Finally, they were both done with their half of the chores and both looked disheveled, with mussed hair and pink cheeks. Shay caught sight of their dual reflections in the hall mirror. Their eyes met in the glass.
“Showers,” they said together.
But before they could repair to separate bathrooms, the doorbell rang.
Really, Shay thought, as her stomach and her heart jumped, I shouldn’t have made that crack about the tango. Her inner organs seemed to be doing the dance themselves.
London stared at an unmoving Shay, the panic in her eyes warring with the blank expression she was trying to keep on her face. “Aren’t you going to answer the door?” she whispered.
“Of course.” Shay smoothed her palms over her hair, then over the sides of her jeans. As she stepped toward the entry, she licked her dry lips. “It might not even be him,” she reminded the girl.
As a precautionary measure, she peeped through one of the porthole-styled windows that flanked the front door. Her whole body froze.
“Well?” London said.
Shay couldn’t make a sound. How had he found her? Why was he here?
It was Jay on the front step, his attention focused on the door.
Gladness, as bright as sunlight and as buoyant as a pop song, poured through her. He’d come after her! The happy feeling was accompanied by the same kind of relief one felt upon waking from a bad dream to discover the test hadn’t been failed or the tumble from the steps had been averted.
She wasn’t the only one who wanted more time together.
Could that be true? Did she really want to see him again? It didn’t seem right to yearn for someone after a mere handful of hours and a one-night stand.
But she remembered his guiding touch as he directed her into her chair at the restaurant table, a gentleman’s move that had nearly brought her to her knees. Then there was the way his calloused hands had brushed her naked shoulders as he’d removed her dress in the dark bedroom. She remembered his golden eyes laughing at her in the candlelight and the tickle of his thick lashes as they fluttered against her skin while he kissed her throat when they lay together on the bed.
“Aren’t you going to let him in?” London demanded.
She already had, Shay thought, her mind whirling. She’d let him into her body precisely because she’d never expected to set eyes on him again—and yet she was thrilled to find him here.
London muttered something, then brushed past Shay to open the door herself. She flung it wide, and Shay’s heart jolted again, every instinct wanting to shout out: go slow! Be careful! Protect yourself!
Then there was no barrier between the three of them. Shay was still formulating the right question to ask the man who was staring at both her and the teen. Which came first? Was it Why did you track me down? or What do you want from me?
Then, as his gaze shifted between her and her charge, once, twice, a horrible, dreadful thought struck.
No. No, it couldn’t be.
It was London who spoke Shay’s fear. “Well, well, well,” she said, her flat voice expressing neither happiness nor hostility. “You must be dear old dad.”
FOR A MOMENT, Jace thought he’d fallen, as he had weeks before in Qatar, and taken another blow to the head. The last time he’d been knocked out, but though he was surely still conscious, his world was rocked all the same. That...that inky-haired, more than half-grown human being was his daughter?
The last time he’d seen her she’d been a chubby-cheeked, irrepressible child, who wore pigtails and shirts with cartoon characters on them. In the intervening years he’d pictured the same, ribbons and Roadrunner, only taller. Never had he expected to find a teen wearing...wearing whatever you’d call that dark garb.
And just as unbelievable...
Birthday Girl.
Birthday Girl! She was standing behind the teenager, looking stunned. She reached out a hand and placed it on the girl’s shoulder. To steady which one of them?
“You’re...” the woman began.
“Jason Jennings. Jace.” He cut his gaze to the teen. “Her father.”
There must have been some question in his voice, because Birthday Girl nodded. “Yes. Right. And this is Om—”
“London,” the youngster interrupted. The black around her eyes and the heavy coating of the same color on her lashes was startling.
“I know your name,” he said. His ex-wife’s selection, of course, chosen after the city she’d run to upon leaving him when she was four months pregnant. Jace, tied financially and morally to the sick old man who’d given him a leg up and his very first job, had remained in the States, frustrated and confused and just beginning to realize that the woman he’d married might have never expected them to grow old together.
He looked at the auburn-haired female behind his daughter and felt his head spin again. It really was the woman from last night. Shit. From the first, he’d known regret would be the outcome of their encounter. Still, he had to carry on. “May I come in?” he asked, wincing at the sharp edge to his voice.
The two females stepped back.
“Of course,” Birthday Girl said—no, he recalled her real name now. Shay Walker. Or S. Walker, as she’d signed the succession of emails he’d finally managed to read last week when his head issues had cleared up at last.
At first he’d thought her talk of tango lessons and celebrity magazines was something his mind was misinterpreting. A few emails later, he’d realized she was either putting him on or was a terrible mentor for his kid.
It had been only one more reason to seethe at the delays—caused by injury, crappy means of communication and his isolated location—that had postponed his return. But he was here now, he told himself, and it was time to implement the simple plan he’d conceived when he’d learned of his daughter’s situation: a summer of getting to know her before school started in September.
He crossed over the threshold, then glanced around the massive foyer, with its thirty-foot ceiling. “Good God,” he said, staring up at the walls of unrelieved concrete. The staircase was more gray cement, with a tubular metal banister painted a janitorial blue. “Is this place butt ugly, or what?”
Both London and Birthday Girl stared at him like he’d sprouted another head. He lifted an eyebrow. “Problem?”
Birth— Shay met the eyes of his daughter then looked back at him. “Um, this is your house.”
“Yeah, but I never saw it before in my life. I needed something in So-Cal, somewhere quiet, I thought, and my man Leonard Case found it. I got it for a song.”
“Which must have been ‘Anchors Aweigh,’” Shay
