EVER SINCE DOMINIC had revealed her existence, Nathan had envisioned the day he would meet his daughter, had tried to imagine what he would say to her. And always—every time—their meeting had been at a time and place of his choosing.

He’d wanted it to be perfect, knowing full well that, having missed her first twelve years, it never would be.

Still, he’d made an effort.

He’d cleared the decks, finished his assignments, met his commitments. Whenever his agent, Gaby, rang him with new projects, new ideas, new shows, new demands, he turned them down. He wanted nothing on his schedule now but Lacey—and her mother.

He was prepared. Or so he’d thought.

He didn’t feel prepared now.

He felt stunned, faced with this girl who wore a pair of white shorts and a fluorescent lime-green T-shirt with the Statue of Liberty and the words New York Babe on it. She had a backpack on her back and sandals on her feet and looked like a hundred preteen girls.

But more than that, she looked like him.

Nathan tried to think of something profound to say or at least something sensible. Nothing came to mind. He had spent much of his adult life in precarious positions—hanging off cliffs, kayaking down white-water rapids, hanging out with polar bears, and tracking penguins in Tierra del Fuego—but none had seemed more precarious than this one.

Now he realized that Lacey was waiting—staring at him, shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, her hand still stuck out in midair.

Awkwardly Nathan shook it and dredged up a faint grin. “I guess I must be,” he said. Must be your father.

He felt short of breath. Dazed. Positively blown away. His voice sounded rusty even to his own ears. He stood there, holding her hand—his daughter’s hand!—learning the feel of it. Her fingers were warm and slender, delicate almost. But there were calluses on her palm. He felt them against his own rough fingers.

From fishing? he wondered. He didn’t have a clue. He knew nothing about her. Nothing at all.

She was still looking at him expectantly, and he realized the next move was up to him. “Won’t you…come in?”

He felt absurd, inviting his twelve-year-old daughter into his home as if she was a stranger. Fortunately, Lacey didn’t seem to see the absurdity of it. She just marched past him into the room, then looked around with interest.

Nathan wondered if she’d ever been in the house before.

He’d always loved it, had thought it was the best place on earth. He had been five when they’d first come to Pelican Cay, and when they’d flown in that first day, he’d thought their little seaplane was landing in paradise. It turned out he wasn’t far wrong. Pelican Cay in those days had sand and surf and sun and no telephones to take his father away on business for a week or more at a time.

He and his brothers had spent their happiest hours here. They used to say that it would be the best thing on earth to spend every day on Pelican Cay.

Lacey had. At least he supposed she had.

“Would you…like something to drink?” he asked her. “A soda?” She wouldn’t think he was offering her a beer, would she?

“Yes, please.” Was she always this polite? Was she always this self-possessed?

He started toward the kitchen, nodding for her to follow. “Is your…I mean, where is your…mother?” Somehow he was sure her visit had not been sanctioned by her mother.

“She teaches a painting class on Mondays,” Lacey said. She slipped off her backpack, set it on the counter in the middle of the kitchen. Then she perched on a stool as Nathan opened the refrigerator.

“Pineapple, sea grape or cola?”

“Pineapple, please. It’s my favorite.”

“Mine, too.” Nathan snagged the cans, straightened up and turned around. Their gazes met. And as he popped the tops and handed her the can, they both grinned, sharing the moment and the appreciation of pineapple soda. The knot of apprehension that had been coiled deep and tight inside Nathan ever since he’d discovered he had a daughter suddenly eased.

It reminded him of the feeling he got when he was just beginning fieldwork on a project. The days before he was actually there drove him crazy. Once he was involved, he experienced a welcome feeling of relief, a sense of rightness. Like this.

“I’m glad you came,” he said, and meant it.

“I’m glad you came,” Lacey countered. “I’ve been needing a father for quite a while.”

Nathan’s brows rose. “You have?”

“It’s difficult to be a one-parent child,” Lacey explained. “I don’t mean that my mother is a bad mother. She’s not. Not at all! She’s terrific. And mostly she manages very well. But there are, I think,” she said consideringly, “some things fathers are better at.”

“Are there?” Nathan was feeling stunned again.

“Mmm. Cutting bait.”

He stared at her blankly.

“Fishing.” She gave him a despairing look. “You do know how to fish?”

“Of course I know how to fish,” Nathan said, affronted. “I was, um, thinking of something else.” As in fish or… “Can’t your mother cut bait yet?”

He grinned, remembering Carin’s squeamishness when he’d taken her fishing so she would be able to share one of Dominic’s pleasures.

“She can. She doesn’t like to. She doesn’t like to fish.”

“And you do.” It wasn’t a question. He could see the sparkle in her eyes.

“But I always have to go with Lorenzo and his dad, and then Lorenzo always catches the biggest fish.”

“Because his dad cuts the bait?”

“No. Because he gets to go with his dad lots more than I do. And we always go where Thomas thinks the fish are biting, and they always are—for Lorenzo.”

“I see.” Well, sort of, he did. He gathered it had to do with the amount of time Thomas spent with his son—time that Nathan hadn’t spent with his daughter. But apparently she wasn’t just going to spell it out. Maybe it was the difference between boys and girls.

“Do you know any good fishing places?”

Nathan rubbed a hand against the back of his neck. “I could probably find some.” He hoped.

“Good.” Lacey took a swallow of her soda. “Lorenzo could come with us, couldn’t he?”

“Sure.”

“I have your books.”

Nathan blinked, surprised by the change of topic, but even more so by what she’d changed it to. “You do?”

Lacey nodded. “My mother got them for me.”

“Why?” He could be blunt, too, Nathan decided.

“When I was little I asked about you, and Mom told me you were a photographer. I asked if she had any pictures you took, and she said no. I asked if she could find some. So on my birthday when I was eight, she gave me one of your books. Now I have all of them. They’re great.”

Nathan didn’t know whether to be flattered or furious. Certainly he was flattered that Lacey approved of his work. But he was also furious that Carin had decided that having his books was all of him that Lacey would need.

“But I like Zeno the best,” Lacey said. “Did you live with him?”

Zeno was a wolf. He had been, for want of a better word, the hero of Nathan’s last book and in some cases, it seemed, his alter ego, as well. Zeno’s “lone wolf” status had been similar to Nathan’s own.

“I didn’t live with him,” he said. “But I spent a lot of time watching him, observing, studying, trying to get to know him.”

Lacey bobbed her head. “You did. You knew him. He was my favorite.”

“Mine, too.” The book itself was called Solo and dealt with several years in the life of one young lone wolf. The project had grown incidentally out of an earlier book Nathan had done on Northern wildlife. While there he’d come across a small wolf pack with several young pups. One of them, a young male, often wrestled and played with the others, but seemed more inclined to go off scouting around on his own. Intrigued, Nathan had shot a lot of photos of him.

A year later, when a magazine assignment had taken him back to the same area, he had, coincidentally, happened across the wolves again. The young loner had been an adolescent then, and Nathan had shot more rolls of film of the wolf by himself and interacting with the pack.

After that encounter he’d looked for more assignments in the area, always trying to track down the wolf, who by this time he’d begun to think of as Zeno.

Two years ago he’d simply indulged his desire to learn more by taking the better part of a year to live in the woods up there and study Zeno’s comings and goings.

Solo had been published this past spring, the story in text and pictures of one young lone wolf. It had garnered considerable critical praise.

It had also fueled a ridiculous amount of comparison between Nathan Wolfe’s own life as a “lone wolf” photographer. He and Zeno were somehow connected in the public’s perception.

More than one magazine article had asked, Who would be the woman to settle him down? And it wasn’t Zeno they’d been talking about.

By that time, though, Nathan had learned of Lacey’s existence, and the question of which woman would “settle him down” had already, to his mind, been decided.

It was just a matter of coming to terms with her—and tying up all the loose ends first.

“Are you going to go back and see Zeno again?” Lacey asked him.

“I don’t know.”

He had planned to. He’d intended to go there again this summer after he’d finished his other jobs. Gaby had been pushing him to do so. But he’d made those plans last summer, before he’d learned about Lacey. For the moment at least, Zeno was going to have to wait.

“I wish you would,” Lacey said. “We gotta know what happens to him.”

“Maybe,” Nathan said. “But I’ve got work to do now here.”

“You’re going to shoot here?”

He shook his head. “I’m writing here. I’ve done the shooting. Now I have to organize the photos for a book.”

“What’s it about?”

“Sea turtles.”

“Oh.” Lacey’s expression said she didn’t think that would be nearly as intriguing as another book on wolves.

“I got to dive with some,” Nathan told her.

“Do you know how to scuba dive? I want to learn to scuba dive. Mom says maybe when I’m older, but it’s expensive. Hugh said he’d teach me, but she thinks it would be presuming.” Lacey wrinkled her nose. “I don’t think Hugh would mind. But as long as you’re here…”

“Who’s Hugh?”

Lacey giggled. “Hugh the hunk. That’s what Mom and Florence call him.” Lacey giggled.

“Who’s Florence?” Hugh’s wife, Nathan hoped.

“Lorenzo’s mother.”

Not Hugh’s wife, then. “So what does this Hugh do, when he isn’t scuba diving?” What sort of “hunk” was Carin running around with?

“He runs the charter service. He’s got a seaplane and a helicopter and three boats. Last summer when Lorenzo had to have his appendix out, Hugh flew him to the hospital in Nassau. When he came home, Hugh took me along to pick him up. It was way cool. Can you fly a helicopter?”

“No.”

“Oh.” A pause. “That’s too bad.” Because maybe she was angling to learn how to fly a helicopter, too? “I used to think maybe he’d be my dad,” Lacey said.

Nathan scowled. “Why?”

“Because he likes Mom. An’ Mom likes him.”

And he was a hunk.

“And now she doesn’t?” Nathan hadn’t even thought that Carin might have a boyfriend. Dominic had only known that she didn’t have a husband.

“’Course she likes him. I told you, he’s nice.”

“But he’s not going to be your dad?”

Lacey gave a long-suffering sigh. “You’re my dad,” she explained.

“Oh. Right. Of course.”

Which was true but wasn’t the answer to his question: Does your mother plan on marrying Hugh the hunk? He couldn’t bring himself to ask that.

“Do you have your book about Zeno here?” Lacey finished her soda, hopped off the stool, carried the can to the sink and rinsed it out. “If you do I can tell you my favorite picture. And you can tell me about when you took it.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it upstairs.” He moved to get it. Like a shadow, Lacey came right after him.

“I like this house,” she said, looking around his bedroom with interest. “It’s big. Lots bigger than our house.”

“Yeah, well, there were three of us boys and my folks.” He opened the duffel on the floor and began pulling clothes out. There was a copy of each of his books at the bottom. He’d brought them for Lacey, never thinking Carin would already have given them to her.

“I’ve always wanted brothers and sisters.” Lacey perched on the edge of the bed and looked hopefully up at him.

“Yeah, well, um…brothers are kind of a pain in the neck.”

She gave a little bounce. “Uncle Dominic is really nice. He came to the shop to see my mom. And then he and Aunt Sierra were here before Christmas. And he and Grandpa came down a couple of months ago.”

Grandpa?

“Which Grandpa?” Nathan asked warily.

“The only one I’ve ever met,” Lacey said. “Grandpa Doug.”

His father had been here? And hadn’t even bothered to mention it?

“Grandpa brought me a camera. Want to see it?”

“A camera? Why’d he bring you a camera?” Nathan demanded.

“Because he thought it would be good for me to understand your business,” Lacey told him.

Yeah, Nathan thought grimly, that sounded like the old man. Grandkids and business were the two most significant things in Douglas Wolfe’s life. Nathan was almost surprised he hadn’t given Lacey a share of the company, and he said so.

“He wanted to,” Lacey said. “My mom said no.”

Nathan blinked. That didn’t sound like the Carin he remembered. The Carin he remembered wouldn’t have said boo to a goose. But then he recalled that she’d taken her life into her own hands the day she’d jilted his brother. So she’d obviously made some changes.

And so had his father if Douglas was taking no for an answer.

“She said if he wanted to visit, he could visit, but he couldn’t buy his way into our lives.”

Nathan choked back a laugh, imagining his father’s reaction to that. Oddly, he felt both proud of Carin for her stance and indignant on his father’s behalf. Because he didn’t know what to say, he dug through the books in his duffel until he found Solo.

“Great.” Lacey took it from him and flipped through it confidently, clearly looking for a particular picture. “This one.” She laid the book open flat on the bed so they could both look at it.

It was a photo he remembered well. He had taken it across a clearing with a telephoto lens. In the clearing itself, there were three half-grown wolf cubs wrestling with each other. It had been fun-and-games time for them. And that was all most people ever saw, and they cooed and oohed over the frolicking pups.

But now Lacey’s finger unerringly found Zeno watching his littermates from behind the brush on the far side of the clearing. He stood silent. Alone. Apart.

“Did you realize,” she asked Nathan, “when you took the photo, that he was there?”

“Not at first,” he admitted. “I was caught, like anyone would be, at the sight of the other pups. But as I took shot after shot, I really started to look, to focus. And then I saw him there.”

“All by himself.” Lacey’s finger brushed over the Zeno on the page. “Do you think he was lonely? Do you think he wanted to play, too?”

“Maybe sometimes he did. Sometimes, though, I think he was happier on his own.”

“Me, too,” Lacey said. “I mean, I’m like that, too.” She slanted a glance up at him from beneath a fall of long dark hair. “Are you?”

Nathan considered that, then nodded. “Yeah, I am.”

Lacey nodded. She ran her tongue over her lips. “Then…do you think you’ll mind being part of us?”

The question caught him off guard.

But before he could even hazard an answer, she went on. “Because I was thinking you might wish you didn’t know…about me.”

“No,” Nathan said flatly. He sat down on the bed beside her and looked straight into his daughter’s big blue eyes. “Don’t ever think that,” he said firmly. “Not for a minute. I’m glad I know about you.”

Their gazes locked. Seconds ticked by. It was like being weighed and measured, judged for his intentions. And Nathan knew, however long it took, he had to hold her gaze.

Finally a smile spread slowly across Lacey’s face. “I’m glad you know about me, too,” she said, then sighed. “I didn’t think you wanted to.”

“Why not?”

“Because you didn’t come. After Uncle Dominic and Aunt Sierra were here the first time, I mean.”

Nathan looked away, wondering how to explain what he wasn’t sure he understood himself. When Dominic had first told him about finding Carin again, he’d been astonished at his reaction. He’d so determinedly “forgotten” her that he was completely unprepared for the sudden clench of his stomach and the flip-flop of his heart at the sound of her name.

And he’d felt awkward as hell about those feelings in front of his brother. Dominic’s old pain was fresh enough in Nathan’s memory to make all his guilt flood back. And even though Dominic was happy now and glad to understand at last why Carin had jilted him, Nathan hadn’t been able to come to terms with the new circumstances that quickly.

He’d resisted all thought of renewing his relationship with Carin.

And then Dominic had mentioned Lacey.

He’d been deliberately vague, mentioning her name casually, hinting at a possibility that had frankly taken Nathan’s breath away.

He had a daughter? He’d been poleaxed by the idea. It had reordered his reality and had paralyzed him at the same time. He’d prowled the beach near their Long Island home for hours afterward, had driven miles. Had tried to think. But his mind had been a blur.

There was no way he could explain to Lacey the roller coaster of emotions he’d ridden that night and for weeks after he’d learned of her existence. A part of him had wanted to grab the next plane to the Bahamas. A saner, more rational part had refused to let him.

He needed to get his house in order, to weigh the implications, to decide what would be best for his daughter. And while he did that, he went on with his life.

He fulfilled the assignments he’d already committed to, wrote the articles he’d agreed to, took the pictures that would go in his next book. And all the while—no matter where he was—his mind was grappling with the knowledge of his daughter.

“I had commitments,” he said finally. “Things that I’d agreed to do before I knew about you. Photo assignments. Articles. People were counting on me.” And your mother definitely was not. “So I did my job. When I came I wanted to be ready to stay. I didn’t want to have to leave again as soon as I got here.”

Lacey nodded happily. “That’s what Grandpa said.”

The old man had certainly been sticking his oar in, Nathan thought. But in this instance he was glad. “He was right.”

“I’m glad you’re staying.” She gave a little bounce on the bed. “For how long?”

As long as it takes, Nathan thought. He wasn’t sure what the answer was. But he wasn’t leaving until he and Carin and Lacey were a family.

“I’ve got a book to write. Pictures to choose. I’ll be doing that here. You can help.”

Lacey’s eyes lit up. “I can? Really?”

“Well, you can’t make all the decisions, but you can have some input. You said you were taking pictures, right?”

“Right. I brought some. An’ I brought my camera. They’re in my backpack. Want to see them?” She looked eager, and then just a little nervous, as if she might have overstepped her bounds.

But Nathan was delighted. “Of course. Show me.”

They went back downstairs and Lacey opened her backpack. Her camera was a good basic single-lens reflex, not a point-and-shoot. Every setting had to be done manually.

“Grandpa said you’d want me to start the way you did,” Lacey told him. “Learning how to do everything.”

Good ol’ Grandpa. It was true, of course. It was exactly what Nathan would have wanted. He handed the camera back to her.

“He said it was exactly the same in business,” his daughter informed him. “A person needs to know how to do things herself before she starts taking shortcuts.”

“Yeah,” Nathan said. “Let’s see your pictures.”

Lacey hesitated. “I don’t focus real good.”

“You’ll learn.”

“And sometimes I wobble a little.”

“So do we all.”

“And some of ’em are too light and others are too dark.”

“It happens. Not every shot is a prizewinner, Lace. I throw out way more than I print.”

“Really?” She looked at him, wide-eyed, as if that had never occurred to her. And at his solemn nod, she breathed a sigh of relief and began pulling out envelopes of photographic prints.

Nathan spread them on the island, and they pulled up stools and sat side by side, looking at them. She was right—many of them were out of focus, many were too dark or too light. On some the camera had clearly wobbled. But she had a nice sense of composition. She had an eye for telling detail.

There were pictures of the harbor and the village, of Maurice blowing a conch shell to call the women to buy fresh fish, of Thomas, Maurice’s son and the father of Lacey’s friend Lorenzo, cleaning fish on the dock. There were lots of pictures of a boy Lacey’s age, mugging for the camera, walking a fence like a tightrope, sitting astride one of the old English cannons near the cliff. Lorenzo, no doubt.

There was a particularly well-composed picture of a row of colorful shirts flapping on a clothesline in the wind and, behind them, a row of pastel houses climbing the hill, their colors pale echoes of the flapping shirts.

Nathan edged that one away from the others. “This is really strong.”

Lacey’s eyes lit up. “You think?”

“Oh, yeah.”

More confident now, she pulled out more envelopes from her backpack and opened them up. Suddenly Nathan found himself staring at Carin.

Close-ups of Carin looking stern, looking pensive. Laughing. Rolling her eyes. Sticking her tongue out at the camera. Long shots of Carin walking on the beach or sitting on the sand or working in her shop.

And a particularly wonderful one of Carin on the dock, her feet dangling in the water, as she turned her head and looked up at her daughter and smiled.

It was a smile Nathan remembered, a smile that, deep in his heart, he had carried with him for the past thirteen years. It was the smile she’d given him so often that week they’d spent together, an intimate, gentle smile that touched not just her mouth but her eyes, as well.

For years, in his wallet, he’d carried a picture of that smile. The photo, one he had taken during their week together on the beach, had become worn from handling and faded from exposure to all kinds of weather. Two years ago he’d had his wallet stolen in a street bazaar in Thailand. The inconvenience of having to get his driver’s license re-issued and his credit cards changed was annoying. But the loss of that photo more than anything had left him feeling oddly hollow and alone.

Now, unbidden, his fingers went out and touched the one Lacey had taken.

“It’s the best one, isn’t it?” she asked.

“It’s…very good. The way the light…” His voice trailed off because his reactions had nothing to do with the way the light did anything.

It was all Carin. He picked it up and stared at it. She could have smiled at him like that today. She could have thrown her arms around him, welcomed him…

“You can have it if you want,” Lacey offered.

“No, that’s okay.” Hastily he set it back down, steeling himself against an ache he refused to acknowledge. He felt trapped suddenly, cornered by emotions he didn’t want to face.

He shifted from one bare foot to the other, then drummed his knuckles nervously on the countertop. “Well, those are good,” he said briskly, gathering the Carin photos into a pile and tucking them firmly back into the envelope. “Let’s see what else you’ve got.”

But before Lacey could pull out any more envelopes, there was a knock on the front door.

“That’ll be Maurice. I can talk to him later.”

But he was wrong again.

It was Carin, pacing on his porch. When he opened the door she whirled to demand, “Where’s Lacey?” Her voice was high and shrill, like nothing he’d ever heard from her before.

“She’s, uh…I—”

“Where is she?” She pushed past him. “Lacey!” She strode into the living room, looking around wildly. “Lacey Campbell! Where are you?”

“She’s in the kitchen. Cripes, Carin, relax. She’s—”

“I’m here, Mom.” Lacey appeared in the doorway, clutching her backpack, looking worried.

“See,” Nathan said. “She’s fine.”

But Carin didn’t even look at him. She was glaring at their daughter. “I told you he was coming by tomorrow, didn’t I?”

“Yes. But I wanted to see him tonight.”

“And the world runs according to what you want?”

“I left you a note.”

“Not good enough.”

“I’m almost thirteen years old!”

“Then start acting like it.”

“He was glad I came. Weren’t you?” Lacey turned to him.

Shoved straight into the middle, Nathan swallowed. “Of course. But—”

“See!” Lacey said triumphantly to her mother.

Carin shot him a fulminating glare. “It doesn’t matter whether he was glad or not. I’m your mother and I didn’t give you permission.”

“Well, he’s my father and he—”

“Doesn’t want you to start a fight with your mother,” Nathan said firmly, getting a grip at last. If there was one thing he did know about parenting it was that the two of them needed to present a united front. “I was glad to see you,” he said to Lacey. “Very glad. But glad as I was, if your mother said tomorrow, she meant tomorrow. You shouldn’t have come without asking.”

“But—”

Nathan steeled himself against the accusation of betrayal in her look. “It might be tough being a one-parent child,” he told her firmly, “but you’ll find out it’s not always a picnic having two, either. Especially when they stick together.”

Lacey scowled. She looked from him to Carin and back again. Her shoulders slumped.

Nathan hardened his heart against it. “Go on with your mother now,” he said, feeling every inch the father Carin had never given him a chance to become. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“But—” She turned beseeching eyes on him.

“Tomorrow, Lace. Unless you don’t want me to show you that fishing spot.”

Lacey’s eyes narrowed, as if she weren’t sure she believed him. She waited hopefully for him to cave in. When he didn’t, she shook her head sadly. “You’re as bad as Mom,” she muttered. Then, shouldering her backpack, she loped past him out the door.

Watching her go, Nathan felt guilty and parental at the same time. He supposed it was a fairly common feeling. Once Lacey had gone, he looked at Carin.

Her arms were crossed like a shield over her breasts. “Thank you,” she muttered, her tone grudging.

“Don’t fall all over yourself with gratitude.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t.”

Her intransigence annoyed him. “Oh, come on, Carin. No harm done. She’s fine. And you can hardly blame her for wanting to meet me.”

Carin’s eyes flashed. “I blame her for not following the rules!”

“I remember when we didn’t always follow the rules, Carin.”

Their gazes met. Locked. Dueled. Minds—and hearts—remembered.

“Carin—” He tried once more, said her name softly this time.

But she tore her gaze away. “Good night, Nathan.”

And she hurried down the steps and almost ran up the drive after their daughter.