The Daddy Deal. Kathleen O'Brien

over his neck and gave Taylor a sorrowful look. “Nothing,” he said mournfully. “Zilch.”

      “Nothing?” Taylor didn’t ordinarily waste time repeating the obvious, but he could hardly believe his ears. “Nothing?”

      Charlie shrugged. “Well, nothing you can use anyway. Nothing that would seriously impeach her character, or the adoption itself. Apparently, Brooke Davenport adopted Justin in good faith—”

      “Good faith?” Taylor leaned over and jammed his forefinger against his thigh angrily. “With my name forged on those adoption papers?”

      “We’ve only your word for that, Taylor.” Before Taylor could let loose the oath that rose in his throat, Charlie put up a placating hand. “And don’t scowl at me like that. You know what I mean. I’m talking as your lawyer now, and legally it’s your word against theirs. It’s a damned good forgery—even the experts we hired can’t agree whether it’s a fake.”

      “It is.” Taylor’s lips were tight, and the words sounded like a hiss.

      “Well, we’re going to have to prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt if we expect a judge to take Justin away from the only family he’s ever known.” Charlie met Taylor’s gaze steadily. “Away from what is, by all accounts, a damn good mother.”

      Taylor narrowed his eyes. “Tell me.”

      “Okay, but it’s really just a bunch of negatives.” Charlie took another unnecessary swipe at his upper lip with the towel. “No record, except for a couple of parking tickets. No drugs, no alcohol, no wild nights at the local saloon.”

      “Boyfriends?”

      Charlie shook his head. “Nope. She spends all day with Justin. She works in her garden. Grows a lot of roses. Then at night, she’s still working as a nurse, mostly nights, mostly private duty. Not much time for a love life, actually.”

      “Who’s home with Justin all night, then?”

      “A nurse friend of hers, older lady.”

      “What about her?” Taylor knew he was grasping at straws, but damn it, there just had to be some chink in Brooke Davenport’s armor. “Any chance this other woman isn’t fit....?”

      Charlie smiled, obviously following Taylor’s line of desperation logic. “You mean is there any chance the old lady is really Ma Barker? Any chance she slips out at night to rob convenience stores, leaving Justin all alone in his crib?” He shook his head. “Sorry. We’ve already checked her out. She’s just a nice, semiretired nurse who rents a room from Brooke in return for a little baby-sitting.”

      Taylor expelled a frustrated breath and pulled on his left earlobe. “God, Charlie—”

      “I know.” Charlie’s eyes were sympathetic, though his tone was determinedly light. “All the wickedness in this heathen world, and we have to stumble into a nest of saints.”

      Taylor frowned. Something about all this didn’t make sense. “There aren’t very many single, twenty-six-year-old female saints around today, Charlie. Why no boyfriends? Is she hideous?”

      “Hardly!” Charlie laughed as if the word were a joke, and Taylor wondered just how attractive Brooke Davenport really was. He should have asked to see a picture of her. Though he was considered a tough and astute lawyer, Charlie McAllister was a notorious pushover for a pretty lady, and Taylor had noticed a definite softening in Charlie’s attitude toward the whole situation since they had finally located Justin and his adoptive mother.

      “So why no men in her life? Surely that’s odd in itself.”

      “No, no.” Charlie seemed irritable, as if he resented Taylor’s implications. “There’ve been men, naturally. She was engaged a couple of years ago to a lawyer named Westover. I checked him, too. Good-looking guy, but word is he’s a little short on ethics. Anyway, he didn’t approve of the adoption, didn’t want to be saddled with a damaged kid, I guess, so the relationship went sour.”

      “Still—”

      “And, of course, there was the teenage fiasco—” Charlie stopped himself abruptly, as if he had said something he hadn’t meant to say. He fussed with the laces on his jogging shoes. “Anyway, as I said, for our purposes there’s nothing. She’s normal, but temporarily celibate. She’s not a saint, I guess, but she’s darn close.”

      But Taylor wasn’t so easily distracted. He straightened slowly. “What teenage fiasco?”

      Charlie frowned. “Ancient history,” he equivocated, moving to his other shoe, grunting as he bent over farther than his paunch wanted to let him. “Irrelevant.”

      Taylor frowned, too, glaring down at Charlie’s bald spot, which was pink with incipient sunburn. “Whose side are you on here, Charlie?” His voice was hard, even harder than he had intended it to be, and he took a deep breath of muggy air. This thing was really getting to him.

      Charlie stopped pretending interest in the shoes. “Yours,” he said calmly, meeting Taylor’s eyes with the same guileless brown gaze Taylor remembered from childhood, the same straightforward honesty that had made Charlie the undisputed referee of all their crowd’s boyhood arguments. “Yours. You know that.”

      “Then why are you holding back on me? If you’ve found out something we can use—”

      “I haven’t.” Charlie leaned back with a sigh, wadding his towel up and tossing it roughly onto the bench beside him. “Look, Taylor, I’m telling you it’s old news. Ten years old, in fact. When Brooke Davenport was sixteen, she got pregnant. The boyfriend was only a little older—eighteen, I think. Parental apoplexy all around, as you can imagine. Turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, though, and the poor kid damn near died of it. Lost the baby, of course, and it messed her up so badly there probably won’t be any more pregnancies, planned or otherwise.”

      Taylor could hear the edge that had crept into Charlie’s voice, an edge of pity for Brooke Davenport and irritation toward Taylor for pushing the issue. But though he knew it was a sad story, and his heart tightened in spite of himself, Taylor wouldn’t allow himself to lose sight of the main point.

      “Well, I’m sorry she can’t have kids, but that doesn’t give her the right to steal someone else’s child, does it?”

      Charlie’s eyes hardened, and suddenly he looked more like the tough opponent other lawyers met in court. “Listen here, Taylor—”

      But Taylor ignored the dangerous flash in his friend’s eyes. He had a feeling his own eyes looked pretty dangerous right now, too.

      “And besides,” he went on ruthlessly, “who says we can’t use the information? Maybe she’s developed an obsession. Maybe being sterile has given her a fixation about adopting, so that she’d do anything to get a baby, even forge my name to those papers. If that could be proved—”

      Charlie cursed, an expression of frustration he rarely allowed himself. “God, Taylor, do you hear yourself?”

      “What? I’m just being practical. This is no time to get squeamish, Char—”

      Before Taylor could finish, a clamor broke out on the playground behind them. Someone was hurt. Above the scuffling of bodies and the confused tumult of voices, Taylor could hear the wailing of a child in pain. He spun around, a foreboding settling in his gut. And he was right—the swing was empty now, twisting crazily back and forth. The freckled little boy was finally on the ground, screaming in fear as his mother knelt next to him, trying to inspect the rapidly reddening scrapes on his cheeks, hands and knees.

      Taylor watched the woman fold the kid in her arms, comforting and scolding all at once. Damn! He had known it was going to happen. He should have said something—he should have done something. But he hadn’t had the right to get involved. The child wasn’t his.

      He tried to hold back the sense of impotence that threatened to overwhelm him. Somewhere in this town, his brother’s