Elizabeth Bevarly - Father Of The Brat

She closed her eyes and remembered again the way he had looked when he’d thrown open his front door. Half naked, with his dark hair falling over his forehead and his unshaven jaw set in exasperation, he’d looked like some brooding gothic hero. So incredibly masculine. An odd thrill of excitement had wound through Maddy unlike anything she’d ever felt. He’d been a wiry kid back in high school, she remembered. Now he was solid rock.

The moment she’d seen him, she’d been nearly overcome by an inexplicable urge to lean against him and feel his arms around her. For some reason she still couldn’t figure out, she had wanted to bury her face in his neck and inhale great gulps of him. She’d wanted him to make her feel as strong as he looked. Instead, she hadn’t even let him know who she was. Because that would have been a foolish thing to do. That would have made him remember too many things, too.

After her divorce, Maddy had only kept her married name because it would have been too inconvenient and timeconsuming to change it back to Saunders. She’d never thought she would have a reason to be thankful she’d kept Dennis Garrett’s name, especially since she hadn’t been able to keep Dennis. But because she was no longer Maddy Saunders—neither literally not figuratively—there was absolutely no reason for Carver Venner to find out who he was actually dealing with. Her time with him and his daughter would be minimal, then she could slip discreetly out of their lives without a backward glance never to see Carver again.

How very like him to have fathered a child without even knowing it, she thought.

Pushing the memory of Carver away, Madelaine Garrett blew an errant strand of hair out of her eyes, found the street she’d been looking for on the map and lurched her little car back into gear. She didn’t have to think about him any more today, she told herself. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

And suddenly, for no good reason she could name—and for the first time in years—Madelaine Garrett was actually looking forward to the following day.

Carver arrived at the airport even earlier than he’d been instructed, but not because he was excited about seeing this kid that the state of Pennsylvania insisted was his daughter. Simply put, he was quite certain she wasn’t. He couldn’t imagine why Abby Stillman would have tagged him for paternity, but he was convinced there was no way he could be responsible for some kid who’d been running around L.A. for twelve years. The idea that he had been a father for that long—or for any amount of time—without even knowing it was simply too troubling for Carver to consider.

Unfortunately for him, however, according to his lawyer, he was indeed going to have to prove his conviction in a court of law. Still, she’d told him it shouldn’t be such a difficult thing to do—a simple DNA test would give the needed evidence. It was only a matter of time before this whole mess was cleared up.

In the meantime, however, Carver had to play by the rules of the Child Welfare Office. Yet even his legal obligation wasn’t the real reason he had come to the airport today. No, if he was perfectly honest with himself, he knew the real reason he’d come, the reason he’d even arrived early, was because he was curious about the social worker assigned to his case. The more he’d thought about her since her departure the day before, the more convinced he had become that M. H. Garrett was in fact Maddy Saunders, a girl he’d known way back in high school, when the world was a warmer, happier place.

A girl, he recalled now, who had always driven him nuts.

Maddy Saunders had been the most infuriating human being Carver Venner had ever met, a Pollyanna of obscene proportions. She had been convinced that the world was full of goodness and light and that the media just made things seem bad to make more money. She had been certain that the people who ran the country had nothing but good intentions and only the welfare of the American people at heart. She had thought it was only a matter of time before inflation was whipped, violent crime was crushed, and poverty was overcome. Her self-professed role model had been Mary Poppins.

She had, quite frankly, made Carver sick.

As if roused by his musings, the woman in question came walking down the terminal toward him, her beige tailored skirt skimming just below her knees, her cream-colored shirt nearly obscured by her massive trench coat. She took her time approaching him, as if reluctant to get too close, her battered satchel banging against her calf all the way.

Funny, Carver thought as he contemplated the wellturned legs below the skirt, he’d never noticed before what great gams Maddy Saunders had.

She seemed to slow her pace when she looked up and saw him, something that convinced him even more completely that he’d been right about her identity. As soon as she was close enough for her to hear him, he dipped his head once in her direction and greeted her simply, “Maddy.”

She blushed as if she were a four-year-old child caught in her first lie. “So, you, uh, you remember me after all.”

He smiled wryly. “You’re not exactly someone I could easily forget.”

His statement didn’t require a comment, and she didn’t seem any too willing to offer one. Instead she only stood there looking at him in that unnerving way she had the day before. Little by little, the silence between them stretched and became more disconcerting. And little by little, Carver began to feel the same edginess Maddy Saunders had always roused in him.

“Boy, you sure whacked your hair,” he finally said, unable to keep himself from reaching out to tuck a short strand behind her ear. Immediately after completing the action, he dropped his hand back to his side, surprised and unsettled at how easily the gesture had come. Twenty years seemed to dissolve into nothing, and he was suddenly right back at Strickler High, sneaking up on Maddy to tug on the long, black braid that had always beckoned to him.

“I had it cut short a long time ago,” she told him as she lifted her own hand to put the strand of hair back where it had been before he touched her. He decided he must have imagined the way her fingers seemed to shake almost imperceptibly as she did so. “It was getting to be too much trouble to take care of. I didn’t have the time.”

He nodded, letting his gaze wander over the rest of her. “You’ve dropped a lot of weight, too.”

She sighed, as if giving in to what would be an inevitable line of questioning. “Yes. I have.”

“You’re too skinny.”

“I know.”

He frowned at her unwillingness to communicate—her unwillingness to spar with him—when that was what the two of them had excelled at in high school. Then he remembered that he’d always had a talent for saying something that would rile her into a state of agitated verbosity. He smiled. “And your name is Garrett now. Finally found some poor bastard to marry you, huh?”

She nodded, then hesitated only a moment before adding, “And divorce me.”

Carver’s smile fell. “Oh. Sorry. Or…or should I say congratulations?”

She stared him square in the eye as she said, “He left me six years ago for a grad student who was his teaching assistant. I couldn’t have been more surprised than I was when I came home one night to find him packing his bag. It just seemed like such a cliché, you know? Sometimes I still have trouble believing it happened.”

Carver nodded slowly and bit his lip. Yeah, he’d always known the right thing to say around Maddy, all right. And she’d always been able to make him feel like a total jerk. “I assume, then, that he taught college?”

Maddy almost smiled at his lame attempt to change the subject and cover his gaffe. Almost. “He still does,” she said. “Don’t worry. I didn’t set fire to him while he was sleeping or anything. Dennis is a physics professor at Villanova.”