He tried again. “Please?”
Caitlyn giggled and he glanced at her askance, which only made her laugh harder. He rolled his shoulders, determined to pass this one small test, but getting his daughter to eat might top the list of the most difficult things he had to do today.
Antonio had learned to walk again on the poorly healed broken leg that the Indonesian doctor had promised would have to be amputated. He’d defied the odds and scarcely even had a limp now. If he could do that, one very small person could not break him.
He tapped the back of Annabelle’s hand with the edge of the spoon, hoping that would act as an open sesame, but she picked that moment to yank her fingers free. She backhanded the spoon, flinging it free of Antonio’s grip. It hit the wall with a thunk, leaving a splash of orange in a trail to the floor.
Frustration welled. He balled his fists automatically and then immediately shoved them into his lap as horror filtered through him. His first instinct was to fight, but he had to control that impulse, or else what kind of father was he going to be?
Breathing rhythmically, he willed back the frustration until his fists loosened. Better.
His first foray into caring for his kid and she elected to show him her best defensive moves. Annabelle blinked innocently as Antonio’s scowl deepened. “Yeah, you work on that technique, and when you’ve got your spinning backhand down, we’ll talk.”
Spinning backhand. The phrase had leaped into his mind with no forethought. Instantly other techniques scrolled through his head. Muay Thai. That had been his specialty. His “training” with Wilipo had come so easily because Antonio should have been teaching the class as the master, not attending as the student.
Faster now, ingrained drills, disciplines and defense strategies exploded in his mind. Why now instead of in his gym, surrounded by the relics of his former status as a mixed martial arts champion?
The headache slammed him harder than ever before and the groan escaped before he could catch it.
“It’s okay,” Caitlyn said and jumped up to retrieve the spoon. “You don’t have to feed her. I just thought you might like it.”
“No problem,” he said around the splitting pain in his temples. “Excuse me.”
He mounted the stairs to his bedroom and shut himself away in the darkened room, but refused to lie on the bed like an invalid.
Instead, he sank into a chair and put his head in his hands. This couldn’t go on, the rush of memories and the headaches and the inability to do simple tasks like stick a spoon in a baby’s mouth without becoming irrational.
But how did he change it?
Coming to LA was supposed to solve everything, give him back his memories and his life. It had only highlighted how very far he had yet to go in his journey back to the land of the living.
An hour later, the pain was manageable enough to try being civilized again. Antonio tracked down Caitlyn in the sunroom, which seemed to be her favored spot when she wasn’t hanging out with the babies. Her dark curls partially obscured the e-reader in her hands and she seemed absorbed in the words on the screen.
“I’ll visit a doctor,” he told her shortly and spun to leave before she asked any questions. She’d been after him to see one, but he’d thus far refused, having had enough of the medical profession during his months and months of rehabilitation in Indonesia.
No doctor could restore his memories, nor could one erase the scars he bore from the plane crash.
But if a Western doctor had a way to make his headaches go away, that would be stellar. He had to become a father, one way or another, and living in a crippling state of pain wasn’t going to cut it.
“I’ll drive you.” She followed him into the hall. “Just because you have a driver’s license doesn’t mean you’re ready to get behind the wheel. We’ll take my—”
“Caitlyn.” He whirled to face her, but she kept going, smacking into his chest.
His arms came up as they both nearly lost their balance and somehow she ended up pinned to the wall, their bodies tangled and flush. His lower half sprang to attention and heat shot through his gut.
Caitlyn’s wide-eyed gaze captured his and he couldn’t have broken the connection if his life depended on it. Her chest heaved against his as if she was unable to catch her breath, and that excited him, too.
“Caitlyn,” he murmured again, but that seemed to be the extent of his ability to speak as her lips parted, drawing his attention to her mouth. She caught her plump bottom lip between her teeth and—
“Um, you can let go now,” she said and cleared her throat. “I’m okay.”
He released her, stepping back to allow her the space she’d asked for, though it was far from what he wanted to do. “I’m curious about something.”
Nervously, she rearranged her glossy hair, refusing to meet his eyes. “Sure.”
“You said that you introduced me to Vanessa. How did you and I meet?” Because if he’d ever held Caitlyn in his arms before, he was an idiot if he’d willingly let her go.
“I was Rick’s accountant.” At his raised brows, she smiled. “Your former manager. He’d gone through several CPAs until he found me, and when I came by his house to do his quarterly taxes, you were there. You were wearing a pink shirt for a breast cancer fund-raiser you’d attended. We got to talking and somehow thirty minutes passed in a blur.”
Nothing wrong with her memory, clearly, and it was more than a little flattering that she recalled his clothing from that day.
“And there was something about me that you didn’t like?” Obviously, or she wouldn’t have matched him up with her sister. Maybe she’d only thought of him as a friend.
“Oh, no! You were great. Gorgeous and gentlemanly.” The blush that never seemed far from the surface of her skin bloomed again, heightening the blue in her eyes. “I mean, I might have been a little starstruck, which is silly, considering how many celebrities I’ve done taxes for.”
That pleased him even more than her pink-shirt comment, and he wanted to learn more about this selfless woman who’d apparently been a part of his life for a long time. “You’re an accountant, then?”
“Not anymore. I gave up all my clients when...Vanessa died.” She laughed self-consciously. “It’s hard to retrain my brain to no longer say ‘when Antonio and Vanessa died’.”
The mention of his wife sent an unexpected spike of sadness through his gut. “I don’t remember being married to her. Did you think we’d be a good couple? Is that why you introduced us?”
All at once, a troubling sense of disloyalty effectively killed the discovery mode he’d fallen into with Caitlyn. He had no context for his relationship with Vanessa, but she’d been his wife and this woman was his sister-in-law. He shouldn’t be thinking about Caitlyn as anything other than a temporary mother to his children. She’d probably be horrified at the direction of his thoughts.
“Oh. No, I mentioned that she was my sister
