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“I am,” Bennett responded.
“It’s about your son, Mr. Dodge.”
Bennett frowned, no immediate emotional reaction bubbling up to the surface. Mostly because the guy was just plain wrong. He had to be.
“I don’t have a son,” Bennett said.
“The paperwork I have says you do. You’re welcome to contest that. But what I have is a kid that’s going to end up in a group home if he can’t stay with his father.”
As if on cue the door to that SUV opened and a woman in a severe-looking outfit got out, followed by a teenage boy. Fifteen years old or so, Bennett figured.
Brown hair, tall, lanky. And he looked up at Bennett with simmering fury in brown eyes that matched Bennett’s perfectly.
“Hi, Dad,” he said. “I guess it’s been a while.”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ud9cbd981-cf4a-5971-abd2-905948ff5127)
“YOUR MOTHER IS Marnie Claire?”
Bennett was sitting at the kitchen table across from the boy and the social worker. The police officer was outside. Apparently, he had been required to act as an escort because the social worker wasn’t confident in her ability to keep the boy from running off. The boy. Dallas.
Dallas Dodge.
That was his name. His legal name. Though, Bennett had had no idea of his existence. In fact, Bennett had been told that the pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. He had lived with it like a weight ever since. Everything he had heard about Marnie, what had happened to her, the kind of life she had fallen into. He had blamed himself. She had been so distraught when she had broken up with him. When she had left and he had been convinced that any dire straits she was in was partly his fault. But if any of this was true, if this was his son... Then she had lied to him. She had lied to him almost sixteen years ago.
And he was a father.
To a teenager.
Dammit to hell.
“That’s right,” the social worker, who was named Grace, answered the question for Dallas.
“How old are you?” Bennett said, addressing the kid straight on. Talking around him was insulting, and even if he did seem like he was a little punk, Bennett wasn’t going to treat him like he was invisible. He knew what that was like.
When his mother had died that was what everyone did. They talked over his head like he was stupid, like he couldn’t possibly understand what was happening. Addressing all manner of sympathy to his father, to his older brothers, and treating Bennett like he had no idea what was happening in his own life. “Fifteen,” the kid said.
“There isn’t a foster family that has been able to cope with him. And he’s extremely lucky that the owner of the last store he robbed didn’t press charges.”
“It wasn’t robbery,” Dallas said. “You make it sound like I had a gun.”
“That’s armed robbery,” Bennett supplied.
“Well,” Dallas continued. “It wasn’t as badass as that. It was shoplifting. Shoplifting would be a pretty pussy thing to go to jail for.”
“But it is something you could have gone to jail for,” the social worker said, clearly well versed in Dallas’s brand of attitude, and pretty damned fed up with it too.
Which was fair enough, he supposed.
“What happened to your mom?” Bennett asked.
“I don’t know.” Dallas shrugged. “She used to come around sometimes, but I haven’t seen her in a few years.”
“His mother lost custody a few years ago,” Grace explained.
Bennett rounded on her. “If this is my kid then why didn’t anyone contact me then?”
“Because we didn’t know,” she said. “There is no father listed on Dallas’s birth certificate. We didn’t know where the last name Dodge came from.”
“How did you find it now?”
“It was in something of my mother’s,” Dallas said. “Something that I kept.”
“He showed it to me when I told him about the group home,” the social worker said.
Bennett just sat there, shock making him numb. And it was probably a damn good thing.
But on some level, this angry, feral-looking kid wanted to be with him. Or at least, he wanted to be with him more than he wanted to be in a group home. But...it was clear he didn’t want to be here that much. And... Bennett couldn’t close the gap that he felt. With the facts in his brain, the words that had been planted there and the feelings in his heart.
This was his son. In all likelihood it was.
Not only did he look quite a bit like a combination of the Dodge brothers, the timing matched up. For Marnie’s pregnancy. The one that she had said she lost.
That had been a lie. Clearly.
“You didn’t know you had a son,” Grace said.
“No,” Bennett responded. “I didn’t know. Do you honestly think that if I knew there was a kid out there that was mine, that had gotten taken from his mother and put in foster care... Do you honestly think I would’ve left him there?”
“I’ve seen everything,” she said, her eyes exceedingly weary. “There is nothing in the whole world that would surprise me at this point. Nothing at all. Actually, what surprises me most of all is finding you here in a house with a career and a semblance of a normal life. Unless you have drug paraphernalia hidden underneath that very nice-looking sectional in the living room, it seems like you might actually be the best thing that could have happened to Dallas.”
“He’s sitting right there,” Bennett said. “Maybe we should talk right to him, instead of just about him.”
“Oh, it doesn’t bother me,” Dallas said, smart-ass grin tipping his lips up. “What’s the point, anyway? You don’t want me to stay here. I didn’t have any idea my dad was living in such a fucking fancy place.”
“It’s not that fancy.” The word dad was echoing in Bennett’s head, and it was making him feel a little bit dizzy.
“Fancier than where I’ve been, believe me.”
“You’ve been with some nice families,” Grace said.
“Yeah,” Dallas snorted. “Too nice for me.”
“So let me get this straight,” Bennett said, resolutely keeping his focus on Dallas, almost unable to keep his eyes off him. This kid that looked like a mirror image of him nearly sixteen years ago. This kid who was a year younger than Bennett had been when he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant and had thought he had to face up to becoming a father.
It hadn’t happened. Then.
But it had all come home to roost in a really strange way.
“You’ve been in trouble with the law.”
“Just a little.” Dallas smirked.
“Yes,” Grace confirmed.
“What else? Why won’t they keep you in the houses?”
“I run away. I cuss a lot. I was with a church family a few months ago and I taught one of the little kids the F word.”
“That was a dick move,” Bennett pointed out.
Dallas grinned. “Yeah.”
“What else?”
Dallas shrugged. “Nothing really. I mean, they want to control me, or turn me into what they think a good kid is, so that they can prove that they made an impact, or whatever bullshit reason they have for taking in foster kids in the first place. I had a mom. I don’t need another one. And as for the fathers... They all sucked. I haven’t seen any evidence that dads don’t.”
“Mine doesn’t,” Bennett said, his voice rough.
“Well, so far mine kinda does.”
Bennett couldn’t argue with that.
“Did you ever hurt anyone?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Dallas said, looking down.
Bennett’s stomach tightened. “What happened?”
“Just a fistfight. One of the older kids was saying shit to one of the girls. I didn’t like it.”
Instantly, that tightening healed. Because if Dallas had that much of a barometer inside of him for what was right, for what needed to be defended...he wasn’t all that bad of a kid.
And then Bennett realized it didn’t really matter if he was. If Dallas was the one who had been punched because he had said something objectionable to a girl, Bennett would still have to take him on. If this was his son, then it didn’t matter if he was the worst little troll on the face of the planet, Bennett had to take care of him.
They were all sitting around this table like there was a choice. But there wasn’t a choice. No way in hell. There was no real choice here.
“What’s the procedure for this?” Bennett asked.
“We can do a paternity test,” Grace said.
“And that...does what? Makes it all official in the court?”
“Yes,” she said. “Then there will be a family court date to grant you official custody. It’s not an adoption if you’re his biological father.”
“Then we’ll do all that.”
“I have paperwork ready for you to be granted temporary custody in the meantime,” Grace said. “He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“He has this place. It’s fine.”
Nothing was fine. Bennett had a feeling that he was existing in some strange plane where nothing seemed real as a precaution against the reality of it all. A reality that was a bit too harsh, a bit too sharp for him to cope with just yet.
“I don’t...” Bennett looked around his house, which was spotless because he had a cleaner that came in once a week and took care of everything. Spotless because he didn’t spend all that much time at home. “I don’t have anything for a kid.”
“I have a bag,” Dallas said.
Again, Bennett couldn’t quite tell if Dallas was being dragged here on sufferance, or if he wanted to be here. He was wondering those things because wondering was a lot easier than feeling at the moment.
“Okay,” Bennett responded.
“I’ll go get it.” The boy stood up.
Grace eyed him speculatively. Dallas put his hands up in a defensive gesture. “That cop is still outside. It’s not like I’m going to run for it. Anyway, I don’t exactly have the equipment to go live in the mountains. You drove me out to the middle of nowhere. Where am I going to go?”
He walked out of the room, and Bennett winced when the front door slammed.
“You didn’t know?” The woman leveled her dark eyes on him.
“I had no clue,” he said, keeping his words as firm as he could. “My girlfriend told me she lost the baby.”
Grace looked suddenly sympathetic. “Oh.”
“I believed her. She left. Said she couldn’t stand to be around me after all that. That was the last I heard of her. We were dumb kids.”
Grace raised her eyebrows. “You must have been. I was surprised by how young you were.”
Bennett had aged about ten years in the last forty minutes, so that statement seemed especially funny right at the moment. But he couldn’t laugh.
“What happened to him?” Bennett asked, his voice rough. “What happened to her?”
Grace sighed, long and slow. “I haven’t been working with Dallas that long. But from what I understand his mother had drug issues. He was neglected and eventually had to be removed from her custody. He went back and forth for a while, but as he said...not recently. He’s been moving between foster homes for couple of years now.”
“And no one keeps him?”
“He’s difficult,” Grace said, folding her hands together. “I’m not going to lie to you about that.”
A difficult kid who’d had more than a difficult life, and there had been no reason for that. No reason at all. Bennett had been here the whole time. And if he’d known...
“It’s okay if he’s difficult,” Bennett said, firming up his jaw. “He’s my difficult.”
She nodded slowly, and something that looked like it might at least be a neighbor of respect flashed in her eyes. “I suppose he is.”
Dallas came back into the room then, dragging a black garbage bag behind him. “Quick packing,” he said, indicating what passed as his luggage.
For a moment, Bennett felt like he was staring into a black hole of rage. Despair. Denial.
And yet here was this kid who looked almost just like him. This kid standing there clutching a garbage bag.
