knowing that her response was only going to infuriate him even more. But she’d thought about that question all night, and she was determined to put her daughter’s interests first. “I don’t want you forcing your way into her life if you don’t plan on staying. It would be worse for Carly to find her father and lose him, than never to have a father at all.”
“Why is that your decision to make?” Colin challenged.
“Because she’s my daughter and I don’t want her to be hurt.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she recognized her mistake. Of course, it was already too late.
“She’s my daughter, too,” he shot back. “And I want to be part of her life. I want her to know who I am.”
“You want her to call you ‘Daddy’?”
“I am her father,” he reminded her.
“You can’t expect to show up, after five years, and—”
“I might have shown up sooner,” he pointed out coldly, “if I’d known about my child.”
“Might being the operative word,” Nikki shot back.
“In any event,” Colin continued, his tone icy, “I don’t think you’re in any position to put conditions on my relationship with Carly.”
“I’m the one who will have to deal with the fallout when you’re not around anymore.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“What happens if your contract is renewed in Texas?”
“I’m not going to debate with you about something that might or might not happen,” he said.
“She’s the one who’ll be hurt when you leave town again.”
“Why are you so quick to assume that I’d abandon her?”
Nikki looked away. She was afraid for Carly, but she was also afraid for herself. Colin affected her as no other man ever had, and she couldn’t bear to see him walk out on her again. And she knew that he would leave. Sooner or later, Colin always left.
“Because you’re always looking for something better. And when a situation becomes a little too difficult, you walk away rather than trying to make it work.”
“Are you still talking about Carly?” he asked. “Or us?”
Nikki flushed. “Obviously our history has colored my perceptions, but you can’t blame me for wanting to protect Carly.”
“I would never hurt her, Nikki.”
I would never hurt you, Nikki. Yes, she’d heard those words before. She’d even believed them at one time. Not anymore.
“If you really want to be her father, you have to start thinking about what’s best for Carly. You need to consider how it will affect her when you walk out of her life as abruptly as you’ve walked into it.”
“Dammit, Nicole. What do you want from me? What am I supposed to do to prove that I’m committed?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But you don’t get to call yourself her father until you’re ready to take the responsibility of being a father.”
“Maybe we should see what a family-court judge says about it.”
The words, once they’d been spoken, surprised Colin as much as they surprised Nikki. He certainly hadn’t come over here this morning with the intention of threatening to take her to court. But he should have expected the unexpected—nothing had gone according to plan since he’d walked back into this town.
And although he was tempted to follow through on the threat, to force Nikki to accept him as part of Carly’s life, he knew he couldn’t. Court documents were a matter of public record, accessible to anyone who cared to look. Filing a legal claim to his daughter would not only announce his location to the world but potentially endanger Carly as well.
Despite Detective Brock’s phone call last night advising of Duncan Parnell’s arrest, Colin remained wary. Unless and until Parnell signed a confession, he couldn’t let himself believe the threat had passed. He couldn’t let his guard down for a minute, which meant he couldn’t sue for custody of his child.
But Nikki didn’t know this, and her face drained of all color in response to his impulsive statement. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Don’t tempt me,” he warned.
She blinked back the tears that shimmered in her eyes. “I’m only trying to do what’s best for Carly. Why can’t you see that?”
“How can not knowing her father be best?”
“It has to be better than knowing he didn’t care enough to stick around.”
He raked his fingers through his hair. “Dammit, Nikki. I didn’t know you were pregnant.”
“And I didn’t think you’d care!”
Her outburst, and the depth of her anger, stunned him into silence for a moment.
“How could you think that?” he asked at last. “How could you think I’d walk away from my child?”
“I didn’t know what to think,” Nikki said bluntly. “But I didn’t think the man who’d told me he’d love me forever would serve me with divorce papers ten months after our wedding, either.”
“You know why I ended our marriage,” Colin said.
“No, I don’t. I’ve listened to all the reasons you’ve given to justify your decision, but I still don’t understand how you could walk out when you supposedly loved me. How could I be sure that you wouldn’t walk out on your child, too?”
“Because I wouldn’t,” he said simply.
He might be a lot of things, but irresponsible wasn’t one of them. Having a baby wasn’t something they’d planned, but if he’d known she was carrying his child, he would have done everything in his power to make their marriage work.
“You told me you didn’t want kids.”
He frowned, having only a vague recollection of a conversation in which she’d asked him about children. It had been shortly after their wedding, and he’d been too preoccupied with his new wife and his lost career to think about anything else. He probably had said he didn’t want them, certainly not at the time.
“Maybe I did,” he agreed. “But there’s a huge difference between the theory of a child and the reality of a little girl who is my own flesh and blood.”
Which reminded him of another issue that had nagged at the back of his mind since he’d first set eyes on Carly. He’d been stunned, not just by the fact that Nikki had had a child, but by the realization that he’d fathered the child. Because if there was one thing in his life that Colin had always been circumspect about, it was birth control.
He always used protection.
