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If Paisley and Kendrickwere coming out to North Dakota, Peyton would be seeing them. There was no point in him hiding anything.
So, before he took a bite, he said, “Kendrick is my daughter. She lives in South Carolina with her nanny and my aunt, my mom’s older sister.”
Peyton nodded her head, her mouth full. She swallowed and then said, “If you don’t take a bite of that, I’m gonna start worrying again about whether or not there is poison in this. Or I’m gonna think you don’t like it.”
He grinned and dutifully picked up his fork, putting it in his mouth. It was delicious. She could not have been exaggerating when she mentioned she sold out of this every Saturday.
“It’s edible,” he said, giving her a look.
“Edible?” she asked, with her brows raised.
“I wouldn’t want to have you get a big head, everybody in town apparently loves it. Do you really need me as your next conquest?”
“Last conquest,” she said, grinning.
He swallowed all of his second bite before answering. “I guess I’m a willing conquest, because this is pretty amazing.”
He loved the way her eyes shone, not surprised but just with a radiant happiness that was unfeigned.
“So you have a daughter?” she said, as though the conversation had not been interrupted by him giving her a compliment on her cooking.
“Yeah.”
“And she doesn’t live with you?”
“No.”
“She doesn’t live with her mom?”
He figured it was going to be twenty questions unless he sucked it up and gave her the information she wanted.
Of course, he could just tell her to buzz off, but he found he really didn’t want to. Interesting, that she’d knock down the walls that he had erected to keep people at a safe arm’s-length distance.
“Her mom and I split when she was little. Her mom raised her for a while, a few years, but had some drug addiction issues, and was in and out of rehab. I ended up with custody of Kendrick. I needed to hire a full-time nanny because of my job. It didn’t leave a whole lot of free time during the season.”
He could have spent more time with his daughter than he did. He’d been pretty selfish. Full of himself. Egocentric, and he hadn’t wanted to be tied down with a kid.
He was ashamed of the person that he’d been and didn’t want to talk about it.
Maybe that was one good thing that had come out of the accident.
He’d never really thought of it before, but it had changed him for sure.
“I see. So I guess I don’t understand why she’s with the nanny now.”
“Because of this,” he said, pointing to his face like it was obvious.
She narrowed her eyes, tilting her head and furrowing her brows. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Would you want to have a dad with a face like this?”
“I guess I wouldn’t care what your face looked like if you were my dad.”
“You maybe don’t understand what it’s like in today’s age of social media. Everybody would know what I look like, her friends, people at school. Everyone. She would be embarrassed and ashamed of me.”
“I guess if you taught her to be embarrassed and ashamed, that’s how she’d feel. But you can teach her a better way.” Peyton’s voice still held uncertainty, like she couldn’t quite believe she was even arguing with him about something like this. Like it was obvious that his daughter would love him.
