No answer.
“Where’d he go?” Sophia asked, peering down the stairs.
“I don’t know, honey.” But whatever had just happened might be in Tessa and Sophia’s best interest, even if it didn’t feel that way right now. She turned Sophia back toward the condo. “Time to read Little Bear.”
Zach’s life just got real.
Extremely real.
Terrifyingly real.
Wondering and witnessing were two very different phenomena. And now that he’d seen Sophia, there was no going back. The shock lingered, giving rise to an even more troubling emotion: panic. Panic that ate at his nerve endings. He’d learned early on that fear was okay, but panic…panic killed.
He’d thought sitting out here on the beach alone at night would have brought some semblance of calm or acceptance or wisdom, but the waves kept hitting the shore, and Zach kept coming up empty.
He pulled his knees up, hooked his elbows around them, and let the bottle of Jim Beam dangle from his fingertips. He had no goddamned idea what he was going to do about this. Tessa was right—he didn’t have a lifestyle fit to raise a child. Which intensified the importance of this role on Hawaiian Heat. Now it wasn’t just a boost for his career but a necessity in his life. And he’d gone and fucking fired the agent who might have been his ticket onto the show.
When he tried to think beyond the role, he kept hitting walls. What to do about Tessa? What to do about Sophia? For the first time, Zach realized he didn’t know how to live a life based around other people’s needs. And he sure as shit didn’t know the first thing about raising a child. But she was his child. Zach’s own parents had turned away from him when he couldn’t, wouldn’t, meet their expectations. And he knew how badly that had hurt him. How deeply it had affected him. He sure as hell wasn’t going to walk away from his own kid and leave her with the same wounds.
God, he was so fucked.
Movement nearby dragged his attention right.
“Hey.” Tessa’s soft voice touched his ear over the waves. She was still wearing the sexy cut-offs and white tank. Her gaze jumped to the bottle of Jim Beam. “Are you okay?”
“How’d you find me?”
“You weren’t in your room, so I took a chance you’d be where you love to be most.”
He didn’t respond.
“I wanted to tell you that I’ve already had Sophia’s DNA processed. I have the results back at the condo. It should reduce the wait time—”
“I don’t need it.”
She fell silent for a second. “What do you mean you don’t need it?”
“I know she’s mi—” His throat closed. He had to force the last word out. “Mine.”
Tessa dropped to her knees. The moonlight lit her shocked face in cool blue-white hues. “How?”
“Her eyes.”
“Her— Oh.”
Zach nodded.
“Then you know it’s not a defect or anything.”
He nodded again. “I know. What color are they? Blue and brown?”
Tessa exhaled and went silent. Zach followed her lead. This was so overwhelming, so life altering, he didn’t know where to start or what to do.
“Blue and hazel,” she said softly. Her posture eased, shoulders slumped. “I don’t even see it anymore. She doesn’t get teased about it yet. Right now we just get the ‘Why are her eyes different colors?’ question. Blue and hazel isn’t as bad as blue and brown. And if you look closely, the colors in her left eye are sort of split up like shards, so her whole iris isn’t hazel, it’s a mix of blue and hazel. It’s blue enough that in some lighting, you can’t even tell they’re different. I figure if it bothers her as she gets older, she can wear—”
“Colored contacts,” he finished.
“How’d you know?”