The Pint-Sized Secret

by Sherryl Woods

  “Can this be our secret, just for now?” he asked Emma.

  She nodded, apparently intrigued with the idea of sharing a secret with mommy’s prince. “I won’t say a single word. Not to anybody. But you’d better tell Gretchen, too. She and Mommy talk a lot.”

  Since that hadn’t even occurred to Jeb, he was grateful for the advice. “Thanks. I’ll talk to her on the way out. By the way, are you allowed ice cream in here?”

  Emma grinned. “Uh-huh. Chocolate’s my very favorite in the whole world.”

  “Then the next time I come, I’ll bring chocolate ice cream. Shall I bring enough for everyone, so we can have a party? You can be the hostess.”

  Her eyes widened. “You would do that?”

  If it meant seeing her surrounded by other children, instead of all alone staring out the window, he would bring anything she asked. “Absolutely,” he assured her.

  “When will you come back?”

  “As soon as I can,” he promised.

  “Tomorrow?”

  Why not? “Tomorrow, it is. I’ll make the arrangements with Gretchen on my way out.”

  “Mr. Delacourt?” Emma asked, her expression vaguely worried.

  “What, angel?”

  “You won’t forget, will you? Like my daddy did?”

  Jeb felt the unfamiliar salty sting of tears at the plaintive question. “No, I will not forget,” he vowed, leaning down to press a kiss against her forehead. “You can count on it. I will be here tomorrow.”

  If he had to move heaven and earth—and one stubborn female—to make it happen.

  Chapter Ten

  Brianna’s head was ringing. Actually, it was the phone that was ringing, but it had done it so persistently for the past few hours that it seemed to echo in her head. She sat in her darkened living room and stared in the general direction of the offending instrument and willed it to stop.

  Eventually it did, only to start up again ten minutes later. Apparently Jeb wasn’t going to give up easily. She knew that’s who it was, because he’d left a message the first half-dozen times he’d called. In an act of desperation, Brianna had finally switched off the machine. Then he’d settled for simply letting the phone ring.

  Tired of the constant sound, the next time it rang, she snatched it up. “I have nothing to say to you,” she snapped before slamming it back down again.

  Of course, that was a mistake. In answering it, she had proved to him that she was home. Moments later, he leaned on the doorbell, then pounded on the door.

  “Brianna, I know you’re in there. We need to talk.”

  She started across the room, then stopped. No, she thought to herself, talking was a waste of time. Nothing she said could possibly penetrate a skull as thick as his had to be.

  “Brianna, dammit. Open the door.”

  “No,” she said just as loudly. At this rate, they were going to disturb any neighbors not already rattled by the constant phone calls.

  “Please,” he said, lowering his voice to a plea.

  She leaned against the door, sighing heavily. As furious as she was, her heart still leaped at the sound of his voice. What sort of idiot did that make her?

  “No,” she said again, this time in a whisper.

  “What?”

  “I am not opening the door.”

  “This is silly. We’re two rational adults. We ought to be able to discuss this in a civilized manner.”

  “One of us may be civilized. I’m not so sure about you,” she countered. “You’re trying to beat down a door in the middle of the night.”

  “I am not trying to beat it down. I am simply trying to get your attention. Besides, it’s not the middle of the night. It’s barely nine o’clock. And I would have been here earlier, but you’ve apparently been sitting inside in the dark pretending you weren’t at home.”

  “Have you been watching the house?” she asked, appalled by the idea that he’d been staking out the place in plain view of her neighbors.

  “Pretty much,” he admitted unrepentantly.

  “Jeb, this has to stop. Go away. I don’t want to talk to you. You made your opinion of me plain earlier today.”

  “I was angry.”

  “A lot of hard truths get spoken in anger.”

  “Brianna, please, if you’ll just tell me what really happened, I’ll straighten everything out. I swear it.”

  “How terribly sweet of you,” she said sarcastically. “Obviously, you assume there are things to straighten out. I, on the other hand, would prefer some indication that you realize I am innocent. Let me spell it out for you, Mr. Delacourt. I have done absolutely nothing wrong. Period. End of sentence. End of conversation.”

  To emphasize it, she walked away from the door, went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of soda with lots of ice. Then she put on the earphones to her stereo and turned it up full volume, so she wouldn’t hear anything more than the muffled sound of Jeb’s voice and the ongoing pounding on her door.

  To her astonishment, he was still at it an hour later, when she forced herself to go off to bed, where she knew she wouldn’t get a single minute’s sleep all night long. If persistence counted for anything, he would have gotten a lot of points tonight.

  As it was, she would have preferred even a hint that he believed in her. Without that, they had nothing.

  “You did what?” Bryce Delacourt’s voice climbed to a level that could have shattered glass. “I thought I told you to stay the hell away from Brianna with these crazy suspicions of yours! When you said you intended to go on seeing her, you assured me it was personal. I’ll admit I was delighted. She’d be perfect for you. She’s nothing like those shallow, insipid women you usually prefer. The fact that she’s threatening to take you to court, rather than trying to get you to marry her, proves that.”

  Jeb felt his father’s wrath and indignation almost as deeply as he’d felt Brianna’s the night before. “It was personal,” he said stiffly.

  He had turned up here this morning to admit to the mess he’d made of things, not to hear a lecture. He should have known he couldn’t do one without being subjected to the other.

  “But you still had to go digging around in her life,” his father accused. “I don’t blame her for being furious. What kind of man tries to incriminate a woman he supposedly cares about?”

  “I didn’t try to incriminate her. Believe me, no one wants her to be innocent more than I do. As a matter of fact, I had dropped everything. I hadn’t checked out a lead in weeks.” He thought of the lengths he’d gone to just to be alone with her in London. “She mattered to me, Dad. She still does.”

  “Then what the hell happened? Is this the way you treat someone who matters? No wonder you’re not married.”

  Jeb ignored the assessment of his courting skills, or lack thereof. “I got a call from Michael about another deal that went south. The only person who knew about it outside of family was Brianna.”

  “So that made it okay to go charging off with a bunch of half-baked accusations? Even though you knew this woman? Even though you should have known that she would never betray us? Even though you had very strict instructions from me to leave her be? What sort of judgment was that? And who the hell’s in charge around here, anyway?”

  “You are, but—”

  “But what? Did you get together with your brothers and conclude I’m not capable of making rational decisions anymore?”

  Jeb winced. His father had hit all too close to the truth, but he wasn’t about to admit to it.

  Fortunately, Bryce Delacourt didn’t wait for an answer. In fact, he seemed pretty much uninterested in anything Jeb had to say. He was more interested in trying to get his own point across.

  “Well, let me assure you that I have all of my wits about me,” he said emphatically. “I also have the title that gives me the right to fire the whole blasted lot of you, which right this moment I am sorely tempted to do.”

  “Dad—”

  “Just stop it.
I don’t want to hear your excuses. All I want to hear is that you intend to find some way out of this mess.”

  “I tried to talk to her. She won’t listen.”

  “Can you blame her? What did you intend to say? That you’re sorry, I hope.”

  “I was going to repeat what I’ve already said, that I’d help her.”

  “Help her?” his father repeated incredulously. “That’s what you said? How magnanimous. The only help the woman needs is to be protected from you. You’ve all but called her a spy. I’m surprised she didn’t wring your sorry neck.”

  “I don’t think she wanted to get that close,” Jeb admitted ruefully.

  “I can’t say I blame her. Let’s start with her supposedly incriminating decision to hide her daughter from you. Did it never once occur to you that she might have told you about her daughter in her own good time, that after being abandoned by Emma’s father she needed to know she could trust you? Well, you’ve certainly reassured her on that score, haven’t you?”

  He shook his head. “The woman has been through hell the last year. Now you’ve gone and made it worse. You’ve twisted her secrecy into something ugly, when you should have been supportive. You’re every bit as bad as that no-account husband of hers.”

  Being compared to Larry O’Ryan was about as insulting as anything his father could have said. Unfortunately, Jeb couldn’t come up with a ready defense of his behavior. When his father described it, even Jeb thought he was a louse.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry won’t cut it. I just pray I can talk her into coming back to work here,” his father said.

  Even though he knew he’d handled things very badly, Jeb was stunned that his father was so readily dismissing the bottom line, that Brianna had betrayed Delacourt Oil. Wasn’t this a time for caution? Weren’t there issues that needed to be resolved first?

  “Dad, you’re not thinking clearly,” he protested. “You can’t just bring her back. No matter how sorry you feel for her, it still seems more than likely that she’s been betraying the company. Maybe she thought she had to, maybe she was desperate, but you can’t ignore what she’s done.”

  “I can and I will, because you don’t have squat in the way of proof. You’re supposed to be this hotshot investigator. You claim you’ve learned how to do the job from your brother, so I assume you know the rules. Do you have so much as a single shred of evidence to prove that Brianna has done anything wrong?”

  He doubted that her secrecy, that mysterious locked room at her house, or any of the rest would satisfy his father. He thought of his conversations with the old codger who owned the last land they’d lost and with Dylan about Jordan Adams’s integrity. “No,” he finally admitted, “but—”

  “But you went off half-cocked anyway. You accused Brianna of doing something so malicious, so totally out of character, that we’ll be lucky if she doesn’t file suit against us. Slander comes to mind, along with wrongful dismissal.”

  Jeb tried to reclaim some of the high ground he’d obviously lost in the past few minutes. “She quit. She wasn’t fired. If she were innocent, wouldn’t she have fought back?”

  His father scowled at him. “Now there’s a brilliant technicality if ever I heard one. In the end, we have the same result. We’ve lost one of the best geologists in the business and hurt the reputation of a woman who doesn’t deserve it.” His expression darkened. “You created this mess. Now fix it.”

  Jeb stared. “Fix it? How?”

  “I don’t give a rat’s behind. Crawl, if you have to. Just do it.”

  Jeb was actually more than willing to try to patch things up with Brianna, at least on a personal level. He didn’t even question the incongruity of wanting to be with a woman he thought guilty of a crime. Somehow he’d made excuses for her that she hadn’t asked him to make. If he tried hard enough, he could rationalize everything she’d done. He just couldn’t figure out how to explain that to her when the woman flatly refused to talk to him.

  As for repairing the damage and getting her back to Delacourt Oil, he figured there were miracles that had been pulled off more easily. He doubted a man in his precarious position with the Almighty had any right to call for assistance.

  Brianna was still muttering curses hours after her blowup with Jeb. Most of them now, however, were aimed at herself. She had walked away from a fight. She hadn’t even tried to defend herself to Jeb, although how she was supposed to do that when the man was blind as a bat was beyond her.

  The situation was complicated by the fact that until he had followed her, found out about Emma and then started hurling accusations, she had almost let herself fall in love with him. She had begun to trust him more than she’d ever anticipated trusting anyone again.

  Now, like Larry, Jeb had betrayed her. Rather than supporting her, he had added to the problem, much as her ex had. But that was personal and Jeb’s accusations were professional. Her professional integrity had never, ever been called into question before. She owed it to her future to fight back with all she had. She just wasn’t sure how much fight she had left in her, which meant getting someone in her corner. The same attorney who’d handled her divorce came to mind.

  She called Grace Foster’s office and made an appointment to find out what her options were. If Delacourt Oil intended to press charges against her, she needed to be ready with a battle plan of her own.

  She was about to leave the house when Mrs. Hanover called.

  “Brianna, dear, are you all right? I expected you in by now. You’ve had several urgent calls. Carly’s been able to handle some of them, but others insisted on speaking to you directly.”

  Obviously the news of her quitting hadn’t made its way down the corporate ladder from the executive suite. Maybe Jeb hadn’t had the nerve to pass along the word. She had enough confidence in herself left to be pretty sure that his father wasn’t going to be happy about it. She was just as glad that no one knew. It would make it easier to go back and fight.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hanover. I should have called first thing. Something’s come up that I have to deal with. I won’t be in today. Possibly not for several days.”

  She heard her secretary’s sharp intake of breath. “Is it anything I can help with?”

  “No, but thanks,” Brianna said. “I’ll be in touch. I’m sorry, but I have to go now. I have an appointment.”

  “What should I tell Mr. Delacourt the next time he calls?”

  “Which one?”

  “Jeb.”

  “Tell him to go straight to hell,” she muttered, then apologized. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Hanover murmured. “Are you sure about this, dear? If this is about something he’s done, shouldn’t the two of you be trying to work it out? He seems like such a nice young man.”

  “Yes, he does give that impression, doesn’t he?” Brianna concurred. “Too bad it’s a charade. The man is a snake.”

  “Oh,” the older woman said with a shocked gasp that didn’t seem entirely due to Brianna’s sharp assessment. “Oh, my.”

  There were rustling sounds, a muffled protest and then Jeb announced, “This is the snake.”

  “Were you listening on the other line? That would be pretty much in character for you.”

  “No, I just walked in in time to hear my character impugned.”

  “Welcome to the club. I have to go.” She hung up before he could try once again to persuade her to listen to him. If he kept at it, sooner or later she would weaken. She couldn’t allow that to happen, not when her stupid heart kept yelling at her to do just that. What did a heart know, anyway? If ever a situation called for cool, rational thought, this was it.

  The attorney she met with agreed. Grace Foster was as indignant on Brianna’s behalf now as she had been during the divorce. She was more than ready to take on the entire Delacourt empire if need be. “You say the word and I’ll file the papers,” she assured Brianna. “We’ll win, too. You’ll never have another financial worry.”


  Brianna had always liked the woman, but never more so than she did at that moment. It wasn’t just because of her unrestrained faith in Brianna’s case, but for her clear assumption that Brianna was innocent.

  “Just so you know, I didn’t sell any secret information to our competitors,” Brianna told her.

  “Even if the divorce hadn’t told me everything I needed to know about your character, I would have known that the minute you started talking. Otherwise, I would never have taken the case. I like fighting for the underdog, but I’m not an idiot. I don’t take cases I don’t think I can win, not against people like the Delacourts.”

  “I don’t have a lot of money,” Brianna warned her. “You know where every cent is going. And Larry’s behind in his child-support payments again.”

  “Which makes it all the more important that we beat the stuffing out of them in court, so you’ll get enough to pay my exorbitant fees.”

  “And if we lose?” Brianna asked worriedly.

  “We won’t. Now you go spend some time with that little girl of yours and forget all about this mess. When the time comes, we’ll whip their butts.”

  Brianna grinned at her confidence. “I like the way you think.”

  “If you think I’m a tough act now, wait till you see me in court on this one. It’ll make what I did to Larry look like child’s play.”

  Brianna was brimming with confidence herself by the time she left the attorney’s office. She’d taken the first and most important step in fighting back. She’d found an advocate who believed in her completely. She couldn’t help wishing that Jeb had had the same sort of faith.

  “But he hadn’t,” she reminded herself wearily. And therein lay all her troubles.

  She managed to push them out of her mind while she visited with Emma, who seemed curiously excited about something she refused to discuss.

  “You have to go now, Mama.”