Nathan's Child - By Anne McAllister Page 0,15

couldn’t have begged Nathan for marriage—not when she’d given him her heart and he’d only shared his body. It would have destroyed them both.

In the end there had been only one thing to do. And the truth was, she admitted to herself, she had barely considered Lacey’s needs at all.

Later she’d assured herself that it would be better for Lacey to have one parent who loved her than have two where one of them might resent her very existence.

Now Carin took a careful, steadying breath and let it out slowly.

“Well, he’s here now,” she said with far more calm than she felt as she smoothed the light cotton blanket over Lacey, then bent to give her daughter a kiss. “So you can enjoy getting to know him.”

“I will,” Lacey vowed, and settled back against the pillows again.

On a normal night, once Lacey had gone to sleep, Carin would have finished up her bookwork from the store, then made herself a cup of tea and taken it out on the porch to sit in the swing and unwind from the day.

Tonight she couldn’t settle. She tried to do her bookwork and couldn’t concentrate. She made a cup of tea and couldn’t sit still to drink it. She paced around the house, picking things up and setting them back down again.

Finally she went outside and flung herself down on the swing, grabbed her sketchbook and tried to funnel some of her restless energy into ideas for her work. But all her drawings became sharp-featured, dark-haired men, and she ripped them out of the sketchbook, crumpled them up and tossed them aside, wishing it were as easy to get rid of Nathan.

A creaking noise at the gate made her look up. A pair of yellow eyes glinted in the darkness. “Ah, Zeno,” she said as the gate was nosed further open. “Come here, boy.”

A dark shape shambled toward the porch. He was a little taller than an Irish setter, a little wirier than a terrier, a little more spotted than a dalmatian, a little less mellow than a golden retriever. He had turned up one day, full-grown, and no one knew which visiting boat he’d come off.

Her friend Hugh McGillivray, who ran Fly Guy, the island transport company, had begun calling him Heinz because he was at least fifty-seven varieties of dog. But Lacey had named him Zeno because he had appeared on their doorstep about the same time Nathan’s book, Solo, had come out.

“He looks nothing like a wolf,” Carin had protested.

“Looks aren’t everything. Are they, Zeno?” Lacey had said stubbornly, hugging the gangly animal who had grinned and furiously wagged his tail.

“He’s not ours to name.” Their house wasn’t close to big enough for a dog the size of a wolfhound.

“He’s nobody else’s,” Lacey rejoined practically. “Not unless someone comes back for him. Besides,” she added, apparently deciding that an outside dog was better than no dog at all, “he doesn’t have to come in. He can just come around.”

Which was pretty much what he did. Zeno the dog seemed to have no more interest in settling in any one place than Zeno the wolf had. He moved from place to place, from house to house—life was a movable feast for Zeno—and pretty soon everyone on the island knew him, fed him and called him by the name Lacey had given him. Mostly he divided his time between their place and Hugh’s, because Hugh had a mostly border collie called Belle who had apparently caught Zeno’s eye.

Tonight, though, Belle must have had other plans as Zeno was looking hopefully at Carin. She scratched his ears and rubbed under his chin. It was soothing, petting the dog. It calmed her, centered her, slowed her down.

“Thanks for coming,” she told him with a wry smile.

Zeno grinned. His tail thumped on the porch. He looked toward the door. Carin knew what he wanted.

“It’s late,” she told him. “You must have eaten. Didn’t Hugh feed you? What about Lorenzo?”

But Zeno cocked his head and whined a denial.

Carin sighed and rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. Let me see what we’ve got.” Giving his ears one last scratch, she went inside to check the refrigerator. She found leftover peas and rice from dinner plus a bit of the fish Lacey had caught. Carin crumbled it into a bowl, carried it back through the living room and started to push open the screen door.

“Here, Zee—”

Nathan was on the porch.

So much for calm and settled. Carin’s fingers automatically clenched