covering mouths and some swearing, and oops, some tears from Elliott’s wife.
“What is she talking about?” Lauren screeched. “Your daughter?”
Cayden handed the crying baby to his wife but kept his glare firmly on Alexis. “This is bullshit. I don’t know who you think you are—”
“She’s our sister,” Candi said. “I have the DNA to prove it.”
Cayden turned his anger on Elliott. “Is this true? She’s your daughter?”
Lauren let out another sob and whipped around, hands pressed to her mouth.
Elliott finally found his balls and stood up straight. “I didn’t want you all to find out this way.”
“Oh my God,” Cayden breathed. “It’s true?”
Another loud sob from Lauren sent Elliott racing to his wife’s side. He circled to face her. “Honey, please. Let me explain. It was a long time ago.”
“Thirty-one years, to be exact,” Alexis quipped.
Lauren’s eyes widened as her brain did the inevitable math. “We were together then, Elliott.”
“No!” Elliott grabbed his wife’s hands. She yanked them back. “We were . . . It was that summer when we broke up. Lauren, please. Listen to me.”
“It was that woman, wasn’t it?” Lauren moaned.
The words were a slap across Alexis’s face. “That woman was my mother, and her name was Sherry Carlisle, and if you don’t believe I’m his daughter, just look at my eyes.”
Lauren paid no attention to Alexis, her weepy eyes locked on her husband. “She’s the one who called you when you came back from San Francisco.”
Wait. What? Her mother had called him? Alexis stormed forward. “Did—Did she tell you she was pregnant? Did you fucking know about me?”
Apparently the f-word was too much for Cayden’s wife, because she hightailed it from the room with the children.
Cayden brought his rage back to Alexis. “I think you’d better leave.”
“No!” Candi cried. “She’s a match, Dad. I know she is. She got the blood test today, and—”
“Stop this, Candi,” Elliott growled. “It’s not a guarantee. And you never should have brought her here without talking to me first.”
Lauren covered her whole face with her hands and began to wail.
Elliott faced Alexis. “Cayden’s right. I think you need to leave.” He leveled his angry stare at Candi. “I’ll deal with you later.”
Alexis shook her head. “Look, if I’m not wanted here, I have no problem leaving.”
She spun on her heel and retraced her steps on shaky legs to the door. Candi raced after her. “Wait. Please stay.”
Alexis yanked open the front door and pounded down the porch steps. Candi jogged after her and grabbed her arm.
Alexis whipped around. “What the hell was that, Candi? Your mother didn’t even know? How could you do that to me? How could you do that to them?”
“I—I was only thinking about—”
“My kidney. Yeah, I get it.”
“No. I was only thinking about saving my father’s life. Excuse me if I don’t know the proper protocol for all this.”
Alexis clenched her fists and stomped to her car, digging her keys from her pocket.
“Please don’t go,” Candi pleaded.
“He obviously doesn’t want me . . .” Alexis stopped short in horror as emotion clogged her throat at the slip of the tongue. “He doesn’t want my kidney.”
“He doesn’t know what he’s thinking right now. He was just surprised.”
Alexis snorted, pulling open her car door.
“Just wait here, okay? Let me go talk to them some more.”
Alexis slid into the front seat, and just before she yanked the door shut, she said, “Don’t call me again.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She drove in a fog. Until anger and resentment and the sting of rejection settled into a blessed numbness. Until oncoming cars on the freeway merged into a single blur. Until the nearly constant buzz of her phone on the floor of the passenger seat became a backdrop to the sound of recriminations in her head.
She should have known better.
She should have listened to Noah.
She pictured him in his house, standing in his kitchen with a bowl of whatever he’d heated up for dinner in his hand, shoveling it in as quickly as he could so he could get back to work. Or maybe he was reclined on his couch, legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles as he watched a documentary on TV. Or maybe he was at his computer, glasses on his face and his hair standing at wild angles because he’d dragged his hands through the strands too many times.
She’d seen him do all those things. His mannerisms were as familiar to her as her own.
And suddenly all she wanted was him.
It was six o’clock by the time she got