A Texas Kind of Cowboy by Delores Fossen
CHAPTER TWO
DAXFORCEDHIMSELFto breathe, and he wished he hadn’t wolfed down those Pop-Tarts. His stomach was already churning, and looking at this picture sure as hell wasn’t helping.
He’d never seen a picture of his backside, but he was almost positive that he was looking at his own butt. The tat was the same, anyway, and it was his usual habit to sleep facedown, which would have given the photographer a decent shot at capturing his back and ass.
Since the photographer was perhaps this Dana Smith who’d died during childbirth, Lorelei had obviously played “connect the dots.” Dots that had led her straight to him. She was staring at him now, clearly waiting for him to say something, and he didn’t think it was his imagination that she looked ready to do some puking from a churning stomach as well.
“Okay,” he finally managed to say. “Let’s work this out.” And he needed to work it out in a way that confirmed that even though that was his ass, it had nothing to do with Dana Smith and the child she’d had. “Was there anything in Dana’s things to make you believe she knew me?”
And, of course, that was “knew” in the biblical sense of the word.
“Just the photo,” Lorelei answered. There weren’t tears in her big blue eyes. Not yet, but along with the possible puking, Dax thought she might be on the verge of doing some crying.
“Okay,” he repeated while he tried to gather his thoughts.
He kept his voice as steady as he could manage because if Lorelei lost it, he would have to calm her down before they could get to the bottom of this. Thank merciful heaven that Lorelei didn’t have a reputation as someone who often lost it. Nope, her rep was more that of a rock-steady, responsible, dignified and polished person.
In other words, his polar opposite.
The only time Dax felt rock-steady was when he was on the back of a pissed-off bull that wanted to toss him up in the air and then stomp the crap out of him.
“Okay,” he said for a third time. “Let’s start with some basics. How old is the baby?”
“She’s nearly eleven months,” Lorelei instantly provided in a way that made him think she could have provided the days, hours and maybe even the minutes of the child’s age.
She started to pull up something on her phone that she was still holding in a death grip. Maybe Lorelei had been about to show him a photo of the child, but she seemed to change her mind about that. Perhaps because she didn’t want to spring it on him yet that the child was his spitting image. Both of them would need more than a moment or two to level out before handling that.
Dax did some quick mental math. “Eleven plus nine would be twenty months ago.” He dragged out his own phone from his pocket and tapped onto the calendar that he was diligent about keeping up-to-date so he wouldn’t miss a rodeo event or important meeting. He scrolled back those twenty months and felt relief wash over him. “I was laid up most of that month with an injury I got in a ride up in Fort Worth.”
He expected that to perk Lorelei right up. It didn’t.
“Stellie was born a little early,” she muttered, some of the color blanching from her face. “The doctor thinks she was born at thirty-six or thirty-seven weeks.”
That was certainly not the news he wanted to hear, but Dax held on to hope and counted forward another four weeks on his calendar.
And the hope vanished, whipped away like thin smoke in a really gusty wind.
“By then I’d recovered from my injury.” A bad one that had required a boatload of pain meds and even some physical therapy. No way had he had sex during his recovery. He’d barely been able to walk. “Let me see the picture of Dana again,” he tacked on to that.
Some of Lorelei’s trademark rock-steadiness disappeared as quickly as his hope had, and with her hand trembling a little, she showed him the photo on her phone again. Dax tried to focus on just her face, but the angle was off so that he could only see one cheek, a portion of her forehead and the profile of her nose.
Still... Crap... Still, it could be her. That is, it could be Dana if she’d changed her hair.
“You recognize her,” Lorelei blurted out on a sharp rise of breath. “You recognize her.” Groaning, she went to one of the stools by the counter and dropped down onto it as if her legs had given way.
Dax was right there with her on that particular response. He was feeling wobbly in a lot of places right now.
“I might recognize her,” Dax emphasized, and he intended to hang on to that might as long as he could. He wasn’t a big fan of denial, but there was that wobbliness and puking potential so he needed to keep as steady as possible. “But if it’s really her, she was a blonde, and her hair was long, well past her shoulders.”
It wasn’t hard for him to mentally pull up that image of her when he’d first seen her eyeing him. A stunner with sad eyes. The looks had made him want to chat her up. The eyes had made him want to offer her a shoulder.
“You probably don’t remember her name,” Lorelei muttered.
Because there was a firestorm of emotions going through him right now, Dax flicked off the insult. And it was, indeed, an insult. Despite what people thought of him, and he knew they didn’t think very much, he made a habit of learning a woman’s name before he took her to bed.
“Valerie Foster,” Dax provided, still looking at the picture.
Hell. Had he gotten Valerie pregnant? He’d used a condom, always did, always, because he didn’t want to be a father.
But had that happened?
Dax just didn’t know so he tried to work through the details of her that he remembered. Not just her stunning looks and sad eyes, but what she’d said. “I met her after a ride at a big rodeo event in Fort Worth. It was the first night of the event, and I was due to be there for three days. She’d been crying but was trying to hide the fact she’d been crying if you know what I mean. We talked for a while, and then we went for a drink and something to eat.”
Lorelei made a sound of agreement and then swallowed hard. “You had sex with her?”
This time, Dax didn’t just flick away the insult. “Not then and there,” he grumbled, giving her a flat look. “When I see a sad, crying woman, my go-to response isn’t to drag her to the ground and have sex with her.”
She didn’t apologize, didn’t seem to react to his annoyance. “But sex eventually happened.” Her voice was a shaky whisper.
Dax nodded, causing Lorelei to groan. All right, so the basics matched up with the possibility of Valerie getting pregnant that one time they were together, but it still didn’t make sense.
“Valerie had my number,” he said, going back over that night they were together. “I told her to call me. And I tried to call her,” Dax added before Lorelei could hit him with another zinger that implied his casual attitude toward his sexual partners. “But she didn’t answer. I left her a message, two of them in fact, and when she didn’t return my call, I figured it’d been a one-off for her.”
Strange, because he hadn’t picked up on that when he’d met her, and he usually had a good radar for buckle bunnies or those on the hunt for a one-nighter with someone they considered a celebrity. Not that he was totally opposed to that because he’d had his own share of one-nighters. Too many. And that’s why people would never think of him as rock-steady or responsible when it came to relationships.
Or anything else for that matter.
But by the time he’d met Valerie, Dax had been trying to, well, be more responsible. Because he’d learned that even one-offs came with a high price tag, and they didn’t lead to anything other than one and off. He wasn’t opposed to having a good time, but he supposed he’d been looking for the “more” that so many of his friends and even his brothers had found.
Morecame with a high price tag, too, but he was betting it wouldn’t leave him with this hollow feeling he’d carried around for as long as he could remember.
“So, it could be you in the photo,” Lorelei said, yanking his attention back to her. “Do you recall her taking it?”
This was an easy answer. “No. No recollection of it whatsoever, but I have been accused of sleeping like the dead.” He winced because, hey, they were talking about a woman who’d died.
Cursing himself, he took a harder look at the photo of his backside. Since it had a grainy texture, it appeared to have been printed not on a professional printer but a “home office type” machine. So, it was possible Valerie had taken the shot with her phone and then printed it out later.
But why?
As a memento of their one night together? If that was it, why hadn’t she just taken a picture of his face or done a selfie with them together? Unfortunately, she wasn’t around to explain any of that. Nor was she around to explain why she’d changed her name. Or why she’d perhaps given him a fake one. People didn’t usually do that unless they had something to hide.
“Why had Valerie been crying when you met her?” Lorelei asked. She was obviously trying to work out some explanations as well.
Dax dug through even more memories of that night. “She wouldn’t say, but I think she might have been going through a divorce or broken engagement because there was an indentation on the finger of her left hand where she used to wear a ring. I did ask her if she was married, and she said no.”
And none of this was helping either of them. Lorelei looked even closer to not being able to stave off those tears, and Dax’s stomach was trying to wring itself into a tight knot.
“Let me see a picture of the baby,” he insisted. “Of Stellie,” he added, remembering that’s what Lorelei had called the child.
Lorelei certainly didn’t jump to do that, and he totally understood her hesitation. He was dealing with the possibility that he’d gotten a woman pregnant. A woman who’d died giving birth. But Lorelei was dealing with the fear that there was a birth parent out there. Or rather a birth parent right here in Last Ride. That had to give a hard slap to any insecurities she had as to her legal claim to the baby.
When she finally started scrolling through the photos on her phone, he could see there was a slew of them, maybe multiple ones for every day of the child’s life. Lorelei finally settled on one, and she lifted the screen again to show him a picture of a smiling round-faced baby with dark brown curls. She looked like one of those cute babies in ads and commercials.
He stared at all that cuteness but didn’t feel any kind of jolt that he was looking at his DNA offspring. Was that the way it worked? An instant love and connection triggered by primal instincts so you’d protect the child and therefore continue the human race?
Maybe.
But maybe that only happened when you knew for sure this was your kid, and he didn’t see any “jump right out at you” resemblance to Valerie or him. Stellie just looked like a cute, happy baby.
So, another strikeout in that he couldn’t confirm he was her father, but there was still nothing definitive, either.
“I could do some searches for Valerie’s name,” he said, going through the contacts on his phone. “Because if she gave me her real name, there’ll likely be something on the web about her.” Dax paused, though, and reconsidered. “But I’ll have Sheriff Corbin do that.”
Matt Corbin was a longtime friend and would get right on this. Especially since he recalled Matt working hard to find the woman’s next of kin after she’d passed.
Before he could press Matt’s number, though, Lorelei caught onto his hand. She opened her mouth, clearly about to protest, but after a few moments, she closed her mouth and eased her grip off him.
“I might not be the baby’s father,” he reminded her. “But if Dana truly was Valerie, then she might have relatives looking for her.”
“I know,” Lorelei whispered, and here the tears came.
Oh, man. Talk about the absolute worst thing he could have said to her. He might as well have found a thousand paper cuts on her and poured lemon juice on them. Cursing under his breath, Dax reached for her, but Lorelei dodged his attempt and moved away from him fast. She didn’t go far, just into the living room.
“Call Sheriff Corbin,” she finally said with her back to him.
Well, he could add honest and even brave to Lorelei’s list of attributes. If any other woman had been in her proverbial shoes, she might have begged him to keep this all to himself. Then again, she had come to his house to show him a photo of his naked butt so it was obvious she wanted to know the truth. Then again, maybe she’d just hoped that it wasn’t his butt, his one-off with Valerie/Dana, his baby.
Dax was especially hoping for the latter, that Stellie wasn’t his. Because he was so far from being daddy material that it wasn’t even a blip on a distant radar. There had to be somebody else better out there who could fill that daddy role for her. If it needed filling, that is. After all, there could be a good reason, perhaps a troubling one, why Valerie hadn’t spelled out to someone in Last Ride whose baby she was carrying.
It was especially troubling if he’d been that man.
Dax pressed the sheriff’s contact number, and Matt answered on the second ring. “No, I didn’t arrest Tiffany Carver for crashing the party and stripping,” Matt said right off.
“Well, good.” Dax hadn’t wanted the woman arrested. He’d only wanted her to leave, and when she wouldn’t, Matt had stepped in to convince her. Dax had gladly let him handle it.
“I’m calling about something else,” Dax went on. Oh, but how to say this. He went with a very abbreviated version. “It’s come to my attention that Dana Smith might have been a woman named Valerie Foster.” Of course, it was possible that was an alias, too. Just as possible that Valerie and Dana were two different people. “I was thinking you could run a background check on her or something.”
Matt didn’t jump to volunteer to do that, and Dax could practically feel the cop’s brain at work. “I can do that, sure. You want to tell me why?”
“Not yet. Long story.” Well, not that long, but Dax didn’t want to go over the possibility he’d knocked someone up while Lorelei was still here. “I’ll fill you in, though, of course, if it turns out that Dana Smith was actually Valerie.”
“All right,” Matt finally said after a really long pause. “Give me any other details you have on her other than her name in case I get more than one hit.”
“I’ll have to ballpark the age. Mid-twenties. Height, about five-two with a slight build. Blond hair. A natural blond,” Dax added, figuring that Matt wouldn’t ask him how he knew that little tidbit.
“Accent, birthmarks, tats or anything else distinguishing?” Matt pressed.
“No real accent, no birthmarks or tats that I noticed.” Now it was Dax who paused, and he recalled something that had struck him about her. “She sounded high-end, like maybe she came from money. She talked about traveling abroad and was wearing an expensive-looking necklace.”
Her underwear had been silk. Black silk. But again, he’d save that detail for a private conversation with Matt.
Matt apparently, though, wasn’t finished with his cop’s questions. “And when was the last time you saw her?”
Since Dax had just done the math for Lorelei, it was still fresh in his memory. “A little over nineteen months ago.” Using his calendar, Dax gave him the date of the Fort Worth rodeo.
“Hell,” Matt muttered. He’d apparently done some math, too.
“Yeah,” Dax verified. “Let me know what you find out.”
He ended the call, downed some more coffee that would in no way help his stomach and then he went into the living room to face the music. Or rather to face Lorelei. Yeah, the tears were still there, and even though he’d seen her dozens of times, he’d never seen her like this. It was as if she were about to shatter into a million little pieces.
“You’ve adopted this baby?” he asked. “I mean, you’re not in the middle of the paperwork, right?”
“I adopted her. The process was finalized yesterday.” She swiped away the tears as if disgusted that she had not managed to stop them. There was no way he’d mention that in the swipe she’d smeared some mascara and now had a black streak on her cheek. “I’m not sure the legalities, though, if Dana did have any next of kin.”
Dax didn’t know the legal stuff, either, but Lorelei had to be thinking that someone with that next of kin connection might challenge the adoption. Or accuse her of not showing him the photo twenty-four hours earlier so that he or Dana’s family couldn’t somehow interfere with the final adoption papers. He didn’t want her going there just yet, though, because there might be much ado about nothing.
“Certainly, somebody in town knew Dana and heard her talk about her baby’s father,” he threw out there.
Lorelei shook her head, her perfect blond hair moving with the gesture. “Dana was only in Last Ride a couple of weeks before she went into labor. She died a few hours after giving birth. A blood clot,” she added in a murmur.
Dax felt that stab of grief and did another “don’t go there yet” reminder. He had too much to learn and get through before he could tackle the guilt and grief.
“But Dana, Valerie or whoever she was would have talked to someone in those two weeks,” he pointed out.
She nodded and blinked hard at the tears. “A few people. Millie Parkman had several pieces of Dana’s jewelry in her shop so they’d had a couple of brief conversations.”
Since Last Ride was the very definition of a small town, that meant Dax knew Millie as well, and Lorelei and she were distant cousins. The Parkmans were the family in town, most of them loaded with old money, and spent their days on the various society committees and clubs. Not Millie and Lorelei, though. They both owned businesses. Ditto for Lorelei’s twin sisters, Nola and Lily. Nola was a glass artist and Lily ran a horse ranch where his brother, Jonas, was the foreman.
Again, this was a small town where people and things just coiled and coiled around each other, often with only one or two degrees of separation at most. Dax was so hoping, though, that one of those coils wasn’t about to come back to bite him in his tattooed ass.
“So, Dana made jewelry?” he asked.
Best to fill in as many blanks as possible, and he couldn’t recall Valerie mentioning anything about that. Maybe because they were talking about two entirely different women here. Just because Dana was in Last Ride, didn’t mean she was Valerie.
“Yes,” Lorelei verified. “Millie said the pieces were very good, that they were modern takes on antique pieces. They worked with the other inventory she has in Once Upon a Time so she agreed to try to sell them.”
That filled in another blank. Well, maybe it did. Dana probably wouldn’t have gone to Millie had she not needed money. Of course, she might have just been an artist who wanted others to be able to buy and wear her art. Again, that matched with nothing that Valerie had said, but he did remember that necklace she was wearing. Very distinctive with dark red stones set in silver. He wasn’t a jewelry expert by any stretch of the imagination, but that piece seemed to fit the very definition of a modern take on an antique.
And that caused Dax to do some more muttered cursing.
“FYI, I always use protection when I have sex,” he let her know in between some of those curse words. “Always, even when my partner says she’s on the pill.”
That was something he recalled Valerie saying. She was also the one who’d initiated sex. Considering that she’d had those tear-reddened eyes, Dax had figured it would be just a talk/dinner date. Something he would have been fine with, but Valerie had wanted more.
Or rather like she’d needed more.
Maybe to forget whatever or whoever had made her cry in the first place? People had sex for all kinds of reasons, and while he was pretty sure Valerie had enjoyed her night with him, that didn’t mean she’d been searching for anything other than enjoyment. In fact, if that butt photo hadn’t been connected to a possible pregnancy and baby, Dax might have considered that she’d taken the photos to sell to some gossip site. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time that’d happened. And that led him to another question.
Were there more photos?
If so, had she shared them with anyone instead of just hiding one in her purse?
“What about Dana’s phone or computer?” Dax asked. “Certainly, she had those things, and there must have been something on them to prove or disprove who she was claiming to be.”
Lorelei dragged in a weary breath. “Nothing. All of this came up right after Stellie was born because Sheriff Corbin was trying to locate any next of kin. Dana was using a prepaid cell, and the only calls she’d made were to her doctor’s office here in Last Ride. There wasn’t anything of use on the computer. She didn’t even have an email account set up, and there was nothing personal in her car. The car was a long-term rental, and she’d used the name Dana Smith to get that.”
Well, crap. That didn’t sound good, and his first thought went in a really bad direction. That maybe Dana had, indeed, been on the run from someone.
And that someone could have been him.
Perhaps because she hadn’t wanted him to know she’d gotten pregnant? But that didn’t make sense since she’d obviously come to Last Ride. Why would she have done that if she’d been trying to avoid him?
She wouldn’t have. Which meant he had to move on to theory number two.
“I’m about to say something that has a big what-if in it,” he started. “Keep that in mind because, again, this could mean nothing. But what if Dana came here to let me know she was pregnant?” That tightened the knot in his gut again. Because it could be the spot-on truth. “I’m always in and out, going here and there for the rodeo events so maybe she was waiting for the right time to come to tell me.”
Lorelei stayed quiet a moment. “Look at your calendar again. For the end of March and the beginning of April last year. She died April thirteenth so it would have been the two weeks before that.”
Dax did look and then realized it shot a big hole in his theory. In this case, it was a good hole and a bad theory. One that he definitely hadn’t wanted to be true, and the dates confirmed that it wasn’t.
“I was here in Last Ride and at my ranch for eleven days of the two weeks prior to April thirteenth,” he verified.
He’d been dealing with a new buyer for the rodeo bulls so he hadn’t even made that many trips into town. In other words, if Dana had wanted to talk to him, she could have come to his ranch. Everyone in Last Ride knew he owned Sunset Creek. So did plenty of others since there’d been magazine and newspaper articles written about him and the ranch.
“I’m sorry,” Lorelei muttered, drawing his attention back to her.
That’s when he saw her swipe at another tear. Now she had two streaks of mascara on her cheeks. Since he seriously doubted she wanted anyone to see her like that, he went into the powder room, grabbed some tissues that his housekeeper thankfully kept stocked there and handed them to her when he came back.
“No need to apologize,” Dax assured her. “I tend to have a lot of chaos in my life, but I’m betting you don’t.”
“No,” Lorelei quietly agreed. “I own a glass shop where one wrong move can destroy fragile pieces of art so I keep the chaos to a minimum. It’s the same for crying. I keep it to an absolute minimum because I hate it,” she added. “It solves nothing, makes my eyes red and clogs my sinuses.”
“Yeah, it does that, but sometimes it just can’t be helped.”
She looked at him as if he’d just told her a whopper. Or sprouted an extra ear. Dax had no intention of filling her in on what might or might not have led him to do some crying because it went back to a time where he just couldn’t go. Mean bulls were a piece of cake compared to some stuff.
Dax heard the sound of a vehicle approaching, and he glanced out the window to see his brother pull his truck to a stop behind Lorelei’s car.
“It’s Jonas,” he told her.
That got Lorelei frantically swiping at her face with the tissues, along with muttering some G-rated profanity. At least he thought what she said qualified as profanity. He heard her say Son of a Baloney Eater. Maybe she’d switched to that kind of talk because she had a kid around. Jonas had done pretty much the same when he’d become a stepfather more than a dozen years ago.
Since she hadn’t been successful at removing the black smears, Dax took one of the tissues, and using the moisture from her tears, he wiped away the mascara. Then, he went Honest Abe with her.
“Jonas isn’t blind so he’ll see you’ve been crying,” Dax pointed out. “Unless you want to get into a discussion with him about that, why don’t you just hang back, and I’ll get rid of him?”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Thank you,” she said, adding a nod.
“No problem.” He wanted to add that soothing women was sort of his specialty, something he was darn good at, but considering the circumstances of another woman, Valerie, who he’d soothed and maybe gotten pregnant, he just went to the door.
Jonas had already lifted his hand to knock, but he stopped when Dax stepped into the doorway. “Figured you’d need some help cleaning up after the party,” his brother immediately said, and then he hiked his thumb to Lorelei’s car. “What’s Lorelei doing here?”
“No help needed. Couldn’t sleep after everyone left so I took care of it.” Dax paused, leaned in closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Could you do me a favor and not ask anything about Lorelei?”
Jonas cursed, not the G-rated crap, either, and Dax could see where his brother’s mind was going. His obviously very dirty mind.
“No,” Dax assured him. “Just no. That’s not why she’s here. I’ll fill you in when I can.”
Jonas studied him. “It’s bad?”
“To be determined.” But, yeah, it could be a whole crapload of bad.
Since Jonas was the big brother of the family and therefore the self-appointed fixer of all things Buchanan-related, Dax could tell he wanted to hang around and, well, try to fix something. But thankfully, Jonas didn’t push to come inside, and when Dax’s phone rang, that was apparently his brother’s cue to get moving.
Jonas would put his curiosity and concern on hold, but it was only a temporary reprieve for Dax. Soon, Jonas would want assurances that he wasn’t dicking around with Lorelei, and that included dicking around in every sense of the term.
“It’s Matt,” Dax relayed to Lorelei as he shut the door. Since she would no doubt want to hear every word of this conversation, he put the call on speaker. “FYI, Lorelei’s listening,” he warned Matt right off.
Judging from Matt’s silence, he might have wanted to do some real cursing, too. Maybe because he had things to say that he knew Lorelei wasn’t going to like. But that didn’t stop Matt from jumping straight into business.
“Valerie Elise Ford,” Matt threw out there. “I’m texting you her DMV photo now. I’ve compared it to her morgue shot, and even though the hair colors don’t match, it’s the same person.”
Well, hell. Valerie Ford was damn close to the name of Valerie Foster, and since Matt was certain that Dana and Valerie Ford were one and the same, then it wasn’t looking good for the outcome Dax wanted. The outcome where he hadn’t gotten a woman pregnant and then she’d died in childbirth.
“Tell me if it’s the woman you met in Fort Worth,” Matt instructed.
Dax waited for the ding to indicate a text and had a look at the picture. A thousand words went through his head. Really bad words. At the moment, it was the only thing his brain could manage. He certainly wasn’t going to be able to come to terms too quickly with what this all meant. That’s why Dax started with a simple answer to Matt’s “not so simple” instruction.
“Yeah, that’s the woman I met in Fort Worth,” Dax managed to say.
Lorelei hurriedly moved to Dax’s side. Shoulder to shoulder with him, and even though it was barely audible, he heard the hitch in her throat. A hitch to let him know that she wasn’t disputing what the sheriff had just said and that she was experiencing the same crap storm of emotions as he was.
“All right,” Dax said, taking in a few much-needed breaths. “Tell me about Valerie Elise Ford.”
Matt took a long breath of his own before he started. “She was twenty-six when she died. No criminal record. Her folks are Miriam and Greg Ford from St. Louis. Real estate moguls with plenty of money. Valerie was their only child, and they reported her missing right around the time you hooked up with her in Fort Worth. They withdrew the missing person’s report a couple of days later, which is why her name didn’t come up when we were searching for her next of kin.”
“Parents,” Lorelei muttered, and just as he’d seen the dirty thoughts go through his brother’s mind, Dax could see the worried ones go through hers. Because these people would be Stellie’s grandparents.
“There’s more,” Matt said.
“Bad more?” Dax wanted to know when Matt didn’t continue.
“Yeah.” Another pause. “She was married, Dax.”
Shit. Shit. Shit. Dax didn’t hold back on the cursing because his number one rule was not screwing around with a married woman. Number two was not getting a woman pregnant. It was possible, likely even, that he’d managed to bust both of those rules at once.
“Her husband’s name is Aaron Marcel,” Matt went on. “He lives in St. Louis as well, and I’ll be calling him shortly to do a notification of his wife’s death.” He paused a heartbeat. “Lorelei, are you still there?”
“Yes,” she muttered.
“I’m not sure what Mr. Marcel is going to tell me, but I’m looking at the dates, and it’s possible that he’s Stellie’s biological father,” Matt informed her. “Depending on how he takes that news, he could be paying you a visit very soon.”