Father Of The Brat Read Online Free PDF Page B

daughter. There will be time for the three of us to talk later.”
    “She’s not my daughter,” Carver insisted, inhaling deeply on the cigarette again.
    “I guess we’ll have to let the courts decide that.”
    “Regardless of what the courts decide, Maddy, Rachel Stillman is not my daughter.”
    “Whatever you say, Carver.”
    “She’s not my daughter,” he repeated adamantly. “She’s not.”
    She was his daughter.
    As soon as Carver saw the girl walk into the terminal, he knew without question that she was she was the fruit of his loins. Her dark brown hair and pale blue eyes, her lanky build and accelerated height, her square face, thin nose and full lips…
    Had Carver Venner been born a girl, he would have looked exactly like Rachel Stillman when he was twelve years old. And he probably would have dressed like her, too, he thought. Except that his clothes would have fit. Everything Rachel wore—from her plaid flannel shirt and Pearl Jam T-shirt to her tattered army fatigues—were about four sizes too big for her. Even her boots looked as if she’d pilfered them from a six-foot-plus construction worker.
    Her hair hung down around her shoulders with two strands in front wrapped in some kind of multicolored thread, and when she tucked the uncombed tresses behind her ears, he saw that one was pierced approximately a half dozen times, the other even more. Seemingly hundreds ofbracelets made of everything from rubber to straw circled her forearms, and a long pendant—a peace symbol almost identical to one he’d worn when he was her age—swung between what would someday be breasts.
    She approached him without ever slowing or altering her stride—as if she knew as immediately as he that they were related—eyed him warily, sighed dramatically, cracked her gum a couple of times and said, “I’m not calling you Daddy.”
    Nonplussed, Carver fired back, “Who asked you to?”
    Rachel shrugged, as if she couldn’t care less about anything, nodded toward the cigarette burning between his fingers and asked, “Got another smoke?”
    He glanced down at his hand, then back at the girl. “What, for you?”
    She nodded.
    “Are you nuts?”
    This time she shook her head.
    He sucked hard on the cigarette, and amid a billowing expulsion of smoke asked, “Don’t you know these things will kill you?”
    She eyed him blandly. “Doesn’t seem to worry you too much.”
    “Yeah, well…” Carver looked down at the cigarette, reluctantly tossed it to the floor and ground it out with the toe of his hiking boot. He frowned. “Well, maybe it should worry you.”
    She made a face, one Carver was certain was endemic of twelve-year-olds everywhere. “Nothing worries me. I’m a kid. Haven’t you heard? We’re immortal.”
    Oh, yeah, Carver thought. She was his offspring, all right. Sarcastic, cocky and smart-mouthed as all get out. He suddenly regretted a lot of things he’d said to his own parents when he was a boy.
    Without even realizing he needed to sit down, he slumped into a nearby chair. He dropped his head into his hands, raked his fingers through his hair and tried not to panic. A daughter. God. Who knew?
    “Mom told me I could get my nose pierced back in L.A., but she, you know, checked out on me before she could sign the permission slip. So, what do you say? You got a problem with it?”
    Carver looked up again to find that his daughter—his daughter—had taken the seat next to his. She studied him with a steady, to-the-point gaze, apparently completely unburdened of any grief one might have expected her to feel for the loss of the woman who had raised her.
    “Checked out on you?” he repeated incredulously. “Your mother is dead, and that’s all you have to say about it?”
    Rachel rolled her eyes and toddled her head around in the way kids do when they don’t want to be bothered with adults who are clearly idiots. “She wasn’t exactly June Cleaver, all right? It’s hard to miss someone who