The Secret Heir

Still with that odd lack of expression in his voice, Jackson announced, “Carl Reiss is not my biological father.”

For a moment, she thought he had just confirmed her suspicions. But then she realized exactly what he had said. Carl was not his father. “But Donna is your mother?”

“Yeah. Turns out I was the product of a long-time affair between her and an older, married man. She planned to use her pregnancy to force him to leave his wife and kids and marry her, but the scheme backfired when he refused to acknowledge paternity. She married my— She married Carl because she needed someone to take care of her and support her when her lover bailed on her.”

Laurel was stunned, as much by the way Jackson had told the story as by the facts he had revealed. He’d made Donna sound like a cold-blooded gold digger. For all of Laurel’s criticisms of Donna’s annoying quirks, that was a far different image than she had ever had of Jackson’s mother.

“She must have been very young,” she offered tentatively, quickly doing the math. Twenty-one. Very young for some people, though Laurel had been on her own for years by that age.

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“I think she knew what she was doing. From what she told me, she had her eyes on the guy’s bank account from the start.”

“Well, obviously she’s changed in the past thirty-one years. Donna likes nice things, but she hardly lives a lavish lifestyle. She brags about being a bargain shopper, for heaven’s sake. You’ve said yourself that she can stretch a penny as if it were made of rubber.”

He had held that up as another one of his mother’s many virtues, actually, boasting about how content she had always been with her husband’s comfortable, working-class income. Usually that observation came in the middle of one of his complaints about Laurel’s work obligations.

“So she settled for a man with less money,” Jackson muttered with a shrug. “But she never had to work and never lacked for anything she really wanted, so I guess she figures she made out okay, after all.”

“I don’t think she would agree that she merely settled. She’s always seemed very happy to me.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t always tell with her, can you?”

There was still anger beneath the sarcasm, and pain. All of which she understood. Jackson had a right to be angry that he’d been deceived for so long—as long as he kept his anger in perspective and didn’t do anything he would regret. Like packing up and moving to Texas, she added wryly.

The one person he hadn’t really discussed yet was Carl. Laurel suspected that was the deepest cut of all, as far as Jackson was concerned. He quite simply adored Carl Reiss. He had spent his entire life trying to learn from him, to be like him. How many times had she heard him laughingly proclaim himself to be just like his dad? He’d even commented a time or two that he thought Tyler had Carl’s eyes.

Now his world had shifted. His way of looking at Carl, his image of himself as Carl’s son, even his perception of his own son as the youngest in a long line of Reiss men—all of that had changed.

“Your dad is worried about you,” she said, choosing her words deliberately. “He wants you to talk to him.”

“Where was he yesterday, when Mom told me the truth?”

“He thought it best for her to be the one to tell you. And maybe he was worried about how you would react. You know how much he loves you, Jackson. He’s probably scared half to death about the way you feel about him now.”

Jackson looked down at his hands, and Laurel suspected that he didn’t know the answer to that himself.

“You know you still love Carl, and that he loves you,” she said by way of reminder. “You’re angry with him right now, and that’s only natural, but it will get better.”

She didn’t know whether to interpret his grunt as agreement with her words or the opposite, but she could tell he wasn’t feeling any better. She searched her mind for something, anything, to say to help him through this.

The telephone rang before she came up with anything. She moved to answer it, but Jackson detained her by laying a hand on her leg. “Let the machine get it.”

She looked at him in question. “It could be important.”

“You know it’s probably my mother. I’m not ready to talk to her yet.”

“It could be your dad.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “I don’t want to talk to anyone right now.”

She nodded. The call could be for her, of course, but Jackson was probably right about the caller’s identity. And she didn’t really want to talk to Donna, either. For one thing, she wouldn’t know how to answer if either Donna or Carl asked how Jackson was doing.

Getting him to talk about this was like pulling teeth, but she decided to keep prodding him. Maybe if he could just express his feelings, it would ease some of his pain. “Did your mother tell you anything else?”

Jackson reached up to rub his right temple, as if to soothe an ache there. “Yeah. She told me the name of my biological father. Apparently she’s been in touch with him and confirmed that Tyler’s heart condition did come from his genes.”

Which only gave Jackson another reason to resent the man, Laurel thought sympathetically. “Is it anyone you know?”