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Damn emotions. I was better off when I couldn’t let them come to the surface.
Now that I had, I was pretty much screwed.
The pain of watching Aiden walk away was almost more than I could bear.
I picked up the papers and looked for contact information.
They close at five p.m.
There was no way I was going to get any answers tonight.
And what would happen if they told me that there was no mistake?
I knew better, but Aiden didn’t.
And I had no idea if I could eventually talk him into doing the test again with a different lab.
“Mom, did Dad just leave? I saw his truck from the window of the music room,” my daughter asked anxiously as she came into the kitchen.
I swiped at my tears before I turned to her. “He did. But I’m sure he’ll be back.”
Eventually.
At the moment, there was no reasoning with him.
“Why did he go? It’s time for dinner.”
I smiled at her. “Dinner is coming up. I was going to make hamburgers. Do you want to go hang out at Aunt Jade’s place to make them? I have a key.”
My best friend had told me to feel free to use her place anytime while she was gone. And I was going to take her up on her offer. I really didn’t want to be around to fight with Aiden when he came back. I was pretty certain he wasn’t going to just blow off steam that easily.
His heart was understandably broken because he thought his daughter really wasn’t his blood. And nothing I could do right now would convince him that she was.
“Why would we want to go there? Dad’s house is nicer.”
Good Lord! Nobody had ever told me how to explain fights to an eight-year-old. And the situation was so much different from when she’d only had a stepfamily that constantly ignored her.
But I never lied to Maya. Okay, maybe just a little about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but she was getting old enough that she knew the truth about those things anyway.
“Something . . . happened. And your dad is a little upset with me. But he’ll get over it. He got some bad information. That’s all. I don’t blame him for being angry, but I can’t get the right information until tomorrow.” That should work, right? I wasn’t blaming Aiden or saying anything bad about him.
“Mom, you can just say that you and Dad had a fight. My friends’ parents fight all the time. I think it’s kind of normal.”
I frowned at her. “Do you think so?”
She shrugged. “When you love somebody, they can still make you mad, right? My friends say their parents get upset about money sometimes, or other stupid stuff.”
I watched as she climbed up on a stool at the breakfast bar. Her eyes were nearly level with mine, and she didn’t look all that concerned.
“It was kind of ridiculous, but I think he needs some time to come to his senses,” I explained, marveling over the fact that sometimes kids could simplify things that seemed pretty complicated to adults.
She nodded. “Then we can go to Aunt Jade’s. It would be fun. But can we come back here tomorrow? I think we’ll both miss Dad.”
I was teary-eyed. My daughter was right. We were both going to be missing Aiden. I could only hope that he didn’t push Maya out of his life before he had confirmation that she really was his daughter.
“I don’t know. We’ll see what your dad says, okay?”
There was no way in hell I was going to let my daughter know that her father had questioned whether or not he was her biological father. It would crush her if she thought he was rejecting her in any way.
“He won’t stay mad,” she said reasonably. “He never does.”
“That’s because you’ve never given him a reason to be all that angry at you. You’re a good girl, Sugar Bug.”
She might be curious and inquisitive, but my daughter was far from being a brat. I rarely had to set my foot down with her, and Aiden was so patient that I doubted she’d ever seen her father this ticked off. Which was another reason it was better if I stayed at Jade’s for now.
Maya idolized Aiden.
And I wanted it to stay that way.
“Should I get my backpack?” she asked.
I nodded. “Put some clothes for school in it, and everything you need for tomorrow.”
I’d figure out the details later. Aiden and I would have to talk to each other eventually.
The lab was actually close. I’d go to San Diego after Maya went to school if I needed to, and find out how and why the results had been screwed up.
And I knew they had.
I’d been with two men in my life.
Aiden.
And I’d endured the rapes my husband had dished out.
So I had no doubt who the father was, since I’d been pregnant before I’d even considered taking Marco up on his offer of marriage.
My chest ached for the pain Aiden had to be going through at the moment.
Maybe it was hard to believe me when the DNA results had been right there in front of him.
But it still destroyed me that he had doubted me, even when he had good reason to be skeptical.
I only wished that he could have listened to his heart.
CHAPTER 27
AIDEN
“Please don’t tell me that you think, for even a second, that Maya isn’t really your daughter,” Seth drawled as he handed me a beer and then dropped onto his sofa with his own bottle.
When I’d left my house, I’d had no idea where I was going. For some reason that I was currently questioning, I’d headed down the beach to my brother’s place.
No matter how pissed off I may have been with Seth, I’d always shared stuff with him, and it had been my natural instinct to show up on his doorstep.
My head was still reeling from the lab results. I hadn’t thought it was possible for Skye to lie about something this damn important. Actually, as far as I knew, she wasn’t really the type of woman to tell falsehoods at all.
“I’m excluded from being her father, Seth. It’s there on the papers. I guess I should have brought them with me for you to see, but you’ll just have to believe me. I saw it with my own eyes. Many times. Excluded means I can’t possibly be her biological father. It’s DNA, for fuck’s sake. How could it be wrong?”
He shrugged and took a slug from his beer. “Shit happens. Nothing is ever one hundred percent if you have humans doing the work. Think for just a minute, Aiden. Maya is like a mini you. There’s no mistaking that she looks just like Brooke and Jade did at her age.”
“Coincidence,” I grumbled. “All of us are dark haired.”
“It’s not just her hair. It’s her facial features, too, and you know it. She’s undeniably a Sinclair. Believe me, if I thought she wasn’t, I would have told you. But not one of us has ever questioned it, because she looks so much like you.”
“Then tell me what the hell you’d think,” I demanded. “Wouldn’t it have messed with your head, too?”
“Hell, yeah,” he answered. “I’d probably believe the test results. But I’m trying to make you calm the hell down and see that even though the possibility is minute, the test could be wrong.”
“And the chances of that?”
“Slim to none,” he answered matter-of-factly. “But it could happen. And in this particular case, you should at least think about it, since she bears an uncanny resemblance to a Sinclair.”
