their family until they were a little better situated. No, he wasn’t a father because it just wasn’t possible. Instead, this was Keaton trying to screw with him, as always. He probably didn’t even know where Skye was. “Funny, Keaton. Real funny.” He shook free of his brother’s grip and bolted out of the booth. He tried to smile at Amanda as he all but bulldozed his way out of the diner.
As he walked, his mind raced through the options. He was going to kill his brother. Keaton had always been a jerk about Jake and Skye, but this? This took the cake. Jake was not a father. Skye hadn’t been pregnant when they’d called it a day.
Had she?
He thought back to the last time he’d lain in bed with her in his arms. They’d gone out to dinner—a fancy thing, because he was making more money now. Business was good. He was trying to show her that he could take care of her, give her the very best in life. But dinner had been tense. They hadn’t spoken much. They’d had sex when they’d gone home, but it’d been...
It’d been missing the spark that had held them together for so long. The evening was supposed to be about showing Skye that they still had something worth saving. But apparently in the end, it’d shown them—her—that what they’d had was already gone.
A few days later, their world had erupted. Skye had insisted that, if Jake loved her, he’d go home to Royal with her and start a family. And Jake had insisted that, if Skye loved him, she never even would have asked him to come back to this pit of a town.
The fight had been—well, he tried not to think about the things he’d said. And he tried extra hard not to think about the things she’d said. He’d gone to a hotel the next morning and left for Bahrain the next week.
He could not be a father. He just couldn’t be. And if he was—that was a huge if—then Skye had even less business serving him with divorce papers. But he’d had no other contact with her. Not so much as a peep.
So Jake did the only reasonable thing. He ignored his brother—who had followed him out of the diner, calling his name—and kept walking. He wasn’t about to sit there and let his brother mock him. There were other ways to find Skye. Ways that did not involve additional humiliation at the hands of Keaton.
He made it to his Porsche Turbo and got the door open before Keaton caught up to him. “Wait,” he repeated, shoving the door closed.
“Go to hell. You want to mock me? Fine. But I don’t have to sit there and take it. For the record, I didn’t come back to Royal for you. I didn’t come back for Mom and Dad. I came back for Skye and Skye alone. We’ll deal with our relationship just like we’ve always dealt with things—on our own. You and the Taylors and this whole town can go to hell. I’ll even buy you a handbasket.”
Keaton leaned against the car door so that Jake would have to go through him to open it. Which was an option that was on the table, as far as Jake was concerned. “You pigheaded fool,” he started.
“That’s how you want to play this? Fine.” Jake’s hands curled into fists. “You’re nothing but a traitor. I wouldn’t trust anything you said even if you had it notarized. I tried that once, remember? I trusted you with my deepest secret and what did you do? You ran to Mom and Dad as fast as your chicken legs could carry you. You tried to break me and Skye up more times than I can count because being a Holt was more important than being with her. You are nothing to me, Keaton. We are not brothers. I am not a Holt. Not anymore.”
If Keaton was insulted by this tirade, he didn’t show it. Instead, he just kept on leaning against the door, looking at Jake as if he pitied him.
Jake had dreamed of calling his brother out. Dreamed of it. But saying those words to his face didn’t leave Jake with a sense of lightness or of closure. He only felt worse. And he’d long since vowed not to feel bad about his family. Those days were over. “Get out of my way, Keaton. Or I will get you out of my way. Last warning.”
“Her name is Grace.”
Grace. He wanted to tell Keaton to go to hell again, but his voice suddenly didn’t work, so he settled for glaring.
“She was eleven weeks premature,” Keaton went on. “She was in the neonatal intensive care unit for almost three months.”
Images Jake had seen in movies of tiny little babies hooked up to wires and tubes suddenly overwhelmed him. He struggled to ask, “The—the hospital? Wasn’t that hit during the storm?”
“She wasn’t in the hospital during the storm.” But damn the man, he didn’t elaborate.
They stood there for a moment. Jake realized he was breathing in great gulps, but he couldn’t help it.
“Aren’t you even going to ask?” Keaton demanded. He sounded frustrated.
“Ask what?”
“Anything, man. You’ve had absolutely no contact with Skye in the last four months—maybe even the whole time you were being a big shot in Bahrain. You obviously have no idea what’s going on.”
“Maybe I do,” Jake snipped, trying to keep his temper under control. He would not give Keaton the satisfaction of getting to him. He would not. “Maybe I’ve been texting with Skye this whole time. How would you know?”
“Because,” Keaton replied, anger and exasperation edging his voice, “Skye’s only come out of the medically induced coma the doctor’s had her in a couple of weeks ago. You can’t talk to a woman who’s been unconscious—oof!”
Whatever else Keaton was going to say was crushed out of him as Jake grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him back against the car. “She what?”
“She’s been out the last four months, Mr. Big Shot,” Keaton said as he tried to push back against Jake’s grip. It didn’t work. “And Grace is yours. She’s a Holt. All the tests came back that she was 99.9 percent positive for being a Holt, which means that her father is either me, Dad or you. And neither Dad nor I have so much as looked at Skye in four years. So it’s you. She’s your baby girl.”
The weight of these words made Jake’s knees weak. He had to step back and lean on the car’s hood to keep his balance.
His baby. His and Skye’s. Who’d been in a coma for months. While he’d been working in Bahrain.
Oh, God. What had he done?
“Where?” That was all he could get out.
“Skye’s still at the hospital. She’s awake, but she doesn’t remember much of anything that might have happened in the last few years. Couldn’t tell us anything about where you might be or why.”
“And...the baby? Grace?” The name felt strange on his tongue. His baby. Everything about that felt strange.
“Funny thing about her,” Keaton said, after a dramatic pause that made Jake want to tear his brother apart. “She’s been handed over to the closest living relatives. Which is me and Lark. You remember Skye’s older sister?”
“You and...Lark?” The way Keaton had said her name—in the same sentence as his own—there hadn’t been any sneer then. None of the mocking tone he’d always used when he talked about the Taylors.
“Yes.
