Live To Tell

by Valerie Parv

  She stood up and groped for the robe Judy had draped over the foot of the bed. It happened to be a man’s shaving coat, but Jo pulled it on anyway, seeming to need the thin layer of protection.

  Blake felt a momentary twinge of conscience for frightening her, but if his suspicion was true, she should thank her stars he wasn’t given to doing more.

  “Of course we work together. Karen’s my boss,” she said as she tugged the robe around herself and belted it. Meant for him, the garment went around her almost twice, and she had to grasp the front to keep it from gaping.

  He watched the feminine movements dispassionately, keeping himself as unmoved as if he were made of stone. “And you’re depending on her goodwill to save your friend’s home.”

  She nodded warily. “You know I am. Why…”

  She gasped as his hand snaked around her wrist and he yanked her against him, the sudden movement almost spilling her out of the robe. He wouldn’t let himself be affected by that, either. “Did she promise you your friend would be safe if you sold me out?”

  Her eyes went round as saucers, the pupils growing huge as her anger surged. “What’s this about, Blake? Nobody’s sold you out, least of all me. I don’t know what you mean.”

  Moments before, without even touching him, she’d had the power to set him reeling. Holding her against his nude body with only a skimpy robe between them, he allowed himself to feel nothing but cold fury. “Oh, no? Then how did you hear of the name Baracchi?”

  “I didn’t until two seconds ago, when Karen said the name.”

  She sounded so credible and so worried that his determination wavered. For a heartbeat he held Jo in his arms, her fluid body setting his senses ablaze with longing. Her mobile mouth was set in a grim line that he’d put there. All he had to do was kiss her and she’d melt and everything would be as it was. The ache in his loins told him how desperately he wanted that.

  He couldn’t. Not without answers.

  He thrust her away. She stumbled against the desk, putting her hands behind her to steady herself while he stalked to the window and turned his back to her. “You expect me to believe this is all coincidence?” he demanded over his shoulder.

  “I expect you to tell me what the hell you’re so worked up about.”

  He had to admire her style. Her tone held just the right mixture of hurt and anger to be convincing. He didn’t turn around, not wanting to see if her expression matched the tone. Afraid you’ll weaken and start believing she didn’t know what she’d just done? he asked himself. He laced his voice with sarcasm. “You really have no idea?”

  “All I know is one minute you can’t keep your hands off me, the next you’re looking at me as if I’m something you’ve picked up on your shoe. I can’t believe this is because Karen mentioned the first name you were known by. You may not have fond memories of it, but it’s a matter of public record.”

  “No,” he said with steely softness, turning. She looked small and fragile. He refused to let the sight sway him. “That name isn’t on public record.”

  “You’re making no sense.”

  “I’ll spell it out for you. I was left on a doorstep in Perth and adopted by the family who found me.”

  She hugged herself as if cold. “And their name was Baracchi. So?”

  “No, it wasn’t. A few days before I was left there, the Baracchis had flown to Rome. Their daughter and her husband were living in the house. When my real mother couldn’t be located, they took me in. They were the ones the media photographed and wrote about. Their surname was Hutchins.”

  Confusion colored her features. “Anyone could have researched the original owners of the house.”

  “The Baracchis had moved to Italy indefinitely. They sold the house to their daughter and son-in-law. By the time I turned up on their doorstep, Lou and Donna Hutchins were the legal owners.”

  It was her turn to look angry. “So what? A good journalist can uncover such details. Karen probably went digging.”

  “Why would she? As far as anybody knows, my first name was Hutchins. Then I was placed with Jane Creedy, the woman who made a living out of fostering kids. She didn’t care what I called myself as long as the support payments arrived on time. So I chose Stirton. The only time I ever saw the name Baracchi was on the back of letters Donna Hutchins got from her mother. She and her husband never returned to Australia.”

  “Karen has shown a lot of interest in you, but then your story is unusual,” Jo said. “Maybe she knows someone in the Baracchi family and got the name from them.”

  “Or maybe there’s another explanation altogether.”

  Jo pushed herself away from the desk, taking a faltering step toward him, but was stopped by his implacable expression. “Oh, my God! Do you think Karen knows your natural mother?”

  “Or she is my natural mother.”

  Jo was thunderstruck. She studied him intently. “There is a slight resemblance if you look for it.”

  “And it never occurred to you to look until now?”

  “Not for a second, I swear.”

  He began to pace. “Add it up. Karen leaves me with what she thinks is the Baracchi couple who, I’m told, adored kids but couldn’t have more than the one daughter. Unknown to Karen, they’re heading overseas and have sold the house to their daughter. They do the noble thing by taking in the dumped baby until he’s usurped by the arrival of their own child.”

  “If it’s true, your mother tried to do the right thing by you,” Jo said.

  “The right thing would have been to go through proper adoption channels, not toss your child out like so much garbage.”

  “Unless she was too young and panicky to think straight.”

  “I might expect you to side with her. This whole thing was a setup, wasn’t it? Our family got plenty of publicity after the Uru cave was discovered. It was all the excuse Karen needed to send you here as her mole. Were you making the video diary to satisfy her curiosity and save her from having to face me herself?”

  Jo drew herself up, seemingly too angry to care about keeping the robe closed. “The diary was my idea. I’m nobody’s mole, and if you think I’d do such a thing, it’s as well we find out now, before we get in any deeper.”

  How much deeper could they get? he asked himself. He was in love with Jo. Discovering she’d duped him from start to finish felt like a knife twisting in his gut. He’d always believed what his natural mother did to him was the worst cruelty he could endure. He was fast learning there were worse hurts. Loving someone who’d deceived him on Jo’s scale was hell on wheels.

  Even so, he still wanted her with every fiber of his being. He ached to lose himself in her and pretend none of this had happened. But it had. Karen Prentiss was his natural mother. He’d stake everything he had on it. He would find out for sure, of course. But inside, he already knew the truth.

  Jo’s eyes sparked with anger as she watched him pace. “You know the worst of this? It isn’t that Karen abandoned you as a baby—if it turns out to be true—or that she planted me here under false pretenses, although both are almost beyond forgiving. For me, the worst is having the man I care about think I could be a willing party to any of it.”

  She tightened the robe and headed for the door. Panic coiled through Blake, far more terrifying than his anger. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to Perth to get some answers. Evidently, there’s nothing more here for me—if there ever was.”

  Chapter 14

  Jo found Judy at the stockyard where she was rubbing down one of the horses. When she asked about flight times from Halls Creek to Perth, Judy said, “Great Western flies via Newman three times a week. There’s a flight today at noon, getting to Perth at five. Why?”

  The timber rail felt rough under the palm Jo pressed against it. “Something’s come up. I need to get home in a hurry.”

  Judy’s brush stilled, earning a soft whicker of protest from the horse. “Anything I can do to help?”

  Short of
Judy flying Jo to Perth in her own plane, she couldn’t think of anything that would make a difference anymore. “Thanks, but I’ll be fine. I have some urgent business with my editor.”

  That was putting it mildly, she thought as she thanked Judy for the family’s hospitality and promised to be in touch soon about finishing the survival story. If she ever came back to finish it, she thought but didn’t add.

  “Is everything okay between you and Blake?” Judy asked as Jo started to walk away. “I hope I didn’t misread your signals and make a mistake with the rooms.”

  Jo glanced back, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You didn’t. If anyone made a mistake, it was me.”

  All the time Jo had been showering, dressing and forcing down some coffee and toast, her mind had been rejecting the unfairness of Blake’s accusation. Jo wasn’t convinced that knowing one obscure name necessarily made Karen his birth mother. The editor probably had a perfectly simple explanation for the slip.

  Whatever the reason, it wasn’t going to help Jo. How could she forgive Blake for thinking she had conspired with Karen against him? His distrust felt like a weight on her shoulders, bowing her down. The comfort and passion of the previous night were fast becoming a memory.

  Not fast enough, she thought as she located the rental car that had remained at the homestead while she’d shared Blake’s Jeep. Seeing the Jeep a few feet away, she felt a tug deep inside as she pictured his strong hands on the wheel, steering them over a rugged stretch of road. In the vehicle’s shadow, he’d made love to her for the first time after they’d emerged from the hidden valley. Wonderful, heated, exhilarating love.

  Would she ever look at that model car again and see only a car?

  She was starting to think of Blake as part of her past, she realized. Wasn’t he? It was a long way back from the things he’d said to her this morning to where they’d been last night. Trying to imagine bridging that gulf, she lowered her head to her crossed arms on the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

  But she didn’t cry. She was damned if she would let him reduce her to tears. The minute she got back to Perth, she was going to confront Karen and demand to know what was going on. Then she would find a way to throw the truth back in Blake’s face as payment for his lack of faith in her.

  What she would do afterward, she had no idea.

  If Karen did have a hidden agenda and had been using Jo to further it, she would start by looking for another job. Her resume was excellent and her savings would last until she found something. The state of her personal life was a different matter.

  The secrets of her past were no longer hidden from her. She was free to commit or not as she chose. She didn’t need to stick to safe relationships. The thought should have been liberating. Instead, she felt hollow inside, as if something had been taken away and nothing new left in its place.

  Time heals all wounds, she assured herself, smiling a bit ruefully at the top-gun writer thinking in clichés. On the drive back to camp, she occupied her mind trying to do better, before deciding she was too demoralized to care.

  The timing of the flight left her little time for soul-searching. By the time she’d telephoned GWA to reserve a seat, changed clothes and grabbed her bags, she barely had time to drive to Halls Creek.

  Returning the rental car took a few more precious minutes. After check-in she had to cross the tarmac at a run and join the end of a line of people climbing the fold-down steps into the twin turboprop aircraft.

  The seat beside her was occupied by a mother traveling to Perth to introduce her baby to the child’s grandparents for the first time, so there was plenty of distraction on the long flight south. Jo couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. The baby’s antics kept her from thinking too much about the world she’d left behind in the middle of Diamond Downs.

  Blake couldn’t be right that the project was just a cover to let Karen learn more about the son she had abandoned. It would mean he was also right about Jo being used to get to Blake.

  She focused on the blur of the propellers taking her ever closer to Perth. One way or another, she would know the truth soon.

  The sound of hammering brought Judy striding around the side of the homestead. Blake was fixing the steps leading to the laundry, attacking each nail as if he had a personal grudge against it.

  “Cade was going to do that,” Judy said mildly.

  Blake didn’t look up. “I’ve saved him the trouble.”

  “Not if you reduce it to firewood. The timber’s too old to take the full brunt of a man scorned.”

  The step shuddered as he pounded again, and said around a mouthful of nails, “No scorned men around here.”

  “Then Jo must be the wronged party.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I did. She was no more forthcoming than you’re being.”

  Blake took a nail from between his teeth and aimed the hammer. Crash. “Have you considered there’s nothing to tell?”

  “I considered it for all of five seconds. Last night, she was a happy woman. Today, she’s a picture of misery. I’m not the most qualified person to comment, but I would hope you’re not that lousy a lover.”

  “You’re right, you’re not qualified. And I’ve never had any complaints.”

  The hammer flew out of his hands and landed with a clang at Judy’s feet. Without flinching she picked it up and returned it to him. “I’m glad we cleared that up.”

  Picking up a nail punch, he went to work on the last of the nails. “We had a difference of opinion over something her editor said. She went back to check it out. End of story.”

  “A difference of opinion over what?”

  He could see Judy wasn’t going to let this go. He set the tools down and wrapped his hands around the now-solid rail. Why shouldn’t he tell her the truth? If he was right about Karen Prentiss, the whole family was entitled to know. “There’s a chance her editor could be my birth mother.”

  Judy staggered back. “Karen Prentiss could be your—”

  “You can say the word. If it’s true, it’s a biological fact. Not that it makes her into one in any other sense.”

  Judy collapsed onto the bottom step. “What tipped you off?”

  He collected the tools, explaining about the editor’s slip of the tongue.

  Judy looked unconvinced. “She could have stumbled across the name in her research.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences that big. If Karen lived near the Baracchis at the time I was born, that’s all the evidence I need.”

  “But if this couple were as sweet and child-loving as they were supposed to be, your mother might have tried to do the right thing in giving you to them.”

  His savage gesture dismissed the possibility. “She didn’t give me to them. She left me on their blasted doorstep. The house could have been empty for all she cared.”

  “Assuming you’re right, do you think Jo knew what Karen was up to?”

  “She says she didn’t.”

  Judy stood up. “Then she didn’t.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Jo is a person of integrity, you know that. And she cares about you. She wouldn’t knowingly deceive you.”

  “I wanted to think so.”

  She placed a hand over his. “Keep thinking so. If you’d seen her face before she left, you’d have no doubts.”

  “She’s gone?” His voice came out sounding ragged.

  “On the noon flight to Perth. Obviously she thought there was nothing left for her here. Is she right, Blake?”

  “The hell of it is, I don’t know. I thought I was in love with her, but this morning when she knew about the Baracchis, I saw red.”

  “She didn’t know. Karen did. There’s a difference. You should be confronting the editor, not taking this out on Jo.”

  “It’s too late.”

  Judy made a sound of annoyance. “Nothing’s too late while you’re still breathing. Go after her. Find out the truth.”
>
  “How? The next flight isn’t for two days.”

  “Unless you have contacts at the airport. One of the flying instructors is returning a plane to Perth this afternoon. If I ask nicely, he’ll give you a ride.”

  He swung her into the air as he’d done when she was a little girl. “I owe you one, little sister.”

  “Not so little, and you owe me big-time.”

  He hesitated. “Will Des be okay?”

  “Cade and I are here if Dad needs anything. He’s resting today after overdoing things at the muster camp, but when he hears why you’ve gone he’ll support you one hundred percent. He knows where he fits into your life. That won’t change no matter what you learn. But he’d want you to know. And besides, you can’t tell me it isn’t what you’ve wanted your whole life?”

  “You know it is.” He didn’t have to tell Judy how his world had shaken on its foundations when he suspected who Karen Prentiss really was. Judy knew him too well not to understand. Or to figure out how devastated he’d been when he worked out why Karen had sent Jo to Diamond Downs.

  She’d sent Jo. He hesitated. Did he want to see her again, knowing she could be part of the deception?

  “You’re still not sure how Jo fits into all this, are you? There’s only one way to find out. If you let her walk out of your life and she’s innocent, you’ll regret it forever.”

  “Finished?” he asked when Judy drew breath.

  “Do you want to keep arguing?”

  “I want you to call your pilot friend. I told my team at Sawtooth Park I’d check in with them later today. While I’m there, I can pick up some gear and go on to the airport.”

  After the vast emptiness of the outback, Perth seemed uncomfortably big and bustling. Jo’s apartment overlooking the Swan River should have been welcoming, but crazily, she’d felt more at home in a rough bush shelter beside Dingo Creek.

  Why didn’t she face facts? Her home was wherever Blake was. Somewhere between helping him build the shelter and spending the night together in a hidden valley, she’d fallen in love with him.