always told himself he didn’t want or need a family. His own childhood had been so tumultuous, marked by his mother’s mental chaos and Harry’s increasing impatience and frustration and his subsequent cold distance. In his mind, family was turmoil and pain.
Jack had always just figured that since he didn’t have the desire—or the necessary skills—to be a father, he was better off just avoiding that eventuality altogether. That had been one of the things that had drawn him to Kari, her insistence that her career mattered too much for her to derail it with a side trip on the Mommy Track.
Mere months into their marriage, she’d done a rapid about-face and started buying baby magazines and comparing crib specifications. Even before that, he’d known their marriage had been a mistake. She hated his travel and his long hours, she couldn’t stand his friends, she started drinking more than she ever had when they were dating.
Bringing a child into the middle of something that was already so shaky would have been a disaster. They started counseling, but when he found out she had stopped taking her birth control pills despite his entreaties that they at least give the counseling a chance to work, he had started sleeping on the sofa in his office.
She filed for divorce two weeks later and ended up married to another attorney in her office a month after the decree came down.
Yeah, he had always figured he and kids wouldn’t be a good mix. But these little glimpses into Sage’s childhood filled him with poignant regret.
Nothing he could do about that now. He realized that Maura was watching him warily and he forced himself to smile. “I like your place.”
She tilted her head, studying him as if to gauge his sincerity, and he was struck again by her fragile beauty. With that sadness that never quite left her eyes, she made a man want to wrap his arms around her, tuck her up against his side and promise to take care of her forever.
Not him, of course. He was long past his knight-in-shining-armor phase.
“Thanks,” she finally said. “I like it too. It’s been a work in progress the last five or six years, but I think I’ve finally arranged things the way I like.”
She untwisted her striped purple scarf and shrugged out of her coat before he had a chance to help her, then hung both on a rack nestled between ceiling-high shelves.
“A bookstore and coffeehouse. That seems a far cry from your dreams of writing the great American novel.”
She seemed surprised that he would remember those dreams. “Not that far. I still like to write, but I mostly dabble for my own enjoyment. I discovered I’m very happy surrounded by books written by other people—and the readers who love them.”
“It’s a bit of a dying business, isn’t it?”
She frowned and stopped to align an untidy shelf of paperback mysteries. “I don’t believe a passion for actual books you can hold in your hands will ever go away. We have an enormous children’s section, which is growing in popularity as parents come to realize that children need to turn real pages once in a while instead of merely flipping a finger across a screen. Our travel section is also very popular, as is the young adult fiction.”
She shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve made sure people come to the store for more than just books, though it’s still the best place in town to find elusive titles. We’ve become a gathering spot for anyone who loves the written word. We have book groups and author signings, writer nights, even an evening set aside a couple times a month for singles.”
“You’ve really built something impressive here.”
She paused and looked embarrassed. “Sorry. You hit a hot button.”
“I don’t mind. I admire passion in a woman.”
In a person. That’s what he meant to say. In a person. Anyone. But it was too late to take the word back. Maura sent him a charged look and suddenly the bookstore felt over-warm. He had a random, completely unwelcome memory of the two of them wrapped together on a blanket up near Silver Lake, with the aspens whispering around them and the wind sighing in the pine trees.
She cleared her throat and he thought he saw a slight flush on her cheeks, but he figured he must have been mistaken when she went on the offensive. “What is this whole business about sticking around town for a few weeks, Jack? You don’t want to be here. You hate Hope’s Crossing.”
He didn’t want to take her on right now. He ought to just smile politely, offer some benign answer and head over to browse the bestseller shelf, but somehow he couldn’t do that.
“If I want to see my daughter—the daughter you didn’t tell me about, remember?—I’m stuck here, aren’t I?” he said quietly.
“Not necessarily. Why can’t you just wait and visit Sage in Boulder when she returns to school? Or have her come visit you in San Francisco. You don’t have to be here.”
“I’m not leaving. Not until after Christmas, anyway.”
“You’re just doing this to ruin my holidays, aren’t you?”
He could feel his temper fray, despite his efforts to hang on to the tattered edges. “What else? I stayed up all night trying to come up with ways to make you pay for keeping my daughter from me. Ruining your holidays seemed the perfect revenge for twenty years of glaring silence. That’s the kind of vindictive bastard I am, right?”
“I have no idea,” she shot back. “How am I supposed to know what kind of bastard you are now?”
“Insinuating I was a bastard twenty years ago to knock you up and leave town.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You must have thought it, though, a million times over the years.”
That was the core of the anger that had simmered through him since that life-changing moment after his lecture. What she must have thought of him, how she must have hated him to keep this from him.
For twenty years their time together had been a cherished memory, something he used to take out and relive when life seemed particularly discouraging.
He had wondered about her many times over the years. His first love, something good and bright and beautiful to a young man who had needed that desperately.
To know that she must have been cursing his name all that time for leaving her alone with unimaginable responsibility was a bitter pill.
“You didn’t tell me, Maura. What the hell was I supposed to do?”
“Not forget me, as if you couldn’t wait to walk away from everything we shared. As if I meant nothing to you!”
As soon as she blurted out the words, she pressed a hand to her mouth as if horrified by them.
“I loved you,” he murmured. “Believe whatever else you want about me, but I loved you, Maura.”
“Yet you hated your father and Hope’s Crossing more.”
“Maura,” he began, knowing he had no defense other than youth and idiocy and his own single-minded resolve to make something out of his life away from
