Tadhg lay in the bed of the hotel room in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He’d hung up the phone with Ivy over an hour ago and his brain just would not shut off. Thoughts of Ivy, tonight, led to thoughts of his daughter and how convoluted his life had begun. Dating, yes he admitted, he was dating Ivy. Dating his daughter’s mother’s best friend. He’d sent an email off to Evie that he’d like to get a custom endurance saddle made for her mustang once he was ready to have one made and the girl seemed receptive.

The thing is, he didn’t want to buy his daughter, and that meant he was going to have to go see her in person. He’d not seen her in person in over a decade. His gift to Caoihme had been to leave her alone. She didn’t want to marry him. He didn’t want to marry her. It had been a moment’s weakness shared after a night at a blues club in San Fransico. Neither of them had been virgins, and he’d been far from it. He’d told off his parents and walked away from his life as the heir to the fortune and went to breed and train racehorses. He’d left his life so that the force of it would not force Caoihme Locke, heir to that ranch and a hundred years of history, into becoming a Barclay on the east coast. She’d sobbed when she’d found out she was pregnant and they’d formulated the plan.

He let the world think him a bastard, to let Caoihme to have the life she wanted. It would have been altruistic except, at night when he was honest with himself, he knew better. Younger him was far from that, he’d just used the unfortunate situation to go do what he wanted. It gave him a perfect reason to leave.

Twenty years ago, give or take, his parents had started to complain about his interest in horse racing. It was not a part of their plan for him. He’d finished school, a bachelor in prelaw, like a dutiful son.

Then, an accident of fate had given him a way out. He used to think that the deeper secret was what he’d done for Caoihme. But that cat was out of the bag, and what was still there in the darkness was the fact he had cared more about doing what he wanted to do than about the child he’d helped conceive. He’d traveled the world and lived what he thought was his dream. Thirteen years ago he’d been a different man.

So here he sat, staring at the ceiling in a hotel in Brazil wondering how in the world he would ever get to actually SEE his daughter and be part of her life. So much had changed in him in the last year. The time with his sister, and the reconciliation with his parents. This time he’d walked away from the racing and his parents thought it was about time he’d done with that phase. Now he wanted to be a part of his child’s life. He hoped he was not too late.

He groaned and flopped his head on the pillow as he flipped to his back. The clock flipped to 1 am and he knew it was the dead of night in West Virginia. He couldn’t call Ivy. So he punched his pillow and flipped over one more time before sleep, blessed sleep finally took him.