Blue Arrow Lake was a private body of water, and only those who owned the exorbitantly priced frontage properties were allowed docks. As they left the town behind and turned into the estate-lined narrow streets, she caught glimpses of deep blue water and the occasional powerboat or sailboat cutting across the surface. No one walked the streets. They didn’t encounter another car.
Still, Shay couldn’t help her recurring fancy from popping up, the one that revolved around London’s absent father. She’d never spoken with the man. After the death of his ex-wife, he’d apparently turned over his daughter’s care—temporarily, she was told, while he finished up some business in the faraway country of Qatar—to a factotum in his company. The aforesaid factotum, one dry and gray Leonard Case, had interviewed Shay via Skype. Then, he’d brought the stoic teen and her plethora of belongings to the cavernous mansion where Shay had met the two in person.
Leonard Case had lasted forty minutes before he returned to wherever he’d come from.
Ever since that day, she’d imagined herself running into her employer, Jace Jennings, accidentally. Not that she’d ever admit it to anyone, but she’d drummed up this idea that it would happen like governess Jane Eyre coming across her as-yet-unknown Mr. Rochester when he and his horse fell on an icy causeway almost at her feet. Of course, now wasn’t the time of year for frosty conditions, and the entire idea was beyond ridiculous, but still Shay couldn’t help herself from keeping a lookout for a frowning, rough-looking traveler.
There was no sign of anyone, of course.
And the house they now approached was no Gothic Thornfield Hall.
Instead it was a massive modern two-story, all steel and glass, with two walls made entirely of windows and a sleek deck that wrapped the entire structure. The prow of it jutted toward the lake, giving the impression of a ship preparing to set sail on the water.
It was butt ugly.
There wasn’t a homey touch about the place.
As they came to a stop in the drive, London sighed, as if she were thinking the same thing. They both pulled their belongings from the backseat. As the teen hitched the strap of her laptop bag over her shoulder, Shay felt another ping of guilt. Not over her brief fling this time, but because she’d left her own computer behind at the house while on her birthday adventure. Not once had she thought about finding a way to check her email. What if Jace Jennings had responded to one of her reports about his daughter at last?
Though that seemed highly unlikely.
Since taking over London’s care, she’d delivered weekly missives to the email address provided by his factotum. At first they’d been news-filled and professional—the topics they’d covered during school hours, his daughter’s excellent progress on catching up to grade-level standards—but at his continued silence she’d begun writing more and more outrageous things in order to provoke a response.
I’ve decided to replace our trigonometry lessons with tango instruction.
Yesterday, we studied literature by reading Celeb! magazine from cover to cover.
Our chemistry field trip was a trek to the local chocolate factory.
So far, no reply.
Inside the house, together they mounted the stairs to their separate bedrooms. “It’s your turn to dust,” Shay reminded the girl, noting the sparkling motes dancing in the sunshine streaming through the windows.
London paused and turned her head, her black-lined eyes narrowing. “I dusted last time.”
“Nope,” Shay said, her voice cheery. “That was me. Of course, if you’d prefer to vacuum—”
“God, no,” London said, and stomped off, each heavy footstep communicating her mood.
Shay let it roll off her back. “Before dinner, all right?”
There was a mumbled answer.
When they’d first moved in, the factotum had said he’d arranged for a weekly housekeeping service. She’d told him not to bother. Cleaning up after oneself was its own lesson, and she’d guessed correctly that it was a lesson the teen had yet to learn. So they split the chores and Shay was unmoved by the eye rolling, the grumbles and the can’t-I-do-it-tomorrow? pleading. Lately, she’d even caught a small smile of satisfaction on London’s face at a well-swept floor or a lemon-wax-polished table.
Inside her bedroom, she caught a whiff of that pleasant scent. It was a large room, with views that overlooked the lake. The four-poster bed was modern in design, but its stark lines were softened by a white lace-edged duvet she’d brought from home. On the cube table beside the bed sat a photo of the Walkers, from when both her mother and Dell Walker had been alive. Shay paused to scrutinize it now. She often did, looking for similarities between her and her siblings, and her and her mother. Shay’s hair color was different from everyone else’s in the family, and she’d always assumed she’d gotten it from the man who’d made her mother pregnant.
The one who’d never bothered to reach out to Shay.
She’d never reached out to him, either. Not even with an innocuous email, let alone an outrageous one.
I’ve decided to replace our trigonometry lessons with tango instruction.
Remembering that, Shay glanced toward her laptop. Out of obligation more than expectation, she turned it on and clicked to her email program. New posts popped up and she ran her gaze down the listing. Something from a high school friend. Another sent to her by an acquaintance she’d made on the homeschool message board she visited. And then her eyes caught on a brand-new sender: JJennings.
Her finger jerked on the mousepad; she blinked, then she clicked to open the email. Oh. My. God.
Shay dashed from the room. “London,” she yelled, forgetting the name of the day. “We have an emergency.”
The girl took her sweet time to saunter to her doorway. “What? Is this about my paper on Romeo and Juliet? I know it was a little trite to compare and contrast the play with that Taylor Swift song—”
“Your father is due to arrive here today.”
London’s insouciance shattered like a glass hitting the floor. Her jaw fell, too. “What?”
“Anytime now. Well, he didn’t give a time, so who knows when?” Shay forked her fingers through her hair. “Or maybe he came by already and we missed him. Do you think he came by when we weren’t here?”
She was aware she was babbling and that the teen was staring, but Shay couldn’t help her jangling nerves and the acute, uncomfortable awareness of those emails she’d been sending.
I’ve decided to replace our trigonometry lessons with tango instruction.
Yesterday, we studied literature by reading Celeb! magazine from cover to cover.
Our chemistry field trip was a trek to the local chocolate factory.
Crap. What had she been thinking?
And a little voice answered: you were thinking about how your own biological dad ignored you and how you don’t want that for London.
Erasing the thought from her head, she sprang into action. “Dust, okay?” she said on the way to the closet where the vacuum accessories were stored.
Then she went to work. It took a few minutes to notice that London wasn’t actually doing her share, but was instead watching Shay flit about. She turned to the girl. “Hop to it. Please.”
“Give me a good reason I should try to impress him.”
Shay could see her point, she really could, since the man had been out of London’s life for years. “Because the care of the house is a reflection on me,” she said. “Your father signs my check so I want to make a good impression.”
The appeal seemed to work. The human-sized crow pushed away from the wall she was leaning upon and did the cleaning without further complaint. Finally, they were both done with their half of the chores and both looked disheveled, with mussed hair and pink cheeks. Shay caught sight of their dual reflections in the hall mirror. Th
eir eyes met in the glass.
“Showers,” they said together.
But before they could repair to separate bathrooms, the doorbell rang.
Really, Shay thought, as her stomach and her heart jumped, I shouldn’t have made that crack about the tango. Her inner organs seemed to be doing the dance themselves.
London stared at an unmoving Shay, the panic in her eyes warring with the blank expression she was trying to keep on her face. “Aren’t you going to answer the door?” she whispered.
“Of course.” Shay smoothed her palms over her hair, then over the sides of her jeans. As she stepped toward the entry, she licked her dry lips. “It might not even be him,” she reminded the girl.
As a precautionary measure, she peeped through one of the porthole-styled windows that flanked the front door. Her whole body froze.
“Well?” London said.
Shay couldn’t make a sound. How had he found her? Why was he here?
It was Jay on the front step, his attention focused on the door.
Gladness, as bright as sunlight and as buoyant as a pop song, poured through her. He’d come after her! The happy feeling was accompanied by the same kind of relief one felt upon waking from a bad dream to discover the test hadn’t been failed or the tumble from the steps had been averted.
She wasn’t the only one who wanted more time together.
Could that be true? Did she really want to see him again? It didn’t seem right to yearn for someone after a mere handful of hours and a one-night stand.
But she remembered his guiding touch as he directed her into her chair at the restaurant table, a gentleman’s move that had nearly brought her to her knees. Then there was the way his calloused hands had brushed her naked shoulders as he’d removed her dress in the dark bedroom. She remembered his golden eyes laughing at her in the candlelight and the tickle of his thick lashes as they fluttered against her skin while he kissed her throat when they lay together on the bed.
“Aren’t you going to let him in?” London demanded.
She already had, Shay thought, her mind whirling. She’d let him into her body precisely because she’d never expected to set eyes on him again—and yet she was thrilled to find him here.
London muttered something, then brushed past Shay to open the door herself. She flung it wide, and Shay’s heart jolted again, every instinct wanting to shout out: go slow! Be careful! Protect yourself!
Then there was no barrier between the three of them. Shay was still formulating the right question to ask the man who was staring at both her and the teen. Which came first? Was it Why did you track me down? or What do you want from me?
Then, as his gaze shifted between her and her charge, once, twice, a horrible, dreadful thought struck.
No. No, it couldn’t be.
It was London who spoke Shay’s fear. “Well, well, well,” she said, her flat voice expressing neither happiness nor hostility. “You must be dear old dad.”
CHAPTER FOUR
FOR A MOMENT, Jace thought he’d fallen, as he had weeks before in Qatar, and taken another blow to the head. The last time he’d been knocked out, but though he was surely still conscious, his world was rocked all the same. That...that inky-haired, more than half-grown human being was his daughter?
The last time he’d seen her she’d been a chubby-cheeked, irrepressible child, who wore pigtails and shirts with cartoon characters on them. In the intervening years he’d pictured the same, ribbons and Roadrunner, only taller. Never had he expected to find a teen wearing...wearing whatever you’d call that dark garb.
And just as unbelievable...
Birthday Girl.
Birthday Girl! She was standing behind the teenager, looking stunned. She reached out a hand and placed it on the girl’s shoulder. To steady which one of them?
“You’re...” the woman began.
“Jason Jennings. Jace.” He cut his gaze to the teen. “Her father.”
There must have been some question in his voice, because Birthday Girl nodded. “Yes. Right. And this is Om—”
“London,” the youngster interrupted. The black around her eyes and the heavy coating of the same color on her lashes was startling.
“I know your name,” he said. His ex-wife’s selection, of course, chosen after the city she’d run to upon leaving him when she was four months pregnant. Jace, tied financially and morally to the sick old man who’d given him a leg up and his very first job, had remained in the States, frustrated and confused and just beginning to realize that the woman he’d married might have never expected them to grow old together.
He looked at the auburn-haired female behind his daughter and felt his head spin again. It really was the woman from last night. Shit. From the first, he’d known regret would be the outcome of their encounter. Still, he had to carry on. “May I come in?” he asked, wincing at the sharp edge to his voice.
The two females stepped back.
“Of course,” Birthday Girl said—no, he recalled her real name now. Shay Walker. Or S. Walker, as she’d signed the succession of emails he’d finally managed to read last week when his head issues had cleared up at last.
At first he’d thought her talk of tango lessons and celebrity magazines was something his mind was misinterpreting. A few emails later, he’d realized she was either putting him on or was a terrible mentor for his kid.
It had been only one more reason to seethe at the delays—caused by injury, crappy means of communication and his isolated location—that had postponed his return. But he was here now, he told himself, and it was time to implement the simple plan he’d conceived when he’d learned of his daughter’s situation: a summer of getting to know her before school started in September.
He crossed over the threshold, then glanced around the massive foyer, with its thirty-foot ceiling. “Good God,” he said, staring up at the walls of unrelieved concrete. The staircase was more gray cement, with a tubular metal banister painted a janitorial blue. “Is this place butt ugly, or what?”
Both London and Birthday Girl stared at him like he’d sprouted another head. He lifted an eyebrow. “Problem?”
Birth— Shay met the eyes of his daughter then looked back at him. “Um, this is your house.”
“Yeah, but I never saw it before in my life. I needed something in So-Cal, somewhere quiet, I thought, and my man Leonard Case found it. I got it for a song.”
“Which must have been ‘Anchors Aweigh,’” Shay muttered, and his daughter snickered behind her hand.
The sound sliced at Jace’s conscience. She didn’t look like she laughed often. When he’d been told the fifteen-year-old had lost her mother, he’d felt sorrow for her loss and a deep uncertainty about what it would mean for him. Of course he was going to step up and do his duty, but he’d expected to find... He didn’t know.
Not this dark-clad teenager whose expression was near deadpan.
Quashing a rising sense of suffocating panic, he reminded himself he had a plan.
“Why don’t you show me around?” he asked London. “After I see my room, I’ll collect my luggage from the car.”
She glanced over at Shay, who nodded. “We’ll both show you,” the woman said. “Come this way.”
Foiled already, he thought, as he followed their lead. He’d hoped to get his daughter alone and determine exactly how things were with the tutor. Though, hell, didn’t he already know Shay—
No, he did not know Shay. The woman with whom he’d spent the night at the inn was someone else altogether. He’d left that person behind in the room, including his memories of her lithe body, her delicate fragrance and the softness of her skin beneath his lips. If he were going to follow through with his idea of taking this time with London, becoming acquainted with her even as she continued her studies, then he had to forg
et all about last night and see the tutor in a completely businesslike light.
He could do that. He’d always been a businessman first, after all.
They showed him around the downstairs area, which had an open floor plan containing some midcentury modern furniture that looked to be all angles and uncomfortable cushions. The kitchen was large enough to feed the navy and the best thing you could say about it beyond that was it was clean.
The view of the lake was stupendous, but even the sun streaming in the windows didn’t warm the atmosphere of the place.
Without much optimism, he mounted the stairs. The top landing opened into a large gallery that contained a long center table. Textbooks sat in neat stacks on it, as well as a desktop and a laptop computer. “This is where London studies,” Shay said.
The girl was already at a computer, drawn to it like a magnet, and as the screen powered on, its pale light washed onto her face, making the darkness surrounding her eyes even more stark. Jace shoved a hand through his hair, keenly aware of being out of his element. Panic tried digging its claws in him again.
Feeling a gaze on him, he glanced over at Shay. She was staring, and when she noticed he noticed, her face colored and she looked away. “What do you know about website building?” she asked, then hurried toward the table without waiting for his answer. “London, why don’t you show your dad what you’re working on?”
The girl’s frozen expression didn’t animate, but she obligingly moved her fingers on the keyboard. Color splashed onto the screen, brilliant-colored flowers and the words Build a Bouquet.
“It’s a multidisciplinary project,” Shay explained. “She’s developing a website for a pretend florist business. Visitors to the site are able to select flowers and greenery to custom-design a floral arrangement. She’s setting it up for three disparate locations throughout the country, so she’s had to research local flora and seasonal availability along with the computer programming aspect.”
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