Love on the Line

by Aares, Pamela

  “I can’t change our family and neither can you,” he said in a flat tone she rarely heard from him. “And you can’t change that you have a responsibility. It might be one you didn’t sign up for, but Grandpa’s money, he made it fair, by providing something of value, and someone is going to disperse that money back into the world. It should be you, Cara, you and a team you put together. Not some hairball ass that Dad owes a favor, and not the government. Grandpa intended that the funds go to causes that can make lives better, and make the world a better place.” He gestured to her small kitchen. “If you hide out here, you’re making a choice about where the money goes, but you’re letting a jerk direct it. You’re giving him power he doesn’t deserve.”

  “Laci felt worthless,” she said, not following his train of thought.

  Quinn whirled toward her.

  “Cara, Laci’s problem was different, we’ve been over that. You have to let all this stuff about her go.” He tilted his head, as if her words were just registering. “And you can’t possibly think that if people know you for who you are that they won’t like you—that you’re not worthy of people’s affection.”

  She looked away. Hearing Quinn state her fear so baldly made it seem both immense and ridiculous at the same time.

  “Cara—you’re kidding me, right?

  She shook her head.

  He wrapped his hands around her neck and pressed his forehead to hers.

  “You knucklehead, of course you’re worthy. I love you, don’t I? And Mom and Dad, for all their quirks, they love you. And then there was Grandpa. He was a pretty good judge of character. He liked you. Hell, even that mean old dog of his liked you. And she used to bite my ankles any chance she got.”

  Cara laughed as hot tears spilled down her face.

  “And haven’t you found friends here, in this town?” He wiped at her tears with his sleeve. “Don’t they like you for being the delightful pain in the ass that you are?”

  She slugged him, and he pulled away laughing.

  “So... ?”

  So... He was right, the jerk. “Yeah, I’ve got some good friends.”

  “And I repeat, so... ?”

  So what did it mean? It meant that she was worthy of being a friend, worthy for just being herself. She’d proved it, but holding on to the snarled tangle of her old fears, she just hadn’t been able to let the realization register.

  “Anybody whose affections change because of this isn’t someone you should be friends with in the first place.” He picked up a knife from her table and tossed it from hand to hand. “Lesson one in dealing with being a Barrington.” He pointed the knife at her. “And you’ll just have to suck up the hangers-on and trust that I can help you with that bit. It’s not as hard as you think.”

  Why had it taken her so long to see what Quinn had nailed in less than half an hour? She grinned—how she hated when he was right and she was wrong. But this was one time she was happy he was right.

  But then it struck her. She might be ready to face stepping into a leadership role in the world of philanthropy, especially if she could do it on her own terms, and she might be ready to face the reactions of her friends and the people in the town, but in no way did she feel ready to face Ryan. Now that she’d discovered what love felt like, she wasn’t ready to lose it.

  She turned away as a shudder ran through her.

  Quinn spun her to face him.

  “Want to tell me what other demons we need to slay today?”

  He slashed his arms through the air using the knife as a pretend sword, and she couldn’t help but smile.

  She sat down at her table and told him about Ryan.

  He shot her a grin. “Little Sis lands an All-Star, huh? Think he can get me tickets to the game tomorrow?”

  He liked calling her Little Sis, even though he was only seventeen minutes older than she was.

  “Quinn, it’s not funny. I finally meet a guy I care about, and he thinks I’m everything I’m not.” She closed her eyes. “He wants everything I’m not.”

  “Hardly. He just doesn’t know that you make twenty times more than he does. Might scratch his ego.”

  “It’s not his ego I’m worried about. He has integrity. He hates lies. I hate lies. It’s a disaster.”

  “You can talk to him and explain. But wait till the season’s over. I want the Giants to win the pennant, and he’s their best bat. Don’t want to screw with that,” he said with a laugh that told her he was only half-joking.

  “You’ll be glad to know I’ve already guarded against screwing up his season. I’m dodging him. And everybody else.” She glanced out her kitchen window. “Which car did you bring?”

  At this point worrying about cars in front of her house was ridiculous, but she couldn’t help it.

  “It’s a rental. A Ford. Your secret’s safe.” He held out his hand. “Let’s go into your living room. I have something I want you to see. Something worth flying three thousand miles to show you.”

  He sat down at her desk and fitted a thumb drive into the side of her laptop. A document spread across the screen with several columns of numbers, narrow paragraphs below each.

  “Alston’s suspicions about Dray Bender were right on.” He reached and tugged her to his side. “Look at this.”

  She scanned the columns and numbers, read Quinn’s careful notes alongside each.

  “He’s skimming funds,” she said, not hiding her dismay.

  “Boat loads. But he’s shrewd. He’s cleverly disguised his trail; we won’t be able to prosecute him. Alston says we can’t prove anything.” He clicked the document shut.

  “I still can’t believe Dad hired him.”

  “He hired him by phone,” Quinn said. “From Australia. Our illustrious father didn’t want to interrupt his golf tournament; an ostrich had just eaten his balls.”

  She laughed, but she wasn’t so easily put off track.

  “It’s easier for you, Quinn, easier for you to step up. You fit the lifestyle. You love it.”

  Quinn pressed his lips into a line and crossed his arms.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t,” she said. “It’s me, remember? I shared a womb with you.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Damn close quarters.” He looked around the living room. “Sort of like this place.”

  She punched his arm.

  “Okay, I like your place. Especially the roads leading to it. Perfect for a new Veyron Legend.”

  “Not happening. This town already has one Bugatti. We hardly need another.”

  “I might like this Ryan guy.”

  “That’s the problem—you would like him. I think I love him.”

  Quinn whistled. “If he breaks your heart, I’ll flatten his tires.”

  “I’m touched. But my deception is a gap even an All-Star won’t be able to leap.” She leaned her hip against the edge of her desk. “I told him I couldn’t see him for a while.”

  “Foul play, Cara. You’re making his decisions for him. I might remind you, being male, that I know something of the male mind. We hate having decisions being made for us. Hate it.”

  “It seemed the right thing to do at the time. What happened to you not wanting me to mess up his season?”

  “I said that before I knew how serious you two are.” He jumped up from the chair. “Look, I can help you sort out your All-Star later. Right now we need to hop into my very slow, very boring rental car and go see Alston. Whether you step up as president of the foundation or not, we need a plan, one with teeth that can oust Dray Bender. Grandpa wouldn’t like any of this.”

  “He should’ve had another plan,” Cara said. She didn’t like the defensiveness in her voice.

  “Maybe this plan was his best shot. Maybe you were.”

  “You sound like Alston.”

  “Been practicing,” Quinn said. “Cara, you can help thirty people or you can help thirty thousand—or three hundred thousand. You could fund this clinic you’re so worked up about. Hey, you could even
help me with Moonbird.”

  “Moon bird?”

  “It’s the name of a very special Rufus red knot, a bird that flies every year from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.”

  Quinn’s eyes lit with the fire she’d always envied. He lived his passion, jumped into projects with his whole heart.

  “This particular guy is a survivor—he’s about eighteen years old, and all told, he’s flown a distance greater than the one between the earth and moon.”

  “You’ve always loved your birds.”

  “He’s a poster child—poster bird—for the whole species. The populations are in trouble. The lords of industry have discovered that the birds’ critical meal for their midflight refueling—the eggs of the horseshoe crab in the Delaware Bay—are also a source for lysate, a chemical used by the medical industry to test for contaminants in injectable drugs or implants. Lysate is a two-million-dollar-a-year industry.”

  “Horseshoe-crab eggs?”

  He nodded.

  “Bender’s probably funding the pharmaceutical firms you’re trying to stop.”

  Quinn pressed his lips together, but didn’t laugh.

  He paced the room. She knew his stride, knew how he ran a hand over his face when he was thinking. She’d missed him. Since she’d moved to Albion Bay and he’d begun the work with migratory birds and the project in China, they’d rarely seen each other.

  “We’re hoping to get the Rufus listed as a threatened species. And maybe train egg collectors to harvest eggs in ways that won’t kill off the crabs.” He shook his head. “You don’t want to know how they do it now.”

  “No fair playing the abused-creatures card,” she said, only half-joking. “You know I have no defenses against that argument.”

  He stopped midroom and planted his feet wide. Jammed his hands to his hips. “The work will take more money than I have at hand, more than my foundation can grant.” He grinned. “See, it begins already, the path to your door. Even I have an ulterior motive.”

  He sat on the arm of her sofa.

  “You can do this, Cara. I know you. We can work out the details and the timing. Maybe keep it under wraps for a while until—”

  “Quinn, you don’t get this town. And you don’t know Ryan. I can’t explain what I feel for him. It just feels right, like he’s my future. I’m afraid to lose that. And stepping up, acknowledging who I am, acknowledging my connections... Well, I’m afraid that will destroy what Ryan and I have... destroy everything.”

  She heard herself say the word afraid and remembered the advice she’d given Molly: fear never solved anything. She pressed her palms against her eyes, felt the pressure, savored the calming darkness.

  She could run, but she couldn’t run forever. And she was tired of hiding.

  Quinn was right. It was time to face her fears. Time to step up. Time to stop using Laci as an excuse and instead stand in the shoes of the person she’d become. And it was time to take her own advice and practice turning up the positive. High time. She’d been touting the benefits of the practice, but now she needed to dig in and use it.

  She pulled her hands from her eyes and held a hand out to him. “I get it,” she said. “I’ll do it—I’ll take the position.”

  He took her hand. “I knew you would.”

  “No gloating.”

  “Can’t promise that.” He grinned.

  As his fingers curved around hers and he pulled her from the sofa, she felt a strange lightness, a lifting, as if the forward motion of her decision was already at work in the world and in her. But the slow churn in her stomach warned her of the shadowed path ahead.

  “But I still need some time.”

  “Alton’s a master,” Quinn said. “I imagine he can pull off a stall or two.”

  She grabbed her purse from beside the TV.

  “Nice TV,” Quinn said. “Not like you.”

  “It was a gift from Ryan.”

  “He must love you if he bought you a forty-eight-inch flat screen.”

  “You have been living in cities for way too long. Love is not determined by the size of screen diagonals.”

  A grin curved across his face. “Sis, someday you’ll realize that most guys still believe size matters.”

  She ribbed him as they got into his rental car and then quizzed him about his recent trip to China. But with each mile they covered as Quinn drove toward San Francisco, Cara ran her decisions over and over in her mind.

  Maybe there’d been another way to carve out her life, one not based on deceit, one that wouldn’t have required such machinations. But what she’d done had seemed her best shot. And though she was a realist, the trace of optimist in her fought to hold on to the hope that she wouldn’t have to give up loving Ryan. The realist knew better, of course. She’d be lucky to come out of the web she’d spun with any friends at all.

  And wouldn’t that be ironic, running off her true friends through her own actions, through the inescapable confession of her reasons for seeking out real friends and community in the first place.

  Ryan bounded into the hotel bar and spotted Alex right off. Now that he was out from under the paternity suit, Boston took its place once again as Ryan’s favorite road trip. He loved the bookstores and the sophisticated fans. A guy could actually go out for a drink and not be interrupted by well-meaning fans. They’d wait in the wings until he paid his bill, then politely hold out whatever they wanted signed. Very civilized, Boston.

  “I’ll have what he’s having,” Ryan said to the bartender. Copley’s Bar was a favorite with its wood-paneled walls, old gaslights and cushy leather barstools that had probably been used for a century. It was no wonder his mother loved visiting her girlhood home. Everything had an air of mystery, of history, and the city was damned gorgeous. Except in the winter. He’d never want to live buried under ice and snow; he hadn’t gotten that gene from his blue-blood mother.

  The bartender plunked down a tumbler with a couple fingers of amber liquid. Ryan lifted the glass and sniffed. “Angelfire?”

  “You bet,” Alex said as he sipped from his glass. “Best whiskey around.”

  “Good for plotting and scheming?” Ryan sipped at his drink, felt the fire burn down his throat. “Because we’ve got some work ahead.”

  “Whatever you say, this fundraiser you’re planning must have you jazzed. You hit the hide off every ball tonight. The cycle, man—Boston is still reeling.” He raised his glass in a low-key toast.

  “I sweated that last hit—wasn’t sure it would get over the fence.” He’d never hit for the cycle before; there was nothing like a single, a double, a triple and then a two-run homer to set off a good buzz. “Eight games to go. We win three and we’ve clinched our spot in the playoffs.”

  “Don’t count those chickens yet,” Alex said with a finger wag.

  “I’d rather count up the advance pledges we’ve got for the Albion Bay clinic.”

  “I’m in. Scotty and Chloe are too. We’ll have to work on the rest of the guys. Most of them have never heard of Albion Bay.”

  “The Pacific-Union Club is all set. Walsh pulled some strings for me.”

  “You have it bad, my boy,” Alex said over the rim of his glass.

  “You’re one to talk. Scotty told me you’re going to the Pribilof Islands for marine mammal research at Christmas. You do realize those islands are between Alaska and Northern Siberia? It’ll be thirty degrees—below zero. Not counting wind chill.”

  “Wind chill’s nothing compared to telling Jackie I wouldn’t go with her,” Alex said with a somber look. “I’ll be the one in the Nanook suit, bearing flasks of brandy.”

  “What we do for love,” Ryan said, shaking his head.

  “We’re talking love now, are we?” Alex drew his brows together. “Glad to know these efforts are for the big prize.”

  “It’s for the clinic,” Ryan countered, not yet willing to lay himself bare.

  A smile lit Alex’s eyes as he raised his glass. “Well, then, her
e’s to the clinic.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Cara sipped at her coffee and read through the foot-high sheaf of papers that Alston had given her after she and Quinn had met with him in the city.

  Alston had been pleased that she’d decided to take the reins at the foundation and had agreed to put protocols in place that would help maintain her anonymity, at least for a while. Both Quinn and Alston were doubtful about her ability to delay, but Alston had gone along with her plan. She’d have to fly back to New York at the end of the month and meet with the board; there was no way around that. And she’d have to deal with Bender sooner than she’d hoped. It hadn’t helped that her dad had given Bender her cell number. Bender had wasted no time in calling and leaving two artificially calm and yet subtly threatening messages. She’d asked Alston to do all he could to keep him away from her, at least for a while. It was going to be a pleasure to eventually oust the guy.

  If all went well, she’d bought herself three precious weeks.

  She shoved the stack of papers aside and sorted through her emails, reading for a third time Jackie Brandon’s request that Cara meet her later that afternoon at a café a few miles from Albion Bay.

  She had no idea why Jackie wanted to meet with her so badly. She looked Jackie and Alex up on the Internet. When she saw the stories about Jackie—Lady Jacqueline Brandon—and how she’d shunned her aristocratic past to set up shop as a veterinarian—with marine mammals, no less—a creeping unease swept her and she wished she’d stalled or at least put off meeting with Jackie for a couple of weeks.

  Jackie’s face had seemed familiar on the day they’d helped with the sea lion, but Cara still couldn’t call up where she’d seen her before.

  Scores of scenarios shot through her mind as she drove the winding road to the café. Perhaps Jackie had heard she lost her job driving the bus. She shuddered at having to discuss job leads. Maybe she wanted to ask Cara to volunteer at her lab, or maybe she needed an assistant in her office up there.

  But as Cara pulled into the gravel parking lot next to the café, the sense of unease squeezed deeper into her chest.