Lisa Jackson - Most Likely To Die

That alone was enough to make him back off. He didn’t compete for girls. They had always been drawn to him, drawn to his dark hair and eyes, his lean, lanky build, his quick grin.

Ironically, one of the girls who popped up on his radar in Lindsay’s wake had been Bella Marcott, Jake’s sister. He’d told himself he’d have been attracted to her even if she didn’t go to St. Elizabeth’s. Even if she weren’t a good friend of Lindsay’s. She was cute and quick-witted-the kind of girl who always had a sharp comeback. He liked that. He liked her-but of course, he didn’t love her.

He loved Lindsay.

And when he was with Bella, Lindsay was usually in the vicinity. He could sneak glances at her when she wasn’t looking. Bella caught him a few times, though. She seemed to shrug it off. Most girls did.

Everyone knew he wasn’t the steady boyfriend type; there were plenty of girls in his life back then. Always had been.

Still were.

And now another one bites the dust, he thought, watching Allison disappear into the bedroom without a backward glance.

Easy come, easy go.

Yeah, and his life had become a series of bad cliches.

Become? It always was.

With a sigh, he tossed aside the knife he’d been using to chop the onions for the omelet and lifted the phone to his ear.

“Yeah, hello?”

Stunned, he listened to the response-and heard the voice he’d been longing to hear for twenty years.

Her voice. Uttering his name.

“Is this Wyatt Goddard?”

Wyatt Goddard?

She frowned in surprise at what she had just overheard. Why on earth would Lindsay Farrell be contacting him after all these years?

After all these years?

Come on. Why would she contact him ever?

It was hard to imagine that someone like her had ever crossed paths with someone like him.

He wasn’t from the wrong side of the tracks, exactly…but pretty darned close.

He had been kicked out of two Catholic schools-once for smoking, and once for truancy-and his parents were both alcoholics. Not that those things made him an instant loser.

Far from it, actually. Wyatt Goddard was popular well beyond the boundaries of Washington High. He always had more girlfriends than Oregon had bridges…and Lindsay Farrell always had a boyfriend.

Well, she did until a few months before Jake died, anyway.

As for Wyatt, yes, he was popular-but a little scary, too, as far as the girls of St. Elizabeth’s were concerned.

There was something intriguing, enigmatic, even, about him-a series of contradictions.

He was athletic, a track star-as well as a pack-a-day smoker.

He had a reputation as a loner-still, there he was at every party, with girls hanging all over him.

He had been kicked out of two Catholic schools, but he got decent grades-and he continued to dutifully attend Sunday Mass, usually solo.

His family was lower middle class, if anything-yet he drove a BMW convertible.

He always wore the same clothes: well-worn blue jeans, plain T-shirts, and low-heeled boots…even though his mother was a clerk in the young men’s department at Nordstrom and his father worked at Nike. Sunglasses, too, most of the time-even on cloudy days.

He occasionally revealed a sharply honed sense of humor, but he rarely smiled. When he did, it was there and gone, like a flash of summer lightning that came out of nowhere and left you wondering if it was ever there at all…

The smile…

That’s it!

She knew it seemed familiar.

Leo Cellamino-who looked nothing like his supposed father, Jake Marcott-happened to have precisely the same smile as Wyatt Goddard.

She hadn’t been able to put her finger on who he reminded her of at the time, but now she knew.

Hmm.

Meanwhile, here was the esteemed Lindsay Farrell, placing a call to Wyatt out of the blue, never stopping to consider that her telephone might be tapped…even after Kristen’s warning.

Hmm.

This, she realized, listening intently for whatever was to come, should be interesting.

An unexpected bonus, if her hunch was correct.

“It’s Lindsay,” she managed to say, sounding deceptively levelheaded when her brain felt as though it were about to explode.

“Lindsay Farrell. From Portland. St. Elizabeth’s,” she prodded when the man on the other end of the line didn’t react.

“I know.” She heard him exhale loudly, as though he were puffing the air through his cheeks. “I know who you are.”

No, you don’t, she found herself thinking. You know who I was…not who I am now.

And I never knew you at all.

“You’re in Connecticut now, huh?” she asked, still marveling at the coincidence that Wyatt was living right here on the East Coast, in Fairfield County, less than fifty miles away.

Coincidence? There were over twenty million people in this metropolitan area. That they had both ended up here wasn’t nearly as coincidental as it would be if they both lived on some remote island.

Still…

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve lived all over the place, but I’ve been on the East Coast a few years now.”

“What…what do you do?”

“I’m self-employed,” he said briefly, as if that explained everything-or anything at all. “You?”

“Same thing.”

“In New York.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes…how did you know?” she asked, wishing her stomach wouldn’t flutter at the prospect that he’d kept track of her.

“Caller ID,” he said simply. “I just checked it and recognized the 212 area code.”

“Oh.”

So much for his keeping track of her. She was lucky he even remembered her name.

Lindsay struggled to pull herself together, to remember what it was, exactly, she had just rehearsed saying to him, before she actually dialed.

Wyatt, you should know that I got pregnant the night we were together and I gave birth to your son. I came to New York and had him, then gave him up for adoption because I thought he could have a better life that way. And now he’s found me…and he wants to find you.

Yes, that was what she was going to say. It had seemed best to go the straightforward route.

Before this moment, anyway.

Now she found herself acutely aware that she couldn’t go around dropping bombshells like that over the telephone. Not when she was less than an hour away from the person whose life would be forever altered by her news.

She had to deliver a bombshell like that in person.

“I need to see you,” she hastily told Wyatt Goddard, trying not to wonder if the woman who had answered the phone was his wife. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about him. About the two of them. It was about their son.

“Did you say you want to see me?” he echoed, sounding surprised…and intrigued.

“No. I said I need to see you. As soon as possible, actually.”

She expected him to argue.

He didn’t.

He said, “I’ll come to New York.”

“When?”

“Now.”

Driving down I-95 along Long Island Sound in morning rush-hour traffic, Wyatt Goddard was careful not to let the Pagani Zonda’s speedometer rise past eighty. He didn’t want to get another ticket and wind up in traffic school again.

Sure, he always drove fast-speed was as much a fact of Wyatt’s life as his good looks and fat bank account were.

Today, however, he was tempted to raise the velocity not as much out of habit as out of anticipation.

But a traffic stop would only delay the payoff.

The payoff: after two decades, he was going to see Lindsay Farrell again.

He had dressed carefully, formally for the occasion. Sure, he still favored jeans and T-shirts in his everyday life. But he now had a closet full of well-cut designer suits, custom-made shirts, Italian silk ties, shiny leather shoes, and sunglasses that cost almost as much as his first car did.