Tadhg lay in the bed of the hotel room in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He\u2019d 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\u2019s mother\u2019s best friend. He\u2019d sent an email off to Evie that he\u2019d like to get a custom endurance saddle made for her mustang once he was ready to have one made and the girl seemed receptive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The thing is, he didn\u2019t want to buy his daughter, and that meant he was going to have to go see her in person. He\u2019d not seen her in person in over a decade. His gift to Caoihme had been to leave her alone. She didn\u2019t want to marry him. He didn\u2019t want to marry her. It had been a moment\u2019s weakness shared after a night at a blues club in San Fransico. Neither of them had been virgins, and he\u2019d been far from it. He\u2019d told off his parents and walked away from his life as the heir to the fortune and went to breed and train racehorses. He\u2019d 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\u2019d sobbed when she\u2019d found out she was pregnant and they\u2019d formulated the plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019d just used the unfortunate situation to go do what he wanted. It gave him a perfect reason to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019d finished school, a bachelor in prelaw, like a dutiful son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, an accident of fate had given him a way out. He used to think that the deeper secret was what he\u2019d 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\u2019d helped conceive. He\u2019d traveled the world and lived what he thought was his dream. Thirteen years ago he\u2019d been a different man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019d walked away from the racing and his parents thought it was about time he\u2019d done with that phase. Now he wanted to be a part of his child\u2019s life. He hoped he was not too late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t call Ivy. So he punched his pillow and flipped over one more time before sleep, blessed sleep finally took him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tadhg lay in the bed of the hotel room in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He\u2019d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":263,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-fullwide.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rmullhollanddesign.com\/stories\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/154"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rmullhollanddesign.com\/stories\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rmullhollanddesign.com\/stories\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rmullhollanddesign.com\/stories\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rmullhollanddesign.com\/stories\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rmullhollanddesign.com\/stories\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/154\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rmullhollanddesign.com\/stories\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rmullhollanddesign.com\/stories\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}