The tears I’d been holding back came out in a waterfall. I might not have this man’s DNA inside my body, but he couldn’t be any more my father.

He swallowed up the room with long-legged strides and crushed me into that great, big, barrel-chested hug that always smelled like peppermint and aftershave, and it felt just like it always did—like the safest place on earth.

Unfortunately, I knew better. There was no safe place. Not for me. Not now. And certainly not for him. Not here.

He’d been walking around Dublin looking for me! I blessed the Fates that had spared him, steering him away from the Dark Zone, protecting him in those alleys from Unseelie. If anything had happened to him it would have been doubly on my head. What had I been thinking—avoiding my e-mail, refusing to call home? Of course he would come looking for me! Dad never took no for an answer.

I had to get him out of Dublin, fast, before something awful happened to him, and I lost another piece of my heart to that satin-lined box in the earth.

I had to make him fly home ASAP, and without what he’d come for—me.

“What happened to your face, Mac?” was the first question Dad asked me after Inspector Jayne left. Though there were still two hours to closing, I flipped the sign and stuck a Post-it next to it that said, Sorry, closed early, please come back tomorrow.

I led him to the rear conversation area where passersby couldn’t see behind the shelves that someone was still inside, fingering my hair nervously. It was one thing to lie to the police, another to lie to the man who’d raised me, who knew I hated spiders and loved hot fudge sundaes topped with peanut butter and whipped cream.

“Inspector Jayne tells me you fell on the stairs.”

“What else did the inspector tell you?” I fished. How much did I have to try to explain?

“That the police officer handling Alina’s case was murdered. Had his throat cut. And that he’d been to see you the day it happened. Mac, what’s going on? What are you doing here? What is this place?” He craned his head around. “Do you work here?”

I filled him in without filling him in at all. I’d realized I liked it in Dublin, I told him. I’d been offered a job that came with lodgings, so I’d moved into the bookstore. Staying in Ireland and working gave me the perfect chance to keep the pressure on the new officer handling Alina’s case. Yes, I fell on the stairs. I’d had a few beers and forgotten how much stronger their Guinness was than ours. No, I had no idea why Inspector Jayne didn’t seem to think very highly of me. I gave Dad the same excuse I’d given Jayne for O’Duffy’s visit. To make it more convincing, I embellished about how fatherly and kind O’Duffy had been and what a favor he’d been doing, stopping by. Crime was very high in Dublin, I told Dad, and I felt awful about O’Duffy’s death but really, police officers died on the job all the time and Jayne was just being a jack-petunia about it to me.

“And your hair?”

“You don’t like it?” It was hard to feign surprise when I hated it myself; I missed the weight of it, the different styles I’d been able to wear, the swish of it when I walked. I was just grateful he hadn’t seen me when I’d still had all my splints on.

He gave me a look. “You are kidding, right? Mac, baby, you had beautiful hair, long and blond like your mother’s…” He trailed off.

And there it was. I looked him dead in the eye. “Which mother, Dad? Mom? Or the other one—you know, the one that gave me up for adoption?”

“You want to go get some dinner, Mac?”

Men. Do they all evade as first line of defense?

We ordered delivery. I hadn’t had a good pizza in forever, it was starting to rain again, and I was in no mood to go out in it. I ordered, Dad paid, just like old times when life was simple, and Daddy was always there to be my Friday night date whenever my latest boyfriend had been a jerk. I gathered paper plates and napkins from Fiona’s stash behind the register. Before sitting down with our pizza, I turned on all the exterior lights, and lit a cozy gas fire. For now, we were safe. I just had to keep him safe until morning, when I would somehow get him on a plane and send him home.

I keep a happy thought inside me at all times. I cling to it in my darkest moments: When all this is over, I’m going to go back to Ashford and pretend none of this happened. I’m going to find myself a man, get married, and have babies. I need both my parents at home, waiting for me because I’m going to make little Lane girls, and we’re going to be a family again.

We kept the talk light through dinner. He told me that Mom was still lost in grief and not talking to anyone. He’d hated leaving her, but he’d taken her to Gram and Gramp’s and they were giving her the best of care. Thinking about Mom was too painful, so I turned the conversation to books. Dad loves to read as much as I do, and I knew that in his opinion there were far worse places he could have found me working, like another bar. We talked about new releases. I told him some of my plans for the store.

When dinner was over we pushed our plates back and regarded each other warily.

He began a somber “You know your mother and I love you” spiel, and I hushed him. I knew. I didn’t have any doubts on that score. I’d been forced to come to terms with so much in the past few weeks that making peace with my discovery that my parents were not my birth parents hadn’t taken as long as I’d expected. It had rocked my world, brutally shifted my paradigm, but regardless of whose sperm and egg had resulted in my conception, Jack and Rainey Lane had raised me with more love and unwavering support than most people ever know in a lifetime. If my biological parents were alive out there somewhere, they were my second set.

“I know, Dad. Just tell me.”

“How did you find out, Mac?”

I told him an old woman had insisted I was someone else, about brown eyes and blue not making green, about calling the hospital to check on my birth records.

“We knew this day might come.” He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. “What do you want to know, Mac?”

“Everything,” I said in a low voice. “Every last detail.”

“It’s not much.”

“Alina was my biological sister, wasn’t she?”

He nodded. “She was almost three, and you were nearly a year when the two of you came to us.”

“Where did we come from, Dad?”

“They didn’t tell us. In fact, they told us virtually nothing while demanding everything.”

“They” were people from a church in Atlanta. Mom and Dad couldn’t conceive, and had been on an adoption waiting list for so long they’d nearly given up. But one day they got a call that two children had been left at a downtown church, and a friend of a friend of the church’s pastor’s sister knew their counselor, who’d suggested the Lanes. Not all couples were willing to accept, or had the financial means to take on two young children at once, and among the biological mother’s lengthy list of requirements was that the children not be separated. She’d also insisted that if the adoptive couple did not already live in a rural area, they must move to a small town and agree to never live in or near a city again.

“Why?”

“We were told it was what it was, Mac, and we could take it or leave it.”

“And you didn’t think it was odd?”

“Of course we did. Extremely. But your mother and I wanted so badly to have children and couldn’t. We were young and in love and would have done just about anything to have a family of our own. Since both of us came from small towns to begin with, we took it as a sign to return to our roots. We visited dozens of towns, finally settling on Ashford. I was a successful attorney and pulled every string I could to push the adoption through. We signed all the documents, including the list of requirements, and in no time, we were proud parents living in a great little town where everyone believed you were our biological daughters, leading the life we’d always dreamed of.” He smiled, reminiscing. “We fell in love with you girls the moment we saw you. Alina was wearing this yellow skirt and sweater set, and you were dressed from head to toe in pink, Mac, with a little rainbow ribbon tied around a blond wisp of your hair.”