visit her. You can imagine how much grief this has caused these people—to find their lost child after so many years only to lose her forever—” at which point, predictably, Lucy sniffed, coughed ferociously and dabbed at her nose “—and then on top of it, to be denied the chance to see and hold their grandchild. I’m sure you can understand why Susan’s parents are hoping to have the chance to raise their daughter’s little girl.”
“Like a second chance,” Mike said, and there was a suspicious gruffness even in his voice.
“Exactly…” It was a sigh of satisfaction. Eric halfexpected her to add, “I have nothing further, Your Honor.”
He looked defiantly straight at them, then, because he could feel them all watching him. Three pairs of eyes arrayed against him, full of questions and accusations. His mom and dad sitting close together at the table, Lucy with one hand clutching Mike’s and the other clamped across her mouth and her eyes suspiciously bright. And Devon standing, half facing them, with one hand on the back of a chair and her head turned toward Eric, as if she’d just finished addressing a jury. As, of course, she had. And it was obvious to him that he’d already been found guilty.
He had to get out of there, blizzard or no blizzard. He had to find a way to calm his mind, prepare himself for the battle ahead. He could put the little one down in his room—she’d sleep awhile, yet—and go someplace peaceful and quiet.
And he knew, suddenly, just where he could go. The place he’d escaped to so often during the turbulent years of adolescence.
But first, he couldn’t hold back the question. One question. He hurled it at Devon and it shattered the silence like a shovelful of gravel slung against a wall.
“Why’d she run away?”
“What?”
Ah—was it only his imagination, or had Devon suddenly gone still…still as a marble statue? Except, he thought, no statue had ever had hair that vivid.
“You heard me,” he said harshly, staring at her so hard his eyes burned. “If your parents’ house was such a great place to raise a kid, why did Susan run away from it?”
Her eyes shifted downward to the hand that rested on the chair back, for that moment the only thing alive in her frozen face. Then she pulled in a breath, drew herself up, and said stiffly, with none of the previous vibrancy, “My sister was always…a difficult child. She was headstrong, spoiled. Rebellious. I imagine she ran away because she didn’t like my parents’ rules. I’m sure she thought she was being mistreated—”
He couldn’t stop a laugh; it made a sound like blowing sand. “No kidding.” Tucking the little one more securely into the cradle of his arm, he pushed away from the counter. No one said a word when he moved toward the door.
Halfway there, though, he turned. Again, he felt as if he had no choice as he softly said, “Tell me something, Devon. How can you do this? To Emily. After—”
“What?” She’d gone wary and still again, just like before. “After what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He took a breath, then shook his head. No. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t say it, not with his parents—his mom—sitting right there. Instead, he smiled a hard little smile. “Susan used to say she had nobody—you know that? Nobody who cared a damn about her. Nobody in this world, that’s how she put it. That includes you, doesn’t it? You said, you imagine she probably thought she was being mistreated. Don’t you know what was going on in that house? Where were you when your sister needed you?”
It was cruel, and he knew it. It wasn’t like him; he knew that, too. He felt the weight of his mother’s reproachful glare and fortified himself against it, bracing himself to meet instead that other pair of eyes…green-fire eyes.
There was no flinching this time; she lifted her chin and those eyes stared back into his. “I was away—in law school—when Susan left. I’d have been there for her, if I’d known—”
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that,” Eric said softly. He turned and left them there.
His going left a void that wasn’t quite silence. To Devon it felt like a sort of hum, a current of tension and distress that was almost audible.
She heard Lucy exclaim, “I don’t know what’s happened to him, I swear,” and probably would have gone after her son then and there if her husband hadn’t tightened his hand on hers and held her where she was—a tiny, private gesture. She also saw the tight, shiny look of worry on Lucy’s face, the tense and skittery way she sat, like a little brown bird perched on a fence, half a heartbeat away from flight.
“How ’bout some of that coffee you made? Sure smells good.” Mike’s gaze, thoughtfully appraising, rested for a long moment on Devon, and she felt a curious tickle of unease. She couldn’t have explained why; his eyes held only kindness and compassion.
They’ve seen a lot, those eyes. They understand too much.
“I’ll get it,” said Devon, and was surprised when her voice came out sounding as rusty as Lucy’s. “How do you take it?”
“Black is fine.”
“Lucy?”
“What? Oh—yes…black for me, too.”
Devon busied herself with the cups, and it didn’t seem strange to her that she, the guest, was serving coffee to her host and hostess. She was bemused and dismayed, though, to find that she felt shaky and nervous doing it.
I’m probably just hungry, she told herself as she bit savagely into cold leathery toast.
Chewing stolidly, she thought about the scene that had just played itself out in the predawn quiet of a farmhouse kitchen…her first meeting with the Opposition. Her thoughts weren’t happy ones. She hadn’t handled it well. She’d allowed herself to be blindsided, and that never happened. When she thought about why it had happened, all she could come up with was an appalling list of mistakes. Her mistakes. Devon hadn’t gotten to be where she was—that is, one of the most respected and feared young attorneys in Los Angeles—by making mistakes.
Mistake number one, she’d failed to prepare herself. So far, the information she’d been able to assemble on Eric Lanagan was proving to be woefully inadequate. Most of what she knew was in the form of statistics gleaned from Emily’s birth certificate: age, race, state of birth. From that, with the help of her firm’s private investigators and a judge’s court order, she’d been able to put a trace on his credit cards. Finding him, tracking him down—that had been the easy part. Finding out who he was—that was where she’d slipped up.
Mistake number two, she’d fallen victim to her own preconceived notion of what kind of person Eric Lanagan was.
Which had led directly to Mistake number three, seriously underestimating her opponent.
And why not? she furiously asked herself. Twenty-eight-year-old man with no employer of record befriends nineteen-year-old homeless woman and gets her pregnant—that sure said Punk-Sleazebag-Loser loud and clear to her! Didn’t it?
She’d come prepared to despise Eric Lanagan and to fight him tooth and nail on behalf of her parents for custody of her sister’s child. But she hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected him to have parents who would unhesitatingly
