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A new birthday, a new beginning.
She hoped.
But sitting on the rock that had once been hers and Stone’s safe haven, all she could think of was how it’d been one of the last times she’d seen Stone. The way he looked without the restriction of any clothes covering that surprisingly savage strength. What she would give to feel him pressed against her, to have his hard arms encircle her body and tighten around her until...
She was crazy thinking like this. Crazy. Drawing a shaky breath, Jenna cleared her head and forced her thoughts in a different direction.
She had to right some of her wrongs, and as hard as it would be, she had to tell everyone who she was.
Or did she?
Confused and surprisingly hurt, she stared at the stairs up which Stone had disappeared.
The detective she’d hired had done his job. She knew all the paper facts about Stone and his daughter—her daughter knew where they lived, what he did for a living, what he drove, and still it wasn’t enough. She yearned for more. She yearned to see her child.
For that, Jenna needed forgiveness. And Stone—she needed him, too. He’d looked so good. So big and powerful and darkly beautiful. So... hers. Only he would never be hers again. She’d seen to that ten years ago, when she’d run from both of them like the frightened seventeen-year-old she’d been. The ache in her heart was so sharp it almost doubled her over.
So did the shock of him not recognizing her—an additionally painful and deflating blow.
Well, what had she expected? A jagged windshield tearing off her face hadn’t helped any. Neither had the reconstructive surgeries or the way her hair had returned darker after being shaved in pre-op. And no one would recognize her voice, which was now throatier—even sexier—thanks to her voice box also being damaged in the accident. But most of all she blamed the ten years that had passed so quickly since she’d left the small town nestled on the California coast.
“It’ll be okay,” she whispered. Stone, in spite of his inner toughness and sometimes blunt nature, was a gentleman at heart. No matter how much rage and resentment he’d built up against her—and she was certain there was plenty—his sense of decency and honor would prevail. He had a will of iron and a stubborn streak to go along with it, but regardless, Stone was honest to a fault.
Unlike her.
At the thought, the tears she’d been barely holding back began to fall.
* * *
Late that afternoon Stone flipped up the page on the calendar and drew a ragged breath as he reminded himself what he already knew.
Jenna’s birthday.
She’d be... He pretended to count. As though he’d forgotten it’d been ten years since he’d last laid eyes on her.
She’d be twenty-seven now. And he wondered, as he often did, what she was doing. She wasn’t living in a small town enjoying the quaint lifestyle, that was for certain. Jenna had never been one for restrictions of any kind, and San Paso Bay, a typical small town, certainly posed them. Stone found the place refreshing and real compared with the bigger cities of the world, but he knew Jenna would be doing something entirely different.
Such as hang gliding off the Angeles Crest. Or sky diving in the Mojave Desert. Maybe even mountain climbing in Tibet. Wait—this was the nineties. She was probably bungee jumping off the Golden Gate bridge or extreme skiing in the Canadian Rockies.
In the quiet of his shop Stone felt his anger swell up once again and grab him by the throat.
He turned abruptly from the calendar.
This date always got him, left him feeling as though he’d just taken a sucker punch to the solar plexus. Always left him drowning in a sea of furious emotion that time never seemed to ease. But it was just this one day, he told himself. All the other days of the year he was perfectly fine.
Yet he went to the beach—their beach—on this day every year at dawn. Just as they had together... The pencil he held snapped. He couldn’t keep doing this.
Look what had happened to him this morning with that woman. Hours later, and he was still thinking about the mysterious Cindy Beatty.
Purposely Stone drew a deep breath and let his surroundings calm him. Toy Station, his pride and joy, never failed him. Some said he wasted his talent as an architect designing and building educational toys for gifted children, which he insisted on making by hand for classrooms all over the globe. Others rumored he’d been disinherited by his rich family and therefore had to spend every day working his fingers to the bone.
It was true, all of it. But Stone loved his life. Loved his work.
And loved...
Sara rushed into Toy Station with a wide grin on her face.
Sara. Just the sight of her completed his thought. He loved his daughter.
“Didja get it?” She bounced from one foot to the other like a Ping-Pong ball. “Didja? Didja?”
“Get what?”
“Daddyyyyy!”
Smiling, he handed her the one-hour-photo envelope.
“Cool!” She tore open the envelope, then flipped through each shot, giggling at some, making faces at others. “Come look. I’m getting good.”
Stone glanced down at the mostly blurred and very unbalanced shots, some with suspicious-looking smudges that might have been a finger on the lens, and nodded seriously. “Very,” he said encouragingly.
“Look, there’s Sally pretending my teddy is her daddy. She doesn’t see him since he remarried, so I told her it was okay to pretend, just like I do about Mommy.”
Stone held his tongue, but it was difficult because anger nearly choked him. He had no patience for people who turned away from family. To him, family was everything. Family took care of their own, or rather, they should. It was that simple. Maybe he was just old-fashioned, but it was the way he felt, and he knew nothing would ever change that.
Unfortunately, he also knew that things rarely happened as they should. “Bring Sally over here, Sara. We’ll be her family anytime she needs us. Okay?”
Her smile lit his heart. “’Kay.”
“So what was your hurry to have the pictures developed?”
She didn’t answer, but pulled out the last photograph with a frown. “Oh, Daddy. I can’t believe you took this one.” She moaned theatrically, as only a ten-year-old can do.
Stone glanced at the photo causing the distress and laughed. “This is my proof,” he teased, tugging on a loose curl the color of coal. “You helped me paint your bedroom. You picked out those horrid colors.” He shook his head. “Chartreuse, of all things.”
Sara snickered.
“Anyway, I needed the snapshot so that in three months, when you come to me with those big baby blues begging for yet another color change, I can pull it out and remind you—this was what you wanted. You wanted it so badly you helped paint it.”
“Oh, Daddy.”
“You already said that.” Stone moved away, heading toward the back of the workshop where he did most of his designing. “You never told me what your hurry was.”
“My album,” she said in a soft dreamy voice that made him turn back to look at her. “I want my photo album to be complete when Mommy comes back.”
His heart stopped. A new wave of rage at Jenna hit him. “Honey...” Hard to talk when his lungs wouldn’t expand, he discovered. “Sara—”
“It’s her birthday today.”
“Yes,” he managed.
She met his unsteady gaze with eyes wise beyond their years. “I know what you told me,” she whispered from the other side of the store, but he caught every word. “That you don’t think she’s ever coming back.”
God. “I’m sorry, Sara—”
“And I know you don’t want me to think about her, but I can’t help it. I want her to come back.”
“Oh, baby.” He sighed and moved toward her. Thankfully he had no meeting, no customers, so there would be no nosy ears listening to this. Gently he took Sara’s shoulders and waited until she looked at him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were thinking about her?”
“Because it hurts you.” Sara, her wide eyes sheened with unshed tears, sniffed loudly. “I hate it when you hurt.”
She hadn’t cried about her mother for some time, and Stone was furious at himself for not noticing sooner that she needed him. “Sara...” Was it possible to feel such overwhelming love for a small child, so much that it was a physical pain? “I don’t want you to keep things inside, ever.” He cupped her chin and kissed her nose. “Even if you think it’s going to hurt me.”
“Then why don’t we talk about her?”
How to explain? How to tell his precious and yes, dammit, sheltered daughter that she’d been abandoned at birth by a mother who had been little more than a child herself? That he’d been too young to take on both the baby and the mother? That even if he could have managed, it didn’t matter because Jenna had run?
But Sara needed to know, needed to understand, and he couldn’t fail her. “I’ll talk about her to you anytime,” he promised, knowing that promise was likely to kill him.
“Why did she go away before I was out of the hospital?”
“She had to go, Sara.” Defending the woman who had nearly destroyed him was easy only because Sara needed answers. Kind ones. “She had to. She had no one to love her, and so she ran away.”
Huge blue eyes waited for more. Jenna’s eyes. They were a more brilliant blue than his, and framed by lush lashes—just like Jenna’s. “I would love her.”
Unable to trust his voice, Stone squeezed her hand.
“Why couldn’t she just have made a family with us and be ours forever? Why did she have to go?”
Solemnly, patiently, she blinked at him, and Stone swallowed hard. His own anguish came back so easily, he discovered. “She was scared, honey. Very scared.” And to be fair to Jenna, there’d been evil forces that had pushed her to leave. Forces he hadn’t been able to protect her from. She’d been betrayed, horribly and cruelly, by her own mother in a single event that had changed Jenna’s life forever. Still, she could have, should have, trusted him to help, and she hadn’t. “She was young, and alone and petrified.”
“But you were with her, and you can fix anything.”
God bless this child who had never wanted for a thing. Stone, with his ruthlessly stubborn streak and single-mindedness, had seen to it. But for the sake of memories and a heartache that had never died, he had to try to make Sara understand. “Yes, she had me,” he told her. “But I was young, too.”
“You were in college. At a fancy expensive school.”
“Yes.”
“And your mommy and daddy got mad at you and never spoke to you again. You had to transpose.”
“Transfer,” he corrected with a small smile. “To the local college here. I wanted you with me, Sara.” His parents had disowned them both, the boy barely a man, and the infant without a mother, all because he had “ruined his life” by keeping his baby. The baby he’d been responsible for.
Neither his mother nor his father nor his brother, Richard, Stone’s childhood hero, had spoken to Stone or Sara since.
Regret wasn’t a part of this. He could never look into Sara’s beautiful face and regret one part of what had happened. But it did bring up his worst nightmare, and remind him of the stoic way Sara accepted the fact that they had no family willing to acknowledge their existence.
For what would happen to his daughter if something happened to him? Who would take care of her, love her?
“It’d be nice to have grandparents.” Sara’s casual tone didn’t fool him. “Or...an uncle.”
She wasn’t talking in general, and he knew it. She meant his own parents and his brother. At the wistful tone in her voice, he actually felt murderous toward his own family. “They don’t understand, Sara. They can’t see past their own stubborn noses. But I love you and I’ll never stop. ’Kay?”
She smiled. “’Kay.” Tipping her head, she studied him. “Has she ever been back?”
“I’d tell you if she had. I’ve always promised you that. You don’t ever have to wonder.” He didn’t add that he’d spent more than a small fortune trying to find Jenna over the years. That occasionally he still tried, although now it was completely for Sara’s sake, because he had the feeling he would always be far too angry at Jenna ever to want her in his life. He refused to add to his daughter’s pain, but he couldn’t stand the thought of her waiting expectantly for something he’d become convinced would never happen. And if a small part of him wondered if there’d ever be a woman in his life who could make him truly forget Jenna, he ignored it. He didn’t need another heartbreak. “I’m afraid she’s not coming back, Sara.”
The girl stared down at the last photo of herself, the one where she was decked out in painter’s attire, grinning broadly as she painted her room a somewhat sickening shade of yellow-green. Completely unaware of how much every part of her—her laugh, her carefree attitude, her easy affection—all reminded Stone of Jenna.
“She is coming back,” Sara whispered. “I just know it.” She met her dad’s worried expression and hugged him hard. “Well, she is.”
Holding her close, Stone stared over her head at the calendar.
Ten years.
He was far from the frightened twenty-year-old left with no family and an infant he didn’t know how to care for. As a result, he’d long ago hardened his heart to the memory of the wild needy Jenna who’d so completely stolen his affections. He’d long ago moved on. Yet in spite of all his lingering rage, he’d forgiven her for what she’d done to him. Or so he told himself.
But as he kissed the top of Sara’s head, he had to admit the truth to himself.
He hadn’t forgiven Jenna for what she’d done to their daughter. Hadn’t even come close.
* * *
Jenna’s chest hurt. It had nothing to do with any lingering injuries and everything to do with the sight in front of her.
She sat on a tier of stands in the gymnasium of the school watching a basketball game.
Sara—it was really her this time, not some cruel dream her mind had conjured up to tease her—was playing basketball with all her little ten-year-old heart. Her tongue was squeezed between her teeth, her eyes narrowed in fierce concentration as she dribbled—okay, tripped—over the ball.
Her daughter. It had to be. Jenna had seen no pictures over the years. How could she have when she’d so completely disappeared no one could have found her even if they’d been looking? And she wasn’t hopeful or foolish enough to think that anyone had been looking.
“Go, Sara!” came a chorus of cries from the crowd gathered around Jenna.
Sara. Her name really was Sara.
Which meant Stone had kept his fervent promise that day in the hospital, when Jenna had named their baby before vanishing.
She was incredible, with beautiful long dark hair, bright laughing blue eyes and a sweet infectious laugh. A perfect little replica of Stone. Jenna’s heart squeezed as her arms crossed over herself in a mime of the hug she yearned to give her child.
Looking at her, Jenna couldn’t remember why she’d stayed away. None of the reasons she’d thought so important all those years seemed to matter now.
Tears welled in her eyes, but Jenna ruthlessly blinked them back. She had no right to cry, none at all. But Lord, it hurt. She’d never wanted anything as much as she wanted her little girl.
“That’s it, Sara,” someone shouted. “Run, run!”
It was an achingly familiar voice that made Jenna’s heart all but stop. Stone, his hands cupped over his mouth, was giving directions to his team, and God, he looked good. When she’d seen him the day before at the beach, she hadn’t been fully prepared for the sheer physical jolt of being near him again, but the long years of separation peeled away as if they’d never been.
There didn’t seem to be an unsure bone in that tall, toned body. There was something raw and earthy and generally untamed about him, despite the casual athletic clothes.
