Reluctant Father. Diana Palmer

glanced up hesitantly.

      “I don’t mind cleaning up crumbs,” Mrs. Jackson said testily. “Do you want cookies?”

      “Yes, please.”

      The older woman nodded curtly and went to get some.

      “Nobody smiles here,” Sarah murmured. “It’s just like home.”

      Blake felt a twinge of regret for the child, who seemed to have been stuck away in the housekeeper’s corner with no thought for her well-being. And not just since her stepfather had found out that she was Blake’s child, apparently.

      His eyes narrowed and he asked the question that was consuming him. “Didn’t your mother stay with you?”

      “Mommy was busy,” Sarah said. “She said I had to stay with Mrs. Smathers and do what she said.”

      “Wasn’t she home from time to time?”

      “She and my daddy—” she faltered and grimaced “—my other daddy yelled at each other mostly. Then she went away and he went away, too.”

      This was getting them nowhere. He stood and began to pace, his hands in his pockets, his face stormy and hard.

      Sarah watched him covertly. “You sure are big,” she murmured.

      He stopped, glancing down at her curiously. “You sure are little,” he returned.

      “I’ll grow,” Sarah promised. “Do you have a horse?”

      “Several.”

      She brightened. “I can ride a horse!”

      “Not on my ranch, you can’t.”

      Her green eyes flashed fire. “I can so if I want to. I can ride any horse!”

      He knelt in front of her very slowly, and his green eyes met hers levelly and without blinking. “No,” he said firmly. “You’ll do what you’re told, and you won’t talk back. This is my place, and I make the rules. Got it?”

      She hesitated, but only for a minute. “Okay,” she said sulkily.

      He touched the tip of her pert nose. “And no sulking. I don’t know how this is going to work out,” he added curtly. “Hell, I don’t know anything about kids!”

      “Hell is where you go when you’re bad,” Sarah replied matter-of-factly. “My mommy’s friend used to talk about it all the time, and about damns and sons of—”

      “Sarah!” Blake burst out, shocked that a child her age should be so familiar with bad words.

      “Do you have any cows?” she added, easily diverted.

      “A few,” he muttered. “Which one of your mummy’s friends used language like that around you?”

      “Just Trudy,” she said, wide-eyed.

      Blake whistled through his teeth and turned just as Mrs. Jackson came in with a tray of milk and cookies for Sarah and coffee for Blake.

      “I like coffee,” Sarah said. “My mommy let me drink it when she had hers in bed and she wasn’t awake good.”

      “I’ll bet,” Blake said, “but you aren’t drinking it here. Coffee isn’t good for kids.”

      “I can have coffee if I want to,” Sarah returned belligerently.

      Blake looked at Mrs. Jackson, who was more or less frozen in place, staring at the little girl as she grabbed four cookies and proceeded to stuff them into her mouth as if she hadn’t eaten in days.

      “You quit, or even try to quit,” Blake told the housekeeper, who’d looked after his uncle before him, “and so help me God, I’ll track you all the way to Alaska and drag you back here by one foot.”

      “Me, quit? Just when things are getting interesting?” Mrs. Jackson lifted her chin. “God forbid.”

      “Sarah, when was the last time you ate?” Blake inquired, watching her grab another handful of cookies.

      “I had supper,” she said, “and then we came here.”

      “You haven’t had breakfast?” he burst out. “Or lunch?”

      She shook her head. “These cookies are good!”

      “If you haven’t eaten for almost a day, I imagine so.” He sighed. “You’d better make us an early dinner tonight,” Blake told Mrs. Jackson. “She’ll eat herself sick on cookies if we’re not careful.”

      “Yes, sir. I’ll go and make up the guest room for her,” she said. “But what about clothes? Does she have a suitcase?”

      “No, that lawyer didn’t bring anything. Let her sleep in her slip tonight. Tomorrow,” he added, “you can take her into town to do some shopping.”

      “Me?” Mrs. Jackson looked horrified.

      “Somebody has to be sacrificed,” he told her pithily. “And I’m the boss.”

      Mrs. Jackson’s lips formed a thin line. “I don’t know beans about little girls’ clothes!”

      “Well, take her to Mrs. Donaldson’s shop,” he muttered. “That’s where King Roper and Elissa take their little girl to be outfitted. I heard King groan about the prices, but that won’t bother us any more than it bothers them.”

      “Yes, sir.” She turned to leave.

      “By the way, where’s the weekly paper?” he asked, because it always came on Thursday morning. “I wanted to see if our legal ad got in.”

      Mrs. Jackson shifted uncomfortably and grimaced. “Well, I didn’t want to upset you…”

      His eyebrows arched. “How could the weekly paper possibly upset me? Get it!”

      “All right. If you’re sure that’s what you want.” She reached into the drawer of one of the end tables and pulled it out. “There you go, boss. And I’ll leave before the explosion, if you don’t mind.”

      She exited, and Sarah took two more cookies while Blake stared down at the paper’s front page at a face that had haunted him.

      “Author Meredith Calhoun to autograph at Baker’s Book Nook,” read the headline, and underneath it was a recent picture of Meredith.

      His eyes searched over it in shock. The plain, skinny woman he’d hurt bore no resemblance to this peacock. Her brown hair was pulled back from her face into an elegant chignon. Her gray eyes were serene in a high-cheekboned face that could have graced the cover of a magazine, and her makeup enhanced the raw material that had always been there. She was wearing a pale suit coat with a pastel blouse, and she looked lovely. More than lovely. She looked soft and warm and totally untouched at the age of twenty-five, which she had to be now.

      Blake put the paper down after scanning what he already knew about her skyrocketing career and her latest book, Choices, about a man and a woman trying to manage careers, marriage and parenthood all at once. He’d read it, as he secretly read all Meredith’s books, looking for traces of the past. Maybe even for a cessation of hostilities. But her feelings for him were buried and there was never a single trait he could recognize in her people that reminded him of himself. It was as if she sensed that he might look at them and had hidden anything that would give her inner feelings away.

      Sarah Jane was standing beside him without his knowing it. She looked at the picture in the paper. “That’s a pretty lady,” Sarah said. She leaned forward and picked out a word in the column below the photograph. “B…o… o…k. Book,” she said proudly.

      “So it is.” He pointed to the name. “How about that?”

      “M…e…r…Merry Christmas,” she said.

      He