The girl looked about the right age. His heart hammered his chest with such force his ribs felt bruised. The child had to be his.
He turned a questioning stare at Kara, but she wouldn’t look at him. Did she really think she could keep his daughter a secret forever?
The little girl attempted to stop on the icy driveway and ended up sliding. Jason instinctively reached out for her. His arms wrapped around her slight shoulders and steadied her.
She eyed him tentatively with wide blue eyes. “Who are you? And why are you holding Bubbles?”
“This is Mr. Greene,” Kara told her. “He helped me during the nasty storm and saved your bear from the snow.”
The girl looked at him again, hesitantly at first. Then her hands rested on her little-girl hips, bunching up her padded coat. “You were smiling at Mommy. Do you like her?”
Jason choked back a laugh.
“Samantha Jameson,” Kara shrieked. “Apologize.”
Samantha—he liked the name. It also didn’t miss his attention that the child had Kara’s surname.
“Sorry, mister. Can I have my bear now?”
The mister part jabbed at him. She had no idea he was her father. Obviously, Kara hadn’t showed Samantha any pictures of him.
He crouched down and held out the stuffed animal. “Here you go.”
“Do you like Mommy?”
She was certainly a cute kid—and quite persistent. “Your mother’s an old friend of mine.”
Both females shot him surprised looks. Before Samantha could continue her inquisition, Kara’s mother called to her from the doorway. Then, catching sight of him, Mrs. Jameson waved, a much friendlier greeting than he’d been expecting. This trip certainly had been filled with one surprise after another.
Samantha waved goodbye and ran to her waiting grandmother, oblivious to the turmoil going on inside him.
When the front door banged shut, Kara turned to him. Her narrowed eyes shot daggers at him. “What’d you go and say that for? She didn’t need to know anything about you and me having a past. Now she’ll be full of all sorts of questions that I don’t want to answer.”
Certain Samantha was their daughter, a daughter he never knew about until now, anger bubbled up in him.
“You haven’t told her about me, have you?”
Kara’s brows scrunched together. “Of course not. Why would I?”
“How long were you going to keep this from me?” Betrayal pummeled him. “I’m her father. I should have been told.”
“No. You’re not.”
“Come on, Kara. Don’t lie. She’s the right age and she has my blue eyes.”
Kara’s hands balled up at her sides. “She is not your daughter.”
“Are you sure there’s not someone else in your life?” he asked, driven to know if he’d been replaced in his daughter’s life. “Someone your little girl calls Daddy?”
“No. There isn’t.”
Kara glared at him as though warning him to drop this line of questioning. But no amount of denials and icy stares would convince him to let go of this subject. There were simply too many coincidences to come to any other conclusion. Samantha was his little girl.
He wanted to push the topic, but backing Kara into a corner wouldn’t get him any closer to his daughter. He needed a different tactic to get Kara to open up to him. And making things even more tense between them wasn’t the right course of action. He needed to retreat and regroup. After things cooled down, he’d come at the situation from a different angle.
“Fine. I understand,” he lied, watching the tension ease in Kara’s shoulders.
What did she have to gain by continuing to deny he was the child’s father?