Father and Child Reunion

Holding his glance, her eyes narrowed.

“So that means everybody knows more than I do. Hal. The police. Now you. It’s their investigation. They’re his contacts. It’s your story. Damn it, Rio. She was my mother.”

For a moment, Rio said nothing. She hadn’t raised her voice. But her tone echoed what flashed in her eyes. Not annoyance. It was something far more subtle. Yet potentially more volatile. It was more like fury that had been refined and suppressed. Or, more likely, quietly denied.

Rio understood why it was there. He even knew how it felt, though her reasons for fighting the suffocating feelings were far more tangible than his own. She was an unacknowledged victim of a murder, a survivor with no answers, struggling to deal with her grief.

That her brother was keeping her in the dark surprised Rio. That he wanted to go for her brother’s throat because of it, surprised him, too.

He glanced at the recorder, then decided to leave it running.

“The union keeps coming up,” he finally admitted, though he kept the confidential aspects of that fact to himself. “A couple of potential suspects have been identified in its membership, but the police haven’t been able to get anything specific on them. That’s why it could be important for you to recall anything she said to you about anyone connected with the lease renewal.”

He could see her frustration slowly give way as she processed what he’d told her. It made no difference that he didn’t want to consider how overwhelmed she might feel by all that had taken place. He was beginning to sense an inner strength in Eve that the girl he’d known hadn’t yet grown to possess. That strength had been evident even yesterday, despite her bewilderment over her mother’s decisions and the stresses straining her relationship with her brother. She was doing what needed to be done and expecting no one to come to her rescue.

He had to admire that. He’d met too many people who expected others to bail them out when life got rough, or who took out their pain and frustration on everyone around them when something went wrong. Yet, despite her willingness to fight her own battles, to deal with her own pain, there was a vulnerability about her that was playing havoc with his more protective instincts.

His protective instincts weren’t the ones he was concerned about at the moment, however. What he felt when Eve tipped her head back and blew out a breath was considerably more basic.

Already more aware of her than he wanted to be, he let his glance slide down the long line of her throat, along her delicate collarbone and over the gentle swell of her breasts. They were fuller than he remembered, and he couldn’t help wondering how they would fill his hands.

At the thought, heat spiked through his gut. He knew how it felt to lie with her. How perfectly she had once fit his harder, tougher body. She had been a virgin the first time they’d made love, totally inexperienced, but so trusting. So innocently willing. With no effort at all, he could recall far more about that night than was wanted or wise, and since seeing her yesterday, he could swear nearly every detail of that first afternoon had been resurrected. She’d had news she’d wanted to share, and she’d come to his apartment. It had been raining and she’d been laughing, and when she’d launched herself into his arms, the feel of her soft, supple body pressed to his had nearly brought him to his knees.

The muscles in his jaw jerked as he sought to banish the memory. What he needed to remember about Eve Stuart was that she had left without a word. Somewhere along the line, she’d gone on to another man, made love with him as they had done, borne a child. The past was over and done with. At least, it was about to be.

“I honestly can’t think of anything else, Rio.”

“Then, answer one last question.” He’d told himself he didn’t need to know. That her reasons couldn’t possibly matter now. No longer willing to lie to himself, he turned off the recorder with a quiet click and looked up to meet her eyes. “Why did you leave without talking to me?”

Rio’s glance never wavered. He simply sat there, solid and unyielding as granite while the color drained from her face.

He knew she hadn’t expected the question. Not then. Not while she was dealing with the too-fresh memories of the night her mother had been killed. Not while she was struggling to remember something, anything, that would help the police.

“Do we have to talk about this now?”

“Seems to me it’s as good a time as any.”

“Because you decided so? I tried to talk to you about something other than this investigation a few minutes ago but you didn’t want any part of it. And yesterday, you acted as if we’d never known each other at all.”

He wasn’t swayed by her logic. “It’s been six years, Eve. How much longer do you need?”

Far more than you’re giving me, she thought, catching the adversarial glint in his eyes. She honestly didn’t think he would want anything to do with Molly. But if he did, she needed to know the man he had become, and what sort of influence he would be in her daughter’s life. In her own life. She had so little to go on now.

Rio didn’t seem to expect an answer. Despite the faint edge in his words, his deep voice remained as cool and matter-of-fact as his expression.

“Did you know that I tried for weeks to find out where you’d gone, Eve? Weeks,” he repeated, the edge hardening. “But all I could find out was that you’d decided to finish school in California and that you were staying with relatives. Your mother refused to tell me anything else. So I went to the registrar’s office at the college. I thought I could find out where your records had been sent. But they wouldn’t give me a thing, so I tried your mom again. Only that time I asked her if she’d sent you away because of me.”

“Rio—”

“She claimed it hadn’t been her idea for you to leave,” he said, cutting her off. “Apparently, you were the one who didn’t want me to know where you were. But she said she’d ask you to call me. Did she ever ask you that, Eve?”

More than once. They’d even argued about it. “Yes,” she quietly replied.

That wasn’t the response Rio wanted. He’d wanted Eve to deny that Olivia ever gave her his message. He’d wanted her to tell him that her disappearance had been her mother’s idea all along, and that Olivia really hadn’t been as accepting of him as she’d seemed to be. It would have salved his pride enormously to know that Eve had been coerced into leaving. But all she’d done was confirm that it had, indeed, been her decision to leave without a word of explanation.

He slipped the recorder into his pocket, then leaned forward to let his clasped hands dangle between his knees. For so many years, none of this had mattered. He’d gone on, done what he’d wanted to do. Forgotten. Or so he’d thought. He’d forgotten nothing. He’d simply buried the feelings of hurt, confusion and anger along with a sense of loss that had stunned him. Seeing her again had been like entering a forbidden burial ground. All manner of ghosts had risen up to haunt him.

“Just tell me what I’d done that you couldn’t at least talk to me before you took off.”

“It wasn’t like that, Rio. It wasn’t a matter of who did what to whom. It was the circumstances.”

“Like the circumstance that you’re white and you decided you didn’t want to be involved with an Indian? Was that it?”

Eve’s startled “No!” was little more than a gasp as she grabbed his arm to keep him from moving away. Race had never been an issue. Not for her.

She wasn’t sure Rio believed that. Seeing his dark eyes turn to flint, jarred by the unexpected accusation, she wasn’t sure of anything at the moment. It was incomprehensible that her leaving so long ago would matter to him now. Just as unfathomable was how deeply he’d dug looking for the reason she’d gone. As for his heritage, he’d scarcely mentioned his family at all when they’d been together, and it was never a factor in their relationship.

The tension in the hard muscles beneath Eve’s hand finally registered. Reaching for him had been instinctive. But touching him had been a mistake.

His glance fell to her hand, pale and slender against his darker skin. In the space of a heartbeat, it moved to her lips, lingering long enough to seal the air in her lungs before shifting to meet her eyes once more.

He was a beautiful man. Solid as the earth. As mysterious as the craggy mountains rising all around them. She’d always thought him so. But there was an edge to him now, a kind of raw energy that surrounded him, an invisible force field that made him even more unreachable than he’d once been.

That thought caused a ball of nerves to knot in her stomach. Or maybe what she felt was the heat of his glance pooling the warmth low in her belly. He was a much harder man than she remembered. So much more cynical.

And so very…male.

Totally unnerved, her hand slipped from his arm. As it did, the rising cry of an ambulance siren sliced through the heavy silence. The sound had just started its downward arc when it was joined by an electronic beep.

Rio swore. With his jaw clenched tightly enough to crush bone, he reached for his phone on his belt and looked at an incoming text message. “I’ve got to go.”

Eve couldn’t hide her relief at the reprieve. Still, desperate to keep the lines of communication open between them, for Molly’s sake, she started to reach for him again.

Like a child who’s just remembered the burner was hot, she pulled back and curled her fingers into her palm. “I don’t want us to be like this, Rio. Please. We don’t have to be enemies.”

Rio was already on his feet, towering over where she remained seated on the bench. With her head tipped back as she looked up at him, she reminded him of a frightened doe with her throat exposed to a predator. She wasn’t even trying to protect herself.

The phone beeped again, the sound as impatient as he was beginning to feel. “We’ll have to talk later.”

“Can I call you tomorrow?”

Her reluctant question caught him as he turned. Not at all sure what to make of her, he told her to suit herself and cut across the grass to where he’d left his Durango parked at the curb.

The ambulance that had just left the hospital went screaming by as he called the news desk. Thirty seconds later, he pulled onto the tree-lined street and was on his way to the other end of town to cover an accident involving a semi and a motorcycle. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which vehicle had lost. He just wished whatever was going on with Eve was as obvious.

She clearly didn’t want to talk about why she’d left. Yet she wasn’t making any effort to avoid him, either. That alone made him curious. He hated unanswered questions.

He was even less enthralled with the unexpected feelings that had crawled out of nowhere.