Promise Forever. Marta Perry

implacable round face of the clock, warning her Sammy could walk in on them.

      Nothing else matters. Just get him out of here before Sammy comes in.

      “I don’t know who sent it. I didn’t. I don’t want anything from you.” It took a fierce effort to look at him as coolly as if he were a stranger.

      He is a stranger, a tiny voice sobbed in her ear. He’s not the man you loved.

      Tyler straightened, his shoulders stiff, his face a mask. “In that case, I’ll—”

      The creak of the screen door cut off the sentence, and fear obliterated her momentary relief.

      “Hey, Momma, I’m home.” Sammy’s quick footsteps slowed when he saw that his mother wasn’t alone. He glanced curiously at Tyler, then tossed a green spelling book on the desk. “Can I get a snack?”

      “May I,” she corrected automatically. Cool, careful. She could still get out of this in one piece. As long as Sammy didn’t hear Tyler’s name, she was all right. “Go on into the kitchen. I have some cookies started.”

      Sammy nodded, turned. She held her breath. Almost out of danger. There’d be time enough later to sort it all out. Get Sammy out, and…

      “Just a minute.” Tyler’s voice had roughened. It carried a raw note of command.

      She forced herself to move around the desk, grasp Sammy’s shoulders, look at Tyler. The expression on his face chilled her to the bone.

      He knew. He’d taken one look at Sammy, and her son’s beautiful eyes, so like his father’s, had given them away. Tyler knew Sammy was his son.

      Tyler couldn’t stop staring. At first he’d seen a child with Miranda’s heart-shaped face, her pointed chin.

      Then the boy looked at him, and Tyler had seen the child’s eyes. Deep brown, with the slightest gold flecks in them when the light hit as it did in that moment, slanting through the wavy panes of the hall window. Eyes deeply fringed with curling lashes.

      Winchester eyes—they were the same eyes he saw every time he looked at his brother and every morning in the mirror.

      Stop, take a breath, think about this.

      He didn’t really need to think about it. Maybe the truth had been there all along, beneath his initial assumption that he couldn’t have a child. He’d known, at some level, that if Miranda had a son, that boy was his.

      She hadn’t told him. Anger roared through his thoughts like a jet. Miranda had borne his child, and she hadn’t told him.

      The three of them stood, frozen in place, the old house quiet around them. From somewhere outside came the raucous squawk of a seagull, seeming to punctuate his anger. She hadn’t told him.

      He shifted his gaze to Miranda, furious words forming on his tongue. He’d tell her just what he thought—

      He couldn’t. Not with the boy standing there, looking at him with those innocent eyes. No matter how little he welcomed this news, how angry he was at the woman he’d once loved, he couldn’t say anything in front of the child.

      He took a breath. “We have to talk.”

      Miranda turned the child toward the swinging doors. “You go on back to the kitchen. I’ll be with you in a little bit.”

      The boy nodded. After another curious glance at Tyler, he pushed through the door.

      He gave the child—his child—another moment to get out of range. He heard the swish of the kitchen door closing. He could speak, if he could find the words.

      “Well, Miranda?”

      Her soft mouth tightened. “Not here. Anyone might walk in.”

      The fact that she was right didn’t help. His son. The words pounded in his blood. “There must be privacy somewhere in this place.”

      She gave a curt nod, then led the way to the room on the right of the hall.

      Tyler shut the door firmly, glancing around at overstuffed, shabby chairs, walls covered with family photos, a couple of toy cars abandoned on a round pedestal table. He didn’t remember being in this room before, but that wasn’t surprising. Miranda’s family had been as opposed to their relationship as his had been.

      He swung toward Miranda.

      “Well?” he repeated. “Why did it take you eight years to let me know I’m a father? Or didn’t you want child support until now?”

      She flinched, her eyes darkening. “I don’t need or want anything from you, Tyler.”

      He suppressed the urge to rant at her. Tyler Winchester didn’t lose control, no matter what the provocation. That was one of the keys to his success. “Then why send me that picture now?”

      “I didn’t!”

      Even through his anger, he had to recognize the sincerity in her voice. And he couldn’t deny the shock that had been written on her face when she’d first seen him.

      “You mean that, don’t you?”

      She nodded.

      “Then who?”

      “I don’t know. Does it really matter? You know.”

      “I should have known eight years ago.” His anger spiked again. “Why didn’t you tell me, Miranda? Even if our marriage was a mistake, surely I deserved to know I had fathered a child.”

      She crossed her arms, hugging herself. He’d thought, when he first saw her, that she didn’t look any older than she had at eighteen. Now he saw the faint lines around her eyes, the added maturity in the way she stood there, confronting him.

      “Well?” He snapped the word, annoyed at himself for the weakness of noticing how she looked.

      She spread her hands out. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Tyler. By the time I knew I was pregnant, our marriage was over.”

      He’d told himself he barely remembered that one short month. That wasn’t true. He remembered only too well—remembered the furious quarrel with his father over his involvement with a local girl, remembered storming out of the beach house intent on showing the old man that he could manage his own life.

      A runaway marriage would do it. He hadn’t found it difficult to persuade Miranda or himself that was their only option. They’d come back from their secret honeymoon to face the music—to tell both their families they were married.

      Miranda’s father had been disapproving but ready to accept the inevitable.

      Not his. His father had ranted and raged at both of them, his emotions spilling out like bubbling acid. And then he’d had a heart attack. He’d died before the paramedics reached him.

      Tyler slammed the door on that memory. He’d better focus on the present. “You were having our baby. I should have been told.”

      Anger flared in her heart-shaped face. “You wanted the divorce.”

      “I had a right to know,” he repeated stubbornly. He moved toward her a step, as if he could impel an explanation. But this wasn’t the old Miranda, the sweet young woman who’d been so dazzled by love she’d gone along with anything he said.

      “What was the point?” She brushed a strand of coppery hair away from her face impatiently. “You were busy taking your father’s place and saving the company. You had a life mapped out that didn’t include a child.”

      “And you figured you didn’t need me.” That was what rankled, he realized. She hadn’t needed him then, didn’t seem to need him now.

      “I had my family.”

      She gestured toward the groupings of family photographs hung against the wallpaper, the movement sending a whiff of her scent toward him. Soap and sunshine,