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Going over the laundry list of Karis Pratt’s claims, Luke was scrubbing his head so hard it hurt.
He eased up, muttering a word his mother had washed his mouth out with soap for saying when he was eight.
It was just that it ticked him off to realize, as he mentally replayed what had happened in his entryway the previous evening, that there was a part of him that kept wondering if it was a scam.
But Karis Pratt had been telling the truth about Lea’s death. What if she was telling the truth about everything else, too?
Damn, but he didn’t want to be thinking that.
Only there were things about the night before that nagged at him. Things that might have only been clever special effects, but still he couldn’t quite shake the memory.
Things like coming close to tears when she’d said she loved Amy. The forget it that had made it seem as if she couldn’t go through with leaving the baby after all. The whole attitude—as if she’d been doing about the last thing in the world she wanted to do. Even the concession that, yes, Lea might have been lying to her when she’d said Amy was his.
She’d been very convincing.
Plus, there was Lea. Lea had taken him for a ride. She’d taken her half siblings for a ride. As far as Luke knew, she hadn’t had a single compunction about lying to anyone about anything at any time. Did he doubt that she was capable of lying to her full sister, too? Or doing something that would cost Karis everything she had?
No, he didn’t doubt it.
Or maybe it was easier to think that if Lea could do what she had to him and pull the wool over his eyes, she could do it to anyone.
“Or maybe you’re getting taken in by another pretty face,” he accused himself as he rinsed off shampoo and soap suds.
Another pretty face that was actually prettier than the one he’d fallen for before. Much prettier. Beautiful, in fact.
Yeah, there was no denying that even looking the worse for wear the previous evening, Karis Pratt was beautiful. More beautiful than Lea had been at her best.
Lea had had untamed good looks. Not trashy, but not girl-next-door, either. Long bleached-blond hair she’d artfully mussed to always appear tousled. Cat-shaped blue eyes. Lips so full they’d seemed enhanced. A chest the same way. A chest that she’d liked to show off.
But her sister? Karis Pratt had a more wholesome beauty. Shiny reddish-brown hair the color of a rain-soaked tile roof on an adobe house. Thick, smooth, healthy-looking hair that kept escaping the control she’d tried to put on it by slipping it behind her ears. Chin-length silk with bangs that teased the left brow of a face that was impossible to find a flaw in.
Creamy, alabaster skin. High cheekbones. A mouth that had some of Lea’s lushness without the falsely enhanced abundance. A nose that was just the right length and more narrow, more refined than Lea’s. And blue eyes that lacked the catlike shape but instead were big and round and sort of glistening, like a mountain lake at daybreak.
Karis Pratt was smaller than her sister, too. Slightly shorter—probably five foot four instead of five-five and a half. Thinner. Flatter, but still curvy enough.
Actually, as Luke turned off the shower and grabbed his towel from where it was slung over the shower door, it occurred to him that Lea had probably learned early on to overdo the makeup and hair—and even the bustline—so as not to be overshadowed by her more naturally stunning sister.
So yeah, he’d noticed Karis Pratt’s looks. How could he not have? But was that making him inclined to believe her?
Hell, he wasn’t inclined to believe her. He didn’t want to believe her. He hated even wondering if anything she’d said beyond the news of Lea’s death might be true.
But he was wondering. And if he was wondering, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to just blow off everything Karis Pratt had said. Including what she’d said about Amy, and Lea’s claim that she actually might be his after all.
The word he spit out then had cost him a mouth-washing at ten.
He was just so disgusted with himself for even entertaining the slightest possibility that Amy was his.
But as long as the question could be raised again, he knew it needed an answer. and it was why he’d agreed to have the testing done. And why, at the moment, Amy was asleep in the crib she’d slept in for the first five weeks of her life.
And the reason Karis Pratt was sleeping in the attic above his head? That wasn’t because of the way she looked, he assured himself. Or because he was buying into the rest of her sob story.
That was so she couldn’t hightail it out of Northbridge before he knew whether or not Amy was his and leave him with a baby that probably wasn’t his.
So maybe he wasn’t being conned for a second time, he told himself.
Even if the image of Karis Pratt, in all its glory, had popped into his head a hundred times during the night to remind him just how incredible looking she was.
No, this was about knowing once and for all if Amy was his own flesh and blood.
And if, in the meantime, he figured out whether the rest of Karis Pratt’s story was true or false?
He’d be interested to know. But beyond general curiosity, he was definitely not investing anything in her. Not financially and not anything of himself, either.
Lea Pratt had been the most embarrassing, costly episode of his life and it would be difficult enough if he did prove to be Amy’s father and ended up raising a child who shared her genes. He certainly wouldn’t add a sister who shared them, too, to the mix.
At least if Amy was his, half of her genes were his. If he raised her, he could teach her to be honest and aboveboard—a good, decent, honorable person. But a full-blooded sister raised by the same people in the same environment? As far as he was concerned, that could have bred the same kind of person Lea had been, through and through.
No, thanks. He wouldn’t risk it.
So while he might have to suffer Karis Pratt’s temporary presence in his house and in his life, that was as far as he was willing to go. No matter how she looked.
And if she kept creeping into his mind’s eye when he least expected it and didn’t want it?
He’d shove her out again with thoughts of Lea.
There was no repellant stronger than that.
Which meant that Luke wasn’t worried about having Karis Pratt around for the time being.
Even if she was so damn beautiful that the mental image of her made wrapping the towel around his waist impossible.
Karis made sure she was up early that morning. To shower and shampoo her hair. To put on her jeans and a beige V-neck sweater she wore over a white camisole top. To dry her hair and give it the few turns of the curling iron it required to curve under on the ends. To brush on a little blush and a little mascara.
She wanted to be ready by the time Amy woke for the day.
But Amy was still sleeping when Karis had accomplished it all and so she was left waiting. She didn’t leave the attic bedroom, because she wasn’t eager to face Luke Walker’s disdain any sooner than necessary.
As she waited, she perched on the window seat of one of two dormers that provided light and air to the slanted-ceilinged room. For the first time, she faced the second reason she’d come to Northbridge—the big, stately, brown-brick house that stood atop the hill at the end of the street.
It was two stories with a steeply pitched slate roof and a large turret that ran along one corner of both levels. A wide, covered porch wrapped the front and side of the house from the turret, shading large-paned glass windows and an oversize front door, and dropping to the sloping front yard by eight stone steps bordered by well-tended bushes.
Multiple windows lined the upper level, all of them flanked by dark shutters and fanlights above them.
It was a lovely, old house that had clearly never seen a day’s neglect. The home of her father’s original family.
And Karis’s single, solitary asset.
Looking at the house put a knot in her stomach, the same knot that had been forming there for the past few weeks whenever she thought about it or researched it. The same knot that formed every time she thought about how the house had come to be hers or what she was going to have to do to get it.
She had no right to it and she knew it. Just as her seven older half siblings would know it. And resent her for the way the house had come to be hers.
“Why did you have to put me in this position, Lea?” she whispered, as if her sister were there to hear.
But when it came to the house, in this, too, Karis didn’t have a choice. The best she could do was vow to make the situation as painless as possible for the seven people she’d never even met.
But still, she was going to have to tell them how things stood. For Amy’s sake. For her own sake. For the sake of other, innocent, trusting people who hadn’t deserved what had been done to them, either.
It just didn’t change the fact that in all of her fantasies of coming face-to-face with this part of her family, she had never imagined these circumstances.
“And now you’re all going to hate me.”
With good reason.
Amy was an even-tempered, easygoing baby. Karis always wondered if that was her nature or if it was just that she’d learned, with Lea as her mother, being demanding didn’t get her anywhere.
Regardless of the reason, the baby didn’t wake up fussy in the mornings. She didn’t cry. She wasn’t impatient to have her needs met. She merely sat in her crib and entertained herself.
Knowing that, Karis had opened the door to the attic bedroom, as soon as she was dressed, to listen for the sounds of her niece stirring. When she heard them, she abandoned her melancholy study of the Pratt family home and left her room, heading down the stairs, being careful to walk softly in case Luke Walker was still asleep.
She only made it to the third of the steps, however, before she paused in her tracks.
Luke Walker was already at Amy’s bedroom door.
He was just standing there, not venturing in, only watching from a distance.
Karis couldn’t see past him into the room but, from the sounds of Amy’s jabbering, Karis assumed the little girl hadn’t noticed him. And he didn’t notice Karis, standing stalk still.
It gave her a moment to do some observing of her own.
He had already showered and dressed. Not in his uniform this morning, though. He had on a pair of time-aged, faded jeans. They fit him so well he had to have bought them years ago and broken them in. So well that her gaze was drawn inescapably to the back pockets that rode his rear in divine symphony with the tight glutes behind them.
She looked upward when she realized she was again staring at the man’s butt.
He had on a stark-white long-sleeved, mock-neck T-shirt that left little to the imagination. The shirt encased wide shoulders, muscular torso and hard biceps every bit as appealingly as those jeans covered his lower half.
The faint scent of his cologne wafted in the air. A clean, airy cologne with citrus undertones, the scent went right to her head and carried her away for a moment before she reminded herself that this wasn’t just any man. Luke Walker wasn’t simply a great-looking, single guy she’d happened to meet and might want to get acquainted with. This man already seemed disgusted with her merely by association. That disgust wasn’t going to be improved when he found out the second reason she’d come to Northbridge. No matter how he looked. Or smelled. She needed not to forget that.
Even so, she couldn’t help thinking that although she hadn’t considered her sister capable of good taste in men, she had to acknowledge that this particular man proved Lea did have some. Either that, or she’d been uncommonly lucky.
Karis went down the remainder of the steps, making sure her footfalls announced her presence.
When Luke Walker heard her coming, those impressive shoulders drew back slightly and he took a step out of the doorway as if he’d been caught.
“Trying to see if she looks like you?” Karis asked as she joined him.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“What do you think?”
“I think she looks like you—reddish hair, pale skin, button nose, big baby-blue eyes… Maybe she isn’t Amy at all. Maybe she’s yours and you’re trumping up this whole thing to get rid of your own kid.”
So today wasn’t going to be any better than last night, Karis thought.
“That’s definitely what I’m doing. You caught me. And here I thought you were a plain cop instead of a detective,” she said sarcastically.
She went into the nursery then, to her niece, bypassing the man at the door.
“An Kras!” Amy greeted when she saw her, using her fifteen-month-old version of Aunt Karis.
“Good morning, sweetie.”
Bringing her elephant with her, Amy stood and hung on to the crib’s rail with her free hand, giving a bit of a bounce to let Karis know she wanted out.
Karis didn’t hesitate to oblige, picking her up and settling the baby on her hip.
“Hi,” Amy said then, spotting Luke Walker.
Karis saw that he was taken aback by the baby’s acknowledgment of him.
He didn’t respond immediately, though, and Karis wondered if he was going to ignore Amy. If he did, Karis’s estimation of him would go rapidly downhill and she waited to see what he would do.
But after a moment he said, “Hi.” And then he saved himself from Karis’s blacklist by actually coming into the room.
“So…she talks?” he said, not getting too close.
“Only a few words, but she’s starting to get the hang of it.”
He pointed to the well-loved elephant. “What’s this?” he asked Amy in a much, much more gentle tone of voice than anything he’d used with Karis.
“Eddy,” Amy informed him.
“Eddy?” he repeated. “Is that your elephant’s name—Eddy? Eddy the elephant?”
“I think it’s just short for elephant and the best she can do with it for now,” Karis supplied.
“Eddy,” Amy said again, as if they were both wrong but without giving any clue as to how.
“Shall we change your diaper?” Karis asked the baby.
Amy didn’t answer. She merely continued staring at Luke Walker, who stared back.
Karis let them have their moment. She knew Luke Walker was still looking for signs of himself in the small child. While she didn’t know what exactly about him had Amy’s rapt attention, she was at least glad to see that her niece wasn’t shy the way she sometimes was around strangers.
“I wonder if she recognizes you,” Karis said, thinking out loud.
“She was five weeks old the last time she saw me. I’m sure she doesn’t remember.”
“Probably not,” Karis confirmed. “But she’s usually more standoffish with strangers.”
