“And you paid for it.”
“I did it for Adam. To give him a chance.”
And Joel would bet he wasn’t the first child she’d done something like that for. The realization caused something inside his heart to shift, settle. “Is Adam the youngest child you’ve had at the camp?”
Riane shook her head. “He was the first, but not the youngest. We had two-year-old twin girls last summer.”
“And your heart breaks for every one of them,” he guessed. “Not just the little ones, but every single kid who walks through the gates of that camp.”
“Am I that transparent?”
“You’re that devoted,” he said. “I’ve never known anyone who gives so much for so little in return.”
She shook her head again. “I get so much more than I give. Every day I spend with those kids is a gift.”
“Ah. The lonely, only child syndrome.”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “I’ve always wanted a sibling, or a dozen siblings. A sister was my first choice, but I would gladly have settled for a brother.”
Her admission, and the undisguised yearning in her voice, tugged at something inside Joel. It might very well be within his power to give her what she’d always wanted, but at what cost? If Riane really was Arden Doherty’s sister, that revelation would tear the rest of her family apart.
Would she thank him—or hate him—for the part he would play in bringing that fact to light? He couldn’t know. He only knew that he didn’t have the energy to tackle any more truths with her tonight.
“I really should be on my way,” he said. “So you can get some sleep.”
If she thought the change of topic abrupt, she didn’t comment on it. She just walked him to the front door. “Thank you for coming with me tonight. I’m glad you were there.”
Unable to resist, he cupped her cheek in his hand, rubbed his thumb gently over the fullness of her bottom lip. How was it, he wondered, that this woman who was so obviously unsuited for him could nevertheless have come to mean so much so soon?
“Me, too.”
She smiled, a slow curving of the lips that did strange things to his insides.
And before he knew what he was doing, before he could remember any one of the dozen reasons that it was a bad idea to get more involved with her, he lowered his head and touched his mouth to hers.
Her lips were soft and warm, and he sank into the kiss. He tried to keep it simple, to maintain some distance. But then her tongue slipped inside his mouth, searching, tasting, teasing, and he was lost. With a groan Joel slid his hands down her slender torso to her hips, pulling her more fully against him. Soft curves molded to hard angles, joining them together as completely as two pieces of a puzzle.
Oh, man, he was obviously in big trouble if he was starting to think in terms of romantic clichés. He wasn’t ready for this, he didn’t want this, but he was damned if he could do anything about it. His attraction to Riane was one thing—he could dismiss that as purely instinctive, nothing more than a natural physical reaction. But the sweetness of her kiss, the yielding of her body, were doing strange things to his heart. He didn’t want to get emotionally involved. He couldn’t.
His mind screamed at him to retreat; his body urged him to advance. Since he feared his body might collapse from sheer exhaustion, and since he knew he couldn’t take their relationship to the next level until he’d clarified the reasons for his presence in West Virginia, he opted for retreat.
Slowly, regretfully, he eased his lips from hers.
Riane opened her eyes. Then she ran her tongue over her bottom lip, as if to savor the taste of him there. The unconsciously seductive gesture only aroused him further. He forced himself to take a step back.
“I’ll call you tomorrow. Later,” he amended.
And he made a hasty retreat.
He didn’t call, Riane thought with more than a little annoyance when she walked into the kitchen later that morning. If he’d called, she could have prepared herself. Instead he’d just shown up, and she was helpless to prevent the silly flip-flops her heart was doing in her chest when she found him at the table enjoying a breakfast of pancakes and bacon.
“You said you would call,” she said by way of greeting.
Joel’s head swiveled toward her, his eyes skimming over her short, silky robe with obvious approval.
“Good morning,” he said. “And I did call. Sophie said you were sleeping and invited me to come for breakfast.”
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” Sophie said, flipping more pancakes on the griddle. “Especially considering how helpful Mr. Logan was last night.”
Riane took a mug from the cupboard. “I thanked Mr. Logan for his assistance. I’m sure breakfast wasn’t necessary.”
“Not necessary,” Joel agreed. “But appreciated. These are great pancakes, Sophie.”
Sophie beamed and refilled his plate, then set another plate at the table for Riane.
“Sit,” Sophie directed.
“I’m not hungry,” Riane said.
“Eat.”
Riane sighed and sat. Sophie continued to watch until Riane picked up the fork.
“Where’s Adam?” Joel asked, not bothering to hide his smirk.
“Still sleeping.” He’d been restless and whimpering, so Riane had sat beside his bed throughout the night, his hand secure in hers. She didn’t mind—she hadn’t been able to sleep anyway as the memory of that bone-melting, skin-tingling kiss she’d shared with Joel had kept her body stimulated long past the hour when her brain was more than ready to shut down.
“You should be sleeping, too,” Sophie told her.
“I’m okay,” Riane said, stifling a yawn.
Sophie’s look was one of patent disbelief but she made no further argument. “I’ll go see if he’s ready for breakfast,” she said, dropping a fresh stack of pancakes on the platter before ducking out of the room.
“Actually, I’m glad you’re here,” Riane said to Joel.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I want to hire you.”
“Sorry?”
“You are a private investigator, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he agreed slowly.
She nodded. “I’ve been thinking about this all night. As much as I want Adam to stay here, I know his aunt needs to be found.”
“Social services will track her down,” Joel said.
“I know. Eventually. But you could do it faster.”
“I could,” he agreed. “Why are you so anxious to find her?”
“Because Adam has a right to know what’s going to happen to him. He’s had enough upheaval in his life lately, and I don’t want him to get settled here only to be torn away again.”
“What if the aunt can’t take him?”
“Then at least we’ll know, and we’ll deal with it.”
He hesitated. “I’m not sure I should get involved in this.”
Riane shrugged. “If you can’t do it, I’ll find someone else. I just thought, since you were here, with so much time on your hands…”
“Ahh. You’re trying to keep me occupied—away from you.”
“I’m offering you a legitimate job. Take it or leave it.”
And that was how Joel found himself driving through the streets of Woodburn, Pennsylvania, on Monday morning. It had been remarkably easy to find Lois Ryder. A phone call to a friend at the Department of Motor Vehicles and he had her address—1314 Paradise Avenue.
If it wasn’t really paradise, it was a hell of a lot closer to it than the run-down apartment complex where Adam had lived with his mother. The neighborhood was postcard pretty, with well-kept houses and neatly manicured lawns littered with bicycles and toys. Number 1314 was a large two-story with blue siding and white gingerbread trim.
Joel parked his vehicle across the street and picked up his digital camera, snapping a few quick shots.
If only his search for Rheanne Elliott had been half as successful.
Rhean
ne. Riane.
He knew it wasn’t just a coincidence. His gut didn’t believe in coincidences.
Unfortunately, his gut was a little short on facts.
He tossed the camera back onto the empty passenger seat and pulled away from the curb, unable to shake the feeling that the woman he’d been hired to find was right in front of him.
After his trip to Woodburn, Joel decided to return to Fairweather to check in with his client, and they agreed to meet for coffee at the courthouse café.
“I’m glad you could meet me on such short notice,” Joel said, as Shaun McIver pulled out the empty chair across from him.
“I’m anxious for an update,” Shaun told him.
“I don’t have much to tell you,” Joel warned. “It’s almost as if the child ceased to exist when she was taken out of her parents’ home.”
“Gavin Elliott wasn’t any help?” Shaun prompted.
“Not much.” In his brief meeting with Rheanne’s biological father, Joel had got the impression the man was holding something back, but he didn’t share that feeling. “He did lead me to a Samuel J. Rutherford, the attorney who handled the adoption.”
“Well, that’s something,” Shaun said.
“It’s a dead end,” Joel said dryly. He waited for the waitress who’d refilled their coffee cups to move out of earshot before continuing. “Sam Rutherford passed away three years ago.
“His secretary still works at the firm and she found an old file labeled Elliott-Adoption. But the only documentation in it was a copy of Rheanne Elliott’s birth certificate, which we already had from the registrar’s office.
“We really don’t have anything else,” Joel admitted. “By all accounts, Rheanne seemed to drop off the face of the earth before her second birthday. But in August of that year, another child’s birth was registered through the American Consulate in Tavaria. Her name is also Riane, spelled R-I-A-N-E.”
“But she would be two years younger than the woman we’re looking for,” Shaun pointed out.
Joel shook his head. “The child’s birth wasn’t registered until she was two years old.”
“You think the people who adopted Arden’s sister took her out of the country and registered her as their own child?”
“I think that’s a possibility,” Joel agreed.
“Do you have any other evidence?”
“It’s all circumstantial,” Joel warned.
“I’m not worried about it holding up in court,” Shaun said dryly. “I just want to find my fiancée’s sister.”
“Okay.” Joel summarized the few facts he and Mike had managed to compile: “The lawyer who handled the adoption of Rheanne Elliott is a distant relative of the other Riane’s mother, and the caseworker assigned to investigate the complaint is her godmother.”
Shaun considered this information. “Don’t you think they would have changed her name, not just the spelling?”
“That bothered me at first,” Joel admitted. “But the child was almost two years old. It would have been traumatic enough for her to be removed from her home and sent to a new family in a new country without changing her identity as well.”
“Where is this Riane now?” Shaun asked.
“Mapleview, West Virginia.”
“You’ve seen her? Met with her?”
“Yes, on both counts.”
“When can I meet her?” Shaun said.
Joel hesitated. “If this woman is Arden’s sister, she has no idea she was adopted.”
“I hadn’t considered that possibility,” Shaun admitted.
“There’s something else you need to consider.”
“What’s that?”
“If I’m right—and I still can’t be one hundred percent certain—the adoptive mother is Ellen Rutherford-Quinlan.”
Shaun frowned. “Rutherford-Quinlan? As in Senator Rutherford-Quinlan?”
“Yeah.”
“Christ.”
Joel just nodded.
“I know it would mean the world to Arden to find her sister,” Shaun said. “But I’m not sure she’d want to turn Rheanne’s whole world upside down in the process.”
“Arden still doesn’t know you’re looking for her?”
Shaun shook his head. “I wanted to wait until we knew something definite.”
“The senator and her husband have been out of town,” Joel told him. “They should be back on Friday.”
“Do you think you’ll get anything out of her?”
“I can only hope.” Without any concrete evidence that the senator and her husband had adopted a child, there was little else he could do.
“If she won’t cooperate, what about DNA testing?”
“It’s something we could consider,” Joel agreed. “As a last resort. There are a few problems with that approach, however.”
“Such as?”
“Primarily the fact that Arden and Rheanne are only half sisters. Without a comparative sample from the mother, the results wouldn’t be one hundred percent conclusive. Plus, the labs are so backed up with DNA testing for criminal trials and paternity cases, it could be months before we got any results.”
“I can’t wait months.”
“Are we working on a deadline?”
“Not really.” Shaun raked a hand through his hair. “I just want this to be over for Arden. She hasn’t seen her sister in more than twenty-two years, but I know not a day has gone by in all that time that she hasn’t felt the void in her life.
“I see her looking at that picture sometimes—the same picture you have a copy of—and I know she’s wondering, worrying. She needs to know. She wants to move on with her life, to put the past behind her, but I don’t think she’ll ever be able to do that until she knows what happened to her sister.”
“Then you want me to follow up on this?”
Shaun nodded, giving him the green light to go back to West Virginia.
Joel wished he could be making the trip for any reason other than to destroy Riane’s beliefs about her perfect family.
On Tuesday, Riane received Joel’s report on Lois and David Ryder. By courier. She sat at her father’s desk in the den and thumbed through the pages, wondering what it meant that Joel had chosen to send the file rather than deliver it himself.
Maybe he’d found the witness he’d come to Mapleview in search of. Maybe he’d finished his business in West Virginia and had gone back to Pennsylvania. Maybe he’d found someone else to show him around—a woman who might be willing to play tour guide in the bedroom.
Riane groaned and shook her head. She’d hired Joel to find Adam’s aunt, and he’d done that. Anything else he did or didn’t do wasn’t any of her business.
So, resolved, she focused her attention on the information in front of her. Lois Ryder, thirty-seven years of age, high school physics teacher. Married twelve years to David Ryder, an electrical engineer and Little League coach. Lois and David were the proud parents of two boys, Matthew and Michael, ages ten and eight. Photos of their home, a four-bedroom in Woodburn, Pennsylvania, were in the file, as was a telephone number.
Tuesday night Riane called Lois Ryder. Wednesday Lois came to pick up her nephew. Her easy and immediate acceptance of the child she’d never known reassured Riane. He was going to a good home, a good family. And he’d been so thrilled to meet his cousins he didn’t even look back as they drove away.
It was a positive resolution, and Riane was confident that the security of a new family would help Adam adjust—as much as possible—to the loss of his mother. She was thrilled that he would finally have a future to look forward to.
Why then, she wondered as she watched the van disappear, was she crying?
Twenty-four hours.
In twenty-four hours Ellen and Ryan Quinlan would be home and he could get answers to the questions that had plagued him for the past several weeks. That was the first thought on Joel’s mind when he awoke two days later.
Two excruciatingly long days in which he’d focused his
attention on one goal: staying away from Riane. The realization that his feelings had grown so quickly out of control scared the hell out of him, and he knew his only hope was to keep his distance and forget about Riane in any context except how she might be the answer to his investigation.
He grabbed his keys and headed for the door. He needed to get out of this room, to stop thinking about Riane. He told himself he was going out for a bite to eat. Yet somehow he found himself pulling into the long winding drive that led to the Quinlan mansion.
“I thought you’d skipped town,” Riane said, when she came downstairs and found him waiting in the den.
He managed a smile, wondering if he’d ever get used to her stunning beauty, wondering if he’d ever see her again after he finished the job he’d come here to do. “I wouldn’t go without saying goodbye.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“No. I was just thinking about you and somehow this is where I ended up.” He glanced around the room. “Is Adam gone?”
She nodded, blinked away a hint of moisture in her eyes. “Yesterday.”
He knew there was nothing he could say to make her feel better, so he just put his arms around her. After a brief hesitation, she leaned into him, accepting his comfort.
“Have dinner with me tonight,” he said, his earlier resolution to avoid spending time with her pushed aside by a more basic need just to be with her.
Time was running out. He knew the end of the charade was inevitable, but he wasn’t yet ready to let her go. He didn’t know if he ever would be. There could be no future for them—the senator’s daughter and the reclusive P.I. But the logic of the mind couldn’t suppress the yearnings of his heart.
“I can’t.” Riane pulled out of his arms with obvious reluctance. “There’s a charity auction at the country club that I promised to attend.”
“With Stuart?” he guessed, feeling oddly annoyed.
She nodded.
“Tomorrow, then?” He was begging for scraps of her time, and he didn’t care.
But she shook her head. “My parents are coming home tomorrow.”
Somehow, the return of the senator and her husband lost all significance when he was with their daughter.
Some Kind of Hero Page 10