Promise Of A Family. Jessica Steele

sake, she fumed impatiently—the doorbell sounded and she went to answer it with her hair left as it had been.

      ‘You found us all right,’ she murmured, remembering her manners as she invited him into her home. He ignored her sociable enquiry. She wondered why she had bothered. ‘Come into the sitting room,’ she said, polite still, and led the way. ‘Would you like coffee?’ she stayed polite to enquire civilly.

      He shook his head. ‘I want to be away long before twelve-thirty,’ he replied succinctly.

      Well, he needn’t bother. She wanted him out of her home long before Dianne dropped Pip off. Determined to stay civilised, Leyne took a seat on one of the several easy chairs in the room, and relaxed a little when he followed suit. Jack Dangerfield was tall, and somehow, even sitting down, he still seemed to dominate the room.

      Leyne was staring at his jet-back hair, her gaze flitting to his eyes, green, and identical to those of her niece, when he interrupted her inventory. ‘Your niece is out somewhere, you said?’

      Quickly Leyne gathered herself together. ‘She and her friend Alice more often than not swim on a Saturday morning,’ she replied. And, lest he should think his daughter neglected in any way—for all he had not yet admitted to being Pip’s father, ‘Dianne, Alice’s mother, and I have an arrangement where one or other of us does the ferrying around. Dianne will keep an eye on the girls this morning.’

      She could have saved herself the breath, Leyne realised—he was not the least bit interested. ‘You’re still insisting that I’m the child’s father?’

      That same raven hair! Those same green eyes! Add that to what her mother had told her. ‘There’s no doubt about it in my mind,’ she answered firmly.

      Jack Dangerfield favoured her with an impatient look. Clearly he did not want a daughter foisted on him, particularly a daughter he had never known about. ‘Her mother’s abroad?’ he questioned.

      She had already told him that! ‘South America at the moment,’ Leyne informed him.

      ‘I thought you said she was in Australia,’ he threw her by stating.

      Leyne blinked—where had Australia come from? ‘No, I didn’t!’ she replied sharply.

      He did not seem convinced. ‘But she has been to Australia?’ he pressed.

      ‘Max has never been to Australia,’ Leyne told him bluntly. ‘It may be on their itinerary before she comes home, hopefully in time for Pip’s next birthday, but it will be Max’s first visit there.’

      He shrugged, but accepted what she said. ‘I must have been thinking of someone else.’

      ‘No doubt,’ Leyne replied. She would not be at all surprised if he had many ex-women-friends in all corners of the globe.

      ‘Well, I have to tell you, Miss Rowberry—’ he began, and looked so serious that she stared at him from her wide blue eyes, expecting some quite shattering announcement. But as he stared back—his eyes on her eyes and on the earnest look of her—he checked. And, after a moment when—ridiculously, she later thought—time seemed suspended, he merely added, ‘That I—hmm—would like to take up your offer of coffee after all.’

      Leyne went to the kitchen and could not help feeling a little let down. Though quite what she had been expecting him to say she wasn’t sure. He seemed determined not to acknowledge Pip as his—and Leyne was not at all certain what she could do about that.

      She returned to the sitting room with a tray of coffee, knowing that for her niece’s sake, and no other, she must be equally determined.

      ‘Oh, if only Max had not lost her cellphone.’ She mumbled her thoughts out loud as she handed him his coffee and took her coffee back to the chair she had been seated in a short while ago.

      ‘Cellphone?’ Jack enquired politely.