The Reluctant Father Read online

  Maybe his mother would have loved him if she’d lived, although his uncle had described her as a pretty, self-centered woman who simply liked men too much.

  So it had come as a shock to find out what shy young Meredith had felt for him. It didn’t help to remember how he’d cut her to pieces in public and private. Over the years since she’d left for Texas in the middle of the night on a bus, without a goodbye to anyone, he’d agonized over what he’d done to her. Twice, he’d almost gone to see her when her name started cropping up on book covers. But the past was best left in the past, he’d decided finally. And he had nothing to give her, anyway. Nina had destroyed that part of him that was capable of trust. He had no more to give—to anyone.

  He dragged his thoughts away from the past and looked at the child, who was staring plaintively and a little apprehensively at the door, because the lawyer had just smiled and was now making his way out, patent relief written all over his thin features. Sarah sat very still on the edge of a blue wing chair, biting her lower lip, her eyes wide and frightened, although she tried to hide her fear from the cold, mean-looking man they said was her father.

  Blake sat down across from her in his own big red leather armchair, aware that he looked more like a desperado in his jeans and worn chambray shirt than a man of means. He’d been out in the pasture helping brand cattle, just for the hell of it. At least when he was working with his hands on the small ranch where he ran purebred Hereford cattle, he could let his mind go. It beat the hell out of the trying board meeting he’d had to endure at his company headquarters in Oklahoma City that morning.

  “So you’re Sarah,” he said. Children made him uncomfortable, and he didn’t know how he was going to cope with this one. But she had his eyes and he couldn’t let her go to strangers. Not if there was one chance in a million that she really was his daughter.

  Sarah lifted her eyes to his, then glanced away, shifting restlessly. The lawyer had said she was almost four, but she seemed amazingly mature. She behaved as if she’d never known the company of other children. It was possible that she hadn’t. He couldn’t picture Nina entertaining children. It was totally out of character, but he hadn’t realized that when he’d lost his head and married her. Funny how easy it was to imagine Meredith Calhoun with a lapful of little girls, laughing and playing with them, picking daisies in the meadow….

  He had to stop thinking about Meredith, he told himself firmly. He didn’t want her, even if there was a chance in hell that she’d ever come back to Jack’s Corner, Oklahoma. And he knew without a doubt that she certainly didn’t want him.

  “I don’t like you,” Sarah said after a minute. She shifted in the chair and glanced around her. “I don’t want to live here.” She glared at Blake.

  He glared back. “Well, I’m not crazy about the idea, either, but it looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

  Her lower lip jutted, and for an instant she looked just like him. “I’ll bet you don’t even have a cat.”

  “God forbid,” he grumbled. “I hate cats.”

  She sighed and looked at her scuffed shoes with something like resignation and a patience far beyond her years. She appeared tired and worn. “My mommy isn’t coming back.” She pulled at her dress. “She didn’t like me. You don’t like me, either,” she said, lifting her chin. “I don’t care. You’re not really my daddy.”

  “I must be.” He sighed heavily. “God knows, you look enough like me.”

  “You’re ugly.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “You’re no petunia yourself, sprout,” he returned.

  “The ugly duckling turns into a swan,” she told him with a faraway look in her eyes.

  She twirled her hands in her dress. He noticed then, for the first time, that it was old. The lace was stained and the dress was rumpled. He frowned.

  “Where have you been staying?” he asked her.

  “Mommy left me with Daddy Brad, but he had to go out a lot, so Mrs. Smathers took care of me.” She looked up, and the expression in her green eyes was old for a little girl’s. “Mrs. Smathers says that children are horrible,” she said dramatically, “and that they belong in cages. I cried when Mommy left, and she locked me up and said she’d leave me there if I didn’t hush.” Her lower lip trembled, but she didn’t cry. “I got out, too, and ran away.” She shrugged. “But nobody came to find me, so I went home. Mrs. Smathers was real mad, but Daddy Brad didn’t care. He said I wasn’t his real child and it didn’t matter if I ran away.”

  Blake could imagine that “Daddy Brad” was upset to find that the child he’d accepted as his own was somebody else’s, but taking it out on the child seemed pretty callous.

  He leaned back in his chair, wondering what in hell he was going to do with his short houseguest. He didn’t know anything about kids. He wasn’t sure he even liked them. And this one already looked like a handful. She was outspoken and belligerent and not much to look at. He could see trouble ahead.

  Mrs. Jackson came into the room to see if Blake wanted anything, and stopped dead. She was fifty-five, a spinster, graying and thin and faintly intimidating to people who didn’t know her. She was used to a bachelor household, and the sight of a child sitting across from her boss was vaguely unnerving.

  “Who’s that?” she asked, without dressing up the question.

  Sarah looked at her and sighed, as if saying, oh, no, here’s another sour one. Blake almost laughed out loud at the expression on the child’s face.

  “This is Amie Jackson, Sarah,” Blake said, introducing them. “Mrs. Jackson, Sarah Jane is my daughter.”

  Mrs. Jackson didn’t faint, but she did go a shade redder. “Yes, sir, that’s hard to miss,” she said, comparing the small, composed child’s face with its older male counterpart. “Her mother isn’t here?” she added, staring around as if she expected Nina to materialize.

  “Nina is dead,” Blake said without any particular feeling. Nina had knocked the finer feelings out of him years ago. His own foolish blindness to her real nature had helped her in the task.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Mrs. Jackson rubbed her apron between her thin hands for something to do. “Would she like some milk and cookies?” she asked hesitantly.

  “That might be nice. Sarah?” Blake asked more curtly than he’d meant.

  Sarah shifted and stared at the carpet. “I’d get crumbs on the floor.” She shook her head. “Mrs. Smathers says kids should eat off the kitchen floor ’cause they’re messy.”

  Mrs. Jackson looked uncomfortable, and Blake sighed heavily. “You can get crumbs on the floor. Nobody’s going to yell at you.”

  Sarah glanced up hesitantly.

  “I don’t mind cleaning up crumbs,” Mrs. Jackson said testily. “Do you want cookies?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The older woman nodded curtly and went to get some.

  “Nobody smiles here,” Sarah murmured. “It’s just like home.”

  Blake felt a twinge of regret for the child, who seemed to have been stuck away in the housekeeper’s corner with no thought for her well-being. And not just since her stepfather had found out that she was Blake’s child, apparently.

  His eyes narrowed and he asked the question that was consuming him. “Didn’t your mother stay with you?”

  “Mommy was busy,” Sarah said. “She said I had to stay with Mrs. Smathers and do what she said.”

  “Wasn’t she home from time to time?”

  “She and my daddy—” she faltered and grimaced “—my other daddy yelled at each other mostly. Then she went away and he went away, too.”

  This was getting them nowhere. He stood and began to pace, his hands in his pockets, his face stormy and hard.

  Sarah watched him covertly. “You sure are big,” she murmured.

  He stopped, glancing down at her curiously. “You sure are little,” he returned.

  “I’ll grow,” Sarah promised. “Do you have a horse?”

  “Several.”

  She brighte
ned. “I can ride a horse!”

  “Not on my ranch, you can’t.”

  Her green eyes flashed fire. “I can so if I want to. I can ride any horse!”

  He knelt in front of her very slowly, and his green eyes met hers levelly and without blinking. “No,” he said firmly. “You’ll do what you’re told, and you won’t talk back. This is my place, and I make the rules. Got it?”

  She hesitated, but only for a minute. “Okay,” she said sulkily.

  He touched the tip of her pert nose. “And no sulking. I don’t know how this is going to work out,” he added curtly. “Hell, I don’t know anything about kids!”

  “Hell is where you go when you’re bad,” Sarah replied matter-of-factly. “My mommy’s friend used to talk about it all the time, and about damns and sons of—”

  “Sarah!” Blake burst out, shocked that a child her age should be so familiar with bad words.

  “Do you have any cows?” she added, easily diverted.

  “A few,” he muttered. “Which one of your mummy’s friends used language like that around you?”

  “Just Trudy,” she said, wide-eyed.

  Blake whistled through his teeth and turned just as Mrs. Jackson came in with a tray of milk and cookies for Sarah and coffee for Blake.

  “I like coffee,” Sarah said. “My mommy let me drink it when she had hers in bed and she wasn’t awake good.”

  “I’ll bet,” Blake said, “but you aren’t drinking it here. Coffee isn’t good for kids.”

  “I can have coffee if I want to,” Sarah returned belligerently.

  Blake looked at Mrs. Jackson, who was more or less frozen in place, staring at the little girl as she grabbed four cookies and proceeded to stuff them into her mouth as if she hadn’t eaten in days.

  “You quit, or even try to quit,” Blake told the housekeeper, who’d looked after his uncle before him, “and so help me God, I’ll track you all the way to Alaska and drag you back here by one foot.”

  “Me, quit? Just when things are getting interesting?” Mrs. Jackson lifted her chin. “God forbid.”

  “Sarah, when was the last time you ate?” Blake inquired, watching her grab another handful of cookies.

  “I had supper,” she said, “and then we came here.”

  “You haven’t had breakfast?” he burst out. “Or lunch?”

  She shook her head. “These cookies are good!”

  “If you haven’t eaten for almost a day, I imagine so.” He sighed. “You’d better make us an early dinner tonight,” Blake told Mrs. Jackson. “She’ll eat herself sick on cookies if we’re not careful.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll go and make up the guest room for her,” she said. “But what about clothes? Does she have a suitcase?”

  “No, that lawyer didn’t bring anything. Let her sleep in her slip tonight. Tomorrow,” he added, “you can take her into town to do some shopping.”

  “Me?” Mrs. Jackson looked horrified.

  “Somebody has to be sacrificed,” he told her pithily. “And I’m the boss.”

  Mrs. Jackson’s lips formed a thin line. “I don’t know beans about little girls’ clothes!”

  “Well, take her to Mrs. Donaldson’s shop,” he muttered. “That’s where King Roper and Elissa take their little girl to be outfitted. I heard King groan about the prices, but that won’t bother us any more than it bothers them.”

  “Yes, sir.” She turned to leave.

  “By the way, where’s the weekly paper?” he asked, because it always came on Thursday morning. “I wanted to see if our legal ad got in.”

  Mrs. Jackson shifted uncomfortably and grimaced. “Well, I didn’t want to upset you…”

  His eyebrows arched. “How could the weekly paper possibly upset me? Get it!”

  “All right. If you’re sure that’s what you want.” She reached into the drawer of one of the end tables and pulled it out. “There you go, boss. And I’ll leave before the explosion, if you don’t mind.”

  She exited, and Sarah took two more cookies while Blake stared down at the paper’s front page at a face that had haunted him.

  “Author Meredith Calhoun to autograph at Baker’s Book Nook,” read the headline, and underneath it was a recent picture of Meredith.

  His eyes searched over it in shock. The plain, skinny woman he’d hurt bore no resemblance to this peacock. Her brown hair was pulled back from her face into an elegant chignon. Her gray eyes were serene in a high-cheekboned face that could have graced the cover of a magazine, and her makeup enhanced the raw material that had always been there. She was wearing a pale suit coat with a pastel blouse, and she looked lovely. More than lovely. She looked soft and warm and totally untouched at the age of twenty-five, which she had to be now.

  Blake put the paper down after scanning what he already knew about her skyrocketing career and her latest book, Choices, about a man and a woman trying to manage careers, marriage and parenthood all at once. He’d read it, as he secretly read all Meredith’s books, looking for traces of the past. Maybe even for a cessation of hostilities. But her feelings for him were buried and there was never a single trait he could recognize in her people that reminded him of himself. It was as if she sensed that he might look at them and had hidden anything that would give her inner feelings away.

  Sarah Jane was standing beside him without his knowing it. She looked at the picture in the paper. “That’s a pretty lady,” Sarah said. She leaned forward and picked out a word in the column below the photograph. “B…o… o…k. Book,” she said proudly.

  “So it is.” He pointed to the name. “How about that?”

  “M…e…r…Merry Christmas,” she said.

  He smiled faintly. “Meredith,” he corrected. “That’s her name. She’s a writer.”

  “I had a book about the three bears,” Sarah told him. “Did she write that?”

  “No. She writes books for big girls. Finish your cookies and you can watch television.”

  “I like to watch Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street,” she said.

  He frowned. “What?”

  “They come on television.”

  “Oh. Well, help yourself.”

  He moved out of the room, ignoring the coffee. Which was sad, because Sarah Jane discovered it in the big silver pot and proceeded to help herself to the now cool liquid while he was on the telephone in the hall. Her cry caused him to drop the receiver in mid-sentence.

  She was drenched in coffee and screaming her head off. She wasn’t the only wet thing, either. The carpet and part of the sofa were saturated and the tray was an inch deep with black liquid.

  “I told you to stay out of the coffee, didn’t I?” Blake said as he knelt to see if she had been burned. Which, thank God, she hadn’t; she was more frightened than hurt.

  “I wanted some,” she murmured tearfully. “I ruined my pretty dress.”

  “That isn’t all that’s going to get ruined, either,” he said ominously, and abruptly tugged her over his knee and gave her bottom a slap. “When I say no, I mean no. Do you understand me, Sarah Jane Donavan?” he asked firmly.

  She was too surprised to cry anymore. She stared at him warily. “Is that my name now?”

  “It’s always been your name,” he replied. “You’re a Donavan. This is your home.”

  “I like coffee,” she said hesitantly.

  “And I said you weren’t to drink it,” he reminded her.

  She took a deep breath. “Okay.” She picked up the coffeepot, only to have it taken from her and put on the table. “I can clean it up,” she said. “Mommy always made me clean up my mess.”

  “This is more than you can cope with, sprout. And God only knows what we’re going to put on you while those things are washed.”

  Mrs. Jackson came in and put both hands to her mouth. “Saints alive!”

  “Towels, quick,” Blake said.

  She went to get them, muttering all the way.

  Minutes later the mess was gone, Sarah Jane was bundled up in
a makeshift towel dress and her clothes were being washed and dried. Blake went into his study and locked the door, shamelessly leaving Mrs. Jackson to cope with Sarah while he had a few minutes’ peace. He had a feeling that it was going to be more and more difficult to find any quiet place in his life from now on.

  He wasn’t sure he was going to like being a father. It was a whole new kind of responsibility, and his daughter seemed to have inherited his strength of will and stubbornness. She was going to be a handful. Mrs. Jackson knew no more about kids than he did, and that wasn’t going to help, either. But he didn’t feel right about sending Sarah off to a boarding school. He knew what it was like to be alone and unwanted and not too physically appealing. He felt a kind of kinship with this child, and he was reluctant to push her out of his life. On the other hand, how in hell was he going to live with her?

  But over and above that problem was the newest one. Meredith Calhoun was coming to Jack’s Corner for a whole month, according to that newspaper. In that length of time he was sure to see her, and he had mixed feelings about opening up the old wounds. He wondered if she felt the same way, or if, in her fame and wealth, she’d left the memories of him in the past. He wanted to see her all the same. Even if she still hated him.

  Chapter 2

  Blake and Mrs. Jackson usually ate their evening meal with a minimum of conversation. But that was another old custom that was going to change.

  Sarah Jane was a walking encyclopedia of questions. One answer led to another why and another, until Blake was ready to get under the table. And just the mention of bedtime brought on a tantrum. Mrs. Jackson tried to cajole the child into obeying, but Sarah Jane only got louder. Blake settled the matter by picking her up and carrying her to her new room.

  Mrs. Jackson helped her undress and get into bed and Blake paused at her bedside reluctantly to say goodnight.

  “You don’t like me,” Sarah accused.