Jasmine Cresswell - Suspect

“As far as my sister is concerned, forever. As far as Sophie is concerned—at least until bedtime. My sister has two preschoolers of her own, and Sophie loves to play with her cousins.”

He gave a quick nod to acknowledge her answer. “Then I’ll expect to see you here this afternoon at four. Try not to get arrested in the meantime, okay?”

He had a child. Sophie was his daughter. Chloe Hamilton was the mother of his child. His daughter was three and a half years old.

However many ways he found to express the simple facts, Liam still couldn’t wrap his mind around the crazy notion that he was a father. A father, for God’s sake! If ever there was one role that he’d been determined never to take on, fatherhood would have to be it.

Among the worst of the unpleasant emotions accompanying the discovery that he had a child was the shame of knowing he’d behaved no better than his own father, the late, not-very-lamented Ron Raven. Ron had impregnated Avery Fairfax twenty-seven years ago, when his legal wife, Ellie, was already pregnant. Then Ron had solved the dilemma of two women simultaneously pregnant with his child by marrying Avery—without bothering to divorce Ellie first.

Ever since he learned about his father’s bigamy, Liam had derived a morbid satisfaction from heaping scorn on his father’s head for the idiocy of contracting a fake marriage. He’d harped on Ron’s carelessness in causing the pregnancy that had precipitated it. Now it seemed that he had been as careless as his father. Juggle the pieces of the Liam-Chloe-Jason triangle, toss them up in the air and you could watch them fall to the ground in a pattern humiliatingly close to the Ellie-Ron-Avery triangle. Like father, like son wasn’t a cliché he’d ever wanted to live up to, Liam reflected cynically, but it seemed he’d done just that.

Court, thank God, was over for the day, and he’d managed to focus on the Cellinis’ civil war, euphemistically described as their divorce petition, long enough to avoid disaster for his client. The financial decisions had gone in favor of Mr. Cellini, more because the legal facts were overwhelmingly on his side than because Liam had presented them with any special brilliance. Still, right now he’d take his victories any way he could get them.

He parked his car in the lot at the back of his office building and sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Five hours had passed since he learned he had a daughter and he still had no idea what he was going to say to Chloe Hamilton except that he wanted to see Sophie. He felt supremely ill-equipped to assume the role of father but, despite his fury at having been tricked into parenthood, he had no intention of taking out his anger on Sophie.

His child. His daughter. The unbelievable refrain started up again. Jesus, there was absolutely no way to make those words sound anything less than insane.

His cell phone rang just as he was getting out of the car and he answered automatically, his attention focused four years in the past on a sexual encounter with Chloe that—surprisingly—he could remember quite clearly.

“Liam Raven.”

A woman responded, her voice tinged with laughter. “Golly gee, big brother, your bark is getting worse by the day! If you always sound this fierce, it’s a wonder you have any clients left!”

“Megan! How are you doing? Sorry to sound so abrupt. I was distracted.” At almost any other time, Liam would have been delighted to hear from his sister. Megan was nearly nine years his junior, so their childhoods had followed separate paths, but he’d always loved her and he was pleased that she seemed so happy in her new relationship with Adam Fairfax. The Fairfaxes weren’t the family he’d have chosen for Megan to marry into, to put it mildly, but in his more rational moments, he realized Adam was no more responsible for the multiple sins of Ron Raven than anyone else caught up in the fallout from Ron’s bigamy. Adam, after all, couldn’t help the fact that he was Avery Fairfax’s younger brother.

Liam shook his head, trying to clear away the fuzziness of shock lingering from the morning’s revelations. He wanted to respond to his sister without alerting her that anything was wrong, but Chloe’s news was so much at the forefront of his thoughts that he was in danger of blurting out something about Sophie if he didn’t watch himself. He loved Megan and respected both her intelligence and her integrity, but he was more in the habit of protecting her than asking for her advice. Besides, he had no intention of telling anyone—friends or family—that he had a child until he’d decided exactly what he was going to make of his relationship with Sophie. He saw no point in adding more complications to an emotional stew that was already overspiced with his own neuroses.

He grabbed his briefcase and tucked the phone between his cheek and his shoulder, using his hip to shut the car door. “It’s good to hear from you, Meg. How are you?”

“Hmm, let’s see. Busy at work. Missing Wyoming. Hopelessly in love with Adam. Wishing he lived about a thousand miles farther away from his parents. Maybe a million miles farther away, actually.”

He made a sympathetic noise. “That would mean living on the moon, Meggie.”

“Yeah, well, that would work for me.” Megan’s laugh was rueful.

“I take it Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax Senior are still less than thrilled that their favorite son is engaged to Ron Raven’s daughter?” Liam pressed the button to summon the elevator, which was currently ten floors away.

“Less than thrilled barely begins to describe it. Try frothing-at-the-mouth furious, interspersed with occasional patches of icy disdain just for variety. They’d have a hard time reconciling themselves to the fact that their Southern gentleman son is living in sin with a damn Yankee, but the fact that I’m Ron Raven’s daughter sends them over the top.”

“They’ll come around, Meggie. Eventually, they’ll get tired of hating our father.”

“Will they?” She sighed. “Is that happy day going to arrive this century, do you think?”

“It’ll arrive when their daughter and granddaughter stop hurting because of what Dad did to them. You need to give everyone a few more weeks, Meg. It’s only three months since Avery Fairfax learned that her supposed husband was dead and that her marriage had never existed as a legal reality.”

“You’re right, I need to be patient, which is never my strong suit,” she said. “I guess I’m feeling extra sensitive because Adam and I were in Wyoming with Mom last week and the tension at the ranch just never let up. And then we flew back to Georgia and found even more hostility waiting for us. After a while, having your prospective in-laws fall silent every time you walk into the room gets kind of old. Adam gets it from Mom in Wyoming and I get a double dose from the Fairfaxes in Georgia.”

Liam was sorry to hear that their mother still wasn’t at ease with Megan’s choice of fiancé. He would have been more than willing to put in a positive word for Adam and his sister, but his own relationship with their mother was sufficiently rocky that interference from him was likely to do as much harm as good.

“Dad managed to mess with everyone’s emotions,” he said, giving another frustrated push to the elevator call button. “Even though Mom likes Adam and wants you to be happy, it still must seem to her as if you’re siding with the enemy.”

“You’re so right.” Megan smothered another sigh. “She tries hard, but she’s really uncomfortable when she has to spend time alone with Adam. If she finds herself in the same room with him, without a cushion of other people around, it’s obvious she’s thinking about just one thing—”