the baby—
Holy hell. After an hour, the shock hadn’t even begun to wear off. He pushed out a short, soundless laugh—he’d finally gotten to the point, if barely, where he no longer felt as though he had a rusty pitchfork lodged in his chest, and now … this.
Even if he had no idea yet what “this” was. If anything.
Frankly, if the child had been his—if that had even been a possibility, of course—he doubted he could have been more stunned. Or furious. Hell, Ryder couldn’t decide which was eating him alive more—that Jeremy had knocked Mel up or that everybody had kept it a secret all these years. That Mel hadn’t told him—
You feel betrayed? Really?
The front door opened. Ryder slouched behind the wheel like some creepy stalker, even as he silently lowered his window to get a better look, rain be damned. So, yeah, the car was Mel’s—even over the deluge he could hear her still-infectious laughter before he saw her, and the memories flooded his thoughts like soldiers charging into battle. Somehow, he steeled himself against them as the kid emerged first, her tall, thin frame swallowed up in a lime-green down vest, the feeble porch light glancing off a headful of blazing curls before she yanked her sweatshirt hood up over them. She tramped to the edge of the wide porch to glare over the railing. At the weather, he guessed.
Crap. She looked exactly like Jeremy.
Ryder’s heart thumped when Mel backed through the door, her translucent, bright pink plastic rain poncho making her look as though she’d been swallowed alive by a jellyfish. He couldn’t tell much, other than she’d traded in those godawful Birkenstocks for even more godawful Crocs. In a bilious pink to coordinate with the poncho, no less.
Ryder felt his mouth twitch: fashion never had been her strong suit.
The door locked, Mel joined her daughter to give her a one-armed hug, laying her cheek atop her curls, and his lungs seized. Of course, between the downpour and the sketchy light from the streetlamp, he couldn’t really see her face, although there was no reason why she wouldn’t be as pretty as ever, her thick dark hair—still long, he saw—a breath-stealing contrast to her light, gray green eyes. Something he hadn’t dared tell her then, despite how badly he knew she’d needed to hear it. Her posture, however, as she held her little girl close, her obvious sigh as her gaze drifted over what must have seemed like a bad dream, positively screamed Just kill me now.
It occurred to him he didn’t know if she was in a relationship. Or even married. If she’d gone to college, or what she’d majored in if she had.
If she was happy, or heartbroken, or bored with her life—
No. Mel would never be bored.
He had no intention of ambushing her. Not yet, anyway. As it was, he was pressing an unfair advantage simply by being here, especially since he doubted she had any idea he knew she’d returned, let alone about Quinn. And he certainly wasn’t about to confront her—not the right word, but the only one he could think of at the moment—before the million and one thoughts staggering around inside his brain shook off their drunken stupor and started talking sense. Or before he shook loose the full story from his mother—the next item on his to-do list, in fact. But for reasons as yet undefined he’d simply wanted to … see her.
The poncho glimmered in the sketchy light as Mel said something to the girl. He couldn’t hear their exchange, but damned if Quinn’s dramatic gestures didn’t remind him exactly of her mother at that age, and it suddenly seemed incomprehensible, that he’d known absolutely nothing about the last ten years of her life when he’d been privy to pretty much all of it up to that point.
Those huge, curious eyes had hooked Ryder from the moment he saw her when she was two days old, as though—or so it seemed to his five-year-old self—she was asking him to watch out for her. Never mind that her parents lived in the groundskeeper’s cottage and he in the main house, the oldest son of her parents’ employers. He was hers, and she was his, and that was that, he now thought with a slight smile.
Images floated through, of her belly laugh when he’d play peekaboo with her, of helping her learn to walk, ride a tricycle, learn her alphabet. Then, later, how to throw a baseball, and cannonball into the swimming pool, and lob water balloons with deadly, and enviable, accuracy—activities his four-years-younger brother Jeremy, coddled and cosseted long after a full recovery from a severe bout of pneumonia as a toddler, found stupid and/or boring.
Of course, as Ryder grew older Mel’s constantly trailing him like a duckling sometimes annoyed him no end, when he wanted to hang with his fifth-grade homies or build his model airplanes without some five-year-old girl yakking in his ear. A five-year-old girl with no compunction whatsoever about slugging him, hard, when he’d tell her to beat it, before stomping off, her long, twin ponytails flopping against her back.
Until he’d come to his senses—or his friends would go home—and he’d seek her out again, finding her in the kitchen “helping” her mother, Maureen, cook, or building castles out of his cast-off Legos.
And she always greeted him with a bright grin, his rejection forgiven, forgotten, Ryder thought with a pang as, shrieking the whole way, Mel and the kid finally dashed down the steps to her car.
His window raised, he watched the Honda cautiously take off through the downpour, thinking how he’d always been able to count on that grin, even after he was in high school and Mel barely up to her ankles in the first waves of adolescence, when their mothers began to cast leery glances in their direction. Although it was absurd, that they’d even think what they were thinking. Mel was his little sister, for God’s sake, a take-no-crap punk kid who knew everything she needed to know about how boys thought … from Ryder. The boundaries couldn’t have been brighter if they’d been marked in Kryptonite.
Until the summer after she turned sixteen.
He’d just finished pre-med. And oh, how grateful he’d been, after that semester from hell, for Mel’s easy, no-demands company, even if the sight of her in that floral two-piece swimsuit seriously threatened those boundaries. She’d always been more mature than most girls his own age. That summer, when her body caught up to her brain … yowsa. And, yes, not being totally clueless, it was evident she no longer looked at him the same way, either.
However. He would have lopped off an appendage—in particular the one giving him five fits those days—before violating her trust. Except it had been that very trust that sent her into his arms, the day after her father’s sudden death, for the comfort she couldn’t get from anyone else. Especially not her wrecked mother.
Even after all this time, a wave of hot shame washed over Ryder as he remembered how desperately he’d wanted to accept what she was offering. How horrified he’d been. And he’d panicked, pure and simple. Pushed her away, walked away … run away, back to school weeks before he needed to be there.
She’d meant more to him than anyone else in the world, and he’d bungled things, big-time. Stomped on her already broken heart like a mad elephant. Worse, he’d never apologized, never explained, never tried to fix what he’d broken, partly because, at twenty-one, he had no clue how to do that.
But mainly because … he’d wanted her. And what kind of perv did that make him?
Groaning, Ryder let his head fall back, his own still-bruised heart throbbing inside his chest. This was the last thing he needed, to have that particularly egregious period of his life return to chomp his behind when his heart was still so sore. But chomp, it had.
