One Kiss in... Miami: Nothing Short of Perfect / Reunited...With Child / Her Innocence, His Conquest

“Wha—”

“What’s her name? It’s Noelle.”

“Whe—”

“When was she born? Eleven months and a handful of days ago. Christmas morning, to be exact. If you need further exactitude, which I’m sure you do, they recorded the precise time on her birth certificate. I’ll arrange for you to receive a copy.”

“Ho—”

“How do I know you’re the father? Because you’re the only man I’ve slept with in the past three years. No doubt you’ll want a DNA test and I have no objection. I thought you should know about Noelle, so I’ve spent the past year and a half trying to track you down without success. But then, since you received all my letters, you already know that, don’t you?” She paused for a beat. “Are you listening, Pretorius?”

“Uh—” came his uncle’s disembodied voice.

“I thought so. I can hear the family resemblance. It only took Jett a few short weeks to find you.” She shot Justice a steely look. “I think that means my computer expert outcomputes your computer expert. Now. What were you saying about keeping me here?”

The logjam clogging Justice’s vocal cords cleared. “Son of a bitch!”

Daisy planted her hands on her hips, glorious in her outrage. “I trust you won’t use that sort of language around our daughter. She’s quite verbal for so young an age. She tries to parrot everything you say.”

“I want her.”

Something very much like hurt flashed across Daisy’s expression and her eyes darkened to the deep green of a mountain forest. For some reason it shredded his defenses and arrowed straight to the emotional core of him. How was that possible? How could a single look possess the power to stir a combination of guilt and defensiveness? He’d worked diligently for over a year and half to eradicate any and all reactions to her from his emotional makeup. And yet from the instant she appeared on his doorstep he’d discovered that he hadn’t eradicated anything at all. One glimpse of her elegant face glaring up at the camera and desire came storming back, eclipsing logic and self-determination.

It defied comprehension.

He hastened to amend his earlier statement. “I want both of you.”

He hadn’t helped his cause. Her chin shot up and her eyes flashed with green fire, full of feminine fury, mingled with a gut-wrenching anguish. “I don’t think you deserve me. And I know you don’t deserve Noelle.”

“If that’s what you believe, why are you here?”

He caught her wariness before she wiped every thought and emotion from her face, closing down and shutting him out. She’d never done that before. He suspected she’d never been capable of it until recently. When they’d last been together she’d been open and forthcoming, her opinions and feelings out there for everyone to see. Was he responsible for so dramatic a change? Had their night together caused her to regard the world with such caution? He flinched from the thought, from the idea he was capable of inflicting that level of pain on anyone, though for reasons he couldn’t bring himself to analyze, Daisy in particular.

“You deserved to know about your daughter. Now that you do, I’m finished here.”

She was keeping something from him, he could tell. “It’s more than that, isn’t it?” He could also tell she had zero intention of explaining herself. “Never mind. Considering how guarded I am about my own privacy, I won’t intrude on yours.”

“Thank you.”

“But if I can help, I will.” He had no idea where the words came from. He certainly hadn’t planned to say them, an unfathomable lapse on his part, but they caught her attention.

She studied his face for a long, tense moment. Then her head jerked in a nod. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Whether she realized it or not, Daisy’s announcement offered him the perfect opportunity to achieve the goals he’d set more than two years ago—to create a family. To have someone in his life who mattered. Who cared. Though she didn’t and couldn’t meet his conditions for an engineering apprentice, any more than those for the perfect wife, the potential existed to shape her to fit many of the same parameters. Hell, he’d even be willing to alter his lifestyle somewhat to suit her requirements for a husband. Within reason, of course.

And then there was Noelle. He struggled to draw air into his lungs at the thought of his progeny. A daughter. He had a child! It stunned him how much that simple fact changed the means by which he processed information. He found he craved her, sight unseen. Wanted and needed them both in ways he found inexplicable. No matter what it took, he’d give Daisy whatever she required in order to have his ready-made family part of his life.

He crossed to a sturdy wooden table and pulled out a chair, formulating a swift game plan. “Let’s sit and talk about this. Are you hungry?”

Annoyance flashed. “Let me get this straight. Now that you know about Noelle you’re willing to feed me?”

“No,” he responded mildly. “Since I planned to keep you here until we relocated, I would have gotten around to feeding you. Eventually.”

That provoked a smile. A tiny one, but a smile nonetheless. The impact of it far exceeded what it should have, based on all rational consideration. And yet, just as at the engineering conference, it drew him in, put thoughts and ideas in his head he’d spent every day since their night together working to eradicate. How many potential apprentice/wives had he interviewed since Daisy? How many times had Pretorius tweaked his Pretorius Program in an effort to find the “perfect” woman? How many failures had there been?

And all because none of them were Daisy, he now realized.

Oh, they’d suited his conditions to a T. Every last miserable one of them had engineering credentials. Were brilliant, rational, sensible women in complete control of their emotions. A few were even more attractive than Daisy, though for some inexplicable reason their beauty left him cold. To be fair, none of them revealed any true meanness that he’d noticed, still he wouldn’t call them kind. Perhaps their very lack of emotional depth prevented them from exhibiting the qualities Daisy possessed in distressing excess.

Regardless, his search had ultimately resulted in only one serious candidate … along with the indelible memory of Daisy. Now he had the ideal opportunity to mold the woman he actually wanted into the perfect wife.

“I thought we were going to talk,” she prompted with another of her irresistible smiles.

“Talking is the easy part.”

Again, the wariness. “And the not-so easy part?” she asked.

“I don’t cook and neither does Pretorius.”

She glanced around. “Maybe that explains the lack of appliances.”

“There’s a fully stocked refrigerator and freezer in the cabinet behind me, as well as a full complement of appliances.” He took a seat beside her. “I also have someone stop in once a day and prepare our meals, so you can cross that concern off your list.”

She blinked. “I didn’t realize I had a list.”

“I’m making one for you.”

Daisy’s eyes narrowed. “And why would you do that? And why should it matter whether or not you can cook, or whether or not you have someone fixing your meals? It has nothing to do with me.”

Now for the hard part. No point in delaying the inevitable. Better to get right to it. “It’s about to have a lot to do with you, because I want you and Noelle to move in here with me and I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

She shook her head before he even finished speaking. “Forget it, Justice. I’m not interested in having you in my life any more than you’re interested in being in mine.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You’d rather share custody of Noelle?”

The breath left Daisy’s lungs in a rush. “What?”

“You said she’s mine. Now that I know about her existence, I’m willing and able to be a father to her. There’s only two ways that’ll work. Either we live together or we shuttle her back and forth between us. I’m thinking it’s in our daughter’s best interest for her to live with both of us. Together.”

Her gaze swept the room and he struggled to see it through her eyes. Despite the state-of-the-art equipment and electronics tucked neatly behind warm oak cabinets, it came up lacking. Empty. Cold. Aw, hell. Dark and dusty, even with the lights.

“You want us to live out here, in the middle of nowhere?” she asked in disbelief. “What sort of life is that for a child?”

“We can work around any of your objections,” he insisted doggedly. “There are reasons I choose to live in the middle of nowhere.”

“Such as?”

“Pretorius? Permission, please.”

There was a momentary silence, then, “Tell her.”

“My uncle has a social anxiety disorder. It’s one of the reasons I was put in foster care after the death of my parents. The courts didn’t consider Pretorius an acceptable guardian.”

Compassion swept across Daisy’s expression and he realized that it was an innate part of her character. It always had been. “Agoraphobia?” She hazarded a guess.

“That’s probably part of it. More, it’s people in general he has difficulty handling.”

“Huh. I have that same problem … with certain people.”

He acknowledged the hit with a cool smile. “Whereas he needs the isolation, I value my privacy. When I turned eighteen and had nowhere to go, my uncle opened his home to me, even though he found it a very difficult adjustment. Since then, it’s worked for us. Or rather, it did.”

“Should I assume something changed?”

Time to be honest with her. Totally honest. “Yes. It changed a couple of years ago.”

“What happened a couple of years—” He caught her dawning comprehension and again that deep flash of compassion. How did she do it? How did she open herself up like that and let everyone in? Especially when it guaranteed she would be hurt in the process. “Oh, Justice. The car wreck?”

He nodded. “It made me realize what I had wasn’t enough.”

“And …?”

He chose his words with care. It felt like tiptoeing through a minefield. “I asked Pretorius to rewrite a business program he marketed a few years ago. I gave him a set of parameters combining qualities important to me, with characteristics that would also be compatible with my uncle.”

She stared blankly. “You just lost me.”

“He asked me to find him a wife,” Pretorius interrupted. “One that we’d both like.”

Justice swore. “I’m telling this story, old man.”

“And I’m just filling in the parts you seem to be skipping over.”

“I was getting to them. I just wanted to do this in a logical order.”

Pretorius snorted. “Right. And E-equals-MC-you’re-full-of-crap.”

Damn it to hell. “Computer, close circuit to kitchen and keep it closed until I say otherwise.”

“No, I want to hear—” Pretorius’s voice was cut off midsentence.

Justice took a deep, steadying breath. “Now, where was I?”

He could see the laughter in Daisy’s eyes before gold-tipped lashes swept downward, concealing her expression. “I believe you were explaining how you used a computer program to find a wife.” The merest hint of amusement threaded through her words.

“It made perfect sense at the time.”

“Of course it did.”

“The Pretorius Program has been quite successful at choosing the perfect employee in the business sector.” He heard the defensive edge slashing through his comment and took a moment to gather himself. What was it about Daisy that caused him to lose his composure with such ease and frequency? “I had more specific requirements to take into consideration for a wife, so Pretorius tweaked the parameters.”

“What sort of specific requirements and what parameters?”

Hell, no. He would not walk down that road. “That’s not important.”

Unfortunately, she seemed unusually adept at adding two and two together, squaring it and leaping to a completely illogical, though accurate, conclusion. “You were looking for a wife at that engineering conference, weren’t you? That’s why you were so mad when you discovered I wasn’t an engineer.”

“That’s a distinct possibility,” he admitted.

She leaned forward, staring intently, her spring-green eyes disturbing in the extreme. “Are you telling me that Pretorius devised a computer program to find you the perfect woman and she was supposed to be at that conference?”

Damn, damn, damn. “Yes.”

“Are you seriously going to sit there and admit that you thought you could waltz into that conference, check out the women your uncle’s program selected and convince one of them to marry you?”

He gritted his teeth. “Engineers are very logical. The women involved would have seen that we were an excellent match.”

Her mouth dropped open. “And agreed to marry you right then and there?”

“That would have been helpful, though unlikely.”

“You think?”

He suspected from her tone that the question was both rhetorical and a bit sarcastic. Just in case he was mistaken, he gave her a straight answer. “Yes. But Pretorius suggested a way around that.”

“Oh, this I have to hear.”

“He suggested I offer her a position as my apprentice. That would allow us an opportunity to get to know each other better before committing to marriage. It would also allow me to determine whether she was acceptable to Pretorius.”

“Huh.” Daisy mulled that over. “Okay, that’s not such a bad plan. So explain something to me. It’s been almost two years. Why don’t you have an apprentice/wife by now?”

He would have given anything to avoid this conversation. But he suspected that unless he put all his cards on the table, he’d lose any chance at having a family. A real family. And over the past two years he’d discovered he wanted that more than anything else. Needed the connection before the ice crystallizing in his veins won and he lost all ability to feel. “It would seem the computer program contained a flaw.”

“Remarkable.”

“Agreed.” He frowned. “In retrospect, I realize that there are some indefinable qualities that prove difficult to adapt to a computer program.”

“Wow. Who would have thought. Enlighten me. What sort of indefinable qualities are we talking about?”

Justice had given it a lot of thought over the ensuing months and as irrational and unscientific as it was, there’d been only one inescapable conclusion. “I believe it must have been chemical in nature and therefore extremely difficult to quantify.”

“In English, please?”

He stood and crossed the room to give himself some breathing space. “I didn’t want them. I wanted you.” The words hung in the air, frank and inescapable. And completely, painfully honest. “It’s not logical. I can’t explain it. It just is.”

She shook her head and to his alarm he saw tears gleam in her too-expressive eyes. “Don’t, Justice. I can’t go there again. Not when I know how you really feel about me. That you still hold me responsible for losing your scholarship and being sent to some hideous foster home.”

He leaned his hip against the counter and folded his arms across his chest. “The truth?”

She forced out a watery smile. “Will it hurt?”

He weighed the possibility. “I don’t believe so.”

“In that case, I guess I can handle it.”

“Six months, three days, twenty-two hours and nine minutes ago I came to a conclusion.”

“And what conclusion is that?”

“That even if I’d known before we made love that I’d lose my scholarship, I’m not positive I could have resisted. I would have tried due to your age, but to be perfectly frank, at seventeen I lacked the maturity to make decisions based on intellect rather than hormonal imperative.”

Her smile wobbled, grew. “Does that mean you forgive me?”

“It wouldn’t be rational to continue to hold a grudge.” He frowned, picking through his words. “Though I no longer feel any anger in association with what occurred, I still possess a certain level of resentment. But considering that my success in the field of robotics hasn’t been negatively impacted by those events, even resentment is an unreasonable response.”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed.

“I also never asked whether our relationship had a negative impact on your life,” he found himself saying, much to his surprise. “Were you negatively impacted?”

“Yes.”

He frowned in concern. “How?” A sudden thought struck and he froze. “You didn’t get pregnant, did you?”

“No, nothing like that. I was hurt because you left without a word. Of course, now I understand why. But at the time it broke my heart.” Her chin quivered ever so slightly. “I missed you so much.”

An odd feeling raced through him, a yearning combined with an almost forgotten pain. “I missed you, too,” he confessed. “I didn’t want to, since I blamed you for what happened. But you were the first real friend I’d ever had.”

“Oh, Justice.”

She escaped her chair and threw herself into his arms. At the first touch of her soft form colliding against his hard angles, he discovered he’d made a serious miscalculation. Whatever they’d experienced all those months ago hadn’t dissipated over time as he’d anticipated. If anything, the craving had grown progressively worse. It might not be logical, but it was unquestionably true. He took the only action he deemed reasonable.

He kissed her.

Alice down the rabbit hole.

Only in this case Daisy tumbled head over heels down the hole and landed in a crazy, new world. Or maybe it wasn’t all that new. She’d worked so hard to forget what it had been like to lose herself in his arms. To know his kiss and have it sweep her away. To reach for something she thought long lost to her. He took his time reminding her of every moment of those lost memories.

Pleasure erupted, a tidal wave of sparkling joy, rushing through her without rhyme or reason. Not that it was love. She couldn’t love him. Refused to allow it. Passion. Lust. Sexual attraction. All those things she could accept, but not love. And she’d do everything within her power to avoid feeling an emotional attachment to a man who spent a lifetime suppressing them. She couldn’t deal with the despair and disillusionment again. It was too painful.

His mouth shifted across hers, deepening the kiss—a kiss that shouldn’t have improved since the last time they were together, but somehow had. She didn’t know whether it came from a growing familiarity or nearly two months of longing. She could only acknowledge the truth of it before going under, drowning beneath the cascade of sensations swamping her.

How did he do it? How did he stir such a helpless reaction? Her lips parted beneath his delicious invasion, opening to the heat. He was a man of logic and control, and yet she felt the instant that control slipped and shattered. He demanded, then tempted. Teased, then seduced. He touched her, kissed her, shifted his body against hers in a rhythm they’d both perfected that long-ago night. And yet, it might have been yesterday, the movements as familiar to her as they were arousing, and she found herself surrendering to the raw power of that primal song that played whenever they came together.

His hands cupped her face, tilting her head so he could more fully explore her mouth. She lost herself in the kiss while the sweetest of memories slid over and through her. Memories of their last night together when he’d taken her countless times, the final one sweet and tender beyond bearing. She suspected it had been then that she’d conceived Noelle, then that passion had caused them to forget a bedside table drawer full of caution. Then that he’d forever branded himself on her, heart and body and soul.

No! Oh, no, no, no. How could she be so foolish?

Daisy ripped free of his embrace and put the width of the table between them. She’d come here, dead certain in her ability to hold Justice at arm’s length, and instead all he’d had to do was touch her and she tumbled into his arms and surrendered. Did she think that everything that had gone so dramatically wrong twenty endless months ago, a single kiss could set right?

Swearing silently, she snatched up her bottle of water and hastily unscrewed the lid and took a long swallow while she struggled to gather her thoughts. “When you said you wanted me and Noelle to move in and you’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen—”

“I have always found that positive reinforcement works best.”

“You’d bribe me to live with you, Justice?” She took her time recapping the bottle. “Or perhaps that kiss was part of your positive reinforcement.”

“Only if it worked. Otherwise, what can I offer that will convince you to do as I request?”

“Do you realize that you sound like a computer whenever you get tense?” Based on the blank look he gave her, he didn’t. “Bribery won’t work, Justice. Nor will kissing me.”

“What will?”

She stood and crossed the kitchen to the shuttered window. “Is there any way to open this?”

“Computer, open window at Kitchen, Station 1A.”

A soft hum sounded and the shutters parted. This side of the house faced a long, rolling valley that must be stunning in the spring. Right now, with winter on the verge of overtaking them, it offered a raw, unforgiving beauty. Without the green of spring to cloak it, or flowers to add bright color and texture, only the bare bones remained. Nature at its most stark, without the pretty artifice to soften the harsh truth.

And the harsh truth was that she hadn’t been completely honest with Justice about why she’d tracked him down. Their daughter, Noelle, had been a huge part of it—the main part. But there was another reason, one she kept from him, one she found difficult to admit, even to herself. Ever since their night together she’d been unable to paint. She’d attempted countless times, without success. But, whatever creative spark, whatever gift or talent she’d been given, had evaporated as though it never existed. It had driven her to extreme measures, to allowing Jett to use every means at her disposal to find Justice’s hideaway in the hope that she could set right something that had gone hideously wrong—both for Noelle’s sake, as well as her own.

He’d asked her to stay and she wanted to, wanted with all her heart to be with him and discover if they couldn’t recapture some part of what they’d shared once upon a time. Why was she hesitating, when he offered to give her just that?

Because he wasn’t offering her love.

Well, too bad. She could move in and take her chances, or she could share custody of Noelle. She released her breath in a sigh and turned to face him. “No bribery, Justice. And I can’t commit to staying with you permanently. But I am willing to come for a visit as your guest. We’ll try it out for a few months and see how it goes. Sort of like what you intended with your apprentice/wife program. Will that do?”

“For now.” His gaze strayed to the window. “I wouldn’t wait too long, though. Winter’s coming.”

“It shouldn’t take longer than a week to organize. Is there enough room for all of us?”

“This place has a dozen bedrooms. I’ll get them ready and you can pick whichever ones you want.”

“And Pretorius? How will he handle having visitors?”

Justice frowned. “He has his own section of the house. So long as you don’t intrude, he should be fine.”

Daisy nodded. “Then I’ll see you in a week.” She turned and started from the kitchen, pausing at the last minute. And that’s when she accepted the heartrending truth. “Our lives will never be the same again. Everything changed twenty months ago, and there’s no going back now, is there? Not for either of us.”

And without a backward look, she fled.

Justice stood unmoving while the house settled into silence, returning to its cold air of detachment. Always a house, never a home. Always cold, never filled with light and laughter and warmth.

“You’re right. There’s no going back,” he whispered. “But what you don’t realize is … I don’t want to go back. I can’t live like that anymore.”

Daisy gritted her teeth, zigging to avoid driving through yet another pothole, this one the size of a large crater. If she ended up staying with Justice for any length of time, she and Justice were going to have words about this road.