by Dee Tenorio
Twelve years since her final, rude awakening about this man, but one look at him could still make her heart stop and her brain short-circuit. For blank seconds she could only stare. Take in the rich golden brown of his skin and that inky black hair full of curl and life. All of him was full of life, as if he were crackling with energy in that powerful frame. Her eyes traced the breadth of his shoulders under an old USC T-shirt, impossibly broader than in his youth, sliding helplessly down his torso to the lean hips encased in old jeans that loved him. So not fair. Couldn’t he have gotten some kind of flaw over the years? One? But no, the same bedroom eyes, soulful and dark brown, same squared jaw and mouth with those dimples in his cheeks that never quite filled out. Full, tastable lips…
Lips most of the women in this small town have tasted, she reminded herself harshly, snapping herself back to reality. It had been a hard decade since she’d been the girl who’d have sold her soul for one second of his affection. She wasn’t that girl anymore. She met his dark gaze with an even glance before dismissing him to address Chloe.
“Where have you been? Your grandmother has been worried sick.”
Chloe’s full lips quirked downward. “I should be so lucky.”
“Hey, what have I told you about wishing bad things on your grandmother?”
Chloe’s sigh could have moved a mountain. “Sorry.”
“Where were you?” Pen wasn’t about to be derailed.
“She came to my place,” Raul’s deep voice interjected softly. Not wanting to face him, unable to avoid it, Penelope turned her attention to the near-stranger leaning casually against her office door. His expression confused her. Watchful. Assessing.
Better to stick with Chloe. “What on earth possessed you to do that? Your grandmother lives miles away.” Eight, to be precise, not that she was counting.
Chloe’s left eye narrowed and her right brow raised, meaning she’d picked up the obvious question of how Pen knew where Raul lived. Wisely, she didn’t ask. “I needed to talk to him.”
“What could you possibly need to talk to him for?” Not shrieking, which was impressive, because her heart was thumping like a broken washing machine.
“Maybe you and I should talk privately, Pen.”
Penelope skewered him with a fast glare and Raul’s brows rose too. Not the sugary sweet little girl he expected, hmm? She crossed her arms and waited for Chloe to answer.
Chloe shrugged stiffly, her head dropping so that her hat shadowed her face all the way to her chin. When it came, her voice was small and tight. “I wanted to meet my dad.”
Penelope felt the blood drain from her face. Without her permission, her eyes shifted to Raul and her stomach pitched sideways. A cord worked in his jaw, but his eyes held all kinds of questions that almost unlocked her knees. “Would you excuse us please?”
His hooded eyes blinked slowly. “I don’t think so.”
“What?”
“She thinks I’m her father. If you can deny it, go ahead. I’ll get out of your hair. But if you can’t, then I think you and I have some talking to do.”
Chloe’s hat came up and Penelope’s face heated beneath two eagle-eyed stares.
“Pen?” Raul’s stance lost its casual slump against the door. He straightened, beautiful mouth flattening into a hard line before he shot another wild glance at Chloe.
“I can’t talk about this right now.” When all else fails, deflect and hide. “I have patients out front. I’m late as it is.” She gripped each end of the stethoscope hanging around her neck, finding her center behind the bedside manner she’d spent years perfecting. “Thank you for bringing her here. I’m sorry about any inconveniences she might have caused you. If you’ll excuse me.” There, a nice polite invitation for him to go away.
“Inconveniences?” Shock gave way to the black scowl she recognized as a very bad sign. Worse, he didn’t open the door and go through it. “What the fu—hell is going on, Penelope?”
Well, he was still in control of his temper enough to censor his language. Not that Chloe particularly needed it.
“Nothing. Nothing is going on. You just need to go and let me handle this with my daughter.” If she put a little too much emphasis on the word my, really now, who could blame her?
Except his scowl deepened and she decided that maybe he could. Raul’s temper had been legendary when they were teenagers. He’d gotten it out of his system, she was sure, because he’d earned the rank of captain before coming home to join the local firefighters squad. Not that she thought he’d ever hurt her, but he did still have a habit of roaring a place down in a virulent mix of English and Spanish. With a host of patients in her waiting room, that could not happen.
“Look, Raul, this isn’t the time or the place to talk about this.”
“Then I’ll wait right here until there is a time and a place.” He widened his stance and crossed his arms to plant himself right in the way.
“You can’t be serious.” Please, God, don’t let him be serious.
But he was. The hard smile that registered more as a threat than a grin told her he was.
The last twelve years never felt as heavy on her shoulders at they did at that moment. She glanced at Chloe, but her daughter was busy staring at Raul with a hopeful hero worship, and the pressure grew heavier. This wasn’t going away.
Ever since he’d come back home, she’d expected this. Waited for him to look at Chloe whenever their paths crossed and wonder. Like she wondered. Like anyone with a pair of eyes probably wondered. Or a pair of ears, once Chloe got going with the swearing. Penelope had been lucky to have made it so long. She just hadn’t counted on having to explain today. Or having to explain to Chloe, not for years.
“It’s my long day. I’m on until six.” A weak protest.
“I can wait.”
She’d just bet he could. Pressing her lips together until it stung, Penelope darted a look at Chloe. “Behave. Find a book and read. Quietly,” she added, because if one wasn’t specific, Chloe found loopholes in the simplest of commands.
Her daughter didn’t argue, which was almost as worrying as the conversation there was no escaping. Almost, but not quite.
Chapter Two
Well, her mouth was sure Montenga. Raul squeezed his eyes tight in an effort to retain what felt like millions of opinions pouring out of one small girl. Baseball, books, food, school, baseball, homework, baseball. She was currently on a tear that spelled all kinds of trouble.
“She’s a prig who never has anything nice to say about anyone, especially not Mom.” For an eleven-year-old, Chloe did scorn real good. “I hate going there every day. It sucks. You can’t even begin to imagine how much it sucks being there. Go read this, Chloe, go clean that, Chloe. Practice your French, Chloe. Stop making a mess, Chloe. You know she checks me for dirt before she lets me in the car?”
“Your mom probably wouldn’t want you talking about your grandmother that way.” It was as close as Raul was willing to get to an admonishment. Defending Lorna Gibson just went against his grain. Something about the woman had always bothered him, from her uppity ways to her uppity looks, not to mention her uppity dismissal whenever they’d managed to cross paths. Or maybe it was just the quietly miserable look on Pen’s face whenever her mother arrived to pick her up from school that set his teeth on edge even now. But she was Chloe’s grandmother…
“Well, it’s true. Mom doesn’t want me lying either. What do you think is worse? Lying or being mean to people?”
Sneaky. If she was his kid, she’d have to have gotten that from him. “They’re both wrong. But you can’t fix what other people do. Just you.”
Which sounded just parental enough to scare him into silence.
Who was he to be giving lessons on how to live? He didn’t know the first thing about being a father. Had gone to damn impressive lengths to avoid being a father. Protection was an absolute must for him. So when the hell could he have gotten Penelope pregnant? Penelope!
No, it w
asn’t possible.
Then again, those dreams of his had always been shockingly real. The feel of her skin, the taste of her kiss. He even remembered a sexy little mole next to her belly button and a raspberry kiss of a birthmark, right in the fold where her thigh met her body. He remembered licking at it and feeling her hips buck in his hands.
Hadn’t he just made it all up in his mind because he’d wanted her? How the hell could it be real?
He studied the girl again, not at all sure what he was feeling. He’d really thought Pen would out and out say he wasn’t Chloe’s father. That she’d look at him like he was completely ridiculous and throw him out on his relieved ass. At least, he was prepared to be relieved. Told himself he would be relieved. But as he’d dressed and grabbed his keys, he’d taken a few seconds to wonder—who wouldn’t?—what it would be like if Penelope announced that yes, Chloe was his kid. But he hadn’t expected it to actually happen.
Technically, it hadn’t. She just hadn’t denied it.
The Penelope he remembered was honest to a fault. She couldn’t lie to save her own skin. Hell, she couldn’t even let him lie for her and he’d liked her enough to try a few times. Her whole face would turn red and her eyes would bulge, like she was holding her breath or something. It was the only time when Pen wasn’t pretty.
“You have to be my father,” Chloe announced, not sounding the least little bit concerned she might as well accuse him of being Santa Claus.
“What makes you so sure, kid? Your mom didn’t tell you, that’s for damn sure.” Crap, he hadn’t meant to swear.
“Lots of things. My birthmark, for one thing.” She thrust out her leg, scrabbling to drag up the denim of her pant leg high enough to show the splotch of darker pigment on the outside of her calf. It looked like a sloppy star, with three wide limbs and one smaller, slimmer line. “Danny has one just like it on his back.”
Of course, her good friend, good buddy Danny’s magical birthmark. He remembered it well. They regularly teased Danny mother, Julia, that it looked like a cannabis leaf and was proof she’d been smoking something when she hooked up with her husband. Raul didn’t have the heart to tell Chloe no one else in the family had one.
Chloe seemed to register his lack of wholehearted belief. “Then there’s the diaries.”
His brows crashed down. “What diaries?”
“The ones in my mom’s old closet. I get to hang out in her old room at Grandma’s house. I mean, it’s a guest room now, so I can’t mess it up or anything, but Grandma never said anything about the closet. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in there. There’s this player thing, it plays these huge CD things, but mom calls them records. She said I could have them if I wanted, so I brought ’em home. I like the covers, everyone is wearing all these weird clothes and colors and their hair has all these colors. The music is okay, I guess. Do you know what block the New Kids lived on? Mom won’t tell me.”
Do not laugh. Do not laugh. “You said something about diaries?”
“Oh, yeah. They were in the box with the records. There’s a bunch of them. That’s how I found out about you,” she confided while perusing a shelf on the bookcase. Penelope’s medical books surrounded a whole shelf of teen fiction, some old, some still shiny new. He guessed that meant Chloe stayed in the office a lot. “She really liked you back then. You were on, like, every page.”
And damn if his face didn’t go bright red. As a young kid, Penelope’s crush had been embarrassing as hell, since she hadn’t made any effort to hide it. Probably that inability-to-lie thing, now that he thought about it. By the time they were teenagers, he’d become a total ass, taking her devotion as his due. By then it was just part of life. Skip school, avoid Dad, Penelope loves me. Rake yard, take out trash, Penelope loves me. Eat dinner, go see movie, oh yeah, Penelope loves me.
Until she filled out. Never tall, just barely average height, she’d turned into an hourglass somewhere around age nineteen and all that had stood between her innocence and his raging libido for a solid year had been his extremely shaky morality. Well, that and his rock-solid sense that she was too good for him. Too nice, too sweet, too perky, too sheltered and too fucking in love with him to know any of it.
“We put two and two together.”
“And came up with nine,” Raul wasn’t able to keep from saying.
“Did not. We asked Danny’s mom when you moved away and that fits too. Exactly eight months.”
“Babies are a nine-month situation, kid.” Something he figured she’d know since her mother delivered all the ones born in RDC.
Chloe only smirked. “Nine and a half, brain child. They can stay in there for ten if they feel like it. I didn’t though. I was early. Mom says I was born impatient.”
Which was a Montenga trait.
“When’s your birthday?” The question slipped out before he allowed himself any time to think about it.
“March twenty-fifth.” Her small chin lifting, she finally pulled out a book from the shelf. Nancy Drew. Big surprise.
She kept talking, but he tuned it out, trying to think what had happened around the time he’d finally moved out of Rancho Del Cielo. Mostly fighting with his father. Lots of feather smoothing from his mother. Back then he’d been young enough to think he knew everything and dumb enough to tell everyone. About the only time he saw Penelope was…when, Trisha Arbourdale’s wedding? Crap, he barely remembered that party. His hangover the next day was memorable though. Less than a week later, he’d packed his stuff and headed north, determined not to get sucked into living a life his family dictated.
Penelope burst through the office door, looking breathless and suspicious, her gaze darting the several feet between her daughter and his no-doubt ruddy face. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t comment. Just asked Chloe to fetch her purse from the bottom of a desk drawer and asked him to follow them home.
It felt a little too obedient, but he did it, his big truck stalking her little beige Volvo like a shark trailing a guppy. He rubbed his eye as she pulled into the newer housing community of Forrest Glen. New people were moving into RDC all the time. There were actual strangers in town these days, though they didn’t stay that way for long.
Figures she’d live here. The Gibsons were always just a little too good for the old Victorian houses with creaky floors or the Craftsmans that were popular back in the fifties. But Pen fit here. Nice without being lavish. New, without being shiny. Brick walkways and green lawns. White stucco and portable basketball hoops in the driveways. She probably had a pool in the backyard, too. Made his apartment look like a hovel, that was for sure, but at least it wasn’t the ostentatious, white-pillared Dallas knockoff of her mother’s. He shuddered at the memory and pulled the truck to the curb in front of a cozy little two story. One of the smaller lots, sure, but more than comfortable for a single mom and her child. Penelope and Chloe pulled into the driveway. Out like a shot before the brake lights even turned off, the little girl all but ran over to his truck, reaching for the handle to drag him out and into her world.
His heart clenched. No matter what Pen had to tell him, this little girl needed a father. Wanted one so bad he almost wished he could be it, just so she wouldn’t have that longing expression anymore. He searched her face again, looking for some sign of himself, but he couldn’t tell if it were really there or just part of his imagination. Was her mouth really like his, only smaller? Was that gold shade of her skin because of him or because she spent all day in the sun? Those were Penelope’s eyes, no doubt about it, and her hair color, but the hairline was different and it was thicker, with a curl there around her face. Pen’s hair was straight. Fine. He knew her hair better than he knew his own. But what did any of that mean?
How the hell was any of it possible?
Chloe pulled him by the hand. Through the windshield he saw Pen standing next to the open door of her car, the wind catching the ends of her hair and whipping it over her shoulder. She had the same look on her face as Chloe, longing for someth
ing she couldn’t have. But she wasn’t watching him anymore. She was staring at her daughter. Wanting something for her baby that she didn’t believe was there?
She held herself so tight against the wind. Stolid. Resolute. Lonely. That was always a word his mind rejected for her. Pretty, well-off, well-liked and possibly the only genuinely nice person he knew, someone like Penelope Gibson couldn’t possibly be lonely. There was no ignoring it now, though.
She should have found someone by now. Should have found someone good enough for her, who could have taken those shadows away and made her smile the way she was supposed to.
She caught him looking. Her pointed chin rose, a wall of feminine pride straightening her shoulders. He felt the clash of her temper at being cornered this way, but he didn’t feel sorry about it. Chloe clearly needed some answers. Some guidance Penelope couldn’t give.
She locked up her car and led the way up the walk to the front door of her house. Raul acknowledged silently that he needed answers too.
“But—” The universal sound of a child being done wrong.
“Upstairs.” Penelope was too tired to have this conversation with Chloe soaking up every lurid detail. Ordering her daughter up and out of the way, however, almost never happened without an argument. “Take a shower. Mr. Montenga and I have to talk and it’s not a topic for children.”
“He said I could call him Raul.” Chloe didn’t pout, exactly. The bottom lip got fuller and it stuck out, but her small face always seemed to resemble an old man with a lump of chew in his craw preparing to deck you.
“I don’t care if he said you could call him the Easter Bunny. This is an adult conversation and you have another seven years before that includes you. Go.”
The lip started to quiver and for a long second, Penelope considered softening her stance. Chloe never cried, not since deeming it for babies back when she was six. And now, almost twice in one day. But no. Someday, she’d explain to her daughter how she’d come into being, but it wasn’t going to be today. And if she had anything to say about it, it wouldn’t be in front of Raul.
