The Secret Father

“Father may have appreciated the value of a good nanny, but he left me a strong company and I’m passing you an empire. Who else can show you how to nourish it?”

He was in his CEO frame of mind. Olivia inched away from him, too stressed to deal with her dad or her curious co-workers. “I’m busy.” And their same old argument meant nothing compared to the fact that her child’s father had disappeared. A Naval pilot, Zach had embarked on a two-week training mission over a month ago.

The weeks had passed. He hadn’t called. He hadn’t shown up. She’d left countless messages on his cell phone. He’d never given her a number for his apartment or his office. She couldn’t even say where he worked for sure. They’d always arranged to meet somewhere neutral. He’d been in Chicago since the end of summer to train on some sort of equipment he’d avoided discussing. She’d seen his apartment once, and only because they’d been desperate for each other and her father had been home that night.

Zach had been more than reserved about his life. He’d been secretive.

Working on very little sleep and even less food, she felt queasy, frightened and idiotic for getting herself in this fix. She refused to leave one more message begging Zach to call her.

Suddenly her father took her arm and turned her to face him. “What’s really wrong with you, Olivia?”

“I don’t want to argue about work.” She avoided his dark brown eyes. “I understand how you feel about Kendall Press. I love knowing what’s going on in the world before anyone else. It’s a rush of power, but I have to learn the job my way.”

“Why don’t you trust my judgment anymore?”

She took refuge in the glowing screen in front of her. She’d changed because she was going to have Zach Calvert’s baby, and when her father knew he might force her out of her livelihood and her home.

Home. A place Zach had described with a softness so unlike him. He’d longed for the farmhouse and the relations he loved in Tennessee. His hunger for family felt foreign to the only child of an only child.

“Olivia, tell me what’s got you on edge.” Losing patience, her father spun her chair.

She stared at him, but her head was with Zach. What if he’d gone home? To Bardill’s Ridge and all those Calverts. The possibility tempted her to confess everything. If anyone could find a guy in a small Tennesseean town, her dad could.

“Good God.” Realization lit his eyes. “That pilot dumped you.” He’d always said Zach, at twenty-six, was too old for her, his job too dangerous. What he’d meant was he didn’t want her to love someone whose work could take her away from the family business. “Olivia?”

“Yeah.” She’d told James about the training mission. “Zach was supposed to come back weeks ago. If he’s home, he’s avoiding me.”

“Have you called? Did you go to his apartment building?”

“I only have a cell phone number he doesn’t answer and I’ve leaned on the buzzer at his building so many times I think his doorman’s about to set the police on me.”

Her father’s head went back as if she’d struck him. “How serious are you about this guy?”

She barely kept from touching her belly where their baby grew, but the truth—that she loved Zach—wouldn’t come out of her mouth either. Not even she trusted true love at twenty-one. She blinked back tears that seemed to stun her dad.

“Exactly where was he training? The address.”

“He couldn’t tell me.” Maybe he just wouldn’t.

“What do you know about his family?”

“I saw pictures at his apartment and I asked about everyone in them.” His grandparents, hugging each other in photos on his mantel and his cousins, Sophie and Molly, who’d been his surrogate sisters. His mom, Beth, he’d seemed anxious about. She’d also never remarried after his father’s death, and he thought she was lonely.

If his mother’s loneliness mattered to him, wouldn’t his lover’s?

“You believe he had the training assignment?”

She nodded. Except for the moments when he’d made love to her, his mission had occupied him as if he was already gone. She took a deep breath and applied some logic. “Maybe he took leave and went to Tennessee. He was homesick.”

“That’s where he’s from? I’d give you time off to go see him if you’d get over this guy and concentrate on work.”

“He didn’t invite me.” He’d made her want to know his “people.” He’d made her love the place. He’d needed the blue-and-green misty mountains that backed every photo on his wall and each memory in his love of home. The air and the soil and the Smoky Mountains that formed Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, ran in his blood like the blood of his family.

It wasn’t her way or her father’s. They cared for their North Shore entry in the National Historic Register, but it was entrusted to them. It owned no part of her soul. Zach was rooted in those Tennesseean hills.

She turned back to the monitor on her desk. A headline, something about a pilot caught her eye. She clicked to read it.

A photo took shape. Even though she was thinking of Zach, she never expected to see his face.

But there he was. The full headline burned itself in her mind. “Pilot Lost On Mission—U.S. Navy Refuses Comment.”

Loss slammed into her. Her muscles clenched. Olivia splayed her fingers across the picture. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe, praying she’d imagined his face. She made herself look again.

Zach. Dear God, Zach. “No.” Shaking her head, she sucked a breath out of dwindling oxygen.

“Hey.” Her dad caught her just in time to keep her head from slamming into the monitor.

In that second life changed. Forever.

She straightened, though her body felt ten times its normal weight. Tugging free of her father’s helping hands, she crossed both arms across her flat stomach. Her baby took precedence over a freefall into grief.

Zach was gone. She’d be their baby’s only parent, and she’d never know whether Zach had loved her even a little bit—enough to want their child.

“Dad.” His name broke in pieces in her mouth as she stared at her dead lover’s face. “I’m pregnant.”

CHAPTER ONE

A BLUNT FINGERNAIL PRODDED Sheriff Zach Calvert’s shoulder from behind. “You’re the law,” said a woman’s voice. “Can’t you order those tellers to speed up?”

Zach turned, and Tammy Henderson, who co-owned Henderson Seed and Feed with her husband, tucked a brown deposit envelope beneath her elbow.

“How many times have I asked you and Mike to call me before you bring that?”

She elbowed the zippered bag closer to her body. “We took your advice and started making three deposits a week.”

That was about the best he could hope for in a town where the citizens believed crime happened everywhere except here. He checked the clock above the gray granite counter. “Is that right?” It was two minutes slower than his watch. “This is my weekend to have Lily.”

Tammy twisted her own watch and then nodded at the clock. “Tennessee Standard Bank and I match. What time do you have to be at Helene’s?”

“Six o’clock.” Or his ex-wife would make a stink in front of their four-year-old daughter. Helene liked to punish him for imagined transgressions and she had an advantage. He’d do anything to keep from hurting his child.

“I’ve heard how Helene tries to keep Lil…”

Zach lifted his brows. Tammy stopped, her mouth open, her weathered face reddening. When she looked away, Zach felt like a bully, but gossip bred like kudzu in Bardill’s Ridge. Being the number-one topic over the Formica tables at the Train Depot Café didn’t sit well with him.

And how would Lily feel if she heard the talk?

Zach tapped his holstered gun as the long black arm on the clock swept each second away, and the guy in front of him, a hunter in camouflage, twitched from foot to foot.