Valentine's Secret Child. Christine Rimmer

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      Quite a crowd for a self-help speaker on a Tuesday night. Was Renata here somewhere? Kelly hoped not. The situation was tough enough. She didn’t need the added stress of trying to behave normally for one of her colleagues.

      Kelly dithered—upstairs or down? Front, center or at the rear? More people filed in around her.

      Finally, frazzled to no end, a bundle of nerves at the prospect that Michael might be in the same building with her and in ten minutes she would see him in the flesh, she chose a seat about a third of the way up from the stage. Close enough that she should be able to tell if the man named Mitch Valentine was actually Michael.

      And far enough back that she doubted he would pick her out of the crowd—again, if he did turn out to be Michael. And if he remembered her.

      It was possible, after all, that he was Michael and he’d totally forgotten he was ever passionately, possessively in love with a girl named Kelly. He’d clearly moved on. And he didn’t know about DeDe. Yet.

      What was there to hold him to the memory of those long-ago days?

      Next to her, a college-age girl wearing a shearling jacket and boots that looked as if they belonged on an Eskimo, giggled and turned to the girl on her other side. “Hottie. I’m so not kidding. Fully doable. You should have gone to the reception before. He shook my hand. God. Those eyes. That voice. I think I came. And you know how I feel about the damn required lectures. But here I am. And you don’t hear me complaining….”

      Her girlfriend was not impressed. “I’ll wait ’til I see him. And I still hate these lectures.”

      “Trust me,” said the girl in the Eskimo boots. “You get a look at him, you’ll change your mind.”

      The two put their heads together and started whispering.

      Kelly tuned them out. Michael had always had a fine, deep voice and beautiful eyes. Most people hadn’t noticed, back then. They saw a skinny, withdrawn teenager and never looked beyond that.

      So was that more proof that she’d found him, at last?

      Wait, the voice of caution warned. Get a look at him. You’ll know soon enough.

      It was warm in the hall and her nerves weren’t helping her cool down any. She wiggled out of her winter coat and draped it over the back of her chair.

      By the time she faced front again, the lights were dimming over the seats—and getting brighter on the stage, brightest of all on the podium, center stage. A man came striding out of the wings: tall, thin, gray hair…

      Not Michael. Or even the man she suspected might be Michael.

      The gray-haired man stepped up to the podium to polite applause. He introduced himself as the head of the sociology department and then launched into a glowing introduction of the evening’s guest speaker.

      Most of it had been in the paper that morning.

      “Mitch Valentine is living, breathing proof that the American Dream really can come true. At nineteen, he designed his first video game. How many of you ever played DeathKnot or Midnight Destroyer?” Hands went up all over the hall. The professor smiled. “From there, he moved into software development, then created a job-search engine for students. Many of you here tonight have or will use FirstJob.com before you send out those resumes. From there, Mitch moved into desktop publishing. Now, at twenty-eight, he owns two publicly traded companies with headquarters in Dallas and in Los Angeles. And he’s written a book about how he did it.”

      Her heart was beating too fast again. Michael would be twenty-eight now….

      And the video games. They hadn’t mentioned the video games in the paper, had they?

      The department head was still talking. About how Mitch Valentine had started from nothing, lived on the streets of Dallas, turned his life around. How he had no formal education beyond a high-school diploma, and yet…look at the man today.

      And then, at last, he said, “And now, it’s with great pleasure and sincere admiration that I introduce to you…Mitch Valentine.”

      There was a roar. It was partly the applause and it was partly the blood spurting so fast through her veins, it made a rushing in her ears.

      A tall, broad-shouldered man in a dark suit with a snow-white shirt and a lustrous blue tie strode confidently across the stage. She thought, Chestnut-brown hair, like Michael’s…

      He stepped up to the podium under the hard gleam of the spotlight. And he spoke.

      “Thank you, Dr. Benson. I’ll do my best to live up to that glowing introduction….”

      He spoke.

      She’d known for certain in her mind when he faced the audience, but when he spoke, she knew in her heart.

      The final shreds of her doubt unraveled and dropped away.

      Kelly knew.

      He was Michael. She had found her daughter’s father, at last.

      Chapter Two

      Mitch Valentine, who had once been Michael Vakulic, talked for over an hour, without notes. He rarely stood still. Instead, he paced back and forth in front of the podium, pausing now and then to turn his arresting gaze on the audience as he emphasized a certain point. He wore one of those little portable mikes that hooked over his right ear, with a thin mouthpiece curving over his cheek, so his voice was crystal clear even though he spoke in a conversational tone.

      He talked about starting from nothing. About never giving up. About making the impossible into the possible. About translating dreams into reality, about goals, about what gets in the way of getting what we want.

      He was funny and he was brilliant and he was inspiring. And he had that audience in the palm of his hand. Even Kelly, though hardly in a receptive frame of mind, was impressed. Hey, she just might have learned something under different circumstances.

      That night, though, she sat there wide-eyed, her heart in her throat, images of the Michael she had known back then popping in and out of her stunned mind, warring with the reality of Mitch Valentine now.

      Up on the stage, the broad-shouldered man in the designer suit said, “Set yourself up in opposition, and where does all your energy go? Exactly. Into the fight—into opposing. But set yourself up in cooperation, and something altogether different occurs….”

      In her mind’s eye, she saw Michael, her Michael, in a cheap white T-shirt and battered, sagging jeans, his arms like two sticks, his hair shoulder length and stringy. His dark, hazel eyes were shining and his thin face seemed to glow from within.

      He said, “I love you, Kelly. You’re everything to me. I’ll always take care of you. It’s you and me against the rest of them….”

      Mitch Valentine said, “Ultimatums? I believe they’re the simplest way to sabotage yourself, to make certain you get the short end of the stick instead of what you want….”

      And she remembered Michael the day he made her choose. СКАЧАТЬ