His-and-Hers Family

There was enough bristle in her tone to make it clear she had a temper but was doing her best to keep it under wraps. “You’re being very candid.”

She raised a brow. “Isn’t that what you want? Answers … and an opportunity to see if I’m respectable and responsible enough to meet Cecily?”

“I don’t—”

“And once you figure that out, Mr. Harper,” she said, cutting him off without batting a lash, “you can answer my questions.”

There’s that temper.

Wyatt might have liked her to simply back down and agree to everything he said but he didn’t really expect it. And he respected her spirit. “Wyatt.”

“What?”

“My name,” he replied. “It’s Wyatt.”

“Okay … Wyatt … so ask me another question. Ask me as many questions as you like.”

He went for the most important. “Cecily’s father? There’s no record of him on the birth certificate.”

“No record.” Visible shutters quickly came up and it waved like a red flag. “That’s right. It’s what I wanted.”

Wyatt pressed on. “Is there any chance he might make an appearance in her life?”

“No chance,” she replied hollowly. “He’s dead.”

Dead? He hadn’t expected that. “Who was he?”

“No one.”

He immediately wondered if she knew who Cecily’s biological father was, but didn’t like how the question sounded rolling around in his head. “Does he have a name?”

“Since he’s dead it really doesn’t make any difference.”

“Unless his family tries to have some claim on Cecily in the future.”

“They won’t,” she said stiffly. “No one knows about him. My mother made sure of it.”

Wyatt’s interest grew. “She didn’t approve?”

“What mother would approve of her fifteen-year-old daughter being pregnant?”

He nodded slowly. “You said you weren’t in a position to care for a child? Did you mean because of your age or something else?”

“I lived with my elderly great-uncle,” she said stiffly. “My mother was dead. I was two years away from finishing high school. I had no income and no way of supporting myself or my baby.”

It sounded like an impossible situation for a teenage girl. “If it’s any consolation to you, Karen and Jim loved Cecily very much. They’d been trying to have a baby for a long time. Cecily brought them a great deal of happiness.”

She smiled and the sparks in her eyes faded. “They didn’t have any other children?”

Wyatt begrudgingly admired how she’d seamlessly moved the questions onto him. “Just Cecily.”

“And you’re her guardian now?”

“That’s right,” he replied. “Karen was the daughter from my father’s first marriage and she was twelve years older than me.”

She nodded fractionally. “So, you and your wife care for her?”

“I’m not married,” he said but was pretty sure she knew that already from the look on her face.

Her expression narrowed. “Does Cecily live with you?”

“She spends most of her time at Waradoon, our family property in the Hunter Valley, which is just over an hour’s drive from Harper Engineering. My parents are retired and my youngest sister still lives at home. Cecily goes to the local high school and is well settled. I have a place in the city but go to Waradoon most weekends. If not, Cecily visits me in the city.”

“Why did they grant guardianship to you?”

He’d wondered it himself in the beginning. Neither Karen nor Jim had discussed what would happen to their daughter upon their deaths. Finding out he was named sole custodian of their precious child had come as a shock.

“Jim had no siblings and his parents are both in poor health,” he explained. “My mother spends as much time with Cecily as she can. But my father is over seventy with a heart condition, my sister Ellen has a four-year-old and two-year-old twins, and my youngest sister, Rae, is twenty-five and in her third year of studying veterinary medicine.”

“So you don’t actually spend a lot of time with her?”

It was a pretty mild dig, but it annoyed him anyway. “I have a business to run and I get home when I can, which is usually most weekends. Cecily understands that. She also likes living at Waradoon. She has her horse there and her friends are close—”

“She has a horse?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Something you have in common.”

Wyatt stared at her, intrigued by the way her eyes changed color. He liked the coppery shine of her hair and the way it bounced around her face. He liked it a lot. And her perfectly shaped mouth was amazing. Something uncurled low in his abdomen, a kind of slow-burning awareness. He’d met pretty girls before. Prettier even. But he couldn’t remember the last time a woman had attracted him so much and so quickly.

“So,” she said after a moment. “What now?”

Wyatt forced his focus back to the issue. “That’s up to Cecily.”

He watched as her bottom lip disappeared between her teeth for a moment. “It looks like it’s up to you.”

“I’m not about to rush into this.” In fact, Wyatt had no intention of rushing into anything ever again. If he’d shown that same sense less than two years ago, Yvette might not have had the opportunity to wreak havoc on his life and his family. “Although I understand how difficult that must be for you to hear.”

“Do you?” she asked quietly.

Wyatt didn’t miss the rawness in her voice. “There are a lot of people who risk getting hurt, and my primary job is to protect my niece.” And you. He didn’t say it, but the notion lodged firmly behind his ribs. He had what might be considered old-fashioned values … about some things. Maybe it came from having an older father. Whatever the reason, Wyatt wasn’t about to start making decisions that had the potential to turn lives upside down, without thinking them through long and hard.

“Can I see that?” she asked and reached across to finger the edges of the folder on the table.

“Of course.”

She slid it across her lap and opened the folder. Wyatt remained silent as she examined the contents. Her expression changed several times as she flicked through the pages, shifting from annoyance to sadness and then a kind of strained indignation.

“You’ve done your homework.” She pushed the folder toward him. “You’ve got everything from a copy of Cecily’s birth certificate to my sixth-grade report card. I hope you paid your investigator well for all the hard work.”