The Once and Future Father

The sound of the doorbell ringing had her hanging up the telephone. Ritchie was here. Finally. The fact that he was ringing the doorbell instead of unlocking the door himself didn’t strike her as particularly odd. He’d probably forgotten his key. Ritchie would’ve misplaced his head if it hadn’t been attached.

Someday, he was going to drive whatever poor woman he made his wife crazy. Until then, he was hers to look after. Moving awkwardly, Lucy made her way to the front door. The doorbell rang once more.

“What’s the matter, Ritchie, lose your key again, not to mention your watch? You’re late—”

Flipping open the lock, Lucy began to launch into a lecture she knew would do no more good than any of the others she’d given him over the course of the last few years. Her tolerant smile faded as she abruptly stopped and stared at the man standing in her doorway. Her heart leaped up, and then down, lodging itself somewhere, uncomfortably, halfway in between.

For just the briefest of seconds, she thought she was hallucinating.

But she was wide awake and he was here, filling out her doorway with his dark good looks the way he had once filled out her entire life.

Dylan.

Funny how much smarter you can become in just nine months.

Her hand on the door, she kept it where it was, half opened, half closed, a barrier to keep him out. The way he had kept her out.

Pressing her lips together, she raised herself on her toes to look over his shoulder, hoping to see the broken-down car her brother drove coming up the street. But it wasn’t in sight.

Her eyes narrowed as she looked at Dylan. “What are you doing here? If you’re here to see Ritchie, he’s not home. I’m waiting for him myself.”

Dylan’s mind went blank as he stared at her. At the one woman who had managed to somehow get past his defenses.

She was pregnant.

Not huge, the way Hathaway’s wife had been just before she’d given birth to their twins, but Lucy was pregnant, carrying a life inside of her, there was no missing that.

She’d said she’d love him, no matter what.

This, he guessed, was “what.”

A wild, hot jealousy rippled through Dylan, born years before he had been, a seed his father had passed down to him and his father before him. For one horrid second, it felt as if that jealousy, that seed, had taken him over, changing the very world that was around him, sending it into tints of red and closing off his air.

Dylan struggled to banish the feeling the way he’d banished his father from his life.

This wasn’t why he was here. Lucy’s life was her own. He’d given it back to her when he’d withdrawn from it, leaving her alone.

Whose baby was it?

The question throbbed through his brain like a bad migraine.

“Did you hear me?” Lucy demanded, her voice rising. “I said Ritchie’s not home. He’s working. I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

Because it hurt just to look at Dylan, she began to close the door. But his hand went out, stopping her. She hadn’t the strength to oppose it.

“What?” she demanded, trying to hang on to her temper, on to the angry tears that had suddenly sprung up inside of her, demanding a release. Why was he back now, after all this time? She was just getting her life back in order. She didn’t need this. And why was he looking at her like that?

“This is about Ritchie,” Dylan said.

She turned pale right before his eyes, holding the door now not so much to block him as for support, to keep from sinking down like a balloon that had suddenly lost all its air. His hand went out to steady her, but she ignored it, stiffening with her last available ounce of dignity. The message was clear. She didn’t need him to touch her.

Lucy felt herself getting light-headed. “What about Ritchie?” she asked, holding on to the door for support.

“Lucy, let’s go inside.”

She didn’t budge. She didn’t have the strength to budge. Ritchie was her older brother, but she had always felt responsible for him. Especially after their parents had died in a train derailment the summer she turned eighteen. Ritchie was the one who could laugh, who could see the bright side of everything even when the chips were down. She was the strength that helped them go on.

She didn’t feel very strong now.

Summoning what reserves she had left, Lucy glared at Dylan. Why was he playing these games with her? Why did he have to be the one to come and tell her whatever it was he had to say?

She clenched her teeth together and repeated. “What about Ritchie?”

Dylan didn’t want to tell her this way. Not on the steps of the house where he had once held her in his arms, breathing in her scent and contemplating things he had no right to contemplate. But Lucy was making no move to let him in, standing instead like some steadfast soldier guarding the borders of her small country, refusing him access.

He tried not to think of a time when things had been different.

Dylan looked at her face. She was fiercely trying to protect herself against what she probably knew was coming. He had no idea how to couch this, how to make something that was so utterly devastating a little less so.

Without a choice, Dylan gave her the news straight and braced himself for the consequences.

“Ritchie’s dead, Lucy.”

Lucy’s breath caught. She looked into Dylan’s eyes and knew he was telling her the truth. She knew even when she wanted to scream at him that he was lying, that he was playing some sort of horrible trick on her, the way he had when he made her believe he loved her. He had never said the words, but there had been feelings between them then, feelings she would have gone to her grave swearing were true.

Except that they weren’t. At least, not for him.

But now it was Ritchie who was going to his grave.

Everything around her began to merge into one color, one huge mass. And then the world began to swim and swirl.

“No,” she mouthed just before everything went black and swallowed her up.

Dylan realized a heartbeat before it happened that she was going to faint. The golden hue of her skin had gone whiter than the snow on the mountain where they had once gone skiing. It was almost translucent.

Dylan reached her side just in time.

The swell that was her unborn child came between them. He felt something move, something kick just as he tried to gather her in his arms. The kick caught him by surprise and he almost dropped her to the floor. The sudden jolt when he caught her seemed to travel through the length of her. Dylan swallowed a curse.

He felt the baby kick again. Amid his concern, jealousy threatened to take control of him.

She’d gone on to love someone else while he had suffered in his own private hell.

A hell, a voice deep inside him whispered, of his own making, not hers.

But it had been the only choice.

He wouldn’t allow himself to feel anything now. It wasn’t any more right now than it had been then.