Nathan's Child - By Anne McAllister Page 0,10

took me along to pick him up. It was way cool. Can you fly a helicopter?”

“No.”

“Oh.” A pause. “That’s too bad.” Because maybe she was angling to learn how to fly a helicopter, too? “I used to think maybe he’d be my dad,” Lacey said.

Nathan scowled. “Why?”

“Because he likes Mom. An’ Mom likes him.”

And he was a hunk.

“And now she doesn’t?” Nathan hadn’t even thought that Carin might have a boyfriend. Dominic had only known that she didn’t have a husband.

“’Course she likes him. I told you, he’s nice.”

“But he’s not going to be your dad?”

Lacey gave a long-suffering sigh. “You’re my dad,” she explained.

“Oh. Right. Of course.”

Which was true but wasn’t the answer to his question: Does your mother plan on marrying Hugh the hunk? He couldn’t bring himself to ask that.

“Do you have your book about Zeno here?” Lacey finished her soda, hopped off the stool, carried the can to the sink and rinsed it out. “If you do I can tell you my favorite picture. And you can tell me about when you took it.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it upstairs.” He moved to get it. Like a shadow, Lacey came right after him.

“I like this house,” she said, looking around his bedroom with interest. “It’s big. Lots bigger than our house.”

“Yeah, well, there were three of us boys and my folks.” He opened the duffel on the floor and began pulling clothes out. There was a copy of each of his books at the bottom. He’d brought them for Lacey, never thinking Carin would already have given them to her.

“I’ve always wanted brothers and sisters.” Lacey perched on the edge of the bed and looked hopefully up at him.

“Yeah, well, um…brothers are kind of a pain in the neck.”

She gave a little bounce. “Uncle Dominic is really nice. He came to the shop to see my mom. And then he and Aunt Sierra were here before Christmas. And he and Grandpa came down a couple of months ago.”

Grandpa?

“Which Grandpa?” Nathan asked warily.

“The only one I’ve ever met,” Lacey said. “Grandpa Doug.”

His father had been here? And hadn’t even bothered to mention it?

“Grandpa brought me a camera. Want to see it?”

“A camera? Why’d he bring you a camera?” Nathan demanded.

“Because he thought it would be good for me to understand your business,” Lacey told him.

Yeah, Nathan thought grimly, that sounded like the old man. Grandkids and business were the two most significant things in Douglas Wolfe’s life. Nathan was almost surprised he hadn’t given Lacey a share of the company, and he said so.

“He wanted to,” Lacey said. “My mom said no.”

Nathan blinked. That didn’t sound like the Carin he remembered. The Carin he remembered wouldn’t have said boo to a goose. But then he recalled that she’d taken her life into her own hands the day she’d jilted his brother. So she’d obviously made some changes.

And so had his father if Douglas was taking no for an answer.

“She said if he wanted to visit, he could visit, but he couldn’t buy his way into our lives.”

Nathan choked back a laugh, imagining his father’s reaction to that. Oddly, he felt both proud of Carin for her stance and indignant on his father’s behalf. Because he didn’t know what to say, he dug through the books in his duffel until he found Solo.

“Great.” Lacey took it from him and flipped through it confidently, clearly looking for a particular picture. “This one.” She laid the book open flat on the bed so they could both look at it.

It was a photo he remembered well. He had taken it across a clearing with a telephoto lens. In the clearing itself, there were three half-grown wolf cubs wrestling with each other. It had been fun-and-games time for them. And that was all most people ever saw, and they cooed and oohed over the frolicking pups.

But now Lacey’s finger unerringly found Zeno watching his littermates from behind the brush on the far side of the clearing. He stood silent. Alone. Apart.

“Did you realize,” she asked Nathan, “when you took the photo, that he was there?”

“Not at first,” he admitted. “I was caught, like anyone would be, at the sight of the other pups. But as I took shot after shot, I really started to look, to focus. And then I saw him there.”

“All by himself.” Lacey’s finger brushed over the Zeno on the page. “Do you think he was lonely? Do you think he wanted to play, too?”

“Maybe sometimes he did. Sometimes, though, I