Patricia Johns - The Deputy's Unexpected Family

“So you wanted to know.” Harper shook her head. “Andrea didn’t think you would! If you had any kind of flexibility, maybe you should have let Andrea know that, because I’m not taking responsibility for—”

Zoey appeared in the doorway, and as Gabe’s gaze landed on the girl, the words died in Harper’s mouth.

“We shouldn’t discuss any of this in front of her,” Harper said, her voice tight.

“Yeah. Agreed.” Even he could see that their old, festering issues would be poison for that little girl.

Zoey stared at them, gray eyes wide. Did Zoey have any sense of who he was? When he was a boy, he used to imagine that his dad would come back for him. His mom was a lost cause, but he’d held out hope for a dad. He’d figured that he’d know his dad right away—some sort of innate feeling, or something. But that had only been a childhood fantasy. In reality, it was possible to look your own child in the face and have no idea who she was.

“Zoey, it’s okay, sweetheart,” Harper said, her tone softening. “Come here. We’re done talking about that anyway.”

“Are you fighting like with Aunt Heidi?” Zoey asked doubtfully.

“Yes.” Shame clouded her expression. “Something like that. But we won’t anymore.”

Gabe had to get out of here. He needed space to process all of this, and he didn’t trust himself to do it in front of Zoey.

“I’m going to head out.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll be in touch.”

It was too casual of a statement to encompass it all, but he didn’t know how to deal with this—and his anger wasn’t going to be of use right now. He needed space.

Before Harper could say anything, he marched to the door and pulled it open. Outside that door was freedom, but something tugged his gaze back over his shoulder once more to the curly redhead who stared at him with regret swimming in her eyes and the dark-haired child next to her, an apple slice held aloft.

He’d promised himself that he’d never come back to this town for good reason, but that was before he’d known he had a child here, and all of his issues aside, life had just gotten a hundred percent more complicated.

“I’ll be back,” he said, moderating his tone. He wasn’t sure why he said it. Maybe it was because of their stricken expressions, or because he knew that he owed that child something more than DNA, whether he liked it or not.

Then he pushed out onto the sidewalk and pulled the door solidly shut behind him.

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