LITMIR.BIZ

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he wondered. If the front door had opened and the boy he’d once been had come strolling across the marble floor, his defiant expression just daring anybody to try to throw him out.

      The thought was so preposterous it almost made him laugh.

      “Damned fine party, Kincaid,” the mayor had said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Not every man gets to celebrate his birthday in such style.”

      My birthday, Tyler thought. His mouth twisted. Who in hell knew if this was his birthday or not? The truth was, he might have come into this world yesterday, or maybe even the day before that. Babies that were dumped on hospital doorsteps didn’t come complete with birth certificates.

      The Brightons, who’d raised him, had told him all about it. They told him how he’d been found and given to them. They’d told him, too, that nobody was sure exactly what day he’d been born, but that the authorities figured he’d been somewhere between one and three days old, when he was found.

      When he was really little, he just hadn’t understood it.

      “Everybody has a real birthday,” he’d said, and the Brightons would say yes, that was true. And he had one. Those same anonymous authorities had decided on July 18.

      “But who was my mommy?” he’d ask. “And my daddy?”

      Myra and James Brighton would look at each other, then at him. “We’re your parents,” one of them would say.

      But they weren’t. Oh, they were kind to him. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say they didn’t mistreat him—but he knew they never loved him. He saw how it was, with other kids. How a father smoothed a hand over a son’s hair, how a mother pulled her boy close and kissed him.

      Tyler’s life wasn’t like that. Nobody touched him, or kissed him. Nobody hugged him when his grades were good or even got angry when they weren’t.

      And his name. Tyler’s mouth thinned with the pain of the memory. John Smith, for God’s sake. John Smith. How could a boy grow up with a name like that?

      He’d wanted to change it but the Brightons said he couldn’t.

      “It’s your name, John,” James Brighton said.

      So it was. And he lived with it. With all of it. By the time he was ten, he’d stopped asking questions that never were answered. What was the point? The Brightons never adopted him, never gave him their name—and then, in one fatal moment, his entire life changed. The three of them were on a Sunday outing when a truck hit their car.

      Tyler wasn’t so much as scratched. He stood by the side of the road, a policeman’s big hand on his shoulder, watching without a trace of expression on his face as his foster parents’ bodies were removed from the wreck and taken away.

      “The kid’s in shock,” he heard the cop tell the social worker who came for him and maybe he was. But the reality was that deep down, he couldn’t mourn people he’d never known.

      The state took him in. He was sent to live in a place with lots of other boys like him, kids nobody gave a damn about, kids with no future—

      But even they had real names.

      He took a lot of crap over his.

      “John Smith,” the kids said with sneers. “Who’re you kidding? Nobody’s named John Smith.”

      They were right, and Tyler knew it. On the day he turned sixteen—the day his bogus birth certificate said he turned sixteen—he took his first name from a chapter in his American history textbook and his second from a character in a TV movie.

      The kids laughed and sneered even harder.

      “Nobody names himself,” they said.

      “I do,” Tyler had replied, and when they went on laughing, he bloodied some noses, beat one kid to his knees. No one ever laughed again.

      From then on, Tyler Kincaid was who he was. It was Tyler Kincaid who danced on the edge of the juvenile justice system, not John Smith. Tyler Kincaid who finally got caught joyriding in a car he’d “borrowed” from a mall, Tyler Kincaid who lucked out—though he sure hadn’t thought so, at the time—and got sentenced to eight months at a place called Boys Ranch, where he learned something about horses and maybe even about himself.

      At eighteen, he left the Ranch and enlisted in the Marines.

      When he got out, he made the name legal, took a job at a working ranch, found he had a talent not just for horses but for understanding the relationship between capital investment and land. After that, he never thought about John Smith again—except once a year, maybe, when the day that was supposed to be the day of his birth rolled around. Tyler had learned to accept the date but he sure as hell didn’t have to celebrate it. What was there to celebrate on a birthday that might not be your own, a birthday that marked the time your mother, maybe your old man, too, had dumped you on a doorstep like a sack of garbage rather than acknowledge your existence?

      “Nothing,” Tyler muttered, and reached for the half-empty champagne bottle he’d gone downstairs and snagged. “Not one damned thing.”

      “Oh, dear.”

      He swung around. The bathroom door was open; Adrianna stood limned by light in the opening. He had to admit, she was magnificent. All that long golden hair, the black silk nightgown barely containing her breasts and clinging to her body, touching her the way his hands would…if he let himself touch her. She stood with one long, shapely leg thrust out through the thigh-high slit in the skirt of the gown, her high-arched foot encased in a black silk slipper with a heel so high it made his blood pressure soar.

      “Talking to yourself, darling?” she whispered.

      She came toward him, her walk slow, her hips swinging. The scent of Chanel drifted to his nostrils; he knew from experience that she’d touched it to all her pulse points, and to the soft skin of her thighs.

      Take her, his blood sang, bury yourself in her…but his brain reminded him, coldly, that taking her now would only delay the inevitable. Despite everything she’d done, she deserved better than that.

      “Adrianna.” He cleared his throat, walked to the nightstand where she’d left her flute of champagne, picked it up and offered it to her. “We have to talk.”

      “Talk?” She smiled, took a sip of the wine and eyed him over the delicate rim of the glass. “Seems to me we can do better than that, darling. Here I am, all ready for bed, and you’re still standing there in your suit.” She put down her glass. “I’ll help you, shall I?” Her hands went to his tie, to the first button on his shirt. “Let’s get you out of this and—”

      “No.” Tyler caught hold of her wrists, drew down her hands. “Dammit, listen to me.”

      “You’re hurting me, Tyler.”

      He looked at his hands, saw them crushing her delicate bones. “I’m sorry,” he said stiffly, and let go of her. “Adrianna. About tonight—”

      “The party.”

      “Yes. Right. The party.” Only minutes ago, he’d intended to end things between them by telling her she’d had no right to make the damned party, to invade his space, to presume things about their relationship that weren’t valid, but she was looking up at him, wide-eyed, her mouth just starting to tremble. Instead of anger, he felt a quick, almost overwhelming despair. “I know that you must have gone to a lot of trouble, arranging it…”

      “And you wish I hadn’t.”

      “Yes. I wish you hadn’t.”

      “I don’t understand.” Tears rose in her eyes, threatened to spill down her cheeks. “I only wanted to make you happy, darling.”

      “I know. But—” But what? Could a man really be angry at a woman for caring about him enough to want to give him a surprise party? “But,” he said gently, “I never celebrate my birthday, Adrianna.”

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