by Nora Roberts
“I don’t know how long it took, but she started putting it together. Noticed that Roger closed the store after she left. And happened to see him go with you later. From what I can gather, she mentioned it to someone else, and that someone else had seen you come out of my office with Suzanne. Saw Jay there. It’s a small town, Callie. People know people, and people remember. The talk’s already getting up some steam that you’re Suzanne and Jay’s lost daughter. I thought you should know so you can decide how you want to handle it. How you want me to handle it.”
“For Christ’s sake.” Callie dragged off her hat, flung it onto the ground. “I don’t know. ‘No comment’ is not going to work. ‘No comment’ just makes people think they know just what you’re not commenting on.”
“Word gets out to the media and it’s inevitable. You’re going to need a statement. The Cullens are going to need a statement. So are your parents. And you’re all going to have to decide what tack you’re going to take.”
She stared across the dig. Jake had moved on, she noted, crouched down to where Frannie worked with Chuck. Jake’s hand rested lightly on the small of Frannie’s back.
Bill was with Dory now, running his mouth. From the looks of it Dory wasn’t nearly as pleased with his company as she’d been with Jake’s.
She wished she had nothing more pressing to think about than the small dramas of her team. “I don’t want to talk to the media. I don’t want to put my parents through that.”
“You’re not going to have a choice, Callie. This was a big story at the time. And Suzanne’s a local celebrity. You need to prepare.”
“Nobody prepares for a clusterfuck. You just get through it. Does Suzanne know?”
“I’ve got an appointment with her in an hour. What she doesn’t already know, I’ll tell her.”
Callie picked up her hat, jammed it back on her head. “I need that list. The names of her doctor, the nurses, whoever shared her hospital room when she delivered. I haven’t wanted to push her about that.”
“But you’d like me to.” Lana nodded. “No problem.”
“Get me Carlyle’s son’s address and phone number. I might have a way to convince him to talk to us. I need to call my mother, give her some warning. My mother,” she said when Lana remained silent. “I’ll leave Suzanne to you.”
“I understand.”
“It helps to have someone who does. Roger seemed to. He made it easy on me.”
“He’s a special man. And maybe, I don’t know, genetically something like this is less emotionally fraught for a man than it is for a woman. For a mother. I know Doug’s twisted up about it, but he’s able to stay level.”
“You and he got a thing going?”
“Hmm. The definition of ‘thing’ is still nebulous, but yes. I think we do. Is that a problem?”
“Not for me. It’s just weird, just one more strange connection. I pick a lawyer who’s got a thing going with my birth brother. I cop what could be one of the most important projects of my career. First my ex-husband gets hauled into it, then I find out I was born almost within spitting distance of where I’m working. My biological mother happens to be the driving force behind my favorite chocolate chip cookies and person or persons unknown throw murder and mayhem into the mix. Any one of those factors would be strange. But put them all together and—”
“A clusterfuck.”
“Doesn’t have the same ring when you say it, but yeah, there you go. Get that list from Suzanne,” Callie said after a moment. “It’s time to segment this project and start some serious digging.”
Suzanne listened to everything Lana had to say. She served tea and coffee cake. She provided a neatly organized computer-generated list of names from the past. She remained absolutely calm as she showed Lana to the door.
Then she whirled around at Jay. “I asked you to be here this morning because Lana said it was important to speak with both of us. Then you say nothing. You contribute nothing.”
“What did you want me to say? What did you want me to do? You’d already taken care of everything.”
“Yes, I took care of everything. Just like always.”
“You wouldn’t let me help. Just like always.”
She balled her hands into fists, then walked past him toward the kitchen. “Just go, Jay. Just go.”
He nearly did. She’d said that to him years before. Just go, Jay. And he had. But this time he strode after her, taking her arm as they reached the kitchen.
“You shut me out then, and you’re shutting me out now. And after you do, you look at me with disgust. What do you want, Suzanne? All I’ve ever tried to do is give you what you want.”
“I want my daughter back! I want Jessie.”
“You can’t have her.”
“You can’t, because you won’t do anything about it. You barely spoke to her in Lana’s office. You never touched her.”
“She didn’t want me to touch her. Do you think, do you really think that this isn’t killing me?”
“I think you wrote her off a long time ago.”
“That’s bullshit. I grieved, Suzanne, and I hurt. But you didn’t see, you didn’t hear. There was nothing for you but Jessie. You couldn’t be my wife, you couldn’t be my lover. You couldn’t even be my friend because you were too determined to be her mother.”
The words were like quick, sharp arrows thudding into her heart. He’d never said this sort of thing to her before. Never looked so angry, so hurt. “You were a grown man. You were her father.” She wrenched free and began to gather the tea things with shaking hands. “You closed off from me when I needed you most.”
“Maybe I did. But so did you. I needed you, too, Suzanne, and you weren’t there for me. I wanted to try to keep what we had together, and you were willing to sacrifice it all for what we lost.”
“She was my baby.”
“Our baby. Goddamnit, Suze, our baby.”
Her breath began to hitch. “You wanted to replace her.”
He stepped back as if she’d slapped him. “That’s a stupid thing to say. Stupid and cruel. I wanted to have another child with you. Not a replacement. I wanted to be a family again. I wanted my wife, and you wouldn’t let me touch you. We lost our daughter, Suzanne. But I lost my wife, too. I lost my best friend, I lost my family. I lost everything.”
She swiped at tears. “There’s no point in this. I need to go out and see Jessica—Callie.”
“No, you’re not.”
“What are you talking about? Didn’t you hear what Lana said? She’s been hurt.”
“I heard what she said. She also said that people are starting to talk, and this is going to put her in a difficult position. You go out there to the site, people see you, and you’re just adding fuel to the gossip.”
“I don’t care if people gossip. She’s my daughter. Why shouldn’t people know it?”
“Because she cares, Suzanne. Because if you go out there you’ll push her that much further away. Because if you don’t wait for her to come to you, if you don’t let her draw the lines you’re going to lose her a second time. She doesn’t love us.”
Her lips trembled. “How can you say that to me? She does. Deep inside, she does. She has to.”
“I hate saying it to you. I hate hurting you. I’d rather step aside again, walk away again, than cause you a single moment’s pain. But if I don’t say it, it’ll only hurt you more.”
He took her arms, firmed his grip when she tried to step away. As he should’ve done, he thought now, all along. He should have firmed his grip on her. “She feels sorry for us. She feels obligated to us. And maybe, if we give her enough time, enough room, she’ll feel something more.”
“I want her to come home.”
“Honey.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “I know.”
“I want to hold her.” Wrapping her arms tight around her waist, Suzanne rocked. “I want her to be a baby again so I can just hold her.”
“I wanted that, too. I know you don
’t believe me, but I wanted that with all my heart. Just to . . . just to touch her.”
“Oh God, Jay.” She lifted her hand, brushed a tear from his cheek with her finger. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Maybe, just this once, you could hold me instead. Or let me hold you.” He slipped his arms around her. “Just let me hold you, Suzanne.”
“I’m trying to be strong. I’ve tried to be strong all these years, and now I can’t stop crying.”
“It’s all right. It’s just us. Nobody has to know.” It had been so long, he thought, since she’d let him get this close. Since he’d felt her head on his shoulder. Since she’d put her arms around him.
“I thought . . . the first time I went to see her, I thought it was enough to know that our baby was safe and well. That she’d grown up so pretty, so smart. I thought it would be enough, Jay. But it wasn’t. Every day I want more. Five minutes back, then an hour. A day, then a year.”
“She’s got beautiful hands. Did you see? They’re kind of nicked up—from her work, I guess. But she has those narrow hands, with long fingers. And I thought, when I saw them, I thought, Oh, we’d have given her piano lessons. With hands like that she ought to play the piano.”
Slowly, carefully, she eased back. Then she framed his face in her hands and lifted it. He was weeping—silent tears. He was always silent, she remembered, when you expected a storm of grief or of joy.
She remembered now he’d wept just like this at the birth of each of their children. With his hand clinging to hers, with tears running down his cheeks, he’d made no sound.
“Oh, Jay.” Going with her heart, she touched her lips to his damp cheeks. “She plays the cello.”
“She does?”
“Yes. I saw it in her motel room, and there’s a little biography of her on the web, attached to some of the projects she’s worked on. It says she plays the cello. And that she graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon.”
“Yeah?” He tried to compose himself, but his voice was thick and broken as he dragged out a handkerchief. “That’s a tough school.”
“Would you like to see the printout? There’s a picture of her. She looks so intellectual and serious.”
“I’d like that.”
She nodded, started to walk to the computer. “Jay, I know you’re right, about her coming to us, about her defining what we’re going to be to each other. But it’s just so hard to wait. It’s so hard when she’s this close, to wait.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard if we waited together.”
She smiled, as she once had smiled when her best friend gave her her first kiss. “Maybe it wouldn’t.”
It took some maneuvering. It always did when it came to Douglas, Lana thought. Yet she’d not only engineered another date, but had talked him into letting her meet him in the apartment over the bookstore.
She wanted to see where he lived, however temporary it might be. And she thought they might start working on defining what this thing was they had going between them.
He called out a “come in” when she knocked on the outside entrance. It was, she surmised, a Woodsboro habit not to lock doors. It wasn’t one she’d picked up, even after more than two years. Too much city girl, she decided, as she opened the door.
The sofa in the living room had a baggy navy blue slipcover, and the single chair with it was a hunter green with worn arms. The choices seemed to have nothing to do with the rug, which was a brown-and-orange braid.
Maybe he was color-blind.
There was a waist-high counter separating living area from kitchen. And the kitchen, she noted with approval, was spotless.
Either he valued cleanliness or didn’t cook. She could live with either option.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” he shouted from the next room. “I just need to finish this.”
“No hurry.”
It gave her time to poke around. There were a few mementos scattered about. A trophy for MVP in his high school baseball’s championship year, a very broken-in ball glove, what seemed to be a scale model of a medieval catapult. And, of course, the books.
She approved all of these as well, but it was the selection of art on the walls that won her envy, and made her wonder more about the man.
There were prints of Mucha’s The Four Seasons, a Waterhouse mermaid, and Parrish’s Ecstasy and Daybreak.
A man who put fancy art on his walls and kept a high-school baseball trophy was a man worth getting to know better.
To get started, she walked to the bedroom doorway.
A very plain bed, she noted. No headboard and a wrinkled blue spread pulled over it haphazardly. And the dresser looked like an heirloom, dark, aged mahogany with brass pulls. No mirror.
He was working at a laptop on a battered metal desk, his fingers moving efficiently over the keys.
He wore a black T-shirt, jeans and, to her fascination, tortoiseshell glasses.
She felt a little curl of lust in her belly and stepped into the room.
His hair was damp, she noticed, just a bit damp yet. She could smell a lingering whiff of soap from the shower he must have taken a short time before.
She gave in to impulse and, stepping behind him, trailed her fingers through all that dark, damp hair.
He jerked, swiveled around in the chair and stared at her through the lenses. “Sorry. Forgot. I just wanted to get this inventory . . . What?” he said as she continued to stand, continued to smile.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses.”
“Just to work. On the computer. And to read. Stuff. Are you early?”
“No, right on time.” He seemed just a bit nervous to have her there, in his bedroom. And because he did, she felt powerful. “No hurry though. The movie doesn’t start for an hour.”
“An hour. Right.” She still had on her lawyer suit. Pinstripes. What was there about pinstripes on a woman? “We were going to grab something to eat first.”
“We were.” She loved the way his eyes widened when she slid into his lap. “Or we could stay in. I could fix something here.”
“There’s not much to . . .” He trailed off when she lowered her head and teased his mouth with hers. “Not much, but we could probably make do. If that’s what you want.”
She ran her hands up his chest, linked them around his neck. “Hungry?”
“Oh yeah.”
“What’re you in the mood for?” she asked, then laughed when he crushed his mouth to hers.
Sixteen
She wound herself around him. Surrounded him, was all he could think as her taste, her scent, her shape dazzled his senses.
It was like being possessed, and it had started the instant she’d risen to her toes and touched her lips to his outside the restaurant.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted to burn this need out of his system or steer it in. He only knew he needed more of her. Now.
“Let me . . .” The chair creaked ominously under their combined weight. A car backfired on the street. But all he could think was how quickly he wanted to get his hands between them, deal with the buttons of her shirt and find her.
“I intend to.” Her heart was thudding, a thick, pounding beat in her breast, her throat. She loved the feel of it—that hard pump of life. She eased back to give his hands room to work. “The glasses were the kicker, you know.”
“I’ll never take them off again.”
“That’s okay.” She feathered her fingers through his hair, then slid the glasses off, folded the earpieces neatly. She set them on the desk as he undid the buttons on her white oxford shirt. “They’ve already done the job.”
“I could say the same about the pinstripes. They just kill me.”
“It’s Brooks Brothers.”
“God bless them.” She was so perfect—almost tiny, with skin smooth and white as milk. He could have lapped at it like a cat. “But why don’t we . . .” He tugged the jacket off her shoulders, let it catch at her elbows. Her shirt was open, and the bra beneath
was a slick of silk over a soft, subtle swell. “That’s a nice look