Page 6 of Unlikely Guardian

A baby who was almost a year old.

“Her name is Megan,” she heard Jason say.

At the sound of some movement, Lilly opened her eyes to find him searching through his wallet. He extracted something. A photograph that was a bit crumpled around the edges. He held it up so she could see it.

Her mouth went dry.

She took the picture, hesitantly, and pulled it closer to her so she could study it. The little girl had auburn hair. Not quite a genetic copy of Lilly’s own, but close. Darn close. It wasn’t straight but instead haloed her face in soft, loose curls. Just as Lilly’s own hair had done when she was that age.

Lilly caught her bottom lip between her teeth to cut off any unwanted sound she might make. At this point, any sound would be unwanted. And too revealing.

In the photograph, Megan was smiling. Not a tentative one, either. It went all the way to her eyes.

“Oh, mercy,” she whispered. Lilly pressed the picture to her chest.

This precious child was hers.

The connection she felt for Megan was instant. Not a gentle tug of her heart, either, but a feeling so intense, so right, that the tears she’d fought came anyway. Lilly didn’t even care that she was losing control. Seeing that tiny face was worth all the tears. It was worth humiliating herself in front of Jason. Worth the coma.

Worth everything.

Her baby.

Her own flesh and blood.

“I’ve missed so much,” she mumbled, knowing it was a total understatement. She’d missed carrying her child. Giving birth. And most importantly, she had missed nearly the entire first year of her daughter’s life.

“Yes,” Jason whispered.

Since there was a lot of emotion in his one-word comment, Lilly looked at him again. He still had on his cop’s face, but those eyes said it all. Or at least they said something. Exactly what that something was, she didn’t know.

Unless…

“She’s Greg’s baby,” Lilly clarified. Why, she didn’t know. She didn’t need to explain her sex life to Jason.

He nodded. “The doctors did a DNA test on Megan after she was born.”

What a waste of time. If Lilly had been awake during Megan’s birth, she could have told them there was no reason for such a test. Before that night with Greg, it’d been nearly a year since she’d had sex. And that one time with Greg hadn’t been unprotected, either, which meant something had gone wrong with the condom.

And then it hit her.

Her heart practically leaped to her throat. “Who has her? Both Greg’s and my parents are dead—”

“I have her,” Jason interrupted.

Lilly was surprised that her heart didn’t jump right out of her chest. It was already pounding, and his statement made it pound even harder. “You?”

That improved his posture. Not that he needed it. He was already soldier-stiff, which was his usual demeanor, but Jason seemed to take her simple question as a challenge.

“Me,” he enunciated through semiclenched teeth.

Oh.

Even with his adamant confirmation, it just didn’t register in her brain and was in total conflict with the image she had of Jason Lawrence.

He shoved his hands into his pockets; it seemed as if he changed his mind a dozen times as to what he was about to say. “You were in a coma so long that the doctors didn’t think you would recover. I didn’t think you’d recover. I was Megan’s next of kin.”

There was something in the way he said that. Especially the tone he used when he tossed out the last part. Next of kin. Something…territorial? Something that launched a flurry of mental speculation.

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