Page 141

It was his turn to get up, but the kitchen was too small for him to pace. “I lost Emma for far too long. But she’s finally mine and I’m not letting go. I’m not lettingeitherof them go.”
Mariana’s sky was falling. Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t tell Emma the truth now! She wouldn’t understand.”
“Then we’ll make her understand,” he bit out. “But things can’t go on the way they have. Emma has to know the truth. And Stella needs to know me. She needs her father.”
Mariana was already getting up, ready to bolt. He reached out, putting a restraining hand on her shoulder. “I know this will be difficult, but you know I’m right.”
Her breaths were coming too fast. If he didn’t stop her, she was going to hyperventilate and pass out on him.
“Mariana, I’m not going anywhere. Emma is mywife,” he stressed. “They will understand. We’ll do it together.”
“You will be there?”
He nodded. “Yeah. And I’m going to help witheverything else.”
Bewildered, she snatched her beer off the table. “What else is there?”
Garrett gestured to their surroundings. “Let’s start with this house. It’s a rental, right?”
Mariana’s expression grew tight. “Yeah. I rent from my friend. He owns it.”
It was the way she said it that clued him in.Well, shit.
“You’re talking about Teddy Bronson, aren’t you?”
She didn’t look at him. Just nodded.
Well, isn’t that just perfect?His aunt’s ex-husband owned this house.
Chapter Fifty-Six
GARRETT
He held his breath as his daughter blew out the candles on her birthday cake, almost bursting into simultaneous laughter and tears when she couldn’t quite manage to do all five at once.
Five years.
He’d missed five fucking years of her life. And not just him. Emma had missed a lot of those years too, through no fault of her own.
According to Mariana, the home they lived in did belong to Theodore ‘Teddy’ Bronson.
Teddy was Phil’s second husband. A decade her junior, he was the son of a good country club family who latched on to his aunt Phil on a cruise. They were married a few months later. He’d moved to Verdant Falls to be with her. But his real goal had been to become a real estate mogul. Using some of his aunt’s capital, he’d opened a small office in Verdant Falls.
That was how Mariana had met him. She’d been the supervisor of a small crew of house cleaners. They got the contract to clean Teddy’s rental properties.
Of course, Mariana hadn’t told Garretthowthey’d gotten involved. But he knew Teddy Bronson by reputation. He’d also seen him in action before and after the divorce.
While he didn’t believe Mariana to be entirely blameless in the matter, Teddy was a piece of shit.
Bronson wouldn’t have hesitated to use his position of authority to pressure a woman into an affair.
As bad as he felt for his aunt, the affair was the last thing he cared about. What mattered was Teddy’s involvement in his daughter’s life.
“He knows Stella isn’t mine,” Mariana had explained before the girls came back downstairs. “I took Emma to a hospital at the other end of the state—they had the facilities she needed for long-term care. Teddy was the only person who came to see us. For a while. But when I decided to claim Emma’s baby as my own, he got mad and stopped coming around so much. It caused some problems for him, you see.”
It was official. Fate was a bitch with a well-developed sense of irony. “Because everyone thought he was the father.”
Mariana shrugged helplessly. “He told me I was being paranoid, but I couldn’t help it. I thought Emma had gotten involved with someone bad and they had hurt her. Letting everyone believe Stella was mine was safer.”