Ready to Roll Read Online Free Page B

and well he was in his mid-thirties. Maybe early thirties, depending on where that line was drawn. Technically old enough to have any number of teenager daughters, but then again, so was Janice. Difference was, Miguel actually did have one, and Janice didn’t.
    “Hang on. She is your only daughter, right?”
    “Do you see any other kids around here?”
    “Well, Toots, I don’t see Sophie, either.”
    “She’s up in Denton, I told you.”
    “And I’m real proud of her, but I’m still curious how I never met her before.”
    Miguel closed the picture of Sophie so fast Janice’s suspicions rose like quills on a porcupine’s back.
    “For that matter,” she added, “I’m curious how I never heard of her before.”
    “ Ella no es un secreto.” He shrugged. “I guess I don’t talk about her at work all the time.”
    Janice snorted.
    “Okay, okay. I don’t talk about her much at all.” He glanced back at the now-dark screen and said, “She grew up mostly in Dallas, with her mom. And her stepdad.”
    Janice hid her wince at his subdued tone, but her hackles were more risen than her heart was empathetic. “You maybe want to go back to the beginning with this story?”
    To his credit, Miguel only rubbed his forehead for a minute before nodding and shifting the chair to face her fully. “I was in high school. Obviously. I mean, we both were, Alicia and I. She was sixteen and I was fifteen and we were dating a little.”
    A little. Hell if Janice would call impregnation ‘a little’ dating, not at that age. Her thoughts clearly showed on her face, or maybe this wasn’t the first time Miguel’d told this same story over the years. All eighteen of them.
    “We weren’t mad in love, not even the kid version of mad in love. It wasn’t Romeo and Juliet or nothing. But we didn’t date other people, and we saw each other a lot, in all the same classes, and lived on the same block. My brothers Pablo and Max both were in the same school, they’d drive us home if we got to the parking lot before them. They thought it was funny to take off without us, but if she and I were together we didn’t mind walking home so much. We were latchkey kids, all of us. And my oldest brother, that’s Rick, he was twenty-three by then. Four big brothers, you know? Plenty of sex talk, not a lot of safe sex talk, you understand?”
    Janice could picture it. Not as easily as she’d pictured the cute toddler version of this brotherhood earlier, but he made sense.
    Still.
    A dad at fifteen?
    Not that people didn’t get pregnant more than occasionally in her little country high school. Where Janice’d grown up, someone showing off a new pickup truck counted as major weekend excitement, so, yeah. Kids had sex. Kids had kids. And if they didn’t have them at sixteen, they did at nineteen, or twenty-two. Her ten-year high school reunion, Janice’s classmates could practically figure out which ones had stayed in town and which had moved to a city just by surveying to see who had elementary-age children.
    So she was no stranger to the concept. And not in the least inclined to judge. But if frankly pissed her off, that she’d known Miguel for half a decade without knowing that he had a teenage daughter from the day they met.
    And Janice’s defenses must have been more down than she thought, or Miguel was better at reading her than she counted on, because next thing she knew, Miguel was answering the very question Janice hadn’t yet voiced.
    “ Sophie no es un secreto, pero...cuando estoy contigo no soy un padre. Cuando estoy contigo, yo soy un hombre.”
    Well, send her to hell in six handbaskets. Rudimentary as her Spanish was, Janice got the point. Being around her made Miguel feel not like a father, but like a man.
    And the tadpoles were aswim down all her limbs again.
     

Chapter Six
     
    Miguel pasted his tongue to the roof of his mouth, not willing to say more on the subject of his manhood. About Sophie, sure. He was a proud