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Dean stood frozen. April couldn’t seem to move. Riley’s stricken eyes filled with tears. Blue couldn’t stand witnessing so much pain, and she rose from her chair. “Dean just rolled out of bed, Riley. Let’s give him a few minutes to wake up.”
Dean shifted his gaze to his mother. “What’s she doing here?”
April stepped back against the stove. “Trying to find you, I guess.”
Blue could see this meeting wasn’t playing out as Riley had imagined. Tears spiked the child’s lashes. “I’m sorry. I won’t ever say anything again.”
Dean was the grown-up, and he needed to take charge, but he stood silent and rigid. Blue moved around the table toward Riley. “Somebody hasn’t had his coffee yet, and it’s made him a grouchy bear. While Dean wakes up, I’ll show you where I slept last night. You won’t believe it.”
When Blue was eleven years old, she’d have challenged anybody who tried to close her out, but Riley was more accustomed to blind obedience. She ducked her head and reluctantly picked up her backpack. The kid was a walking heartache, and Blue’s own heart contracted in sympathy. She slipped an arm around Riley’s shoulders and steered her toward the side door. “First, you have to tell me what you know about gypsies.”
“I don’t know anything,” Riley muttered.
“Fortunately, I do.”
Dean waited for the door to shut. In less than
twenty-four hours, two people had confronted him with the secret he’d been able to keep for so many years. He spun on April. “What the hell is going on? Did you know about this?”
“Of course I didn’t know,” April retorted. “Blue found her asleep on the porch. She must have run away from home. Apparently she only has an au pair watching her.”
“Are you telling me that selfish son of a bitch left her alone less than two weeks after her mother died?”
“How would I know? It’s been thirty years since I talked to him in person.”
“Un-frickin’-believable.” He thrust his finger at her. “You find him right now and tell him to get one of his flunkies over here this morning to pick her up.” April didn’t like being ordered around, and she set her jaw. Too bad. He headed for the door. “I’m going to talk to her.”
“Don’t!” Her intensity stopped him. “You saw the way she was looking at you. It’s easy to see what she wants. Stay away, Dean. It’s cruel to raise her hopes. Blue and I’ll handle this. Don’t do anything to let her get attached to you unless you’re going to see it through.”
He couldn’t hide his bitterness. “The April Robillard school of child rearing. How could I have forgotten?”
His mother could be a real hard-ass when she wanted to, and her chin shot up. “You turned out all right.”
He threw her a disgusted look and left by the side door. But halfway across the yard he slowed. She was right. Riley’s needy eyes said she wanted everything from him that she knew she wouldn’t get from her father. The fact that Jack had abandoned the kid so soon after her mother’s funeral spelled out her future in big capital letters—an expensive boarding school and vacations spent with a series of glorified babysitters.
She’d still have it better than him. His vacations had taken place in luxury villas, fleabag hotels, or seedy apartments, depending on where April had been with her men and her addictions. Over time he’d been offered everything from marijuana to booze to hookers and generally had accepted it all. In fairness, April hadn’t known about most of it, but she should have. She should have known about a lot of things.
Now Riley had come after him, and unless he grossly misread the yearning on her face, she wanted him to be her family. But he couldn’t do that. He’d kept his connection with Jack Patriot secret for too long to have it blown now. Yes, he felt sorry for her, and he hoped like hell things got better, but that was as far as it went. She was Jack’s problem, not his.
He ducked inside the gypsy caravan. Blue and Riley sat on the unmade bed in the back. Blue was her customary fashion disaster, her pointy nursery rhyme face at odds with a pair of tie-dyed purple pants that had to be somebody’s idea of a joke, and an orange T-shirt big enough to house a circus. The kid gazed up at him, a world of misery inscribed on her round little face. Her clothes were too tight, too fussy, and the script FOXY on her T-shirt looked obscene over the innocent buds of her breasts. She wouldn’t believe him if he tried to convince her she was wrong about his connection to Jack.
Seeing so much desperate need in Riley’s expression brought back too many bad memories, and he spoke more harshly than he meant to. “How did you find out about me?”
She glanced at Blue, afraid to reveal more than she already had. Blue patted Riley’s knee. “It’s okay.”
The kid poked at the lavender wales on her corduroy pants. “My—my mom’s boyfriend told her about you last year. I sort of heard them talking. He used to work for my dad. But he made her swear not to tell anybody, not even Aunt Gayle.”
He braced his hand on one of the caravan’s ribs. “I’m surprised your mom knew about the farm.”
“I don’t think she did. I heard my dad talking to somebody on the phone about it.”
Riley seemed to overhear a lot of things. Dean wondered how his father had found out about the farm. “Give me your phone number,” he said, “so I can call your house and tell them you’re all right.”
“There’s only Ava, and she doesn’t like when the phone wakes her up too early. It makes Peter mad.” Riley picked at the blue nail polish on her thumb. “Peter’s Ava’s boyfriend.”
“So Ava must be your au pair?” he said. Nice work, Jack.
Riley nodded. “She’s pretty nice.”
