would he hide the truth about who she was? An image of the woman’s face flashed in her mind. She recalled her dark feathery hair and brown eyes, and remembered thinking that she looked familiar.
“Why does it matter?”
“Because you need my help,” Caroline reminded him. “Because in order for me to give you that help, I have to trust you. Completely. I can’t do that when you hold back. I would shake it out of you if I could, but you’re too damn big. So I’m telling you it ends now. You have to let me in.”
“You are in,” he said tightly.
“No, it’s not enough. You think you’ve let me inside, but you don’t realize how many levels of defense you have.”
“I’m trying.”
It was barely a whisper, but it gave her hope. “I know. Who is she?”
He paused. “She’s my half sister.”
It was the truth. “You told me you had no family.”
“She’s my father’s daughter. He abandoned her like he did me. Only her mother was lucky. She remarried. Nora’s stepfather adopted her, but they never got along. As a teenager she had an attitude. Revenge, spite, who knows why a teenager does what she does? She went looking for her real father only to be told by him that he wanted nothing to do with her.”
Caroline tightened her grip on his hand in a knee-jerk reaction of sympathy for a girl who was all grown up. “How did she find you?”
“Like I said, she had a talent with computers. Somehow she tracked me down. Found me despite my new identity.” Dominic grinned as he remembered. “She showed up in my office with spiked purple hair, white face paint, chains from one end of her body to the other, combat boots and a ring through her nose. I thought she was from the circus, but she told me who she was and threatened to expose my past if I didn’t give her the money she needed to run away.”
“You gave her a job instead.”
“Then I called her mother.”
Of course he did. Caroline swallowed the lump in her throat as it once more became painfully obvious to her that this man, her husband, was a good guy.
“Nora and I aren’t close. My fault. She tried a couple of times, but I did everything I could to keep her at a distance. She could work for me, but I didn’t let her stay in my house. I didn’t acknowledge to anyone that she was related to me. She was an employee. That’s all.”
“You regret that.”
He nodded. “I went to see her graduate from the academy. She didn’t know I was there. I thought if we got this government contract I would be traveling back and forth to D.C. a lot. I thought maybe I could try to see her. Get to know her.”
Caroline rested her head on his shoulder. “You’re really pathetic, you know that?” She felt him flinch, but he didn’t pull away. “You did everything you could to keep this person out, too. But the second you sent her an e-mail saying you needed help, she was on the first flight out to the west coast. You know, for someone who does everything he can to keep people at arm’s length, you’re remarkably lucky to find these women who obviously love you. Or maybe it’s not luck.”
She lifted her head and met his eyes. She saw in them what she’d seen the first time he looked at her. Intensity, desire-that was there, too-and need. It was probably the need that got to her. The need that cried out and practically begged for the soft touch of someone who cared.
She leaned forward and kissed him. She felt the surprise in him, knowing he hadn’t expected it. She ran her tongue over the seam of his mouth, loving the feel of him, loving the idea that she could do this again. The pain of missing him was gone and it felt as if she’d lost a hundred pounds. But when he opened his mouth, wanting to deepen the kiss, she pulled back.
As much as she wished it could be over, they weren’t done yet. There was still one thing she had to know. It would hurt him, she thought. Hurt him to tell it, and so it hurt her to ask.
“Tell me why you went to jail, Dominic.”
Chapter 12
“I need to know.”
Dominic remained silent.
“They said you assaulted a man.”
He closed his eyes and she could see his body tightening. There was no escaping the question. They’d gone too far now. It had to be everything between them or there could be nothing.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I hated him. And when I was eighteen, I wasn’t as adept at controlling my emotions as I am now.”
“Who was he?” Although she already suspected the answer, she thought the questions would help him get it out.
“My father,” he exhaled.
Caroline, too, released the breath she’d been holding. “Tell me about him.”
“What’s to tell? He was a bastard. Worthless and mean-spirited. My mother was seventeen when they met. She was a migrant worker in the grape fields in Central California. I like to think it was his fault. That he seduced a girl who barely knew English, but she loved him.”
“Sometimes you can’t necessarily help it.”
“That sounds like you’re speaking from experience,” he said.
Caroline wasn’t going to lie. “I will admit there have been a few times in the past week where I wished I had just gotten a cat.”
“Anyway, they married. How she managed to get him to do that, I’ll never know, but it was legal. She became pregnant with me. Once that happened he left. She was devastated. But we had each other.”
“She loved you.” She remembered how defensive he’d gotten when she’d suggested that his mother abused him. There was devotion on his part. Had there been on hers as well?
“She did,” he agreed. “But maybe only because I was a part of him.”
Caroline said nothing. She simply processed the blow to her chest. She’d called him cold. Heartless. But he wasn’t. Not really. He was just a man who had been abandoned by his father and made to believe his mother only cared for him because he reminded her of the man she loved.
It was a wonder that there was any softness in him at all. And it made her question whether or not he would ever be able to return the love she wanted to give him. She couldn’t think about that. She needed the story. All of it. Then they had to figure out what the next step was going to be.
When this was over, she could decide if there was hope.
“She got sick,” he continued. “Breast cancer, but she let it go unchecked. By the time they diagnosed it, it had spread. We didn’t have any money for doctors or hospitals, nowhere near enough for the type of care she needed. I was out of my mind with worry and guilt. Not her, though. She just seemed to accept it. Told me everything would be okay. I was seventeen, mostly raised, smart. She told me I had a chance to be something. But I wasn’t ready to let go.”
“No one ever is. Not when it’s their mother.”
“She was so young,” Dominic insisted. “Too young to die. I worked three part-time jobs, but that just paid the rent and bought food. Medicine was out of the question. It was either go to him or rob a bank.”
“He didn’t help you.”
“He told me he barely remembered her. I stood there looking at this man who was supposed to be my father, a man my mother was in love with when I was conceived, and he didn’t even know who I was. The irony is I look like him. I have my mother’s coloring, but his nose, his eyes, his chin. It sickened me, knowing I could look like someone
