Nathan's Child Read online

  Embarrassed at his sudden fierce arousal, he had turned away toward the dresser. “I’ll get ’em,” he’d said hoarsely.

  But instead of waiting outside his room, she came in. She came to stand beside him—so close that he could see goose bumps on her arms. “You’re cold,” he’d said. “We’ve got to warm you up.”

  He hadn’t meant to reach for her. He hadn’t meant to make love with her. But the next thing he knew she’d been in his arms.

  If he shut his eyes now, Nathan could still remember the tremble of her body against his, could taste her cool flesh as his lips had touched it.

  Right here. Right in this room.

  Nathan jerked back to the present, cursing the desire that flooded his veins, hating the need that seeing her again this afternoon had aroused!

  He grabbed his gear and stamped out of the bedroom. He could sleep in any room. He didn’t have to stay in there where the memories would haunt him every second.

  But the room next to his had been Dominic’s. And Carin had stayed in Rhys’s. He stood there, clutching his duffel, torn, frustrated, angry—

  And heard a knock on the kitchen door.

  He clattered down the stairs, expecting Maurice, who was going to help him build a dark room. “Hey, there,” he said, glad for the distraction, as he jerked open the door.

  But it wasn’t Maurice.

  It was a girl.

  “Hello,” she said politely. “I’m Lacey. You must be my father.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  EVER SINCE DOMINIC had revealed her existence, Nathan had envisioned the day he would meet his daughter, had tried to imagine what he would say to her. And always—every time—their meeting had been at a time and place of his choosing.

  He’d wanted it to be perfect, knowing full well that, having missed her first twelve years, it never would be.

  Still, he’d made an effort.

  He’d cleared the decks, finished his assignments, met his commitments. Whenever his agent, Gaby, rang him with new projects, new ideas, new shows, new demands, he turned them down. He wanted nothing on his schedule now but Lacey—and her mother.

  He was prepared. Or so he’d thought.

  He didn’t feel prepared now.

  He felt stunned, faced with this girl who wore a pair of white shorts and a fluorescent lime-green T-shirt with the Statue of Liberty and the words New York Babe on it. She had a backpack on her back and sandals on her feet and looked like a hundred preteen girls.

  But more than that, she looked like him.

  Nathan tried to think of something profound to say or at least something sensible. Nothing came to mind. He had spent much of his adult life in precarious positions—hanging off cliffs, kayaking down white-water rapids, hanging out with polar bears, and tracking penguins in Tierra del Fuego—but none had seemed more precarious than this one.

  Now he realized that Lacey was waiting—staring at him, shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, her hand still stuck out in midair.

  Awkwardly Nathan shook it and dredged up a faint grin. “I guess I must be,” he said. Must be your father.

  He felt short of breath. Dazed. Positively blown away. His voice sounded rusty even to his own ears. He stood there, holding her hand—his daughter’s hand!—learning the feel of it. Her fingers were warm and slender, delicate almost. But there were calluses on her palm. He felt them against his own rough fingers.

  From fishing? he wondered. He didn’t have a clue. He knew nothing about her. Nothing at all.

  She was still looking at him expectantly, and he realized the next move was up to him. “Won’t you…come in?”

  He felt absurd, inviting his twelve-year-old daughter into his home as if she was a stranger. Fortunately, Lacey didn’t seem to see the absurdity of it. She just marched past him into the room, then looked around with interest.

  Nathan wondered if she’d ever been in the house before.

  He’d always loved it, had thought it was the best place on earth. He had been five when they’d first come to Pelican Cay, and when they’d flown in that first day, he’d thought their little seaplane was landing in paradise. It turned out he wasn’t far wrong. Pelican Cay in those days had sand and surf and sun and no telephones to take his father away on business for a week or more at a time.

  He and his brothers had spent their happiest hours here. They used to say that it would be the best thing on earth to spend every day on Pelican Cay.

  Lacey had. At least he supposed she had.

  “Would you…like something to drink?” he asked her. “A soda?” She wouldn’t think he was offering her a beer, would she?

  “Yes, please.” Was she always this polite? Was she always this self-possessed?

  He started toward the kitchen, nodding for her to follow. “Is your…I mean, where is your…mother?” Somehow he was sure her visit had not been sanctioned by her mother.

  “She teaches a painting class on Mondays,” Lacey said. She slipped off her backpack, set it on the counter in the middle of the kitchen. Then she perched on a stool as Nathan opened the refrigerator.

  “Pineapple, sea grape or cola?”

  “Pineapple, please. It’s my favorite.”

  “Mine, too.” Nathan snagged the cans, straightened up and turned around. Their gazes met. And as he popped the tops and handed her the can, they both grinned, sharing the moment and the appreciation of pineapple soda. The knot of apprehension that had been coiled deep and tight inside Nathan ever since he’d discovered he had a daughter suddenly eased.

  It reminded him of the feeling he got when he was just beginning fieldwork on a project. The days before he was actually there drove him crazy. Once he was involved, he experienced a welcome feeling of relief, a sense of rightness. Like this.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said, and meant it.

  “I’m glad you came,” Lacey countered. “I’ve been needing a father for quite a while.”

  Nathan’s brows rose. “You have?”

  “It’s difficult to be a one-parent child,” Lacey explained. “I don’t mean that my mother is a bad mother. She’s not. Not at all! She’s terrific. And mostly she manages very well. But there are, I think,” she said consideringly, “some things fathers are better at.”

  “Are there?” Nathan was feeling stunned again.

  “Mmm. Cutting bait.”

  He stared at her blankly.

  “Fishing.” She gave him a despairing look. “You do know how to fish?”

  “Of course I know how to fish,” Nathan said, affronted. “I was, um, thinking of something else.” As in fish or… “Can’t your mother cut bait yet?”

  He grinned, remembering Carin’s squeamishness when he’d taken her fishing so she would be able to share one of Dominic’s pleasures.

  “She can. She doesn’t like to. She doesn’t like to fish.”

  “And you do.” It wasn’t a question. He could see the sparkle in her eyes.

  “But I always have to go with Lorenzo and his dad, and then Lorenzo always catches the biggest fish.”

  “Because his dad cuts the bait?”

  “No. Because he gets to go with his dad lots more than I do. And we always go where Thomas thinks the fish are biting, and they always are—for Lorenzo.”

  “I see.” Well, sort of, he did. He gathered it had to do with the amount of time Thomas spent with his son—time that Nathan hadn’t spent with his daughter. But apparently she wasn’t just going to spell it out. Maybe it was the difference between boys and girls.

  “Do you know any good fishing places?”

  Nathan rubbed a hand against the back of his neck. “I could probably find some.” He hoped.

  “Good.” Lacey took a swallow of her soda. “Lorenzo could come with us, couldn’t he?”

  “Sure.”

  “I have your books.”

  Nathan blinked, surprised by the change of topic, but even more so by what she’d changed it to. “You do?”

  Lac
ey nodded. “My mother got them for me.”

  “Why?” He could be blunt, too, Nathan decided.

  “When I was little I asked about you, and Mom told me you were a photographer. I asked if she had any pictures you took, and she said no. I asked if she could find some. So on my birthday when I was eight, she gave me one of your books. Now I have all of them. They’re great.”

  Nathan didn’t know whether to be flattered or furious. Certainly he was flattered that Lacey approved of his work. But he was also furious that Carin had decided that having his books was all of him that Lacey would need.

  “But I like Zeno the best,” Lacey said. “Did you live with him?”

  Zeno was a wolf. He had been, for want of a better word, the hero of Nathan’s last book and in some cases, it seemed, his alter ego, as well. Zeno’s “lone wolf” status had been similar to Nathan’s own.

  “I didn’t live with him,” he said. “But I spent a lot of time watching him, observing, studying, trying to get to know him.”

  Lacey bobbed her head. “You did. You knew him. He was my favorite.”

  “Mine, too.” The book itself was called Solo and dealt with several years in the life of one young lone wolf. The project had grown incidentally out of an earlier book Nathan had done on Northern wildlife. While there he’d come across a small wolf pack with several young pups. One of them, a young male, often wrestled and played with the others, but seemed more inclined to go off scouting around on his own. Intrigued, Nathan had shot a lot of photos of him.

  A year later, when a magazine assignment had taken him back to the same area, he had, coincidentally, happened across the wolves again. The young loner had been an adolescent then, and Nathan had shot more rolls of film of the wolf by himself and interacting with the pack.

  After that encounter he’d looked for more assignments in the area, always trying to track down the wolf, who by this time he’d begun to think of as Zeno.

  Two years ago he’d simply indulged his desire to learn more by taking the better part of a year to live in the woods up there and study Zeno’s comings and goings.

  Solo had been published this past spring, the story in text and pictures of one young lone wolf. It had garnered considerable critical praise.

  It had also fueled a ridiculous amount of comparison between Nathan Wolfe’s own life as a “lone wolf” photographer. He and Zeno were somehow connected in the public’s perception.

  More than one magazine article had asked, Who would be the woman to settle him down? And it wasn’t Zeno they’d been talking about.

  By that time, though, Nathan had learned of Lacey’s existence, and the question of which woman would “settle him down” had already, to his mind, been decided.

  It was just a matter of coming to terms with her—and tying up all the loose ends first.

  “Are you going to go back and see Zeno again?” Lacey asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  He had planned to. He’d intended to go there again this summer after he’d finished his other jobs. Gaby had been pushing him to do so. But he’d made those plans last summer, before he’d learned about Lacey. For the moment at least, Zeno was going to have to wait.

  “I wish you would,” Lacey said. “We gotta know what happens to him.”

  “Maybe,” Nathan said. “But I’ve got work to do now here.”

  “You’re going to shoot here?”

  He shook his head. “I’m writing here. I’ve done the shooting. Now I have to organize the photos for a book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Sea turtles.”

  “Oh.” Lacey’s expression said she didn’t think that would be nearly as intriguing as another book on wolves.

  “I got to dive with some,” Nathan told her.

  “Do you know how to scuba dive? I want to learn to scuba dive. Mom says maybe when I’m older, but it’s expensive. Hugh said he’d teach me, but she thinks it would be presuming.” Lacey wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think Hugh would mind. But as long as you’re here…”

  “Who’s Hugh?”

  Lacey giggled. “Hugh the hunk. That’s what Mom and Florence call him.” Lacey giggled.

  “Who’s Florence?” Hugh’s wife, Nathan hoped.

  “Lorenzo’s mother.”

  Not Hugh’s wife, then. “So what does this Hugh do, when he isn’t scuba diving?” What sort of “hunk” was Carin running around with?

  “He runs the charter service. He’s got a seaplane and a helicopter and three boats. Last summer when Lorenzo had to have his appendix out, Hugh flew him to the hospital in Nassau. When he came home, Hugh took me along to pick him up. It was way cool. Can you fly a helicopter?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “That’s too bad.” Because maybe she was angling to learn how to fly a helicopter, too? “I used to think maybe he’d be my dad,” Lacey said.

  Nathan scowled. “Why?”

  “Because he likes Mom. An’ Mom likes him.”

  And he was a hunk.

  “And now she doesn’t?” Nathan hadn’t even thought that Carin might have a boyfriend. Dominic had only known that she didn’t have a husband.

  “’Course she likes him. I told you, he’s nice.”

  “But he’s not going to be your dad?”

  Lacey gave a long-suffering sigh. “You’re my dad,” she explained.

  “Oh. Right. Of course.”

  Which was true but wasn’t the answer to his question: Does your mother plan on marrying Hugh the hunk? He couldn’t bring himself to ask that.

  “Do you have your book about Zeno here?” Lacey finished her soda, hopped off the stool, carried the can to the sink and rinsed it out. “If you do I can tell you my favorite picture. And you can tell me about when you took it.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it upstairs.” He moved to get it. Like a shadow, Lacey came right after him.

  “I like this house,” she said, looking around his bedroom with interest. “It’s big. Lots bigger than our house.”

  “Yeah, well, there were three of us boys and my folks.” He opened the duffel on the floor and began pulling clothes out. There was a copy of each of his books at the bottom. He’d brought them for Lacey, never thinking Carin would already have given them to her.

  “I’ve always wanted brothers and sisters.” Lacey perched on the edge of the bed and looked hopefully up at him.

  “Yeah, well, um…brothers are kind of a pain in the neck.”

  She gave a little bounce. “Uncle Dominic is really nice. He came to the shop to see my mom. And then he and Aunt Sierra were here before Christmas. And he and Grandpa came down a couple of months ago.”

  Grandpa?

  “Which Grandpa?” Nathan asked warily.

  “The only one I’ve ever met,” Lacey said. “Grandpa Doug.”

  His father had been here? And hadn’t even bothered to mention it?

  “Grandpa brought me a camera. Want to see it?”

  “A camera? Why’d he bring you a camera?” Nathan demanded.

  “Because he thought it would be good for me to understand your business,” Lacey told him.

  Yeah, Nathan thought grimly, that sounded like the old man. Grandkids and business were the two most significant things in Douglas Wolfe’s life. Nathan was almost surprised he hadn’t given Lacey a share of the company, and he said so.

  “He wanted to,” Lacey said. “My mom said no.”

  Nathan blinked. That didn’t sound like the Carin he remembered. The Carin he remembered wouldn’t have said boo to a goose. But then he recalled that she’d taken her life into her own hands the day she’d jilted his brother. So she’d obviously made some changes.

  And so had his father if Douglas was taking no for an answer.

  “She said if he wanted to visit, he could visit, but he couldn’t buy his way into our lives.”

  Nathan choked back a laugh, imagining his father’s reaction to that. Oddly, he felt both proud of Carin fo
r her stance and indignant on his father’s behalf. Because he didn’t know what to say, he dug through the books in his duffel until he found Solo.

  “Great.” Lacey took it from him and flipped through it confidently, clearly looking for a particular picture. “This one.” She laid the book open flat on the bed so they could both look at it.

  It was a photo he remembered well. He had taken it across a clearing with a telephoto lens. In the clearing itself, there were three half-grown wolf cubs wrestling with each other. It had been fun-and-games time for them. And that was all most people ever saw, and they cooed and oohed over the frolicking pups.

  But now Lacey’s finger unerringly found Zeno watching his littermates from behind the brush on the far side of the clearing. He stood silent. Alone. Apart.

  “Did you realize,” she asked Nathan, “when you took the photo, that he was there?”

  “Not at first,” he admitted. “I was caught, like anyone would be, at the sight of the other pups. But as I took shot after shot, I really started to look, to focus. And then I saw him there.”

  “All by himself.” Lacey’s finger brushed over the Zeno on the page. “Do you think he was lonely? Do you think he wanted to play, too?”

  “Maybe sometimes he did. Sometimes, though, I think he was happier on his own.”

  “Me, too,” Lacey said. “I mean, I’m like that, too.” She slanted a glance up at him from beneath a fall of long dark hair. “Are you?”

  Nathan considered that, then nodded. “Yeah, I am.”

  Lacey nodded. She ran her tongue over her lips. “Then…do you think you’ll mind being part of us?”

  The question caught him off guard.

  But before he could even hazard an answer, she went on. “Because I was thinking you might wish you didn’t know…about me.”

  “No,” Nathan said flatly. He sat down on the bed beside her and looked straight into his daughter’s big blue eyes. “Don’t ever think that,” he said firmly. “Not for a minute. I’m glad I know about you.”

  Their gazes locked. Seconds ticked by. It was like being weighed and measured, judged for his intentions. And Nathan knew, however long it took, he had to hold her gaze.