Silver Linings. Mary Brady
out the window, now icy enough from condensation on the inside to blur the beacon from the lighthouse.
“You have a daughter.”
She couldn’t tell whether it was the vinegar or the surprise that made her sputter.
She shouldn’t have been caught off guard, though. In a casual office environment like Morrison and Morrison one needed only to stand anywhere near the break room to hear about everyone’s life, whether one wanted to or not.
“I do. Her name is Brianna.”
“A six-year-old daughter.” The smoke of a smoldering fire nearly poured from his ears.
Oh, no. He thought Brianna was his child. She breathed a sigh of relief. This was a simple problem, easily fixed.
“She’s not your daughter.”
In the light from the dashboard, horror flooded his features instead of the relief she’d expected. He turned away, and a moment later when he turned back, his face was a sculpture of pleasant disagreement. This would be the face he put on when the opposing attorney presented a shocking and damaging piece of evidence. She knew it was only because his guard had been down so far that she’d seen anything at all.
“You know that for certain. You have DNA results.” They weren’t questions. They were statements, as if this was the evidence he would need for proof. Her verbal assurances would fall short. Dark-haired, dark-eyed Brianna was her proof, but she wasn’t putting her daughter before an angry man for judgment.
“I don’t have to give you any sort of answers.” He had a legal right to his daughter, but with Brianna the only right he had was the moral right to know that a child was not his.
“If she’s not my daughter, then you...”
“Don’t. Don’t you even say those words.” He was her first and the only man she’d loved. Micky had been there after her heart had been broken into so many pieces she’d thought she would never heal. She had not left one man’s bed and gone directly to the other. “If we’re not careful, some of the things we say to each other might not be forgivable.”
He stayed silent, but his gaze never left her face.
“Would it help if I told you Brianna was born prematurely?”
She could tell he was trying to hide the scorn, but it was leaking out through his attempted mask of indifference. She would not fault him for that, either. Scorn had been what she had felt for herself starting the day Micky left. She and Micky had done nothing but combine bodies; there was not the commingling of souls Delainey had always thought making love should be.
She had made love with Hunter.
He did not speak.
He was using the silence technique. Give a witness enough time and she might say something incriminating or at least telling to fill the void.
She had thought they would use the time tonight to reacquaint themselves, maybe to recapture some of their old rapport.
She wasn’t sure there was anything to recapture and silence worked well on her. “You left me.”
He turned and looked out the windshield into the darkness. Silence would not work again. She put her seat belt on and started the car. When they reached the Murphys’ house, he paused before getting out of the car.
“We’ll have to finish this.”
When he bid her good-night and disappeared into Shamus’s house, her only thought was...he’d left her again.
After the first time, it should have gotten easier.
It had not.
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