His-and-Hers Family

She took a deep breath, drawing strength. “And you’re her uncle?”

“That’s right. My sister and her husband adopted Cecily.”

A lovely couple. That’s what she’d been told by the adoption agency. People who would be able to give her daughter everything she couldn’t. Stability. Safety. A perfect home. She’d had fourteen years to imagine what they were like. Fourteen years where she hadn’t known her child’s name. Fourteen years to dream about reconnecting with the baby she’d given up.

But not like this. Not when she was totally unprepared and caught off guard. Whoever he was, and whatever he wanted, Fiona had no intention of falling apart in front of him. She didn’t do vulnerable. Ever.

She stood and crossed her arms. The only words she could form came out. “Why now?”

He waited to respond, taking stretched-out seconds as he looked her over. “Because Cecily wants to meet you.”

She shook her head instinctively. No one was going to turn her world upside down. Not ever again. She wasn’t fifteen and gullible. She was nearly thirty and called the shots in her own life. If Wyatt Harper thought rocking up unannounced was going to give him an advantage, he could think again. If she had this conversation, she’d do it when she was ready, and not before.

“I can’t do this here,” she said and tilted her chin, defiant and with way more strength than she felt. “I won’t. I need time to think. Goodbye, Mr. Harper.”

“Fiona, you need to—”

“Goodbye,” she said again and turned on her boots. She walked in a straight line back to the dressage arena and felt the sear of his gaze right up until she was out of view.

Minutes later she heard the sound of gravel crunching beneath tires. He was gone.

Fiona spent the following hour in a daze. She attended to Titan, got him untacked, fed and rugged, and headed home before Callie had a chance to question her about Wyatt Harper. She wasn’t in the mood for an interrogation, not even from her closest friend.

Once she opened the door of her small house, dropped her keys on the hall stand and made her way to the living room, she let out an emotional shudder.

My daughter.

She sank down into the sofa.

My daughter’s name is Cecily. Fiona had wondered so often what they’d called her. She hadn’t had the strength to name her baby. It was better that way … that was what she’d been told.

The only way.

But how she’d despaired over her decision. Even knowing that at fifteen she hadn’t been in a position to care for a baby and giving her up had been her only option.

The hardest decision I’d ever make.

That’s what the nurses at the small country hospital where she’d given birth had said.

Your baby will be better off.

And then her great-uncle’s voice, reminding her about her own mother.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Back then she’d believed him. Memories of her mother, Shayne, were etched into her mind. Unreliable, self-absorbed, an irresponsible flake, more interested in staying out late and getting high than being a parent. A woman who’d forfeited her chance for an education at seventeen to raise a child she never really wanted, and who’d married a man she’d never loved. A marriage that had lasted two years. Tired of her life in the small town where she’d been raised and the rules she was forced to follow living in her uncle’s house, Shayne packed up a then five-year-old Fiona and began following the rodeo circuit. She chased one cowboy after another, dragging Fiona through countless motel rooms and a string of transient jobs.

When she was fifteen, Fiona had been shipped back to her great-uncle … alone and scared and pregnant. Fiona had few illusions about Shayne. Her mother’s reaction to her pregnancy was borne out of anger and resentment. Three weeks after Fiona was left at her uncle’s farm, Shayne and her much younger rodeo-rider boyfriend were killed in a railway-crossing accident. She didn’t grieve, didn’t feel. There was too much hurt, too much betrayal, too much pain.

Six months later Fiona had given up her baby after only fifteen minutes of holding her. She’d said goodbye to her precious daughter and handed her over to strangers, hoping with all her heart that her baby would be treasured by her new family, knowing that because she’d agreed to a closed adoption she could never look for her, and lived on the hope that one day her daughter would seek her out. But she’d never really believed it. Never let hope linger for too long.

Until Wyatt Harper dropped into her world.

Her daughter’s uncle. An envoy. Clearly here to check her out. Although, since he knew her full name, he’d probably done a fair amount of checking already. Fiona gripped her hands together. How much did he know? The paper trail was meager at best. With Shayne dead there was nothing linking Fiona to her mother’s lover. Or what had happened on that terrible night.

Nothing except Cecily.

No one knew the truth. No one ever would. Fiona had held on to her secret for over fourteen years. There was no mention of him anywhere. She hadn’t talked about it since the day she was dumped on her uncle’s doorstep. Her daughter’s birth certificate stated father unknown. He was dead. What good would rehashing it do now?

Only … Wyatt Harper had turned up and she knew he’d have questions. Questions I can’t answer. There would be no nice way to admit the truth about her daughter’s conception.

So what did he really want? Did her daughter actually want to meet her? And if so, where were her adoptive parents? Why had Wyatt Harper been sent on this digging mission?

If she wanted answers, she had to pull herself together.

First, a shower and a change of clothes. And then a strategy. She liked strategies and lists and being organized. She didn’t like being in the dark. She didn’t like Wyatt Harper knowing things about her when she knew nothing of him.

She fingered the business card he’d given her. Seconds later she was at her computer and typed Harper Engineering into the search engine. It wasn’t long before she had a dozen or so hits. He was from the third generation of Harpers to run the steel-fabrication business. With well over one hundred employees at the huge factory on the outskirts of Sydney, he appeared to be doing everything right. There was a nice picture of him, too, with his father and grandfather. It was clearly a family business in the truest sense of the word.

Fiona flicked off the computer and headed for the kitchen. Muffin, her energetic Tenterfield Terrier, jumped up at the back door, and she quickly let the dog inside and fed her. The card in her hand burned her fingertips. There was only one way to find out what he wanted.

He’d failed. When he’d promised Cecily he wouldn’t. Fiona Walsh obviously wasn’t prepared to talk, and Wyatt felt as if the door had been well and truly slammed. She’d said she needed time—but time for what? She’d looked horrified when he’d faced her with the news. Her pretty face had turned ghost-pale, emphasizing the brightness of her lips and sparkling blue-gray eyes.

He shouldn’t have confronted her out in the open. Yesterday would have been better. But the moment he’d spotted her walking from her little house in her cute pajamas, he’d forgotten why he was there. Forgotten that he had a job to do and forgotten that Cecily was relying on him to not screw it up. But by the time he’d shaken the image of Fiona Walsh’s bouncing hair and pretty face out of his head, she had disappeared inside.

Now, back in his hotel room, Wyatt had time to think about the way he’d ruined his chances. Cecily would be bitterly disappointed, and the last thing his niece needed was more of that. He checked emails and called his personal assistant. Glynis had been with him for ten years; she’d been with his father for twenty before that. The sixty-year-old widow was his right arm, sometimes his conscience and often his sounding board.

“Your flight is booked for tomorrow morning,” she told him. “You are still coming back tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“I’m not sure.”

She made a disagreeable sound. “And Miss Walsh?”

“I’ve made contact. We’ll see what happens.” He wasn’t about to admit he might have screwed up.

“Just be careful,” she warned. “Sleeping dogs sleep for a good reason. Sometimes the past is best left where it is.”

“It’s what Cecily wants,” he said and ended the call, feeling the weight of his promise to Cecily press between his shoulder blades.

When his niece had asked him to find her birth mother, Wyatt hadn’t been surprised and he had understood her motives. Cecily wanted answers. Now that he’d met Fiona Walsh, Wyatt was intrigued and wanted some answers, too. He knew she was a teacher and had lived in Crystal Point for five years. Before that there had been a series of jobs at various schools, none lasting more than six months. She appeared to go from one small town to the next, never settling until now. What made Crystal Point different? Did she have roots in the small community? From the investigation he’d undertaken, Wyatt knew there were no relatives, only a great-uncle who’d passed away twelve months earlier and left her a modest inheritance after the sale of his property out west. There were no parents. No siblings. Not even a distant cousin she could claim as family.

Fiona Walsh seemed to be as alone as a person could possibly get.

She wasn’t married … but maybe she had a boyfriend? She was as pretty as hell, after all. Her hair was an amazing color, not red, not blond but an unusual mix of both. In more normal circumstances, Wyatt would probably have been attracted to her.

Whoa … where did that come from?

He was here on Cecily’s behalf. The kid had been through enough over the past eighteen months. Now she wanted to find her birth mother, and it was Wyatt’s job to help her. He wasn’t about to get caught up in Fiona’s lovely blue-gray eyes. He wasn’t about to rush into getting caught up with anyone, not after the disastrous end to his engagement eighteen months earlier. Yvette’s betrayal had left a bitter taste in his mouth.