good sand villages, and maybe would’ve let her play Frisbee with his dog on the beach. If she had a Frisbee. She’d lost hers.
Then he’d said his name. Mary Jane hated his name. And she hated him, too. Because Mom didn’t want him to be her dad—or he didn’t really want to be her dad. How did she know which it was?
She stumbled again. And fell on the very same knee. And got wet sand in with the skin.
It stung a lot. But that wasn’t why there were tears in her eyes. She just felt like crying. That was all.
Pretty soon, she felt like crying a lot. And it was going to get dark. She wasn’t afraid of the dark but bad men came out more at night. The ocean meant dreams come true, though, so she’d stay close to that.
Wondering what she was going to do next, Mary Jane wandered farther up the beach.
BLAKE DIDN’T KNOWhow to have an eight-year-old daughter. He’d never been a father.
Striding up the beach, eyes straining to see every movement, focused on any movement, he revised his last thought. He’d been a father. He just hadn’t known about it.
He couldn’t walk fast enough, look carefully enough. He couldn’t do enough. Ever. He wasn’t going to recapture eight lost years. And he might not have eight more weeks to get to know the child who was flesh of his flesh. His family.
The only family still alive.
As he passed a man and woman on a blanket with their little boy, asking if they’d seen a little girl, and moving on as they shook their heads, he wondered if he even wanted his own child to get to know him. Did he want his daughter to meet a man on trial for more crimes than she had years on earth? Did he want her to learn that her father might be spending the rest of his life in jail?
He wanted her to know he wasn’t guilty of those crimes. He wanted her to know that if she had nothing else but her integrity, it would be enough.
He wanted her to understand that he loved her without even knowing her. That he’d give his life for her.
About her mother, he thought not at all. He couldn’t afford to.
The beach was relatively deserted. Blake wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. With fewer people out, the percentages were less that a twisted jerk would find a little girl strolling alone on the beach. And yet, with fewer people around, a twisted jerk would find that girl easy prey.
Sick to his stomach, he walked on, moving rapidly, missing nothing. There were indentations in the sand, but too many to be distinguishable as a little girl’s footprints.
Or there were no footprints, which was why he was only seeing footprint-like indentations. She might not have come this way. She might be somewhere in the village of Mission Beach, wandering streets where all kinds of weirdos could be watching her—a beautiful little curly-headed angel all alone.
No. He couldn’t think that way. She was out here on the beach, pouting, drawing shapes in the sand somewhere with a twig, maybe even on the verge of running back home.
Was she smart enough to walk on the edge of the waves so her prints would be washed away? Or smart enough to stay away from the water so that she wasn’t unexpectedly sucked under?
The familiar dull stabbing in his chest struck again as he considered that he knew nothing at all about his own child. Was she good in school or did she struggle? Did she laugh at cartoons?
Could she keep herself safe?
Blake had thought, when he’d been face-to-face with the reality of possibly losing his freedom for the rest of his life, that the emotions consuming him were the absolute worst he could ever experience.
He’d been wrong.
He walked. He searched. Under every bit of brush, in every cranny of every cliff bank, in yards. He talked to the few people he passed on the beach. He knocked on cottage doors, asking if anyone had seen an eight-year-old girl with dark curly hair and sweet chubby cheeks. He could hold up a hand to show them how tall she was. But he didn’t have the actual statistic.
He didn’t even know the color of her eyes.
And when people shook their heads, again and again, he resolved not to lose hope. He’d find her.
He had to find her. To know she was safe. To get to know her.
And when he did find her, he was going to spend every waking moment with the child, listening to everything she had to say, telling her about her grandparents. Showing her his home. He was taking no chances. If he went to prison, his daughter was at least going to have these weeks. She was going to know that she came from good, hardworking, honest people.
He had a lot to do in very little time.
The sun was starting to sink and Blake had covered more than a couple of miles of beach, with still no horn sounding from the road above. Worry was starting to override every positive effort he made. If they didn’t find her by nightfall, the entire situation changed. His daughter would no longer be an upset little girl pretending to run away. She’d be an endangered female child.
A young couple with a dog had seen a little girl pass by, although they couldn’t really describe her. A couple of teenage boys with new surfboards and no idea what they were doing were sure they’d seen her. But they didn’t even know the color of her hair.
He should turn back. The police would be there, and a search party would have gathered by now. Maybe Marcie or Juliet had found her and sounded a horn and he just hadn’t heard it.
She’d probably run back home as quickly as she’d left.
But still he plunged on. That little girl had been furious with her mother. She thought she’d been lied to.
He stopped himself just short of determining that her running was justified.
Did he seriously want his little girl sacrificing her life because of a lie?
God, no.
Truth wasn’t worth that.
He almost missed the sound as he walked. A quiet, animal-like moan coming from between a boulder and a cliff in a spot where the beach narrowed to almost nothing.
Heart pounding, Blake focused on calm as he slowly rounded the boulder, not sure what he’d find. An injured squirrel? A dog?
A child.
Sitting hunched over, knees pulled up to her chest, her head buried in her thighs. He’d only seen her once, but one glance at the curly brown head and Blake knew he’d found his daughter.
There was dried blood all over her.
The sound came again. A tiny moan followed by a dry sob, as though she was still hurting but was all cried out.
Keeping his emotions in check, when he wanted to grab up that tiny body and run for the nearest phone, Blake kneeled down a few feet away. He didn’t want to scare her, but he had to know how badly she was hurt.
“Mary Jane?”
She
