swung toward Miranda.
“Well?” he repeated. “Why did it take you eight years to let me know I’m a father? Or didn’t you want child support until now?”
She flinched, her eyes darkening. “I don’t need or want anything from you, Tyler.”
He suppressed the urge to rant at her. Tyler Winchester didn’t lose control, no matter what the provocation. That was one of the keys to his success. “Then why send me that picture now?”
“I didn’t!”
Even through his anger, he had to recognize the sincerity in her voice. And he couldn’t deny the shock that had been written on her face when she’d first seen him.
“You mean that, don’t you?”
She nodded.
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. Does it really matter? You know.”
“I should have known eight years ago.” His anger spiked again. “Why didn’t you tell me, Miranda? Even if our marriage was a mistake, surely I deserved to know I had fathered a child.”
She crossed her arms, hugging herself. He’d thought, when he first saw her, that she didn’t look any older than she had at eighteen. Now he saw the faint lines around her eyes, the added maturity in the way she stood there, confronting him.
“Well?” He snapped the word, annoyed at himself for the weakness of noticing how she looked.
She spread her hands out. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Tyler. By the time I knew I was pregnant, our marriage was over.”
He’d told himself he barely remembered that one short month. That wasn’t true. He remembered only too well—remembered the furious quarrel with his father over his involvement with a local girl, remembered storming out of the beach house intent on showing the old man that he could manage his own life.
A runaway marriage would do it. He hadn’t found it difficult to persuade Miranda or himself that was their only option. They’d come back from their secret honeymoon to face the music—to tell both their families they were married.
Miranda’s father had been disapproving but ready to accept the inevitable.
Not his. His father had ranted and raged at both of them, his emotions spilling out like bubbling acid. And then he’d had a heart attack. He’d died before the paramedics reached him.
Tyler slammed the door on that memory. He’d better focus on the present. “You were having our baby. I should have been told.”
Anger flared in her heart-shaped face. “You wanted the divorce.”
“I had a right to know,” he repeated stubbornly. He moved toward her a step, as if he could impel an explanation. But this wasn’t the old Miranda, the sweet young woman who’d been so dazzled by love she’d gone along with anything he said.
“What was the point?” She brushed a strand of coppery hair away from her face impatiently. “You were busy taking your father’s place and saving the company. You had a life mapped out that didn’t include a child.”
“And you figured you didn’t need me.” That was what rankled, he realized. She hadn’t needed him then, didn’t seem to need him now.
“I had my family.”
She gestured toward the groupings of family photographs hung against the wallpaper, the movement sending a whiff of her scent toward him. Soap and sunshine, that was how Miranda had always smelled to him. She still did, and he was annoyed that he remembered.
“They thought you shouldn’t tell me?” This branch of the Caldwell clan had never had much money, as he recalled. He’d have expected them to be lining up for child support long before this.
She glanced at him with an odd expression he couldn’t quite pin down.
“They were as opposed to our marriage as your family was, remember? They never held with marrying someone from a different world. My daddy said only grief could come from that.”
“Looks like he was right, doesn’t it?”
Her chin lifted, looking considerably more stubborn than he remembered. “I have Sammy. I don’t consider that a source of grief, no matter what.”
“Sammy.” He didn’t even know his son’s full name. “What’s the rest of it?”
She didn’t look away. “Samuel Tyler Caldwell, like mine.”
It struck him, then, a fist to the stomach. He had a son. Somehow, he had to figure out how to deal with that.
“Didn’t he ask questions about his father?”
She winced. “Of course he asked. Any child would.”
“And did you bother telling him the truth?”
“Sammy knows his father’s name. He knows our marriage ended because we weren’t suited to each other.”
It was what he believed himself, but it annoyed him to hear her say it. “Why does he think I never came around?”
“When he asked, I told him you had to work far away.” For an instant there was a flicker of uncertainty in her face. “Eventually he stopped asking. He gets plenty of masculine attention. My father, my brothers, my cousins—he doesn’t lack male role models, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It hadn’t been, but now that she said it, he knew the sprawling Caldwell clan would take care of its own. But Sammy was his son. He didn’t know what that was going to mean yet, but it had to mean something.
“I’m his father.”
She crossed her arms again, as if she needed something to hang onto. “He doesn’t have to know you were here. You can leave, and we’ll go back to the way things were.”
“I don’t think so, Miranda.”
“Why not? You don’t want to have a son.”
“Maybe not, but I have one. I’m not just going to walk away and pretend it never happened.”
She took a breath, and he seemed to feel her gathering strength around her.
“If you mean that, then I’ll have to tell him you’re here.”
His world shifted again. He had a son. Soon that son would know Tyler was his father.
Chapter Two
Had she ever felt quite this miserable? Miranda sat on the porch swing, staring across the width of the inland waterway at the sunset over the mainland. Maybe, when she was eighteen and discovering that she couldn’t function in Tyler’s world. And that her fairy-tale marriage wouldn’t survive the strain.
At the
