His daughter.

Oh, my God. What had I done?

Heaven help me. I deserved to rot in hell. Or worse, I deserved whatever the future might bring. Why hadn’t I done the math all those years ago and realized the twins could be his? We’d always been so careful, and I was on the pill. It’d never occurred to me they were anything other than Mark’s kids. That sounded ignorant of me, and I understood why Easton thought I was full of shit.

I’d deluded myself into believing he wouldn’t want to be a father any more than he’d wanted to be with me once that summer had ended.

I’d seen it in his eyes. He wasn’t going to walk away. He wasn’t going to be an uninvolved father. No one could be that angry if they didn’t want a relationship with their children.

He wanted to know his kids.

I’d opened Pandora’s box.

I’d let this man back into my life and into my kids’ lives.

I was the worst kind of fool to think he meant nothing to me. He did, he always had, and he always would. One look at him, and I was ready to fall into bed with him. Even worse, fall for him.

How would the kids react when they found out they had another father? It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known until recently, they’d blame me, because they were angry at the world for taking Mark from them.

I deserved their anger. I deserved Easton’s anger.

How had I not figured this out sooner?

I was a horrible person, and soon everyone would know it.

Wiping my face on my sleeve, I called Fran.

“How did it go?” she asked before even saying hello.

“He hates me. He’s livid.” I’d thought I was done crying, but I wasn’t. The sobs came unbidden from somewhere so deep inside me they were physically painful.

“He’ll calm down. This has to come as a shock to him.”

“He was so angry, a concerned couple intervened. I got the hell out of there.”

“You ran away from him again?” I heard the chastising tone in Fran’s voice.

“Yes,” I sniffled. I was such a sniveling idiot.

“You have to stop doing that. Running isn’t getting you anywhere. It’s only prolonging the agony. Rip off the bandage and get on with it.”

“I think he’s going to want a relationship with the kids.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“It could be. How are they going to feel about this? About me?”

“They’ll be angry, but they already are angry. You’ll get beyond this and be stronger for it.”

I fished a tissue from my purse and blew my nose in a very unladylike way. I sounded like the Canadian geese that hung around by the lake back home every night.

“How long ago did you leave him?”

“Several minutes.”

“Go back there. Now.”

I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “Not yet. He needs time to cool off.”