Coincidence? There were over twenty million people in this metropolitan area. That they had both ended up here wasn’t nearly as coincidental as it would be if they both lived on some remote island.
Still…
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve lived all over the place, but I’ve been on the East Coast a few years now.”
“What…what do you do?”
“I’m self-employed,” he said briefly, as if that explained everything-or anything at all. “You?”
“Same thing.”
“In New York.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes…how did you know?” she asked, wishing her stomach wouldn’t flutter at the prospect that he’d kept track of her.
“Caller ID,” he said simply. “I just checked it and recognized the 212 area code.”
“Oh.”
So much for his keeping track of her. She was lucky he even remembered her name.
Lindsay struggled to pull herself together, to remember what it was, exactly, she had just rehearsed saying to him, before she actually dialed.
Wyatt, you should know that I got pregnant the night we were together and I gave birth to your son. I came to New York and had him, then gave him up for adoption because I thought he could have a better life that way. And now he’s found me…and he wants to find you.
Yes, that was what she was going to say. It had seemed best to go the straightforward route.
Before this moment, anyway.
Now she found herself acutely aware that she couldn’t go around dropping bombshells like that over the telephone. Not when she was less than an hour away from the person whose life would be forever altered by her news.
She had to deliver a bombshell like that in person.
“I need to see you,” she hastily told Wyatt Goddard, trying not to wonder if the woman who had answered the phone was his wife. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t about him. About the two of them. It was about their son.
“Did you say you want to see me?” he echoed, sounding surprised…and intrigued.
“No. I said I need to see you. As soon as possible, actually.”
She expected him to argue.
He didn’t.
He said, “I’ll come to New York.”
“When?”
“Now.”
Chapter 18
Driving down I-95 along Long Island Sound in morning rush-hour traffic, Wyatt Goddard was careful not to let the Pagani Zonda’s speedometer rise past eighty. He didn’t want to get another ticket and wind up in traffic school again.
Sure, he always drove fast-speed was as much a fact of Wyatt’s life as his good looks and fat bank account were.
Today, however, he was tempted to raise the velocity not as much out of habit as out of anticipation.
But a traffic stop would only delay the payoff.
The payoff: after two decades, he was going to see Lindsay Farrell again.
He had dressed carefully, formally for the occasion. Sure, he still favored jeans and T-shirts in his everyday life. But he now had a closet full of well-cut designer suits, custom-made shirts, Italian silk ties, shiny leather shoes, and sunglasses that cost almost as much as his first car did.
It had taken no time at all this morning to go from the boxer shorts he’d slept in to the elegant attire he now wore. His dark hair, still damp from his shower, was cut much shorter than it had been back in high school, but he still had a full head of it. Luckily for him, receding hairlines didn’t run in the family. Even his father had aged well, despite his years of hard living.
And so had Wyatt. Nobody he met ever realized he was closing in on forty. He forgot, most of the time, himself. The only hint of his age, whenever he looked in the mirror, were the faint beginnings of crinkly lines around the corners of his eyes.
At the moment, they were concealed behind a pair of black designer sunglasses.
No, the sun wasn’t shining brightly today-not yet, anyway. But he had donned the glasses despite the overcast sky, the way he used to back in high school. Back then, he used them as an impenetrable fort that could keep the world at bay.
Not anymore. He didn’t have to hide anymore.
And he wasn’t hiding from Lindsay-not really. But the glasses would give him an advantage. He wouldn’t have to look her in the eye until he’d had a chance to get used to the fact that he was with her again. Until he figured out how he felt about that-and had a chance to look at her and maybe figure out how she felt about him, and why she had called him so abruptly.
He supposed she was going to tell him. She’d said she had to talk to him about something. What could it be?
Whatever.
That she had crashed into his world out of the blue for the second time in his life seemed fitting. He only hoped that this time, she wouldn’t blow right on out of it again.
Maybe she won’t. We’re both adults now.
Right. They had that in common, if nothing else, he reminded himself wryly. That and, oh yeah, irony of ironies: money.
During their brief conversation, she had acted clueless about his life now-and he had pretended to be just as clueless about hers.
Of course he knew she was an event planner in Manhattan-a successful one, judging by her address and her client list.
Keeping track of her was simple, despite the fact that Wyatt’s parents were long deceased, his brothers had relocated, and he’d lost touch with his other hometown connections when he left.
Google was a handy invention. Plug in someone’s name and poof! There they were: name, location, occupation…
He only wished there had been a photo of Lindsay on the Web, but there never was when he checked.
And he checked often.
Well, now you don’t need a photo. Now you’ll get to see her for yourself.
His right foot pressed down on the accelerator before he remembered to lighten up.
This wasn’t a race. After twenty years, he could wait another half hour to see her.
Yeah, sure you can.
He forced himself to steer his way into the right lane, allowing the luxury sports car to languish behind a relatively slow-moving double semi.
Why did she call him? What did she want? And in person, no less.
Maybe she was interested in him now that she’d found out that he could now buy and sell her old man-and Farrell Timber-from here to the West Coast and back.
She wouldn’t be the first opportunist from his past to resurface.
Then again, Lindsay had never struck him as a gold-digger.
Come on…she didn’t have to be.
She had her own money, plenty of it. Everybody in Portland knew that money grew on the Farrell family tree.
Anyway, information about Wyatt wasn’t readily available on the Internet. He was a silent partner in the business, importing exotic luxury cars for high-profile clients.
Cars had always been his thing, even back in high school.
That was how he first noticed Lindsay, in fact. He’d turned his head to admire a sleek black Porsche that had pulled up in front of church one Sunday morning before Mass. Then she’d emerged from the backseat, and he was instantly more captivated by her than the car. Which was saying a lot.
In those days he worked his ass off, holding three part-time jobs to save enough for his used BMW. There were plenty of days when he got home at three a.m. after washing dishes at a local restaurant, too exhausted to wake up for school the next morning. You miss one too many days, and you’re expelled.
And once you’ve been expelled from one school, the next one has a zero-tolerance policy. Get caught having a cigarette on school grounds, and you’re out. No excuses accepted, no questions asked.
Of course college was beyond his reach anyway, so he didn’t worry much about his academic record. After graduating from Washington High, he found his way into automobile sales-first in Portland, then Indianapolis, then Daytona. Race cars.
From there, he got into luxury imports, found his way up the East Coast through a series of stepping stones, and here he was. Still working his ass off.