She looked over sharply, anticipating the question before it was asked. “I won’t lie to you and tell you I loved him then. I did care. It was impossible not to care for a man like that. And I was grateful. His parents were upset, naturally enough, but he claimed he would bring them around. Being Colin, I think he would have, but they were killed on their drive home. So it was just the two of us, and you. I promised myself I would be a good wife to him, make him a home, accept him in bed. I vowed not to think of Tommy again, but that was impossible. It took me years to understand there was no sin, no shame in remembering the first man I’d loved, no disloyalty to my husband.”

“Not my father,” Shannon said through lips of ice. “He was your husband, but he wasn’t my father.”

“Oh, but he was.” For the first time there was a hint of temper in Amanda’s voice. “Don’t ever say different.”

Bitterness edged her voice. “You’ve just told me different, haven’t you?”

“He loved you while you were still in my womb, took both of us as his without hesitation or false pride.” Amanda spoke as quickly as her pain would allow. “I tell you it shamed me, pining for a man I could never have, while one as fine as was ever made was beside me. The day you were born, and I saw him holding you in those big clumsy hands, that look of wonder and pride on his face, the love in his eyes as he cradled you against him as gently as if you were made of glass, I fell in love with him. I loved him as much as any woman ever loved any man from that day till this. And he was your father, as Tommy wanted to be and couldn’t. If either of us had a regret, it was that we couldn’t have more children to spread the happiness we shared in you.”

“You just want me to accept this?” Clinging to anger was less agonizing than clinging to grief. Shannon stared. The woman in bed was a stranger now, just as she was a stranger to herself. “To go on as if it changes nothing.”

“I want you to give yourself time to accept, and understand. And I want you to believe that we loved you, all of us.”

Her world was shattered at her feet, every memory she had, every belief she’d fostered in jagged shards. “Accept? That you slept with a married man and got pregnant, then married the first man who asked you to save yourself. To accept the lies you told me all my life, the deceit.”

“You’ve a right to your anger.” Amanda bit back the pain, physical, emotional.

“Anger? Do you think what I’m feeling is as pale as anger? God, how could you do this?” She whirled away, horror and bitterness biting at her heels. “How could you have kept this from me all these years, let me believe I was someone I wasn’t?”