Page 1 of The Beekeeper

Chapter 1

Blaze

“How’s that ice cream, pumpkin?” I couldn’t hold back my smile as I watched my daughter bite into the chocolate ice cream stacked high in her cone.

I’d never seen a person—adult or child—use their teeth to eat ice cream. It was even more impressive because she was currently missing her two front teeth, but that was my kid, biting toothless into ice cream like it was an apple.

My kid.

The idea was still like a sucker punch to my sternum even now, almost a year and a half after I learned I had a daughter from a brief relationship seven years ago. I’d had no idea I’d gotten Megan pregnant, no idea about Paisley at all until Megan passed away, and now I was the only parent left. Dad to a six-year-old daughter.

“Good.” Paisley grinned, chocolate smeared across her lips. A rare smile from my daughter who kept her emotions shuttered like a clam inside her shell since losing her mother and coming to live with me.

I was a poor substitute, but damn if her guarded smiles didn’t make me feel like no matter what I did, it was wrong. A sentiment I should be used to considering I’d grown up with it from my dad, but damn if it didn’t hurt worse coming from my daughter.

“All right. So, when we get back, we’ve got to pick an animal for your science project,” I reminded her of our arrangement: ice cream in exchange for tackling this science project that we’d been putting off for a week.

Her shoulders slumped, and her pace instantly slowed. “Do we have to?” Her frown melted into another bite of ice cream.

“Yeah. We do,” I told her and put my hand on her back, guiding her along Main Street in Stonebar Harbor toward our apartment.

Science was her least favorite subject, and that was compounded by the fact that I was the least equipped to help with it. I barely made it through high school and a few college credits before my acting career took off when the low-budget hockey romcom I’d starred in went viral. Who needed school when you were suddenly rich and famous?

That was the mantra I’d lived by for the last dozen years, especially when compared to my older brother, Wade, who excelled at everything and who’d taken over the Stevens family legal dynasty. Dad’s golden child.

Meanwhile I’d failed at everything but acting, which “wasn’t a real profession” according to Dad, no matter how much money it brought in. The truth was, I wasn’t good enough, and it wasn’t until I was older that I realized that the only way to be good enough was to be Wade.

“I’m not good at science.”

“That’s okay, pumpkin. We don’t have to be good at everything, we…”

“Just have to try,” she whispered, repeating the phrase I’d told her—and myself—hundreds of times over the last year and a half.

I might not know how to be a dad, but I knew how not to be one; I would never make Paisley feel inadequate the way my father had done to me.

“So, what animal do you want to learn about for your project?”

Another shrug. “Don’t know.”

It might look like ambivalence, but it wasn’t. It was fear. Pais was too afraid to want anything or really care about things because they might disappear. My therapist said it would take time for her to feel safe enough to come through that after losing her mother, but I wished there was a way to make it faster.

My jaw flexed. “What about a horse? You liked when we went horseback riding in Wyoming.”

Not even a shrug this time.

Maybe she hadn’t liked it. She’d been too afraid to ride on her own, so she’d sat in the saddle with me and stared down at the pommel the whole time.

“How about cats? Like Baguette and Brioche? We could call Mimi and PopPop and get their help.”

That got a vigorous shake no, and I was surprised. Paisley loved her grandparents; she’d lived with Megan and Megan’s parents for the first five years of her life. Same house. Same people. Same overweight cats. They’d helped Megan with Pais, and having Megan around had helped them since they were both diagnosed with degenerative diseases within a year of one another.

And then Megan died and suddenly Pais couldn’t live with them anymore, not with how their conditions would develop. So, she was dropped into my life instead—one that never stopped moving. No consistent home base. Few familiar faces. No pets. And a dad who’d barely kept himself alive for the last decade.

No wonder the horseback riding hadn’t meant shit.

“All right. We’ll figure it out when we get back,” I said, feigning optimism as my hopes melted faster than her ice cream.

Sometimes, it felt like my daughter was never going to open up, but then again, I only had myself to blame; I wasn’t there for the first five years of her life. Sure, I had no idea Megan had been pregnant or that Pais existed, but it was still my fault. When I couldn’t succeed at doing anything right, I decided to, instead, strive to do everything wrong. And in Hollywood, doing wrong was remarkably easy.