As the program began, there were several times Josh found himself laughing out loud. Kiley and her helpers had to lead wandering kids back to their places, hand giant plastic candy canes back to the little ones who dropped theirs and take a giant bell away from one of the preschool boys when he used it to bop one of the little girls on the head. Josh enjoyed the program immensely and he was certain the rest of the crowd had, too.
When the kids sang the last song, Kiley thanked everyone for attending, told the parents that the day care was dismissed for the rest of the afternoon and then motioned for Josh to come up to the stage. “Would you mind watching Emmie for a moment while I get everything cleared up here?” she asked.
“No problem,” he said, picking up the toddler. “We’ll be over by the tree.”
As he carried her over to look at the decorative ornaments on the tree, he marveled at the fact that he was actually watching after a kid and didn’t mind it at all. “Did you see this ornament, Emmie?” he asked, pointing to Santa’s sleigh with eight tiny reindeer hanging from one of the branches.
“Ponies,” Emmie said, her little face beaming as she pointed at it.
Tickling her tummy, he laughed. “You’ve got a one-track mind, princess.”
“Your daughter is very cute,” the woman who had sat next to him throughout the program said as she and her husband walked over with their grandson in tow. “She looks just like you.” Josh smiled and started to correct her, but the woman didn’t give him the chance. “Do you have a cell phone?” she asked.
“Yes, do you need to use it?” He unclipped his phone from his belt and handed it to her.
“I’ll use the camera on your phone to take your picture with her here by the tree, if you’ll return the favor and take one of us with our grandson,” she said, pulling a digital camera from her purse.
“Sure,” Josh agreed. He wouldn’t mind having a picture of himself and Emmie, and if the woman wanted to think they looked alike, what would it hurt?
After the pictures had been taken and the couple moved on, he checked the gallery on his phone to see how the photo had turned out. He smiled at the image. Perched in the crook of his arm, Emmie had her hand resting on his cheek and the sweetest grin he had ever seen on her cute little face.
But his smile suddenly faded as he looked at his image and then Emmie’s. He normally didn’t pay any attention to who resembled who. He had a mirror image of himself in his twin brother, Sam, and didn’t figure he looked like anyone else. Staring at the picture suddenly had him changing his mind.
He had never before seen himself and Emmie together—not in a mirror or a picture. And since he hadn’t been looking for any similarities between the two of them, he hadn’t given it so much as a fleeting thought. But there was no denying that Emmie looked a lot like him. He could see glimpses of Kiley in Emmie’s big brown eyes and the delicate shape of her face, but the child had his nose and smile. And their hair color was almost exactly the same shade.
“Did you enjoy the program?” Kiley asked, walking up to them.
Looking up, he clipped the phone back on his belt as he nodded. “Are you finished for the day?”
“Yes. The children have all been turned over to their parents and the props have been stored in my office,” she said as she took Emmie from him to set her on her feet. Helping the little girl into her coat, she zipped it up. “Would you like to come over and help us bake and decorate sugar cookies for the rest of the afternoon?”
Suddenly needing to put space between them, Josh shook his head. “I’ll have to take a rain check on that. I need to get back to one of the job sites,” he lied. What he needed was time to think.
“We’ll save some for you,” she said, oblivious to the turmoil beginning to roil through him.
He nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“At the meeting of the funding committee?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He kissed Kiley’s cheek and the top of Emmie’s head, then started toward the exit to the ballroom.
As he walked out of the clubhouse and got into his SUV, he sat there for several long minutes staring blindly at the steering wheel. He knew Kiley had expected him to at least drop by that evening after he finished with his duties at Gordon Construction. But he needed time to think, time to do some calculating and then decide what he was going to do.
Beyond learning how to protect himself and his partner when they made love, he hadn’t paid much attention in sex education class. Hell, he couldn’t think of a teenage boy who did. They all had more hormones than good sense and were too busy hoping to get lucky with one of the cheerleaders to give things like the gestation of a woman’s pregnancy a lot of thought. But it didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure out that there was more than just a possibility, there was a very real probability, that the cute little girl he called the pony princess was his daughter.