A Mother's Secret (14 page)

And then, damn it, Sam had given it back at the funeral, letting Adam take it with him to his final rest. That was a surprisingly decent thing to do. And…Sam was Daniel’s brother. Half brother. A connection by blood that was real, whether or not either of them welcomed it.

So maybe it would be interesting to find out why he tended to be such a jackass, given that he’d been his father’s only acknowledged son.

Daniel was better acquainted with Emily Carson, since she’d visited Adam regularly in the hospital. She had thought her husband was wrong in refusing to accept that they were brothers, and she had been determined to make up for his rejection. She was a pretty, gentle, gracious woman. Belle, he thought, had taken the best from both her parents.

Sleep didn’t come easily to Daniel that night.
What a goddamn mess!
he kept thinking. Was it really possible for a man to love two women? Or had it been nothing but arrogance and lust?

Had it occurred to anyone to wonder whether Robert Carson had had other women? Other children?

If so, his wife hadn’t known about them. She
had
known about Jo Fraser, and had evidently forgiven him for that transgression. So maybe she’d believed it truly was love he felt. Which, Daniel wondered, would hurt worse? To find out your husband enjoyed other women on the side without necessarily feeling any deep emotion, or to find out he had been close to leaving you for a woman he did love and—apparently—never was able to forget?

Not the kind of thing Daniel usually wasted any thought on. Why would he, when he’d not only never been married, he’d never been in love? But he remembered when he in
sisted on coming to Rebecca’s house and it occurred to him that she might have a husband and even other children. He’d felt gut-churning rage. He hadn’t seen her in five years, and yet he had violently disliked the idea of her with anyone else.

He disliked the idea even more now. What if she started dating some guy? What if she got
married?
He’d be relegated to being Malcolm’s father, whose schedule had to be considered when the family made plans.

Over my dead body
, Daniel thought grimly, staring at the streetlight leaking around the curtains. Rebecca was
his
. He couldn’t figure out how else to articulate the emotion that made his chest feel hollow.

Would it be so bad to get married? To forsake all others?

For the first time, he considered the idea without feeling any panic and concluded that no, it wouldn’t be bad at all.

Something to think about.

Something else guaranteed to hold sleep at bay.

D
ANIEL CALLED
R
EBECCA
’
S
house the next evening, hoping she’d answer rather than Malcolm, just so he could hear her voice. Judge whether he was exaggerating his attraction to her.

But Malcolm answered, saying hello and then, without covering the phone, yelling, “It’s Daniel, Mom! I mean, Dad!”

Wincing, Daniel pulled the phone a few inches back too late to save his eardrum.

“I had a great day,” Malcolm told him. “Guess what?” He didn’t wait for any response. “I get to spend tomorrow night with Chace. I don’t think I’ll get scared this time. I’ve never stayed all night at anyone’s house before, except
Aunt Nomi’s. But Mom said maybe I should practice. For when I stay at your house. And Chace and I are real good friends. Most of the time,” he added judiciously. “When he isn’t all braggy.”

“About his dad’s truck.”

“Uh-huh. But now I can say so what, because my dad has a bulldozer. And that’s better.”

Daniel laughed. “I’m glad to be useful.”

“I’d like you even if you didn’t have a bulldozer,” his son told him earnestly. “But I’m glad you do.”

Should he tell the boy that he had more than one bulldozer? And a lot of other heavy equipment? Yeah, but maybe he’d need to pull them out of the hat later, when Malcolm had become less impressed by only one measly piece of earthmoving equipment.

“I’m glad you’re practicing for staying with me,” he said. “But I hope you don’t get scared when you do. You liked my house, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I ’specially like it when Mom’s there, too.”

You and me both, kid
.

“But I’m getting bigger all the time,” Malcolm continued. “It won’t be that long until I’m five, like Noelle. I can’t remember how long Mom said it would be. And then I’ll go to kindergarten. ’Cept I can already read. I mean, not whole books. But
some
. Like
‘bat’
. And
‘hat’
. Mom says I’m real smart, when I haven’t started school yet.”

Daniel thought he was, too. He felt a ridiculous swell of pride.

Malcolm rattled on. All Daniel had to do was ask an occasional question. Here he’d worried about making conversation with a four-year-old over the phone! This one had the art of conversation down pat.

“What’s your mom going to do without you home?” Daniel managed to ask casually. “Go party with your Aunt Nomi?”

Malcolm thought that was hysterical. His mom didn’t party! And Aunt Nomi had a friend. A
boy
friend.

“She goes somewhere with him every Friday. And then she calls in the morning so she can tell Mom all about it. I don’t know why she does that,” he confides. “Once I picked up the phone, and she talked and talked, and it was really boring. But Mom said you have to listen when your friends want to talk. So that’s what she was doing.”

“I see,” Daniel said gravely, pleased at his information-gathering strategy. Should he ask to talk to Rebecca? Invite her out?

Or should he just drop by tomorrow night and hope she was having a peaceful evening at home? Was she listening to Malcolm’s side of the conversation? Maybe he could pretend to have forgotten Malcolm was away for the night.

Or maybe he should just say, “I wanted to catch you home alone.” Wasn’t honesty the best policy?

Unless she slammed the door in his face.

Somehow, he thought she wouldn’t do that. On the other hand, he suspected that if he asked her out, she’d say no.

He was smiling when he ended the call
without
asking to speak to Malcolm’s mom.

R
EBECCA FELT…RESTLESS
. Which was really dumb. She had often thought how nice it would be once Malcolm was old enough to occasionally spend the night with a friend. In four and a half years, she’d had barely a handful of evenings to herself. She went out sometimes—it wasn’t as though she didn’t hire a babysitter occasionally, or leave
Mal with Naomi for a few hours. And he had spent the night at Naomi’s a couple of times, but always when Rebecca had to be away. Otherwise—she just wasn’t used to him not being here.

So no wonder she felt a bit unsettled. Plus, she wouldn’t be at all surprised if she had to go pick him up at some point this evening, or even late tonight. A first sleepover for a boy his age could be scary.

Still, she should be doing something more extravagant than cooking a dinner she knew he wouldn’t like and planning to read one of the books she’d picked out at the library yesterday.
She
should be going out with a man. Naomi told her often enough that it was past time.

Rebecca had told herself she just hadn’t met anyone who appealed enough to her. Of course, it was hard to be attracted to another man when you were still in love with the last one.

She turned the burner on to heat as she sliced beef into thin strips, then browned them and cut up an onion into slices thin enough to be near-translucent. All the while, she kept…oh, expecting the phone to ring, she supposed.

Malcolm wouldn’t cry, of course. She smiled, imagining how brisk and reasonable he would be.

Mom, I think I want to practice spending the night some other time. Tonight’s not a good night. I’d like it better if
you
were tucking me in tonight, instead of Chace’s mom
.

She measured burgundy and water, adding them to the sizzling strips of beef, then reached for the jar of bay leaves. Already it smelled wonderful. She’d have her burgundy beef on brown rice, Rebecca decided, another food her incredibly picky son was quite sure he didn’t like.

She had just put the lid on the pan and turned the heat to low when the doorbell rang. Her hand jerked. Who on earth…?

But she knew, even before she opened the front door a cautious crack and saw Daniel Kane on her doorstep.

R
EBECCA THOUGHT SHE
’
D
become used to his presence, able to—almost—turn off her powerful awareness of his body. But this time Malcolm wasn’t here. If she let Daniel in, they’d be alone. That changed everything.

Of course, he was as imposing as ever. In jeans and a brown-and-russet plaid shirt in some nubby fabric open over a brown T-shirt, he was the sexiest man she’d ever seen. His face was craggy and pure male, his mouth tight to disguise whatever he felt.

“Daniel,” she said warily.

“I hope you don’t mind me showing up like this.”

“What if I told you I had company?”

A shutter seemed to close over his expression. “Do you?”

A flutter of excitement told her even before she opened her mouth that she was about to be reckless. She made a face at him. “No. But I wish I did, just to teach you to call first.”

“If I’d called, you would have made an excuse.”

“Probably.” She hesitated, then finally opened the door wide and stepped back. “Fine. Come in.”

Choosing not to comment on her ungracious invitation, he walked in, so close to her she had trouble breathing.
Damn him
. And yet, she reminded herself, he’d been civil
when she asked him to meet her for lunch that day in the city. She owed him for that.

She closed the door, then faced him. “Daniel, why are you here?”

He was silent for a moment, and she saw some struggle on his face. “I’ve been thinking about you this week.” His voice sounded slightly hoarse. “Wanting to talk to you.”

“About Malcolm?”

“No.” He cleared his throat. “Actually, uh, about me.”

About
him?
She studied him, noticing belatedly the way his hands were shoved in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. New lines drawn on his face.

Understanding dawned, along with compassion. “You got the DNA results back.”

His mouth twisted. “Yeah.”

“Oh, dear,” she said involuntarily.

He frowned. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I doubt either answer would be a relief.” She touched his arm. “Come on back to the kitchen. Let me check on my dinner.”

Following her, he said to her back, “I was going to offer to take you out.”

“I’m making burgundy beef, and there’s enough for two.” She smiled over her shoulder. “Although the leftovers would have made a great lunch.”

Daniel paused in the kitchen doorway, his broad shoulders filling it, the gravel back in his voice when he said, “I was presuming a hell of a lot, showing up here like this.”

“Yes, you were, but I’d like to hear what you learned.”

“I’m related to Belle Carson,” he said. “Robert was my father.”

“Oh.” She gave her dinner a perfunctory stir, but studied him the whole time. “How do you feel about it?”

He gave a grunt that was probably supposed to be a laugh. “How do you think? Pissed. Relieved. Illuminated. Hell, confused, shocked, indifferent. Ask me in five minutes and who knows what I’d say?”

Rebecca picked one word out of this string. “Why illuminated?”

He stayed in the doorway, watching her. “Because it explains a lot.”

“Why your dad walked away.”

He nodded.

“What did you think before? That it was because he was so mad at your mom?”

“No.” He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I thought it was me.”

“You?” she echoed, appalled. “You were a child!”

“What else was I supposed to think?”

What else would he think, a five-year-old boy whose father hardly bothered to call after he left? Rebecca imagined Malcolm, if she suddenly lost interest, and felt tears sting her eyes for this man, who had believed his entire life that he was somehow lacking.

“I’m not sure it’s an improvement to find out my real father was even less interested.” He sounded…detached. As if they were talking about somebody else.

And yet he’d come here tonight to talk about this. He’d admitted to confusion and shock, too. Even to anger. Which meant the indifference he projected was a big fat lie.

“You said yourself that he might have assumed you were Vern’s son,” she reminded him. “And that’s if he and
your mother maintained any kind of contact. What if she told him not to call again? That she couldn’t bear to see him? It might be that he never knew about you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t believe it. He had sex with her. You can’t tell me he wouldn’t have kept an ear to the ground, wanting to be sure there weren’t consequences.”

Consequences
. He said the word drily, reducing himself to a mere nuisance.

“I played sports,” he continued. “Later on, he’d have seen my name in the newspaper. No. He had to know about me.”

“Could your mother have flat-out lied? Told him you were Vern’s?”

He gave another of those shrugs that broke her heart. “Sure. If you’d been Robert, would you have believed her?”

She didn’t say anything, but he could probably read her answer on her face. No, of course she wouldn’t. She would have insisted on the truth. She would never have turned her back on a child of hers.

Any more, she thought, than he was willing to do. Raised with so little love, how had Daniel Kane turned into the kind of man who was incapable of abandoning his son, even though he hadn’t planned for him, hadn’t wanted him? She couldn’t imagine.

Her chest burned. How could she hold on to any resentment at having to share Malcolm? If ever anyone needed someone to love, it was Daniel.

“Well, he was an idiot,” she declared, bending to clatter pans in the cupboard while furiously blinking away tears. She thought she’d subdued them by the time she straightened with a saucepan in her hand. “To be so careless in the first place. And then to have two sons that somebody else
raised. I’m glad he’s dead. I wouldn’t want Malcolm to have to pretend to love him.”

“I wouldn’t have asked that of Malcolm,” Daniel said in a mild voice. “Not when I sure as hell wouldn’t have been willing to pretend.”

Rebecca made herself revert to her original point. “But…it might not have been all his fault.”

“No. Some of it was Mom’s.”

There it was again, that utterly flat, expressionless voice that hid…something. A great deal of hurt, was Rebecca’s best guess.

“What was she like?” she asked curiously.

He was silent long enough she wasn’t sure he’d respond, but eventually he did start talking about his mother while Rebecca put water on to boil for the rice, cut up broccoli and found a pan for it, and made a salad.

He had never known his grandparents, which made his mother harder to put into perspective. Very young, she’d married a man who immediately went off to war. He survived the fighting only to die shortly after coming home. Robert and her husband had served together, and he had evidently felt a responsibility toward her. One that had quickly become more.

“Apparently Mom managed to pass Adam off as her husband’s child, although he was born a month too late. She built Billy Fraser up to be this big war hero and fabulous guy.” He shrugged. “Maybe he was. They looked happy in their wedding picture.”

He talked about the job his mother had held in the county assessor’s office, about her fondness for baking even though she worried about her weight and made everyone else eat the fruits of her labors.

“Which wasn’t a problem when any of us lived at home. Wait’ll Malcolm starts shooting up. I could put food away, and Mom always swore Joe could push back from the table, stuffed, then be back foraging in the refrigerator an hour later.”

His mother had been a big reader, one reason he was, as well. They’d visited the library once a week, religiously. She couldn’t afford to buy many books, although she often had a bag of paperbacks from the secondhand bookstore, too.

“When I picture her,” he said in an odd tone, “I always see her in the living room, the lamp making a pool of light in the darkness, her head bent over her book. She’d be lost in it. I could tell when she looked up that she’d forgotten there was a here and now.”

He didn’t have to say,
She’d forgotten she had a son
. That memory made Rebecca sad, the idea that Daniel hadn’t had a place in that living room, or else it would have been better lit in his memories.

The last thing he said before she served dinner was, “Funny how little I really did know Mom.”

Rebecca shook her head. “I simply can’t imagine.” And she couldn’t. Daniel must have been so much like Malcolm: smart, cute, eager. Had Jo Fraser not loved him because she thought he was Vern Kane’s son and not Robert Carson’s? But even then—he was
her
son. Shouldn’t that have been what mattered most?

As they sat and began to dish up, Rebecca said, “I’m amazed the phone hasn’t rung yet.”

“Malcolm?” A grin tugged at Daniel’s mouth. “He did tell me he thought he wouldn’t be scared this time. Because after all, he’s almost five. Although he couldn’t remember how far away his birthday actually is.”

She laughed. “Yeah, the passage of time is still a puzzle to him.”

“It’s relative to all of us. Depending on whether we want something to happen, or we dread it.”

“True enough,” she said lightly. She felt…odd. As if some champagne had joined the blood flowing through her body. She seemed to
fizz
. What was going to happen? Did she
want
it to happen?

Did she even have to ask herself that question?

Rebecca closed her eyes.
Oh, I’m as big a fool as Jo Fraser was, taking back the man I love, over and over again!

She grabbed for something, anything, to say. “I don’t suppose you plan to change your last name.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Carson Construction doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

“No-o…But you wouldn’t have to change the name of the business, since it’s so well established.”

He was shaking his head. “No. I have no desire to take on his name. A name is a gift. He didn’t give me his.”

And Vern Kane had, whatever his other failures as a father. Rebecca nodded.

“Most of these new relatives aren’t Carsons, either. Sam will be the only one once his daughter Belle is married. Jenny took her husband’s name, too.”

“No boys to carry it on.”

He looked at her. Of course there had been boys. Adam and he both ought to have been Carsons, which would have made Joe a Carson, too.

“Do names matter anyway?”

“I think they might,” Daniel said thoughtfully. “They have power. Kids get ridiculed for the wrong name. Actors choose names that express…God knows.”

“Magic. Charisma.”

“Anything but the ordinary,” he agreed. “A business rises and falls in part because of the name the founder chooses. We judge people by their names.”

“Kane is a good one,” Rebecca decided.

“You sound like Malcolm.”

Oh, Lord, so she did. She remembered how awful she’d felt when he had announced that Kane was a
good
name, and she couldn’t help thinking it should have been his.

“Well, it’s true.”

Daniel watched her, his eyes dark and intense. “I missed you. Talking to you.”

Please don’t do this to me
, she begged silently, but said only, “You must have other friends.”

He shrugged, his gaze not leaving her face. “Joe.”

She set down her fork. “You have other friends!”

“People I entertain. Maybe enjoy. Nobody else I could talk to about this.” He frowned. “Sam Carson’s daughter, Belle. We’ve talked.”

What an idiotic time to feel jealous! And hadn’t he said she was getting married?

“She’s the one with the birthmark that looks like mine. She was trying to tell me about family the other day.”

“Do they know about Malcolm? I mean, besides Joe?”

He shook his head. “Hasn’t come up.”

It seemed they had safely left behind dangerous territory.
I missed you
. She rose. “I’m afraid I don’t have any dessert to offer. And my coffee is instant, but if you’d like a cup…”

She knew what a coffee snob he was. He shook his head, but in an automatic way, not as if he cared whether she was offering powder from a jar or fresh-ground Bolivian dark roasted. He wasn’t thinking about coffee.

He was thinking about her.

“Rebecca.”

She froze.

“What if I’d come after you? What if I hadn’t accepted the note as goodbye?”

Her legs failed her. She sank back into the chair. “I don’t know.” Her voice came out husky, barely above a whisper. “I suppose…I would have had to tell you.”

“The note didn’t sound as if you minded parting ways. Did you?” He made a gesture. “Malcolm aside.”

She couldn’t look away from him. Lying would be the best tactic.
I thought we’d taken the relationship as far as we could. Sound…blithe. Surprised he’d ask now.

“Yes, of course I minded.” She glared at him. “I thought you were tired of me. That hurt. And then, when I found out I was pregnant…” Her throat clogged.

“You should have told me.”

“Why?” That old pain pressed at her rib cage. “It wouldn’t have made you love me when you didn’t. Or want to get married. Or even be a father. You’d made it plain your answer would have been none of the above.”

A muscle in his jaw spasmed. “I was scared.”

His voice was so soft, she wasn’t sure she’d heard right. She
couldn’t
have heard right.

“What?”

“Conversation with a woman is usually, uh, a means to an end.”

“That’s…that’s an awful thing to say.”

His shoulders moved. “But true. I’m not saying I haven’t enjoyed talking to women I’ve been involved with. But that wasn’t the point. I didn’t…count on it.” Lines creased his forehead again, as if he’d disconcerted even himself.
He took a moment before he finished, “It was different with you.”

She tried to comprehend. “You liked talking to me. And that
scared
you?”

“Needing someone else doesn’t come naturally to me.”

That almost made her cry. Of course it came naturally to him, as it did to every helpless newborn! But Daniel, while never truly neglected or abused, had been taught that no one else cared all that much about him. He had to be sufficient unto himself. And whatever he had come to feel for her had threatened that self-sufficiency.