Page 13 of Love In The Spotlight

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. Penelope never knew her mother anyway.”

She wanted to ask more but knew by his tone that it was off the table.

She got what she needed for now and would move on to actual business and keep this as professional as possible.

It’s the one thing she was good at.

4

ON HIS OWN

“Daddy is going to miss you,” Jamie said to Penelope the day before Thanksgiving ten days later.

“Bye, Daddy,” Penelope said.

“I’m not leaving yet.” He laughed and gave her a kiss while she was playing with her doll. “I hate to leave you,” he said. “But Daddy has to work.”

There was a time he’d played on Thanksgiving, but now he’d be calling the first game in Detroit. Only a two-hour flight there and back, but the time to get to airports and wait around added up. He was leaving first thing in the morning at the crack of dawn before Penelope would even be up. He’d get home when she was in bed too.

Who would have thought this parenting thing would be so hard?

And he was doing it on his own.

“I’ll see you on TV,” Penelope said. He understood her words. She spoke well, but he knew that some who weren’t around her as much didn’t catch it all.

“You will,” he said. “Are you going to tell Janelle it’s me again?”

Janelle was the nanny he’d hired when Penelope was born and he brought her home from the hospital. He’d be lost without the woman he paid through the nose to care for his daughter.

Just as he’d told Laken last week when he’d met with her. You need the best in your supporting rolls and you couldn’t be cheap about it.

Aside from the small guesthouse he’d had on his property that Janelle lived in, she stayed in the main house when he was out of town.

Days he didn’t work, Janelle had off. He figured he called on her more on the off hours. She’d be over when he got Penelope in bed.

He liked the nighttime routine with his daughter, but if Janelle was here, Penelope would rather go with the older woman.

“I will,” Penelope said. “Dolly will see you too.”

He looked at the doll Penelope was holding with a tiny pair of glasses on. He’d had the doll custom made for his daughter.

“She will,” he said. “Are you hungry? Do you want a snack before your bath and bed?”

“Cookies?” Penelope asked.

She was batting her big blue eyes at him. His eyes. The color and shade of them. The blonde hair, that was Mercedes’s. Not much he could do about it.

It was only a hair color, but his daughter did resemble him a lot. He’d seen pictures of himself as a child that his mother had sent. He was grateful she’d done that when they weren’t happy with his decisions in life.

His lifestyle and the results.

They did love their granddaughter even if they didn’t see her much.

He was sure the pictures had more to do with his parents not being positive he was the father of Mercedes’s baby even though those DNA tests said otherwise.

“No cookies,” he said. He knew his daughter got them when he wasn’t around, but he tried to keep her diet as healthy as he could. “How about animal crackers?”

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