From where she stood at the edge of the park, Laney saw Wes Grayson slumped on the bench, watching his daughter engaged in a game of kickball. She glanced anxiously down at the white jumpsuit she had chosen. Was it right? she wondered once again. What did one wear, after all, to meet one’s seven-year-old daughter for the first time? What if Amy hated it? What if Amy hated her?
Ignoring the ache of threatening tears behind her eyes, she flipped her hair back over her shoulder, lifted her chin, and started toward Wes. She had loved ladies with long hair when she was a child, so she had let hers hang freely today. Now she wondered if it made her look too young. How would Amy relate to someone who looked like a kid claiming to be her mother?
She caught herself and forced back the hope that Amy would eventually learn who she really was. Wes had agreed to let her meet Amy, not spill out her heart.
She had no right to expect miracles, she thought as she walked toward him. She had given up on miracles long ago. The most she hoped for now was a chance.
Wes didn’t move when she reached him. “She’s playing kickball right now,” he muttered without glancing at her. “We’ll have to wait until the game’s over.”
“Of course.” Laney swallowed and sat down next to him. She saw Amy kick the ball and run after it, then gasped when the black-haired girl tripped over a rock and caught herself.
“I’m OK, Daddy!” she shouted with a wave.
He waved back, then regarded Laney with a quick, dispassionate look.
Her cheeks stung, her nerves were frazzled, and her hands trembled like leaves rustled by an unforgiving wind. “She looks just like me,” she said in a raspy voice.
Wes nodded, as if the concession was too much to make verbally.
His silence was as smothering as her fear was strangling, and if she could not relieve the fear, Laney resolved at least to break the quiet. “Thank you for letting me come,” she said.
He moved his unfocused eyes back to the playground. “Didn’t have much choice.”
Laney regarded the austerity in his eyes, the dark circles beneath them, and the stubble darkening his jaw. “You had one.”
A brief surge of guilt shot through her at the brooding shrug of his brows, but then she looked back at her laughing child and realized that her cause was a sound one, in spite of the pain it caused Wes Grayson.
The pain it caused within her, however, was something she hadn’t expected. Giggles rolled over one another as Amy ran after the ball and kicked it, then took off in a sprint with the others. But the child’s joy only widened a sorrowful fissure in Laney’s heart. All the time lost. All the smiles missed. All the discoveries and the heartaches and the tears … they were gone forever, and all Laney had of them were a few brief memories of a tiny infant and some pictures she had had to hide in the shadows to take. “I held her, you know.”
“What?”
“When she was born. They handed her to me …”
Laney felt his eyes burning into her with an appraisal teetering between burgeoning hostility and grudging sympathy. She told herself to stop before she broke down, but somehow it was important for him to know. “I watched her color change from purple to pink, and she held her head up just a little, and she had so much hair …” Her voice broke off, and she took a cleansing breath.
Wes looked away and squinted, unseeing, at something across the park. “Was that the last time you saw her?” he asked without inflection.
The sound of laughing children and passing cars and whispering leaves kept her control from snapping completely. “No,” she said. “I held her once more the next morning. I even nursed her …” She swallowed and pushed at the corners of her eyes, as if the pressure could dam the tears.
The ball escaped the players and rolled in front of them, and Wes gave it an absent kick toward the children. He looked back at her, his eyes effectively guarded. “I didn’t know they let you hold your baby when it was going up for adoption.”
“They usually don’t,” she said. “But I didn’t plan to give her up.”
A cloud gave way to sunlight, and a ray of it illuminated Wes’s frowning face. He set his foot down and straightened out of his slump. Leaning forward and clasping his hands between his knees, he asked, “So why did you?”
Laney swallowed hard and brushed away the tear paving a path down her cheek. “Because my father was very insistent.” She gave a sad laugh. “He had lots of reasons, among them the fact that I wasn’t competent as a human being, much less as a mother. He said I would ruin her life.”
“And you believed him?”
Laney met his gaze. “When you hear something enough you can’t help believing it. And I was only eighteen. But that wasn’t enough to make me give up my baby. I had an escape planned for the second day. I was going to take her and go as far away from my father as I could get. But he acted faster. When I went to get her she was already gone.”
The lines around Wes’s eyes deepened, as if the revelation somehow unsettled his own past. “But you must have signed something.”
“After that I did,” she admitted, looking back at the giggling little girl. “My father told me that I wasn’t mature enough to make such a decision, and he was afraid I’d do something selfish instead of what was right. I felt defeated, so I signed.”
She heard Wes clear his throat, and he looked away again, eyes narrowing further as he seemed to struggle with this new information. “What about Amy’s natural father? Didn’t he try to—”
Laney cut quickly across his question. “The only thing he tried to do was forget he’d ever known me. He reinforced what my father told me. And I believed them both.”
A cloud veiled the sun again, casting shadows over the park, cooling the breeze a degree but not enough to account for the chill taking hold of her. Laney looked toward the playing children and wished she hadn’t told him quite so much. She hadn’t meant to burden him with her story. All she wanted was to meet her child.
Several moments ticked by as Wes seemed to digest her words. “What happened when you left the hospital?” he asked quietly.
Laney shrugged. “I left home after that and went to Houston. I never saw my father again.” She stopped, tempered her voice. “I had time to grow up, time to learn my own value, time to find out that I wasn’t a worthless burden, time to regret and wonder …”
“Time to decide to correct the bad hand you were dealt?” he asked, protective antagonism working back into his soft voice.
“I just wanted to make sure she was happy, to convince myself that things had worked out for the best,” she said, unable to stop a new ambush of tears. “I thought then I could find peace and stop wondering if it was her every time I saw a little girl.”
A mother and child passed by, and the child pointed at the tears staining Laney’s face before being dragged away.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, dropping her face and letting her hair curtain her anguish. “I promised myself I wouldn’t get emotional. That’s not good for Amy.”
Wes wet his lips and fought the compassion tugging at his heart. He lifted his hand to touch her … then pulled it back, fighting his own traitorous feelings. It wasn’t easy to let a woman cry without comforting her, but he told himself that any sensitivity on his part might backfire. In many ways, she was the enemy.
“I … I just didn’t want you to think that I’m some … callous monster.”
“I didn’t,” he said. But his tone hovered somewhere between condemnation and compassion, as though he couldn’t decide which to feel.
Forcing herself to get control, Laney wiped back the tears and dug into her purse for a tissue. She rubbed her face, ridding it of the evidence of tears, and glanced up at Amy, still playing ball. “She didn’t see me crying, did she?” she asked anxiously.
Wes shook his head. “She’s too busy.”
Laney took a deep, shuddering breath and looked fully at her daughter laughing with her teammates, and realized her whole world hung on the smile of a small child. “I’m so nervous.”
Wes followed her gaze, his own eyes glossing over, as if he didn’t know which side to join in the battle of his feelings. “I’m a little nervous myself,” he admitted. The wind ruffled his mahogany hair and made him look more endearing than she wanted to acknowledge. His full lips seemed to droop at the corners, and he stroked a knuckle across them.
“All this,” she said, glancing back at the child, “and she probably won’t even like me.”
“She’ll like you,” he said in a quiet voice, but the words of assurance seemed to leave him without any for himself.
He looked back toward the children who were breaking up into smaller groups. “I’ll go get her now.”
“No!” The word came too abruptly but not as quickly as the dive of her stomach. She caught his hand.
He stopped and gave her a long, searching look that stripped her soul bare. “Why?”
“Because I’m scared.”
Wes’s throat convulsed, and he drew a breath that didn’t seem to come easily. “It’ll be all right, Laney.”
The words comforted her more than anything else he could have offered, but his hard expression fought with the compassion in his voice.
“Will you stay?” she entreated anxiously.
“If you want me to,” he said. “Just take it easy. I’ll go get her.” He stood up, but Laney grabbed his hand.
“Wes? Are … are you going to tell her who I am?”
His eyes were tormented when they meshed with hers, and he raked a hand through his hair. Finally, he whispered, “Not yet.”
There was hope, she thought. He wasn’t ruling it out forever.
But as Wes approached his daughter, he wasn’t sure whether the little crumb of hope he’d thrown her was a form of self-betrayal or simple weakness.
“Daddy, they cheated,” Amy told her father.
Wes slid his shaky hands into his jeans pockets and feigned a smile. “You always say that when you lose. Try being a good sport.”
“I was being a good sport until they started cheating. They don’t even know the rules.”
Wes tousled her hair and wished that a meaningless game in the park was all Amy had to bring her down. “It’s just a game, short stuff. Next time you can cheat.”
A little smile broke through Amy’s scowl. “You’re not going to let me cheat.”
Wes gave a shrug. “Well, maybe not. But that glimmer of hope might tide you over until next time.”
Amy giggled and set her hands on her hips. “I’m not dumb.”
Wes gave a mock gasp. “You’re not? Then I’m going to have to rethink my parenting strategy a little.”
“Daddy, you’re so silly.”
Wes feigned indignation. “Silly? I’ll show you silly.” With that he picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, tickling her until she squealed and twisted with delight.
“Let me down, Daddy!”
Wes gave in and let her down, her giggles lightening the weight of his burden a little. “Boy, you’re heavy. What have you been eating?”
“Your cooking,” Amy said with a smirk. “And it’s made me lose weight.”
“Don’t insult my culinary talents, or I’ll feed you oatmeal for the rest of the week.”
Amy grimaced, and Wes stooped down and glanced toward Laney, who seemed to be loosening up as she watched the bantering with a look of poignant anticipation.
“Come on, short stuff. I want you to meet that lady over there.”
Amy took his hand and followed him toward Laney. Wes watched Laney lean forward and give a shaky smile, a smile that touched his heart despite his efforts to ignore it.
When they were close to her, Amy offered her an astonished smile of recognition. “They let you out of jail, huh?”
Laney’s face went blank, and she glanced up at Wes in a panic.
“For taking pictures,” Amy continued. “Did they make you do push-ups?”
Wes rubbed his jaw and gave a slight grin as he sat down. “I think she has prison mixed up with spring training.”
Laney found herself laughing with overwhelming relief, the first time she’d laughed since … she couldn’t remember. “I didn’t go to jail, Amy,” she said. “And it’s a good thing, because I’m hopeless when it comes to push-ups.”
Wes pulled Amy onto his lap. “Honey, I told you they just asked her some questions. It was all a mistake. Laney and I are …” He hesitated on the word friends. “We know each other now, and she wanted to meet you.”
Amy’s tongue tested the hole where her front tooth had been as she pondered Laney. “Can you cook spaghetti?” she asked intently, as if that were an important clue to the woman’s character. “Spaghetti that isn’t runny?”
Laney’s eyes sparkled as she smiled at the beautiful child. “Well, yes. I make very good spaghetti.”
“Can you make it tonight? My daddy said he was feeding me oatmeal tonight.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Laney looked at Wes with uncertain eyes, suddenly embarrassed at the unexpected turn in the conversation. “He wouldn’t really feed you oatmeal, would he?”
“Trust me,” Amy assured her. “It’s either that or canned soup. And he doesn’t even warm it up right.” A child across the park called her name, and her attention was diverted. “I have to go,” she said quickly. “Sarah only has fifteen more minutes to play.” With that she slipped out of her father’s lap and barreled across the lawn toward her friend.
“Well,” Laney said on a frustrated chuckle. “That didn’t go exactly as I’d planned it.”
“I think she liked you,” Wes admitted. The words held a note of dread.
“For now,” she said, casting him an uneasy glance, though relief danced in her black eyes. “I was intriguing to her. She thought I was an ex-con.”
Wes almost smiled. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“It’s OK. It was a good icebreaker.” Her big eyes sparkled, warming something inside him that had been cold a long time, and he told himself it was just because her eyes looked so much like Amy’s.
“You’re a good father. I can’t imagine mine ever throwing me over his shoulder.” A tendril of envy uncurled inside her … not just envy of Amy for having a father who cared but envy of the woman he had loved and married and made a family with. What was he like as a husband? she wondered fleetingly.
Wes’s smile faded a degree, and he looked back at Amy. “If only playing and laughing were all it took to be a good father.”
Laney followed his gaze and slipped the strap of her purse to her shoulder, leaning forward but not getting up, as if she didn’t know whether to leave now or hang around until Amy’s friend had gone.
Wes felt for her, in spite of himself, for she had suffered such emotional anguish to meet so little reward. And yet he didn’t know if he was strong enough to offer her more.
Laney looked at him the same moment he looked at her.
“It was really—”
“You know, you don’t—”
The sentences were begun simultaneously, then died off together. “Go ahead,” they said together.
Black eyes locked mirthlessly with green ones, and finally Wes spoke. “She’s expecting spaghetti,” he said with a sober expression that told her the words were difficult. “And she wants you to cook it.”
Laney felt warm blood coloring her cheeks, and she shook her head. “I … I couldn’t impose that way.”
Wes’s eyes remained as serious as she’d ever seen them. “Cooking us dinner is no imposition,” he said. “I’m not wild about my cooking, either.”
Laney bit her lip and tried not to fantasize about the possibilities whirling through her mind. Making friends with her daughter, earning her love through a big dish of spaghetti, getting to know Amy’s father … She cut her thoughts off with the last fantasy and searched for her voice. “I’d like that.” She paused. “Could we tell her then?”
“We’ll see,” he said, and she wasn’t sure if it was the thick clouds blotting out the sun or the utter fear of what was happening that had turned Wes’s face pale. “Five-thirty?”
“Five-thirty,” she agreed breathlessly.
At that moment, Laney almost believed in miracles again.