Page 33 of Baby It's Cold Outside

The lines around his eyes crinkled as he sent her a boyish grin. “I told you the elf outfit was hot.”

She smiled, but then something else occurred to her and the smile died. “Why do you dislike your father so much?”

He let out a heavy sigh. “It’s a long story.”

“Was he a terrible father?” she asked, realizing that it was more than probable that a man with Lachlan Sinclair’s insatiable work ethic would also have been an absentee parent. Funny to think that until this moment, it had never even occurred to her that to be a good person you needed to do a lot more in your life than simply succeed.

“He wasn’t too bad. He wasn’t around much when I was growing up, and when he was he had very strict rules about what he wanted in his son and heir,” he said with little emotion. “But in the end, it wasn’t what he did to me, it was what he tried to do to Gully.”

“Gully?” she said, confused.

“Yeah, Gully,” he said, emotion vibrating through his voice now. “Whom he’s never met and wishes to this day didn’t exist.”

“But how could he wish that?” she asked, astonished. “About his own granddaughter?”

His eyes met hers, the ice-blue gaze hard with contempt. “It’s real simple and real ugly.”

Holding the sheet, he leaned down and lifted his trousers. Pulling out his wallet, he flicked it open and held out a photograph.

“I took that shot a couple of months back on her birthday. See if you can figure it out.”

She took the photograph and stared down at a stunningly beautiful child, her sunny personality captured perfectly in the impish grin as she cuddled her puppy. The little girl had a delicate heart-shaped face, pale-blue eyes that were the same shape if not quite the same shade as Ryder’s, her father’s wide smiling mouth, masses of curling brown hair, and caramel-colored skin.

“You have a beautiful daughter. She has your eyes and mouth,” she said, handing him back the photograph and feeling sick to her stomach. “And your father is a bigot,” she finished, realizing that the man she had idolized from afar was a far-from-stellar human being.

“Among other things.” Ryder gave the photo a gentle swipe with his thumb, then tucked it back into his wallet and dropped the wallet on the floor. “He wasn’t too pleased when he heard that Christine’s dad was a tollbooth operator from Queens, either.”

He raked his hand through his hair, the movement stiff and self-conscious. “But yeah, his main beef was that Christine was African-American. He tried to pressure me into paying her off and disowning my own daughter.” He stretched his neck from side to side, as if trying to release the tension caused by the unpleasant memory. “In the end it was a whole lot easier to disown him.”

She could hear the tinge of sadness and inevitability and doubted it had been all that easy, which made her despise Lachlan Sinclair all the more.

“But you know what?” Ryder continued. “Once I’d made the choice and told him where he could shove his inheritance, I realized I didn’t need him or his damn money. I quit the MBA course he’d insisted I do and got work as a photographer’s assistant. Christine’s dad helped me get a night job on the booth, and I worked my damn butt off for the first time in my life.”

“But I don’t understand. Why are you listed as a company director then?”

He hitched a shoulder. “He had a heart attack three years back, said he’d reevaluated. I believed him at the time. He’s got nothing in his life except this place.” He glanced around the cavernous showroom, and Kate shuddered.

Maybe she wasn’t a bigot like Ryder’s father, but what did she really have in her life except her job?

“So I go through the motions,” he said, resigned. “I have a polite conversation with him maybe once or twice a year. But when he insisted on putting me on the payroll against my wishes, I knew he hadn’t really changed. So I stick the money in Gully’s college fund—because the irony kind of appeals to me—but I’d never let him meet her. Gully’s an intuitive kid, and I don’t want her exposed to that kind of prejudice any sooner than she has to be.”

“Did you ever try and make it work with Christine?” she asked, perhaps more interested in the answer than she ought to be.

“We tried for a couple of months after Gully was born.” He sounded pragmatic. Why that should make her heart lif

t, she had no idea. “But we didn’t fit. Christine’s scary smart, IQ off the charts, three PhDs, and she works as a research fellow at Cornell now.”

“And that was a problem?”

He sent her a bashful grin. “I guess it makes me sound shallow, but it’s a real turnoff feeling like a dumbass all the time.”

She laughed.

“Laugh all you want, the male ego is a delicate thing,” he said, grinning back, the tension broken. “But hey.” He sobered. “The important thing was we fit as Gully’s parents. And Christine met a guy named Bill, another professor, a couple of years after Gully was born. They’ve been married six years now. They seem happy. And he’s great with Gully,” he added, but there was a definite edge to his voice now. “So that’s good.”

“It must be wonderful for Gully having two dads who care about her,” she said, thinking how much she would have adored having just one dad.

“Well…” He rubbed a spot between his eyes. “It is and it isn’t. Me and Bill, we don’t get on much.”

---