Angel Mine

“In here,” he replied with a resigned sigh.

She appeared in the kitchen doorway with a frantic expression. She surveyed him from head to toe—probably looking for cuts and bruises from some accident he’d failed to mention—then finally sank onto a chair opposite him.

“Don’t ever do that to me again,” she pleaded. “My heart’s still pounding.”

“What did I do?”

“You stayed home. You didn’t call in. And then,” she said as if this last was the worst, “you snapped at me.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t want your apology. You were past due. What I want to know is what has you in such a tizzy that you are behaving in such a totally uncharacteristic way?”

“Why do I have to be in a tizzy, as you put it? Why can’t I just be having a bad day? People have bad days all the time.”

“Because you don’t have bad days,” she retorted. “You see to it that every day runs smoothly.”

“Maybe I just see that your days run smoothly. Maybe mine are total chaos.”

“No way. You’d never allow it.”

He frowned at the suggestion that he was able to exert that much control over events, even though up until yesterday he had prided himself on doing just that. “In other words, I am totally predictable and boring.”

“No, you are a treasure,” she corrected him. “Twenty-four-carat gold. Solid as a rock. Dependable. That’s why not finding you at your desk today was such a shock.”

He wasn’t especially reassured by the praise. It merely served as a reminder that he was going to have to do the right thing in a situation that he wasn’t the least bit prepared to handle.

“Maybe I’m tired of being dependable,” he said. “Maybe I want to be the guy dressed in black, the dangerous man no woman would dare trust.”

“And the one every woman wants, anyway?” Megan suggested, gaze narrowing. “Is that what this is about? Are you in love? I didn’t realize you were dating anyone seriously.”

Now, there was a laugh. “Megan, the only women I’ve seen in the past year have been married, and I’m not about to tangle with the wife of some man who’s likely to own a shotgun.”

“Then what is this about?”

“It’s private.”

Megan laughed. “‘Private’ never stopped you from meddling in my life.”

“And now you intend to get even? I don’t think so. This is my problem. I’ll handle it.”

She gestured toward the wadded-up papers he’d tossed on the floor, evidence of his inability to make one single rational list of solutions to the situation.

“Is that your idea of handling it?”

“Yes.”

She reached for one of the scraps of paper, but he got to it first, crumpled it in his fist and kept it there.

“Stay out of this, Megan. You can’t help.”

“You don’t know that. Try me.”

“No,” he said flatly, his gaze locked with hers. “Now go away and let me think.”

She stood up with obvious reluctance. “Okay, I’ll go,” she told him. “But before I do, think about this. Not every problem can be solved by cold, hard logic. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut.”

True enough, Todd conceded as she left. Unfortunately right this second his gut was all but shouting for him to pack his bags and get out of Dodge—or in this case, Whispering Wind.

A few months ago, he might have heeded that instinct eagerly. He would have seized any sign that encouraged him to head back to New York to a world he understood, a place he’d belonged. Ironically, he realized that going there would only put him right back in Heather’s path, make it even easier for her to pursue this quest she had to involve him in his daughter’s life.

More important, to his amazement, he realized that Whispering Wind had started to feel like home. He wasn’t nearly as anxious as he once was to abandon not only his job, but his friends. Megan and Jake and Tess, Henrietta and Peggy, the people connected to Megan’s show—they were like family to him, closer than the parents he so rarely saw. He couldn’t see himself running out on them, not just because he was duty-bound to stay, but because he cared about them.

It was ironic, really. Thanks to this makeshift family—to say nothing of his deeply ingrained code of honor—it appeared he was going to have to stay right where he was and figure out how to deal with a real family, which until yesterday he hadn’t even known he had.

That didn’t mean he had to do it today, he thought as he grabbed a shirt and headed for his car. For once in his life he was going to be totally irresponsible and self-indulgent. He was going to run away—even if it was just for a day.

“What happened when you saw Todd yesterday?” Jake asked when Heather arrived in his office promptly at eleven. “I saw the two of you talking on the sidewalk. I imagine you told him.”

Heather sighed. “I didn’t see any way around it. He asked me point-blank what I was doing here. He’d already met Angel. I think he had a pretty good idea even before I said the words. You haven’t seen her up close, but she’s got her daddy’s coloring and her daddy’s eyes. Only a blind man would miss it. And believe me, Todd’s vision is twenty-twenty.”

“How did he take the news?”

“How do you think? He was stunned and angry. He didn’t believe me. He wants a paternity test. He didn’t come right out and ask for it, of course. He’s far too polite. But when I offered, he didn’t turn me down flat.”

“You can’t blame him for that.”

“No, I suppose not,” she conceded, though understanding that didn’t make it hurt any less.

“There isn’t any question about how it will turn out, is there?”

Heather stared at him, shocked that he even had to ask. “Absolutely not.”

Jake nodded. “Okay, then. We’ll do it right away. That’ll be one less obstacle down the road. Have you given any more thought to what you want besides child support?”

“Some sort of custody arrangement,” she told him. “Shared custody, joint custody, whatever you call it.”

“Not just visitation?”

“What’s the difference?”

“In one, the time would be pretty much equally divided. With visitation, Angel would only spend a set amount of time with Todd each year. The latter’s more practical, if you intend to go on living in New York. Otherwise, you’ll be completely separated from your daughter for half the year. She’ll be dividing her time between schools, unless you put her in a boarding school. Even though that’s down the road a couple of years, it’s something to think about.”

Heather shook her head. She didn’t want to spend that much time away from her daughter. Boarding school was out of the question for the same reason. She hadn’t even considered being separated from Angel when she’d started the process. She’d just wanted Todd to take over from time to time. If he’d been in New York still, this would have been simple, a matter of shuttling Angel from one part of the city to another.

“How would visitation work?”

“She’d fly out here at set times of the year. Summers, maybe. Certain holidays.”