He hadn’t known then what he would become. How could he have known?
The oldest photos were in black and white, but the later ones were in color. Gabe had collected them in spite of himself. Often he’d used the excuse that he was merely curious to see if there were any physical resemblances between himself and his father at different stages of their lives. Did his dad, at thirty, look the way Gabe had at thirty? How about at nineteen?
Now he was looking for a resemblance to Sam. Sam. God, what had possessed Carrie to take him, to raise him as her own? And by what stroke of serendipity had she chosen to name him Sam? That would have to be one hellishly huge coincidence, wouldn’t it?
There was no doubt in his mind as he looked through the photos, though, that young Sam was of superstar Sammy Gold’s bloodline. It was in everything from the solid, wide jawline to the dimples in the boy’s cheeks. It was in the very noticeable curved bridge of his nose, which looked as if it had been broken in a bar fight but hadn’t.
Gabe shared those traits with his father, and so did Sam. How had he missed them the first time he’d seen the kid?
How had Carrie?
As he looked away from the laptop, shaking his head, he felt awash in regret. The physical markers weren’t the only things Gabe had passed on to his son. He’d given him more. A childhood without a father. A parent who acted as if his son didn’t exist. Gabe had given young Sam those things, just like Sammy Gold had given them to Gabe. The only difference was that Gabe hadn’t even known he had a son. Given the choice, he would have raised his son, loved him, taught him all he knew.
But Gabe hadn’t been given the choice. It had been taken from him. And as angry as Carrie was, she had to know she was the one who’d taken it. He had as much right to be angry as she did. More.
And yet he wasn’t. Couldn’t be. God, if he’d had to handpick a mother for his son, he couldn’t have chosen better than Carrie. She adored Sam. How could he be angry when she’d raised his boy so damn well?
He shut the laptop down, and decided he had let her cool off long enough. It was getting on toward dinnertime. She should be home. He wasn’t going to call first, because that would make it too easy for her to hang up on him. He was just going to go over there and sit her down and make her talk to him. He didn’t intend to give her a choice. He had the right to know his son, and she had no right to keep the truth from the boy. Or from him.
At 6:00 p.m. Gabe found himself standing outside Carrie Overton’s front door with a heat-preserving take-out bag in his left hand and a big fat bottle of hard lemonade in his right. His righteous indignation had taken a backseat to common sense. You caught more flies with honey and all that. And there was the small matter of his attraction to her. More than at traction. He liked the woman. More than liked. Hell, maybe if he could just get that through to her…
She opened the door, and looked from him to the bottle to the take-out bag, then back to him again. “I figured you’d bring a lawyer, not dinner.”
He stood there and let his eyes drink in the sight of her. All her long, curly red hair was spilling loose tonight. She was wearing yoga pants and a tiny, tight-fitting T-shirt, with thick cushy socks. She was dressed for comfort, and yet she was sexy as hell.
“It was either this or flowers and chocolate. And frankly, I thought a solid meal would do us both more good.”
She stepped aside to let him in. “Flowers and candy are overrated anyway.”
“Yeah, and so are lawyers.” He walked inside, all the way through to the kitchen, and set the bag on the table. “The fire department was having a chicken barbecue,” he said. “I could smell it for two miles before I got there.”
She leaned in the kitchen doorway, watching him as he got plates from the cupboard and unpacked the large white bag. He felt nervous, as if he were the one who’d been keeping secrets and telling lies for sixteen years, when he’d only been doing so for a week. He took out cardboard containers holding tiny salt potatoes and corn on the cob, all locally grown.
“So is this some kind of a bribe?” she asked.
He looked up. “No. It’s some kind of a meal.” He slid huge brown-skinned chicken pieces onto the two dinner plates, yanked a handful of paper towels from the roll and sat down. “You gonna eat?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him. “What are you doing, Gabe?”
“Having dinner.”
“You know what I mean. Why are you…being friendly? What are you up to?”
Gabe sighed, lowering his head. “Look, what’s the point in fighting? We are where we are, so we can deal with it like reasonable people or like total jerks. But nothing will change the basic truth. We’ll still be where we are.” He lifted his head. “We have some talking to do, Carrie. There’s no way around it. I figured, why not do it over a nice dinner? That’s all.”
She nodded slowly, pushing herself away from the wall. “I expected you to be furious. To march in here demanding your rights.”
“Well, I’m not. That’s not who I am. If you’ve been paying attention at all, you should already know that.”
“Oh, I’ve been paying attention. I just thought maybe I was seeing what you wanted me to see and not who you really are.”
“Well, you were seeing me. I don’t play games. I know it seems like that’s what was going on, but I’m telling you, I don’t do that shit. This just got…it got away from me.”
Studying him, at first warily and then with growing interest in her eyes, she sat down at the table and started eating.
“Should we save some for Sam?” he asked.
She averted her eyes a little. “I talked him into going camping after all. He left before noon.”
He met her eyes. “You wanted to keep him away from me until we’d hashed this out.”
She nodded but had the sense to look guilty about it. “I told him the truth myself. I didn’t want you blurting it out to him until I’d had a chance to explain.”
“I wouldn’t have done that, Carrie.”
She met his eyes, held them, and in a moment her brows bent closer. “I really don’t think you would have, would you?” He shook his head, and she went on. “Still, I thought if word got out there would be another media circus. So I told him everything and asked him to give me this weekend to try to work things out. I just didn’t want him here if all hell broke loose again.”
“I don’t see any reason why it should,” he said.
She frowned and picked at her chicken. “So you want to talk this out, huh?”
“I don’t think we have a choice. Do you?”
Sighing, she lowered her head. “No, so… Okay. We’ll talk. Tell me about you and Sam’s birth mother.”
“I was going to ask you to tell me about her,” he said.
She shook her head, her red curls bouncing. He wanted to touch them but held back.
“I barely know anything about her,” she said. “Besides, this was your idea. You go first.” Sitting back in her chair, she ate some chicken, and despite the conversation’s seriousness, seemed to appreciate the flavor. How could she not? Gabe wondered. It was mouthwateringly good.
He finished chewing, then wiped his mouth with a paper towel and reached for the bottle of hard lemonade. “All right, I’ll go first.” He twisted off the cap and filled their glasses. “Livvy was a mess. A train wreck. And I tend to be…drawn to train wrecks.”
Carrie lifted her brows.
“Until I met you, I mean. I’ve been pretty shocked at the chemistry between us from the very beginning, Carrie. I have to be honest about that. You’re far from my type.”
“You’re the polar opposite of mine.”
He smiled. “I met Livvy one summer when I was camping on a deserted patch of shoreline on the Gulf of Mexico. I was strumming my guitar beside a little campfire, and she just came walking along the beach and stopped to say hello.”
“She just saw some stranger living out of his van on the beach and stopped to say
hello?”
He shrugged. “Actually, she was looking to score some drugs, and she wasn’t too fussy about what kind. I had a bottle of wine and offered to share it. And she wound up staying the night. When she didn’t leave, I started thinking maybe I could…save her. Fix her.”
Carrie frowned. “Did she ask you to?”
“No. No, it was my own knight-in-shining-armor complex kicking in. I know it’s a flaw. But knowing it and beating it are two different things. She told me she’d been in a psych ward in Galveston just before I met her—she’d made a suicide attempt. I just…I wanted to save her. So I found a little beach house for rent, and we moved in there together. White sand, green water, summer sun. It was beautiful. And for a while, so were we.”
“I imagine you were. So she stayed off drugs while she was with you?”
He nodded slowly, his mind seeing her pretty face, her slightly dull eyes, her far too thin frame. “But she was drinking all the time, so I don’t imagine there’s too much difference.”
“Substance abuse is substance abuse,” Carrie said. “And an addict is an addict.”
He nodded. “I wanted to save her. She didn’t want to be saved.”
“They rarely do. When did you figure it out?” she asked.
“She stayed with me through that summer and fall, and into the winter. Then one day—in January, it was—she left to run some errands and just never came back. I had no idea she was pregnant. And until a few weeks ago, no idea she’d died only a few months after I’d last seen her.” He looked at Carrie, searched her face. “That’s it. That’s all of it. Though I’d like to know what happened to her between the time she left me and the time she died. I’d like to know a lot of things.”
“Did you love her?” Carrie asked softly.
He sighed. “I think I loved the idea of who she could be. I think I had an image of her clean and sober and healthy and happy. But she wasn’t any of those things. In hindsight, I started to realize she’d probably been using the entire time we were together. She was a pessimist. She was a fatalist, actually. So no, I was in love with a fantasy of who she could have become. I didn’t love who she really was. To tell the truth, I didn’t even like her all that much. And I think that’s really sad. That I was so focused on who I thought she could become that I didn’t even notice who she was until she was gone.”
Carrie nodded. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about her, either,” she said. “But I can tell you what I know.”
“That would mean a lot to me.”
She nodded. “I’m not a rule breaker. I’m so by the book, my nickname at the hospital is Anal Annie.”
He chuckled, and she sent him a look that made him put a lid on it.
“I was on my way to my first real job as a doctor, here in Shadow Falls, when I came upon a car on the side of the road, and a very pregnant, very distressed woman standing beside it,” she began.
And she went on to tell him the story of the night she’d met Livvy Dupree, alone and about to give birth, along the side of a deserted road. She told him about her own defective fallopian tubes, a secret only her own ob-gyn knew. The doctor she went to see in the next town assumed Sam was adopted and had never probed further. Why would she?
Carrie said that Livvy had left her a note, a note she had kept all this time, because it was the only real evidence she had that Livvy had wanted Carrie to raise her son. She told Gabe that she’d intended to track the girl down again, get her to sign papers making Sam hers by private, legal adoption, but that before she ever found her, Livvy’s body was on a table in Carrie’s morgue, misidentified—though she didn’t know it at the time—as Sarah Quinlan.
Carrie had been forced to make note of the signs of a recent pregnancy when she’d performed the autopsy, but she’d tried to bury the information, glossing over it lightly, and when asked, she had insisted to the police that it was entirely believable that the girl had given the baby up for private adoption. Since there was no sign of a potential father, the case of the missing baby remained little more than a curiosity. A loose thread left dangling and forgotten.
Eventually Carrie finished her story by telling Gabe that she’d forged the paperwork to obtain a birth certificate, using the name of a midwife she’d worked with during her residency. The woman had specialized in home births and had retired to the Bahamas just before Carrie left town. No one had ever had cause to double-check. Why would they?
Gabe took it all in and found himself absurdly glad he’d decided to reserve judgment until he’d heard the entire story. He believed her, with no reason to doubt any part of what she’d said.
“Given all you’ve told me,” he said when she’d finished, “I don’t see how you could have done anything differently. Not without the risk of losing Sam. And I’m glad you didn’t lose him, Carrie. You’ve done a beautiful job raising him.”
“Thank you for that.” She sighed. “I only learned that the dead girl wasn’t really Sarah Quinlan a few weeks ago, when the rest of the world learned it, too. Then there was the reward, and the tabloids, and I’ve…I’ve just been living in fear ever since, worried that someone, somehow, would find out and try to take Sam away from me.”
“He’s old enough that his preferences would have to be taken into consideration, though,” Gabe said.
“They might be. But they might not. Besides, for all I knew, he would be so angry with me for lying to him all these years that he wouldn’t want to go on living here.”
“You know better than that. He adores you.”
She blinked back the moisture that had suddenly gathered in her eyes. “You’re trying to comfort me, when you’re the one who’s been denied your son all this time.”
“You really think he is? My son?”
She looked across the table at him. “Of course I do. And so do you. God, he looks just like you. I don’t need DNA results to tell me that. I mean, we’ll get them anyway. I took a swab from him this morning, in fact. But still…I don’t think there’s any doubt.”
Gabe felt his lips curve slightly upward in pride as his chest swelled with the validation of what he’d already known in his heart to be true. Sam was his son. Even Carrie admitted it.
“What made you choose the name?” Gabe asked.
“Livvy. It was in her note. She didn’t say why, just asked me to name him Sam. It was the only thing she asked of me, so naturally I honored the request.”
He nodded slowly. “She knew about my…history.”
“The superstar father who pretends you don’t exist and writes enough checks to let him keep on pretending?”
“Yeah. She used to tell me to go find him, confront him, demand some answers. She thought we could find some way to build a relationship, I guess. I thought she was dead wrong, of course, but…I don’t know. Maybe naming my son after my father was her way of trying to…plant a seed.”
“A seed of healing. I can see that.”
“She really wasn’t all bad,” he said. “She was messed up, but the girl had a heart bigger than the moon.”
Carrie nodded. “See? You really did see her for who she was, and you did like her. And I know there was goodness in her, too. There had to be. Sam is too incredible to have come from anything less. Frankly, you must have seen something in her worth saving, or you wouldn’t have tried so hard.”
“I’ll never regret it for a minute,” he said. “She gave me Sam. Even if it took me this long to find him…” He broke off there, seeing the tears rising in Carrie’s eyes.
She licked her dry lips, blinked against the moisture. “I could lose my license over this. But that doesn’t mean a damn thing if I lose my son.”
“You’re not going to lose him,” Gabe said. “But he’s my son, too. I have rights, Carrie. If anything happened to you, I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on without a huge court case and a lot of noise. Carrie, he’s my son. Tell me you’re not going to try to deny me the chance to be his father.”
They sat facing e
ach other across the table. He saw anger and fear warring for top spot in her eyes. He was frustrated and fast running out of patience. He’d been more than fair.
He looked at her, at her eyes and the way they sparked with the intensity of her emotions. He looked at the fullness of her lips and the way they trembled just a little. He looked at the rise and fall of her chest beneath those folded arms. He knew she wanted him, liked him, maybe more. Why was she being so damned stubborn?
None of Gabe’s explanations, none of his answers, had told Carrie the one thing that was stuck in her craw like a two-inch thorn. And he ought to know what it was she needed to hear him say. She needed him to tell her that his feelings for her had nothing to do with Sam. That he wasn’t just using her to get closer to his son, or trying to grease the wheels of an impending custody battle.
In fact, he probably did know that was what she needed to hear from him. That he was refusing to say it told her more than words could that his feelings for her were nothing. Less than nothing. An act. A big lie. And if he were lying to her about that, she couldn’t trust him about anything else, could she? His promise that he would never want to take Sam away from her? Or that he would never want to come between the two of them? What did those words mean, coming from a man who would seduce her just to get to her son? A man who would try to make her fall for him? God, she’d been a fool. A blind, naive fool. Because she had fallen in love with this man, and what she wanted was to hear him tell her that he loved her, too. She was an idiot.
The phone started ringing before she thought of anything to say to him. She felt defeated, beaten, wounded and abused. “Excuse me,” she managed, and she knew her voice sounded cold as ice.
He took a bite of chicken as she got up to answer. Bastard hadn’t even lost his appetite over any of this. She couldn’t have eaten another mouthful if she’d had to.
She picked up the cordless phone. “Hello?”
“Hey, Doc. It’s Wes Haskins. Is Sam there?”
Kiss Me, Kill Me Page 23
