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She stared at him, baffled. “I didn’t send you a package.”
With a swift movement he took something from his pocket and tossed it to the desk between them. It fluttered onto the faded red blotter. She forced frozen fingers to pick it up.
Sammy. Her stomach twisted, making her feel as she had during those months of morning sickness. Tyler had a picture of Sammy.
No. He couldn’t. Her mind moved slowly, struggling against the unthinkable reality.
With a quick, angry movement he turned it over in her hand. “Don’t forget the inscription.”
Your son.
The printed words struck her in the heart. They rang in her ears, mocking her. All these years of protecting her secret from him, only to have it blown apart by two simple words.
“Where did you get this?”
“You sent it to me.”
“No!” The word nearly leaped from her mouth. “I didn’t.”
He made a quick, chopping motion with one hand, as if cutting her away from him. “Who else? I have to warn you, Miranda. If you want child support, you’d better be prepared to prove that boy is mine.”
It took a moment for his words to penetrate, another for her brain to actually make sense of them. Then anger shot up, hot and bracing. How dare he imply she’d had someone else’s child?
Common sense intervened. They hadn’t seen each other in years. For all Tyler knew, she might have remarried, might have…
He doesn’t know for sure Sammy is his.
Beneath the anger, beneath the pain, relief flowered. If Tyler wasn’t sure Sammy was his son, she might still avert disaster. She wouldn’t have to fear the nightmare of Tyler snatching Sammy away from her.
She stood up straight, trying to find the strength Gran always insisted was bred into generations of Caldwell women. “My son has nothing to do with you.” She picked her words carefully. “I think it best if you leave now.”
Furrows dug between his brows, and his angry gaze seemed to grasp her with the power that had swept her eighteen-year-old self along with whatever Tyler wanted. “I’ll leave as soon as I’m satisfied, Miranda. I want to know why you sent this to me.”
His words rattled around her brain. Who had sent it? None of this made any sense at all. She tried not to glance at the implacable round face of the clock, warning her Sammy could walk in on them.
Nothing else matters. Just get him out of here before Sammy comes in.
“I don’t know who sent it. I didn’t. I don’t want anything from you.” It took a fierce effort to look at him as coolly as if he were a stranger.
He is a stranger, a tiny voice sobbed in her ear. He’s not the man you loved.
Tyler straightened, his shoulders stiff, his face a mask. “In that case, I’ll—”
The creak of the screen door cut off the sentence, and fear obliterated her momentary relief.
“Hey, Momma, I’m home.” Sammy’s quick footsteps slowed when he saw that his mother wasn’t alone. He glanced curiously at Tyler, then tossed a green spelling book on the desk. “Can I get a snack?”
“May I,” she corrected automatically. Cool, careful. She could still get out of this in one piece. As long as Sammy didn’t hear Tyler’s name, she was all right. “Go on into the kitchen. I have some cookies started.”
Sammy nodded, turned. She held her breath. Almost out of danger. There’d be time enough later to sort it all out. Get Sammy out, and…
“Just a minute.” Tyler’s voice had roughened. It carried a raw note of command.
She forced herself to move around the desk, grasp Sammy’s shoulders, look at Tyler. The expression on his face chilled her to the bone.
He knew. He’d taken one look at Sammy, and her son’s beautiful eyes, so like his father’s, had given them away. Tyler knew Sammy was his son.
Tyler couldn’t stop staring. At first he’d seen a child with Miranda’s heart-shaped face, her pointed chin.
Then the boy looked at him, and Tyler had seen the child’s eyes. Deep brown, with the slightest gold flecks in them when the light hit as it did in that moment, slanting through the wavy panes of the hall window. Eyes deeply fringed with curling lashes.
Winchester eyes—they were the same eyes he saw every time he looked at his brother and every morning in the mirror.
Stop, take a breath, think about this.
He didn’t really need to think about it. Maybe the truth had been there all along, beneath his initial assumption that he couldn’t have a child. He’d known, at some level, that if Miranda had a son, that boy was his.
She hadn’t told him. Anger roared through his thoughts like a jet. Miranda had borne his child, and she hadn’t told him.
The three of them stood, frozen in place, the old house quiet around them. From somewhere outside came the raucous squawk of a seagull, seeming to punctuate his anger. She hadn’t told him.
He shifted his gaze to Miranda, furious words forming on his tongue. He’d tell her just what he thought—
He couldn’t. Not with the boy standing there, looking at him with those innocent eyes. No matter how little he welcomed this news, how angry he was at the woman he’d once loved, he couldn’t say anything in front of the child.
He took a breath. “We have to talk.”
Miranda turned the child toward the swinging doors. “You go on back to the kitchen. I’ll be with you in a little bit.”
The boy nodded. After another curious glance at Tyler, he pushed through the door.
He gave the child—his child—another moment to get out of range. He heard the swish of the kitchen door closing. He could speak, if he could find the words.
“Well, Miranda?”
Her soft mouth tightened. “Not here. Anyone might walk in.”
The fact that she was right didn’t help. His son. The words pounded in his blood. “There must be privacy somewhere in this place.”
She gave a curt nod, then led the way to the room on the right of the hall.
Tyler shut the door firmly, glancing around at overstuffed, shabby chairs, walls covered with family photos, a couple of toy cars abandoned on a round pedestal table. He didn’t remember being in this room before, but that wasn’t surprising. Miranda’s family had been as opposed to their relationship as his had been.
He swung toward Miranda.
“Well?” he repeated. “Why did it take you eight years to let me know I’m a father? Or didn’t you want child support until now?”
She flinched, her eyes darkening. “I don’t need or want anything from you, Tyler.”
He suppressed the urge to rant at her. Tyler Winchester didn’t lose control, no matter what the provocation. That was one of the keys to his success. “Then why send me that picture now?”
“I didn’t!”
Even through his anger, he had to recognize the sincerity in her voice. And he couldn’t deny the shock that had been written on her face when she’d first seen him.
“You mean that, don’t you?”
She nodded.
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. Does it really matter? You know.”
“I should have known eight years ago.” His anger spiked again. “Why didn’t you tell me, Miranda? Even if our marriage was a mistake, surely I deserved to know I had fathered a child.”
She crossed her arms, hugging herself. He’d thought, when he first saw her, that she didn’t look any older than she had at eighteen. Now he saw the faint lines around her eyes, the added maturity in the way she stood there, confronting him.
“Well?” He snapped the word, annoyed at himself for the weakness of noticing how she looked.
She spread her hands out. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Tyler. By the time I knew I was pregnant, our marriage was over.”
He’d told himself he barely remembered that one short month. That wasn’t true. He remembered only too well—remembered the furious quarrel with his father over his involvement with a local girl, remembered storming out of the beach house intent on showing the old man that he could manage his own life.
A runaway marriage would do it. He hadn’t found it difficult to persuade Miranda or himself that was their only option. They’d come back from their secret honeymoon to face the music—to tell both their families they were married.
Miranda’s father had been disapproving but ready to accept the inevitable.
Not his. His father had ranted and raged at both of them, his emotions spilling out like bubbling acid. And then he’d had a heart attack. He’d died before the paramedics reached him.
Tyler slammed the door on that memory. He’d better focus on the present. “You were having our baby. I should have been told.”
Anger flared in her heart-shaped face. “You wanted the divorce.”
“I had a right to know,” he repeated stubbornly. He moved toward her a step, as if he could impel an explanation. But this wasn’t the old Miranda, the sweet young woman who’d been so dazzled by love she’d gone along with anything he said.
“What was the point?” She brushed a strand of coppery hair away from her face impatiently. “You were busy taking your father’s place and saving the company. You had a life mapped out that didn’t include a child.”
“And you figured you didn’t need me.” That was what rankled, he realized. She hadn’t needed him then, didn’t seem to need him now.
“I had my family.”
She gestured toward the groupings of family photographs hung against the wallpaper, the movement sending a whiff of her scent toward him. Soap and sunshine, that was how Miranda had always smelled to him. She still did, and he was annoyed that he remembered.
“They thought you shouldn’t tell me?” This branch of the Caldwell clan had never had much money, as he recalled. He’d have expected them to be lining up for child support long before this.
She glanced at him with an odd expression he couldn’t quite pin down.
“They were as opposed to our marriage as your family was, remember? They never held with marrying someone from a different world. My daddy said only grief could come from that.”
“Looks like he was right, doesn’t it?”
Her chin lifted, looking considerably more stubborn than he remembered. “I have Sammy. I don’t consider that a source of grief, no matter what.”
“Sammy.” He didn’t even know his son’s full name. “What’s the rest of it?”
She didn’t look away. “Samuel Tyler Caldwell, like mine.”
It struck him, then, a fist to the stomach. He had a son. Somehow, he had to figure out how to deal with that.
“Didn’t he ask questions about his father?”
She winced. “Of course he asked. Any child would.”
“And did you bother telling him the truth?”
“Sammy knows his father’s name. He knows our marriage ended because we weren’t suited to each other.”
It was what he believed himself, but it annoyed him to hear her say it. “Why does he think I never came around?”
“When he asked, I told him you had to work far away.” For an instant there was a flicker of uncertainty in her face. “Eventually he stopped asking. He gets plenty of masculine attention. My father, my brothers, my cousins—he doesn’t lack male role models, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It hadn’t been, but now that she said it, he knew the sprawling Caldwell clan would take care of its own. But Sammy was his son. He didn’t know what that was going to mean yet, but it had to mean something.
“I’m his father.”
She crossed her arms again, as if she needed something to hang onto. “He doesn’t have to know you were here. You can leave, and we’ll go back to the way things were.”
“I don’t think so, Miranda.”
“Why not? You don’t want to have a son.”
“Maybe not, but I have one. I’m not just going to walk away and pretend it never happened.”
She took a breath, and he seemed to feel her gathering strength around her.
“If you mean that, then I’ll have to tell him you’re here.”
His world shifted again. He had a son. Soon that son would know Tyler was his father.
Chapter Two
Had she ever felt quite this miserable? Miranda sat on the porch swing, staring across the width of the inland waterway at the sunset over the mainland. Maybe, when she was eighteen and discovering that she couldn’t function in Tyler’s world. And that her fairy-tale marriage wouldn’t survive the strain.
At the sight of Tyler standing in the hallway that afternoon, all the pain of losing him had surged out of hiding. Tyler was back—Tyler knew about Sammy. Somehow she had to come to terms with that.
This old swing, on the porch that stretched comfortably across the front of the inn, had always been a refuge. It wasn’t today.
She closed her eyes, letting the sunset paint itself on the inside of her lids. Lord, I don’t know what to do.
