Code Name: Daddy

by Marilyn Tracy

  “It’s all right, Alec,” she lied.

  “No. It’s not. In fact, it couldn’t be worse.”

  She frowned a question.

  “Whoever it is, they’ll be back, Cait.”

  “Let me patch your arm, then you can go.”

  “You don’t understand, Cait. I’m not going to leave you here. They know I’ve been here. They’ll believe you’ll know where I’m going.”

  Her frown deepened and her heart seemed to be attempting to escape from her body. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, so calmly and quietly that it angered her a little. “But I’d feel better if we got out of here.”

  “Out of here,” she repeated. “Leave here in the middle of the night.”

  “It’ll be morning in a few hours.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll find us someplace safe.”

  She knew what he was saying and guessed at many things he wasn’t. But he didn’t understand. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been two years ago. She had other things, other people to consider now. She could only stare at him, not so much in fear of the ramifications but in denial that they could touch her.

  “I could be wrong, Cait. Let’s hope I am. But I’m damned if I’ll take chances with your life. Not now that I’ve found you again.”

  She realized in a blinding flash that he’d only seen her on the news. He didn’t know anything about her. He “hadn’t asked about Allie. It was safe to assume he didn’t know about her, safe to believe he didn’t have so much as a glimmer of an idea that a child slept upstairs.

  His child. Their child.

  A wave of undiluted horror washed over her. In her fantasies, in the millions of dreams where Alec came back, it had been easy to tell him about Allie, he’d somehow known a little girl waited to call him Daddy.

  “Cait, I’m serious—”

  What was she to do? Take Allie and flee with Alec into the unknown darkness, not even knowing why? She shook her head. “No, Alec. I can’t.”

  “Cait—”

  “No. I’m not going a single step until I make some sense of this,” she said, her voice trembling.

  He looked away from her as if seeking an answer from her dim living room, and something in his shadowed expression made her realize that he truly didn’t fully understand what was happening. That frightened her more than anything else.

  And it made her next words colder than she might have wished. “Start with your supposed death and continue from there.”

  “The FBI faked my death.”

  “No kidding,” she retorted. “Somehow, I managed to guess that much, Alec. Give me a break. I’m stunned to see you alive, but it doesn’t make me brain-dead. What I want to know is why? Why fake a death?”

  “I told you earlier, I had to be out of the picture.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I knew too much?”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “What?”

  “Are you playing that game where you answer a question with a question?”

  “Cait, damn it.”

  “Statement. You’re out.”

  He stared at her as if she’d suddenly sprouted snakes from her hair. “You’ve changed.”

  “Of course I’ve changed. Two years is a long time, Alec. I thought you were dead. I went on with my life. A life you’ve had absolutely nothing to do with. And then you show up on my doorstep with a—a bullet in your arm—”

  “It’s just a scratch. There isn’t any bullet in me.”

  “Excuse me. You show up with a bullet wound on your arm and you tell me that someone’s after you, and they’re going to come back, and you imply that if I don’t leave with you right now they’re going to torture me into telling them what I probably wouldn’t have known in the first place. Have I got just a little of the picture here?”

  To her utter amazement, he grinned. A totally, wholly disarming, memory-warping grin. “You were always good at that.”

  They’d had too little time together for him to know if she’d always been good at anything. The very word always implied an interwoven past, a contiguous time spent together. Still, she had to ask, “At what?”

  “At taking the most outrageous, terrible thing and turning it into a joke.”

  “A joke?” she asked, shocked. “I wasn’t joking, Alec. I can’t do this.”

  His brows furrowed. “Do what?”

  “Do what?” she asked, so astounded she literally had to walk off her stupefaction. “Danger. Bullets. Lovers returning from the dead. Let’s take those for starters, shall we?”

  He lifted his hand as if he would reach for her, only to drop it to his side again. The gesture stopped her, despite the lack of contact. Aching for him to touch her, she stayed three inches out of his grasp and studied him, trying to glean any semblance of understanding.

  His perplexed expression and his tense body let her know more clearly than any words that she had to listen to him, that she had to get Allie out of the house.

  “I don’t know how much time we have, Cait,” he said, unknowingly underscoring her thoughts.

  “We never have any time,” she said.

  He stared at her for a long moment before stepping within kissing distance of her. “And if we don’t get a move on, we won’t have any time ever.”

  She could feel his warm breath on her skin, he was so close. And his eyes never wavered from hers as he let her see he was saying nothing but the absolute truth. The “scratch” on his arm, the one dripping blood onto her carpet, confirmed that grim truth.

  “Who’s after you, Alec?”

  “If I’m right, it’s one of three friends of mine.”

  “Pretty crummy friends.”

  He grinned crookedly. Bitterly. “One of them is.”

  “And you don’t know which one.”

  “That’s right. Can we go now?”

  He’d said, If I’m right, which led her to assume there was a possibility that he wasn’t. “Are these supposed friends colleagues of yours in the bureau?” she asked slowly, understanding beginning to filter in.

  He looked surprised. “Yes.”

  “But why would they be after you? You’re one of them. Or at least, you were. Are you still?”

  He nodded to her last question, but didn’t answer her others. She understood why; he didn’t have those answers.

  He reached for her then, resting his broad palms on her shoulders. She could feel the heat through the satiny material of her nightgown. He lifted one hand to her cheek and traced the curve of her jaw with his thumb. “Hurry, Cait.”

  But standing in the dimly lit living room, feeling the touch of a man she’d truly mourned as dead, she found she could scarcely breathe, let alone move. She had to tell him about Allie. Needed to tell him. And couldn’t find the words.

  His hand enfolded her shoulder, squeezed it gently. “Cait. God knows we need to talk.” He slowly drew her closer. She didn’t resist. “There’s a lot I don’t understand, and we can go over it together. And there’s...” He trailed off, his eyes boring into hers. His mouth worked, his gaze faltered. “But we’ve got to get going. Now. ”

  His hands seemed to burn her skin. She might as well have been naked. His grip shifted, turned to caress instead of grasp. Unconsciously she tilted her head to the side, allowing him access.

  He’d said they needed to hurry, and she believed him. But he didn’t release her shoulders and she didn’t pull away. His thumb traced a small circle against her collarbone. She closed her eyes, the memory of his touch merging with reality.

  “You are so very beautiful, Cait.”

  This time she didn’t lower her face, didn’t try to hide from his kiss. His firm lips were amazingly soft and his tongue liquid velvet. She couldn’t withhold a moan as she leaned into him. A sharp, jagged-edged surge of pure desire rioted through her, making her knees buckle, her body arch into him. Danger. a secret baby, two years of loneli
ness...they were swept away in the mindless need for his touch. God, how she’d missed him.

  That strange and cold inner voice so vocal earlier made a few squawking protests, but subsided completely as his hands drove into her hair. His palms pressed against her cheeks, and he pulled her even closer, deepening his kiss.

  She gave in to the kiss, the feel of his hot lips against hers, his solid body pressing into her. His hands grasped her waist and pulled her even closer as though to draw her inside him.

  She tasted him and recognized the sweet-salty tang unique to him, drank in his scent and reveled in the feel of his hands in her hair, at her back, his chest beneath her fingers. She heard his ragged breathing and knew it matched her own.

  Not such a stranger, after all. Two years gone, but the chemistry hadn’t altered one iota. What did it mean? And soon she had no thoughts at all. She seemed to be floating inches above the ground, her body alive, gloriously, wondrously alive.

  Far away, in another reality, a baby cried.

  The feel of Alec’s lips—moist, hot, demanding— drowned the single cry, allowed her to lose the link she had with that voice.

  Another cry, more demanding. Pay attention to me.

  Reluctantly, more reluctantly than he would ever know, Cait dazedly pulled back a bit and turned her face toward the landing at the top of the stairs, listening, trying to find her way back to the ground, craving the touch of the fantasy, needing to attend her daughter in the very concrete present.

  Alec held on to her, stopping her, blocking her automatic departure. He frowned and tilted his head in her view. “What’s that?”

  Cait had thought that all she had to do was tell him and they’d run out into the night together, escaping danger, neatly rearranging their lives and realigning their fates. But like everything else about Alec, simple explanations were a fantasy, too.

  “My.... d-daughter,” she said faintly.

  “Your what?”

  “You didn’t know.”

  “Hell, no, I didn’t know. I thought you were dead, remember ? How would I know you had a...a daughter?” He didn’t sound angry but he looked as though he were poised to strike or waiting for a blow to fall.

  Somewhat angrily, she realized he didn’t even so much as suspect the truth. She tried pulling away from him, but he didn’t let her go. He held her almost absently, his mind obviously churning furiously while his daughter continued her demand for company.

  “Cait?”

  She wouldn’t meet his eyes, wouldn’t let him read her thoughts.

  “You have a baby?” he asked incredulously. He sounded as if she’d just picked up a two-by-four and slammed it into his head. “I don’t... How—? I mean, when?”

  The baby’s wails escalated and Cait shrugged free and started up the stairs.

  His hand shot out and circled her upper arm, checking her flight. She didn’t look back at him.

  “Are you married, Cait?” His voice was hoarse. Raw. “Is someone else...here?”

  Cait knew the question he’d almost asked didn’t relate to anyone else’s presence in her home, but rather if there was anyone in her life at all.

  “Yes...no. I’m not married”

  “But someone else is here?”

  “I told you. My daughter. I’ve got to go to her,” Cait said, desperate for escape and pulled by her baby’s cries.

  “Ma-ma!” the baby called out, her little voice never clearer than at this moment.

  Alec’s hand squeezed painfully, and Cait suspected unconsciously.

  “Mama?” he asked. “She’s old enough to talk?” He pulled her back around to face him. The muscle in his jaw jumped and his eyes blazed with sharp, stunned comprehension. “How old is your baby, Cait?”

  In her fantasies, in the dreams in which Alec hadn’t died, in which they’d moved to that big house in the country with the big oaks and the picnic table, Alec had known every detail of her daughter’s life—her birth, her first tooth, her first stumbling step.

  Staring straight across at him now, seeing by his face that he could read the truth in hers, she could only think that life wasn’t fair, that some cruel and twisted fate had stolen so much from both of them.

  “How old is your baby?” he asked again. He seemed unaware his fingers were digging into her arms.

  “She,” Cait corrected.

  “How old is she, Cait?”

  Cait took a deep breath and told him the raw truth. “She’s fourteen months old.”

  Alec let Cait slip from his nerveless hands. He didn’t try to stop her as she fled up the stairwell. He stood alone on the first floor of Cait’s house, his thoughts as murky as the gloom surrounding him.

  When he’d first heard the baby cry, with Cait molded against him, her body still warm from sleep, the emerald satin liquid beneath his hands, he’d half wondered if he wasn’t hearing things. Almost immediately, the notion that Cait might be married flashed through his mind like a bolt of too bright, jagged lightning.

  But the look on Cait’s face. Good God, that look. Surely he’d misunderstood. Surely his supposition was wrong.

  The baby crying upstairs—Cait’s baby—was fourteen months old. It didn’t take a math wizard to wade through the simple subtraction process to discover the baby’s possible conception date. Three days, two years ago. Three days when they’d been certain to die. Time spent with no thought of protection because there had been zero chance of survival and ramifications only applied when a future was involved.

  But they had lived.

  And Cait had had a baby fourteen months ago, while he was still suffering through physical therapy. Had she cried out in pain? Had she cursed him? Would their individual pain have been less had each known the other lived?

  The baby stopped crying and the house seemed unnaturally silent.

  Cait’s pale face, her quivering lips, even the odd apology in her eyes had all told him more clearly than any direct words could have done that the baby upstairs was his.

  A little girl. A daughter.

  His daughter.

  Whatever look of shock he’d seen on Cait’s face when he burst into her home had to be nothing compared to what must be plastered on his own features right now. He was assaulted by a myriad of unrelated emotions ranging from a stinging guilt to an almost embarrassed pride. His lips twitched in what might be considered a hysterical grin while his fingers flexed in helpless restlessness.

  On numb legs he steered up the stairs, taking them as an old man might do, one careful step at a time. A softly glowing lamp beside an opened bedroom door beckoned him and made his heart pound with fear greater than any he’d ever known before.

  He heard Cait murmuring softly, and entered the lampgolden bedroom in time to see her lowering her lips to the baby’s soft crown of dark curls. Somewhere deep inside him a fist took hold and wrenched open a door he’d believed nailed shut.

  Cait held the baby in her arms, slowly rocking from foot to foot, ethereal in her satin robe, soft light creating a halo around her blond hair. She’d never looked more beautiful than she did cradling the dark-haired child in her arms. Her expression was soft with an aching tenderness and mirrored the deepest of loves.

  He didn’t know how long he remained silent in the doorway. It felt like seconds and at the same time, the moment seemed to stretch into infinity, a memory forged into his mind with blades of hot iron. As long as he lived, he knew he would never forget his first sight of Cait holding her—their—daughter.

  He had to clear a suddenly aching and full throat before he could speak. “What’s her name?”

  Cait looked up from her contemplation of the baby, the tenderness still sculpted on her features, a soft smile still teasing her parted lips. For the fraction of a second Alec knew what it felt like to have such love directed at him, then her chin lifted, and a wariness, perhaps even a fear, stole into her green eyes.

  “Allie,” she said.

  “What?” he asked blankly.

  �
��Her name. It’s Allie. I called her Allie Elaine Wilson.”

  Allie Elaine. Alec MacLaine.

  Alec had to close his eyes against the proof he hadn’t needed. Unbidden came that picture of a mantel in a desperate dream house, a little girl’s school photos.

  Dark haired like him.

  Chapter 6

  Saturday, November 10, 4:10 a.m. EST

  “She looks like you,” Cait said, unknowingly echoing his thoughts.

  Alec opened his eyes to see tears standing in hers. He glanced down at the baby before Cait could see that his own eyes were misting over.

  “Allie,” he murmured, tasting his baby’s name on his tongue for the first time. The name felt right, carried a hint of spice and nostalgia.

  The little girl, still a newborn in Alec’s inexperienced eyes, turned her wide blue gaze in his direction. Her lips, rosy and pouty like her mother’s, pursed, and a tiny frown creased her brow. Alec found himself holding his breath. She seemed to study him with the serious contemplation of a judge in criminal court, then, in a transition as swift as the change from warm to hot, her baby lips parted in a broad, toothy smile.

  Alec’s heart turned over and he found he could breathe again. Unconsciously, he grinned back, and the smile felt odd on his face, as if it didn’t belong there, as if the muscles needed to create the grin had atrophied years before.

  How could his friends have stolen this strange and wonderful feeling from him? By not telling him Cait was alive, by letting him believe his own senses, they’d not only robbed him of the potential of Cait, they’d stripped him of having known he had a child. A daughter. Allie.

  For a moment, gripped in the struggle between anger at his friends and a far more powerful wonder at meeting his own daughter, Alec had to speculate what might have happened in his life if he hadn’t watched the news earlier that night. Would he never have known Cait lived? Would he have gone through the rest of his days never even suspecting Allie existed?

  Allie said something he couldn’t understand, and he instinctively looked at Cait for translation. Silent tears were snaking down her cheeks and her lower lip was caught between her teeth as if holding in a sob. Whatever fist had wrenched that door open dragged it even wider now, forcing him to be flooded with feelings he’d locked away two years ago, emotions he hadn’t understood then and couldn’t begin now.