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I knew it probably pained Jade that her best friend had never shared her secret. “Probably because she assumed that I knew and just didn’t give a damn.”
“Can I meet her?” Brooke, Jade’s twin, asked excitedly.
“After I do,” I said drily. “I still can’t believe I have a daughter who I don’t know.”
I’d only had a matter of hours to get used to the fact that I was a father. I was pretty sure it was going to take a hell of a lot longer to be comfortable with it.
“You’ll love her,” Jade said warmly. “Maya is special. Gifted, so she can be a challenge. She’ll ask a million questions. But she has an enormous heart.”
Jade was gifted, too. So I knew my sister could relate to my daughter. Jade had gotten her doctorate degree in record time, and she was a genius in her field of wildlife genetics.
“I’m just a blue-collar guy,” I said in a hesitant tone that I didn’t even recognize.
I wondered how Maya would feel if I couldn’t so much as help her with her homework someday.
I’d always loved to read, and I preferred it to television. But I hadn’t ever had enough time to read everything I wanted until recently.
Keeping the Sinclair family afloat had been an all-consuming task when we’d had limited funds. Noah, Seth, and I had spent almost every waking hour working.
Jade smiled. “That isn’t going to matter to her.”
“I think I can give her a hell of a lot better life than she had with the mob family,” I said huskily.
At least I would never treat her like she didn’t exist.
“You can give her an amazing life,” Brooke said. “Aiden, you were always there for us. It isn’t like you don’t know how to raise a kid and give them a ton of love. She’s not going to care about your education level.”
I leaned back in my recliner. “I hope you’re right, because someday she’ll be way smarter than I am. I’d like to give her all the education she wants. But at least I have a lot of money now. I can give her everything she needs.”
“Are you going to share custody with Skye?” Noah questioned, his expression still puzzled.
“They’ll both be living here as of tomorrow morning,” I announced. “I want to get to know my daughter. I’ve already missed so much of her life. I don’t want her part time, and I think she deserves better than being shifted back and forth.”
Brooke clapped. “So you’re getting back together with Skye?”
“No,” I said flatly. “Not exactly. But since she doesn’t want to be without her daughter, they’re both coming to live with me. We’ll get married eventually.”
“Are you serious?” Noah asked roughly. “You don’t have to get married to parent a child together.”
My eldest brother was sounding a lot like Skye. “Maybe not. But it’s happening anyway. The only other options are to share custody, or fight for primary custody. After all that Maya has been through, I don’t want that to happen.”
And I sure as hell couldn’t imagine Skye and me living in the same household while we were dating other people.
That was not happening.
“You’re pissed off at Skye. I can tell,” Jade observed.
“How can I not be? She never told me that she’d had my child. She just ran off and married somebody else.”
Jade spoke up. “There’s more to the story. There has to be. I’ve been friends with her since grade school. She’d never do that. And you said it was a misunderstanding. That she thought you knew.”
“I was on a long fishing job. Apparently her mother flipped out when she found out Skye was pregnant, and told her she had to marry Marino. I hadn’t gotten back yet, so she left a letter.”
“What happened to the letter?” Noah asked.
“Seth decided to destroy it,” I told him. “He thought it would be better if I didn’t read it, since Skye had left with another man. He didn’t know she was pregnant with my kid.”
Understanding dawned on Noah’s face. “Ahhh . . . so that explains why he’s not here.”
“I want to hurt him,” I answered honestly. “He literally robbed me of eight years of my child’s life.”
“His intentions were probably good,” Noah mused.
“I don’t give a shit about his motivations right now.”
I was livid with Seth. Now that I knew that Skye had been pregnant with my child, the thought of my brother destroying a critical communication from her royally pissed me off.
“It will blow over,” Noah said confidently.
“Don’t hold your breath,” I warned him.
“Please don’t punish Skye,” Jade pleaded. “There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened with her marriage, but I know it wasn’t good. Maybe Maya wasn’t in the best of situations, but I can guarantee you Skye loves her daughter and did the best she could to keep her safe.”
“Let’s get back to the marriage part of this,” Noah said as he folded his arms across his chest. “Marrying her is not a good idea. If you two hate each other, what kind of atmosphere is that for Maya?”
“I don’t exactly hate her,” I confessed. “I’m just angry right now.”
If I’d been thinking logically—which I wasn’t—I probably wouldn’t have been such a bastard to Skye this morning. Truth was, my dick still coveted her. I never had been able to control the attraction between the two of us. But finding out that she’d birthed a kid I’d never known about had sent me over the edge. Especially since I’d never been able to keep myself in check around her.
Skye Weston brought out the best and the worst of me because she made me as irrational as hell. She always had.
It fucking hurt that she had actually thought I wouldn’t give a damn about my own daughter.
I might be insanely attracted to Skye, but I realized that she’d never really known me all that well at all.
“She was only eighteen, Aiden,” Jade reminded me. “Give her a break. She honestly didn’t have very many options. Her mother was loony tunes, and it sounds like Skye had nowhere to go. I can’t imagine having to deal with that when I was eighteen. The only thing I worried about was starting college at that age. I don’t think I was mature enough to handle having a child.”
I shifted uncomfortably because I knew Jade was probably right. Skye had been so damn young when she’d gotten pregnant, and I had to shoulder a lot of the blame. I had been quite a few years older than her. “If she just would have come back and told me in person.”
“She didn’t because she thought you knew and were ignoring the whole situation,” Brooke said. “You knew each other for what? A few months?”
“She was just Jade’s friend. Obviously I’d known her for longer than that.”
Brooke let out an exasperated sigh. “But you saw her as a kid before you dated her. It’s not the same thing.”
Maybe my sisters were correct. And maybe I should have kept my dick in my pants since Skye had been young. But there had been no chance of that once I’d gotten to know her.
