Gina laughed softly. “They’re not dating, Laine. He’s her father.”
Laine’s head snapped back into forward position and looked at Gina in shock. “But...”
The girl came in and walked right behind the counter. “Hi, Mom. Eric gave me an Amazon gift card.” Then she looked at Laine. “Hi,” she said, and Laine could see the resemblance—red hair, green eyes, but that smile belonged to someone else. Gina.
“Ashley, this is Laine. Laine, meet my daughter, Ashley.”
“Nice to meet you,” Ashley said. “I’ll go change and be right out to relieve you.”
Laine was speechless. She didn’t even know what question to form first and she felt the color drain from her face. Great game face, Laine, she chided herself.
“High-school romance,” Gina said. “Eric didn’t know about Ashley until about a year ago. I was very young and raised Ashley alone, with my mother’s help. The deli is my mother’s business—Ashley works there part-time, whenever Mom needs her help. And she’s here a few afternoons and evenings a week.”
“He didn’t mention...”
“I guess you can’t know everything about each other after one date,” Gina said with a shrug.
“Having a daughter would seem real high on the list,” Laine said. And then she felt the color come back to her face with a vengeance and she thought, What the hell? I’m an experienced undercover investigator! I don’t go pale, don’t flush, don’t allow personal emotions to dominate my behavior or responses. But she said, “You and Eric?”
“Getting along better than I expected we would. I located him and met with him to get some medical history from his side of the family, a purely practical thing. It was Ashley’s decision to meet him and at first it made me very nervous, very paranoid, but it’s worked out well for both of them, I think. He’s changed a lot in seventeen years. But then, so have I.”
But for Laine, there was a red flag. Having children, having a child, being a parent—even a recent or part-time parent—would seem to be one of the most obvious things to mention, maybe right after what you did for a living. How had they spent almost four hours together without that subject coming up? Concealment? Because hiding information was one of the first signs something was wrong.
Is that so, Agent Carrington? she chided herself. But wait, wasn’t her situation a matter of public safety? National security? Almost?
But she said to Gina, “It seems to have worked out, then.”
“Don’t let this get under your skin, Laine. I’m a very happy woman. Mac seems to respect Eric. And Mac isn’t easy. I’m sure when you bring this up to Eric, he’ll give you the whole story. He’s a very nice guy. Now.”
“He wasn’t then?”
“I don’t know, that’s a tough one. He was nice to me, but he was such a typical nineteen-year-old—shiftless, irresponsible, egocentric. And I was a completely typical teenage girl—love was more important than common sense. It’s a terrible trap—but I do believe we’ve outgrown those tendencies. Look, we all have baggage. Don’t we?”
“Sure,” she said. However, Laine believed she could keep the heaviest of her baggage to herself for a long time. And it wasn’t all about her work with the FBI. “But you know what? The best way to take care of this is to take care of this.” She stood up. “What do I owe you for the cocoa?”
“On the house. Don’t draw blood. I forgave him a long time ago and I think he’s forgiven me for keeping Ashley to myself.”
“I won’t hurt him,” she said with a weak smile. Then she got out of the diner before she thought about it any further.
She jogged down the block, hood up and covering her head, and went straight for the station. There were a couple of cars at the pumps being taken care of by a teenager. Inside the garage, she could see someone under the hood of a car. He had long legs she recognized, although now he was wearing a coverall of some kind.
“Eric?”
He peeked out. First he smiled, then he frowned in concern. “Laine, you’re all wet....”
She stepped toward him. “I just met Ashley in the diner. You didn’t mention her.”
He grabbed a rag and wiped his hands. “I meant to, but we were talking about other things.” He grinned at her. “Obviously I can’t keep her a secret. The hair, the eyes—she’s either a clone or mine. Isn’t she beautiful?”
Laine nodded but felt numb.
“She’s beautiful inside, too. Just an awesome kid. Gina and her mother really worked their magic raising her.”
“It makes me wonder, though, what other important things you might be waiting to tell me. Because I like the really major stuff up front. I don’t want to get involved and then find out there are issues like having a family that wasn’t even mentioned.”
Eric frowned as if in thought. He was quiet for a moment. Then he took a deep breath and spoke. “There’s no privacy for talking here, Laine. Go home, get dried off. I’ll wash my hands and come over. I’ll tell you the circumstances, you’ll ask me anything on your mind. We’ll get it all on the table. Before tonight.”
“Before tonight?” she asked, already disappointed.
“I don’t want you to waste your time. I like you. I want you to like me. But I’m not perfect by a stretch. So let’s do it.” He lifted one of those copper brows. “How’s that sound?”
It sounded like bad news was coming. But it had to be done.
“Don’t make me wait too long,” she said. Then she turned and jogged out of the garage and down the hill to her house.
* * *
Laine threw on a warm, dry sweat suit and put her chicken on to stew with a halved onion and the end of the celery stalks in the water. It was one o’clock. She put the ingredients for the Parmesan breadsticks on the counter—that would be her next project. She was determined to make her chicken and dumplings whether her encore date happened or not.
And then there was a knock at the door.
She opened it and there he stood in that blue jacket and pants. She took a breath. “I don’t mean to be like this—so suspicious of everything. Certainly a beautiful, sweet girl like Ashley is nothing to be—”
He came inside, took her elbow in a firm grip and said, “Come on, Laine. Let’s talk.” He directed her to the sofa. They sat there, facing each other. “Ashley’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. She’s letting me help her look at colleges. I shouldn’t even have that privilege—not only am I not educated, but Gina and Mac have been her parents, not me. I didn’t know about Ashley. Well, I wondered...”
“Huh?” she asked.
“I dropped out of high school at sixteen. I thought I had the world by the balls because I was making nine dollars an hour changing oil and tuning up engines. And girls—I had girls. And boy,” he said with a rueful laugh, “I thought I had all the moves, too. I thought I was so slick—God’s gift. And I was just a stupid horny kid. And Gina—she was the prettiest girl. All of fifteen, but I had no brain and it didn’t even register that she was too young. We dated, if you can call it that—it was a few fast-food meals and movies and a lot of making out. And then she said she thought she might be pregnant and I ran like my pants were on fire. I was nineteen and she was fifteen—I almost heard the cell door slam behind me. I headed out of town and didn’t look back. I found work in Idaho—more mechanics. And I found my kind of buds—the kind that worked by day and drank and partied and did some recreational drugs at night. We spent our money partying and I thought I had life figured out until I saw the flashing lights in the rearview mirror. My new buddies stopped for a case of beer and I was driving while they bought the beer because I was nineteen and they were twenty-one.”
Her eyes narrowed. She had not expected this, but she was a trained interrogator and nothing much surprised her.
“Yep. They held up the store. Took the case of beer and eighty dollars—they were such high rollers. There was a silent alarm and my buddies...? They didn’t even really have a gun, thank God, or we might’ve all been killed. One of them stuck his finger out in a sweatshirt pocket and said, ‘Hand over the cash!’ We were tried separately but I had the worst public defender, toughest judge and the longest sentence. I did five years.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “Crap,” she said before she could stop herself. She fell against the couch back and closed her eyes. She put her hand against her forehead.
“Five,” he repeated. “I don’t drink much because for five years I didn’t drink at all and while I was on parole, no drugs and no alcohol was the price of freedom. Believe me, a case of beer is never going to be that important again. I have no intention of going back to the useless imbecile I was. I cleaned up my act, learned some lessons, moved on to a better life. That’s it, Laine. I’m an ex-con. Gina, Mac, Ashley and for all I know the whole town is aware of it. I’m not trying to hide anything but I don’t advertise it. I was going to tell you tonight—I’m not trying to pull anything.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Do we have anything in common?”
He shook his head. “I’m also afraid of heights,” he said. “I won’t be parasailing or rock climbing with you. I can’t even watch movies that have people fighting on the rooftops and ledges of buildings. And I’m in passable good shape but I never took karate. I never took lessons of any kind. You can probably kick my ass, too.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she muttered. “What a mess.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “But this is all I have. I’m a mechanic who was a delinquent and had a baby I didn’t even know about. I thought about Gina and wondered, but I didn’t think she’d appreciate a letter from prison asking about her condition, so I kept my curiosity to myself. That’s it—that’s all I’ve got.” He stood up.
“Eric, I’m an FBI agent.”
He sat back down. “Jesus.”
“Yeah. Not on the job at the moment but that doesn’t change my status. I guess you’ve figured out—I’m not talking about that around town. I don’t need people looking at me funny. I’m a Fed. A fibbie. I hurt my shoulder by getting in the way of a bullet. I can kick your ass. We don’t fool around about that stuff....”
“You can’t weigh one-twenty soaking wet!”
“And I know every dirty trick,” she told him. “I can kill you with my bare hands.”
He shuddered.
“Okay, not with my bare hands, but if I had a corkscrew or hat pin, you could be history. My brother thinks I’m cool. My father thinks I’m ‘blue-collar.’”
Eric laughed in spite of himself. “He’s jealous.”
“Probably not. I’ve never quite measured up to his expectations.”
“Well, after getting arrested, going to prison and being forever an ex-con, my parents have been pretty disappointed in me, as you can imagine. We get along better these days, but they’re older than dirt and lack the energy to stay mad at me. And then there’s Ashley. My mother and sister had no idea I could actually produce something that pure, that brilliant, that beautiful.” He shrugged. “But then, neither did I. I give all the credit to Gina. If I’d had half a brain back then, I’d have let her straighten me out....”
“Do you still love her?” she asked.
He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. “I never loved her, Laine. I was attracted to her and knew she was an awesome person, but back then I lacked the capacity for real love. She was so lucky I ran. I would’ve dragged her down.”