Meg’s heart leaped wildly. ‘What’s happened?’
His head snapped up. His eyes were so fierce they’d darkened to navy. ‘Our lawyers can’t find a wedding certificate for my grandparents.’
‘You mean, there’s no record at all?’
‘Sweet nothing.’
‘So that means—’
‘It means that almost certainly my grandparents were never married.’ Sam shot a warning glance in her direction. ‘Don’t you start on about how happy you are for Dolly.’
Meg gasped. ‘Well, I guess I am pleased for Dolly.’ She took another step towards him. ‘But I can understand your family’s problems as well. This is awful for you. Are they going to keep looking, or are the lawyers certain there’s nothing to be found?’
‘They’ll probably make a few more investigations. But there’s virtually no hope,’ he told her bluntly. With a despondent sigh, he shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans.’ They’ve already done an exhaustive search. It looks as if my grandmother’s family did a cover-up job about the marriage. She and Tom Kirby were already engaged before he left—and she was pregnant. Somehow, I doubt Tom knew that.’
‘But they never married?’
‘No. My grandmother came from old blue-blood stock. Her family would have hated the stigma of illegitimacy.’
‘I’m so sorry. This must be a terrible blow for you.’
‘Yeah. It looks like Dolly was right all along. The letter was meant for her.’ He pulled his hands back out of his pockets and banged one knuckled fist against the other. ‘Which means Dolly is probably the legal inheritor of Kirby & Son.’
‘Goodness.’ Meg cried. ‘Where does that put you and your family?’
His mouth stretched into a grimacing grin as he shook his head. ‘Into a long, expensive, legal mess that could go on for years.’
‘How terrible.’ A feeling of dread swept through Meg. She hurried to Sam’s side and gave him what she hoped was a reassuring hug. In return, he dropped a swift kiss on her cheek, but she could see his mind was distracted elsewhere.
‘It looks like this whole business of coming over here to Australia for the bottle—has caused a huge problem for you and your family,’ she said in a flat tone that matched the sinking feeling in her stomach.
He heaved a loud sigh. ‘It sure has.’
The room seemed to sway abruptly. Meg reached for the back of a nearby chair to steady herself. What else had she expected Sam to say? That it didn’t matter? That finding her had been the highlight of his life? That one night with her cancelled out the down side of losing millions of dollars, a family company and his father’s legitimacy?
She willed the walls to stop closing in.
Sam spoke again. ‘Of course, my lawyers will still want to take a good look at the letter. Nothing’s certain until that’s been sighted. That reminds me—’ Abruptly, he picked up the phone again. ‘Reception?’ He barked the word. ‘Sam Kirby here. I need to advance my return flight to Seattle. Can you organise that for me? That’s right. I need the first available flight back. You’ve got my details, haven’t you?’
As he replaced the phone, Meg stared at him open-mouthed. She had known this news meant Sam would have to go home, but so soon? ‘You’re going back, just like that? Straight away?’
‘I have to get back. You can see that, can’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said in a cold little voice. ‘After all, there’s a lot of money at stake.’
His jaw clenched. ‘You really have got a huge chip on your shoulder when it comes to money, haven’t you?’ He glared at her and his shoulders stiffened.
Her stomach churned as she watched him pace the room, his face dark and grim.
‘You don’t realise what’s really at stake here.’ He hurled the words at her angrily. ‘It’s not just about money. Four generations of my family have worked hard to build up a fine, successful company. I’ve worked my butt off to keep it going since my father took sick. And now, it could all be lost. It’s unbelievable that we could lose it just because—’
He plunged tense fingers into his hair. ‘I’m still not sure this isn’t some kind of incredible prank. If I take my lawyers’ advice, everything should be under suspicion. Dolly’s story is so hard to believe.’
Meg frowned at him. ‘But Dolly has proof.’
He crossed his arms over his chest and she averted her eyes. The pose made his physique more impressive than ever. But her drooling days were over.
‘We don’t know yet if any of her papers are legitimate,’ he said coldly. ‘Anyone can mock up photos and certificates these days.’
Meg stared at Sam, aghast. ‘Dolly wouldn’t. How can you even suggest such a thing? You’ve got to be wrong about that.’
This was too much!
She thought of the smile she and Dolly had shared—the smile of one woman in love recognising the same blinding joy in the other. ‘I’m sure you’re wrong, Sam. You can’t possibly believe it.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time people have been hoodwinked by white hair and a sweet smile.’
Meg tried to suppress a growing suspicion that she’d been hoodwinked by blue eyes and a sexy smile. While she watched, Sam seemed to be transforming from a sensitive, exquisite lover into a hard-bitten, callous sceptic.
‘Sam,’ she said, deliberately keeping her tone sympathetic. ‘I can understand how upset you must be by all this. But can’t you believe Dolly’s story? Can’t you imagine how it was for Tom and her? Meeting here, just as we have, and falling helplessly in love?’ Her voice broke on the word ‘love.’
For a brief moment, his eyes linked to hers and their flinty hardness softened. His Adam’s apple moved up and down in his throat.
Please, Sam, she begged silently. Please tell me you can picture what love was like for them. Surely, if he felt only half the emotion she was feeling for him, he would know Dolly’s story made sense.
But his next chilling words proved to her that he was on a completely different wavelength. ‘Everything about this whole situation stinks. Look at the way Fred’s used me to get his grubby publicity. Honestly, right now, I can’t help thinking the whole business with the bottle and the letter has all been one huge hoax.’
Stunned, she backed away from him until she bumped into her sofa. She sank into it as his words echoed in her head. One huge hoax? He didn’t believe she’d found the bottle! How could Sam doubt her? Last night he’d thanked her for finding it in front of a resort full of people.
And he’d given every impression that he was falling in love with her.
He had made perfect, beautiful love to her!
Tears slid down her face and she let them fall.
No wonder Sam hadn’t trusted Dolly. He didn’t trust anyone! For Pete’s sake! When he’d first come to the island, he’d hidden his real identity. He’d been suspicious of her right from the start!
This was beyond terrible! Meg had never felt so wretched—as if she had fallen into a swirling black whirlpool and was drowning… She struggled to breathe.
Sam stopped pacing. His mind had been seething with shock and a hundred worries, but suddenly it penetrated that Meg had been silent for a long time. He blinked and looked around searching for her.
She was curled up on the sofa, her lovely, honey-tanned legs tucked primly to one side and her curls tumbling every which way around her face. He peered closer. Her face looked blotchy, streaked and strained. Concerned, he walked over to her and touched her cheek.
If she hadn’t seemed so stiff and tense he would have stooped to kiss her, but something in the tight, held-in way she was sitting stopped him. ‘Are you OK, Meg?’
Her answer was to haul herself off the sofa and to storm out to the kitchen. ‘I’m getting extremely hungry.’ She tossed the words over her shoulder. ‘But I don’t suppose you’ll have time to cook dinner now.’
‘Er—I guess that depends on what flights are available.’ From the kitchen, he could hear the
sounds of Meg opening the door of the refrigerator. ‘Meg, I’ve been so agitated. I might have said something out of turn. I don’t even know now what I said. I—’
Her hard voice interrupted him. ‘Nice try, Sam, but don’t expect me to buy it.’
He frowned. He still couldn’t see Meg’s face. She was hunting around in a cupboard for something, but she was sounding as edgy as a precipice.
Completely baffled, he offered an apologetic smile in her direction. ‘I take it you’re mad at me?’
Her head came out of a cupboard and she glared at him, her face flushed. ‘I think you’d better take your seafood and your computer and get out of here,’ she said slowly, her tone icily quiet.
Struggling to make sense of her anger, he held his hands out in a gesture of innocence. ‘Don’t I get any kind of explanation?’
Shaking her head, Meg folded her arms across her chest and looked away. He could have sworn her chin was trembling as if she were struggling to hold back tears. His heart lurched. ‘Meg,’ he shouted angrily. ‘Speak to me.’
She almost—almost—weakened. Turning her tear-blurred eyes back to Sam, Meg saw his genuinely puzzled expression, as if he was honestly confused. It was tempting to simply throw herself into his arms, to have a sob that he could kiss better and to forget what he had just said about the bottle being a hoax.
But that was the weak option and she’d been weak around Sam Kirby just once too often. She’d given in to the ultimate weakness with a man she hardly knew.
Drawing in a deep, strengthening breath and then releasing it once more, she said softly, so softly she wondered if he could hear her, ‘When we made love, I was offering you more than my body.’
She saw him stiffen. His face tightened, his shoulders straightened and he seemed to grow taller. ‘Yes?’
‘I told you I’m not in the habit of—of sleeping around.’
‘Meg, I didn’t think for one moment—What are you trying to tell me?’
‘I have to feel emotionally involved with a man. I did feel very emotionally involved with you, Sam.’
His throat worked and he stared at her, his eyes puzzled. She wanted to tell him how she’d fallen head over heels for him—that already she loved him deeply, irrevocably. But it was way too late for that kind of admission.
‘I trusted you.’
‘Of course you can trust me, Meg.’
Tears threatened, but she willed herself not to cry. ‘Trust has to be mutual.’
Sam’s hands rose to his hips. He shook his head. ‘Meg, I’m no good at guessing. This is driving me insane.’ At that moment, the phone rang again and he snatched it up. ‘Kirby.’
Meg’s heart thumped and crashed harder than ever as she watched him listen carefully to his caller.
‘That’s good,’ he answered with a grim nod of his head. ‘Thanks. I’ll be there soon.’
His eyes swung to Meg and she felt herself grow cold. ‘They can get you a seat on a flight out tonight?’ Couldn’t he at least stay tonight? Just one more night?
‘Yeah. I can get a flight out of Townsville to Sydney. That way I can catch the first connection to the US in the morning.’
‘That’s—that’s what you want, isn’t it?’ Meg felt on the edge of panic. They were fighting. But that didn’t stop her from wanting him. That didn’t stop her from feeling desolate because Sam didn’t need her the way she needed him.
He took a step towards her and reached out to touch her arm. ‘What can I say to make amends?’
‘Don’t bother,’ she cried and she made a dismissive gesture with her hand.
His eyes narrowed. ‘What if I want to bother? What if I don’t want to leave here with things in a mess like this?’
She shook her head, trying to convince herself that she wanted Sam out of her life. It was the only sensible way to handle this. She’d broken her own wise rule. She’d fallen in love with a resort guest.
And now she was paying the price.
She knew from the experience of her friends that once a man left the island he wanted to forget any romantic entanglements.
Looking straight at him, she said, ‘You’re—you’re very—attractive, Sam Kirby, and it will probably take me twenty light years to forget about—last night.’ She pressed her lips together tightly and took another breath before adding softly, ‘But I can’t trust my feelings right now.’ Her eyes met his and she didn’t look away as she added, ‘And you’re not thinking straight either. I’m afraid if I listen to anything else you try to say now I’ll end up in a terrible mess.’
A wave of self-disgust clenched Sam’s stomach. How could he have been such an A-grade ass? He had always prided himself on his diplomacy and now he struggled to place exactly where everything had started going wrong. How had he made such a royal mess of things?
Meg wasn’t a girl who made love lightly. Intuitively, he had known that. In a way it had been part of why he’d found her so alluring.
Grimacing, he shoved his hands deep in his pockets. He had a fair idea he knew what was at the bottom of her hurt feelings. ‘Meg, we aren’t the same as Tom and Dolly.’
A weird little sob came from her direction. ‘How do you mean?’
‘They had a whirlwind romance and jumped straight into a hasty marriage.’
‘Don’t be silly. I don’t expect you to marry me.’
He looked at her carefully, trying to guess if he was missing any subtleties of meaning here. ‘It was different for them,’ he suggested gently. ‘They were in the middle of a war. Tom knew that any day he might die.’
‘Of course, Sam, you don’t have to—’
‘Listen!’ he ordered, his tension breaking through. ‘I’m not saying that what I feel for you isn’t just as strong. But our circumstances are completely different. We’ve had even less time to get to know each other than they had. I guess I should have known better than to—’
‘I understand!’ Meg cried. ‘You don’t have to spell out the fact that we both made a hasty mistake.’
He sighed. The way things stood, he really had no choice but to leave tonight. ‘I’d really like to hang around and sort this out. But my company’s in the middle of all kinds of hassles back home. Not just this latest crisis. My father’s ill, so I have to get back to cushion the blow of this news for him. I’m not in a position to even think about the long term.’
She said through her teeth, ‘I don’t need a list of your explanations. I’m sorry things are so bad for you. I don’t want to make it worse. Please, just go.’
‘It’ll take me quite a while to stop thinking about you, too, Meg.’
She gave him a look that said loudly and clearly that she didn’t believe him.
‘As soon as I’ve sorted everything out I’ll come back.’
‘Don’t try to make me feel better, Sam. And, please, don’t make promises you can’t keep.’
‘I want to come back and get to know you properly, Meg. I’ll write to you.’ He struggled to find a way to lighten the moment. ‘But I do getting-to-know-you best face to face.’
She bit her lip, but he was rewarded by the tiniest chink of a wayward smile. ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘You’re even better at mouth-to-mouth.’ She held up her hands as if to ward him off. ‘That’s the trouble with you, Sam Kirby.’
‘I’ll be back for sure next year for that coral-spawning you were telling me about. I can’t miss out on the world’s biggest sexual encounter.’ He crossed the room and leaned down quickly to steal one final taste of her warm lips.
He felt her mouth tremble beneath his and heard the sharp intake of her breath.
‘I’ll be seeing you, Nutmeg,’ he whispered. He wasn’t feeling very cheerful, but he managed to wink at her.
Meg watched Sam disappear into the night and felt an enormous wave of hopeless misery wash cruelly over her. Her face crumpled as the tears began again. She tried to tell herself she had no right to feel so let down. She was being foolish.
All a
long she had known that Sam had only wanted a holiday romance. It was why she’d tried so hard to resist him. But last night, she’d honestly felt he cared for her in a way that went way beyond casual sex. She’d been quite certain she wasn’t just another notch on a playboy bachelor’s bedpost.
Now she was just as sure she’d been wrong. Sam might think he cared for her. But he couldn’t have let fly with that hurtful remark about the bottle if he felt the way she did. It was clear that he didn’t feel the same helplessness, the same sense of spinning out of control, the same all-consuming need that was eating her up.
Once he got home to Seattle—to his business, his family and his girlfriends—he would be like all the rest. He would soon forget this brief holiday affair.
Shivering, she wandered into the kitchen, dragged the bag of seafood out of her fridge, and, with an angry cry, tossed it into the freezer compartment.
So much for the romantic dinner!
How could she ever have imagined her destiny was linked to that stupid bottle?
And what in the world was she going to do about her feelings for Sam?
CHAPTER SEVEN
’SAM, darling, how lovely to see you.’ Amanda Kirby beamed at her son as he strode into the familiar kitchen of his parents’ waterfront home on the outskirts of Seattle. ‘I was just going to make your father a cup of coffee. I’ll bring a cup for you, too. Go find him. He’s out on the deck. It’s lovely this morning in the sunshine.’
Sam kissed his mother’s cheek. ‘I’ll hang around in here while you make the coffee. Then we can go out together.’
Amanda sent Sam several thoughtful glances over her shoulder as she filled the coffee maker, selected cups and saucers and placed them on a tray. ‘Are you keeping well, son?’
‘Sure,’ he replied quickly. ‘Hey, don’t rush straight into mother mode. I’ve only been here a minute.’
‘I’m sorry. But you must be used to my fussing by now. It’s just that, ever since you came back from Australia, you seem…strained. And you’re looking thinner I’m sure.’
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