Father Of The Brat by Elizabeth Bevarly Read Free Book Online

outta here. You’re bogus, dude. Just because you had a quickie with my mom doesn’t mean anything. I don’t care how much you look like me. You’re not my father. And I don’t have to do a damned thing you say.”
    Carver looked at his daughter again, realizing then that there was a lot more of him in her than met the eye. “Oh, boy,” he said under his breath. Then, turning to his other female companion, he added more clearly, “Ever the optimist, aren’t you, Maddy? Well, something tells me this isn’t going to be quite as easy as you thought.”

Three
    C arver stood outside his bathroom door wearing nothing but a pair of battered blue jeans and rapped loudly for the sixth time. He sighed as he halfheartedly performed the gesture, knowing what the response to his summons would be before Rachel even uttered it.
    “Just a minute!” she called out from the other side.
    “You’ve been saying ‘Just a minute’ for more than half an hour,” he called back. “What the he…” He sighed fitfully. “What on earth are you doing in there?”
    “Just a minute!”
    Carver spun around on his heel and went to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. The clock on the stove reminded him that he should have left for work fifteen minutes ago if he was going to arrive when he normally did, and he hadn’t even had a shower yet. Rachel had commandeered his bathroom just as he was reaching for the doorknob himself, shouldering him out of the way with enough force to shove him back against the hallway wall. And she hadn’t come out once. He’d heard water run briefly, but had detectednot a sound since it shut off. He couldn’t imagine what a twelve-year-old girl would need with forty-five minutes in the bathroom. She was only doing it, he was certain, to annoy him.
    Annoying him had seemed to be Rachel’s favorite pastime since her arrival the day before. On the drive to his apartment, she’d prohibited any opportunity for conversation by snapping on the radio and fiddling incessantly with the dial. When she had finally found a station she deemed appropriate, she had turned the volume up so loudly, it had almost blown out his speakers. And today’s music was nothing but garbage, something Carver had taken great pleasure in pointing out to Rachel. Naturally, she had taken exception to his pronouncement, and had assured him he couldn’t relate because he was too old.
    “Kids,” he muttered under his breath as he topped off his coffee.
    Upon their arrival at his apartment, Rachel had taken one look at the spare room, had told Carver he had got to be kidding, then demanded a couple hundred dollars to do the place up right. She’d unpacked by removing piles of wadded-up clothing from her suitcase and heaving them haphazardly into drawers and onto the closet floor, and had assured him she never did her own laundry. And when he’d pressed her about that taking care of herself business, she’d only shrugged in that maddeningly nonchalant way he was quickly coming to hate.
    “Damn kids,” he mumbled as he sipped his coffee.
    Then, last night, just as Carver was settled into bed and on the verge of sleep, she’d cranked up the stereo in the living room until the whole apartment building shook. Within seconds, his phone had been ringing off the hook, virtually every neighbor within a four-block radius calling to complain about the noise. And when he’d gone out to confront his daughter about her nocturnal activities, he’d found her sprawled on the couch with the music blaring, watching television with the sound turned down, a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray beside her. She had been eating pizza—the piece Carver had been saving for breakfast the following morning—and washing it down with a beer she’d evidently also swiped from the fridge.
    And when Carver had demanded to know what the he…what on earth she thought she was doing, she’d swallowed a mouthful of beer, inhaled deeply on the cigarette and turned