Chapter Six
Charlotte
When Hunter came storming into the diner the next morning, I knew he wasn’t there to order bacon and eggs.
There was a feral look in his eyes, a dangerous gleam that made me think once again of a jungle cat sizing me up for dinner. He looked haggard, like he hadn’t slept all night, and he didn’t bother with a seat, just walked up to me, catching me between tables. His scent, wintry and cool, drifted to me, but I tried to ignore it.
“We need to talk,” he said, his voice low, ominous.
My heart pounded in my chest so loudly I was afraid he might hear it, but I refused to show any fear. I lifted my chin and looked him straight in the eye.
“I’m working right now,” I said. “I don’t get a break till noon.”
“I don’t care,” he said between his teeth. “I want to talk to you outside, right now, or I’ll create a scene that will keep the good people of Pinecone talking about you for the next year. Understood?”
Oh, I understood all right. I didn’t see any way out of this confrontation, so I heaved a sigh and nodded.
“All right,” I said, nodding apologetically to the customers who hadn’t been served yet, and trailed after him as he strode out of the diner. It was still very cold, and a couple of inches of snow blanketed the ground, stubbornly resisting the weak efforts of the morning sun to melt it.
Outside, around the corner where the scent of the dumpster hung heavy in the air despite the cold, Hunter spun around and glared at me. If his eyes had been gleaming before, now they were practically throwing off golden sparks.
“You have a daughter,” he snapped.
Panic exploded in my chest, but I fought to keep my expression from giving anything away. I lifted an eyebrow. “I do. Who told you that?”
“I followed you last night to make sure you got home safely. I heard her on the baby monitor.”
A strange and complicated mixture of emotions eddied in my chest. I wasn’t sure whether to feel pleased that he’d been that concerned for my safety, or furious because he’d ignored my wishes and followed me—no, stalked me home. I decided on fury.
“I told you not to follow me, damn it!”
He was unimpressed by my rage. “For all we knew, that guy might have come after you again the minute I left you alone. I couldn’t let you deal with another assault on your own, could I? So I followed you. But I didn’t know you were keeping secrets, Char.”
I bristled at his accusatory tone because who the hell was he to be accusing me? He’d said he’d heard Diana calling for me on the baby monitor—and that had happened a good five minutes after I’d arrived on my own front porch safe and sound. He’d been spying on me, damn it.
“My daughter,” I said as icily as I could manage, “is absolutely none of your business.”
I tried to walk past him as regally as I could considering I was wearing an ugly uniform and clunky shoes—the furthest thing from queenly regalia—but he caught my arm and spun me around. His eyes were filled with a seething emotion so intense it was a little scary.
“Hang on,” he spat. “I think she is my business, damn it. Is she mine, Char?”
“Yours?” I tried to suck in a steadying breath, but my lungs didn’t seem to be working. “Of course not. I told you that night, I was on the pill.”
“Don’t give me that crap!” His hand tightened on my wrist like a steel manacle. “I’ve been asking around town this morning. She’s a few months over two, and unless you’ve been with a lot more men than I think you have, that means she’s probably mine. Is she?”
I hesitated for a moment, and his hand tightened even further. “Is she?”
“Stop it. You’re hurting me.”
He glanced down at his hand, as if he’d forgotten what he was doing with it, and instantly loosened his grip. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding terribly remorseful. “Answer the question.”
I let out a long, unsteady sigh. “She’s yours.”
Something in his face went hard. “I want to see her.”
“I can’t—“
“Today, damn it.”
I wrenched my arm free and backed away from him slowly. All at once I was afraid of him, because the cold look on his face reminded me that he was a felon, a criminal. Hardened, ruthless, angry. He must have seen the fear in my expression, because he drew in a deep breath, and some of the ice melted from his eyes, leaving them soft and golden.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was no longer steel-edged. In fact, he sounded almost…humble. “I know I don’t have the right to come back into your life and make demands like this. I know we didn’t have a real relationship, just a one-night stand, and I also know that I’m not the sort of man you’d choose for your child’s father. I just—I’d like to see her. If you’d allow it.”
I hesitated. Despite the long years of my adolescence in which I’d dreamed innocently about Hunter, despite the past three years in which I’d fantasized about him much less innocently…I wasn’t at all sure I wanted Hunter to be part of Diana’s life.
But the stark, inarguable truth was that she was his daughter. He had the right to see her, at the very least.
“All right,” I agreed at last. “But I want to meet with you in the park. Jacob—well, he doesn’t have the slightest idea what happened between the two of us that night, and he doesn’t know she’s your daughter. I’m not quite sure what would happen if he found out. He hates you.”
He flinched, so slightly that I almost missed it. “All right. The park’s fine.”
***
Hunter
I was going to meet my daughter.
I’d never really thought of myself as the parental type. Sure, my father had expected me to marry well and produce handsome children, and I’d planned on acceding to that eventually. But the idea of a wife and children had always been set in some vague, misty future I couldn’t see clearly. I’d never once thought seriously about settling down, let alone impregnating a woman and having her bear my child.
But through an accident of fate, I was a father.
And I was fucking thrilled about it.
As I sat on an iron bench in the deserted park that afternoon, waiting for Char to arrive with her little girl—no, our little girl—in tow, I could feel my heart racing. I’d only heard her voice once, but already I was absolutely sure I wanted to be a real father to the little girl we’d made together. I wanted Char to trust me enough to let me into their lives.
But for that to happen, I’d have to convince Char that I wasn’t the bad boy she remembered or the felon that everyone knew had stolen from his own father. I’d need to be more than Hunter Kensington, ex-convict.
I needed what every respectable member of society needed. I needed a job.
Cold winter sunlight shone down on me from a crystal-clear, cerulean sky, and a chilly breeze blew around the snow that remained on the ground, lifting snowflakes and spinning them like toys as I sat and plotted my next move. It would be almost impossible for me to obtain any sort of decent job outside the family. Not only was I a felon, but thanks to the stories that had been written about my crime nationwide, I was known throughout the country as a hard-drinking, motorcycle-riding bad boy. No one was going to hire me.
In order to convince Char I’d reformed, my first step would have to be somehow obtaining a position, any position, in Kensington Media. And if that meant crawling on my hands and knees to Au—well, I’d do it. The thought made me want to vomit, but I’d do it for the sake of my child.
But I didn’t want to think about that now. I shoved my worries aside with surprisingly little effort. Despite everything, I was happy. It might be a cold February day, but the sun was shining brightly, and it echoed my mood perfectly.
I was going to meet my daughter, and all was right with the world.
***
Charlotte
“Hi there. My name is Hunter.”
I couldn’t help smiling as Hunter leaned down from his relatively great height and very solemnly offered his hand to Diana. She put her tiny hand into his, and they gravely shook hands like two business moguls meeting for the first time.
“Hi.” Ordinarily Diana was shy on first acquaintance, but apparently Hunter had a way with children, because she seemed quite willing to talk to him. “I like the park.”
Her words were as blurrily unclear as any two-year-old’s, but he managed to understand her. “Me too.”
“It’s empty today. There’s no one here.”
Hunter grinned down at her, probably amused by her pronunciation of “empty,” which sounded like “empy”. “That’s because it’s cold.”
“I have a coat.” She pointed to the pink coat I’d gotten her at Wal-Mart.
“Your coat is very pretty. I like the color.”
She looked around again, confirming the lack of playmates her own age, and looked back up at him, apparently deciding he’d do in a pinch. “Want to go down the slide with me?”
Hunter uttered a soft laugh. “Sure.”
Within moments the two of them were chasing each other around the snowy park, playing some complicated game of tag which Diana kept winning, mostly because Hunter was very clearly letting her win, while I elected to sit on a bench and watch. The park was only a small open space with swings and a slide, surrounded by evergreen bushes, and beyond that a larger wooded area where there was a path joggers liked to use. But today, thanks to the cold and the remaining layer of snow on the ground, no one was there except us. The park was as silent and empty as I’d ever seen it.
But it didn’t stay silent for long. Soon Diana was screeching with laughter, and Hunter’s mouth was open in a delighted grin I’d never seen on him before. Even as a teenager, he’d worn a perpetual scowl. But this expression washed all the cares from his face and made him look younger, carefree, happy.
It made him look beautiful.
He was so gorgeous that my heart stuttered in my chest. A slow-rising warmth began to fill me, along with a sensation of complete and utter adoration I hadn’t felt since my adolescence. I tried to will the feeling away, but I couldn’t.
I still love Hunter Kensington, I realized. I’d been infatuated with him as a child, but I’d fallen in love with him on that night in the alley behind Zippo’s. And despite everything that had happened, I’d never been able to stop loving him. And seeing him so happy—well, it was like the sun shining brightly in the bleakest part of winter. Unexpected, but wonderful.
At last Hunter staggered back to the bench and sat down next to me heavily.
“She’s like a perpetual motion machine,” he marveled, watching Diana dash around the playground by herself.
“Two-year-olds never stop until it’s time for a nap. They’re incredibly tiring.”
“They certainly are.” He watched her a while longer, and I tried to see her through his eyes—a small, perfect human blessed with inexhaustible energy, her hair dark like his, but with coppery highlights like mine. As she left babyhood behind, the Kensington features were beginning to emerge on her face—the firm chin, the arched eyebrows, the full lips were all miniature versions of Hunter’s. She was, I thought, a pretty child, even allowing for motherly bias. The soft look in his eyes as he watched her made me certain he thought so too.
“What’s her name?” he asked at last.
I cleared my throat. “Diana.”
I watched his face as he slowly processed that. “After the Roman goddess?”
I nodded.
“Oh.” He looked down at me, and an expression almost of wonder crossed his face. “I see. The goddess of the hunt. You…you named her for me.”
“Yes.” I met his eyes squarely. “Because even after everything that’s happened…I wanted to remember that she was yours, Hunter. I couldn’t let myself pretend that night never happened. I just couldn’t.”
He looked at me for a long moment, his face strangely intent, and for an instant I thought he might lower his dark head to kiss me. But then he looked back at Diana, and his expression lightened. It seemed almost a conscious effort, as if he were deliberately trying to keep things casual between the two of us for now.
“Why don’t we get some hot cocoa?” he suggested.
We spent the rest of the afternoon sipping cocoas from the coffeehouse near the park and feeding the ducks paddling around in the partly-frozen-over pond. Diana squealed happily at the way their tails flicked from side to side, and had to be restrained repeatedly from trying to grab them. I saw Hunter smiling his wide, genuine smile more than once, and every time it made my heart pound in my chest.
I remembered my earlier realization: I still love Hunter Kensington.
And as we spent more time together, I discovered that I was falling deeper and deeper in love with him by the moment.