Lip Service

by Susan Mallery

  “Who the…” He caught himself. “Who are you?”

  She grinned. “I’m Erin. Fiddle and Arturo missed you so much. Arturo didn’t say anything, but I could tell. He was sad in his eyes. And Fiddle talked about you all the time, so it’s like I knew you and then I missed you, too. Are you hungry? Fiddle’s making pancakes. I really wanted some, but I waited for you because you’re back and it’s polite. So do you want pancakes?”

  Fidela wiped her hands on a towel. “Good morning,” she said, moving behind the girl and putting her hands on Erin’s shoulders. “This is Erin.”

  “I told him that,” the girl said happily as she smiled at him.

  “Skye’s daughter.”

  He got it then—the red hair, the shape of her eyes, although Skye’s were green, not blue. He saw the similarities in the set of her shoulders.

  Here it was—living proof of Skye’s betrayal. Her child with another man.

  The anger that lived inside of him flared again, making him want to raise his fist to the heavens. But then what? Did he plan to call God out? And if he did, what made him think God gave a damn?

  “Why are you here?” he snapped.

  Fidela glared at him. “Erin comes over most days. She keeps me company.”

  Some of the brightness faded from the girl’s smile. “I wanted to see you,” she said, sounding less sure of herself. “I wanted to meet you.”

  Skye’s daughter. The child they were supposed to have together. She’d promised to marry him and then had walked away because her father had told her to. She’d chosen Jed’s old friend as a husband, rather than him, and Erin was the result.

  “I’m going to make pancakes now,” Fidela told the girl. “Why don’t you get the plates.”

  “Okay.” Erin looked at him out of the corner of her eye, then turned away.

  Fidela was at his side in a heartbeat and dug her fingers into his arm. “She is a little girl,” she whispered. “She believes that you’re someone special. Do you understand me? She didn’t do anything wrong. You have no reason to be angry with her.”

  He would have ignored the words, except Fidela was right. Erin wasn’t to blame for her mother’s actions and he hadn’t fallen far enough into hell to take out his rage on an innocent child. Not yet, anyway.

  He nodded once.

  Fidela tightened her grip.

  “I’m fine,” he told her.

  She released him and returned to the stove where she picked up a pot of coffee. Mitch limped to the table. Erin stood there, looking uncertain. He forced himself to smile.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Erin,” he said, feeling stupid but determined to make an effort.

  Her smile returned. “Do you want me to get you a mug? I know where they are.”

  “Sure.” He eased into the seat. “Thanks.”

  She brought back a blue mug and set it in front of him. Fidela poured his coffee.

  “I’ll get started on the pancakes,” she said.

  Erin sat across from him. “Are you happy to be home? I would get really sad if I had to go away. Were you sad? Do you have lots of friends where you were? I have friends and I have horses, too. I ride.”

  “Erin rides over nearly every day all by herself. Very impressive for a little girl.”

  Erin laughed. “Fiddle, I’m not little. I’m growing like a weed.” She smiled at him. “That’s what Mom says. Are your friends going to come visit you? Did you fly on a big plane to get home? I was on a plane once. I wasn’t scared at all. Mom says I’m fearless. I’m not sure what that means, but it’s good, right?”

  She kept on talking, apparently not needing anyone to participate. She had an energy he admired. These days it took everything he had just to stay standing. As long as he didn’t think about Skye, he could handle Erin sitting across from him, looking at him as if he’d just made her day.

  “Fiddle says you’re getting more medals. She says you’ve saved our country.”

  He glanced at the older woman. “I had help,” he said dryly.

  “But you’re very brave. You’re a hero.”

  He frowned. “I’m not a hero.”

  Erin’s eyes widened. “But you are. Everyone knows that.”

  He started to argue, then shrugged. Let the kid think what she wanted. Life would teach her hard lessons soon enough.

  Fidela slid a plate of pancakes in front of each of them.

  Erin picked up her fork. “I told Mom there would be pancakes, but she didn’t want to get up. She said she was tired.”

  He wondered if Skye hadn’t slept well. Had she been haunted, as he had? Had she relived their time together? Had his harsh words wounded her?

  He ignored any stirrings of guilt, telling himself she deserved what she got.

  The pancakes were better than he remembered. He’d finished three when Erin asked, “Can you ride a horse without your leg? I hope you can because then we could go riding together. Does it hurt? You have a new leg, right? Fiddle told me about it. Can I see?”

  Mitch froze, not sure what to say. No one outside the hospital and rehab center had been so open in discussing the amputation. He wasn’t sure if he appreciated Erin’s attitude or if he wanted her to shut up.

  Fidela walked over and touched Erin’s shoulder. “Maybe less questions on the first day.”

  Erin sighed. “I talk too much. Everyone tells me that. Sometimes I don’t want to talk about stuff, either.”

  “We can talk about it later,” Mitch said, surprising himself.

  Erin brightened. “Okay. And it’s my birthday soon. I’m having a party. You can come. You don’t even have to bring a present. There’s cake. You like cake, don’t you?”

  A kid’s birthday party? “I, ah—”

  “It’s at my house, which is right next door. You can find it easy.” She looked hopeful.

  He found himself not wanting to hurt her feelings, but there was no way he wanted to go. “Erin, I—”

  “I’m going to be eight and that’s a big deal. Mom keeps telling me that. Eight means I’m getting big and everything.”

  She might have kept talking, but he wasn’t sure. The words became a hum that buzzed in the back of his mind.

  Eight? Erin was turning eight?

  The math was easy. Beyond easy. He knew the exact date of the last time he and Skye had made love. He knew when and where and how they’d held on to each other. They’d been planning on getting married. Laughter had shared space with the moans and cries. There had been so much anticipation.

  He looked at Erin, studying the shape of her mouth, the way she held her head. He saw it in her fingers and her movements.

  The pancakes he’d eaten sat in his stomach like a rock. He felt both sick and stunned. Reality stared back at him in the form of a nearly eight-year-old girl.

  Erin was his. Skye’d had his child and hadn’t bothered to tell him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SKYE FINISHED her speech to the women’s group in Austin. She’d started with a few funny stories and had ended with a couple of case studies about specific children to bring the point home. In the middle, she’d carefully layered in the painful statistics about the over twelve million children who lived in food-insecure households. A statistic her foundation wanted to change.

  “I have a few minutes for questions,” she said from behind the podium.

  One young woman in a red power suit stood. “Why did you pick this issue? You’re a Titan. You probably never even knew anyone who went to bed hungry.”

  Skye had been asked this before and it always annoyed her. Did she have to have cancer to want to donate to that cause? She’d never been in a natural disaster, either. Did that mean the Red Cross was out of luck?

  Then she reminded herself of the greater good, that the person asking the question was probably curious. Cynical, but curious.

  “When my daughter was a year old,” Skye began, “she fell down the stairs and hit her head on a table. There was blood everywhere and bein
g a good mother, I completely panicked.”

  The women in the audience laughed.

  Skye leaned forward. “We went to the emergency room where she was treated. While we were waiting to fill out the insurance info, I bought a box of animal crackers in the vending machine. A girl about seven or eight walked over and asked me if I was going to eat them.”

  The audience faded and Skye was back to that moment in the emergency waiting room. The girl had been blond and painfully thin. Her clothes hung on her.

  “I gave her the crackers and asked who she was with. She said her mother had been brought in. They lived on the street and she hadn’t eaten in three days. I asked my sister to take my daughter home and I took the girl to the cafeteria for dinner. When the social worker arrived, she wasn’t surprised by the girl’s condition. It happens far too often, in neighborhoods very close to where we live.”

  Skye drew in a breath. “I went home and took care of my daughter but I couldn’t forget about that other little girl. I called the social worker and made an appointment. I wanted to talk about being a foster parent. I knew I had to do something to make a difference. But when I got to the appointment, the woman was tired and busy and told me she didn’t have any time for rich people who wanted to play at making a difference. I was a Titan. Why didn’t I do something that mattered?”

  She shrugged. “I was angry and insulted, but I also thought she might be right. I had an inheritance from my mother, which became the seed money for the foundation. We feed over a million children a year. When I say feed, I don’t mean a lunch here or a Christmas dinner there. We provide one to three meals a day to over a million children right here, in this country. Our goal is to make sure no child ever goes hungry again. It’s ambitious but I believe it can be done. We can make a difference, one box of animal crackers at a time.”

  She leaned toward the microphone. “What are you doing to make a difference?”

  The woman in the red power suit sat down.

  Questions continued for a few minutes. Afterward, Skye chatted with several of the women, took a few checks for contributions before driving to the airport where she caught the shuttle to Dallas. An hour later, she was back in at the foundation.

  “You did good,” Elsa, her secretary, said as Skye walked into her office. “We’ve already had three calls from people wanting to be silver-level sponsors. I’m sending out packages today.”

  Skye passed over the checks. “We’re growing,” she said. “That’s what we want. The more people interested in the problem, the more chance we have to fix it.” She shrugged out of her suit jacket and kicked off her heels. Most days she did the business casual thing, but when she was speaking, she wanted to look the part. “What did I miss?”

  “Glenna wants to see you,” Elsa said. “She says it’s important. I cleared you for the next hour. Then you have a phone interview with the LA Times.”

  While the foundation had an excellent PR department, nothing seemed quite so interesting to the press as speaking to an actual Titan. When she wanted to complain about the drain on her time, Skye reminded herself that she was on a mission. So what if she was inconvenienced or tired or pulled in too many directions? She was feeding hungry children. What could matter more?

  “Do we have prep answers?” Skye asked.

  Elsa produced a folder that would contain all the current statistics on hunger in America, information on how the foundation squeezed every penny until it screamed for mercy, their success at fund-raising and a list of ways the average person could make a difference.

  “Great. Thanks. Send Glenna in.”

  “Will do.”

  Skye had time to finish nearly two e-mails before her managing director walked in. Glenna was a forty-something professional who knew what it took to run a successful charitable foundation. She’d been courted by every major charity in the country. Skye had been determined to win her.

  “I did the lunch thing today,” Skye said as Glenna paused to close the door behind her. The other women looked concerned. “I was going to complain about it, but something tells me I shouldn’t.”

  Glenna had short dark hair, sensibly cut, and an easy smile. Only she wasn’t smiling today.

  “We have a problem,” she said, sitting on the opposite side of Skye’s desk. “Another one. And it’s big.”

  Skye didn’t like the sound of that. A couple of months ago someone had gone to the district attorney, claiming that the foundation was a front for money laundering. Skye and her people had been cleared of all charges, but too much time and money had been spent proving they were innocent.

  Glenna passed over several newspaper articles. “I downloaded these from the Internet. Two of them will appear in print over the next few days. They say that our executives are being paid excessive salaries and bonuses. Money that should be going to feed children is funding vacations, cars and parties. Supposedly you make over a million dollars.”

  Skye wanted to scream. “I don’t get a salary at all,” she said, deliberately keeping her voice quiet.

  “I know, as does everyone who works here. We also don’t pay bonuses of any kind. These are all lies. I’ve contacted the reporters and will be meeting with each of them. I’ll try to find out who gave this information and why they wrote about it without checking with us first. One of them claimed he did speak with someone from the foundation.”

  Skye felt as if someone had hit her on the back of the head with a tire iron. “This is insane.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Glenna said. “I just wanted you to know what was going on.”

  “I appreciate that. Let me know what happens.”

  Glenna nodded and left.

  Skye reached for the phone and dialed a familiar cell number. “Where are you?” she asked when her sister answered.

  “About five minutes away. Why?”

  “Can you stop by? I need to talk to you about something.”

  Lexi Titan was as good as her word. Less than five minutes later she walked into Skye’s office.

  “What’s up?” she asked. Lexi was the cool, blond beauty of the sisters. She owned a day spa and could easily be their spokesmodel. Her clothes were elegant, her skin perfect, her hair a shimmering cascade of ice-blond. Despite being nearly three months’ pregnant, she didn’t show at all. If they hadn’t been sisters, Skye would have found it fairly easy to dislike someone as perfect as Lexi.

  But none of that mattered now. Skye stood and hugged her, then led the way to a sofa against the far wall.

  “I heard from Garth again,” she said.

  “Our evil half brother came acalling?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Apparently the tip to the D.A. about the foundation laundering money was only the first part of his attack. Now he’s got someone telling reporters that we pay excessive salaries and bonuses, not to mention fund staff vacations.”

  Lexi took the papers Skye held out but didn’t read them. “We knew something like this was going to happen. We knew his campaign was just beginning.”

  A few months ago the sisters had received their first threat from Garth Duncan. At the beginning they couldn’t figure out why the successful businessman would care about them. A little digging had produced an unbelievable fact. He was their half brother, and Jed Titan’s bastard.

  Although Jed claimed Garth and his mother had been given a generous trust fund that should have taken care of them for life, Garth was out for blood. Or at the very least, the destruction of the Titans. He’d waged business and personal attacks on Lexi and Skye, along with Jed. And the hits kept on coming.

  “Glenna is looking into this,” Skye said. “But these reporters aren’t stupid. They would check their facts. Which meant Garth was able to give them the information in such a way that they believed it.” She felt sick to her stomach. “Can’t he go pick on someone else? Does it have to be us?”

  “We’re the family he never had,” Lexi reminded her. “He’s angry. I just wish I knew what had triggere
d all this. Why now? Why wait so long to start?”

  “He’s certainly moving forward with whatever plan he has. This one is especially good. The D.A. won’t get involved, but the IRS will. His claims put our nonprofit status at risk. Worse, who will want to donate? Being bad is always front-page news, but the retraction comes much later and on the back page. No one remembers that. They just remember the charges.”

  Frustration flared inside of her. “I will accept that for some reason Garth hates us. But children will go hungry because of his actions. Doesn’t that matter?”

  Lexi shook her head. “Not to him.”

  Skye stood and crossed to the window. “This is beyond frustrating. I have worked my butt off here. I wanted to make a difference and I have. When the rest of my life is in the toilet, the foundation reminds me of what is important. That at the end of the day, I can count the meals we served and the lives we made better. I won’t let him take that from me or from those kids.”

  Lexi stood and moved toward her. “He’s not going to win. We won’t let him.” She hugged Skye. “We’re the Titan girls. Nobody screws with us.”

  “Garth didn’t get the memo.”

  “Then we’ll send another one.”

  “Okay. Just give me a minute and I’ll be feisty again.”

  “We’ll get him. One way or another.”

  “I know.”

  They returned to the sofas. Lexi sat across from Skye.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” she asked. “You don’t usually let things get to you. You’re as much a fighter as any of us.”

  Skye leaned back in the cushions. “There’s a lot going on right now. I’m a little distracted. It’ll get better.” She hesitated. “Mitch is back. I’ve seen him.”

  Lexi stared at her. “Oh my God! What happened. How is he?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s different. I know it’s been years and he’s been through a lot. But I didn’t think…” That he would turn mean, she thought, knowing she couldn’t say that. She loved her sister and trusted her completely, but she wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened.