He lifted an eyebrow. “You’d rather share custody of Noelle?”
The breath left Daisy’s lungs in a rush. “What?”
“You said she’s mine. Now that I know about her existence, I’m willing and able to be a father to her. There’s only two ways that’ll work. Either we live together or we shuttle her back and forth between us. I’m thinking it’s in our daughter’s best interest for her to live with both of us. Together.”
Her gaze swept the room and he struggled to see it through her eyes. Despite the state-of-the-art equipment and electronics tucked neatly behind warm oak cabinets, it came up lacking. Empty. Cold. Aw, hell. Dark and dusty, even with the lights.
“You want us to live out here, in the middle of nowhere?” she asked in disbelief. “What sort of life is that for a child?”
“We can work around any of your objections,” he insisted doggedly. “There are reasons I choose to live in the middle of nowhere.”
“Such as?”
“Pretorius? Permission, please.”
There was a momentary silence, then, “Tell her.”
“My uncle has a social anxiety disorder. It’s one of the reasons I was put in foster care after the death of my parents. The courts didn’t consider Pretorius an acceptable guardian.”
Compassion swept across Daisy’s expression and he realized that it was an innate part of her character. It always had been. “Agoraphobia?” She hazarded a guess.
“That’s probably part of it. More, it’s people in general he has difficulty handling.”
“Huh. I have that same problem … with certain people.”
He acknowledged the hit with a cool smile. “Whereas he needs the isolation, I value my privacy. When I turned eighteen and had nowhere to go, my uncle opened his home to me, even though he found it a very difficult adjustment. Since then, it’s worked for us. Or rather, it did.”
“Should I assume something changed?”
Time to be honest with her. Totally honest. “Yes. It changed a couple of years ago.”
“What happened a couple of years—” He caught her dawning comprehension and again that deep flash of compassion. How did she do it? How did she open herself up like that and let everyone in? Especially when it guaranteed she would be hurt in the process. “Oh, Justice. The car wreck?”
He nodded. “It made me realize what I had wasn’t enough.”
“And …?”
He chose his words with care. It felt like tiptoeing through a minefield. “I asked Pretorius to rewrite a business program he marketed a few years ago. I gave him a set of parameters combining qualities important to me, with characteristics that would also be compatible with my uncle.”
She stared blankly. “You just lost me.”
“He asked me to find him a wife,” Pretorius interrupted. “One that we’d both like.”
Justice swore. “I’m telling this story, old man.”
“And I’m just filling in the parts you seem to be skipping over.”
“I was getting to them. I just wanted to do this in a logical order.”
Pretorius snorted. “Right. And E-equals-MC-you’re-full-of-crap.”
Damn it to hell. “Computer, close circuit to kitchen and keep it closed until I say otherwise.”
“No, I want to hear—” Pretorius’s voice was cut off midsentence.
Justice took a deep, steadying breath. “Now, where was I?”
He could see the laughter in Daisy’s eyes before gold-tipped lashes swept downward, concealing her expression. “I believe you were explaining how you used a computer program to find a wife.” The merest hint of amusement threaded through her words.
“It made perfect sense at the time.”
“Of course it did.”
“The Pretorius Program has been quite successful at choosing the perfect employee in the business sector.” He heard the defensive edge slashing through his comment and took a moment to gather himself. What was it about Daisy that caused him to lose his composure with such ease and frequency? “I had more specific requirements to take into consideration for a wife, so Pretorius tweaked the parameters.”
“What sort of specific requirements and what parameters?”
Hell, no. He would not walk down that road. “That’s not important.”
Unfortunately, she seemed unusually adept at adding two and two together, squaring it and leaping to a completely illogical, though accurate, conclusion. “You were looking for a wife at that engineering conference, weren’t you? That’s why you were so mad when you discovered I wasn’t an engineer.”
“That’s a distinct possibility,” he admitted.
She leaned forward, staring intently, her spring-green eyes disturbing in the extreme. “Are you telling me that Pretorius devised a computer program to find you the perfect woman and she was supposed to be at that conference?”
Damn, damn, damn. “Yes.”
“Are you seriously going to sit there and admit that you thought you could waltz into that conference, check out the women your uncle’s program selected and convince one of them to marry you?”
He gritted his teeth. “Engineers are very logical. The women involved would have seen that we were an excellent match.”
Her mouth dropped open. “And agreed to marry you right then and there?”
“That would have been helpful, though unlikely.”
“You think?”
He suspected from her tone that the question was both rhetorical and a bit sarcastic. Just in case he was mistaken, he gave her a straight answer. “Yes. But Pretorius suggested a way around that.”
“Oh, this I have to hear.”
“He suggested I offer her a position as my apprentice. That would allow us an opportunity to get to know each other better before committing to marriage. It would also allow me to determine whether she was acceptable to Pretorius.”
“Huh.” Daisy mulled that over. “Okay, that’s not such a bad plan. So explain something to me. It’s been almost two years. Why don’t you have an apprentice/wife by now?”
He would have given anything to avoid this conversation. But he suspected that unless he put all his cards on the table, he’d lose any chance at having a family. A real family. And over the past two years he’d discovered he wanted that more than anything else. Needed the connection before the ice crystallizing in his veins won and he lost all ability to feel. “It would seem the computer program contained a flaw.”
“Remarkable.”
“Agreed.” He frowned. “In retrospect, I realize that there are some indefinable qualities that prove difficult to adapt to a computer program.”
“Wow. Who would have thought. Enlighten me. What sort of indefinable qualities are we talking about?”
Justice had given it a lot of thought over the ensuing months and as irrational and unscientific as it was, there’d been only one inescapable conclusion. “I believe it must have been chemical in nature and therefore extremely difficult to quantify.”
“In English, please?”
He stood and crossed the room to give himself some breathing space. “I didn’t want them.