"'Daddy'?" she echoed, reading the inscription. "You been keeping secrets, Luke? Is this your ex-wife?"

"No, Pippa and I weren't married. I knew her in London when I worked there eleven years ago. She still lives there."

"The child doesn't look anything like you. How do you know she's yours?"

"Because Pippa wouldn't have said she was if she wasn't. Besides, Josie and I talk over the Internet."

The supreme idiocy of this last remark burst on him only when it was too late. Dominique laid down the picture and regarded him very, very kindly.

"You talk on the Internet, and therefore she must carry your genes? I guess it beats DNA testing."

"I didn't mean that the way it came out," he said hastily.

"Darling, don't treat me like a fool."

No. Big mistake. Dominique's eyes were sharp as gimlets. They always were when she was in an acquisitive mood, he realized.

"Josie's mine," he repeated. "We have a very good relationship-''

"Over the Internet? Boy, you're really a close father, aren't you?"

"Considering we live on different continents, I'm a very close father," he said, stung.

"Luke, honestly, there's no need for this."

"What do you mean?"

''I mean that this child is no more your daughter than I am. You've probably never even met her mother. I expect you picked this up in some junk shop and wrote the inscription yourself. It was a clever idea putting 'and Josie' in different writing, but you were always a man who thought of the details."

He took a long, nervous breath. This wasn't going right. He grasped her hand.

''Dominique-sweetheart-''

"Luke, it's all okay. I understand."

"You…do?"

"It's natural for you to be a little scared at first. You've avoided commitment for so long, and now that things are changing, well-I guess it's all strange to you. But you show me in a thousand ways what I mean to you, and I can hear the things you don't say aloud."