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I’ve decided to replace our trigonometry lessons with tango instruction.
Yesterday, we studied literature by reading Celeb! magazine from cover to cover.
Our chemistry field trip was a trek to the local chocolate factory.
Crap. What had she been thinking?
And a little voice answered: you were thinking abouthow your own biological dad ignored you and how you don’t want that for London.
Erasing the thought from her head, she sprang into action. “Dust, okay?” she said on the way to the closet where the vacuum accessories were stored.
Then she went to work. It took a few minutes to notice that London wasn’t actually doing her share, but was instead watching Shay flit about. She turned to the girl. “Hop to it. Please.”
“Give me a good reason I should try to impress him.”
Shay could see her point, she really could, since the man had been out of London’s life for years. “Because the care of the house is a reflection on me,” she said. “Your father signs my check so I want to make a good impression.”
The appeal seemed to work. The human-sized crow pushed away from the wall she was leaning upon and did the cleaning without further complaint. Finally, they were both done with their half of the chores and both looked disheveled, with mussed hair and pink cheeks. Shay caught sight of their dual reflections in the hall mirror. Their eyes met in the glass.
“Showers,” they said together.
But before they could repair to separate bathrooms, the doorbell rang.
Really, Shay thought, as her stomach and her heart jumped, I shouldn’t have made that crack about the tango. Her inner organs seemed to be doing the dance themselves.
London stared at an unmoving Shay, the panic in her eyes warring with the blank expression she was trying to keep on her face. “Aren’t you going to answer the door?” she whispered.
“Of course.” Shay smoothed her palms over her hair, then over the sides of her jeans. As she stepped toward the entry, she licked her dry lips. “It might not even be him,” she reminded the girl.
As a precautionary measure, she peeped through one of the porthole-styled windows that flanked the front door. Her whole body froze.
“Well?” London said.
Shay couldn’t make a sound. How had he found her? Why was he here?
It was Jay on the front step, his attention focused on the door.
Gladness, as bright as sunlight and as buoyant as a pop song, poured through her. He’d come after her! The happy feeling was accompanied by the same kind of relief one felt upon waking from a bad dream to discover the test hadn’t been failed or the tumble from the steps had been averted.
She wasn’t the only one who wanted more time together.
Could that be true? Did she really want to see him again? It didn’t seem right to yearn for someone after a mere handful of hours and a one-night stand.
But she remembered his guiding touch as he directed her into her chair at the restaurant table, a gentleman’s move that had nearly brought her to her knees. Then there was the way his calloused hands had brushed her naked shoulders as he’d removed her dress in the dark bedroom. She remembered his golden eyes laughing at her in the candlelight and the tickle of his thick lashes as they fluttered against her skin while he kissed her throat when they lay together on the bed.
“Aren’t you going to let him in?” London demanded.
She already had, Shay thought, her mind whirling. She’d let him into her body precisely because she’d never expected to set eyes on him again—and yet she was thrilled to find him here.
London muttered something, then brushed past Shay to open the door herself. She flung it wide, and Shay’s heart jolted again, every instinct wanting to shout out: go slow! Be careful! Protect yourself!
Then there was no barrier between the three of them. Shay was still formulating the right question to ask the man who was staring at both her and the teen. Which came first? Was it Why did you track me down? or What do you want from me?
Then, as his gaze shifted between her and her charge, once, twice, a horrible, dreadful thought struck.
No. No, it couldn’t be.
It was London who spoke Shay’s fear. “Well, well, well,” she said, her flat voice expressing neither happiness nor hostility. “You must be dear old dad.”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_d33f87a7-cf4f-57dc-82bb-12697dbe0b98)
FOR A MOMENT, Jace thought he’d fallen, as he had weeks before in Qatar, and taken another blow to the head. The last time he’d been knocked out, but though he was surely still conscious, his world was rocked all the same. That...that inky-haired, more than half-grown human being was his daughter?
The last time he’d seen her she’d been a chubby-cheeked, irrepressible child, who wore pigtails and shirts with cartoon characters on them. In the intervening years he’d pictured the same, ribbons and Roadrunner, only taller. Never had he expected to find a teen wearing...wearing whatever you’d call that dark garb.
And just as unbelievable...
Birthday Girl.
Birthday Girl! She was standing behind the teenager, looking stunned. She reached out a hand and placed it on the girl’s shoulder. To steady which one of them?
“You’re...” the woman began.
“Jason Jennings. Jace.” He cut his gaze to the teen. “Her father.”
There must have been some question in his voice, because Birthday Girl nodded. “Yes. Right. And this is Om—”
“London,” the youngster interrupted. The black around her eyes and the heavy coating of the same color on her lashes was startling.
“I know your name,” he said. His ex-wife’s selection, of course, chosen after the city she’d run to upon leaving him when she was four months pregnant. Jace, tied financially and morally to the sick old man who’d given him a leg up and his very first job, had remained in the States, frustrated and confused and just beginning to realize that the woman he’d married might have never expected them to grow old together.
He looked at the auburn-haired female behind his daughter and felt his head spin again. It really was the woman from last night. Shit. From the first, he’d known regret would be the outcome of their encounter. Still, he had to carry on. “May I come in?” he asked, wincing at the sharp edge to his voice.
The two females stepped back.
“Of course,” Birthday Girl said—no, he recalled her real name now. Shay Walker. Or S. Walker, as she’d signed the succession of emails he’d finally managed to read last week when his head issues had cleared up at last.
At first he’d thought her talk of tango lessons and celebrity magazines was something his mind was misinterpreting. A few emails later, he’d realized she was either putting him on or was a terrible mentor for his kid.
It had been only one more reason to seethe at the delays—caused by injury, crappy means of communication and his isolated location—that had postponed his return. But he was here now, he told himself, and it was time to implement the simple plan he’d conceived when he’d learned of his daughter’s situation: a summer of getting to know her before school started in September.
He crossed over the threshold, then glanced around the massive foyer, with its thirty-foot ceiling. “Good God,” he said, staring up at the walls of unrelieved concrete. The staircase was more gray cement, with a tubular metal banister painted a janitorial blue. “Is this place butt ugly, or what?”
Both London and Birthday Girl stared at him like he’d sprouted another head. He lifted an eyebrow. “Problem?”
Birth— Shay met the eyes of his daughter then looked back at him. “Um, this is your house.”
“Yeah, but I never saw it before in my life. I needed something in So-Cal, somewhere quiet, I thought, and my man Leonard Case found it. I got it for a song.”
“Which must have been ‘Anchors Aweigh,’” Shay muttered, and his daughter snickered behind her hand.
The sound sliced at Jace’s conscience. She didn’t look like she laughed often. When he’d been told the fifteen-year-old had lost her mother, he’d felt sorrow for her loss and a deep uncertainty about what it would mean for him. Of course he was going to step up and do his duty, but he’d expected to find... He didn’t know.
Not this dark-clad teenager whose expression was near deadpan.
Quashing a rising sense of suffocating panic, he reminded himself he had a plan.
“Why don’t you show me around?” he asked London. “After I see my room, I’ll collect my luggage from the car.”
She glanced over at Shay, who nodded. “We’ll both show you,” the woman said. “Come this way.”
Foiled already, he thought, as he followed their lead. He’d hoped to get his daughter alone and determine exactly how things were with the tutor. Though, hell, didn’t he already know Shay—
No, he did not know Shay. The woman with whom he’d spent the night at the inn was someone else altogether. He’d left that person behind in the room, including his memories of her lithe body, her delicate fragrance and the softness of her skin beneath his lips. If he were going to follow through with his idea of taking this time with London, becoming acquainted with her even as she continued her studies, then he had to forget all about last night and see the tutor in a completely businesslike light.
He could do that. He’d always been a businessman first, after all.
They showed him around the downstairs area, which had an open floor plan containing some midcentury modern furniture that looked to be all angles and uncomfortable cushions. The kitchen was large enough to feed the navy and the best thing you could say about it beyond that was it was clean.
The view of the lake was stupendous, but even the sun streaming in the windows didn’t warm the atmosphere of the place.
Without much optimism, he mounted the stairs. The top landing opened into a large gallery that contained a long center table. Textbooks sat in neat stacks on it, as well as a desktop and a laptop computer. “This is where London studies,” Shay said.
The girl was already at a computer, drawn to it like a magnet, and as the screen powered on, its pale light washed onto her face, making the darkness surrounding her eyes even more stark. Jace shoved a hand through his hair, keenly aware of being out of his element. Panic tried digging its claws in him again.
Feeling a gaze on him, he glanced over at Shay. She was staring, and when she noticed he noticed, her face colored and she looked away. “What do you know about website building?” she asked, then hurried toward the table without waiting for his answer. “London, why don’t you show your dad what you’re working on?”
The girl’s frozen expression didn’t animate, but she obligingly moved her fingers on the keyboard. Color splashed onto the screen, brilliant-colored flowers and the words Build a Bouquet.
“It’s a multidisciplinary project,” Shay explained. “She’s developing a website for a pretend florist business. Visitors to the site are able to select flowers and greenery to custom-design a floral arrangement. She’s setting it up for three disparate locations throughout the country, so she’s had to research local flora and seasonal availability along with the computer programming aspect.”
Shay reached around the teen to hit a key. The screen switched from bright photography to rows of incomprehensible—to Jace anyway—letters, numbers and symbols. “This is the language for creating web pages,” she explained, glancing over her shoulder at him.
“Impressive,” he murmured. “But a lot to accomplish between tango lessons, isn’t it?”
Shay’s face flushed again. “Um...”
“Tango?” London asked, looking between the two of them while still managing to convey that their conversation didn’t interest her in the slightest.
“Never mind,” her tutor said. “Why don’t we show your father around upstairs?”
Again the girl obliged in a long-suffering manner. Ennui oozed out of her as she slowly moved from the computer and then led their small party down the hallway. Jace glanced into her bedroom and several empty ones, then another that appeared occupied. The bed linens were pure white and it smelled of Shay’s scent, causing him to stride past quickly in an attempt not to remember how that particular fragrance had risen from his own skin in the steam of the shower just a few hours before.
They had a business relationship now, remember?
London guided him along the catwalk that was open to the foyer and living room below. At the other side of the house, she gestured to double doors standing open.
Shay spoke up. “The master suite.”
He stepped inside, winced again. More gunmetal-gray walls accented with industrial lighting. Though the bed was huge, the mattress was perched on a wooden platform that hung from the ceiling using thick iron chains. A sitting room wasn’t any more hospitable. The attached bath, while spacious, was as welcoming as an operating room.
Maybe the inhospitable environs would serve a good purpose, he decided. Under the circumstances, he’d be better off thinking like a monk, not a man.
Ignoring the headache beginning to throb at the base of his skull, Jace exited the room and addressed the hovering females. “I’m going to bring in my things,” he said.
Shay appeared uneasy at the news. His daughter appeared unaffected. He might have said his hair was on fire or there was a snake in the shower and he’d bet she’d wear the same nonexpression expression.
It didn’t help that he had no one to blame for that but himself. Fifteen years was a long time to go without having a relationship with your father.
When he’d learned of London’s mother’s death, he’d been in Qatar’s capital city of Doha. Though he’d instantly called, she’d been mostly nonresponsive to his assurances that they’d both be back in the States soon. That then they’d sort out the future.
Not once had he considered bringing her to him. His work in the Arab country sent him to remote, primitive locations that made her presence impractical. To underscore that point, not a short while later he’d been in an earthmover accident, miles from the nearest village. One of the workers with medical training had tended to his injuries, but when his wits had finally unscrambled, he’d lost weeks of time and further opportunities to connect with his daughter.
It took him a few trips to haul all his gear from the car. He refused Shay’s help and London drifted back to her computer. As he passed her, he noted she was modifying those lines of gibberish on the screen.
The truth couldn’t have hit him harder. They were two people, he thought, who didn’t know the same language.
Dumping his bags on the floor of his room, he battled the urge to punch something—the wall, himself for his own ineffectiveness as a parent, the memory of his effing unfeeling martinet of a father who hadn’t given Jace a clue as how to proceed.
Each moment that passed only made it clearer that he’d never have a chance with London.
Or that maybe he didn’t deserve one, because a lone wolf couldn’t change its ways.
A soft footstep sounded behind him. The air suddenly charged and his next breath brought with it a faint note of sweetness. The nape of his neck itched. Shay.
His daughter’s tutor. His employee.
“Dinner’s at six thirty,” she said to his back. “Can I get you anything before then?”
He turned, and at the sight of her warm beauty, memories of the night before slammed into his chest. Blood rushed to his groin as he recalled her fingers wrapped around him, the taste of her pale nipples as they hardened beneath his tongue, the quiet, low sound she’d made when he’d entered her. Jace’s breath felt trapped in his lungs.
Hell. Damn. Shit.
Anger rose from the depths of his belly. How could this have happened?
How could one woman and one night so tangle his simple plan? But she had. It did.
Everything was turning into knots and snarls.
Not only was he certain he was fighting an uphill battle in forging some kind of understanding—if not a relationship—with his kid, but his notion of retaining a businesslike attitude also already felt as if it were failing.
His daughter was an enigma.
Having the hots for her teacher was no help at all.
* * *
LONDON JENNINGS KNEW she was a freak.
