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“Bummer,” Maya commiserated. “This time will be better.”
I sat up and rose from the bed. Aiden took up a seated position beside his daughter. “It will be fantastic,” he promised.
There was silence before Maya asked hesitantly, “Can I hug you good night?”
My heart squeezed as Aiden opened his arms for her immediately. My daughter threw herself against his strong body and wrapped her arms around his neck trustingly.
The two of them stayed like that for so long that I thought Maya might fall asleep on her father’s shoulder. But Aiden eventually lowered her back onto her pillow and kissed the top of her head. “Sleep, Princess,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”
He backed off so I could hug and kiss my daughter good night.
“I love you, Mom,” Maya said as she enthusiastically hugged me. “Thank you for giving me a dad.”
If I hadn’t already known how much Maya missed having a father, I realized it as I held her warm body against mine. “I love you, too, Sugar Bug,” I said as I let her go and kissed her cheek.
I didn’t trust myself to say anything more without bursting into tears.
Maya made herself comfortable, and I pulled the covers tightly around her.
By the time I went to turn off her bedside lamp, I was pretty sure she was already out cold.
She’d had a long day.
When I glanced at her for the last time before I plunged the room into darkness, I realized that my daughter had fallen asleep with a smile on her cherubic face.
It was pretty pathetic that I couldn’t even remember the last time that had happened.
CHAPTER 8
SKYE
“This was her baby picture,” I told Aiden as I pointed to one of the first photos in the album I was holding. “It was taken right after she was born.”
When Maya had gone to sleep, Aiden asked if he could look at pictures of the parts of her childhood he’d missed. He grabbed a beer, and I got a glass of wine before we sat down on the living-room couch together to look at her childhood photos.
“She’s so damn tiny,” Aiden remarked.
“She was big enough,” I informed him. “Eight pounds, eleven ounces, and she was breech. I had to have a C-section.”
“Was it painful? Who was there with you? Your ex-husband?”
“I had some pain after it was over, but I was so in love with our daughter that I didn’t notice all that much. And nobody was there. It was just me and Maya.”
“Nobody came to the hospital?” He sounded angry.
I slowly shook my head. “No. I told you that nobody really acknowledged Maya.”
“How in the fuck can anybody be that cold?”
I wasn’t about to tell him just how cold the Marino family could be. Not having them at Maya’s birth had been nothing to me. In fact, I’d been relieved.
“It didn’t really matter,” I said hastily. “I had my daughter. And things were awkward with my in-laws. They hated the fact that Marco had married a woman who was pregnant with someone else’s child. I think I was more relaxed being alone. I was nervous, anyway. I had no idea how to take care of a baby.”
“The nurses helped?”
“A lot,” I acknowledged. “They taught me all of the routine stuff, and once I got home with Maya, I got over worrying about hurting her if I did even the slightest thing wrong. But I was still a young first-time mother. I guess some fears never go away. I still get concerned over every cold or case of sniffles she gets.”
“I’m sorry you went through all that alone,” he said hoarsely.
“I lived through it,” I replied. “Oh, this is her first birthday.” I pointed to a picture on the next page.
“God, she looks so much like Brooke when she was little,” he said as he reached out and touched the edge of the picture.
“She looks like you,” I said softly.
“I guess she does,” he said in an awed tone.
“I’m sorry you missed all those years.”
“I’ll make it up to her. To be honest, I’m sure I probably would have lost it when she was a baby. I would have been even more freaked out than you were. I don’t really remember my younger siblings being babies. Mom was still around back then.”
I flipped the page once Aiden had glanced at all the visible photos. “They’re so small that it’s pretty intimidating. But it seems like she’s growing up way too fast now.”
I kept explaining all the pictures he was seeing, and we sat like that for a long time, just looking at Maya’s childhood images.
Finally, I got to the end of the book. “I have some others that I haven’t had time to put into an album yet.”
Aiden took the pictures and put them on the coffee table as he said, “All this was hard on you, Skye. I can understand that now. You were way too young to be alone, much less alone with a baby.”
“I wouldn’t trade what happened for the world,” I assured him. “I love Maya, and I can’t imagine not having her in my life.”
He looked frustrated as he answered, “If I had only gotten that letter. I would have been there.”
I put a hand lightly on his forearm. “I know.”
And honestly, I did know that now. Seeing my daughter with her father made me recognize just how serious Aiden was about family, and how readily he’d always taken on whatever responsibility he felt he needed to shoulder.
If he’d known, he would have been there. I’d just been too disappointed and hurt to realize it when I’d been eighteen.
I glanced at the clock. “I have to go. I need to go close up at the café.”
He looked at me, his expression confused. “Now? It’s late.”
“I always close. All of my staff is part time. Most of them are college students. I don’t have anybody who knows how to close things down.”
“You can’t be there alone,” he said stubbornly. “It’s late, and it’s not safe.”
I stood up. “Aiden, this is Citrus Beach. And it’s not tourist season. It’s pretty quiet after dark.”
He rose. “It’s a big-enough city to have our share of crime.”
He was right. Citrus Beach was growing, and bad things did happen here occasionally. Honestly, I didn’t love being in the café at night after all the employees had departed. There was money to count, and accounting to do. So it made me uneasy. But I’d kind of gotten used to it.
“I’ll be fine,” I told him.
“You’ll be great, because I’m coming with you,” he stated stubbornly. “And tomorrow we’ll look at hiring you a manager. You said you wanted the restaurant to be more. So make it more, but don’t plan on ever being alone there again at night. It’s not safe.”
I wanted to say something. I really did. But the fact that he was actually concerned about me kind of overrode my indignation about him telling me what I could and couldn’t do.
Nobody had ever cared whether I was safe or not.
And the warmth that flooded my body because someone cared felt so damn good.
“You don’t need to go,” I argued weakly.
