Page 21 of Anchor Point

I needed to get the fuck out of here.

Wiping my palms on my pants, I leaned forward a bit and extended a peace offering. Not that we’d been fighting. I just wanted to offer her something. Anything.

“I figure you and I are on the same team, and I’m just trying to help. Bring you up to speed on things. When Mike gets back, I’ll send him your way. In the meantime, I’ll keep an ear to the ground and see if I can find out what the PD knows that they aren’t telling us.”

Her shoulders released ever so slightly. I hoped she’d been battling herself as much as I had.

“Thank you, Captain.” The words were a relieved dismissal.

With no reason to linger, I left her office and made my way home, wondering why I’d even bothered to try to meet with her. She’d made it very clear she held no remaining interest, not that I could go there with her anyway, or would even want to, especially since there were rules prohibiting any kind of relationship between us. But still, there might have been a tiny part of me, buried somewhere down deep, that wondered what if.

Buster, my yellow lab, watched from his lounge spot in the yard as I pulled up to the house. He met me at the door with a chewed-up stick poking out both sides of his mouth.

“Hey, buddy.” I gave him a good scratching behind the ears before tossing the stick toward the pond. A couple of tosses later, he was bouncing into the edge of the lake, his favorite thing.

We had an easy routine, a simple one. I liked it that way.

We played fetch, Buster would swim. We’d go inside and find some food, then settle in for some TV, or I’d finish a book, Buster at my feet. On my off days, we worked on projects, or we went to the lake and worked on my boat. A quiet life. It was a good life.

So why couldn’t I get a certain ice queen and her little princess off my mind?

A week went by and, finally, things at the fire department were settling in.

Mike had come home and pushed the issue of the officer’s negligence. We’d had a blessedly silent week of minor medical calls. I stayed away from headquarters.

So why couldn’t I quit replaying all the times I’d seen Olivia Hawkins. The way her skirts cupped her ass. The way she wasn’t afraid to hold a man’s gaze.

More than once, I’d fantasized about that skirt, with her bent over the table in the conference room, and it bunched up around her waist.

A knock at the front door ripped me back to the present. I wasn’t in the conference room with a certain sexy brunette who I had exactly zero business fantasizing about. I was nursing a lukewarm beer in the silence of my den on a Tuesday afternoon instead of taking advantage of my time off.

With a curse, I stood, dropped the beer on the counter on my way to the door, and grabbed my shop keys from the rung. I needed to get out of this funk and do something with the rest of my day.

The young girl staring back at me from the doorway stopped me dead in my tracks. With a backpack slung over one shoulder, she wore a vintage Eagles concert T-shirt, ripped jeans, and beat-up Converse sneakers.

Recognition was a lightning bolt, firing all my senses and zapping my brain.

There was no denying she was mine. She was the perfect combination of both her mother and me. She had her mother’s luscious hair and facial structure, but those were my eyes that stared back at me, my nose on her face. She was tallish for a girl. Lanky. Just like I’d been. My heart stopped beating, breath caught in my throat.

This was not a joke.

This girl was mine. If you held a picture of me next to her at the same age, we’d be twins.

“Are you Mac Collins?”

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move.

Dumbstruck.

That was the word I was looking for.

Every-fucking-thing I’d ever known just flew out the window. Every lie I’d ever told myself about not wanting kids or a family slapped me in the face with the truth. An overwhelming sense of loss threatened to consume me. I had a child, a daughter. A living, breathing part of me that existed outside of my body.

As I took her in, that grief morphed into fiery-hot rage. All of my unanswered questions rose to the front of my mind.

How’d she find me?

Had her mother told her where I lived?

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