“People do it all the time.”

“Do they?” She pulled her hand out from his grip. Repulsed and stunned, she shrank into a corner of the chair. She loved and hated him in one second, even though she herself knew about love gone wrong. Isn’t that what had happened with Mason? Hadn’t he been involved with two women? Oh, Lord, she felt like she might throw up. She stared at her father and tried to understand. “So why tell me now?”

“I said I was gonna get married. Soon.”

Her laugh was brittle and forced. “Don’t tell me you expect me to come to the wedding?” When he didn’t answer she rolled her eyes and felt the hot moisture that had collected beneath her eyelids. “Oh, Dad . . . please don’t even ask. I . . . I can’t believe this is happening.”

He glanced away, ran his tongue around his teeth and seemed to weigh his next words carefully. “Listen, honey, there’s more.”

“More?” she whispered, feeling a sense of doom sneak through her insides. What “more” could there possibly be? She didn’t want to hazard a guess.

He sniffed, ran a hand under his nose and sighed. “It’s not just me and Brynnie.”

Bliss bit her lip.

He hesitated, searching for the right words. “There’s a girl—well, a woman now—”

“I—I don’t know if I want to hear this,” Bliss interrupted, rubbing her hands together to ease the intense cold that had permeated her bones.

“You have to, honey. Because, you see, you have a half-sister.”

“Wh-what?” The white tiles of the hospital floor seemed to buckle beneath her chair.

“Well, more than one, actually.”

“More than one?” This was too absurd to be true. And yet she knew as she looked at him that he wasn’t lying. “Wait a minute, Dad. Something’s wrong, here. Very wrong.” She tried not to glare at her father who was still recuperating, but, damn it, she could barely make sense of his words. “You’re trying to tell me that I have a sister—no, make that two?”

When he nodded she said, “But how?” Her mind was spinning in furious, complicated and very ugly circles. Everything she’d believed in, all that she’d trusted in her life, had been a lie—a dirty, dark and shameful lie. “Why?” she asked, trying to sound rational when her entire world was turned upside down. “This . . . this Brynnie is their mother?”

“She’s Katie’s mother,” John said slowly and scratched the side of his cheek. “My other daughter—”

“Does she have a name, too?” Bliss couldn’t hide the sarcasm in her words.

“Tiffany. She’s older than you by a few years. The result of an affair I had before I met your mom.”

“Oh, Dad,” Bliss whispered, the tears she’d been fighting beginning to slide from the corners of her eyes. How could she have been so wrong about this man she’d loved all her life? The man who’d taught her how to ride bareback and lasso a wayward calf and swim in a river where the current was strong and swift? “You—you didn’t marry her?”