3. Eddie

“ D ad!” Melody practically exploded into his room, with Jazz hot on her heels.

“Close the door,” he insisted, looking behind them for signs of the mother-daughter duo who’d rocked his entire world.

“I thought you were going to tell her!” Melody exclaimed.

“Tell her?” he sputtered. “You two practically grilled the women on their family tree and attacked poor Lovely for the sin of still being alive!”

“Well, we thought Rebecca’s mother was dead. We read her obituary. Olivia Mitchell. Dead as a doornail.” Melody turned to Jazz. “You said Lovely could be a nickname for Olivia.”

“Could be, but isn’t.” Jazz dropped into a chair in a corner sitting area. “Cool it and think, you two. There is definitely some confusion in the facts. Are you sure you read all that Ancestry.com stuff correctly, Mel?”

“Every word, and then Lark dug through every database and newspaper and real estate record, and my daughter is nothing if not thorough,” she said. “So Lovely is alive. It doesn’t really change anything, does it?”

“Oh, but it does.” Eddie walked toward the sliding glass doors that led to a small second-floor balcony, his gaze locked on the blue water beyond but only seeing a face…from his far and distant past. Two faces, actually.

Those of the women connected to him inexorably by a one-night stand he hadn’t thought about in decades…until his granddaughter, Lark, showed up at his door, waving her phone, and announcing he had another daughter named Rebecca.

“I think it changes everything,” he said.

“How?” Melody asked. “We came here to meet Rebecca Foster, a woman we believe is our half-sister and your daughter, based on the fact that my daughter found a perfect match to our paternal DNA on Ancestry.com. The mother was supposed to be dead but?—”

“But now she’s alive,” he said, turning to her. “And who knows what she told her daughter about her conception? She might have married and claimed her husband was Beck’s father.”

“She might have,” Jazz conceded. “But in this day and age, with all the DNA testing available and the databases giving access to customers? Those things don’t stay secret. My firm funded a start-up dedicated to this very thing and I know the statistics. There are biological reunions going on all over the world as we speak. Hundreds of babies from the same sperm donor, twins separated at birth, and babies given up for adoption finding siblings online. It’s very common.”

“Common, maybe, but not easy,” Eddie replied. “All those babies have stories, all those siblings have lives, and all the parents have reputations to protect.”

“And you’re protecting hers, aren’t you, Dad?” Melody guessed.

Of course he was. “Look, when I thought Lovely was dead, I was prepared to meet Rebecca Foster. My plan was to determine what she’d been told, if anything, about her conception. I’d either keep that story out of respect for Lovely, or share the truth if it seemed appropriate. If the door was open to get to know her, great. But I didn’t plan to blow in here and wreck Lovely’s life. Or Rebecca’s, for that matter.”

“That’s sweet, Dad, but her conception is ancient history,” Mel said. “Honestly, no one cares that two strangers met at a rock festival and hooked up in a tent fifty-seven years ago. The shock value is zero nowadays.”

“Please, Mel.” He shot her a harsh look. “I do not want to march downstairs and announce I’m Beck’s biological father.”

“Why not?” Mel demanded.

Of course, he understood she believed in the truth at all costs…but the cost might be too high for Lovely to pay.

Even nearly six decades later, he instinctively sensed a few things about the girl named Lovely who’d inspired his one big hit. She’d been a young, reckless virgin who’d sneaked off to a concert, gone too far too fast with a boy who’d shared a little pot. She’d run off early the next morning without saying goodbye or telling him her last name.

He suspected she’d gone way out of her comfort zone that night, and disappeared so she didn’t have to face the shame—or him.

Except they’d conceived a child. So her life had probably been turned inside-out by a pregnancy he hadn’t even known about. She’d lived with the consequences of the night, and he’d paid none. And she deserved far more than raised eyebrows or crass jokes about “hooking up” in a tent while The Dave Clark Five crooned Catch Us If You Can at the other end of a parking lot in Key West.

And now she was very much alive—vibrant, in fact—and still had an angel’s smile and unforgettable eyes, just like he’d written in that song.

“So, what do you want to do, Dad?” Jazz asked, studying him carefully.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I know what I don’t want to do, though. I won’t drag that beautiful woman through the mud of her past, publicly or privately. Not yet. I have no desire to cause whitewater or heartbreak. I wanted to meet my third daughter but not open old wounds with her mother.”

“Your third daughter who doesn’t look anything like you but is a carbon copy of Lovely,” Mel noted, leaning back on the bed, braced on her elbows. “What is it about your DNA that always takes a backseat?”

His eyes shuttered as he refused to answer the question, even though it wasn’t that far from the truth.

Melody, ruled by her feelings for every one of her fifty years, was so like her mother, whose passionate Hawaiian roots made her spontaneous, emotional, and willing to risk anything for someone or something she loved.

And Jasmine, now forty-three—but she’d acted that age since she was a toddler—was a study in rationality and common sense, like her mother, a scientist with a crazy high IQ.

“The way I see it?” Jazz looked from one to the other. “We already provided a logical reason for our interrogation about their family and covered our initial shock.”

“Sort of,” Eddie said, having clearly seen the dismay on Lovely’s face.

“What’s your point?” Mel pressed her sister.

“My point is we don’t have to tell them anything. We could actually let the whole thing go. No harm, no?—”

“No!” Melody shot up. “She’s our sister , Jazz! We have to tell her! I will not leave without the truth on the table. And she has daughters who are our nieces. And at least one grandchild! So many people who share our blood!”

“Mel, this is not your call,” Eddie said softly, used to refereeing between his polar-opposite daughters. “I agreed to come with you two on this mission with one caveat—I make the decisions. If and when we drop this bomb on these ladies, it will be in the most gracious and kind way possible and after we’ve determined that Lovely wants the story to come out.”

“But we came here with the explicit purpose of telling Rebecca Foster that the online DNA sites confirmed that we are her half-sisters,” Melody said.

“The DNA could be wrong,” he said.

“Not a chance,” Jazz said. “It never is. Plus, based on her birthday, Rebecca Mitchell, married name Foster, was conceived around the third week of March, which, in 1965, was the date of a certain music festival in Key West. Not to mention there’s a perfect paternal DNA match. And remember, they could find that information as easily as we did. But whoever submitted their tests never even opened the message I sent.”

“So you can’t be sure Beck is?—”

“Yes, we’re sure.” Jazz tapped her phone, reading a screen. “Her name was listed and then it was just a matter of finding her, which took a little digging, but we did it. Rebecca Mitchell Foster turned fifty-seven on May twentieth. Her mother—at least legally—was Olivia Ames Mitchell, a widow who remarried twenty years after her first husband’s death, then divorced him less than five years later. Rebecca spent most of her life in the Atlanta area, has three daughters, divorced a year or so ago, moved here and opened Coquina House.”

He huffed out a breath. “People’s lives are an open book—er, phone—now.”

“Welcome to the twenty-first century, Pops,” Jazz said, her favorite nickname for him taking some of the bite out of all the information she was dumping on him. “So, what are we going to do? Drop the bomb, play it cool, or just have a nice vacay in the Keys with some sunshine and sleep? God knows I need both.”

He didn’t answer, but unlatched the sliding glass door and inched it open, stepping outside. Instantly, he was assaulted by balmy air that seemed absolutely dense compared to the dry breezes of northern California.

Mel joined him, putting a gentle hand on his arm. “You’re reeling, aren’t you?”

He smiled down at her. Yes, she was right-brained to a fault, but that made this beautiful woman deeply empathetic and wildly good-hearted.

“Spinning like I could fall off this balcony,” he said.

“Well, don’t. If you want to keep the past buried, then I’ll respect that. But Beck is about to have me as a friend, whether she wants me or not. Because she is my big sister, and I’ve never had one of those.”

Smiling, he put his arm around her and gave a squeeze. “I get that. Let’s just give it some time, okay? No more probing questions but we’ll get to know these ladies.”

Jazz joined them, stepping to Eddie’s other side. “Honestly? You have the truth inked on your arm, Dad. How many women named Lovely are there?”

“You’d be surprised,” he said on a dry laugh, thinking of how many he’d met over the years. None of them made him take notice…until today.

Because this Lovely? She was the one he’d written about.

“She might put two and two together,” Melody said. “Most people know Ned is a nickname for Edward. And maybe she saw pictures of you when your song became famous and said, ‘Look, there’s my tent guy.’”

He cringed at the thought of being her “tent guy.”

“You know as well as anyone that despite my hotshot agent changing my name from Ned Sylvester to Eddie Sly, I never made the cover of Tiger Beat ,” he reminded her . “ The Electric Breeze broke up a year after that song came out, and there would be no reason for me to ever be on her radar.”

Until now.

“And the more I think about Olivia raising her?” Jazz added. “It makes sense if you consider when this happened. Yes, the world was changing in the decade of free love, but this is a small community. Lovely was, what? Eighteen?”

“I hope,” he muttered.

“Well, it was 1965 and teenage pregnancy was considered a scandal. I bet Lovely’s sister raised the baby as her own, saving Lovely’s—and probably the whole family’s—reputation. Somehow, sometime, the truth came out and now Lovely and Beck don’t try to hide it.” She shrugged. “Makes total sense to me.”

“We don’t know any of that,” Eddie said, uncertainty wrapping his chest in a vise. “But here’s what I’d like to do, girls.”

They shared a smile, as they always did when he called them that.

“There’s no rush,” he said. “We’re here for two weeks. I’d like to get to know them both and when the time is right, it won’t have to be an explosion that destroys their world. Until the time is right, there will be no…whisper of truth.”

“Ooh. Whisper of Truth .” Mel’s dark brows rose. “Sounds like an Eddie Sly tune. Write it, Dad.”

For a split second, he almost said yes to that. But he just blew out a breath. It had been a long time since he’d been able to get past the first line of a song, even with a title that good.

“I’m retired,” he volleyed back. She rolled her eyes, knowing better than anyone that it was just an excuse for his writer’s block.

“So, is that our plan?” Jazz asked after a beat. “We go down and surreptitiously interview them? Get them to reveal everything without knowing who we are? I can do that.”

Mel nodded slowly. “It’s kind of subterfuge-y, but I’m okay with that. Lark would love it,” she added, smiling at the thought of her twenty-six-year-old daughter, who’d set this whole earthquake in motion.

“We won’t interview these ladies,” Eddie said. “We will talk. We’ll build bridges. We connect and then…we’ll see.”

“We’re not doing any bridge-building today,” Jazz reminded them. “They left.”

“What?” Mel’s jaw dropped. “They just ditched us?”

Jazz laughed. “We’re not guests in their home waiting to be entertained,” she said. “They own the B&B. They check us in, show us our rooms, ply us with mimosas and coffee and those delicious baked things. They said they’d be gone with family for the day.”

Mel groaned. “More family we have to meet.”

“They gave us a list of things to do and see, told us where to rent bikes, and showed us the beach.” Jazz pointed to the water. “Let’s go there now, shall we? I don’t get a lot of vacations, and I want to do whatever people do when they vacate their offices.”

“But Rebecca lives here,” Mel insisted, ignoring their conversation. “She should be around for us to…not interview.”

“Beck,” Eddie corrected. “She specifically asked to be called Beck.”

“You’re already defending her.” Mel grinned at him. “Father of the Year, I tell you.”

He just shook his head, smiling at her.

“Then let’s ride bikes or go to the beach,” Jazz said. “We are in the Florida Keys. First time for all of us, right?”

Eddie gave her a look. “Not me,” he reminded her. “I was at a rock festival in Key West in March of 1965.”

They laughed at that, and Mel slid her arm around his waist. “I’ve got an idea, Dad. Let’s go to Key West. It’s fifteen minutes down the road and a tourist mecca. We can see Beck and Lovely when we get home.”

He nodded, searching her face and seeing—as always—the memory of Kailani Kahue, his first true love. But Lani was gone now, ashes fluttered into the Pacific, mixed with his tears. Her spirit lived on in Melody, and his grandchildren, Lark and Kai.

“Thanks, Mel. You’re the best.”

“What am I?” Jazz cracked. “Chopped liver?”

He turned to her and reached out a hand, and like he had with his other daughter, he only saw her mother, Victoria Swann, still one of his best friends, even though their marriage ended years ago.

“You, my dear, are the brains of the operation.”

“I’m the heart,” Mel chimed in.

“That leaves you as our soul, Pops.” Jazz pointed at him. “And we’ll follow your lead. Until you say so, we won’t utter one…what did you call it? Whisper of truth.”

He squeezed each of his daughter’s hands in his. Ooh, it was a good song title.

“You know, I might have written a lot of songs over the years, but my two greatest works of art are right here.”

“And Beck,” Jazz said softly.

“And somehow we’re not supposed to tell her she’s our sister.” Melody groaned. “It’s impossible, Dad.”

“Nothing’s impossible, Mel. You will not tell her. You will not imply the truth to her. You will not.”

She curled her lip. “Fine. I’ll do my best.”

Eddie knew that keeping a secret wasn’t impulsive Melody’s strong suit. So he’d have to move quickly to breathe his whisper of truth .

When the girls left, he changed for the beach, and couldn’t help himself. He pulled out his notebook, stared at the page, and grabbed a pen.

Green eyes…how they glint.

Could I ever…give a hint.

“Oh, please,” he muttered, ripping out the page and balling up the dreck.

But he could imagine how Lovely’s eyes would flash if he would…whisper the truth.

Part of him was terrified. The other part? Could not wait.