Page 19 of The Unknown Colton
“I’ll hurry it up so you can get right back to him,” the barista promised.
A few minutes later, Lakin was trying to juggle both mugs and open the door when someone opened it for her. “Thanks,” she said as she stepped out.
But instead of walking into Roasters, the man followed her to her truck parked at the curb just outside the café.
Her skin chilling with uneasiness, she looked up at him. He was tall with a rangy build, iron-gray hair and a lot of lines in his face. One of them was actually a scar, and it ran jagged down the left side of his face. Despite the wrinkles, he was probably just in his sixties, maybe even late fifties. While his hair was gray, his brows were black, like his eyes, and bushy.
Her uneasiness increased. She glanced into the café, hoping that the barista saw what was happening even though Lakin herself wasn’t sure what this was.
“I can take it from here,” she assured him. She set the coffee mugs on the roof of her SUV so that she could find her key fob in her purse. She wasn’t sure if she would need it to unlock her doors or to sound the alarm button on it. There was something menacing about the man. Or maybe that was just her paranoia.
“Lakin,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time, girl.”
She tensed with even more fear. How did he know her name? How did he know her at all? “I… I don’t know who you are,” she said. And some instinct told her she really didn’t want to know him.
He pressed his hand against his heart. “That hurts. But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s been a long time since I saw you, girl.”
She shook her head. “I don’t remember you.”
“You were just a little girl,” he said. “My little girl. I’m your father.”
Instinctively she shook her head. Her father was handsome with kindness and gentleness that radiated from him. She glanced around, wishing he was running around town like usual. But he’d probably already been out for his morning run and was back home again with her beautiful mother.
She shook her head again, denying his claim. “No…”
He narrowed those beady dark eyes of his and leaned closer. “I am your biological father,” he said. “You must know that you’re adopted. You must remember me and your mother. You weren’t a baby when you went missing.”
“I didn’t gomissing,” she said. “I wasabandoned.” And nobody had come looking for her. That was why the Coltons had been able to adopt her after they’d taken over fostering her. Nobody else had claimed her. “And I was only three years old.”
“So you don’t remember me at all?” he asked, suspicion in his dark eyes. “But I remember you, my sweet little girl.” He smiled at her, but it didn’t seem to quite reach his eyes.
Maybe he wasn’t happy because she’d made it clear she didn’t believe him. Should she? That was what Will and Sasha Colton had taught her; to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. To believe what they said until they were proven wrong. Because nobodyhad believed young Caroline Colton that she had a stalker…until it was too late.
Was this man a stalker? Was he the one who’d been watching Lakin?
He didn’t look like he could be her father any more than the Coltons could be biologically related to her. From her darker complexion and hair and features, she was clearly part Inuit. This man wasn’t. The only thing they had in common was the fact they both had dark eyes.
He reached into the pocket of his flannel shirt. “I got this,” he said. “I’ve carried it with me for years, looking for you. And then to find you here…” He pulled out a photograph and held it out to her.
Her fingers shook as she reached for it. The colors had faded with age, leaving the photo in sepia tones, but the woman in it looked like Lakin. Her dark hair was long and straight and parted in the middle, highlighting the same nose and mouth and cheekbones that Lakin had. That woman held a toddler who had dark hair and chubby cheeks, and she wore a little dress. The color was faded, but Lakin knew the dress was pink and came with ruffled underpants. The dress was tucked into a box somewhere in her cabin, the one thing she had left from that time before the Coltons adopted her.
But it wasn’t just the woman and the child in the photograph. A man stood next to them, almost towering over them, casting them even more in shadow. He was tall and lean, and even in that photograph, he hada scar on one cheek. In the picture his hair matched the dark color of his bushy black brows. He looked younger but no happier. But then maybe he just didn’t smile in photographs. Her brothers had gone through a phase where they had refused to smile, thinking they looked cooler with a scowl.
“That’s me, your mama and you,” he said, pointing a tobacco-stained fingertip at them. “Don’t you remember us, Lakin? Your parents? Your real family?”
She shook her head again, not just because she didn’t remember but because he was not her real family. The Coltons were. “No, I don’t remember you.”
“Well, that’s a damn shame,” he murmured. “Damn shame…”
She didn’t remember him, and she didn’t want to believe him although the family motto compelled her to. Her heart was beating fast and hard with fear. She didn’t know if she was scared of him or scared of what he might tell her.
She had the urge to escape. To get away from him as fast as she could.
“I… I have to go,” she said. “I’m going to be late for work.”
“You don’t want to talk to your daddy?” he asked with a slight smile as if he was more amused than offended. “You don’t want to get to know me better?”
“I don’t know you,” she said. And despite her family motto, she was struggling to believe him. But that picture… She couldn’t stop staring at it.
