And Then Forever Read online

  “I have plenty of those. Let’s see what we’ve got.” She turned the corner into a small room at the rear of the shop. Hundreds of stuffed animals lined the wall, popping out of bins hanging off hooks on the lattice board. There were lions and tigers and elephants, in a sea of pastels that looked like some kind of furry rainbow. “Which one do you think she’d like?”

  “I have no idea.” How did he explain to the woman that he didn’t even know his own child? That she could show him a thousand stuffed animals and he wouldn’t be able to pick the right one? He felt overwhelmed, debated leaving and forgetting the whole thing.

  No. This was too important. He had six years to make up for, and if he didn’t think it would make Darcy run for the hills, Kincaid would have bought out all the inventory in the little shop and dropped it at Emma’s feet. “She likes dogs,” he said again. “Do you have a stuffed dog?”

  “I think I do.” The woman dug through one bin, then another, and then finally in the third, she found a small stuffed cocker spaniel. It was the same color as Mooch, though a different breed. The stuffed version had big soulful brown eyes and a fluffy tail, and looked just the right size for Emma to tuck under one arm and tote around.

  “Perfect,” Kincaid said. “Can you put a bow on it or something?”

  The woman gave him one of those oh-you-poor-man-shopping-for-this smiles, and led the way back to the counter. “I certainly can.”

  A few minutes later, he left the shop with a stuffed dog and a stuffed bear. At the last second, he’d decided on something for Abby’s baby, too. At least with his future nephew, he could start early.

  Abby came out of the doctor’s office, her steps wider now, slower, with a little of that pregnancy waddle in her step. But she looked happy and relaxed, which was always good. For too many years, his sister’s face had been as tense as a stretched rubber band. She’d lost her sparkle, her wit, her strength, in her marriage to Gordon. But now, on her own, with the baby on the way, all that was coming back. It was good to see. Real good.

  “Here, I got the little slugger something.” He held out the bear.

  “It’s her first gift,” Abby said. She hugged it to her chest. “Thank you, Kincaid.”

  “It’s his first gift,” Kincaid corrected. “Even has a blue bow tie and everything. You know, for a boy.”

  Abby laughed, then fell into step beside him as they walked the short distance back to the cottage. “Are you nervous?”

  “Yeah. Which is crazy. I’ve argued court cases where millions of dollars were at stake. Given speeches in rooms filled with hundreds of people. How hard can one six-year-old be?”

  Abby just laughed, and patted her brother on the shoulder. “For a smart man, Kincaid, you still have a lot to learn.”

  *~*~*

  Darcy had been up since six, pacing the tiny square footage of her house, trying to work off her nerves. This was a good thing for Emma, she told herself. And there was no reason to think Kincaid would go running to his father.

  If after today Kincaid decided he truly wanted to be part of Emma’s life, then Darcy would sit him down and tell him about the contract. The edict from his father. And let Kincaid handle the Foster patriarch. She could only pray that if it did come down to that, that it would go well—and the two Fosters wouldn’t join forces against her.

  Emma got up a little after eight and wandered into the kitchen in her Paddington Bear pajamas. Her hair was a jumble, a veritable cloud of dark waves around her head, and she was rubbing the last of the sleep from her eyes.

  There were only a few days left in the school year, and Darcy was looking forward to having Emma here every morning, rather than seeing her off on the bus. Those school days the house was too quiet, too empty, without Emma’s sweet face.

  Darcy took a seat on the sofa and put her arms out. “Come on over, monkey.”

  Emma clambered into her mother’s lap, then laid her head on Darcy’s shoulder. Oh, how Darcy loved these moments. She knew there would come a day when Emma would be too big to sit on her lap, when her daughter would choose time with friends over time at home, but for now, for this moment, Darcy inhaled that strawberry scent and just held on to the seconds. She wondered if her own mother had done any of these things. Darcy couldn’t remember a moment like that, and though she was sure her mother had loved her, she’d never been a very demonstrative woman. Maybe that was why Darcy tried to hug and kiss Emma as often as possible. To make up for all that she had missed. Yet another reason why she should welcome Kincaid into Emma’s life. So her daughter wouldn’t grow up someday and wonder how life would have been different if her dad had been a part of it from the start.

  After a while, Emma began to perk up, her usual morning energy kicking in on a Saturday morning. Sometimes, getting Emma out the door for school on the weekdays required a Herculean effort, but when the weekend came, Emma was up with the birds. “What are we doing today, Mommy?”

  “Well…remember my friend from yesterday? Mr. Foster? He’s coming today to go to the beach with us.”

  “Is he bringing his puppy dog? I really liked his puppy dog.”

  “I bet he will.” Darcy smoothed a lock of hair out of Emma’s eye, and tucked it behind her ear. “Mr. Foster isn’t just a friend,” she said. “He’s…”

  Damn. What if she told Emma the truth and then Kincaid changed his mind about being part of Emma’s life? That would break Emma’s heart. It would fracture the little world that Darcy had created in this cottage, one where nothing bad entered Emma’s life.

  “He’s a very special friend,” she finished. If Kincaid stayed, then she would tell Emma the truth. Until then, Darcy was taking the cautious route.

  The rest of the morning passed with the usual routine. Breakfast, bath, brushing Emma’s hair, and sending her off to choose an outfit for the day that hopefully matched. Darcy cleaned the cottage, even though the place was so small, she barely needed ten minutes to pick it up, then packed the beach bag.

  Exactly at ten, the doorbell rang. Darcy froze for a second, then felt Emma tugging on her hand. “Mommy, is that Mr. Foster with his puppy?”

  “Yeah, it is. Why don’t you go play, Emma, and I’ll let him in. I need to talk to Mr. Foster first.”

  “Okay,” Emma said, then ran over to her toys.

  Darcy let out a breath, and with it a silent prayer that she was doing the right thing, then crossed to the door.

  Her heart leapt at the sight of Kincaid, just the same as it had when she was eighteen, and swept off her feet by the handsome college freshman. He smiled at her, and something caught in her throat, and for a long second she forgot about everything but him. He’d missed a spot when he shaved this morning, and the little patch of dark stubble under his chin made him sexier somehow, more vulnerable. More human.

  More like a man she could trust.

  “Come on in,” Darcy said, “and see Emma.”

  He gave her a nod, and in his eyes, she saw the same flutter of nerves that filled her gut. She’d never seen Kincaid nervous or stressed, and somehow, seeing him like that now made her own worries abate.

  “I brought her a gift,” Kincaid said, holding up a stuffed dog. It was cute, a little cocker spaniel, with a big pink bow and oversized eyes. Exactly the kind of stuffed animal that Emma would grab in a store.

  It melted Darcy’s heart. It was a small thing, but it was thoughtful, and it showed that Kincaid had paid attention. That edged Darcy further into the hopeful column.

  “Then you should go ahead and give it to her yourself. She’ll like that. A lot.” Darcy stepped aside, and waved Kincaid in. He crossed the threshold, standing there for one long second, as if he was unsure about this whole thing, then he swung his hand behind his back to hide the stuffed animal, and stepped over to Emma, who was sitting on the floor, surrounded by Barbie dolls.

  Kincaid bent down to her level. She glanced up and smiled at him, with that toothy smile that Darcy loved. “Hey, Emma, remember me?”

>   She nodded. “You’re Mr. Foster. Mommy’s special friend.”

  Kincaid’s shoulders tensed a bit at that, but then he nodded, as if he understood why Darcy would say that instead of telling Emma the truth straight off. “I am. And I came to go to the beach with you guys today. Is that okay?”

  “Did you bring your puppy?”

  “I did, indeed. She’s sitting right outside, waiting for us.” Kincaid moved his hand out from behind his back and held out the stuffed dog. Emma squealed. “And I brought this for you, for when my puppy isn’t here.”

  Emma’s eyes lit, wide and happy. She snatched the dog out of his hands and crushed it to her chest. “I love it! I’m gonna call her...Elsa. ’Cause Elsa is my favorite in Frozen, and she’s so pretty, like this puppy.”

  “Frozen? What’s that?”

  Darcy stifled a laugh. Poor Kincaid, needing a primer on kids’ films and toys. And Emma was just the one to give it to him. She could talk about her favorite movie for hours.

  Emma launched into a lengthy description of the popular Disney movie, which Kincaid, bless his heart, sat through, even asking a few questions. Emma dashed over to grab the DVD, then gathered up all her Frozen dolls, and dumped the whole pile into Kincaid’s lap. “We should watch the movie. ’Cause it’s my favorite. Mommy says I’ve seen it ten thousand trillion times.”

  Kincaid glanced up at Darcy. His brow arched in amusement. “Is that so?”

  “It feels like it, when I’m watching it with her. Again. And again. And again.” Darcy grinned. “Hang around long enough and you’ll be singing “Let it Go,” too.”

  “I hope so.” His face softened when he looked over at Emma, who had already incorporated the stuffed dog into her Barbie family. It didn’t matter to Emma that the dog was ten times the size of the dolls; to her it was their new puppy. Kincaid talked to her about the Barbie dolls, leaning in to help set up the furniture for the family, just as Darcy had done a few days before. He was a little awkward at it, but he was trying, and that was good to see.

  Darcy dared to let hope take flight in her chest. Hope that Kincaid might actually want to be a real father, that he could build a relationship with Emma, and he could ward off his father’s lawyers and threats. The hope was as fragile as a new bird, but it was there. And growing with every minute Kincaid stayed.

  “I think we should have a tea party,” Emma said. “With my new puppy and Mr. Foster and my Barbies!”

  As much as Darcy would pay good money to see Kincaid squeeze into one of Emma’s child size chairs and pretend to drink tea from plastic cups, she thought it might be nicer to rescue him. It was only his first day, after all.

  “Well, we could have a tea party, or…who’s ready for the beach?” Darcy said.

  Emma leapt to her feet. “Me! Me! Is the puppy coming? Can I take Elsa?”

  “Yes, the puppy is coming. And yes, you can take Elsa.” Darcy chuckled. “But you have to either carry her or keep her on the picnic blanket so she doesn’t get all dirty. Only real puppies can play in the sand, okay?”

  “Okay!” Emma gathered her toys into a bag, and a few minutes later, the three of them headed outside. Mooch woke from her nap on the porch, scrambled to her feet and tagged along, right beside Emma, who giggled and patted the dog every few seconds. Darcy carried the towels and an umbrella, while Kincaid hefted Emma’s bag of toys and a cooler filled with lunch.

  Just like a family.

  Darcy wasn’t sure if that made her happy or panicked. She decided to think about that later—much later. It could still go south pretty quickly. Maybe that was the pessimistic side of her talking, or maybe she had learned not to put too much trust in anything that came from a Foster.

  The beach was still relatively empty, which was part of what Darcy liked about going there in the morning. The college kids often slept past noon, and rarely started working on their tans before two in the afternoon. The older tourists walked the sand and searched for shells early in the morning, leaving the families to populate the sandy shores of Fortune’s Island during the day. A few other families had set up under wide umbrellas a little further down the beach on the public end, which left Darcy, Kincaid and Emma mostly alone.

  Darcy got the picnic blanket out of the bag and unfolded it. Just as she was about to lay it on the sand, Kincaid grabbed the other half. “Here, let me help.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “I know you do. But I’m here now, and I’m hoping you’ll let me help.”

  Did he mean with more than just the blanket? Or was she reading too much into a simple statement? She held his hazel eyes for a moment, and that little flutter of hope grew a bit more. “Okay.”

  They laid the blanket down, then set up the picnic, with Kincaid naturally falling into whatever other tasks needed doing. He unpacked the umbrella, twisted the base deep into the sand, then angled the canopy to cover their picnic area. Darcy sat on the blanket and uncapped a water bottle, then handed it to Kincaid. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” He settled beside her, and they watched Emma running back and forth with Mooch at her heels, sand kicking up in their wake. Emma’s giggles carried in the air like the light, happy music of a flock of birds. “She loves that dog.”

  “She’s been asking me to get her a dog for months now. I’m glad we can borrow yours.”

  “Sounds funny to say it’s my dog. I mean, I know it’s temporary and everything, but it’s kind of nice to have a dog. I never had a pet, or at least a pet with four legs, when I was a kid,” Kincaid said. “Always wanted a dog, but my father said they were too destructive. I had a goldfish instead, kept it in a little bowl on the desk in my room. Named him Larry.”

  Even though Kincaid laughed a little at the memory, Darcy thought it all sounded incredibly sad. A family with that much wealth could have paid someone to follow the dog around all day. “Well, maybe that’s why Mooch found you. She knew you needed her as much as she needed you.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Kincaid turned to her. “What makes you think I needed a dog?”

  She leaned back on her elbows. She’d had a lot of years to think about Kincaid, years that weren’t distracted by the dizzying infatuation she had felt for him in those early days. Not that she hadn’t missed him, especially late at night when she was alone, and she thought about that summer. It had taken years before she stopped wondering what if and dealt with what was. She told herself she could look at him objectively now.

  Well, as objective as she could be with a man she had just slept with. Even looking at him now made a river of desire run through her veins. God, he was a good-looking man, and when he smiled…she could barely string a thought together. All these years, she would have thought she would be immune to Kincaid, but no. If anything, she found him more intriguing now, this grown-up, wanting-to-do-the-right-thing man.

  “When I first met you, I thought you were the loneliest rich kid I’d ever seen,” she said. “I’d met a lot of them, especially when I lived on the mainland, but you…you seemed like you had this hole in your heart, in your life. Maybe that’s why you came over to The Love Shack that night. To find something to fill that hole.”

  “I think I did.” He thought about that for a moment, then shook his head. “God, Darcy, you know me better than anyone else in the world. I guess that’s why I connected with you so quickly and trusted you so easily. It’s like you can read me.”

  “Only because we went through a lot of the same things.”

  “True.” He picked up some sand and let it sift through his fingers, back down to the beach. “I told you that I was raised by a steady rotation of nannies. My father could never keep anyone on the payroll. They’d commit some tiny infraction and the next day, I’d have a new nanny. So there was never a bond, never a connection. Never…” his voice trailed off.

  “Anything you could count on.”

  He was quiet a long time, watching Emma, listening to her laughter. “Yeah.”

  “My childhoo
d was like that, too, but without the monetary perks.” She grinned. “My mom was…irresponsible. Flighty. I don’t think she expected to get pregnant, and kept on waiting for the world to tell her it was a big prank. She waited eighteen years to hear that.”

  Darcy said the words like it didn’t hurt that her mother had basically abandoned her for most of her childhood. Darcy had spent her afternoons with a friend of her mother’s, one friend on Tuesday, another on Thursday, and a third on the weekends. When she was old enough to stay home alone, her mother would stay out overnight, sometimes all weekend, as if she’d forgotten she had a child at all.

  She remembered a day she had come home from school, and found her mother at the kitchen table, nursing her second or third bottle of scotch for the day. It was a wonder her mother managed to hold on to retail jobs, just enough to keep a roof over their heads. Her mother had wagged a finger at her and said, “Don’t ever have kids. They’ll ruin everything.”

  That had been the moment when Darcy had decided she was leaving Plymouth as soon as she could. And she had vowed to herself that if she ever had children of her own, she would never, ever make them feel like a burden. So she rebelled against her mother, found a place of her own on this island, then worked hard to be a good mom.

  “I guess that’s why I was always so ‘wild.’” Darcy put air quotes around the words. “Because I had no rules, no one caring what I did or where I went.”

  “And so you became the opposite kind of mother.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say I’m the exact opposite. After I had Emma, I realized how hard being a young, unwed mother can be. So I guess having Emma helped me develop some sympathy for my mom, and in the last couple years of her life, we built the relationship we never had before. Although I’m much more involved and responsible than my mother was, I’m not big on rules, either. I do believe in being with my daughter as much as I can be, and in having a life that is as stable as possible for her. She’s had the same babysitter since the day she was born, an older woman named Nona.”