“Lady, you have a hell of a lot of relatives. Getting them to agree to meet with me and then talking to them all takes time. And I’ve got to fit sleep in there somewhere.”
She’d been struggling to maintain distance between herself and the others. Hearing Quartermain refer to them as her family, having him bring her “little messages,” didn’t make it any easier for her.
“They’re not my relatives,” she informed him tersely. “They’re just people.”
To her surprise, Quartermain reached over the table and placed his hand over hers. The kindness in his eyes surprised her even more. It struck a chord she wanted to remain silent.
Her hand felt rigid. She really did feel it was her against the world, he thought. It was a hell of a lonely road she was forging for herself.
“Just because you suddenly find out that you don’t share the same blood doesn’t mean that they’re not family, Blair. It’s not blood that makes a true family, anyway. It’s love.”
That sounded like something she’d find in the middle of a greeting card. Something she would have believed in. Once. Before she knew better. “Why are you taking their side?”
“Actually,” he corrected, “I’m not. I’m taking yours.”
He was playing word games with her. “People who love you don’t lie to you.”
What planet was she living on? “Sure they do.” He saw the resistance. And the need to believe. It was the latter that he was attempting to make contact with. “People tell lies for a hell of a lot of reasons. The best—intentioned ones are to spare feelings. Spare pain. Shield the very ones they love.”
The shrilled cry of a blue jay punctuated the last word. He leaned a little closer as the noise level on the street increased with the hour.
“From what I found out, your aunts and uncles didn’t tell you that you were adopted because your mother and father asked them not to.” He could see it wasn’t enough for her. “Maybe they didn’t even want to keep it from you, but their loyalty was to your parents—even after they were both dead.” His eyes delved into hers, trying to find a way around Blair’s barriers. “You can understand loyalty, can’t you?”
Yes, she could understand loyalty. But she could understand truth, too. And why hadn’t they been loyal to her? Why hadn’t someone cared about her feelings in all this?
The pain was so bad, she could still feel it cutting little pieces out of her. Maybe she would always feel it. “Still…”
“Still,” he repeated. She was still unconvinced. Still had doubts. He approached it from a different route. “What would you have done if your mother had told you that you were adopted?”
That was easy. “I would have understood.”
But he wasn’t finished yet. “At what age?”
The autumn breeze had picked up, playing with the loose tendrils about her neck, teasing them around her face. He resisted the temptation to tuck them behind her ear.
His question didn’t make any sense to her. “What?”
He elaborated, pulling her a little further into the argument he was fashioning. The defense he was mounting for her family—and for her benefit.
“Let’s take this from your mother’s point of view. Suppose her secret was really weighing heavily on her and she was thinking of telling you, but she didn’t know how or when.” He went on to give her a plausible scenario. “When you were very young, maybe she thought that you wouldn’t comprehend what it meant, or that it might even frighten you.”
Blair watched as a mother, holding her young daughter’s hand, urged her to go faster as they hurried across the street. They both laughed as they made it just before the light turned red. She could remember coming here on outings with her mother over the years. The pang was automatic.
“Frighten me?” she asked, distracted.
He saw where she was looking. She was identifying, he thought. It was a good sign.
“Sure, a kid’s world is fragile. If it changes, a kid doesn’t feel secure anymore. She thinks if one thing changes, maybe something else will, too. If she’s adopted, maybe someone’ll come to take her away. That’s a very real fear when you’re too young for people to listen to you and take you seriously. I think your mother would have done anything she could not to put you through that sort of uncertainty.”
He was right. Ellen Stephens had always been very careful to paint a secure world for her. When her father had died—or the man she thought was her father, Blair amended bitterly—her mother had done everything in her power to rebuild the crumbled walls of her childhood for her so that she could feel safe again.
Until now.
Reluctantly, Blair gave him that point. “All right, then, when I was older.”
He studied her expression very quietly, then asked, “How old?”
The calmer he seemed, the more agitated she became. “I don’t know. Twelve. Fifteen.” Blair waved a hand in frustration. “Older.”
“Follow me here,” he instructed patiently. “The longer she waits, the harder it is to tell you. The longer she doesn’t tell you, the more she seems to be withholding the truth,” he said, deliberately using Blair’s words. “And teenagers are known to be moody.”
“I wasn’t.” Except maybe once or twice, she added silently. But it had never been for long.
“Then you were the exception,” he conceded, although he had his doubts about it.
Everyone had scenes in their adolescent years they would rather forget. In his case it had involved making a monumental ass of himself and taking the family car on a two—hundred—mile, unsanctioned joyride. He’d nearly killed himself. And then his father had nearly killed him. After tearfully hugging him.
“Still,” he continued, “teenagers are usually pretty difficult creatures to figure out. No telling how they might react. So by now, your mother’s the one who’s afraid.” He didn’t give Blair a chance to protest. “Afraid you might turn from her. Might want to find your birth mother, or worse, think of that woman as your ‘real’ mother.”
“She wasn’t like that,” Blair insisted. “She wasn’t insecure.” And then she stopped, thinking. Fragments of memories came back to her, things that were said, done, which had made no sense at the time. In the light of what she knew, now they did. “Maybe she was,” Blair conceded quietly.
Disappointment deepened in her eyes.
“Anyone in her position would be,” he assured her. “When you love someone a great deal, there are all sorts of fears that are wrapped up in that little package. Fear of something happening to the person you love, of their being hurt emotionally. Of losing them.”
Had there been someone like that in his life? she wondered suddenly. Someone he’d lied to because he was afraid the truth would drive them away? Or was he just theorizing for her benefit? She found herself wondering about him. Again.
“That’s pretty deep thinking for a detective.”
He’d encountered more than his share of stereotyping. TV and the movies shared equally in the blame. “Hey, we’ve got our roots in Sherlock Holmes, not Inspector Clouseau.” He didn’t usually drag out his degrees, but this time, it mattered to him what she thought “I have a degree in criminology and I minored in psychology.”
That didn’t seem to fit his image. It was easier thinking of him majoring in mayhem. “To make your mother happy?” she guessed.
“Partially. And because I found the human mind interesting.” He thought of the book sitting on his nightstand. The one he hadn’t had time to get to in the last few weeks. It delved into profiling the career criminal. “I still do.”
Leaning her chin on her hand, she looked up at him. Maybe he was deeper than he looked. “So why didn’t you become a psychologist?”
Exactly his parents’ question when he’d refused to follow the game plan that Evan had structured for himself. Devin told Blair what he’d told them.
“Too passive an occupation. I didn’t want people telling me their problems—I wanted to be active in solving t
he problems.” Enough about him, he thought. Though he enjoyed being in her company, he did have to push this investigation forward.
“Which brings me to why I’m here.”
She feigned surprise. “Not just to grill me and drink coffee?”
He laughed shortly. “Not this coffee.” Devin grew serious. “I need to go through your mother’s things, Blair.”
Blair supposed, despite everything that had happened, that the label did still fit. Ellen Stephens was, or had been, her mother. And she felt protective of her.
She shook her head. There was no need for an invasion of her mother’s possessions. “I already did.”
He didn’t think telling her that he was a professional and she an amateur would be very wise at the moment. Diplomacy was an art not necessarily restricted to ambassadors.
“Two sets of eyes are better than one. If there is anything that might eventually help us find your sister, your mother wouldn’t have been careless enough to have left it in plain sight”
Blair couldn’t decide if he thought she was a fool, or just naturally simple. “You mean like under the mattress?”
The sarcasm in her voice was unexpected. “Obvious, but you’d be surprised.”
She could tell he wasn’t about to take no for an answer. To try to make him was just a waste of energy. “All right, when?”
It wasn’t yet noon. That gave him a lot of time. “Now?”
Blair thought for a moment. Her afternoon held nothing that couldn’t be rescheduled.
“All right.” She moved her chair back. The legs scraped along the concrete. “I’ll come with you.”
He worked faster and more thoroughly when there wasn’t someone looking over his shoulder. “You could just give me the keys.”
She didn’t want anyone in her mother’s house without her being there. Her mother’s house. It was hers now, and yet it would always be her mother’s house to her, she realized.
Damn, but she wished this shadow had never passed over her life. She wished with all her heart that she’d either known about this from the very beginning, or that someone had had the presence of mind to destroy that photograph before she’d ever found it.
“Like you said,” she pointed out lightly, “two sets of eyes—”
If she was trying to fool him, she wasn’t successful. “Don’t trust me?”
Blair gave up the ruse. “Don’t let it bother you, Quartermain. I already told you, I don’t trust anyone anymore.”
Which was a colossal pity. “You will, Blair. You will. In time.”
She pressed her lips together as she rose to her feet. “I wish I were as sure about that as you seem to be.”
Devin pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. “I’ve been around the block a few more times than you have.” He took out a ten—dollar bill and tucked it under his coffee cup. The coffee had been lousy, but that wasn’t the waitress’s fault.
Blair looked at him, puzzled. “You just put down a ten—dollar bill.”
“I know.”
It wasn’t a mistake? “The tip is twice as large as the bill was,” she pointed out. He was a difficult man to figure out.
“She has to make a living, too,” he told her mildly. Then, because the answer didn’t seem to satisfy her, he added, “My mother was a waitress to help make ends meet when I was growing up. Every time I see a waitress, I think of her.”
As they left the café, he took her arm again.
“I can walk on my own.” But she made no attempt to disengage herself from him.
“I know. I just like touching you.” He guided them across the street, to where she’d left her car parked. He’d pulled up in the row behind hers. “I figure this way is safe for both of us.”
Blair wasn’t altogether sure about that.
Quartermain was right, she grudgingly admitted to herself hours later. He did look in places she hadn’t thought of.
He didn’t look like a man who would be thorough, but he was. They’d been at it for hours now, and he went through each room of the house methodically, even the bathrooms. He checked everywhere she’d looked and everywhere she hadn’t The underside of furniture and cabinets, the backs of the paintings her mother had framed, through every scrap of paper she had ever put aside and every book in every room.
The latter was the most time—consuming of all, because her mother owned a great many books. Reading was a gift to be cherished and she’d encouraged Blair to follow her example and build a library of her own.
Her mother had eclectic taste, but a good deal of it ran toward artists and the art world. Quartermain thumbed through or fanned out every one of them.
Restless, anxious, she’d asked him what she could do to help. He’d answered that she could be in charge of returning each item to its proper place.
“I figure you like neatness as much as she did. Me, I could never get a handle on it. Made my mother crazy.” He grinned, stopping. “My mother would be crazy about you.”
He saw the surprise flower in Blair’s eyes and pretended not to. He picked up another book, fanning out the pages. Nothing.
“She always used to complain that she could never keep a neat house because of all of us. My father liked to point out that the day she could would be the day she’d find herself living alone. And hating it. He was right.” He glanced at Blair. “She does hate it.”
“She’s alone now?”
Reaching, he took down the last book from the shelf. A giant volume that traced the history of art from its caveman origins to the present day, which, in the book’s case, was a year before the copyright 1973. The book looked to be untouched. “Oh, we all live somewhere close by, but she is alone in the house.”
“Your father?”
His father. Damn, but he missed that old man. There’d be so much to share with him now. “He died of a heart attack a few years ago.”
The sympathy was instant and unguarded. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me, too. He was a hell of a guy.” Placing the book on the desk in front of him, Devin began to go through it. So far, he’d turned up nothing. Maybe Ellen Stephens had been too afraid to keep any evidence on hand beyond the photograph. “Did she have a safety deposit box?” he asked suddenly.
“Not that I know of.” Which didn’t mean there wasn’t one, Blair thought ruefully. She raised her eyes to his and saw that he was thinking the same thing. “Be careful with that,” she chided as he moistened a thumb that was beginning to feel as if it had been rubbed raw. “That was her favorite book.”
The pages looked hardly touched. “She didn’t look at it very often,” he remarked. The book was too large and bulky to turn over and shake out, though he would have preferred that. With a sigh, he continued flipping through the pages. “How do you know it was her favorite?”
“For one thing, she kept it out of my reach. But she told me that it was.” Her mouth curved as she remembered her mother’s exact words. “It was published the year I was born. She said…she said when she bought it, she was carrying me.” The smile faded as tears came to her eyes. “She said she was carrying me right under her heart.” Blair covered her mouth to stop the sob that threatened to break loose. Everything felt as if it was crumbling. “She lied to me, even about that.”
He didn’t even think about it. Devin just set the book down and took her in his arms.
“There are different ways to interpret things, Blair. A pregnant woman can carry a baby beneath her heart. And a woman who isn’t pregnant can do it holding that same baby in her arms, pressing it to her heart. Like this.” He held her closer, so close that she could feel his heart beating. And he could feel hers. “In the absolute sense, it means the same thing.”
There was warmth in his arms, and comfort. For a moment, she wanted just to lose herself in that feeling, in him. To lose herself and outrun the hurt that rose up to haunt her even in the midst of her triumphs.
The nails of distrust had raked over her flesh and scarred her. Blair
felt as if she was never going to be completely happy again. How could she be, when everything she’d ever believed in had been completely shattered?
And yet, she wanted to be happy so desperately.
He’d pressed her head against his chest only to illustrate his point. He didn’t know if he succeeded or not; all he knew was that he’d managed to mess himself up a little more in the process. Mess himself up and get entangled in her.
When she slowly lifted her head to look up at him, he knew that there were no options opened to him. He had to kiss her. Unprofessional conduct or not, he was quite simply a goner. Drowning in the blue of her eyes.
Devin feathered his fingers along her upturned face, then lowered his mouth to hers and in doing so made the drowning official.
The breath rushed from her in a whoosh, leaving Blair limp and on fire at the same time. And aware. Very, very aware.
For this time she was completely aware of the fact that she was digging her fingertips into his shirt. Aware that she was moving her body urgently against his to feel its strength, its desire. Because she needed it, needed to be wanted.
Needed him.
Devin savored the kiss. Her lips parted, admitting him. Dooming him to want only this, only her, and no one else.
He ran his hands through her hair, cupping the back of her neck to bring her closer. Pressing her as close as the laws of physics and nature allowed, given the present situation.
But not as close as he desired.
To do that would be to violate everything he believed in. She was too vulnerable for him to take the next step, the step his body was pleading with him to take. If it was to happen, she would have to be the one to make the move. And she would have to be clear—headed when she did.
The agony of knowing that he could have her and not taking her was excruciating. But sweet for all that. Just as the taste of her mouth was sweet. He forced himself to be content with that, with kissing her and knowing that she was kissing him back.
When all her questions were answered, when her disquietude was finally at rest, he meant to come back to this. To her.
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