A Family Kind of Guy (3 page)

A twinkle lighted her father's faded blue eyes and his lips turned up in a semblance of a smile. Even the skin on his face, paler than his usual tan, seemed to grow a little rosy. Bliss thought she might be sick. He looked like a love-struck teenager. Shifting in the bed, he pulled on the IV again and winced when the tape tugged on the back of his hand. “Brynnie Perez… Well, her name's changed a few times over the years. She's been married more than once, but…” He stared at his daughter and reached forward, taking her hand in his again. The cool plastic tubing of his IV brushed her arm. He hesitated, as if unsure of his next words.

“What, Dad?”

His gaze slid away for a second and he squared his shoulders. “This isn't easy for me to admit, Blissie, but I've loved Brynnie most of my life—well, since I met her twenty-six—no, twenty-seven years ago.”

“You what?” Bliss whispered, feeling as if a thunderbolt had shot through her. “Most of your life?”
And all of mine!

“Adult life.”

“But—” All the underpinnings of Bliss's life were suddenly shifting, causing her to lose her sense of balance, her security, her knowledge of who she was. “Wait a minute. I don't believe—”

“It's true, Bliss.”

“No—” Had John Cawthorne been living a lie for years? Bliss's stomach tightened into a hard knot. It was one thing to think that this infatuation had been recent, but to admit to years—
years
—of loving someone other than his wife. This was too much to take.
Way
too much.

Her father's bony fingers tightened over hers. “I've loved her forever. Still do.”

“But Mom…”

A sadness stole over his thin features—the same sadness she'd witnessed a dozen times before but had never understood. “Your mom and I, we cared about each other, but it was a different feeling…hard to explain. She was a good woman, that's for sure. A real good woman.”

“Of course she was.” Bliss felt a jab of indignity for the proud woman who had borne her father's name for most of her life. “Mom…Mom was the greatest.” Tears threatened her eyes and she had to swallow hard.

“No doubt about it.”

“But you loved someone else.” Despair flooded her insides and she stared at the fragrant white blooms of a gardenia someone had sent him. “Oh, Dad, how could you?”

“I just fell in love, honey. I know, I know, I shouldn't have, but…well, there it is. Your mother, she knew about Brynnie, but we thought it would be best for you if we stuck it out together and gave you some kind of normal family—”

“Normal family? You call this normal? Living a lie?” The room seemed to spin for an instant and there was a loud rush in her ears, like the sound of the ocean pounding the shore.

“People do it all the time.”

“Do they?” She pulled her hand out from his grip. Repulsed and stunned, she shrank into a corner of the chair. She loved and hated him in one second, even though she herself knew about love gone wrong. Wasn't that what had happened with Mason? Hadn't he been involved with two women? Oh, Lord, she felt as if she might throw up. She stared at her father and tried to understand. “So why tell me now?”

“I said I was gonna get married. Soon.”

Her laugh was brittle and forced. “Don't tell me you expect me to come to the wedding?” When he didn't answer, she rolled her eyes and felt the hot moisture that had collected beneath her eyelids. “Oh, Dad…please don't even ask. I…I can't believe this is happening.”

He glanced away, ran his tongue around his teeth and seemed to weigh his next words carefully. “Listen, honey, there's more.”

“More?” she whispered, feeling a sense of doom sneak through her insides. What “more” could there possibly be? She didn't want to hazard a guess.

He sniffed, ran a hand under his nose and sighed. “It's not just me and Brynnie.”

Bliss bit her lip.

He hesitated, searching for the right words. “There's a girl—well, a woman now—”

“I—I don't know if I want to hear this,” Bliss interrupted, rubbing her hands together to ease the intense cold that had permeated her bones.

“You have to, honey. Because, you see, you have a half sister.”

“Wh-what?” The white tiles of the hospital floor seemed to buckle beneath her chair.

“Well, more than one, actually.”

“More than one?” This was too absurd to be true. And yet she knew as she looked at him that he wasn't lying. “Wait a minute, Dad. Something's wrong, here. Very wrong.” She tried not to glare at her father, who was still recuperating, but, damn it, she could barely make sense of his words. “You're trying to tell me that I have a sister—no, make that two?”

When he nodded, she said, “But how?” Her mind was spinning in furious, complicated and very ugly circles. Everything she'd believed in, all that she'd trusted in her life, had been a lie—a dirty, dark and shameful lie. “Why?” she asked, trying to sound rational when her entire world was turned upside down. “This…this Brynnie is their mother?”

“She's Katie's mother,” John said slowly and scratched the side of his cheek. “My other daughter—”

“Does she have a name, too?” Bliss couldn't hide the sarcasm in her words.

“Tiffany. She's older than you by a few years. The result of an affair I had before I met your mom.”

“Oh, Dad,” Bliss whispered, the tears she'd been fighting beginning to slide from the corners of her eyes. How could she have been so wrong about this man she'd loved all her life? The man who'd taught her how to ride bareback and lasso a wayward calf and swim in a river where the current was strong and swift? “You—you didn't marry her?”

“I was ridin' rodeo at the time. It wouldn't have worked. Matter of fact, she wasn't interested. I offered, she said ‘No, thanks,' told me that she was givin' the baby up for adoption. Seems as if she lied about that, though. I found out a few years back.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“As I said, I didn't know it, but she kept the girl. Tiffany's almost thirty-two now, and…well, it's time she and I met. Especially now that she's moved back to Bittersweet. Living in the same town, it doesn't make much sense not to acknowledge that we're father and daughter.”

“Are you sure? Maybe she's not interested in meeting you.” Bliss, who had always prided herself on her strength, felt suddenly weary. She was usually a woman who moved easily in business circles, handled herself well at sophisticated and elegant social events, could adjust her style so that she felt as at home in a Seattle high-rise overlooking Puget Sound as she was in a low-slung ranch house that hadn't seen fresh paint in twenty years. But this—this complete alteration of what she'd grown up believing to be right and true—was more than she could deal with. Nothing in her life had been this mortifying, except maybe her faith in Mason Lafferty all those years ago.

“It's not so bad,” her father insisted. But then, he had no choice but to believe his own words, did he? If what he was saying was the God's honest truth, then he had to trust that the situation would someway, somehow, work out. His graying brows drew together as if he were confused by the puzzle that was his life.

“Not so bad?” she repeated. “Well, it's damned unbelievable.” Bliss, raised as an only child, had not one but two half sisters—grown women she'd never heard of before, never had known existed.

Clearing his throat and squaring his shoulders beneath the thin cotton of his hospital gown, her father mustered up as much bravado as he could. “So now I'm gonna change things. Brynnie and I are gonna get married as soon as the docs tell me I can move back to Bittersweet.” He fingered the edge of his sheet. “I'd like you to come with me, Blissie. Meet Brynnie and your sisters.”

“Meet them?” Boy, her father had really lost it. “Dad, it's not just that simple. I mean…do
they
want to meet
me?
”

“Brynnie does.”

“And the others?”

“Don't know.”

Could she do it? Go back to Bittersweet, a town that held all kinds of bad memories? She felt a familiar ache in her heart—one she'd tried to bury for ten years—and that old, dark pain seared through her. She rubbed her thigh where she still sometimes felt a jab of pain from the accident so many years before. She could only hope that Mason was roasting in his own private hell. “I don't think so, Dad,” she heard herself saying. “My life's here, in Seattle.”

“What have you got other than an apartment and a job?”

“Oscar.” She hitched her chin up an inch.

“That mutt of a dog can move with you. You can sublet your apartment and work from Oregon, what with fax machines and computer links and all. I know you spent one summer working out of a cabin in the San Juan Islands and another in Victoria. So don't give me any guff about having to be near the office. I'll have the phone company put in more telephone lines to the house for your modem and whatever else you need. The way I understand it—” he eyed her as if expecting her to mount a protest “—or at least what you've always led me to believe, is that you're pretty much independent anyway.”

That much was true. She worked with two other architects restoring old buildings in Seattle, but she was between projects right now and had planned to take a vacation to Mexico or the Caribbean or somewhere in the sun. So why not Bittersweet? A dozen reasons why. Mason Lafferty was at the top of the list. If he still lived there. She hadn't heard from him in a decade and had never asked her father about him, though she had, over the years, gleaned a little about his life from people who had run across him. Not that it mattered. He'd betrayed her. Pure and simple.

Like your father betrayed your mother.

Well, she, for one, wasn't about to dwell on the mistakes of her past. Not now. Not ever.

As for the half sisters she'd never known existed, what would be the point of meeting them now? True, she'd been raised as an only child and had always wished for siblings—brothers or sisters—but now that she was faced with her father's infidelity, she wasn't sure she could accept her sisters. Oh, what was she thinking? Sisters?
Half
sisters? Two of them? What would she say to them? What
could
she say?

“This is way too sudden for me, Dad.”

“And I'm runnin' out of time.” He scowled and clicked off the television. “Who knows when the Grim Reaper's gonna knock on my door?”

“Don't talk like that!”

“I've already had one heart attack. I think it's time to live my life the way I want to.” He rubbed his jaw, scratching the silver bristles covering his chin. “Besides, you'll like Brynnie, if you only give her a chance.”

Bliss wasn't so sure. Brynnie, was, after all, her father's mistress and even though Bliss had known that her parents had drifted apart over the years, she couldn't just accept this other woman as part of her family. Bile climbed steadily up her throat, but she forced it back down.

“Your mother and I…well, we were never right for each other. We were from different worlds. I was at home in the saddle with a plug of tobacco, and she wanted to see the damned ballet.”

“I remember.” Margaret Cawthorne was from old San Francisco money. John had been a cowboy with a keen mind who had bought land during the recession and made a fortune. He'd split his time between Seattle, where he owned property, and Bittersweet, Oregon, where his ranch was located.

A cloud passed behind his eyes, as if he still felt some kind of regret.

“But you stayed married.”

“Believed in the institution. And there was you to consider.”

“You made a mockery of the institution, Dad. And of me.” Bliss stood, folded her arms over her chest, leaned against the cool wall and stared out the window to the parking lot three stories below. Rain drizzled from oppressive gray clouds, streaking down the panes. She could scarcely breathe. Her parents hadn't loved each other? Her father had been and still was involved with another woman? How could she not have known or guessed? She swallowed against a suddenly thick throat. Everything she believed in seemed to be falling apart, and more rapidly by the moment.

“I always thought opposites attracted,” Bliss said lamely. Heat stole up the back of her neck when she thought of her one experience with a man as opposite from her once-prim city-girl ways as could be. Mason Lafferty, the randy, tough-as-rawhide ranch hand who had worked for her father the summer she was almost eighteen, had managed to steal her naive heart before her father had stepped in.

“I suppose there's some truth to the saying, but not as opposite as we were. In the beginning, I guess we didn't realize how different we were and then…well, I found Brynnie.…” He had the good grace to look sheepish and Bliss felt the bleak ache in her heart thud painfully. He'd cheated on her mother with this woman he intended to marry. He'd fathered a child with her. “Brynnie's had her share of troubles, you know. Been married a few times and has some older boys that give her headaches you wouldn't believe.”

From the half-open door Bliss heard the reassuring beep of heart monitors and the quiet conversation of the nurses busying around their station, from which the corridors fanned toward the private rooms on the outside walls of the building. A medications cart rattled by and the elevator call button chimed. Sighing, Bliss looked down at her father, her only living parent.

“Come down to the wedding, Bliss,” John said, his leathery skin stretched tight over his cheekbones. “It's important to me. Damn it, honey, I know it will be hard for you, but you're tough, like your ma. The way I see it, I've lost too much time already and I think we should start over. Be a family.”

“You and Brynnie and her children and me,” she clarified.