Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You’re going to have to run that by me again.” The room was closing in on him, and Wyatt tugged at the material of his shirt. He was too damn hot, and he couldn’t breathe. “I don’t understand.”
“Arthur didn’t want to know. And he didn’t want you to ever know there was a possibility,” she said, her voice flat. Emotionless. How was that possible given their current conversation? He was ready to claw at his skin.
“Start over. From the beginning.” He slid to the floor, bringing his back to the wall and propped a knee up with one leg stretched out. “Word for damn word.”
There was a crackle over the line like he was on a SAT phone out in the Middle East and just keyed his mic for help. The sound was the result of a shaky breath. Emotion from Charlotte now showing. And it terrified him.
“When the doctor told me I was pregnant, I assumed it was Arthur’s because you and I were together only the one time.”
“I used a condom, Lottie.” He hadn’t used her nickname since they were in primary together, but it’d just slipped out.
“Arthur always did, too.” Another loud crackle hit his ears.
“Doctor said conception was June. I admitted to Arthur after we were married that there was a small chance the baby could be yours. He didn’t want to even talk about it.
He said she was his, and he forbade me from telling you or anyone else what I’d told him. ”
“You never found out? Tested her blood against his or something?” How the hell was this happening?
A daughter.
No.
He couldn’t have an almost twenty-one-year-old daughter.
A daughter who was attending the Bug Bounty Competition in Montreal.
Hell, she might have even run across The Knight, unaware he was the best hacker to date as well as a dangerous and ruthless monster.
The same monster Natasha had been hunting down for years.
And no doubt the reason she was currently “on vacation” in Montreal.
“As she got older, she started to remind me of you, and I wanted to check. But every time I brought it up to Arthur he’d get so upset. In his eyes, blood didn’t matter, she was his. And he’s right, I mean—what’s blood, anyway? He raised her. He’s the only father she’s known.”
“You were going to tell me at the wake, weren’t you?” Arthur had just passed, and what, Charlotte thought it was time to set the record straight, to let Wyatt know he might be Gwen’s dad?
He stared at the tattoo reminder inside his forearm of the friend he’d lost twice. Once because Wyatt left England and never looked back and again to cancer. Emotion plowed through him too heavy and fast to handle.
“It occurred to me then that Gwen might still have a father,” she said, an echo to his thoughts.
“Might.” There was still a chance she wasn’t his. But the second he saw Gwen on screen, he knew in his heart, in his gut, she had his blood coursing through her veins.
God, he didn’t know which way was up right now. The world was spinning.
He squeezed his eyes closed and drew in a breath to try to calm the hell down. He never got like this. Not ever. But this was . . . new. Foreign. A dad? He thought about his uptight father, and he gripped his chest.
How could his parents not have realized the similarities? Didn’t they see the Montgomerys regularly?
“I’m so sorry. We were doing what we thought was best, and admit it, you wouldn’t have wanted to know.”
Her words were a cold slap in the face. “I . . .”
“How’d you know? Why the call?”
Because she’s on a list of hackers. She might be in danger.
A sense of worry, concern like he’d never experienced, shot through him. It was a vicious sound and it rang so loud he thought blood would come out of his ears.
He’d already made his mind up to go to Canada before the admiral’s request to protect Natasha, but now—shit, he also had to go there to protect his own daughter.
Is she mine?
Yes.
No.
Damn it.
“I’m going to Canada for work, and I’ll be near the . . .” He couldn’t get the words out. His ability to speak was buried deep beneath a pile of new responsibility he’d never in his life shouldered, nor believed he would have to.
“There’s a chance she may not be yours,” Charlotte said in a soft voice, but she wasn’t even buying her own words. “Your mum has seen Gwen a dozen times, and she never made the connection, so . . .”
His mum didn’t want to see the resemblance. It would cause a scandal, and she’d lose her bloody mind. She had to have some idea, though.
Gwen looked nothing like Arthur. She didn’t have Arthur’s hook nose, or Charlotte’s small button one.
No, Gwen’s cheekbones, her bone structure was a feminine version of Wyatt’s.
Even a touch of a cleft in her chin like his, almost unnoticeable, but he’d spotted it on the screen.
He’d noticed every detail as if he’d been staring at an image of a much younger sister.
“I have to go.” He blinked, working to pull his shit together as he forced himself upright. He braced a palm to the wall at his side to maintain balance, feeling as though he were pissed drunk.
“You’re not going to reach out to her, are you? She’d never forgive me, and we still don’t know for certain. And you don’t want kids, right? Your mum said you didn’t.”
Of course. His mother had planted seeds in Charlotte’s head to prevent her from letting the truth slip, to prevent a larger stain on the family name than Wyatt had already caused.
“I have to go,” he said again in a daze and ended the call at the sound of the door opening.
“You good?” A.J. must’ve sensed something was wrong because he closed the door behind him and approached Wyatt like he’d just pulled the pin on a grenade. Or maybe it was all in Wyatt’s head because he was on the verge of a mental breakdown. “Sick?”
He let go of the wall to ensure he appeared as though he had it in him to fly to Canada and take down a hacker while also protecting two women. “No, I’m good. Bad sushi at lunch.”
“You didn’t eat sushi. I was with ya. BLT.”
Right. Shit. “Bacon was probably, um, bad. Or the lettuce.” He forced a half-smile. “There’s always some lettuce recall these days.”
I’m losing my mind.
A.J. closed the space and slapped a hand over his shoulder. “We really talking about lettuce right now?” His gaze moved to the mobile clutched in Wyatt’s hand. “Or is this about the admiral’s daughter?”
He wished it was only about her.
Facing Natasha would more than likely test his resolve. He hadn’t done a stellar job at resisting her before, and it’d taken all of his damn strength to do so in Colorado.
But no, this was about the fact he may have a daughter, a daughter that could be in danger. And he didn’t have a clue as to how he was supposed to act and feel right now.
“I’ll sleep it off on the plane.”
“That mean you’re volunteering Echo for this mission?”
Wyatt nodded. “Did you really expect anything different?”