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He hadn’t helped his cause. Her chin shot up and her eyes flashed with green fire, full of feminine fury, mingled with a gut-wrenching anguish. “I don’t think you deserve me. And I know you don’t deserve Noelle.”
“If that’s what you believe, why are you here?”
He caught her wariness before she wiped every thought and emotion from her face, closing down and shutting him out. She’d never done that before. He suspected she’d never been capable of it until recently. When they’d last been together she’d been open and forthcoming, her opinions and feelings out there for everyone to see. Was he responsible for so dramatic a change? Had their night together caused her to regard the world with such caution? He flinched from the thought, from the idea he was capable of inflicting that level of pain on anyone, though for reasons he couldn’t bring himself to analyze, Daisy in particular.
“You deserved to know about your daughter. Now that you do, I’m finished here.”
She was keeping something from him, he could tell. “It’s more than that, isn’t it?” He could also tell she had zero intention of explaining herself. “Never mind. Considering how guarded I am about my own privacy, I won’t intrude on yours.”
“Thank you.”
“But if I can help, I will.” He had no idea where the words came from. He certainly hadn’t planned to say them, an unfathomable lapse on his part, but they caught her attention.
She studied his face for a long, tense moment. Then her head jerked in a nod. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Whether she realized it or not, Daisy’s announcement offered him the perfect opportunity to achieve the goals he’d set more than two years ago—to create a family. To have someone in his life who mattered. Who cared. Though she didn’t and couldn’t meet his conditions for an engineering apprentice, any more than those for the perfect wife, the potential existed to shape her to fit many of the same parameters. Hell, he’d even be willing to alter his lifestyle somewhat to suit her requirements for a husband. Within reason, of course.
And then there was Noelle. He struggled to draw air into his lungs at the thought of his progeny. A daughter. He had a child! It stunned him how much that simple fact changed the means by which he processed information. He found he craved her, sight unseen. Wanted and needed them both in ways he found inexplicable. No matter what it took, he’d give Daisy whatever she required in order to have his ready-made family part of his life.
He crossed to a sturdy wooden table and pulled out a chair, formulating a swift game plan. “Let’s sit and talk about this. Are you hungry?”
Annoyance flashed. “Let me get this straight. Now that you know about Noelle you’re willing to feed me?”
“No,” he responded mildly. “Since I planned to keep you here until we relocated, I would have gotten around to feeding you. Eventually.”
That provoked a smile. A tiny one, but a smile nonetheless. The impact of it far exceeded what it should have, based on all rational consideration. And yet, just as at the engineering conference, it drew him in, put thoughts and ideas in his head he’d spent every day since their night together working to eradicate. How many potential apprentice/wives had he interviewed since Daisy? How many times had Pretorius tweaked his Pretorius Program in an effort to find the “perfect” woman? How many failures had there been?
And all because none of them were Daisy, he now realized.
Oh, they’d suited his conditions to a T. Every last miserable one of them had engineering credentials. Were brilliant, rational, sensible women in complete control of their emotions. A few were even more attractive than Daisy, though for some inexplicable reason their beauty left him cold. To be fair, none of them revealed any true meanness that he’d noticed, still he wouldn’t call them kind. Perhaps their very lack of emotional depth prevented them from exhibiting the qualities Daisy possessed in distressing excess.
Regardless, his search had ultimately resulted in only one serious candidate … along with the indelible memory of Daisy. Now he had the ideal opportunity to mold the woman he actually wanted into the perfect wife.
“I thought we were going to talk,” she prompted with another of her irresistible smiles.
“Talking is the easy part.”
Again, the wariness. “And the not-so easy part?” she asked.
“I don’t cook and neither does Pretorius.”
She glanced around. “Maybe that explains the lack of appliances.”
“There’s a fully stocked refrigerator and freezer in the cabinet behind me, as well as a full complement of appliances.” He took a seat beside her. “I also have someone stop in once a day and prepare our meals, so you can cross that concern off your list.”
She blinked. “I didn’t realize I had a list.”
“I’m making one for you.”
Daisy’s eyes narrowed. “And why would you do that? And why should it matter whether or not you can cook, or whether or not you have someone fixing your meals? It has nothing to do with me.”
Now for the hard part. No point in delaying the inevitable. Better to get right to it. “It’s about to have a lot to do with you, because I want you and Noelle to move in here with me and I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
She shook her head before he even finished speaking. “Forget it, Justice. I’m not interested in having you in my life any more than you’re interested in being in mine.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “You’d rather share custody of Noelle?”
The breath left Daisy’s lungs in a rush. “What?”
“You said she’s mine. Now that I know about her existence, I’m willing and able to be a father to her. There’s only two ways that’ll work. Either we live together or we shuttle her back and forth between us. I’m thinking it’s in our daughter’s best interest for her to live with both of us. Together.”
Her gaze swept the room and he struggled to see it through her eyes. Despite the state-of-the-art equipment and electronics tucked neatly behind warm oak cabinets, it came up lacking. Empty. Cold. Aw, hell. Dark and dusty, even with the lights.
“You want us to live out here, in the middle of nowhere?” she asked in disbelief. “What sort of life is that for a child?”
“We can work around any of your objections,” he insisted doggedly. “There are reasons I choose to live in the middle of nowhere.”
“Such as?”
“Pretorius? Permission, please.”
There was a momentary silence, then, “Tell her.”
“My uncle has a social anxiety disorder. It’s one of the reasons I was put in foster care after the death of my parents. The courts didn’t consider Pretorius an acceptable guardian.”
Compassion swept across Daisy’s expression and he realized that it was an innate part of her character. It always had been. “Agoraphobia?” She hazarded a guess.
“That’s probably part of it. More, it’s people in general he has difficulty handling.”
“Huh. I have that same problem … with certain people.”
He acknowledged the hit with a cool smile. “Whereas he needs the isolation, I value my privacy. When I turned eighteen and had nowhere to go, my uncle opened his home to me, even though he found it a very difficult adjustment. Since then, it’s worked for us. Or rather, it did.”
“Should I assume something changed?”
Time to be honest with her. Totally honest. “Yes. It changed a couple of years ago.”
“What happened a couple of years—” He caught her dawning comprehension and again that deep flash of compassion. How did she do it? How did she open herself up like that and let everyone in? Especially when it guaranteed she would be hurt in the process. “Oh, Justice. The car wreck?”
He nodded. “It made me realize what I had wasn’t enough.”
“And …?”
He chose his words with care. It felt like tiptoeing through a minefield. “I asked Pretorius to rewrite a business program he marketed a few years ago. I gave him a set of parameters combining qualities important to me, with characteristics that would also be compatible with my uncle.”
She stared blankly. “You just lost me.”
“He asked me to find him a wife,” Pretorius interrupted. “One that we’d both like.”
Justice swore. “I’m telling this story, old man.”
“And I’m just filling in the parts you seem to be skipping over.”
“I was getting to them. I just wanted to do this in a logical order.”
Pretorius snorted. “Right. And E-equals-MC-you’re-full-of-crap.”
Damn it to hell. “Computer, close circuit to kitchen and keep it closed until I say otherwise.”
“No, I want to hear—” Pretorius’s voice was cut off midsentence.
Justice took a deep, steadying breath. “Now, where was I?”
He could see the laughter in Daisy’s eyes before gold-tipped lashes swept downward, concealing her expression. “I believe you were explaining how you used a computer program to find a wife.” The merest hint of amusement threaded through her words.
“It made perfect sense at the time.”
“Of course it did.”
“The Pretorius Program has been quite successful at choosing the perfect employee in the business sector.” He heard the defensive edge slashing through his comment and took a moment to gather himself. What was it about Daisy that caused him to lose his composure with such ease and frequency? “I had more specific requirements to take into consideration for a wife, so Pretorius tweaked the parameters.”
“What sort of specific requirements and what parameters?”
Hell, no. He would not walk down that road. “That’s not important.”
Unfortunately, she seemed unusually adept at adding two and two together, squaring it and leaping to a completely illogical, though accurate, conclusion. “You were looking for a wife at that engineering conference, weren’t you? That’s why you were so mad when you discovered I wasn’t an engineer.”
“That’s a distinct possibility,” he admitted.
She leaned forward, staring intently, her spring-green eyes disturbing in the extreme. “Are you telling me that Pretorius devised a computer program to find you the perfect woman and she was supposed to be at that conference?”
Damn, damn, damn. “Yes.”
“Are you seriously going to sit there and admit that you thought you could waltz into that conference, check out the women your uncle’s program selected and convince one of them to marry you?”
He gritted his teeth. “Engineers are very logical. The women involved would have seen that we were an excellent match.”
Her mouth dropped open. “And agreed to marry you right then and there?”
“That would have been helpful, though unlikely.”
“You think?”
He suspected from her tone that the question was both rhetorical and a bit sarcastic. Just in case he was mistaken, he gave her a straight answer. “Yes. But Pretorius suggested a way around that.”
“Oh, this I have to hear.”
“He suggested I offer her a position as my apprentice. That would allow us an opportunity to get to know each other better before committing to marriage. It would also allow me to determine whether she was acceptable to Pretorius.”
“Huh.” Daisy mulled that over. “Okay, that’s not such a bad plan. So explain something to me. It’s been almost two years. Why don’t you have an apprentice/wife by now?”
He would have given anything to avoid this conversation. But he suspected that unless he put all his cards on the table, he’d lose any chance at having a family. A real family. And over the past two years he’d discovered he wanted that more than anything else. Needed the connection before the ice crystallizing in his veins won and he lost all ability to feel. “It would seem the computer program contained a flaw.”
“Remarkable.”
“Agreed.” He frowned. “In retrospect, I realize that there are some indefinable qualities that prove difficult to adapt to a computer program.”
“Wow. Who would have thought. Enlighten me. What sort of indefinable qualities are we talking about?”
Justice had given it a lot of thought over the ensuing months and as irrational and unscientific as it was, there’d been only one inescapable conclusion. “I believe it must have been chemical in nature and therefore extremely difficult to quantify.”
“In English, please?”
He stood and crossed the room to give himself some breathing space. “I didn’t want them. I wanted you.” The words hung in the air, frank and inescapable. And completely, painfully honest. “It’s not logical. I can’t explain it. It just is.”
She shook her head and to his alarm he saw tears gleam in her too-expressive eyes. “Don’t, Justice. I can’t go there again. Not when I know how you really feel about me. That you still hold me responsible for losing your scholarship and being sent to some hideous foster home.”
He leaned his hip against the counter and folded his arms across his chest. “The truth?”
She forced out a watery smile. “Will it hurt?”
He weighed the possibility. “I don’t believe so.”
“In that case, I guess I can handle it.”
“Six months, three days, twenty-two hours and nine minutes ago I came to a conclusion.”
“And what conclusion is that?”
“That even if I’d known before we made love that I’d lose my scholarship, I’m not positive I could have resisted. I would have tried due to your age, but to be perfectly frank, at seventeen I lacked the maturity to make decisions based on intellect rather than hormonal imperative.”
Her smile wobbled, grew. “Does that mean you forgive me?”
“It wouldn’t be rational to continue to hold a grudge.” He frowned, picking through his words. “Though I no longer feel any anger in association with what occurred, I still possess a certain level of resentment. But considering that my success in the field of robotics hasn’t been negatively impacted by those events, even resentment is an unreasonable response.”
“Yes, it is,” she agreed.
“I also never asked whether our relationship had a negative impact on your life,” he found himself saying, much to his surprise. “Were you negatively impacted?”
“Yes.”
He frowned in concern. “How?” A sudden thought struck and he froze. “You didn’t get pregnant, did you?”
“No, nothing like that. I was hurt because you left without a word. Of course, now I understand why. But at the time it broke my heart.” Her chin quivered ever so slightly. “I missed you so much.”
An odd feeling raced through him, a yearning combined with an almost forgotten pain. “I missed you, too,” he confessed. “I didn’t want to, since I blamed you for what happened. But you were the first real friend I’d ever had.”
“Oh, Justice.”
