Long-Lost Father

The tight-leashed control she’d sensed in him must have slipped just a little, for his dimples twitched. “You’d better get dressed now, Sam. It’s been a long time—for me, at least—and you’re still the most beautiful woman I know.”

She crossed her arms over her breasts in guilty confusion. The winds, cooling now, sent a chill down the length of her overheated body. She shuddered, but with a massive effort she managed to stop her teeth from chattering. “W-why are you here?”

His gaze remained steady on her face. “You’re shivering on a night as hot as this—you’re in shock. Dry off and get dressed or you’ll end up sick.”

She jumped unsteadily to her feet and fled into the house, locking her bedroom door. She leaned against it for a minute or more, just shaking, drawing deep breaths. She couldn’t think, could only feel right now—and what she felt was sheer panic.

She reached out with trembling hands to gather up her forgotten towel and dried herself.

“Sam? Are you all right? You’ve been in there a long time.”

Frantically she pulled herself together. “I’ll be right there.” She scrambled into her underwear and the plain cotton sundress she’d kicked under the bed and then used a second towel to fluff her hair semi dry. Time, she needed just a little more time to think…

On the other side of the door waited the husband she’d been told was dead.

She walked through to the living room and turned on the lights to negate the sensual, soft, deep velvet of night and the memories that were too strong, too beautiful, for either of them to forget, too dangerous to remember.

Brett waited for her by the open double glass doors leading to the small back veranda, arms folded, leaning on the doorpost.

It seemed some things didn’t change. He still wore his favourite hip hugging jeans and a black Screaming Jets T-shirt. The evening shadow showed that he hadn’t shaved since morning, giving him a rough, unfinished look that had always melted her.

He’d seemed a living oxymoron to her at first: a high-born doctor, the son of a judge, dressed like a rock star. Then, as she’d come to know him, she’d seen beneath to the boy forced to wear designer labels and always looking perfect for the world, as expected of a Glennon. But Carlton Brett Glennon, while loving his wealthy, socially active family and remaining close to them, had rebelled against his parents’ perfect standards of dress and expectation from his teen years. From the day they’d met, he’d impressed her by caring more for his patients than his status, or the car he drove: the exact opposite of his socially conscious family he still somehow managed to love and respect—at least he had until he’d left for the tiny African nation of Mbuka to join Doctors for Africa, when their expectation had been for him to be a top Melbourne surgeon.

Did he want that, now, too? Would he finally fulfil his parents’ hopes for him, and join the professional A-list?

She shook herself. Whatever he’d been when he’d loved her, things were different now. I’m not the girl who ran from the threat of the Glennons. I will stand and fight this time!

Then she noticed that he was pale beneath his tanned skin and he was shifting what was obviously his bad leg in an effort to find comfort. “Sit down, Brett,” she said, aching for him, for his pain. “Put your leg up if it’s hurting you.”

The grin he directed her way was strained. “Watch it, I might think you care. All those tears and concern about my leg.” He limped to the chaise lounge she’d found at a garage sale and lowered himself onto it with a sigh of relief. His cane clattered to the wooden floor.

And the spell broke. Brett was achingly familiar yet so distant, a man she’d once loved with all her starved heart. Now he was a stranger, and the memories of all they had shared only added to the awkwardness of this meeting. What were they now?

We are Casey’s parents and have shared memories. That’s all there can be.

“Don’t play games, Brett.” She knew her voice was curt, but she couldn’t help it. He looked so much like the man she’d fallen so hopelessly in love with. The Brett who had brought her to life, the man who’d taught her how to live, to laugh and love.

She had to bury those memories. Brett was Casey’s father, but he was also a Glennon: a man whom she had no doubt was still close to his parents, since he had always been before.

And his parents were the people who’d threatened to prove her an unfit mother, and take Casey from her by force.

David and Margaret Glennon, secure in family love and with wealth to back them up, didn’t care if they left her all alone, as she’d been before; all they knew was that Casey was a Glennon, and deserved better than the penniless orphan mother who had nothing but love to give her. They’d wanted her to give Casey life and then leave as if she’d never existed.

What if that was why Brett had found her? Had he come to take Casey from her?

CHAPTER TWO

SHE WAS SLAMMING the emotional shutters down on him.

Brett thought he’d steeled himself for this—after all, he’d seen it all before, but he thought he’d helped her past all the insecurity and pain in her childhood of neglect had branded on her heart. But she’d seemed terrified by his appearance, and while he’d half expected that—he must have seemed like a ghost—he still hadn’t seen a sign of happiness that he was alive.

The one thing that had kept him going until now was the hope she’d be thrilled he wasn’t dead. That she might run into his arms to rejoice at his resurrection…but she’d shrunk from his touch.

Did that mean she’d prefer him to be dead? Why? Why?

“I’m not playing games,” he replied, his voice curt with the pain he’d had to bury deep inside for too long. “I’m the one who never got any letters from you once I finally notified my family that I was alive. I’m the one who missed the calls that never came. I’m the one who’s been looking for you for almost two years.” He dragged in a breath. “I had to find out I was a father through my parents—but I discovered I had a daughter through a private detective. I had to learn her name through a stranger I paid to find you.”

She flushed and turned away, her hands fiddling in the deep pockets of her blue sundress. Her hair was the same, the silver-blonde curls worn loose; she was barefoot, like the hippie he used to tease her about being. He’d loved her that way—the barefoot angel, his sweet nonconformist. She’d kicked her sandals off at the party where they’d met—that had drawn him to her. In a place full of stuffed shirts trying to impress each other, she’d been a lovely phantom of freedom.

It seemed they still had that in common—no need to impress anyone or to be anyone but themselves. But what else did they have? Did he even know her anymore?

“You could have left a forwarding address, Sam,” he said, forcing calmness into his voice, willing his heart to the same. Anger and accusation would get them nowhere. “Were you so relieved that I was dead you just left me behind?”

“You know nothing about what I went through,” she said, her voice barely audible through its shaking. “Maybe you can understand that in my grief for a husband I barely knew, I decided that starting over was best.” She lifted her brows as she finished the words, trying for a sarcasm that didn’t come off. Sam had never been any good at sarcasm, he thought with an unwanted shaft of tenderness.

But my Sam was never a coward, either.

“By changing your name and leaving no forwarding address?” he repeated the point, as cool as he could manage. “You never thought of checking with my parents or Doctors for Africa, to see if I could be alive? My parents were frantic about you and their grandchild. You never considered they’d need her when they lost me—or that she’d love to know the only extended family she has?”

Her nostrils flared; her lips were white with strain. “I don’t have enough experience with loving families to have thought of that. Sorry.” She didn’t sound bitter, just resigned…yet something simmered beneath the surface, some extreme emotion she wasn’t willing to show him.

Once, Sam had shared her every thought, her every insecurity and bad memory with him.

You’ve been apart six years, his inner voice jeered. What did you expect—that while your life blew apart, time stood still for her?

He sighed. “I’d have thought your background was even more reason. You finally had a family, didn’t you? My parents welcomed you into the family—”

“Despite the fact that I was a nameless orphan,” she agreed softly, “and not worthy of the honour of gaining the affections of a Glennon.”

What the hell did that mean? “I never once thought of you that way.”

“I know,” she said, still expressionless. What was she hiding?

“My parents were good to you,” he growled, testing that particular water.

Something fleeting crossed her face, then disappeared—an emotion as heartfelt as it was private. “They were very good to me.” Her voice held no inflection whatever.

Oh, man. A far greater distance separated them than a mere twelve feet of space. He felt like a soldier invading a fortress on his own, ramming his head against invisible barricades.

So much for those years of dreams in Mbuka, envisioning the joy of their reunion. Those dreams had gotten him through a life so dark and vile, so alone, that he could barely stand to think about what it had taken just to survive. He’d focused on coming home to Sam. She was his hope, his joy, the future, the only reason to want to get out of bed each day. A day filled with patching up people with little chance of surviving another week; a day where he was a prisoner of war and his medical skills were all that kept him alive, doctoring people who held life so cheap they’d shoot their mothers for food…

In the compounds and ragged camps, deserts and dank jungles of Mbuka’s changing war zones, clinging to this moment had been his only hope.

Coming home hadn’t done a damn thing to stop the nightmares, the shaking, the times when he’d just zone out and not know where he was, lost in memories an Olympic sprinter couldn’t outrun. During two years of grueling physical therapy after the reconstruction of his knee, and repeated bouts of infection, he’d snatched the dying vestiges of his dream and hung on to them with a mindless tenacity that defied reason. He’d shut out the demons of doubt that whispered to him. She’d never been there for your calls from Africa…and her calls late at night had been strained, scaring the hell out of you. Remember?

But he’d blanked it out. Sam hadn’t left him; they’d been so happy! Surely when he found her, he’d find home at long last…because home was in Sam’s arms, in the heart he’d always known had been totally his.

Well, he’d found her again, and he’d seen how she felt about it. While he’d used every resource of strength he’d had not to haul her against him and lose his living nightmare in her loving kiss, inside her welcoming arms and body, all she’d done was scramble to put distance between them.