Uh-oh, I was in for it. When he gets that tone, heads roll. Six feet two inches of corporate tax attorney that manages the IRS on behalf of his clients and frequently bests it, Jack Lane is smart, charming, well spoken, and tough as a tiger when provoked. And from the way he was raking back his silver-tipped dark hair and his brown eyes were flashing, he was currently very provoked.
He was lucky I was still calling him “Dad” at all, I thought bitterly. We both knew he wasn’t.
He stalked toward me, eyes narrowed. “MacKayla Evelina Lane, what on earth did you do to your hair? And your face! Are those bruises? When was the last time you showered? Did you lose your luggage? You don’t wear—Christ, Mac, you look awful! What happened—” He broke off, shaking his head, then aimed a finger at me. “I’ll have you know, young lady, I left your mother with her parents four days ago! I dropped every case I was working on to fly over here and bring you home. Do you have any idea the heart attack it gave me to find out you hadn’t been staying at the Clarin House for over a week? And nobody knew where you’d gone! Could you check your e-mail, Mac? Could you pick up a phone? I have been walking up and down these dreary, rainy, reeking-with-stumbling-drunks streets, staring into every face, searching trash-filled alleys for you, hoping and praying to God that I wasn’t going to find you lying facedown in one of them like your sister and have to kill myself rather than take the news back home to your mother and kill her with it!”
The tears I’d been holding back came out in a waterfall. I might not have this man’s DNA inside my body, but he couldn’t be any more my father.
He swallowed up the room with long-legged strides and crushed me into that great, big, barrel-chested hug that always smelled like peppermint and aftershave, and it felt just like it always did—like the safest place on earth.
Unfortunately, I knew better. There was no safe place. Not for me. Not now. And certainly not for him. Not here.
He’d been walking around Dublin looking for me! I blessed the Fates that had spared him, steering him away from the Dark Zone, protecting him in those alleys from Unseelie. If anything had happened to him it would have been doubly on my head. What had I been thinking—avoiding my e-mail, refusing to call home? Of course he would come looking for me! Dad never took no for an answer.
I had to get him out of Dublin, fast, before something awful happened to him, and I lost another piece of my heart to that satin-lined box in the earth.
I had to make him fly home ASAP, and without what he’d come for—me.
“What happened to your face, Mac?” was the first question Dad asked me after Inspector Jayne left. Though there were still two hours to closing, I flipped the sign and stuck a Post-it next to it that said, Sorry, closed early, please come back tomorrow.
I led him to the rear conversation area where passersby couldn’t see behind the shelves that someone was still inside, fingering my hair nervously. It was one thing to lie to the police, another to lie to the man who’d raised me, who knew I hated spiders and loved hot fudge sundaes topped with peanut butter and whipped cream.
“Inspector Jayne tells me you fell on the stairs. ”
“What else did the inspector tell you?” I fished. How much did I have to try to explain?
“That the police officer handling Alina’s case was murdered. Had his throat cut. And that he’d been to see you the day it happened. Mac, what’s going on? What are you doing here? What is this place?” He craned his head around. “Do you work here?”
I filled him in without filling him in at all. I’d realized I liked it in Dublin, I told him. I’d been offered a job that came with lodgings, so I’d moved into the bookstore. Staying in Ireland and working gave me the perfect chance to keep the pressure on the new officer handling Alina’s case. Yes, I fell on the stairs. I’d had a few beers and forgotten how much stronger their Guinness was than ours. No, I had no idea why Inspector Jayne didn’t seem to think very highly of me. I gave Dad the same excuse I’d given Jayne for O’Duffy’s visit. To make it more convincing, I embellished about how fatherly and kind O’Duffy had been and what a favor he’d been doing, stopping by. Crime was very high in Dublin, I told Dad, and I felt awful about O’Duffy’s death but really, police officers died on the job all the time and Jayne was just being a jack-petunia about it to me.
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“And your hair?”
“You don’t like it?” It was hard to feign surprise when I hated it myself; I missed the weight of it, the different styles I’d been able to wear, the swish of it when I walked. I was just grateful he hadn’t seen me when I’d still had all my splints on.
He gave me a look. “You are kidding, right? Mac, baby, you had beautiful hair, long and blond like your mother’s…” He trailed off.
And there it was. I looked him dead in the eye. “Which mother, Dad? Mom? Or the other one—you know, the one that gave me up for adoption?”
“You want to go get some dinner, Mac?”
Men. Do they all evade as first line of defense?
We ordered delivery. I hadn’t had a good pizza in forever, it was starting to rain again, and I was in no mood to go out in it. I ordered, Dad paid, just like old times when life was simple, and Daddy was always there to be my Friday night date whenever my latest boyfriend had been a jerk. I gathered paper plates and napkins from Fiona’s stash behind the register. Before sitting down with our pizza, I turned on all the exterior lights, and lit a cozy gas fire. For now, we were safe. I just had to keep him safe until morning, when I would somehow get him on a plane and send him home.
I keep a happy thought inside me at all times. I cling to it in my darkest moments: When all this is over, I’m going to go back to Ashford and pretend none of this happened. I’m going to find myself a man, get married, and have babies. I need both my parents at home, waiting for me because I’m going to make little Lane girls, and we’re going to be a family again.
We kept the talk light through dinner. He told me that Mom was still lost in grief and not talking to anyone. He’d hated leaving her, but he’d taken her to Gram and Gramp’s and they were giving her the best of care. Thinking about Mom was too painful, so I turned the conversation to books. Dad loves to read as much as I do, and I knew that in his opinion there were far worse places he could have found me working, like another bar. We talked about new releases. I told him some of my plans for the store.
When dinner was over we pushed our plates back and regarded each other warily.
He began a somber “You know your mother and I love you” spiel, and I hushed him. I knew. I didn’t have any doubts on that score. I’d been forced to come to terms with so much in the past few weeks that making peace with my discovery that my parents were not my birth parents hadn’t taken as long as I’d expected. It had rocked my world, brutally shifted my paradigm, but regardless of whose sperm and egg had resulted in my conception, Jack and Rainey Lane had raised me with more love and unwavering support than most people ever know in a lifetime. If my biological parents were alive out there somewhere, they were my second set.
“I know, Dad. Just tell me. ”
“How did you find out, Mac?”
I told him an old woman had insisted I was someone else, about brown eyes and blue not making green, about calling the hospital to check on my birth records.
“We knew this day might come. ” He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. “What do you want to know, Mac?”
“Everything,” I said in a low voice. “Every last detail. ”
“It’s not much. ”
“Alina was my biological sister, wasn’t she?”
He nodded. “She was almost three, and you were nearly a year when the two of you came to us. ”
“Where did we come from, Dad?”
“They didn’t tell us. In fact, they told us virtually nothing while demanding everything. ”
“They” were people from a churc
h in Atlanta. Mom and Dad couldn’t conceive, and had been on an adoption waiting list for so long they’d nearly given up. But one day they got a call that two children had been left at a downtown church, and a friend of a friend of the church’s pastor’s sister knew their counselor, who’d suggested the Lanes. Not all couples were willing to accept, or had the financial means to take on two young children at once, and among the biological mother’s lengthy list of requirements was that the children not be separated. She’d also insisted that if the adoptive couple did not already live in a rural area, they must move to a small town and agree to never live in or near a city again.
“Why?”
“We were told it was what it was, Mac, and we could take it or leave it. ”
“And you didn’t think it was odd?”
“Of course we did. Extremely. But your mother and I wanted so badly to have children and couldn’t. We were young and in love and would have done just about anything to have a family of our own. Since both of us came from small towns to begin with, we took it as a sign to return to our roots. We visited dozens of towns, finally settling on Ashford. I was a successful attorney and pulled every string I could to push the adoption through. We signed all the documents, including the list of requirements, and in no time, we were proud parents living in a great little town where everyone believed you were our biological daughters, leading the life we’d always dreamed of. ” He smiled, reminiscing. “We fell in love with you girls the moment we saw you. Alina was wearing this yellow skirt and sweater set, and you were dressed from head to toe in pink, Mac, with a little rainbow ribbon tied around a blond wisp of your hair. ”
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I gaped. Does the infant mind remember? To this day, pink and rainbow hues are my favorite.
“What other strange requirements did the woman have?” I couldn’t call her “our mother. ” She wasn’t. She was the woman who’d left us.
He closed his eyes. “I no longer recall most of them. There’s a legal document tucked away in a box somewhere that your mother and I signed. But there’s one I never forgot. ”
I sat up a little straighter.
He opened his eyes. “The first promise we had to make to the adoption agency before they’d even consider putting us on the list of prospective parents was that under no circumstances would we ever let either of you set foot in Ireland. ”
I couldn’t get him to go home.
I tried everything.
In his mind, he’d violated his most sacred trust the moment he’d caved in to Alina’s radiant face when she’d announced that she’d won a full scholarship to study abroad—at Trinity, of all places!—by not locking her in her room and forbidding it. He should have threatened, he should have taken her car away, should have tempted her with the offer of a sporty new one if she stayed home. There were a thousand ways he could have stopped her from going, a thousand ways he’d failed.
She’d been so excited, he told me sadly. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to stand in her way. Those conditions they’d agreed to so long ago had seemed as insubstantial as ghosts in the warm, sunny light of day. More than twenty perfect years had passed, and the odd demands accompanying us had lost their immediacy, become the phantom fears of a dying woman.
“She’s dead, then?” I asked in a hushed voice.
“They never told us. We assumed. It was easier that way; we liked the finality of it. No worries that one day someone out there might come to their senses and try to take our girls away. Legal nightmares like that happen all the time. ”
“Did you and Mom ever go back and try to find out more about us?”
Dad nodded. “I don’t know if you recall, but Alina was very ill when she was eight and the doctors wanted more information about her medical history than we had. We found the church had burned to the ground, the adoption agency had closed, and the private investigator I hired to look into things couldn’t locate a single ex-employee. ” He absorbed the look on my face and smiled faintly. “I know. Odd again. You must understand, Mac, the two of you were ours. We didn’t care where you’d come from, only that you’d come. And that you’re coming home with me now,” he added pointedly. “How long will it take you to pack?”
I sighed. “I’m not packing, Dad. ”
“I’m not leaving without you, Mac,” he said.
“You must be Jack Lane,” said Barrons.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. “I wish you’d quit doing that. ” I craned my neck to shoot him an over-the-shoulder glare. How did such a large man move so silently? Once again, he was standing behind me while I was having a conversation, and neither of us had heard him approach. It aggravated me even more that he knew my father’s first name. I’d never told him.
Dad rose in that way big, self-assured men have, slowly, stretching to the last quarter inch of his height, and seeming to fill out even larger along the way. His expression was reserved but interested; he was curious to meet my new employer—despite the fact that he’d already decided I wouldn’t be working for him anymore.
His expression changed the instant he saw Barrons. It frosted, shuttered, hardened.
“Jericho Barrons. ” Barrons extended his hand.
Dad stared at it, and for a few moments I wasn’t sure he’d take it. Then he inclined his head and the men clasped hands, and held.
And held. Like it was some kind of pissing contest, and whichever man let go first might have to forfeit a ball.
I looked from one to the other, and realized that Barrons and my dad were having one of those wordless conversations he and I have from time to time. Though the language was, by nature, foreign to me, I grew up in the Deep South where a man’s ego is roughly the size of his pickup truck, and women get an early and interesting education in the not-so-subtle roar of testosterone.
She’s my daughter, you prick, and if you’re thinking about your prick when you’re looking at her, I’ll rip it off and hang you by it.
Try.
You’re too old for her. Leave her alone. (I wanted to tell my dad he was way off base with this one, but despite the dogged determination with which I tried to interrupt and force my ocular two cents’ worth in, neither of them would look at me. )
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You think? I bet she doesn’t think I’m too old. Why don’t you ask her? (Barrons said that just to irritate him. Of course, I think he’s too old for me. Not that I think about him that way at all. )
I’m taking her home.
Try. (Barrons can be a man of annoyingly few words. )
She’ll choose me over you, Dad told him proudly.
Barrons laughed.
“Mac, baby,” my dad said without ever taking his eyes off Barrons, “get your things. We’re going home. ”
I groaned. Of course, I’d choose my dad over Barrons, if given a fair choice. But it wasn’t a fair choice. I hadn’t been given many of them lately. I knew my refusal was going to hurt him. And I needed to hurt him, because I needed to make him leave.
“I’m sorry, Daddy, but I’m staying here,” I said softly.
Jack Lane flinched. His gaze cut away from Barrons to stab at me with cool reproof, but not before I saw the hurt and betrayal beneath the lawyer-face he didn’t paste on quick enough to mask.
Barrons’ dark eyes gleamed. As far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.
I went with Dad to the airport the next morning to see him off.
Last night I wouldn’t have believed I’d get him to go, and frankly I’m not sure I’m the one that did.
He’d stayed at the bookstore, in one of the extra fourth-floor bedrooms, and kept me up until three o’clock in the morning, arguing every angle he could think of—and believe me, attorneys can wear you out with them—trying to change my mind. We’d done something we never do: gone to bed mad at each other.
This morning, however, he’d been
an entirely different man. I’d woken up to find him already downstairs, having coffee with Barrons in the study. He’d greeted me with one of those big all-encompassing hugs I love so much. He’d been relaxed, affectionate, his usual charismatic self, a man that, even at twice their age, had made most of my high school girlfriends giggle like morons. He’d been robust, cheerful, in all-around better spirits than I’d seen him since Alina’s death.
He’d smiled and shaken Barrons’ hand when we’d left, with what had looked like genuine friendliness, even respect.
I suppose Barrons must have confided something of himself in my father that revealed a hidden integrity of character I have yet to see, that set Jack Lane’s legal-eagle mind at ease. Whatever he and Barrons had found to talk about, it’d worked wonders.
After a quick stop at Dad’s hotel to grab his luggage, a bag of croissants, and coffee, we filled our time on the way to the airport discussing one of our favorite topics: cars and the new designs unveiled at the latest auto show.
At the terminal I soaked up another hug, sent my love to Mom, promised to call soon, and managed to make it back to the bookstore just in time to open up for business.
I had a good day, but I’ve begun to realize that’s when life likes to kick you in the teeth—the moment you start to relax and let your guard down.
By six o’clock, I’d had fifty-six patrons, rung up an impressive amount of sales, and discovered that I loved being a bookseller. I’d found my calling. Instead of serving drinks and watching people turn into drunken idiots, I was being paid to give people wonderful stories to escape into, full of mystery, mayhem, and romance. Instead of splashing anesthetizing alcohol into glasses, I was pouring fictional tonics to alleviate the stress, hardship, and drudgery of their lives.
I wasn’t corroding anybody’s liver. I didn’t have to watch balding, middle-aged men hitting on pretty young coeds, trying to recapture their glory days. I wasn’t deluged by the sordid sob stories of the recently and so often well deservedly jilted, while I stood behind my counter. I didn’t have to watch a single person cheat on their spouse, urinate on the floor, or pick a fight all day.
At six o’clock, I should have counted my blessings and closed early.
But I didn’t, and just when I was starting to feel almost happy and good about myself, my life went to hell again.