Judy Duarte - The Daddy Secret

His footsteps sounded as he padded downstairs, and her heart belly flopped into the pit of her stomach. Her whole world was going to blow sky high the moment Rick spotted Lucas.

After all, he’d have to be blind not to see what she saw each time she looked at the boy.

Lucas was the spitting image of Rick Martinez.

Chapter Two

The moment Rick heard Mallory’s son call out from the top landing, reality slammed into him like a horse hoof to the chest.

He’d wanted to shove open the door and push past her, but he didn’t need to. The boy had enough curiosity for the two of them. Within several pounding heartbeats, he joined his mother at the door.

There stood Lucas, the kid Rick had met earlier, the boy with blue eyes and a cowlick like Rick’s.

Of course, Rick might be connecting imaginary genetic dots, but how likely was that?

“Hey! Dr. Martinez. Where’s Buddy?”

Rick’s first instinct was to launch into an interrogation of Mallory, but he needed to control his gut reaction. Why take out his anger and frustration on the poor kid?

“I’m afraid I left Buddy at home this evening,” he said.

Mallory, her eyes wary, her cheeks flushed, looked as if she’d just picked up the wrong end of a hot branding iron. She glanced at Rick, then at the boy. Her son. “I didn’t realize you two had met.”

Apparently not. Would she have mentioned anything about even having a son if the boy hadn’t come downstairs?

“We met today,” Lucas said. “While I was at Mrs. Reilly’s house.”

Mallory took a deep breath, then slowly let it out, clearly at a loss and probably trying to buy time in order to gather her thoughts—or maybe to fabricate a lie.

How about that? If there was one thing he could say about Mallory Dickinson, at least the Mallory he’d once known, it was that she was as honest as the day was long.

But it didn’t take a brain surgeon to see the writing on the wall. She’d kept the baby she was supposed to have given up for adoption, and she’d let more than nine years go by without telling him.

Betrayal gnawed at his gut, and anger flared in a swirl of ugly colors. He ought to challenge her right here and now, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it in front of the boy. Apparently, she no longer saw a reason to bar him from entering the house because she stepped away from the door and allowed him in.

“Lucas called you a doctor,” she said, arching a delicate brow.

The fact that she found it surprising that Rick had actually made good ought to set him off further, although that was pretty minor in the scheme of things.

Still, he couldn’t quite mask his annoyance in his response. “I’m a veterinarian. My clinic is just down the street.”

As she mulled that over, Lucas sidled up to Rick wearing a bright-eyed grin. “Did you come to ask my mom about Buddy?”

No, the dog was the last thing he’d come to talk to Mallory about. And while he hadn’t been sure just how the conversation was going to unfold when he arrived, it had just taken a sudden and unexpected turn.

“Why would he come to talk to me about his dog?” Mallory asked her son.

Or rather their son. Who else could the boy be?

Rick’s emotions, which he’d learned to keep in check over the years, spun around like a whirligig, and he was hard pressed to snatch just one on which he could focus.

Lucas, whose smile indicated that he was completely oblivious to the tension building between the adults, approached Mallory. “Because Buddy needs a home. And since we have a yard now, can I have him? Please? I promise to take care of him and walk him and everything. You won’t have to do anything.”

Mallory drew a hand to her chest, just below her throat where her pulse fluttered. “You want a dog? I don’t know about that.”

“Why not?” the boy asked.

She seemed to ponder the question, then said, “We’ll have to talk about it later. However, to answer your question about the Legos, I put them on the shelf in the linen closet just outside your bedroom.”

“Okay. Thanks.” He flashed Rick a smile, then turned and headed toward the stairs.

As Lucas was leaving, Rick’s gaze traveled from the boy to Mallory and back again.

Finally, when he and Mallory were alone, Rick folded his arms across his chest, shifted his weight to one hip and gave her a pointed look.

“Cute kid,” he said.

Mallory flushed brighter still, and she wiped her palms along her hips, tugging at the fabric of her robe.

Nervous, huh? Rick’s internal B.S. detector slipped into overdrive.

Well, she ought to be.

When he’d found out about her pregnancy, he’d only been seventeen, but he’d offered to quit school, get a job and marry her.

However, her grandparents had decided that she was too young and convinced her that giving her child up for adoption was the only way to go. So they’d sent her to Boston to live with her Aunt Carrie until the birth.

Yet in spite of what she’d promised him when she left, she hadn’t come back to Brighton Valley. And within six months’ time, he’d lost all contact with her. She might blame some of that on him, but he didn’t see it that way.

Either way, she’d had a change of heart about the adoption. And about the feelings she’d claimed she’d had for him.

At the thought of Mallory’s deception, something rose up inside of him, something dark and ugly and juvenile, something that reminded him that he might always be prone to bad genetics and a lousy upbringing. But he tamped it down, as he’d learned to do in recent years, and glared at the woman he’d once loved instead.

As a teenager, Mallory had attended church regularly. Now she stood warily in the center of her living room looking as guilty as sin.

“Excuse me for being blunt,” Rick finally said, “but your son looks a lot like my brother Joey did as a kid.”

“It’s not what you think.”

What he thought was that she’d lied to him, that she’d kept their baby. Was she saying that she hadn’t?

“If I’m off base, suppose you set me straight.”

She glanced upstairs. “Not here. Not tonight.”

Rick wasn’t sure if Lucas could hear their conversation or not. But she was right. Any further discussion ought to be done in private.

“All right,” he said. “Another time. Preferably tomorrow. You tell me when.”

“I...” She bit down on her lip, then glanced upstairs again. “I have a job interview at two o’clock and have already lined up Alice Reilly to babysit. I’ll ask her to keep Lucas longer. Would that work for you? We can meet here in the late afternoon.”

He had a pretty full schedule at the clinic tomorrow, as well as a couple of minor surgeries. “That’s fine, as long as it’s after five.”

“Okay.” She started for the door, signaling that it was time for him to leave.

All right. He’d go for now.

Mallory might have shut him out of her life when they were teenagers, deciding she’d rather raise their son on her own, but a lot of things had happened since she’d been gone. A lot had changed.

When Rick stepped out of the house, she closed the door behind him, shutting him out once again, it seemed.

But he was going to get to the bottom of this once and for all. He intended to learn more about the baby they’d conceived.

And about the boy who looked like Rick and who called Mallory Mom.

* * *

“Excuse me, Dr. Martinez. But there’s a lady and a little boy asking to see you. She said her name is Alice Reilly and that you told them to stop by.”

Rick, who’d just placed a plastic cone on a German shepherd’s head so he couldn’t chew at his sutures, glanced up at Kara Dobbins, his receptionist. “They’re here? Now?”