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slight incline. The sooner she dumped Jace off, the sooner this conversation would be over. She’d had all she could take for one day. She wasn’t about to discuss Justin with this man who had dropped back into her life as suddenly as he had left it.
    “If I fathered a child, I have a right to know.”
    “I told you, you’re not Justin’s father.”
    Jace’s temper rattled the lid on his control. Quelling the urge to reach over and shake the truth out of her, his blunt-tipped fingers bit into the armrest. “Then who the hell is, and where the hell is he?”
    “It’s none of your business.”
    Rebecca turned in at the drive of a Victorian monstrosity with peeling brown paint. The place had a definite air of neglect about it. The lawn was trimmed, but the flower beds were brown patches of dirt studded with dried skeletons of plants. Cats scattered in all directions at the car’s approach.
    Jace barely glanced at his new residence. His attention remained riveted on the woman beside him. He remembered the tilt to her chin, the tightness around her lush mouth. Wild horses wouldn’t drag the answer from her, but he would try. “Dammit, Rebecca, now see here—”
    “No. Now you see here.” She turned in her seat and jabbed a slender forefinger at him. “You can’t question me about my personal life because my personal life doesn’t concern you. You gave up all rights in that area seven years ago, Jace.”
    She climbed out of the car and opened the back door to lug Jace’s duffel bag out of the backseat. It wasn’t exactly light, but neither were the patients she lifted every day. Slinging the strap over her shoulder, she backed away from the car and shut the door before a big black cat could slip inside.
    Jace hauled himself out of the compact, his concentration divided between his throbbing knee and getting the truth out of Rebecca. He couldn’t decide which would be worse—finding out he had sired a son seven years ago and no one had bothered to tell him, or finding out Rebecca had given birth to another man’s child.
    Without a word to him, she turned and started up the winding sidewalk to the front porch of the imposing house. He hobbled after her, dodging a pair of tiger-striped kittens who seemed to think crutches were great fun to play with.
    “I know you’re not married, and I don’t think you’re divorced,” he said, catching up to her. “So what’s the story? Either Justin is my son and you’re flat-out lying to me, or you met some other man when you were on the rebound.”
    Rebecca paused at the foot of the steps and gave him a look as she adjusted the shoulder strap of the duffel. “
All My Children
could have used you during the writers’ strike.”
    “What happened, Becca?” he asked, clomping up the wooden steps with a kitten latched onto one of his crutches. “You got pregnant. What did the bastard do, leave you?”
    She rang the doorbell. Her words were quiet, but they delivered all the sting of a slap. “You found that easy enough to do.”
    Self-loathing lashed out like a whip inside him. She was right, but he wanted to believe he would have done the right thing by her had he known. “Rebecca, if you were pregnant, if you’d told me—”
    “What?” she asked on a half-laugh, more than willing to let him squirm. “You might have sent me your forwarding address? Or maybe I would have rated season tickets to all the Kings’ home games?”
    The door swung open, and Muriel Marquardt squinted up at them, merry brown eyes twinkling behind a pair of rhinestone-studded glasses. She was all of five feet nothing and had the build of the Pillsbury Doughboy. With her blue-tinted hair and cotton print apron, she was the image of the All-American grandmother.
    “Ooooh, Rebecca, how nice to see you!” she exclaimed in a piping little voice. She scooped a fat gray cat off the hall table to her right and cradled the pewter-colored feline in her arms like a baby, absently stroking its