He didn’t take the card. “So you can arrest her for abandoning her child?”
She thought about the sweet baby that she herself had rocked and played with and fallen for just like everyone else who’d come into Layla’s orbit. It didn’t really matter what had drawn this man and his nomadic sister to the same place at entirely different times.
What mattered was Layla.
She placed the card on the center of the table as she stood. “So I can find a child’s mother,” she amended quietly.
He didn’t respond. Didn’t reach for the card.
She squelched a sigh. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Cooper.” She turned to leave the kitchen.
“I haven’t talked to Karen in nearly three years,” he said abruptly.
She stopped and looked at him. She couldn’t imagine not speaking with any one of her siblings for three days, much less three years. “That’s a long time.”
“You don’t know Karen.” He stood from the table and escorted her from the barren kitchen back through the nonlivable living room. “She’s flighty. Irresponsible. Manipulative. But she wouldn’t have done this.” He opened the front door and a rush of bitterly cold wind swept inside. “She wouldn’t have dumped off her baby.”
“Not even if she was desperate?”
His lips tightened. “If she was that desperate, she would have let me know.”
“Well...” Ali zipped up her jacket. Fortunately, her departmental SUV had good heating. She stuck out her hand, hoping to show him that she wasn’t his adversary. “If you think of anything at all that might help us find her, please consider calling me.”
He looked vaguely resigned. He briefly clasped her hand, then shoved his fingers in the front pockets of his jeans. “I won’t think of anything.”
She fought the urge to tuck away her own hand, because her palm was most definitely singing. “But if you do—”
“But if I do, I’ll contact you.”
It was the best she could do at the moment. Bringing up the subject of testing his DNA to help identify whether or not Karen, aka Daisy Miranda, was actually Layla’s mother wouldn’t get her anywhere. Not just yet. She didn’t have to possess the kind of brilliant mind that had been bestowed on her siblings to recognize that particular fact. “Thank you.” She barely took two steps out the front door when it closed solidly behind her.
She didn’t look back, but let out a long, silent exhale that clouded visibly around her head as she went down the steps and headed to the SUV. At least she’d learned Daisy’s real name.
Daisy Miranda might have seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.
But maybe Karen Cooper hadn’t.
She pulled open the truck door and climbed inside, quickly turning on the ignition and the heat.
Only when she drove away did she finally rub her palm against the side of her pants until the tingling went away.
* * *
Grant Cooper watched the SUV until it was out of sight.
Then he turned on his heel and strode through the disaster zone that was the living room, heading back to the kitchen.
The sight of the book sitting on top of his packing crates stopped him.
He picked up the thick novel. Stared for a moment at the slick black cover featuring an embossed outline of a soldier. The author’s name, T. C. Grant, was spelled out in gold and was as prominent as the title—CCT Final Rules.
He turned and threw the book—hard—across the room.
It bounced against the plaster wall, knocked a can of white paint onto its side and fell with a thud to the floor.
He still felt like punching something.
If not for Karen, he never would have written the damn book he’d just thrown. But what was a little signature forgery, which had locked him into writing a fourth CCT Rules book, compared to abandoning her own child?
He raked his fingers through his hair.
“She wouldn’t do that,” he muttered.
But his eyes caught in the old mirror hanging on the wall. And there was uncertainty in his reflection.
Karen would have had to have been desperate to do it. If he hadn’t barred her from his life three years ago, she’d have come to him.
Just like she’d always come to him, expecting him to clean up the latest mess that she’d landed herself in.
Until that last, unforgiveable act, when she’d signed his name on the publishing contract he’d decided against accepting, he’d always been there for her.
She’d been crashing on his couch at the time, pitching the advantages of the contract as heavily as his publisher had been. It was his fault for leaving the unsigned contract right out on his desk where she’d had easy access to it. His fault for not even realizing the contract had disappeared, until he’d received it back, fully executed and with a handwritten note of “glad to see you came to your senses” attached. That’s what he got for having an ex-wife for his publisher. He’d known immediately what Karen had done, then. Signed his name on the dotted line. Same as she’d used to sign their parents’ names on school report cards.
It was easier to write the book than admit what she’d done. Courtesy of his ex-wife, Karen had walked away with a shopping spree for her part in “convincing” him to take the deal he’d admittedly been waffling over. She’d never known that writing the book had taken everything he had left out of him. Because he’d drawn the line with her by then. No more cleaning up. No more paying off. He didn’t want to hear from her. Didn’t want her phone calls. Her text messages. Her emails. Not even the postcards she always mailed from the places she ended up on her never-ending quest to find her “perfect” life.
Didn’t matter how many times Grant told her there was no such thing. His troubled sister was always on the hunt for it.
She’d even come to Wyoming, where she didn’t have any connections at all except for the one that he had.
And now there was a baby. Supposedly hers.
He looked in the mirror.
It wasn’t his reflection he saw, though. It was his sister’s face when he’d told her to stay out of his life for good.
He looked away from the mirror. Sighed deeply.
“Hell, Karen. What have you done?”
Grant didn’t recognize her at first.
Which wasn’t all that surprising, he supposed.
Instead of the shapeless navy blue police uniform covering her from neck to ankles, she wore a short red dress edged in black, which crossed tightly over her breasts to tie in a bow at her hip, and high-heeled black shoes. Her shapely legs peeked out below the snug hem that reached only a few inches past her butt.
He studied Officer Templeton over the rim of his beer as she made her way between tables, taking orders and picking up empties on her way toward the bar, where he was sitting in front of the taps. She didn’t even glance his way when she got to the end of the bar, delivered her orders to the bartender and picked up a fresh set of drinks.
“Thanks,