Big mistake. Dominique’s eyes were sharp as gimlets. They always were when she was in an acquisitive mood, he realized.
“Josie’s mine,” he repeated. “We have a very good relationship—”
“Over the Internet? Boy, you’re really a close father, aren’t you?”
“Considering we live on different continents, I’m a very close father,” he said, stung.
“Luke, honestly, there’s no need for this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this child is no more your daughter than I am. You’ve probably never even met her mother. I expect you picked this up in some junk shop and wrote the inscription yourself. It was a clever idea putting ‘and Josie’ in different writing, but you were always a man who thought of the details.”
He took a long, nervous breath. This wasn’t going right. He grasped her hand.
“Dominique—sweetheart—”
“Luke, it’s all okay. I understand.”
“You…do?”
“It’s natural for you to be a little scared at first. You’ve avoided commitment for so long, and now that things are changing, well—I guess it’s all strange to you. But you show me in a thousand ways what I mean to you, and I can hear the things you don’t say aloud.”
Luke gulped. When a woman got to hearing things a man hadn’t said, he was in big trouble.
“Dominique…I swear to you that picture is genuine. Josie is my child, and Pippa is the very special lady who bore her—”
“Shh!” She laid a beautifully manicured finger over his lips. “You don’t have to keep this up. We understand each other too well for pretenses.”
Luke couldn’t speak. Now he knew how a drowning man felt when he was going down for the third time.
It was the perfect moment for a shadow to appear outside the back door, for a tap on the frosted glass, for him to open the door, for Pippa to be standing there with Josie, and for Josie to hurl herself at him with a cry of “Daddy!”
Chapter Two
The first words Luke Danton had ever spoken to Pippa eleven years before were, “Get out of here, quick!” after she’d barged into the kitchen of London’s Ritz Hotel, where he’d been working.
He’d followed it up by grasping her elbow and hurrying her out of the door about as ungallantly as possible.
“Hey!” she objected.
“I didn’t want you to be in trouble, and you would have been. You had no right to be in there.”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
“Because you’re a chambermaid. I’ve seen you coming to work, and I asked about you.”
“Oh,” she said, taken aback.
“What time do you finish?”
“In an hour.”
“Me, too. I’ll meet you in the park, on the bench near the entrance. Don’t be late.” He was gone before she could answer.
She scooted back to her own work, indignant, or trying to be. Suppose she didn’t want to meet him in the park? He had an almighty cheek. But he also had laughing eyes and a vibrant presence, not to mention being tall and handsome. In fact, she didn’t mind at all that he’d been asking about her.
After work she quickly changed out of her uniform and into her normal clothes. Not that most people would have called them “normal.” They were young and crazy and turned heads wherever she went. The tight orange jeans shrieked at the purple cowboy boots. The big floppy hat was deep blue, and the multicolored sweater went with everything almost, and nothing exactly. She was eighteen and sassy. She could carry it off.
She checked herself in the mirror, pushing back a strand of her red-brown curly hair. Then she ran all the way to Green Park, the huge swath of grass and trees that stretched behind the hotel. It annoyed her to realize that she was actually hurrying so as not to miss him.
Glorious as a peacock, she sat on a bench that gave her a good view of the path he would have to take, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
She leaned back, resting one elegantly booted ankle over the other knee, the picture of impish nonchalance. After a while she changed legs.
And waited.
At the end of an hour she was in a temper, less with him than with herself for still being there. Fuming, she rose and began to walk away in the direction of Buckingham Palace, but she couldn’t resist one look back, and was in time to see him racing along the path as if his life depended on it. His hair was tousled, and his expression was desperate. She hadn’t enjoyed a sight so much in years.
“Oh, no!” he yelled as he saw the empty bench. He raised his arms to the sky. “Please, please, no!”
“Hm!” she said, coming from behind a tree to stand before him.
He leaped a foot in the air. “You waited! Bless you!”
“I most certainly did not wait. I left after five minutes. I just happened to come back this way.”
“Really!”
“Really. I hope you’ve got a good excuse.”
“Actually,” he said airily, “I forgot all about our meeting.”
“It looked like it.”
“Well, I thought I’d better drop by in case you’d hung around in hope.”
Hands on hips, she confronted him. It was hard because she was five foot seven to his six foot two, but she did her best.
“Oh, yeah?” she challenged.
“Oh, yeah!” he returned.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Oh, yeah!”
“OH, YEAH?”
“OH, YEAH!”
They both began to laugh at the same moment. He took firm hold of her hand and said, “There was a last-minute crisis in the kitchen, and I couldn’t get away. I was going crazy thinking of you here. Still, I knew you’d wait for me, no matter how long.”
“I’d thump you if I could get my hand free.”
“Great. I’ll consider myself thumped. Now let’s find something to eat.”
She thought he
