He nodded slowly. "Any idea what your mother looked like?"
"Nothing like me." For some reason it seemed important that he know that, that she assure him he wasn't looking at a carbon copy of her mother. "She was petite, probably around five feet, and she had short, dark brown hair."
"Were your mother's eyes blue-green like yours?"
Though Morton's words were innocuous, something in his voice sent chills through Rebecca. She glanced in Jake's direction, but he gave no indication of noticing anything awry. Likely she was being too sensitive. She'd done a lot of that lately. "We don't know her eye color," she said. "It was all so long ago. The people I talked to said she wore glasses and rarely looked up from her work."
"Doesn't sound like anybody from here, and I'd know if it was. This is a small town and I've been here most of my life. I know everybody, even people that left years ago. I think you folks are wasting your time, but, like I said, anything you need, give me a call. I'll do my best to open any doors I can for you."
Jake eased upright from his half-sitting stance. "We do appreciate that, Mayor. We'll be sure to let you know."
He clapped a hand on Morton's back in simulated good-old-boy camaraderie, guided Morton out the door and closed it behind him.
Yes, Jake Thornton was a man in control of his world and anyone who infringed on that world.
Including her.
She pushed up from the chair, forcing herself to face him. "How did he find out about you?" she demanded, channeling her uneasiness about the whole situation into anger. "Have you told the whole world I'm looking for the mother who dumped me? I thought this was supposed to be private!"
Jake stood in the middle of the floor, arms again folded across his chest, legs planted wide apart, his expression implacable. "I've just spent the day going through public records at the courthouse and talking to people. When you start asking questions, those people want to know why. I had to tell them I have a client who wants to find her birth mother. But nobody would have known who you are if you hadn't come down here and jumped into the middle of things."
Rebecca sank back into the chair. "Okay, you're right. I apologize for snapping at you. This whole business is making me crazy."
Jake scowled. "You can't let it do that."
"That's easy enough for you to say when all this means to you is a job." She was only too aware that she wasn't maintaining her professional demeanor, but she had to make him understand how important this was to her. "It's a little more than that to me. When I lost my parents...lost them completely, I mean, not just to death...it was like I ceased to exist. You have no idea what something like that does to a person. You couldn't possibly know since it hasn't happened to you. Everything's different. Everything's wrong." She spread her arms helplessly. "Somehow I have to get things right again."
He regarded her for a long, speculative moment, then walked over and placed both hands on her shoulders. "Grieve for your parents. Try to find your real mother if that's what you have to do. But don't let this interfere with your life. Families come, families go...real families, stepfamilies, half families, whole families. In the long run, you're all you've got."
Jake's deep voice resonated through her, his words echoing with a loneliness completely out of character for him. Was she filtering what he said through her own loneliness or did Jake...the man who'd answered her knock tonight, not the private investigator she'd met in Dallas, the man who'd so effortlessly ushered Charles Morton out the door...did he have his own pain, his own losses to deal with?
She lifted her gaze to his, searching for answers, and found instead a thousand questions as his lids lowered halfway and a smoky haze washed over the sharp blue-black stone of his eyes. In the sudden silence, she heard her own quick intake of breath, her own blood racing past her ears. She was excruciatingly, wonderfully, frighteningly aware of Jake's hands on her shoulders.
His nearness blurred the edges of her thoughts so she couldn't remember what it was she'd wanted to ask him. His spearmint scented breath wisped past her, and his chest was so close she could have touched it...wanted to touch it, to take in the warmth of his skin, to press the hairs and feel them spring back beneath her fingers.
His hands slid from her shoulders down her arms and he moved closer, so close his tingling warmth reached her skin through her cotton dress.
Abruptly he turned away, leaving her arms cold where he no longer touched them and her face hot with embarrassment that she could have responded so hungrily to an incidental contact. Was she so desperate to find a family, someone to belong to, that the first stranger she met was a candidate?
He flopped back onto the bed. "You're paying the bills," he said, his tone deliberately nonchalant but with an underlying huskiness as if he hadn't been totally unaffected by the strange encounter. "If this town is where you want to spend your vacation, go for it. I'll deliver a daily report every night, but you're not going with me to question Doris Jordan or anywhere else I have to go. Do you let other people sit in when you're doing whatever it is Directors of Human Resources at big hotels do?"
"My boss sits in whenever he chooses to."
"Lady, you may be paying for my services, but you're not my boss."
Humiliated, angry with Jake and even angrier with herself, Rebecca took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "There's no point in getting into semantics. You've agreed to perform a service for me, but that doesn't preclude my working separately on my own behalf."
"It does preclude your hindering me in performing that service."
Jake's tone, his exclusion of her, bothered her, but she refused to back down. She couldn't back down, couldn't let her life continue to spiral out of control. She had to take charge somehow on some level. "How do you think my presence is going to hinder you?"
His gaze burned across the room with that same smoky intensity as a few minutes before, but his voice was cold when he spoke. "I can give you a good example. If you hadn't been here when Mayor Morton paid a call, I might have been able to get some information out of him."
"I don't recall anything that would indicate he knows something."
"That's because it's my job to notice things that you don't. That's why you hired me. Why'd the man come around at all? Why was he so interested in what I might find? Why is he so anxious to get us out of town? Why did he tell us Doris Jordan is senile? She sounded fine when I talked to her on the phone this morning."
"You think he knows who my mother is?"
"Maybe. He'd have been a young man when you were born. He might remember some high school girl leaving town for a few months, his buddy's sister, his buddy's girlfriend."
A chill clutched Rebecca's chest. "His girlfriend?" She choked as she put the thought into words.
"Maybe. But probably not. He didn't look at you in a fatherly way."
Jake had noticed, too.
"He made me feel very uncomfortable."
"Why? You're a beautiful woman. I'm sure lots of men look at you that way."
The thought of Morton's viewing her as a woman made her nauseous. "That's not the way he looked at me."
Jake shrugged, neither accepting her denial nor arguing with her. "I'll see if Doris Jordan has anything to say about him when I talk to her tomorrow."
After her protestations that she had no intention of hindering his investigation, Rebecca couldn't ask to go with him no matter how desperately she wanted to.
"What time are you seeing her?" she asked instead.
"I'm meeting her at ten in the morning. Why do you ask? Do you plan to come along and stand on her front porch, peeking in the window?"
"I expect you to give me an oral report as soon as you get back. I'm in room 102."
His eyes widened slightly. "You're in the room next door?"
She nodded. "This place had plenty of vacancies, and being close seemed logical." Though now she wasn't so sure how logical it was, how well she'd sleep tonight knowing Jake with his bare chest and slate blue eyes was
in bed one wall away. Because the room layout was flipped, she'd be sleeping with her head against the same wall as Jake.
She didn't dare look at him for fear that absurd thought would show on her face, that she'd embarrass herself again.
"Well," she said, "I guess I'll see you tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
***
Jake woke from a tantalizing, erotic dream about Rebecca Patterson.
Damn! She'd kept him awake for a long time just with the thought of her sleeping in the next room, and now he was awake in the middle of the night because of her...awake with his body hard and ready.
A faint ringing sounded, and he realized that must be what woke him. Rebecca's nightstand would be directly behind his, and her phone was ringing.
He flipped on a bedside lamp and glanced at the clock. Two fifteen? That was an odd hour to get a phone call.
He lay back and pulled the sheet over him, then kicked it off again.
Why in hell did she have to come here?
Why in hell did it have to bother him that she was here?
He'd thought her attractive when she'd come to his office, but tonight, in jeans and a thin cotton dress instead of a business suit, she was incredibly provocative. That, combined with the setting, the small motel room, had kept him fighting the urge to take her into his arms and throw her across the bed that was so conveniently near.
She'd felt something, too. He'd seen it in those changeable, indecipherable blue-green eyes. But there was so much more going on in those eyes than just desire, and that's what scared him.
Rebecca Patterson needed him. She'd come right out and said it. I hired you because I need you. Not your services or your expertise, but I need you.
A Freudian slip, of course. She hadn't meant it to come out that way. But it was true. Not that she needed him specifically. She just needed somebody. She'd lost everybody and she hadn't learned to cope on her own yet.
No matter how much he might want her, he couldn't do that to her, couldn't let her mistake passion for something else, couldn't let her count on him for anything else when passion was all he had to give and all he wanted to take.
"Jake!" A pounding came from outside. "Jake! Please let me in!"
He bolted out of bed, snatched his jeans from the floor and yanked them on then flung open the door.
Rebecca dashed in, closed and locked the door with trembling fingers and leaned against it. Her perfect hair was mussed. She was breathing hard, her high, rounded breasts rising and falling beneath the short, silky white gown that hid nothing.
"Somebody threatened me." Her words and her expression—frightened but trying not to show it—pulled his libido up short.
"What do you mean?"
"I just got a phone call. Somebody told me I'd better go home and forget about finding my mother, that she's dead and if I keep looking, I'll end up that way, too."
Chapter 4
"Come sit down." Jake took Rebecca's arm, guiding her toward the chair while trying to ignore the silky softness of her skin and the allure of her nearly nude body.
He switched on the light over the table and pulled out the single chair, offering it to her, resisting the impulse to take her in his arms and comfort her. She was far too appealing in that sexy getup. Only his concern for her obvious distress kept him from making a complete fool of himself.
She made a movement to sit, then looked down at herself as if she could read his thoughts...or the lust in his eyes. That was probably pretty easy to do.
"I'll get you...something," he mumbled, his gaze searching all around the room as though he expected a robe to materialize out of nowhere. But at least it gave him something to stare at besides her.
"Do you...is this normal to get threatening phone calls when you're looking for somebody's birth parents?" Her voice sounded so small he half expected to find she'd shrunk to the size of a child.
He yanked one of his denim shirts from a hanger and returned to find she hadn't shrunk at all. She was still tall and elegant, though she now had her arms wrapped self-consciously about herself.
He held the shirt toward her, and she turned, sliding her arms into the sleeves, hiding the sleek curves of her body. But the damage was done. He remembered only too well what she looked like without the shirt.
He stood motionless behind her, paralyzed by her nearness, the faint scents of summer flowers and sleep that wafted from her while she fumbled with the buttons. It would be so easy to wrap his arms around her, pull her to him, murmur soothing, meaningless words in her ear.
And take advantage of her helplessness, her neediness? No, even he had a few rules...like never playing the game with someone who didn't know the score beforehand.
She curled in the chair, looking up at him, her eyes full of pain and fear. "Do you?" she asked, and for a minute he thought she was referring to his self-imposed rules, asking if he really had the strength to ignore his desire for her.
"Do I?" Then he remembered her unanswered question. He cleared his throat. "No. Threatening phone calls are not typical for this sort of case. Do you want something to drink?"
She clutched the shirt tightly and nodded. He headed to the bathroom, the trip really an excuse to take himself away from her physical presence, to get his libido under control. "Sorry I can't offer you anything but tap water. These rooms don't come equipped with a mini bar."
"Water's fine."
When he returned, she seemed to have regained some of her composure, though her eyes were unusually bright and her skin extremely pale. She accepted the glass as graciously as if it were a crystal snifter of aged brandy. "Thank you."
He sat on the edge of the bed. If these meetings kept up, he was going to have to get another chair in here. Sitting on the unmade, rumpled bed put too many ideas in his head.
"All right, now tell me exactly what happened, what this caller said."
"I answered the phone." She hesitated, biting her lower lip.
"It's not unusual to have trouble recalling exactly what happened in a stressful situation. Just tell me what you remember."
She shook her head, the movement abrupt and jerky. "I remember every word. Go away. Go back home and forget about finding your mother. She's dead and if you keep looking, you'll end up that way, too."
"Was the caller a man or a woman?"
She shook her head again, more slowly this time, allowing the shadows in her pale hair to shift in the harsh light from the lamp hanging above the table. "I don't know. The voice was muffled and I was half asleep. It could have been either."
"Any chance it might be our friend, the Mayor?"
"It's possible. But why would he do that? Why would anybody do something like that?"
"Most threatening phone calls are bluffs. It's pretty far-fetched to think somebody might want to kill you just because you're trying to find your birth mother."
She studied him silently for a moment. "So you're saying somebody is using empty threats to scare me into leaving before I find her."
He nodded. "That'd be my take on the situation."
"They don't want to kill me. They just want me to go away."
He nodded a second time.
"Why?"
"We haven't found the answer to that yet, but it would seem somebody doesn't want you to find your mother."
"Or my mother doesn't want to be found. If the caller was lying, if she's not really dead, that could have been her on the phone."
She sat with her legs curled under her, his shirt pulled around her knees, her hands clenched in her lap. Without makeup, she lost all traces of a sophisticated veneer. She was young and vulnerable, a sapling bent to the earth by a hurricane, not strong enough to stand on her own.
Rebecca had so much to learn, and before this hunt for her mother was over, he suspected she'd learn a lot more than she expected or wanted to learn.
"You knew that going in." His words came out more harshly than he'd intended.
"Yes." She straightened abrup
tly, swinging her feet to the floor, lifting her chin defiantly even as her lower lip quivered ever so slightly. "Yes," she said. "I knew that, but it's still unpleasant to have it confirmed. When you're following somebody's husband or tracking down somebody's parents, doesn't it ever occur to you that what you find might change your client's entire life? Maybe for good, maybe for bad, but it's likely to have a strong effect, one way or the other."
"That's exactly why ninety percent of my business is done for corporate clients. Tracking down a missing heir, finding out who's dipping into the company till, those are the kinds of jobs where no innocent person gets hurt." Jake felt a little uncomfortable, aware he was taking out his irritation with himself on Rebecca, fighting that same need he'd felt the first time he saw her in his office...to go to her, wrap her in his arms, pull her against him, stroke her hair and reassure her that everything was going to be all right.
But that would be the cruel in the long run...for both of them.
He'd had his doubts about this case from the beginning, and that phone call confirmed that she was not going to have a happy reunion with her long-lost mother. She might as well be prepared.
As though suddenly deciding to fight, Rebecca stood, her bare feet wide apart, her entire stance a defiant gesture. His shirt was long. On a smaller woman, it would have been like a robe, loose and concealing. But on Rebecca it was suggestive, reaching only halfway down her thighs, the slits on each side rising up far enough to expose an edge of gauzy white gown and a lot of smooth, ivory thigh. "I'm going with you tomorrow to talk to Mrs. Jordan," she announced.
He rose from the bed and towered over her, aware of the intimidation advantage his height gave him. "The hell you say."
Secrets Rising Page 4