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CHAPTER 1
Standing in the family room of the big house on the Kissing Oaks Ranch, Blake Landry stared at the letter in his hands. Who the hell had the nerve to send him this?
He read the missive once again.
Someone is keeping secrets from you. Someone you once loved has a child they don’t want you to know about.
What the hell? Rage filled him. Who would do this?
All right, maybe in his younger years, he’d been a little wild. A little crazy. And he’d probably had too much to drink on several occasions, but he always used a condom. Always. And he did his best to leave on good terms with every girl he’d broken up with.
All except one. But she hadn’t been a girlfriend.
So who was hiding a child from him? And was it really his kid? No, he’d know if he had a child, wouldn’t he?
Were they trying to extort money from him? Wouldn’t be the first time.
Most of his past girlfriends lived here in town. Did any one of them have a child? And since the ranch had made a lot of money, he wouldn’t doubt someone would step forward and expect child support.
He wasn’t certain this was real. Somebody was playing games and he didn’t appreciate it. But still, what if it was true?
“Hey, Blake, what are you doing?” Cody his younger brother, the professional football player, asked. He was about to leave for training camp.
Blake certainly didn’t want his family to learn about this. There would be hell to pay if they learned he had a child that none of them knew about.
“Reading the mail,” he said, standing in the kitchen, his voice sounding gruff with the fury spreading through him.
“Did you hear that Adrian is taking Madison out to the family oak tree today?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, knowing that his brother and Madison were right for one another. He’d seen the way they looked at each other, and he was happy for them. This time, he felt certain his brother had chosen wisely.
Right now, he has his own problems.
“You seem distracted,” Cody said frowning at him.
And he was. He was trying to determine which girlfriend was hiding a baby from him. There was no hint as to what the age of the child was. There was no other information.
Was this real?
“Excuse me,” he said and walked out the door of the kitchen. He had to go back to his house and make a list of everyone he’d had sex with. No, it wasn’t that long, but long enough.
Then, one by one, he was going to see each woman until he learned who was hiding his child from him.
When he reached the house, he had to search high and low for a piece of paper and a pen, but when he finished, twelve names were written down. Out of that number, eight were married. Surely, this woman wouldn’t keep a secret like this from her husband, would she?
He would check out those first. Then he would move on to the last four who were single.
And if this message was true, when he learned who had kept this information from him, they would regret never telling him. They would be sorry that he’d finally learned the truth.
CHAPTER 2
Cristina Howard sat rocking her son, holding him close, dreading leaving him. Normally a very good-natured baby, tonight Wyatt was fussy and she had a flight in three hours. At six months old, he’d received his shots yesterday afternoon at the doctor’s office and the poor child was running a slight temperature. For hours, she’d been holding him, rocking him, and trying to soothe him the best way she knew how.
Gazing around her small apartment, she wanted to give her son the best life possible. So therefore she had to work. It was just the two of them and she wished her artwork would sell better, but so far, she’d only been accepted into one gallery and she’d yet to sell a painting. And now with a baby, it was hard to find the time to paint.
His bottom lip trembled and he gazed up at her with those damn blue eyes he’d received from his father. Those eyes that knew how to seduce a woman and make her feel like she was the most important person on this earth. Those eyes that had convinced her that she could soothe his troubled soul, if only for one night.
Those eyes that haunted her still. That one night had been the best and yet he’d left before she woke.
