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I’m speechless.
I’ve never met Kristin, but I’ve seen pictures of her. She has the same color eyes as Gage. Her brown hair is the same shade as his.
When I saw her smile in the first photograph he showed me, I swore that i
t was the spitting image of her father’s smile.
Gage isn’t her father.
At least not by blood, but the love he has for that little girl is evident in his voice when he talks about her and in his eyes now.
He can’t mask the pain that he’s in.
“I didn’t question whether she was mine or not.” He hangs his head in his hands. “I love her as much as I would a child that had my blood running through them.”
Emotion knots my gut.
“Madison’s ex came to Nashville looking for her a couple of years ago.” His voice evens. “I didn’t meet the guy right off, but months later I ran into him when he was leaving Madison’s place one morning.”
“He looks like Kristin?” I ask the obvious question.
“There’s a resemblance.” His hand scrubs his chin. “I shrugged it off at first, but it all came to a head one morning and the truth came out.”
“What happened?”
“I asked Madison if there was a chance that I wasn’t Kristin’s dad.” He finally glances in my direction. “She came to my apartment and confessed. She told me that she’d screwed him once days after our last time together. She did the math.”
“She sucks at math,” I say under my breath.
It lures a faint smile to his mouth. “She said he was her rebound. When she was found out she was pregnant, she assumed I was the dad.”
“She didn’t tell you for four years.” I shrug my shoulders. “Why did she wait so long?”
“Our relationship ended badly.” He closes his eyes briefly. “She said that she didn’t want to subject a child to that bitterness.”
She changed her tune as soon as she found out that Gage was set to marry me. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
“Madison stopped at my parents’ house because her mother willed a necklace to my mom,” he goes on, “from what I understand, my mom told her that she’d wear it to my wedding.”
“She told you about Kristin once she knew that you were marrying me.” My words sound petulant.
Madison made a choice, but Gage did as well.
He could have told me what was happening. I would have told him to take a step back and consider the possibility that the child wasn’t his.
I admit that the drive to urge him to question Kristin’s paternity would have been coming from a selfish place. I didn’t want kids when I was on the cusp of becoming Gage’s wife.
Despite that, I know that I would have accepted his daughter. I would have fallen in love with her as desperately as he did when he saw her beautiful face with those big green eyes and the crooked grin.
It might have taken me time to do that.
Not months, or years, but weeks.
A heart can heal when it’s placed in tender hands.
My mom said that to me a month-and-a-half after I’d moved to Manhattan. She wanted to fix me up with the son of one of her friends. He lived in Boston but was headed to New York City for business.
I turned her down.
