the line, yanking his jacket as if he couldn’t make it fit right over his shoulders. Three and a half minutes ran by before he crossed to the next teller.
Another time check. Helene would explode in exactly twenty-two minutes. Unless he made it. Which he just might do if another patron walked away right now.
The camo guy turned. Zach almost breathed a thanks heavenward, but the other man opened his field jacket and revealed the reason he was uncomfortable. A silver cannon—or a gun the size of one—rested on his hip.
“Nobody move, or I’ll kill you all.” Something—fear?—sent his voice into an unnaturally high pitch as he pulled the gun out.
Not good. If he was scared, he might shoot anyway.
“Damn.” The word slipped out of Zach’s mouth as he eased in front of Tammy Henderson and her deposit bag. Any chance of reaching Lily in less than twenty minutes had just gone down the barrel of that gun. At least he’d caught the armed thief’s wild gaze.
“I said no talking, and especially not you, Sheriff.” He used the back of his hand to wipe spit off the top of his lip. “I’m in charge here.” He swung the weapon, his finger tightening on the trigger. The gesture told Zach that pulling the trigger took pressure. A good thing or else half the customers would be dead now.
The guy turned to the nearest teller, his gun veering in a silver arc that made Zach clench his hands in two fists. What kind of a coward did this to innocent people?
“Don’t even breathe near the alarm. I can see all four sides of this building from the windows.”
He nudged the nearest young woman with the gun barrel, shaking so hard the metal bumped her chin. Her eyes sparkled with tears, and Zach actually pictured himself snapping the other guy’s spine.
“If a police car comes, you die. Anyone makes a move, you die.” The thief swept the other patrons with a scornful gaze and stamped his booted foot. “Put your damn faces on the floor!”
Zach took his time, sparing a glance for Tammy, who was obviously trying to hide a third of a week’s profits. Zach grabbed the bag and slid it over to the thief’s feet.
“Hey,” Tammy protested.
“You want him to think you’re stingy?”
“You got more, lady?” Camo guy scooped up the bag and then came over to kick the purse wrapped around Tammy’s arm. “Dump it.”
Zach focused on the weapon while the robber looked to see whether Tammy was hiding any more money. As if he were reviewing a schematic, Zach saw exactly how to part the man from his gun and put him on the floor unconscious and on his stomach—bonus points for ease of cuffing.
Noting that the citizens in his care had all reached the marble, Zach sank the rest of the way, calming his rage to prevent impairing his response. He angled his gaze to keep an eye on the gunman.
“What are you looking at?” the guy asked. “I’m happy to start killing now. With you.”
People cried out around him, but Zach waited, forcing a few more seconds to go by. Keep it low, non-confrontational. No need to get anyone killed.
“How do you plan to escape? The second you leave, the law will pour in from all the nearby towns where everyone knows everyone else. You’re going to stand out.”
“Stand out?” This time he jabbed the gun in the direction of Zach’s head. “I didn’t ask for advice, Andy Taylor. Why don’t you keep your mouth shut?” He nodded at the tellers. “Faster with the money—I want it now.”
Zach smiled as he willed his body into the air. A fraction of a second later his foot connected with Camo Guy’s cheekbone. The thief rose off his feet, flew about a yard and landed on his face. Out like a light.
And no one died in Bardill’s Ridge. But damned if he didn’t long to kick the punk lying at his feet for threatening his people.
Instead, he leaned over the gunman, grabbed the weapon and took it apart. He’d flown helicopters in the Navy until he’d been trained to kill with the nearest weapon—or with his bare hands. A crash and a head wound had stolen his memory of that time and the two years preceding it. He sometimes discovered secrets about himself. Skills he shouldn’t have.
Though he shouldn’t know squat about any gun except the one he’d fired to qualify on the range, he scattered the pieces of the cannon across the marble floor. Continuing on unnerving instincts, he picked up the gunman’s wrist to check his pulse.
Still fluttering. “When you get out of the prison hospital, you should consider a different line of work.” He glanced at the closest teller. “Hit the alarm. Then get me Leland Nash on the phone.”
Nash’s family owned Tennessee Standard Bank. He was also married to Zach’s ex-wife, a connection that had never seemed useful until today. With one phone call, Zach could arrange for Nash to inspect his property and also beg Helene to allow him to pick up Lily tomorrow.
He glanced at the unconscious man, his own actions disturbing him almost as much as his town’s close call.
Before now, he’d controlled the bursts of rage he’d felt toward lawbreaking idiots who occasionally came to Bardill’s Ridge. Throwing that guy headfirst onto the marble floor could have killed him, and vigilantism wasn’t part of Zach’s job description.
He didn’t want to be a killer.
AT THE CHICAGO HEADQUARTERS of Relevance magazine, Olivia Kendall’s office door burst open. Her assistant, Brian Minsky, skidded across the sand-colored carpet. “Picture this.” He waved a printout at her as he collapsed in the chair across from her desk.
They’d worked together from day one on Relevance. Since they never stood on boss-employee etiquette, she waited for him to continue, half her mind still on the competitor’s article she’d been reading.
Brian remained silent. At last she noticed and looked up, plucking off her glasses with two fingers.
Brian looked satisfied. “You’re with me now.”
“What’s up?”
“I want you to listen. This story has a twist.”
She’d learned to give Brian the time he required. “Okay.”
“You’ve been in line at the bank for thirty-eight minutes, waiting to pay your car loan.”
“Not that big a twist.”
He offered a sour grin, the equivalent of telling her to shut up. “The guy in front of you gets to the teller and opens his coat to show off his big gun. He orders you and everyone else in the bank to lie on the floor while the tellers collect the money. What do you do?”
“I lie down.” Her first thought went to her five-year-old son, Evan. Face to the floor, she’d be praying like crazy that she got home to him. “And if I survive, I arrange a payroll deduction for that loan.”
Brian cracked a real grin. “Funny. But I’m not finished. The guy sees you’re the local sheriff. You tell him he can’t go far. It’s a small town, and everyone will notice him. Instead of thanking you he asks who you think you are—Andy Taylor?”
She laughed.
Brian didn’t, and she erased her smile. This must be the good part.
“What do you do now?” he asked.
“I point my nose to the floor, and I curse myself for not taking advantage of that payroll deduction option my helpful loan officer suggested.” She paused. “And I propose to change my name to Andy. What do you do?”
“I do what this Andy—his real name is Zach—I do what he did. I kick the gunman’s ass all over that bank, and then I tell him to look for another line of work after he gets out of the jail hospital.”
“You’re kidding.” She sat back, trying to hide her Pavlovian response to the name Zach.
Old memories fluttered at the back of her mind. She pushed them back. This might be a good story. “Didn’t Andy-Zach realize his response put everyone else in danger?”
“He says not. Apparently, he took the guy out by acting purely on instinct. Instinct that told him how to overpower an armed man with one blow.”
“One blow…” She leaned forward, jamming her stomach into the glass desk’s blunt edge. “What are you talking about?”
“Now you’re on board.” Brian slid her a photograph. “You and I want to know what’s behind Andy-Zach’s story. So will our readers. They’re going to see the facts in brief paragraphs about stupid criminals in their Kendall newspapers, but they’ll want to know more, and we can give them a bigger picture in Kendall’s premiere news magazine. Is the sheriff an android or a man? He says he just reacted. A guy doesn’t react like that without training.” Brian leaned back. “Or I would have had a better time in high school.”
She put her glasses back on and turned the picture around. The man’s face made her breath catch.
Not again.
Her heart boomeranged painfully. He was older, his blond hair longer than a military cut, his eyes more cynical and his body leaner.
But once again, the man in the picture, the kick-ass sheriff, was Lieutenant Zach Calvert, looking pretty damn healthy for a man who’d died six years ago.
She scanned the brief column beneath the picture. After she’d told her dad everything, he’d gone to the Navy. He was perfect for the job; he could get to the truth about the Loch Ness monster.
He’d spoken to a Commander Gould, who’d explained that Zach’s crash had been bad luck in a routine training flight. Today’s article didn’t mention the flight or the Navy or the crash that had supposedly killed Zach.
Olivia stared at his face in the grainy photo. She wasn’t wrong. This was Evan’s father. “Your daddy’s in heaven” had become her mantra. She’d hoped a daddy somewhere would make Evan feel like the children he’d envied for having fathers at home.
Numb with shock, she didn’t know whether to be furious or relieved. At least this time she didn’t seem to be falling apart at the sight of a lousy photo. She’d grieved and recovered. For six years, Lieutenant Zach Calvert had been dead.
Did that make being a sheriff in Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee heaven? Or hell?
TWO DAYS AFTER Brian showed her Zach’s photo, Olivia’s plane drifted out of the clouds on approach to McGhee-Tyson Airport in Knoxville.
Her shock had dissipated and been replaced by pragmatism. Whatever Zach was playing at, he had a son. And her son deserved a chance to know and be loved by his father. She had to believe he could be kinder to his son than he’d been to her.
He’d gone to a lot of trouble to leave her. How had he persuaded his commanding officer to lie to her father? She’d barely stopped her dad from getting to the bottom of that question.
With any luck, looking after Evan would keep him too busy to hunt down Captain Kerwin Gould and pry the truth out of him. She wanted a word with Zach first.
After she’d called his office three times without being able to force a word out of her mouth, she’d asked Brian to set up the interview. She needed to see Zach’s face the first time he heard her voice. She’d believed him to be an honorable and loving man. She had to know who he really was before she invited him into her son’s life.
And she wondered why he’d agreed to let her interview him if he’d been so desperate to get away from her six years ago? Maybe he’d forgotten her.
Fine. He only had to remember enough to believe he might be Evan’s father.
As the plane drifted on descent, she opened Zach’s dossier. After his accident, he’d spent three months in a hospital outside San Diego. Four months after that, he’d married one of his nurses. Within eight months of their marriage, their daughter, Lily, had been born.
Which explained his silence. Had he been sleeping with Helene and her at the same time? Even six years later she felt like an idiot for trusting him.
Zach had been her first love. Tall and tough, unstoppable in his pursuit, he’d made her think she was all that mattered to him in the whole world. Combine that with his status as her father’s last choice, and she’d hardly known how to resist.
Looking back through newly opened eyes, she no longer believed in his passion or her own. She’d taken a stupid risk the night she’d forgotten her birth control. And after his supposed death, she’d made up a loving father for her son. The part where Zach had abandoned her never came into her stories.
Finally she’d tried not to remember Zach at all. But then a day would start when Evan woke with sleepy, is-it-morning eyes that reminded her of his father, or he startled her with the long capable fingers that looked too uncomfortably much like Zach’s.
She closed the folder and peered through the small window at the deep green forest flowing beneath the airplane. Dark and verdant, as mysterious as Zach’s true intentions. What had he wanted with her? Not that she’d expected forever, but a phone call to tell her she was no longer in the picture would have been nice.
Looking at mountains that seemed to have no border with flat land, she felt like an intruder. She’d once prayed Zach would ask her to meet his family. Now, possibly in front of them, she had to find out who he really was so she could decide whether to tell Evan he hadn’t died.
Olivia slipped the folder back into her soft briefcase and then fished out another clean, almost untouched file Brian had put together for her. She hadn’t told Evan or Brian the truth, so she had to go home with some kind of story.
The bank photo lay on top. Beneath were clippings from all the other stories Brian had gathered on the attempted robbery.
After the plane landed, Olivia collected her bags and packed them into her rental car. As soon as she left the airport, the road began to rise. The interstate, narrowing into two lanes, had been cut into red clay and granite hills spiked with evergreens, smoothed by icy-looking streams.
Like a bad omen, clouds covered the sun, dulling the red and gold leaves of the hardwoods. Rest stops and traffic came few and far between, and her ears began to pop at the higher elevation.
She fumbled in her purse and briefcase for gum, but Evan must have found her stash. Her boy was a fiend for gum. She gave up and yawned to clear the pressure.
As she passed the first mileage sign for Bardill’s Ridge, she breathed a sigh of relief. She ought to be able to find Sheriff Calvert’s office just in time for her appointment.
At her turnoff, she followed the long ramp away from the interstate. No sign of life stirred within the trees. Such a heavy dose of nature could make a city woman a little anxious.
At the end of the ramp a sign pointing to the left offered her the chance to turn back. To the right Bardill’s Ridge waited. Olivia opened her window and breathed in pine-laden air.
She could go home, continue the life she’d made with Evan and tell Brian the story on Zach hadn’t panned out. Her heart pounded in jackhammer fashion.
A right turn would change her life, but it might also bring her son a father who could love him. What choice did she have?
She turned right and the road inclined again. Soon a white church spire peeked out of the leaves. Just beyond the spire a redbrick cupola topped a black-shingled roof. Extremely Norman Rockwell. Olivia’s heart rate returned to normal. She could handle a Norman Rockwell town.
In front of her, a tractor turned off a dirt road onto the shoulder. The driver lifted his ball cap as she slowed to pass him.
That never happened in Chicago.
On the outskirts of Bardill’s Ridge, she passed a large blue clapboard feed store. The sign that clung to the roof of a wide veranda-cum-loading dock shouted Henderson’s in capital letters. Sticks of straw blew into the road from the bales on the porch. The men hoisting feed onto their trucks and into the backs of their SUVs looked up from their chores as she slowed to the speed limit.
Zach had been right when he’d warned the bank robber that people here noticed strangers. She passed a library, two small churches and too many curious faces.
Farther down the street, a sign painted with cartoon bears and rabbits and a bouncing typeface proclaimed the building behind it the ABC Daycare. Olivia missed Evan with a keen ache as the boys and girls spilled across the play yard.
Closer to the center of town, there were more office buildings. As she passed them the women and men who strode the surprisingly busy sidewalks watched her. No matter what he decided to do about Evan, Zach would have to explain about her after she left town.
Olivia glanced at her watch. Five past two.
At the next stop sign she glanced right and found the big white church. She turned, but had to stop again on the edge of a small square encircled by wrought iron. On one side stood the church. Beside her, a curlicued, Victorian theater promised the latest releases. Opposite, a high school looked buttoned up and busy, with papers on the windows and a teacher holding class outside as his students inspected a maple’s bright shedding leaves. The redbrick building across the square was the courthouse, Bardill’s county seat, according to a tall, black sign posted out front.
Olivia glanced at her briefcase, containing both folders and a photo vital to her plan. Zach had told Brian she’d find him in his office in the jail at the back of the courthouse.
She parked and grabbed her things. Fighting wind, she slipped into the square, via an iron gate. Her heels slid on the cobblestone path that crisscrossed the grass. At the other side of the park she exited through another gate and crossed the wide street. Breathing hard, she climbed the courthouse steps and scoured the map at the front door.
The jail was a left off the long, tall lower hall. Just beyond, a glass door led to a closer parking lot. Olivia swore and tried to tame her wild hair as her shoes clicked loudly on the marble.
Reaching Zach’s office door exactly on time, she twitched her skirt into place, tugged at her sweater’s neckline and then watched her right hand tremble on the doorknob.
If she’d known she was pregnant before Zach left, she would have told him. She was simply doing what she would have done then. If Zach didn’t want Evan, she could still say she’d done her best for her son.
She opened the door, anticipating a dispatcher. Instead, Zach looked up from paperwork spread on a wide, scarred oak desk.
His dark blue uniform emphasized lean muscles and the dark blond hair that nearly touched his collar. From ten feet away, a bleak shadow in his green eyes startled her. He was the same man, but he looked at the world from a different point of view. Something had drawn extra lines on his face and added more than six years of weariness to his eyes.
Olivia clung to the doorknob, rocking back on her high heels.
Zach stood and came around his desk. His gaze swept her, cataloging her head to toe. Not the way he had when they’d been lovers, but the way a stranger took stock of someone he might not entirely trust.
Olivia forgot how to breathe. How much had she changed? It didn’t seem to matter. Zach’s smile held no hint of recognition.
He held out his hand. “You must be Olivia Kendall.”
CHAPTER TWO
HIS VOICE WAS AS THICK as if he were thinking of making love to her. He clearly was not, but Zach’s low, husky, I’ve-waited-for-you-all-my-life tone had seduced her when they’d met the first time.
She’d been unable to forget him. He obviously hadn’t bothered to remember.
Seeking composure, she crossed to his desk and offered her hand. “Call me Olivia.” For Evan’s sake she had to feel out the situation and wait for the right moment to remind Zach of their past.
The moment he closed his fingers around hers, the past flooded back, images of his hand on her waist, at her breast, the male scent of him as he’d lowered his head to kiss her. She gritted her teeth, recognizing the texture of his palm as if she were touching her own skin.
Why had this man remained such a part of her? As if what she wanted to feel didn’t matter. She backed up a step. He had to release her. Curiosity flickered in his gaze, but not recognition. Her first love had forgotten her.
“Have a seat.” Zach gestured to two leather armchairs that flanked a low table in front of his desk. “Coffee?”
“Thanks.” A few moments’ distraction might remind her why she’d come. Sitting, she unzipped her briefcase.
“Cream? Sugar?”
“Both, please.”
With a pleasant, interested smile, he handed her a foam cup and then took the chair beside hers. He stretched his legs in front of him. “You’ve come a long way to talk about a bank robbery that didn’t come off.”
She busied herself with her briefcase zipper, covering her shock at his continued detachment. She’d made a child with this man, but she’d clearly had no idea who Zach Calvert was beneath his skin. She plucked a business card from her briefcase and passed it to him. “Let’s talk about your suspect.”
Without a glance at her card, he slid it inside his uniform pocket. “I’m not sure I can add to the stories you’ve already seen.”
Such a weak attempt to stall woke her share of Kendall determination. “I’d like to talk to the guy.”
Zach glanced toward the back where the cells probably were. “The FBI already picked him up.”
Olivia pulled out the robbery folder. “I read that he belongs to a local militia group?”
“Not local, from a town over the Kentucky border.”
Zach sounded defensive, protecting his town’s reputation. He still loved his home. What were his current feelings on family?
Olivia studied his knife-sharp collar, his gleaming black shoes, their high shine a hint of the Navy officer from Chicago. Addicted to danger and flight, he’d still been drawn to this rural mountain town, but he’d never mentioned a need to settle here for good.
Whatever had happened to him had made him focus on home and hearth. He’d quickly had a daughter. How would he feel about their son?
She gave herself a mental shake. “Did the guy want funds for a specific action?”
“He requested an attorney when he regained consciousness. By the time we found a public defender, the FBI showed up and took him to their office in—” He stopped as if he hadn’t meant to say so much. “The feds are investigating the robbery and the suspect’s affiliations.”
“So you disarmed him, but now you’re out?”
He frowned, interest turning into irritation. “I did my job when I kept him from killing any citizen of this town.”
She was searching for a sense of responsibility that belied the way he’d left her. “Weren’t you afraid the guy might kill someone when you attacked him?”
“I recognized his gun.” His matter-of-fact tone implied anyone would have, and anyone would have acted. “I just had to make sure he was unconscious before he applied enough pressure to the trigger to fire.”
“Your Navy training helped you do that?”
He narrowed his eyes. “How did you know I was in the Navy?” His tone had dropped another disquieting octave.
“I investigated your background before I came.”
His expression went protectively flat, but antagonism jerked a muscle tight in his jaw. “What do you want, Ms. Kendall? Why come all the way from Chicago to talk about a three-day-old story?”
He suspected ulterior motives. It was the moment she’d waited for, and she went blank. All she could think was how loudly the clock ticked on his desk.
Time to come clean. “Why are you pretending you don’t recognize me?”
His chiseled face hardened to stone. “I’m pretending?”
She licked dry lips. “Maybe not.” Her father would be appalled. No one forgot a Kendall. She’d cared so much for Zach, his response humiliated her, but Evan’s best interests made her go on. Finding out who Zach had become was worth some loss of face. “You and I met each other six years ago in Chicago while you were in the Navy.”
“Chicago?” He sounded as if he’d never heard of the city.
“This is ludicrous. Surely you remember Chicago even if you forgot me?”
“No.” He stood, his posture guarded, danger in his eyes.
She was probably seeing the same gaze the bank robber had just before he’d found himself unconscious. She rose on shaking legs and wiped her clammy palms down the sides of her skirt.
She could describe every sinew beneath Zach’s dark clothing. She could tell him he slept with one arm crooked beneath his head, the other flattened on his belly. She should have the advantage. Instead, she was trying desperately not to collapse at his feet.
He turned to his desk. “I was stationed in California until an accident forced me to resign my commission.” His mouth tightened. “Why are you here?”
Now they both understood she had the advantage, and Zach didn’t like it.
“I came to talk to you.” His stare accused her of setting an ambush. Maybe she should let him cool down before she told him about Evan.
“I have no information you’d want to print, Ms. Kendall.”
“You know my name is Olivia.”
He turned toward the door, his dismissive attitude suggesting she use it. “We’re done.”
She groped inside her briefcase for the framed picture she’d packed that morning. Zach shifted his hand to his holstered pistol. It wasn’t in the least funny, but Olivia wanted to smile. He didn’t trust easily either.
“I’m sorry to do it this way.” She hadn’t come here to be unkind. “But I don’t think you’ll believe me without proof.” She held the photo against her chest. “I met you in Chicago. You were taking some kind of a class. I believed we cared for each other.” She broke off. “I’m rambling because I’m nervous, but here’s what happened. You left for a training mission—it was supposed to last two weeks—but I didn’t hear from you for over a month, and then I saw a wire release that said you were dead.”
He stared. For a moment, time tunneled. She was trying to reach him, but he’d left her behind. “Zach, look at this photo.” She turned it, showing him his son’s face.
At first his eyes widened. His nostrils flared with each deep breath. When he opened his mouth, a sigh eased between his lips. “No.” Anguish added a syllable to the word.
Olivia held as still as she could, considering she was trembling. His “no” didn’t mean he’d denied Evan was his child. He could have trouble believing he’d forgotten his son.
“I would have told you I was pregnant, but you left before I knew.”
Without looking at her, Zach came back, his leather belt creaking in the thick silence. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He curled his fingers around the photo’s frame and her hand. Unable to bear the heat of his touch, she let the picture go.
“I’ve seen his face all over my mother’s house.”
She didn’t understand. “What?”
“In photos of me.” He looked up, his gaze soft, yet wounded. “He’s six?”
“Five.” What the hell was going on? “What happened to you?”
“I honestly don’t remember Chicago. I trained there for a mission in a place not many people know about. I was on a team no one talks about.” He met her gaze—no, he held hers with his intensity. “I was supposed to fly in and pick up an officer who was stuck in a place she shouldn’t have been. She was killed, and I suffered a head injury that destroyed part of my memory—the two years before the accident—and you were part of the time I lost.” A mixture of anger and despair fired his glance. He nudged the robbery file she’d dropped on the floor when she’d stood. “I also learned about weapons then.”
His story was hard to believe. “Why did the wires say you died? Why did the Navy tell my father you were dead?”
“The Navy?”
“My dad asked Captain Kerwin Gould, your commanding officer, what happened and he spouted the story about a failed training mission off San Diego.”
“Your dad?” Zach nodded in recognition. “James Kendall, I get it. Did he mention you when he talked to Admiral Gould?”
“Admiral?”
Zach shook his head. “That’s his rank now. Did your father tell him you were pregnant?”
“No. I only wanted to find out what happened.”
“But he would’ve told your father the truth if he’d known. He gave you the story we discussed. It kept me out of the media. I didn’t want the public mess any more than the Navy did.” Failure filled his eyes with heartrending emptiness. He lifted his hand to the back of his neck, striking her dumb as he twisted his head, a grown-up version of Evan under stress. “I came home—here—after I left the hospital.”
“What about your apartment in Chicago?” Having a place suddenly made no sense. “Why did you— Your things were all over those rooms, pictures of your family—were they even your family?”
“Yes.” He rubbed his neck again. “The apartment belonged to the government. We were advised to bring our own belongings and make ourselves look like full-time residents. They figured one Navy officer in uniform looked like any other.” He sat on the corner of his desk. “I’m not even sure who packed my stuff and sent it home. It was just waiting when I got here.”
“But what about your career? You were gung ho.”
His faint smile softened the lines in his face. “I resigned because the surgeons decided my injury made me unfit to fly.”
Six years he’d been gone, and he’d never remembered she existed. “How can I believe you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t blame you. I’ve had to ask Admiral Gould or other pilots about what happened.” Guilt thinned his features. “I’ve listened to the crash tapes.”
She couldn’t ask for those details. They were too personal to him, too horrible to her. “How big is this team?”
“I have two friends who also went through the training.” He angled the photo so they could both see Evan’s innocent, laughing face. “You came here because of him? Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? Why pretend you wanted to interview me?”
She didn’t sugarcoat her answer. “I couldn’t trust you. You were dead until you showed up foiling a bank robbery.”
“Why didn’t you look for my family?”
“You talked about them, but reluctantly.” Heat swept up her throat. “I thought you didn’t want to tell them about me.”
“Because of my job.” She shared the desolation in his eyes. “I could skim over the facts, but I wouldn’t have felt safe involving you in my life outside Chicago.” He stared at Evan, not realizing he was telling her he hadn’t shared the depth of her feelings. “They’d have loved my son.”
“At the time I was—” The agony of losing him swept back for a moment, but he’d never really been hers to lose. She shouldn’t have come here. She blinked, gripping reality. Her son still needed his father, and Zach deserved explanations as much as she. “My dad was disappointed in me and I was scared, and later the idea of telling your family became as difficult as telling you is now.”
“What about a funeral?”
She glanced at the nearest window, where orange and red leaves brushed the glass and shielded the rest of Bardill’s Ridge from her view. “My face was in the news because I’d graduated from college, and my father’s important. I didn’t think I could hide who I was in a town this small.” And she hadn’t been up to pretending indifference.
“The boy makes everything different.”
“Different, how?”
“I want to see him.”
Good. She’d been hoping for that. “His name is Evan. Evan Zachary Kendall.”
He stared at his son’s face, a smile curving his mouth slowly, as if smiling no longer came easy.
“I wanted him to have something of yours. Your name was the only thing I could give him.”
“Thank you.”
Zach’s simple gratitude touched her, but she couldn’t let down her guard yet. She lived in Chicago. Zach lived here. They both had rights to Evan if Zach wanted access.
She grimaced. Access. A sterile term for making a life with a child.
“You can have the picture.” She latched her briefcase and lifted it, comforted by its familiar heft in her hand. A touch of the cynicism she’d learned after Zach’s disappearance came back to her. “I’m not a big fan of amnesia stories.”
He didn’t seem to care. “It’s the only one I have, and it’s true.”
Subjects who lied usually put on a big defensive show. But sometimes not.
“What you do next is up to you. I read that you have a daughter with your ex-wife, so I know you’re facing complications. If you really want to see Evan, you have to make a decision you can live with the rest of your life.”
He nodded, but she reiterated to make sure he understood.
“I mean this is a lifetime commitment.”
He reached for her arm, but then stopped short of touching her. “I won’t let you take him away.”
She shrugged, her heart pounding in the back of her throat. He’d been twenty-six when they were together. She’d been more mature than most of her peers, but the balance of power had clearly lain with him. She didn’t intend to let that happen again.
“I won’t leave him alone with you until I’m sure you’re telling the truth. What if you aren’t good for him?”
His chest expanded beneath his shirt. Anger glittered in his eyes, but he controlled it so quickly she might have imagined it.
“I understand,” he said.
That seemed to be that. She headed for the door.
“Where are you going, Olivia?”
His use of her name stopped her. “To give you time to think.”
He set the photo on his desk, staking an unambiguous claim. “I share custody of my daughter Lily, but my ex-wife thinks I’m bad for her.”
Olivia’s stomach tightened, but she tried to look calm. At least he wasn’t going to hide anything from her. “You’re bad for Lily?”
“I should have said not good enough.” His bitter smile held no humor. “My bank account could use some more zeroes. Helene married up when she became Mrs. Leland Nash, and she thinks Lily would be better off without her ties to the common folk.”
“Leland Nash?” She’d read that name in Brian’s file. “She married the bank president?”
He nodded. “I love Lily, and I fight for time with her. I don’t want another troubled relationship with a child of mine, so I’m telling you what you’ll hear about me when you dig deeper.”
Again, her tongue felt tied. Was this his side of the story or a side? “I don’t understand about your ex-wife.” Money and social standing were the last thing Olivia cared about, but then again, she’d always had too much of both. “My first concern is Evan, and I’m giving you a chance to be his father.”
“I am his father.”
“You’re talking genetics. Evan needs baseball games, Band-Aids on his knees and to trust that you’ll show up at his door when you say you will. Don’t let an urge to do the right thing make this decision for you.”
“You’re talking shared custody?”
He was calm under fire, but the concept of sharing anything about Evan filled her with terror. “Maybe. Someday.”
His tension eased, but as he crossed the room and reached for the door, she moved out of his way. He simply held on to the doorknob, effectively keeping her in the room. “I’m sorry,” he said. “If I’d even been aware…”
“We’re way past apologies.” But his gentleness boded well for her son. “You don’t remember, and it all ended a long time ago for me. We’ve both made different lives. You just have to decide what you want to do about Evan before we talk again.” She patted her pocket. “I’m staying at a bed-and-breakfast.” She’d written the place’s name on a slip of paper that morning, a bit fearful the only accommodations she might find would be her old Girl Scout tent on the side of the road. “I found it on the Internet.”
“The Dogwood,” he said. “My uncle and aunt own it. Did you park in front of the courthouse?”
She nodded. “Beside the church.”
“Turn left when you leave the square. Go straight for about a block. It’s not that far from the bank, and you’ll see a sign in the yard.”
“The bank that was nearly robbed?” she asked.
“Tennessee Standard, the only bank in Bardill’s Ridge.” He stopped her again, taking a step nearer. “You really came because you saw my picture?”
She nodded at the stranger she’d loved. His story—reality—took some getting used to. “Because I never knew my mother. She died when I was a baby. I don’t want Evan to grow up without one of his parents if you’re a good man.”
“You have the resources and the skill to find out about me, so I’ll tell you I have a dead career, a broken marriage.” Wrath infused his tone with husky richness. “But I’m still Evan’s father.”
She’d loved his voice when it was thick with any flavor of passion, but being a Kendall, she restrained a shiver of awareness to ask a question. “No one’s ever figured out the truth? No one else who knew you in Chicago?”
“You were apparently the one mistake I made there.” A warning lit his eyes. “You’re not looking for a story, Olivia? I don’t think you’d want to write that kind of article about your son’s father.”
He was right.
STARING THROUGH the square panes of his kitchen window into the pitch-dark night, Zach reached for the phone. He had one thought, to tell Olivia he didn’t need time.
But he remembered the rest of his family and let the phone go. He had to talk to his daughter, to his mother and to his ex-wife. For Evan’s sake he needed to prepare Helene. He turned to the fridge, opening the cabinet on his right at the same time to take down a glass.
A bottle of Scotch on the top shelf tempted him, but he opted for a quart of milk and a brown plastic container of chocolate syrup from the fridge. Using the long spoon Lily favored, he mixed a big helping of her favorite elixir and wished she were here to share it with him. Ice-cold chocolate milk started their bedtime ritual on her weekends at his house.
What would she think of a brand-new older brother?
Zach sipped his chocolate. He could imagine Helene claiming he didn’t need Lily now that he had a son. And she’d blame their lousy marriage on his “subconscious” feelings for Olivia.
Olivia had said she’d made a mistake with birth control. Helene had made a plan, which she’d later admitted had been the worst mistake of her life. She’d thought she was marrying a military superhero who’d use his contacts and the medal he’d never taken out of its box to build a life she’d dreamed of as she’d worked in a hospital.
Her plan made no sense. Trusting her tender loving care, he’d shared his shame at being alive after losing the woman—whose life he was supposed to save.
His mission had been to fly into a restricted zone on a chopper so stripped he couldn’t even carry the weight of a copilot. He was to pick up Lieutenant Kimberly Salva, a dear friend from the Academy, and bring her out. He’d failed. He’d needed the penance of guilt. Since the crash, he’d dreamed with rage that he’d actually killed Salva, who’d died in his hands on the floor of his chopper.
As part of the therapy he’d soon quit, he’d listened to the tape of his radio calls. No matter who told him Salva’s death hadn’t been his fault, that he’d done his best to save her, he continued to relive the moments he’d listened to. His obvious despair, his refusal to give up on her, had never relieved the guilt or the nightmares that had painted pictures like memories in his mind.
Salva’s daughter, eight years old now, was growing up without her mother. How could he believe he had the right to survive?
Inexplicably, Helene had imagined he’d ride an unworthy hero’s welcome into fame and fortune. But Zach had made another plan.
Losing two years of his life, his identity as a pilot and, most of all, his faith in himself, he’d searched for respite in Bardill’s Ridge. Walking the woods he’d run as a youth, mending the barn he’d jumped off pretending he could fly, he’d come home because he’d needed the Calvert clan’s strength and the sustenance of the haze-covered, blue-and-green Smokies.
Maybe he and Helene had never loved each other. She’d thought he was someone he couldn’t be. He’d been grateful for the physical contact he’d needed to remind himself he was still alive.
After she’d become pregnant, he’d married her, and they’d come to Bardill’s Ridge where his new wife had quickly deemed her life pure hell. Zach had worked on his family’s farm for the first year. That had been bad enough in Helene’s eyes, but after he’d taken the sheriff’s position, she’d railed that “Andy Taylor” wasn’t good enough for her and their daughter.
He was starting to hate that TV show.
After his wife met Leland Nash and they’d fallen in love, Helene tried to convince Zach he had no right to his own child because he didn’t share Helene’s priorities for Lily’s future. He was just lucky Helene had found Nash and not some wealthy out-of-state tourist. Leland Nash’s money had made East Tennessee bearable for Helene. It had made short work of Zach’s marriage.
And even shorter work of his ability to trust a woman who’d borne his child. Olivia seemed different, but his ex-wife had shown him honesty could be a moving target.
After Olivia left his office, he’d researched her in every database he could access. She ran Relevance, a magazine positioned somewhere between U.S. News and People.
She was too young to be managing editor except her father owned the show and acted as the magazine’s editor in chief. To get a feel for her work, Zach had read stories from her earlier career, and then he’d scanned several recent issues. Olivia might have gone straight to the masthead because of her connections, but she was a good reporter.
What if she really was after a story? The possibility made him set his drink on the counter so hard the glass clanked. Could her job be the reason she’d come here?
Evan was his son. No doubt about that, but what if Olivia still believed he’d deserted her? What if her whole story was true—except that unlike Helene, she’d put two and two together?
Her flimsy rationale for not telling his family about Evan troubled him, and her father had built an empire breaking secrets wide-open. She might decide he made a good story—failed rescue mission, lost memory, secret son and all.
He dragged the back of his hand over his mouth. He was tired of dreams shot with light like tracer fire from a weapon, tired of waking sweat-covered and panicked as if he’d run through enemy battle lines in his bare feet and still managed to get his friend killed.
Staring at Evan’s photo, aching to see the boy, to hear his voice, Zach ran his finger over the cowlick his son would never be able to tame unless he got himself a military haircut. For Evan’s sake, he wanted to trust Olivia Kendall.
Closing his eyes, he saw her—tall, breezing into his office on the strength of her own self-confidence, her wavy black hair sliding over her shoulders, gray eyes splintered with ice that melted only a little beneath occasional warm concern. She wouldn’t research or write any story that would hurt Evan.
It wasn’t so hard to believe he’d loved her. Inconceivable that he’d forgotten her if he’d cared enough for her to make a child.
Zach glanced at his watch. Why waste any more time? He reached for the phone to call Olivia and tell her he knew exactly what he wanted.
Once she knew where he stood, he’d warn his family they were about to meet his son. He didn’t want Helene or anyone else to find out about Evan from a newspaper or TV.
CHAPTER THREE
“AMNESIA?” James Kendall’s mirthless laugh nearly deafened Olivia through her cell phone’s receiver. “He was never good enough for you, and this lame amnesia excuse just proves my point.”
“Why would he lie, Dad?” Despite her own doubts, she tried to soothe her father’s. At the first sign of weakness in her, he’d try running Zach out of the country. She stayed calm for several reasons. One, she didn’t want him all over Zach. Two, he’d stuck by her through a pregnancy that had shamed him. And three, he loved Evan.
“He dumped you and he doesn’t have the guts to be a man. Why are you willing to let him think about it? Evan deserves a father who simply wants him for a son.”
“I’m not holding a grudge.” Not much of one, and she’d fight every step of the way to make things right for Evan. “He couldn’t help what happened.”
“Why let him jerk you around?”
“I insisted Zach think about the obligations I’m asking him to take on.”
“Did he argue with you?”
“No, but he was stunned, and I don’t want him to do the right thing out of some knee-jerk response. What good would Zach’s sense of duty do my son?”
“I didn’t have to decide whether I wanted to be his grandfather.”
She could have argued. He’d conveniently forgotten the day he’d suggested he could help her “not have” the baby. He’d made up for it too many times to count since. She twitched the curtain away from her window. Dusk hovered over Bardill’s Ridge. In the street below, Victorian lamps glowed orange-yellow.
“You had seven and a half months to get used to the idea of Evan. I’m willing to give Zach a few hours, and I’ll stay with Evan and him when they’re together at first.”
“Thank God you’ve still got some sense. Calvert should have considered his actions back then. When a twenty-six-year-old man knows he can’t even be honest about his job with a twenty-one-year-old woman, the honorable thing is to abstain.”
“You like to forget I was there, too, and you’re still annoyed I didn’t hold out for a wedding ring. You and I aren’t selfless.”
“More so than the man who left you holding the diaper bag.”
“If Zach decides to become part of this family, I expect you to be civil to him.”
“If you hold a single doubt about this man, I say we start the paperwork to sue him for support.”
“Great idea, Dad. Evan will never need a dime from Zach, but he’s gone without a father’s care for five years. A lawsuit should fix all his problems.” She dropped the curtain and opened the nightstand drawer to find a laminated pizza menu. “I don’t think Zach’s going to duck out. Why can’t you give him the benefit of the doubt?”
“You are, and that’s more than he deserves.” Her dad went quiet. She hoped he was trying to find some restraint. The family counselor they’d seen when Evan was a baby had taught him to give Olivia room to parent her own child, but her dad was always happiest when he’d worked up a full head of steam. “When are you supposed to see Calvert again?”
“His name is Zach, and I’ll let you know when he calls.”
“Are we supposed to twiddle our thumbs while he decides? I should be there with you. In fact, I’m on my way.”
Olivia laughed to remind her father he was over-reacting. Suddenly, the phone at her bedside jangled. She eyed it with foreboding. “I have to go, Dad. You stay put in Chicago. Is Evan all right?”
“Sound asleep, or I’d let you talk to him.”
He’d already admitted to spoiling her son with dinner and the richest cheesecake in Chicago at Evan’s favorite “grown-up” restaurant. From there, her father swore Evan had hauled him to a batting cage. He’d exhausted the little guy.
The other phone rang for the third time. “I’ll call you,” Olivia said again. “Kiss him for me.”
“Get back here and kiss him yourself, or let me bring him to you.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“I’ll arrange a healthy meal for Evan tomorrow night.”
“I’m glad.” Her father was a man who showed his love through service rather than affectionate words. “Bye.”
She switched off her cell phone and lifted the other receiver. “Olivia Kendall.” Putting this conversation on business terms was like suiting up in her best armor.
“It’s Zach Calvert. I want to come by in the morning.”
“To talk?” Who cared if she sounded eager? “You can come now.”
“I’ll be ready to travel in the morning, but tonight I have to tell my own family.”
Her pulse tripped over a few beats. He was saying yes. He wanted to know Evan.
“Yes” terrified her. For her son—a little for herself. She’d once loved this man, and he was coming back into her life. She remembered desire and trust that had turned on her like Cleopatra’s asp. She couldn’t afford to get confused about long-dead feelings.
“Maybe it would be better if you didn’t mention Evan to your daughter until you meet him.”
“What?” The one word suggested she’d over-stepped.
“Until you make up your mind, why disrupt Evan’s life or Lily’s?”
“You have nothing to do with my daughter, Olivia. I take care of my family.”
His harshness hurt her feelings. She tried not to snap back. His anger might come from problems he’d had with Helene over custody of Lily.
“Bottom line,” she said, pretending to ignore his quick temper, “I don’t want my son hurt.” She threaded her voice with sharp steel, just in case he considered her soft. “If he ever thinks you’re sorry…”
Silence met her half threat. Seeing his expression would have been nice.
“Is eight o’clock too early to leave tomorrow?” he asked.
“Fine.” She probably wouldn’t sleep. “I’ll arrange our flight.”
“Let me.”
“Face it. I have more pull.” Zach could be in charge next time.
SHARING A GLASS of iced tea with her mother-in-law, Greta, Beth Calvert recognized her son’s car down-shifting to start the climb up her hill. Over a pot of chili, the two women had begun planning a party to celebrate Greta and her husband Seth’s fifty-fifth anniversary.
They’d planned very little party and talked more about Seth’s single anniversary request—more time with his wife. He wanted her to retire from her job as director of The Mom’s Place as she neared seventy-six years of age.
Beth smiled. Greta seemed to feel her husband asked too much. Already pregnant with Ned, Zach’s father, when she was in premed, Greta had worked nearly all her life, and pretty much all the time she or Seth could remember. Seventy-six wasn’t too young to retire by any means, but around here country doctors worked a lot longer than that.
“I’ve asked Sophie to join me,” Greta said. “At least to discuss it while she’s here for our anniversary, but she swears she’s happy delivering babies for those rich women in D.C. They have more OB/GYNs than they can choose from. I need her. My clients need her if Seth’s going to make me step down. We have plenty of time—you know my parents both lived until well into their nineties—but Seth refuses to discuss my work anymore.”
Watching for Zach’s car, Beth nodded in sympathy. “You started the clinic. You’ve helped a lot of young girls in these mountains.” Greta’s paying customers, women who craved some pampered time before their babies came, provided funding for young women who found themselves “in trouble” in Bardill’s Ridge and the surrounding towns. “You own the baby farm and you want to put it in hands you trust.”
Greta expressed disapproval with a tart look. “I hate when y’all call it the baby farm.”
“Sorry.” Beth knew that, but this late, unannounced visit from Zach had sidetracked her.
“I don’t believe Sophie’s happy. She and Molly and Zach were like siblings when they were kids, and she’s a Calvert just like the rest of us. She’ll be happier among family.”
“Maybe you should advertise for another physician just in case.” Beth craned her neck, waiting for Zach’s headlights to sweep the dusk-shadowed turn in her drive. Something had troubled him since that bank robbery. Who wouldn’t be upset to discover such violence in himself? “Sophie will come home when she’s ready. You can’t push children.” At last bright light feathered through the shrubbery that lined the gravel driveway. “Even when they’re grown up.”
“I’d expect Sophie to remember her loyalty to this side of her family as well as to that rogue mother of hers.”
“I don’t think she sees Nita too often.” Beth pointed to the car nosing around the bend. “Look—there’s Zach. Wonder what he’s after so late?”
Greta looked concerned. “Something wrong? Seth will be calling any second if I don’t start home, but I can stay and help you—”
“I’m sure Zach’s fine.” She wasn’t sure at all, but Greta had enough on her mind. The family had all assumed she’d work at the baby farm till she couldn’t work anymore. Seth must have been insistent if Greta was considering retirement. “Would you like more tea?”
“No.” Her mother-in-law stood, flexing her back. “I left my glasses at the office. Better get moving. Seth’s also nagging me to stop driving after dark.” She leaned down and aimed a swift kiss Beth’s way. “Now, if he asks, we talked about the party, not work, right?”
“He must be really upset this time.” Seth had retired from his seat on the county circuit court over ten years ago, and he’d expected his wife to join him in taking leisure.
“He’s serious.” Greta patted her hair. “So I’m paying attention. Good night, honey. I’m just going to wait by my car to speak to Zach.”
“’Night, Greta.”
The older woman floated down the stairs, reaching her car as Zach parked his. They spoke between their doors for a moment, and then Greta waved goodbye and drove off.
Zach headed toward the house, but trouble climbed the wooden porch steps with him. Beth stood, sniffing wood smoke on the crisp air.
“Smell that, son? Fall’s got us in its grip.”
“It’s your favorite time of year, isn’t it, Mom?” He turned at the top step and joined her in appreciation of the darkening ridge that rolled from beneath her house. Out here the rising moon provided scarce light. Beth’s nearest neighbor lived a stiff hike down the road.
Zach lived on his father’s farm now, in the house she’d loved during her marriage. But she’d hated the place after Ned died. A tree had fallen on him as he’d cleared a field during a storm’s early gusts. She and Zach, only eight at the time, had taken refuge from their loss on this lonely, untamable patch of ground that had once belonged to her family. She’d wanted no more farms.
“Tell me what’s wrong, son.”
He grinned. “How’d you know?” A little tired, a lot cagey, still wearing the uniform he usually took off the second he left the sheriff’s office behind, he pushed his hands into his pockets. “Never mind. You just know.”
“Better come inside. Want some coffee?”
She always had a pot on the warmer. Mr. Coffee had become her best friend the first day he’d shown up at the hardware store in town.
Her son towered over her as he ducked to cross the threshold into the small living room. Her grandfather had built this house, and every room formed a perfect square. Zach used to say the squares made him feel claustrophobic. He worked at the knot in his tie as she patted his shoulder.
“Come into the kitchen. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten.”
“Try not to mother me, Mom.”
“It’s still my job.”
He never gave her credit for the times she tried to let him alone. But she was a Southern woman—when she sensed a heavy load of dread on her son’s shoulders, she got the urge to throw something in a casserole. Feeding him was her only refuge when Zach turned as standoffish as the bushy gray cat that sprawled in front of her fireplace.
Spike and Zach shared the same views on comfort. They wanted to be in the room, but they preferred a minimum of human affection.
Zach followed her. “I have to tell you something.”
“How bad is it?” Since that day Seth had come up from the field to tell her about Ned, she tended to expect the worst. She tried not to, but she had to pray nothing worse than losing Ned ever happened to her while she had a son and a family who depended on her to be sane.
“It’s good in a way. In a lot of ways.” Zach opened the refrigerator and popped the top on a pale blue plastic bowl. “Chili? Smells great.”
Elbowing him aside, she took the bowl and dished a couple of Zach-sized servings into a saucepan. No microwaves in her house. She cooked the old-fashioned way. “I’m waiting.”
“I’m trying to think of a way to say it.” He opened the door to the back porch. “Let me bring in some wood for you. The weather forecast says we might have a freeze tonight.”
“Okay.” She plucked a sweet onion from the wire basket that hung above her counter. If he had to belly up to telling her, it couldn’t be that good.
While the screen door banged open and then shut each time Zach carried a load of wood from the pile out back, Beth peeled the onion.
Spike slinked in to investigate the racket. He hunkered down at her feet while she diced onion the way Zach liked, in small chunks. With the cat twining around her ankles, she cut a hunk of corn bread and set it on a bread plate at the table. She was stirring the steaming chili as Zach got his fill of loading the bin.
He came back in, sniffing the chili’s aroma. Again, like Spike. “I didn’t even know I was hungry.” He slapped on the faucet to wash his hands at the sink. “Aren’t you eating?”
“I ate with Gran, but I might have a bite of corn bread.”
“I hate to eat alone.”
He never admitted that to anyone else, but she knew. It pricked at her during the long two-week periods when Lily stayed at Helene’s. Zach’s discomfort with being alone had started after the accident, too.
He needed a family. Helene hadn’t been a good wife for him, but someday a woman would arrive sporting sense enough to value a guy who always did the right thing—even when it came to letting his wife go. Beth often wondered how much of Zach’s pain came from a suspicion that, as Helene alleged, he hadn’t been good enough for her.
“Mom, do you remember I was in Chicago before I took that last flight?”
It was an odd beginning, but she went with him. “How could I forget?” She could have bitten her tongue off.
With a look of forebearance, Zach went to the counter where she’d set out a bowl. He ladled chili from the saucepan and sprinkled onions over the top.
“I knew someone in Chicago—a woman named Olivia Kendall.”
“Olivia Kendall? I’ve heard that name.”
He lifted his head so sharply chili spilled over the edge of the ladle to splatter the stove. “How? Did she write me here?”
“Huh?” Beth circled the counter to the family room and plucked a magazine from the stack beside her favorite chair. “No one wrote to you here. I always wondered why. I thought you surely had friends.” She showed him last month’s issue of Relevance. “I know her from this. How did you meet a woman like her?” All he needed was another Helene type.
“I’m not sure.” He shook his head and then lifted his spoon for a bite. Normally, chili was the next best thing to nectar for Zach. He savored it like those folks on the food channel swilled choice wine. This bite, he swallowed almost without chewing, but then cringed and ran for the sink where he splashed water into his burned mouth.
“I’m sorry, son.” She got him a beer, twisted the top and put the bottle on the counter. “Now, tell me about Olivia Kendall. What does she want from you?”
His still-wary gaze reminded her of the little boy who’d once thought she knew everything. After all these years, some of that child’s vulnerability remained in Zach’s eyes. He’d hate it if he knew.
“I knew her well. I—” He broke off, his face tight. She couldn’t tell if the chili burn hurt him or if he was struggling with the words. “Apparently, I cared for her.” He looked almost ashamed. “We have a son. Olivia and I.”
While she stared, mouth literally agape, he took the bottle top from her hand and tossed it into the garbage beneath the sink. Then he maneuvered her into the nearest chair. He might be giving her time to take it in. More likely, he was embarrassed. He’d had Lily too quickly with Helene, too.
“How does a man forget a child?”
“Or the boy’s mother,” Zach said. “She was young. I know what kind of resources her family has, but I hate to think of what she went through, being a single mother because I disappeared.” He patted his pockets as if he were looking for something. “Olivia brought a picture, but I left it at home.” He pointed to the mantel in her living room. “He looks just like those.”
She turned her head slowly. She’d all but papered her house in photos of Ned and Zach. She hadn’t wanted her boy to forget his father. “He looks like you? Or your daddy?”
“So much like me you wouldn’t be able to tell our pictures apart.” He pointed toward the end of the table, at his kindergarten graduation photo above a dried-flower arrangement. “He’s that old.”
She stared at the picture, taking time to let Zach’s news sink in. Ned, as tall as Zach was now, but already more gray about the head than blond, had hoisted their son in miniature cap and gown to his shoulder. As proud as if their Zach had finished Harvard magna cum laude. Good thing, because he’d been gone twelve years by the time Zach finished college on the government’s dime.
She shook her head. “How’d you even meet someone like her? That family hardly keeps our kind of company.”
“After she told me about Evan I didn’t think to ask for details.” His haggard expression was painful to see, but he turned away, rejecting her concern for a swig of his beer. “I left on my last mission before she could tell me she was pregnant, and then she saw my picture in the news. Her father tried to get more information out of the Navy, but Kendall was the last person they wanted to see, and they didn’t know about Olivia—any more than she knew what I was really doing. She never heard I survived until she saw a report on the bank robbery.”
“My God.”
He took his chair again, his moving body pushing the heavy oak table away. “Yeah.”
“Is she looking for support?” A mother’s protectiveness sharpened her voice. For once, Zach didn’t seem to notice.
“Olivia Kendall,” he repeated, as if her name said it all.
It did.
“Still, I owe my son support.”
True. “What else does she want?”
“A father for Evan.” He stood again, his meal forgotten as he strode the creaking wooden floor. “That’s what she says.”
After Helene, it was a hard concept to follow. “Do you believe her?”
“I think so.” He lifted a troubled gaze. “I have to because I want to see him. I don’t know if Evan needs me, but I’m shocked that I’ve had a son for five years. He’s at an age where it must be obvious he’s different from other boys and girls.”
“Nonsense. We don’t live in that world anymore. People divorce now. Unwed mothers keep their children. He won’t have…”
“You see his life through an adult’s eyes. I’m trying to look through his.” He turned. “And I need to know if you can be his grandmother—if you can love him as much as you love Lily.”
“You have to ask?” He’d lost his ability to trust, along with those memories that had disappeared in his injuries. She worshiped her granddaughter. “I value every second with Lily, just as you do, and I’ll love your boy as much. Let’s ask Olivia and—” She broke off. “You said his name is Evan?” He nodded. “Let’s invite them to your gran and grandpa’s anniversary celebration.”
Seth and Greta Calvert had loved her like a daughter. They’d made her part of their family the day Ned had brought her to these mountains, and since then they’d all claimed countless other “marry-ins.” They’d claim Olivia and Evan, too, and make them welcome.
“I just hope we don’t overwhelm him.” Beth assumed Zach agreed with her plan, without giving him time to differ. “Does his mother have family I might not have read about?”
“Only her father.” Distraction distanced Zach’s voice. “She named Evan for me, Mom. His middle name is Zachary.”
Red-rimmed eyes described the gratitude he obviously couldn’t voice. He already knew how to love this child who’d appeared out of the past he couldn’t explain or defeat.
She went to him. “He’s in Chicago?”
Zach nodded.
“When do you go?” Since the day he’d come home to heal, she hated to see Zach leave the safety of Bardill’s Ridge.
“Tomorrow morning.” He looped his arm around her shoulders. “Warn the rest of the family to treat Evan and Olivia right? Remind them not to confuse her with Helene.”
“We’re all protective of you.” She hugged him briefly. He hardly ever allowed more. “If she’s good to you, we’ll love her.”
He let her go and scooped up Spike, who inexplicably began kneading his fellow loner’s shoulder. “No,” Zach said. “You’ll love her because Evan will feel more accepted if you do.” With a last pat for Spike as he set him on a padded kitchen chair, he headed for her door. “I’ll call you from Chicago.”
“Are you bringing him home?”
“Chicago is his home. I thought he’d have an easier time if we met where he’s comfortable, but while I’m there, I’ll arrange visitation with Olivia.”
“Another visitation agreement?”
He nodded, a frown creasing his forehead. “Or something like it. Olivia seems to believe we should take decisions slowly. I have no intention of losing contact with my son, now that she’s told me about him, but I figure we’ll fight the battle of how often I get to see him when it comes.”
Hardly good news, but she stomped down hard on her opinions. Zach stopped at the door.
“Everything will be fine, Mom.”
He offered the same reassurance every time he left town. He expected no answer. He was only promising he wouldn’t die when he left Bardill’s Ridge. Obviously, she knew something could happen, but he was a good son to try to persuade her not to worry.
She added some comfort of her own to her “I know” smile. When he came back they’d all find a way to live with another custody arrangement. She waved him off, and he tried to smile back, but his hard-edged face lingered in her mind after the door slammed at his back.
She slumped against the table. Apart from the fact that he’d clearly been reckless six years ago, he didn’t deserve all this. A past that wouldn’t let him alone and a child who’d been a secret from him. When would Fate let up on her son?
She reached for the phone to circle the family wagons for support.
THE MOON BARELY LIT his way as he got out of his car in front of the Dogwood, his uncle Patrick and aunt Eliza’s bed-and-breakfast. His cousin Molly erupted from the front door, flying as fast as one of her roguish kindergarten students. On seeing his truck she stopped short. As she waited for him to climb out her smile bent the other way into a frown.
“What’s up, Zach? Something bugging you?”
“Sort of.” He wrapped an arm around her waist, at ease with being Molly’s hero. No matter what he did, he’d maintained his status with her since Patrick and Eliza had made her their foster child. No small feat, considering the neglected life she’d endured until they rescued her. “Where are you headed in such a hurry?”
“Parent-teacher conferences at school tonight. I have to change clothes.” She slapped her jeans. Molly, the hellion Aunt Eliza had saved from reform school liked to appear demure in front of her students’ parents.
“You’d better go,” he said, laughing, “if you plan to reach your classroom before midnight.”
“Ha ha ha.” She caught his arm as he tried to pull away. “That was homage to your lousy sense of humor. Now explain your problem.”
“I have no problem.” He had to talk to Olivia. His mom would cover the family bases for him.
Molly’s smile faded again. “You’re scaring me.”
Calverts large and small had treated him as if he were on the verge of a breakdown since the accident. Maybe if he’d managed a happier marriage, maybe if he and Helene could be civil to each other… “I’m fine, but I have to talk to one of your mom’s guests before she goes to bed.”
“Ah.” She glanced at a second-floor window bordered with Victorian gingerbread that their cousin Sophie’s father had carved during Patrick and Eliza’s restoration of the old building. “Olivia. I just took her fresh towels and bath oil.” Molly slipped him a sidelong, sisterly glance. “Or was that for you, too?”
He looked away from her, as distracting, erotic pictures of Olivia formed in his head. “I hope the parents and the other teachers don’t know you talk like that.” He ruffled Molly’s hair, but she surprised him with a hug rather than the karate chop she usually dispensed for such a gesture.
“If you don’t explain, I’ll only ask your mom.” She headed for her car, waving goodbye over her head. “I’ll bet she needs firewood.”
“I already carried in enough for the whole winter.”
“I’ll paint her kitchen.”
“If you can persuade her to give up that classic wallpaper.”
Molly tossed a condescending glance over her shoulder, but he only grinned. Crazy Molly. Early on, trying to survive after her natural parents had pretty much abandoned her, she’d damn near destroyed the school where she taught now. Aunt Eliza and Uncle Patrick had transformed her from a dangerous punk into family. Still, it was a good thing his mom had plenty of leftovers. Molly could eat her weight in homemade chili.
Zach climbed the steps a few at a time and pushed through the B&B’s front door. His aunt looked up from the registration desk, sliding her hand through salt-and-pepper hair that brushed her shoulders.
“Evening, Zach. Beth said you were on your way.”
“That was fast work, even for Mom. Which room, Aunt Eliza?”
“Top of the stairs, immediate left.”
“Thanks.”
“Better hurry. Molly just took her some bath oil.”
He ran up the stairs. At Olivia’s door, he paused, his hand raised to knock. Even through the thick wood, he heard water running. He banged with extra force.
A moment later, Olivia opened the door, black hair flying, eyes wide. She opened her mouth in a throaty gasp. “Zach.” Her hands went to the pale pink lapels of her robe.
It was hardly sexy attire, but he found himself imagining the warm body that curved beneath the terry cloth. By the time he met her gaze, a glacier had formed in the icy gray eyes that were quickly becoming his obsession.
“I want to meet Evan,” he said.
The ice melted. She seemed to reach for him without lifting a finger. “Do you want to know Evan?”
“I’m his father. He’s my son.”
“That’s not good enough. I’ve kept him safe—and happy enough—for five years. I need to hear plain talk.”
“I want to be Evan’s father for the rest of my life. I want to hear him call me dad.”
Smiling, she let the robe go. He noticed the swell of lightly tanned flesh between the open lapels, but he was man enough to know their son mattered more than lust.
“We’re in this together,” he said. “I want to know Evan.”
She grabbed his hand—to shake it of all things. He stared at her small, strong fingers. It was an odd way to start a relationship with your son’s mother.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE NEXT MORNING, Zach followed Olivia back to the airport in Knoxville. All the way down the mountain road his heart hammered. Sweat beaded on his lip again and again. His body’s natural response to an unnatural fear was about to reveal one of his most humiliating secrets to Olivia. Zach Calvert, former Navy pilot, was terrified of flying.
Forcing himself to ignore the fact he had to get on a plane, he concentrated on Evan waiting at the other end of the flight. Meeting his son was worth a couple of hellish hours.
At the airport, Olivia veered off to return her rental car while Zach parked in a lot. They’d agreed to meet at the ticket counter. Tall and confident as ever, she was easy to spot. Too easy.
They checked in without talking to each other and then headed for their gate. Walking at her side, he noticed how the other travelers stared.
Her poise and her flawless face, an aristocratic, elegantly drawn nose, and her intelligent gaze vied with the tousled confusion of long black hair. She drew attention partly because she didn’t seem to know she was suck-the last-breath-from-your-lungs gorgeous.
Zach had nothing to set on the security conveyor belt, but he waited while Olivia pushed her briefcase and her purse through.
Her poise made him more aware of his Achilles’ heel. A smart guy would have rejected her offer to arrange for seats together. A smart guy wouldn’t let a self-assured woman who’d been in sole charge of his son for the past five years discover he was afraid of flying.
They cleared security with more than an hour to wait for their flight. Olivia was already fishing work out of her briefcase as they closed in on their gate. Zach held back. He couldn’t sit there for sixty minutes without throwing up.
“I’m going to look for a paper,” he said. “And a coffee. Want one?”
“Sure. With cream and sugar.” Sitting, she pushed a pen behind her ear. “Wait— Will you make that half-and-half?”
Nodding, he turned, breathing easier the more distance he put between them. How was he going to pretend to be normal on the plane?
He took his time and passed the coffee shop twice before he turned in. A teenager in a cap and acne came to the counter and threw him a look that asked for his order.
“A bottle of water.” Last thing he needed was caffeine. “And a large coffee. With half-and-half.”
“The milk and stuff’s over there,” the kid said. “That’ll be seven-fifty.”
“Thanks. Do you have newspapers?”
“Beside the milk and the stir sticks. You pay here. That’ll cost you another fifty cents.”
Zach paid and tucked the paper beneath his arm. He stirred sugar and half-and-half into Olivia’s coffee and started back to the gate. She didn’t look up until he sat beside her. Even then she just reached for the cup.
“Thanks.” She sipped. “Perfect. I thought you wanted coffee, too.” She might not be looking at him, but she saw too much for his peace of mind.
“I reconsidered.” He unscrewed his water bottle’s cap and guzzled half the contents. It didn’t help.
Olivia checked the time. “We’ll be boarding soon. Maybe we should discuss what we intend to tell Evan.”
“Discuss what?” He felt his face harden. “There’s no argument. We tell him who I am.”
“From the start? What if you change your mind?”
He stared at her. Who did she see when she looked at him? “Did you ever change your mind about wanting Evan?”
She let her mouth open slightly, showing surprise. The moisture on her full lower lip made breathing a little harder for Zach.
“You can’t appreciate what you just said.” The joy in her smile made him glad, whatever it was. “I’m never sure I’m the best mom Evan could have. I have to work. He spends time in day care. Even my father assumed I wouldn’t want to be a mother when I was so young, but you assumed I never considered an alternative.”
His throat went tight. For a moment, it was as if he could almost remember her, as if the feelings they’d shared were there, on the fringes of what felt real to him now. “Maybe I can’t imagine you not wanting to keep our son.”
She widened her gaze. “Well, you’d be right.” As if the subject had grown too personal, she busied herself with the pages in her lap.
“You’re uncomfortable discussing your pregnancy with me.”
She nodded. “It’s all still as real as if it just happened to me, but to you I’m a stranger. I loved being pregnant, feeling Evan grow, even though I—” She stopped, her face pink with a blush. “I missed you.”
“I was angry for a long time about what happened, but I thought I was getting over it.” He wiped his mouth, his resentment an old, no-longer-welcome partner.
“Why did they give you so much training for one mission?” She was thoughtful. He was surprised she hadn’t asked before.
He glanced at the empty seats around them. “I was assigned to do that kind of work from then on, but I was chosen for that flight because Kimberly Salva was a friend.” His whole body seemed to tighten as he pictured Kim, idealistic, smarter than he’d ever be, full of fire for her own career. “We went to the Academy together.”
Olivia drew back. “I don’t mean to pry, but you’re angry when you talk about her. You were just friends?”
He nodded. “She was a year behind me. I’m angry because I lost her. She had a husband and a two-year-old daughter, and she trusted me.”
“And you’re not over it yet?”
He considered lying. His own child’s mother deserved the truth. “Maybe I never will be. I get to meet my son. Her daughter will never see her again. It’s not fair that I lived when I couldn’t save her.” Olivia’s scratching pen drew his gaze. She was outlining the same abstract, many-pointed doodle so hard the page looked ready to tear. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“No.” But her glossy black hair hid her face from him.
“I’m not going to hurt Evan. I only lose control with people who want to kill the citizens I’m trying to protect.”
“You’re joking, but people don’t make jokes like that without a little bit of honesty.”
He curved his hand around her wrist, making sure to touch only where her black blazer covered her skin. “I’m telling you the truth. I wouldn’t hide anything that might affect Evan. I’ve explained my problems with Helene. I don’t want you and me to have difficulties. I’m a good father to Lily, and I’ll be a good father to Evan.”
“I should have seen you with her. Not seeing you together was a mistake.”
“I didn’t tell her,” he said.
“Thanks.” She sagged against her chair, clearly deep in thought about how much fathering a wounded man could do. He couldn’t keep assuring her of his reliable mental health. He’d start to sound crazy. A sudden thought brought Olivia upright again. “What if Lily or Helene find out about Evan through the papers?”
“They won’t. Helene doesn’t read them, and I never saw her watch the news.”
“What if someone else tells her?”
“Leland—her husband—is a reasonable guy. He’ll figure out the facts and hold Helene back until I get in touch. He won’t let her say something hurtful to Lily.”
“You trust her new husband more than you trust her?”
“We didn’t know each other when we got married.” How well had he known Olivia?
She turned away, leading him to believe she’d experienced broken trust. With a painful start, he realized he’d taught her that lesson. She’d trusted him.
“I didn’t mean to leave you,” he said.
“Your amnesia makes it no easier for me. I tell myself over and over that you won’t just abandon Evan, but if you’re not good to him, I’ll—”
Ahhh. He understood rage. Though she sputtered to a halt, her vehemence drew him closer.
The vulnerable curve of her lips fascinated him. He’d made love to her and yet he had no memory of her mouth’s firm, tempting texture. She knew secrets about him, about them together that he might never remember.
Her mouth twisted into a smile, and he dragged his gaze back to hers. “Can’t think of a threat?” he asked. When she looked serious, he regretted teasing her.
“I won’t need a threat if you hurt my son.”
“Our son.”
Her expression, stony, determined, and not in the least wary of him, was all too familiar. She like Helene did when she was about to announce he’d broken her rules and to hell with the ones in the custody agreement. He knocked back the rest of his water. They finished their wait in a troubled state of truce. It was almost a relief when the attendant began to call their flight.
He stayed behind Olivia as they handed over their boarding passes and entered the jetway’s gaping maw. His feet grew heavier, but he forced himself to keep walking.
Inside the narrow passage, his heart thudded in his ears. He felt as if he might plod right through the flimsy flooring. At last, the door of the aircraft came into view, along with a few precious inches of daylight around the gate’s edges. He could see himself pushing through the plastic material and jumping to the ground. A broken leg or two would be worth escape.
The flight attendant eyed him with concern, but passed him through. To first-class. Which he couldn’t afford.
He hung back when Olivia offered him the choice of aisle or window, with no idea he had a problem. Behind him, the rest of the first-class crowd began muttering at their unaccustomed delay.
“I can’t pay for this.” He grasped exactly how different their worlds were. How different they’d look to Evan.
“Fortunately, I can, so it’s not a problem for either of us.” She passed him her briefcase. “Could you put this…”
Before he answered, another attendant took her case. “May I take your jacket, sir?” she asked.
Olivia settled into the window seat. As if the cost of the ticket was no big deal. He’d bet on it being at least three of his car payments. He shrugged off his jacket and surrendered it. As he sat and latched on to the seat belt with sweating hands, Olivia nodded his way.
“You’re doing me a favor. Forget about the cost.”
“Being my son’s father isn’t a favor. I’m in this for good—you’d better get used to it.”
“I meant for now, coming with me when you don’t really know who I am. I probably would have asked for a DNA test.”
The idea startled him. “I didn’t think of it. The pictures… I can’t deny his face.” He rubbed his hands down the thighs of his jeans.
She smiled and he had the feeling he’d passed some test. Little did she know. She had no experience sharing custody. They both faced plenty of tests to come.
“I have videotapes we’ve been making since the day he was born, and a library full of photo albums.”
“I’d like to make copies.” As he spoke the plane rocked. He turned to the aisle, gripping the armrests to hide his shaking hands.
“Sure.” Olivia looked him up and down. “Are you all right?”
Grunting an affirmative, he managed to ease breath in and out at regular intervals. His humiliation was complete when the kid in front of him sat up on his knees to peer at Zach.
“You sick, mister? I always use that bag down there.” He slithered over the back of the seat to reach for the one in front of Zach. “You’ll be okay.”
The kid’s mom snatched him down so hard he seemed to disappear. Zach glanced at Olivia, whose close scrutiny made him feel weak.
He waved off an offer of wine and sensed Olivia doing the same. The floor rumbled beneath them as the engines powered up and then down. Flaps opened and closed as the pilots went through their preflight checks. Zach’s mouth dried like a desert in a drought.
He studied the stuff sticking out of the seat pocket. He might have to grab one of those bags.
At the first hint of movement he closed his eyes. When the jet jerked backward, his sweating palms slid off the armrests. A hand closed over his. He opened his eyes, biting back a shout.
It was Olivia, of course. She pulled his hand into her lap and deliberately threaded their fingers together. Her touch was more warmth and comfort than he’d known in six years. More than he had a right to know, considering.
“You don’t have to pretend.” Her low, liquid voice intoxicated more quickly than strong wine. “I know about being scared. When I heard you’d died, I tried to pretend I was strong, but I was terrified my dad would fire me and throw me out. He’s terribly proud of our name, and I knew he’d be ashamed of me. I’d always lived a spoiled, easy kind of life, but food and clothing and car seats and immunizations felt beyond my reach. Can you imagine Evan or Lily going to bed hungry because you’d been foolish?”
“Why are you telling me this?” She’d hardly been an adult herself when he’d left her pregnant and alone. Not having known didn’t seem to ease his guilt any more than it made her feel better.
“I told you because we don’t trust each other yet.” Each word came out under strain. “I can’t forget you disappeared, and you’ve had a bad time I can’t imagine and a bad marriage that makes you think a woman can’t share a child with his father. I just learned something about you that you’d rather I hadn’t, and I thought if I gave you something equally personal, we could skip a few steps learning about each other.” She squeezed his hand with a shrug that didn’t quite look casual. “And I know how it feels to believe every breath is the last one you’re going to squeeze past the boulder on your chest.”
He leaned toward her without turning his head. He didn’t want her to see the terror in his eyes. “Even if your father came through for you, what you faced makes my flying phobia trivial.”
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Anna Adams
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: How is it possible to forget the love of your life?Zach Calvert has no memory of his last three years as a Navy pilot. And for the most part, he′s resigned himself to that. He′s content with his new life as the sheriff of his hometown, happy that his small daughter lives close by.But everything changes when he discovers he has a five-year-old son and a lover he can′t remember.