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Child of His Heart
Joan Kilby
He's raised one child who might not be his own. Does he have it in his heart to do it again?Fire chief Nick Dalton has a lot on his plate. He's had to move to a small town in Washington to get his twelve-going-on-twenty-year-old daughter away from the rough crowd she was hanging out with in Los Angeles. He's also struggling with the knowledge his late wife imparted on her deathbed–their child might not be his biologically.Erin Hanson has returned to the small town she grew up in to come to grips with a failed romance, and Nick is just the kind of man to make her quickly forget her woes. But suddenly she has a more wrenching situation on her hands–she's pregnant with her ex-fiancé's child.Erin knows Nick loves her. Now they both have to find out if he can love her baby, too.
“I’m sorry, Nick, this isn’t going to work out.”
Erin took a deep breath and started to walk away, heart pounding.
“Wait!” He strode after her and put a hand on her arm. “I don’t understand. What happened between Saturday evening and this morning to change your mind?”
Lifting her eyes to his, she answered, “I—I’ve had time to think. You know how people in small towns talk.”
“You’re not going to tell me you’re worried about the town gossips. What could anyone say that could possibly harm either of us?”
She conjured up a vivid image of herself hugely pregnant, and Nick cast unfairly as the father. She couldn’t put him in such an untenable position.
Nor could she bear to sit and wait for him to reject her.
She shrugged, forcing herself to appear nonchalant. “I’m sorry. I just don’t want to get involved. Please accept my decision.”
Shutting her heart to the hurt and anger in his eyes, she put her chin in the air, straightened her shoulders and walked out of his life….
Dear Reader,
Kids—you gotta love ’em. They say that mothers always know who their children are, but a father can never be certain. Until the advent of DNA testing, that is. The idea for Child of His Heart came by playing around with the writer’s favorite creative tool—what if? What if suddenly you discover that the child you always thought was yours might not be?
Nick Kincaid’s wife confessed on her deathbed to having an affair around the time their daughter was conceived. The galling knowledge doesn’t diminish Nick’s love for his daughter, Miranda, but he does think twice about getting romantically involved with Erin Hanson, who is pregnant by her ex-fiancé. The last thing he wants is to raise another child that isn’t his. Or does he?
Child of His Heart explores what it means to be a parent. Is fatherhood purely genetic? Or is a commitment to a child’s welfare on a daily basis just as important, perhaps more so? I think any parent, biological or adoptive, knows the answer to that.
Erin figures out pretty quickly that Nick would make a better father to her child than the biological father, despite Nick’s protestations. Nick gets there in the end, with Erin’s help, but not before he risks losing those he holds dearest. It’s a happy man who knows that, child of his loins or not, the child he loves and cares for is a child of his heart.
I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did writing it. I love to hear from my readers. You can contact me c/o Harlequin Enterprises, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada, M3B 3K9; or e-mail me at www.superauthors.com.
Joan Kilby
Child of His Heart
Joan Kilby
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
For the children of my heart—Ryan, Gillian and Matthew
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
THE PHONE WAS RINGING when Erin entered her Seattle apartment late one Sunday night in early August. She longed for a hot shower and a quiet finish to the weekend with her fiancé, John.
Correction—her ex-fiancé.
“Hold on,” she muttered at the phone. “I’m coming.”
Slipping off her Prada slingbacks, she tossed her overnight bag onto the living room sofa and moved through the dark to the granite-and-oak kitchen. Three of her seven clocks chimed the quarter hour and she automatically looked at her watch—11:45.
The phone clicked onto voice mail. “Hi, Erin. It’s Kelly. Call me—”
At the sound of her sister’s voice, Erin snatched up the phone. “Kel? I’m here. I just got in.”
“Erin, thank God. I’ve been calling since yesterday morning.”
“I was away for the weekend with John. What’s up?” Stifling a yawn, she flicked on the lights and wriggled onto a bar stool, pushing back the spiraling blond strands that fell around her shoulders.
“It’s Gran,” Kelly said. “She’s fine now—”
“What do you mean now? What happened?” Erin hugged the cordless phone to her ear, one arm wrapped around her waist. Please, God, not Gran.
“She had a slight heart attack,” Kelly explained.
“Oh, my God.” Erin slid off the stool, her free hand pressed against her forehead. “Where is she? Is she okay?”
“She’s back home. She’s fine, honestly,” Kelly reassured her. “The doctors did all kinds of tests and they say there’s no serious damage to her heart. But I’m worried, Erin. When it happened, I was at work. She felt pain in her chest, and instead of going to the doctor she went around the house and penciled a name on the back of all her needlepoint pictures so we wouldn’t fight over them in case she died.”
“As if we would.” But Erin could just see Gran doing that.
“Well, Geena might,” Kelly said. “You know she’s always coveted the one of the lighthouse.”
Erin chuckled, and Kelly joined in. Laughing was okay because they both knew that like them, Geena wished Gran could live forever. No amount of needlepoint pictures would make up for her loss.
“I asked her to come and live with us,” Kelly continued. “She refused.”
“I’m not surprised—that house is her home.” Erin opened the fridge door and reached for the carton of orange juice. “She and Granddad built it over sixty years ago. I can’t imagine her living anywhere else. And we grew up there. I’d hate to see it go out of the family.”
“What should we do?” Kelly asked.
“I agree she shouldn’t be alone.” Erin pictured Gran suffering another heart attack, reaching for the phone and collapsing before she could dial 911. “Maybe we could get her a live-in housekeeper.”
“I suggested that, too. She doesn’t want a stranger in her house. I got her a Medic Alert tag, but she won’t wear it. I don’t know if she’s in denial or just forgetful.”
Erin drank some juice while she considered their options; there weren’t many. “I could come home,” she said slowly.
“But how?” Kelly objected. “What about your job? And John?”
Erin’s shoulders drooped. “John and I broke up.”
She barely finished speaking before clocks began to sound the hour from their various locations around the apartment. As she waited for the chimes to cease, her mind flitted back over the weekend at John’s cabin. She’d gone with the expectation that they’d plan the wedding; he’d come to tell her he wanted to postpone it—again. After two days of arguments, lovemaking and tears she was drained, emotionally and physically.
“Oh, Erin. I’m sorry.” Hesitantly, Kelly added, “To tell you the truth, I’m glad. He wasn’t right for you. But are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Erin put down her glass and moved into the darkened living room to stand before the picture window. From her twelfth-story apartment the lights of Seattle twinkled around the dark fingers of Puget Sound. “I’m running on empty, but I’ll survive. John’s not a bad guy—”
“He’s manipulative. I don’t know why you can’t see it. What did he do—put off the wedding again?”
“This is a bad time for him, workwise. As prosecuting attorney he has responsibilities, and now he’s thinking of running for Congress. Maybe I’m being too pigheaded. Gran isn’t the only stubborn one in the family.”
Kelly snorted impatiently. “All you wanted was a June wedding. After being engaged for over two years you’d think he could fit that on his agenda. You shouldn’t have to do things his way all the time. Love is about mutual respect and compromise—”
“I know. I know,” Erin cut in. She was grateful for Kelly’s support, but her sister had a blind spot about John. “It might do us good to have a break from each other for a while.”
“I thought you just said you’d split for good!”
“This could blow over given a little time.” Gut instinct told her John was never going to change, but she’d invested so much time and emotional energy in the relationship that letting go was hard.
“Oh, Erin.” Kelly gave an exasperated sigh and switched topics.
Leaving her new position as manager of the Loans Department would be a sacrifice, Erin had to admit. She’d worked hard for three years and had finally been rewarded with the promotion. Job opportunities appropriate to her qualifications weren’t exactly thick on the ground in Hainesville. Not only that, she loved the vibrancy, the variety a larger city like Seattle offered. She enjoyed the anonymity and the freedom to do what she wanted, to be who she was, without fear of censure or gossip.
Yet sometimes, like now, when her mind was weary and her heart sore, she longed for the cozy comfort of the small town she’d grown up in. A place without traffic jams and road rage, where the air smelled of blossoms and freshly cut grass, not diesel fumes; where people who’d known her as a child stopped on the street to chat. A place with memories and continuity, where life proceeded at a user-friendly pace.
“A job is just a job,” she told Kelly. “Family is everything.”
“YOU’VE RUINED MY LIFE. You know that, don’t you?” Miranda complained from the passenger seat of her father’s Suburban. She tugged irritably at a purple-streaked strand of curly auburn hair. “I’m not even thirteen and my life is over.”
Nick Dalton ignored his daughter’s histrionics and kept his eyes straight ahead on the northbound lane of the interstate freeway. Puberty. Would it never end?
Usually he laughed off her over-the-top statements because they were underscored with humor and affection. But she was more furious than he’d ever seen her, and he was tired. Instead of finishing his last week as battalion chief for Orange County with paperwork, he’d had to contend with a major blaze that had broken out at a chemical plant and had been on duty around the clock, coordinating three battalions of firefighters. Now he and Miranda had been on the road for three long days and she’d been at him every waking minute. According to her, he’d “ruined” her life so many times it was a wonder she’d survived preschool.
“So sue me,” he teased, trying to pull her out of the despair she apparently loved to wallow in. “Taking you out of a smoggy, overcrowded, crime-ridden city and into fresh air and open spaces ought to be good for at least a million dollars.” When she didn’t even crack a smile, he added, “Don’t be so negative. I grew up in a small town.”
“Exactly,” she said, as if his origins accounted for his every deficiency. Miranda slumped in her seat, arms crossed over her recently blossomed breasts. “Hicksville isn’t small—it’s microscopic.”
“Hainesville,” he corrected her wearily. He rubbed his jaw, his fingers rasping over the stubble of his heavy beard. “People are friendly in small towns. And I hear the fishing in the area is fantastic.”
She rolled her eyes. “Is there a mall? Or a movie theater?”
“Maybe you can get a horse. Join a sports team.”
“I still don’t see why we had to leave L.A. I only got a navel ring. You can’t punish me as though I were a little girl. You didn’t freak out like this over the nose ring or the eyebrow ring.”
True, he had controlled his anger over the first two rings, telling himself that what was done was done and sooner or later she’d grow out of this ridiculous phase. But the navel ring had been the last straw. Curving provocatively from her bare midriff, it drove him crazy with paternal anxiety. Even now, he couldn’t keep his voice from rising when he spoke of it. “What the hell is a young girl doing with a ring in her navel? Huh?”
“You’re afraid I’ll look sexy,” she taunted. “You’re afraid I’ll start having sex.”
The smirk in her voice sent his blood pressure soaring. She’d pushed his hottest button. Nick gripped the wheel with both hands and forced himself to breathe deeply. You weren’t allowed to strangle your daughter. Nor could you lock her up until she was over thirty.
He’d taken the job at the Hainesville Fire Department partly to get Miranda away from the gang of older kids she’d started hanging with. Sex, drugs—who knew what those lowlifes got up to. Grounding Miranda hadn’t tamed her; more than once she’d snuck out of the house after he was asleep. Even the housekeeper he’d hired hadn’t been able to control her. The only solution, in his mind, was to distance her from bad influences.
Twelve-going-on-twenty, Miranda was trouble with a capital T. The older she got the more she looked like her mother, all lush curves and pouty lips. And if she looked like Janine, he couldn’t help think she would end up acting like Janine. His late wife had always been flirtatious, but until she lay dying in the hospital from injuries sustained in a hit-and-run accident, he’d never seriously thought she had deceived him. Before she’d passed away she’d confessed to having an affair around the time of Miranda’s conception. The memory was a slap in the face every time he looked at his daughter—if she really was his daughter.
“This move isn’t only about you,” he reminded her. “I got a promotion, don’t forget. You should be proud of your old man. At thirty-six I’m probably the youngest fire chief in Washington State.”
“Only because no one else wanted to come here!”
“Miranda, that’s enough.” The warning edge to his voice still had the power to subdue her—just. This move may have been sparked by concern for Miranda, but the change would be good for him, too. In the two years since Janine’s death he’d turned into a hermit. He needed balance in his life just as much as Miranda did.
A meeker voice said, “You look tired, Dad. Want some coffee?”
Nick glanced over to see Miranda, contrite after her outburst, screwing the lid off the thermal jug. “Thanks, honey. Any of those doughnuts left?”
She handed him a travel mug, then picked up the paper bag at her feet and offered it to him. “Don’t eat the blueberry one.”
Grinning, he tickled her behind her ear. “Who’s going to stop me?”
Reluctantly, she giggled. “Da-a-ad.”
ERIN TURNED INTO Linden Street and parked in front of Gran’s house. The two-story Victorian home, set on a wide, deep corner lot, was painted white with blue trim. Lilac bushes flanked the steps, and colorful petunias lined the footpath. In the center of the front yard grew a tall maple, in whose sturdy limbs she’d spent half her childhood.
