Carolina Man (2 page)

She was going to hear from him, all right, Luke thought grimly. As soon as he could find a damn phone.

 • • • 

“I
WANT A
paternity test,” Luke said.

It had taken him four days to arrange transportation to the main camp, Leatherneck, so he could make this call. Another eight and a half hours waiting for Eastern Standard Time to catch up with Afghanistan so that he could talk to this lawyer person, K. Dolan, in her office. His head throbbed. His mouth was dry. His nerves stretched tight with stress and fatigue. This was not a conversation he intended to have via e-mail. Not a conversation he wanted to have at all.

But he was determined to be responsible. Reasonable. He had no proof this kid was even his. Only Dawn’s word, and Dawn . . . He blinked gritty eyes. Dawn was dead.

“That’s understandable and practical,” the lawyer said in a voice that matched her letter, guarded and cool. “If you’re not a blood relative of the child, you have no real standing for custody.”

Perversely, her attitude made him want to argue.

“Except for Dawn’s will,” he said.

“The court is not bound by Dawn’s decision,” the Dolan woman said. “If you want to renounce your claim to the child, her grandparents are very willing to take her.”

Grandparents. God. How would his parents react to the news? They’d already rallied once, to help raise his brother’s child. He couldn’t ask them to . . .

But she wasn’t talking about his parents, he realized. She meant Dawn’s folks, Ernie and Jolene Simpson. Were they even around anymore? He vaguely recalled his mom saying they’d moved off island when the fish house closed eight years ago.

“That’s not what Dawn wanted,” he said.

“I don’t think Dawn truly anticipated this situation ever arising. Her death was very sudden.”

Tell me about it
. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of Dawn, dead. There had to be something he should say, something he could do. “When’s the funeral?”

“August thirteenth.”

Two weeks ago.
His throat tightened.

“I’m sorry.” The lawyer’s voice softened.

He swallowed. “Why the hell did it take you so long to contact me?” he asked roughly.

“I took the will to the clerk’s office to be probated within a few days of Dawn’s death. After which, I had to locate you.”

“How’d you find me?” It wasn’t like he and Dawn had kept in touch. He didn’t even know she had a child.
He
had a child. Hell.

“Your parents still live on the island where Dawn grew up. I looked them up.”

“Do they know?”

“Only that you’ve been named in a will that I’m probating and I needed to get in touch.”

“Did you tell them it was Dawn?”

“I didn’t see the need,” the lawyer said, still in that carefully measured voice. Actually, he was grateful for her restraint. This wasn’t the kind of news you wanted to spring on somebody.

Luke winced. The way she’d just sprung it on him.

So it was up to him to tell his folks. To explain that while he was overseas, they had suddenly somehow become grandparents again. “How did she die?”

“An aneurysm. A ruptured blood vessel in the brain,” Dolan said, as if using little words would help him understand. “The doctors said it was probably the result of a congenital condition.”

“Did she suffer?”

“As I said, her death was very sudden.” Did he imagine it, or did her voice shake slightly, as if she was suppressing actual emotion? “Dawn had a headache, a bad one. I told her to take the afternoon off. And then . . .”

“Wait. She worked for you?”

“Yes.”

“Where was the kid?”
The kid.
His kid. He didn’t believe it. Dawn would have told him.

Wouldn’t she?

“In school,” Dolan said.

Yeah, sure, the kid would be school age. Nine? Ten?

Dawn had written to him in boot camp, he remembered suddenly. Once, ten years ago, the summer after high school graduation. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember anything beyond some hello-how-are-you kind of bullshit. He’d had other, more important things on his mind than a remorseful ex-girlfriend. He’d been too exhausted, or too pissed off still, to reply.

And when he’d gone home for his ten days of leave before his unit was deployed, Dawn had already left the island with ol’ Bo.

Part of him had been disappointed she wasn’t around to admire him in his new uniform. Maybe he’d even been hoping for one more hookup for old time’s sake, a little pre-deployment action. But he’d been relieved, too. Dawn had made it clear when she dumped him that she didn’t want a boyfriend in the Marines. She was already part of his past, part of the life he was leaving behind.

How the hell was he supposed to know she was pregnant?

He struggled to organize his thoughts. “You said she left a letter. What did it say?”

“It was sealed.”

“But you’re her lawyer. You could open it.”

“I would have, if there had been no other way to find you. Since I was able to locate you through your parents, that wasn’t necessary.” The lawyer had this precise, deliberate way of speaking, like she charged by the word instead of by the hour.

Her lack of drama actually made this easier to get through. But she was so guarded that Luke wanted to reach through the phone and shake her, the way she’d shaken him.

He bit back his impatience. “Well, can you read it to me?”

“If that’s what you want.”

His teeth clenched. What he wanted didn’t enter into it. This was about what needed to be done. “Yeah.”

“One moment. All right. Here we go.” A rustle of paper—or maybe that was just the connection—before she took a breath. “‘
Dear Luke, I guess you never expected to hear from me again.
But Kate says every parent ought to have a will naming a guardian, and I couldn’t think of anybody better to raise our baby girl than you.
’”

Oh, shit. He cleared his throat. “Who’s Kate?”

“Me.”
Yeah, definite emotion there, under the professional act
. “When Dawn came to work for me, I told her that a lot of cases I see . . .”

“Yeah, okay, I get it. Go on.”

“Er . . . ‘
Her name is Taylor. She’s wonderful, Luke. The best thing that ever happened to me. I feel bad because you haven’t had a chance to see her, how special she is. Maybe you never will. I didn’t figure I’d ever have to ask you for anything. We’ve never needed anybody, Taylor and me. But if you’re reading this, then she needs you now. I love her more than anything. I hope you can, too. Take care of her for me. Dawn
.”

No explanations. No excuses. None of the answers Luke craved. Just the faint, remembered rhythm of her speech and the weight of expectations reaching across the years and miles.

His blood pounded in his head.
She needs you.

“It’ll take me a couple days to get there at least,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll get emergency leave. But even with a good connection through Ramstein Air Base, it’s thirty hours from Kandahar to Lejeune.”

The phone was silent. Then, “I appreciate the thought. And your effort, Staff Sergeant,” the lawyer said carefully. “But there’s no need to act impulsively. We need to find a long-term solution for Taylor.”

“That’s why I’m coming home,” Luke said. “I can’t take care of this over the phone.”
Take care of her for me.

Another measured breath. “I hear what you’re saying,” the Dolan woman said almost gently. “But we have to think practically. Taylor has no relationship with you. You’re a stranger to her.”

I feel bad because you haven’t had a chance to see her.

“So she’ll meet me now,” Luke said. “If she is my kid, she’s entitled to military benefits. I can take her to the base, get her ID.”

“Obviously, it’s in Taylor’s best interest to have health care,” the lawyer said. “I can ask the court to grant you temporary custody, which would allow you to remove her from the Simpsons’ home. But the issue of long-term care still has to be addressed. You have options. Dawn’s parents . . .”

“We’ll talk about it when I get there,” Luke said.

After the paternity test. After he’d met her, this daughter.

The daughter he’d left behind.

BEAUFORT, NORTH CAROLINA, DECEMBER (FOUR MONTHS LATER)

K
ATE
D
OLAN LEFT
the courtroom, flushed with victory.

“That’s it?” Her client, twenty-seven-year-old Libby Brown, sounded dazed. “We can go home now?”

Her bewilderment tore Kate’s heart. It had taken her almost eight months to convince Libby that she had the right to live free from abuse. Painstakingly, Kate had laid out the other woman’s options, encouraging her to look beyond her husband’s threats, promises, and emotional appeals to the real, recurring harm. Even so, if Will Brown hadn’t finally hit her in front of the kids, if he hadn’t gone after their oldest when he tried to intervene, Libby might never have found the courage to leave. Her decision had probably saved her life. It had also left her and her children homeless—at least until today.

“Your husband’s been ordered to vacate the residence,” Kate assured her. “And to stay away from you and the children. As soon as we verify that the house is safe, you can move back in.”

“He won’t go,” Libby said.

“Then he’ll be evicted,” Kate said with grim satisfaction. “By the sheriff, if necessary.”

The courtroom doors opened behind them as more people filed into the lobby.

“Good job, Kate,” Susan Bennett, another attorney, murmured as she passed.

Kate nodded in acknowledgment, but her focus stayed on Libby and the kids. The two older ones waited with Libby’s sister in the chairs in the center of the room. The youngest, a five-year-old with shadowed eyes and a chipped front tooth, pressed against his mother’s side.

Kate kept a jar of candy on her desk for her clients alongside a big box of tissues. The Brown boy liked Smarties, she remembered. Her gaze dropped to the ugly purple bruise on his arm.

She took a deep breath. Outrage would not help her client. Preparation would. “I want you to stick with your safety plan,” she told Libby. “The act of taking legal action can spur—”

“
You bitch!”

Kate braced. Turned.

Will Brown looked ready to bust the seams of the shirt and tie his lawyer had almost certainly ordered him to wear to court. His fists were clenched, his face dark with anger.

Kate almost flinched before she got a grip on her emotions. Contrary to popular belief, most abusers
could
control their actions. They didn’t blow up at their bosses. They beat their spouses instead.

Kate moved to put Libby and the child behind her. Brown would not hit her. Probably. Not in front of witnesses. She hoped.

“You’ve got no right to interfere between a man and his wife. His property,” Brown said, his voice thick with violence. “Them’s my kids. That’s my house.”

Kate’s heart rate kicked up. She stood her ground, her armpits damp, her stomach cramping with tension. “You heard the judge, Mr. Brown. For the next twelve months, you are barred from the house and ordered to stay away from Elizabeth and the children.”

“I’ll make her sorry. I’ll make you sorry, too, you interfering bitch.”

Behind Kate, Libby made a choked sound, as if her husband’s hands were already around her throat.

Where the
hell
was a deputy?

“Don’t you threaten me. One more word, and I’ll have your ass arrested,” Kate snapped. “Mr. Reynolds.”

Brown’s lawyer hurried over, hovering ineffectually around the big man like a cocker spaniel with a pit bull.

“Control your client.” Kate stepped away, lowering her voice so that the children would not hear. “Mrs. Brown hasn’t pressed assault charges against him, but I will.”

 • • • 

A
LL IN ALL,
a good day’s work, Kate thought later as she walked back to her office, two blocks from the courthouse.

Her heart still raced. Raised voices still had the power to make her sick inside. But she wasn’t a cringing child any longer. She had learned to fight back, to channel her fear into action.

Five cases, she thought with satisfaction. Five successful outcomes that she and her clients could live with. She couldn’t save every battered or betrayed woman, every bruised or abused child who came through her doors. But that only made today’s victories all the sweeter.

Kate liked helping people. It made up for all the years that she felt helpless.

She unlocked the front door of her house, a 1930s bungalow she’d converted into an office with an apartment upstairs. Quiet enveloped her. The air was chill and stale. No point in wasting heat when she was gone all day.

After graduating from law school, Kate had done her time as an associate in a big Charlotte firm. But protecting the rights and privileges of the powerful wasn’t her idea of the law. She wanted her own practice. The freedom to choose her own cases, to control her own schedule, to order her own life, was worth the financial risk. No partners to placate. No egos to manage. She
liked
living alone. Her home was her castle, defended against all invaders.

Still, on days like today, she missed having someone to share her successes with. Sometimes castle life was lonely.

She adjusted the thermostat. Maybe she should look into getting some fish for the moat. Except she didn’t have a moat. Maybe a cat?

The truth was, she missed Dawn. She hadn’t noticed the silence so much when Dawn came in every day with her cupcakes and holiday sweaters, her kitten videos and constant stories about her daughter.

A yellowing philodendron drooped from the mantel of the bricked-up fireplace. Kate sighed and picked a leaf off the beige carpet.

She had never been particularly great at making friends. Not close friends, anyway. By the time she was eighteen, she’d moved six times and attended eight different schools. Always adjusting, always being the new kid on the block, always having to prove herself, had made her cautious about letting people in. Her home life had choked off any attempts she might have made at friendship. No play dates. No sleepovers. No sharing secrets. Kate had carried that reserve into adulthood.
Fear of intimacy
, her therapist said.

But she’d genuinely liked Dawn, her sunny smile, her upbeat optimism, her devotion to her daughter. It was like having a friend at a slight, professional remove or a family from a safe, vicarious distance.

I love her more than anything
, Dawn had written in her letter to her child’s father.
I hope you can, too.

There was a lump in Kate’s throat. She swallowed, brushing the dead leaf into her wastebasket.

He’d sat right there, she remembered, on the other side of this desk. Staff Sergeant Luke Fletcher, stiff and unsmiling as a soldier on a war monument, his blue eyes alive and focused on Kate with breath-stealing intensity. He made her uncomfortable, with his broad shoulders and lean, almost gaunt face, crowding her safe, neutral office, his large, spit-shined shoes touching the legs of her desk. Totally in command of his space. Her space.

Not her type, she told herself firmly, ignoring the stupid flutter of her pulse. She went for men who were more . . . cerebral. Not men who rode in tanks or sprayed villages with automatic-weapon fire or flew for thirty hours on a plane when any normal man would have simply picked up the phone. That whole “see the hill, take the hill” Marine thing he had going on made her prickle like a cat confronted by a large dog. But despite her distrust of his gung ho approach to Dawn’s letter, there was something pretty great about his willingness to take responsibility for Dawn’s child. His daughter.

Maybe an unmarried staff sergeant wasn’t the best person in the world to raise a ten-year-old girl. The Simpsons—Dawn’s parents—certainly hadn’t thought so.
He doesn’t know her
, Jolene Simpson had wept.
He can’t love her like we do.

And maybe he didn’t, yet. Kate hadn’t observed any evidence of an instant father-daughter bond during their brief meeting in her office. The little girl had been sullen and mistrustful, the man awkward and clearly frustrated.

But at least he was trying.

Kate booted up her computer.

Anyway, a judge had awarded the Fletchers temporary custody while Staff Sergeant Fletcher was in Afghanistan. Taylor was their responsibility now.

Kate scrolled through her in-box. Time to concentrate on the mothers she could help, the children she could save.

The subject line leaped out at her.
Taylor Simpson
.

Frowning, she clicked the e-mail to open it.

Her stomach dropped as she read. She should have seen this coming.

It’s not fair
, Jolene Simpson had cried in the courtroom.
Taylor’s all we have left of our little girl
.

Your little girl didn’t want you to raise her kid
, thought
Kate, staring at her computer.

Her thoughts beat like moths against the back-door screen.

Dawn had never explained
why
she would entrust her only daughter to a man she hadn’t seen in ten years rather than her own mother and father. But Kate’s imagination—and experience—could supply plenty of reasons, all of them bad. Maybe Dawn and her parents were simply estranged. Maybe Dawn had been motivated by guilt at keeping Taylor’s existence a secret from Luke all these years. And maybe . . .

Kate read the e-mail again, resolve balling in her stomach. She was
not
reacting emotionally, she told herself. Taylor had told the judge at the temporary hearing that she wanted to stay with the Fletchers.

Kate reached for the phone to call them.

 • • • 

H
OMEMADE BANNERS FLUTTERED
for miles on the chain link fence along Highway 24, dazzling against the bright green grass and tall dark pines.

Through the windows of the charter bus carrying Luke’s squad to Camp Lejeune, he could read the hand-painted signs.

WELCOME HOME.

MY H
USBAND. MY HERO.

WE DA
DDY. I MISSED YOU.

Ortega gripped the seat in front of him. “Man, I can’t wait to see Kendra.” His girlfriend.

“I want to see my daughter,” Danny Hill said. “Stephanie was still pregnant when I left. I mean, I’ve seen the baby on Skype, but it’s not the same as being there, watching her grow up, you know?”

Luke nodded tightly. At least Hill only had eight months to make up for. Luke had missed
ten years
of his daughter’s life.

“Better hope you don’t drop her,” Ortega said.

Hill turned pale.

“You’ll do fine.” Luke intervened before Ortega’s teasing created a situation. After a ten-month tour and over thirty hours of nonstop travel, they were all on edge. “Babies aren’t so hard to figure out.”

At least babies cried when they needed something, when they were tired or wet or hungry. They didn’t scowl at you with big, wounded eyes, leaving you to wonder what the hell you were supposed to do differently.

Luke’s gut clenched.

“So you’re some baby expert now?” Ortega asked.

“I have a nephew.” Luke stared out the window. And a daughter he’d met exactly once.

Luke was twelve years old when his brother, Matt, dropped out of college and showed up on their parents’ doorstep holding a three-month-old son and a world of hurt inside. The Fletchers had rallied, as they always did, to care for their own.
Back to back to back.

Luke admired his brother for stepping up, his parents for stepping in, but he’d never figured on following in Matt’s footsteps. He’d never planned on dumping another grandchild on them to take care of. Mom and Dad weren’t getting any younger. They had their own business to run, a bed-and-breakfast on North Carolina’s Dare Island. Luke didn’t like adding to their responsibilities.

But he didn’t have a choice.

He was a Marine, first and foremost. Who was going to take care of Taylor while he was away?

And now that he was back, what the hell was he supposed to do? He didn’t know the first thing about raising a kid on his own. Especially not a daughter.

The bus rumbled through the main gate, following the trucks that carried the gear.

Cody Burrows grinned. “My mom’s going to flip. She and Dad drove all the way from Texas to meet the bus.”

Luke had told his family not to come. It wasn’t like he was returning from his first deployment. Anyway, his father, Tom, would be out on the boat with Matt. His mom was still recovering from a car accident a couple of months ago. The last thing they needed was to battle the traffic around base and then stand around for hours waiting for Luke to show up.

As for the kid, his daughter, Taylor . . . She barely knew him. She might not even recognize him. She definitely didn’t need to take a day off from school to see him get off some damn bus.