“You know that for certain. You have DNA results.” They weren’t questions. They were statements, as if this was the evidence he would need for proof. Her verbal assurances would fall short. Dark-haired, dark-eyed Brianna was her proof, but she wasn’t putting her daughter before an angry man for judgment.
“I don’t have to give you any sort of answers.” He had a legal right to his daughter, but with Brianna the only right he had was the moral right to know that a child was not his.
“If she’s not my daughter, then you...”
“Don’t. Don’t you even say those words.” He was her first and the only man she’d loved. Micky had been there after her heart had been broken into so many pieces she’d thought she would never heal. She had not left one man’s bed and gone directly to the other. “If we’re not careful, some of the things we say to each other might not be forgivable.”
He stayed silent, but his gaze never left her face.
“Would it help if I told you Brianna was born prematurely?”
She could tell he was trying to hide the scorn, but it was leaking out through his attempted mask of indifference. She would not fault him for that, either. Scorn had been what she had felt for herself starting the day Micky left. She and Micky had done nothing but combine bodies; there was not the commingling of souls Delainey had always thought making love should be.
She had made love with Hunter.
He did not speak.
He was using the silence technique. Give a witness enough time and she might say something incriminating or at least telling to fill the void.
She had thought they would use the time tonight to reacquaint themselves, maybe to recapture some of their old rapport.
She wasn’t sure there was anything to recapture and silence worked well on her. “You left me.”
He turned and looked out the windshield into the darkness. Silence would not work again. She put her seat belt on and started the car. When they reached the Murphys’ house, he paused before getting out of the car.
“We’ll have to finish this.”
When he bid her good-night and disappeared into Shamus’s house, her only thought was...he’d left her again.
After the first time, it should have gotten easier.
It had not.
CHAPTER FIVE
HUNTER HUNG HIS overcoat in the foyer closet, glad the Murphys’ house was quiet and mostly dark.
You left me.
He’d left her and she’d created a child. A child of hers that could have been his.
He wandered into the kitchen and tossed the wrapper from the sandwich into the trash bin. The trash bin. A real metaphor for the state of his personal affairs these days.
Connie appeared in the doorway with a glass in her hand. When she saw him, a look of concern fell over her face and he let his own relax. He smiled as he crossed the kitchen to where she met him halfway.
“Hello, Connie. I didn’t expect you to be up.”
“Oh, my dear Hunter, don’t give me that smiley look. What’s wrong?” she asked as she put a frail hand on his arm and looked up into his face with true concern.
“Looks as if someone could use a drink,” Shamus added from the doorway. He was never far from Connie except when he went into the office without her.
Connie nodded her agreement and led the way to the den, where a fire burned, reminding him of the one he had just left. Last night they had sat before this fireplace and Shamus and Connie had told him why Shamus had suddenly decided to retire. Connie had been diagnosed with leukemia. She disguised her trips to the clinic in Portland as some of the many trips she used to take with her sisters.
Shamus had wanted to leave the law firm the minute he found out, but Connie would not hear of his leaving Harriet and the workers in the lurch. When Connie suggested he call a Morrison, Hunter, the only attorney from the family, Shamus had.
Without giving too much detail, Hunter had hinted during their first call he might be available for an indefinite period of time. Hunter had become the perfect candidate and the two of them had begun to court him, Shamus in person, Connie on the phone.
At the time, he had no idea why. He would have been on the next plane if they had told him. He didn’t know Shamus and Connie well, but he knew their reputation as good people.
Shamus tended bar for the three of them. Easy enough. Clear still water for Connie and two fingers of neat scotch for each of the two men.
Hunter poked the fire and tossed on another log before he sat down to his drink.
“Now, my boy, your secrets are safe with us and it would not harm you to have someone to tell them to.”
Hunter swirled the scotch around in the tumbler and then put it to his nose and inhaled deeply. The heady fumes went straight to his brain and he took a sip of the smooth, fiery liquid.
“I made a judgment call.”
“A judgment call. The choices must have been big ones.”
Hunter let out a derisive grunt. “As you know, my family moved back to the Midwest after I graduated from high school.”
“The town missed all of you. Your mother was a well-thought-of music teacher and your father would have been wonderful on the town council—progressive,” Connie said between sips of water.
“During Christmas break my senior year in college, my parents asked me to go to law school near them. My dad was having heart problems and my mother said she would feel much more ‘at ease,’ as she put it, if I lived nearby.”
“So you did. Northwestern University was very near your parents’ home in Chicago.”
“Yes. I had already been accepted at all the law schools to which I had applied, including Northwestern, so the process wasn’t an arduous one.”
“And you did quite well, as I understand it, dear.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Connie waved her glass of water in the air. “You know what I told you about the ma’am stuff.”
“Of course, Connie.
“I came back to close down my grandmother’s estate because Dad hadn’t been feeling well and he knew it might be a long time until he got to it. So I spent almost a month here right after I graduated.”
“Saying goodbye to your friends.” Shamus smiled as if remembering friends of his own.
Hunter hesitated. He hadn’t meant to say goodbye that way to Delainey, but he’d done his best to explain and that was all he’d thought he could do at the time. He’d been so young, ambitious...selfish even, although he didn’t see it then.
“Delainey,” Shamus said.
Hunter looked up at the older man. Shamus’s mostly gray eyebrows stood out on his face almost like wings. His shock of gray hair bristled no matter what he tried to do with it, but Hunter doubted there was a kinder face on the planet. “As you might have figured, the judgment call didn’t turn out well for me.”
He hadn’t been able to see how Delainey would fit in his life, and it wouldn’t have been fair to her on so many levels until he could. Besides, she loved Bailey’s Cove and had had a lot going on here—whereas he no longer had. At least, that was what