“You’re welcome. The powder room is down the hall on your right.”
“I’ll find it.”
“When you’re through, come to the conference room across the hall. We’ll eat in there. The agent will be joining us.”
Kit nodded, feeling a weight had been lifted from her heart to know her parents hadn’t kidnapped her.
As she’d explained to Maggie, her mom had been a good person who’d believed in God. Maybe she hadn’t been able to bring herself to admit Kit was adopted. Maybe that secret, plus Frankie’s desertion, had caused her to turn to alcohol.
Somehow, some way, her mom must have heard the story of the McFarland tragedy and hallucinated about it. That had to be the explanation. Maggie agreed it was a possibility.
Kit left the room, anxious to phone Janene at the first opportunity and tell her that one of her worst fears had been abated. Her mom wasn’t a kidnapper.
But there was still another one that haunted her. It had to do with Cord.
USING HIS CELL PHONE, Cord conducted as much shelter business as possible while he sat in his car. He’d parked in a spot where he had the whole frontal view of the motel. Dwayne was covering the back.
Kit had to return sometime. Even if she didn’t show up until the middle of the night, he would be here to confront her. She would have no place to hide.
While he was contemplating her reaction to their unexpected reunion, his cell phone rang. It was Maggie. He clicked it on.
“Are you back from Cedar?”
“Yes.”
“Any luck there?”
“No.”
That was bad news.
“Cord—I need you to come to my office right this minute!”
He blinked. There was an urgency in her tone that alarmed him. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Just come now. Please. I’ll explain everything when you get here.”
Good grief.
“I’m on my way.”
He started the car and drove out of the parking area. When he was on his way to the plaza, he phoned Dwayne and explained that an emergency had arisen and he had to leave.
The other man said he would keeping driving around the motel and watching for Kit. Cord didn’t need to worry.
With that settled, Cord reached the complex in record time and parked in the underground lot. Instead of waiting for the elevator, he opted for the stairs, taking them two at a time to the ground floor.
A couple of police officers and the head security guard for the plaza hovered near the law firm doors. They nodded to him as he went inside. What in the hell was going on?
He found Maggie waiting for him in the reception area. That much was reassuring, but the place looked totally deserted. She flew across the expanse and hugged him with surprising strength.
“Come into my office, quick!”
He’d never seen his sister behave this mysteriously before. Intrigued, he followed her.
She shut the door behind him. “I’m conducting an experiment,” she said before he could get in a single word.
“An experiment—”
“Yes. There are two women in the conference room. The redhead is an FBI agent named Pat Simpson. The other one could be…our sister.”
Cord hadn’t misunderstood what she’d said. He just couldn’t comprehend it.
“I know you have a thousand questions. Forget them for now, and, please, do as I ask.”
She’d left him no choice.
“There’s something you need to know first. After I met her, we agreed we couldn’t be related because we don’t look anything alike.”
“Then I—”
“Just listen,” she interrupted. “I’m going to take you in and introduce you. When you get a good look at her, I want you to think which person in our family, living or dead, she bears a faint resemblance to.”
“Maggie…” He grasped her shoulders. Emotion had caught him by the throat so he couldn’t talk.
Her eyes filled with tears. “I know what you want to ask. There’s no proof yet. Not until we match her DNA against Mom and Dad’s. But Cord—I think she might be Kathryn!”
He hugged her to him, unaware of his own strength. “Does anyone else in the family know about this yet?”
“No.” She eased out of his arms to look at him. “I don’t dare say anything in case I’m wrong, but I had to tell you. Maybe I want it to be true so badly, I’m seeing something that isn’t there. That’s why I want your opinion before we make another move.”
Cord struggled for breath. “You like her.” It was a rhetorical question.
She searched his eyes for a long moment. “Yes. How can you tell?”
“Because you’ve already accepted the possibility she could be our flesh and blood.” That fact alone shook him.
“I’ve only been talking to her a couple of hours, but I have to tell you, she’s wonderful, Cord.”
“If you think so, she must be.”
Still skeptical, he followed her out of the office and down the hall to the conference room. He suspected this woman wasn’t a McFarland.
He hated to see his sister this worked up emotionally, and at this stage, they didn’t yet have a way of knowing whether this was a repeat of the two other times imposters had approached them and turned out to have histories of mental illness.
Unfortunately, Maggie wasn’t so different from their mother. When the truth came out, she would take the disappointment hard.
As for Cord, he’d already undergone one shock today when he’d discovered Kit had disappeared on him. He didn’t know if he could stand another one.
THE FBI AGENT TURNED OUT to be the redheaded receptionist Kit had seen when she’d entered Maggie’s law firm. After the conversation with Janene earlier, Kit wasn’t that surprised.
What struck her was the other woman’s direct yet sensitive approach. Kit liked her and welcomed any assistance that would help supply the answers concerning her parentage.
After the three of them ate lunch, Maggie had slipped out to take care of some business while the agent finished up the last of her questions for Kit.
“Your mother never left the state of California?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“She never suggested visiting a relative somewhere else, like Utah?”
“No. I’d always been told we didn’t have relatives. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. We didn’t have extra money to take vacations.”
Over the years Kit had made friends with several girls who’d begged her to go to Hawaii and Mexico with their families, but she’d been afraid to leave her mother alone for that long.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Kit. With the research you’ve already done at the library, plus your family pictures and records, I have everything I need to begin an investigation. How soon are you planning to return to California?”
The agent had asked a simple question. If it weren’t for Cord, Kit would tell her she was leaving in the morning. But now that Kit had met Maggie McFarland and knew they weren’t related, she planned to talk to Cord before she went anywhere. Maybe—just maybe—he would ask her to stay in Salt Lake longer.
“I’m here on my paid vacation from work and have already used up a week of it. If there’s nothing else you need from me, I’ll probably fly home within a few days.”
The agent nodded. “A team of agents will be assigned to your case to track down your father. They’ll start looking into your falsified birth certificate and go from there. With the McFarlands’ financial backing, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to find him soon.
“If we locate him, we’ll contact you immediately. Chances are it will solve the question of your parentage and possibly shed some light on the McFarland kidnapping.” She handed Kit a card. “This is my cell phone number. Stay in touch with me. If you remember anything else, no matter how unimportant you think it is, call me.”
“I will. No one’s more anxious than I to find out the circumstances of my birth. You
don’t know how grateful I am for your help.”
“On top of grieving for your mother, you’ve carried a painful burden. Let’s hope it isn’t long before we have answers for you and the McFarland family.”
“I feel terrible to have brought Maggie more pain. Until we got a good look at each other, I know she had hopes I would turn out to be her sister. Now they’ve been dashed.”
“All’s not lost,” the agent reminded her. “You’ve brought the first real lead to a case that’s gone nowhere for years. It’s not a small thing. I’ll be talking to you again soon.”
Once the other woman left the room, Kit realized there was nothing more to be done here. She’d accomplished her purpose for coming to Salt Lake. At this point she was anxious to return to the motel so she could call Cord. By now he probably knew she’d left the shelter. Before any more time went by, she needed to get hold of him and explain why she’d vacated the cottage without leaving him a note.
He had to forgive her. He had to.
Reaching for her purse, she got up from the table with the intention of stopping by Maggie’s office to say goodbye. But she never made it to the door because the attorney unexpectedly came back to the conference room.
She wasn’t alone….
A tall, striking man with rich brown hair had walked in with her. A familiar man in jeans, with his shirtsleeves pushed up to the elbow. He happened to be the exciting man who in a few days time had come to mean the world to Kit.
“Cord!”
It was as if thinking about him had conjured him up. She thrilled to his physical presence the way she did every time she saw him.
“You do get around, don’t you.”
Maggie stared at both of them in bewilderment. “You two know each other?”
“Very well, in fact.”
His benign, civilized tone didn’t match his eyes, which were filled with anger.
Kit took a step back to clutch the nearest chair. “H-how did you know I was here?”
His humorless smile sent a chill through her body. “Stop pretending, Kit. We know what you’re here for.”
She shook her head, hurt and confused. She’d expected he might be upset that she’d left the cottage without telling him, but this icy reaction left her wounded. “What do you mean?”
“Trying to pass yourself off to Maggie as our long-lost sister.”
Sister?
The blood pounded in Kit’s ears. “How could she be your sister, unless—”
Oh, no.
His lips twisted with distaste. “Come off it, Kit. You know damn well who I am.”
“I do now,” she whispered in anguish. The situation had turned into a nightmare.
“Excuse me,” Maggie said, turning to leave.
“No—don’t go.” Cord reached out to grasp her arm. “I want you to stay and hear all of this. Everything on the background check I ran on her jibed except for one small detail. She isn’t homeless and she’s never owned a house. We’ve got a bona fide extortionist on our hands, sister dear. One wonders if she’s made the rounds of the whole family already. Mother would have swallowed her story alive!”
A mixture of pain and anger forced heat to Kit’s face. “You honestly think I could have kissed you the way I did, or let you kiss me the way you did, if I’d believed for one second you could be my brother?”
Her agonized cry had a ring of hysteria. It reverberated off the walls of the conference room.
He stood there, his face ashen.
“I admit that I came to Salt Lake to find out if I’m Kathryn McFarland. I admit to having entered the shelter under false pretenses. But, Cord—I swear the whole purpose behind my elaborate charade was to talk to Richard McFarland for a few minutes.
“He was the person I was looking for. I thought if I could get a good look at him without his knowing the real reason I was here, I would see if we shared the same genes before I said or did anything that could upset the whole McFarland family. But Mr. McFarland was never around.”
She heard a strange sound escape his throat.
“Since I didn’t want to use you to get an appointment with him, I decided enough was enough. This morning I contacted Margaret McFarland. Now that your sister and I have met and talked, we both agree we couldn’t be related. There’s no more point in my staying in Salt Lake. I’m going back to California.
“Meeting you in her office has saved me a phone call. When I get home, I’ll send Renaissance House the money I owe for the gracious way you took care of me.” She stopped for breath. “I’ll never forget your kindness or Gwen’s.”
By some miracle Kit stayed dry-eyed. She tore her gaze from Cord to look at his sister. The two of them shared a definite family resemblance. But they weren’t Kit’s family.
“Thank you for seeing me today, Maggie. I’m sorry to have caused any grief to either of you. I’ll find my own way out.”
MAGGIE GRABBED CORD’S ARM. “Let her go,” she urged when Kit disappeared into the hall. “She needs time. So do you. I know where to find her.”
“So do I,” he muttered. “When you phoned me, I was in the motel parking lot waiting for her to show up.”
His sister still held on to him. “Before you race after her, we have to talk.”
“Just tell me one thing, Maggie.” He felt as if he’d been running a marathon and had hit the wall. “What brought her to Salt Lake?”
“It’s an amazing, tragic story. Her mother was an alcoholic who suffered from hallucinations toward the end of her life. While she lay dying, she told Kit she wasn’t her real mother.”
“And you believed her?”
“We have to believe her,” his sister replied on a solemn note. “The agent has already spoken to the attending physician in California. Everything Kit told us has been verified.”
The blood in Cord’s veins turned to ice.
“Her mother urged her to come to Salt Lake, the home of her Copper King ancestor, John McFarland, and tell the McFarlands she was their daughter Kathryn. That way God would forgive her.”
Cord covered his eyes with his palms.
This wasn’t a dream. This was reality. That’s what terrified him—the fact that he couldn’t wake up from it and go back to ten minutes ago, before the earth had moved and everything changed.
“It’s my turn to ask you a question,” Maggie said. “The same one I wanted an answer to earlier. Who does Kit remind you of?”
Don’t say another word.
“The second she entered my office, I thought she bore a superficial resemblance to pictures of Grandma Cordell in her twenties.”
Pain ripped his gut apart. “You’re wrong.”
Maggie had to be wrong!
She slid an arm around him. “You’re the most honest person I know. Are you saying I’m wrong because at the core of your being you truly don’t see anything about her that reminds you of Grandma?”
Cord wheeled away.
Maggie walked around in front of him, forcing him to face her. He knew his sister. She wasn’t about to leave this alone.
“Have you slept with her yet?”
He flinched, hardly able to articulate. “No.” But if the boys hadn’t been with them yesterday…
“I’m going to ask the question one more time. Are you satisfied Kit couldn’t possibly be our sister?”
Shut up, Maggie!
“You look ill. That means you’re not sure. Neither am I.”
Dear Lord.
“Kit has had the opportunity to be around both of us, Cord. But she doesn’t know about her likeness to Grandma yet. At the moment she’s convinced we’re not related. Maybe we aren’t. The only way to obtain proof is to have her DNA test results compared to Mom’s and Dad’s. You’re going to have to stop her from leaving Salt Lake.”
At the thought of Kit’s DNA matching his parents’, Cord felt a shudder pass through his body. The idea of never holding her in his arms again, of never touching her…
How could she be
their sister?
If they found out she was his parents’ kidnapped baby, how would he be able to live around her as if nothing had gone on between them? Who had enough power to change the chemistry between a man and a woman drawn to each other by a force beyond their control?
What button did you push to shut off all desire, so you could love her like a sibling?
Cord shook his head. It wouldn’t be possible for him to do that. He knew himself too well. There was no pill he could swallow that would bring on a state of forgetfulness.
This was a nightmare that could turn out to be never-ending. He felt a wave of nausea.
“Cord?”
At the sound of Maggie’s voice, he reached for his cell phone and made a call. “Dwayne?”
“Hi, Cord. So far Kit Burke hasn’t shown up yet.”
I know. “Thanks for keeping a close vigil. I’m on my way back to the motel now. In case you see her before I get there, detain her until I arrive.”
“Will do.”
“There’ll be a bonus in your paycheck for this.” He clicked off.
“Cord?” This time his sister sounded alarmed. “You need to sit down. Your face has lost color.”
“I have to go!”
She wrapped supporting arms around him. She shouldn’t have done that. A sob rose in his throat.
“I don’t believe this is happening.” His shoulders shook. “I met her last Thursday. It was like the whole universe lit up for me.”
“I knew it,” Maggie whispered.
He eased away so he could look at her. “What do you know?”
“When you came to the penthouse the other night, I thought there was something different about my brother. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but you seemed excited by something. As if you were really alive. I couldn’t remember ever seeing you like that before, not even with Lisa. I thought it had to be because you’d met a very special woman. Much as I wanted to ask, I held back.
“Since I hate anyone cross-examining me about my own love life, or lack of it, I thought I’d better practice what I preach and leave yours alone.”
Cord was still trying to come to grips with the reality of the situation. “I pray to God she’s not our sister, Maggie. What kind of monster does that make me?”
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