And he wasn’t just any man, she thought, holding her purse tightly to her chest. He had to be the most rugged man she’d ever seen. The navy-blue T-shirt he wore hugged his muscular upper torso, while faded denim stretched across his long legs. He’d neglected to cut his dark hair for some time and his face—a face that had made her breath catch when she’d first turned around—hadn’t seen the sharp end of a razor for a couple of days, either. His eyes were almost as dark as his hair, his nose bent at the bridge and his mouth—her gaze dropped there now—his mouth had a devil-take-you arrogance that made her throat go dry.
Straightening her shoulders, she tried to push past him. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t—”
Once again he blocked her. “Have you ever heard the names Jonathan and Norah Blackhawk?”
“No. And I would appreciate—”
“What about Rand and Seth Blackhawk?”
She faltered, had to blink back the unexpected and sudden pain behind her eyes. She’d never heard any of those names before, she was certain she hadn’t. And yet…
Rand and Seth…
She shook her head. “Why would I?”
“Because—” Jacob leaned down and inched his face closer to hers “—Jonathan and Norah Blackhawk are your real parents, and Rand and Seth are your brothers.”
She stared at him for what felt like an eternity, then started to laugh. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
But he didn’t smile, just kept that dark, somber gaze locked on her face. “Jonathan and Norah were killed in a car accident in Wolf River twenty-three years ago. Their three children were in the car, as well, but they survived the accident and were split up. Rand, age nine, was adopted by Edward and Mary Sloan in San Antonio. Seth, age seven, was adopted by Ben and Susan Granger, in New Mexico. Elizabeth Marie, age two, was adopted by Charles and Josephine Beauchamp, from South Carolina, but living in France at the time. You and Elizabeth, Miss Beauchamp, are one and the same.”
The smile on her lips died, and the pain behind her eyes intensified. “This is either a bad joke, Mr. Carver, or you’re a bad private investigator who’s made a very big mistake.”
“This is no joke,” he said, shaking his head. “And I don’t make mistakes. You were born Elizabeth Marie Blackhawk, adopted illegally by the Beauchamps while they were living in France. When Charles and Josephine returned to the States a year later with a three-year-old baby girl and told everyone you were their daughter, no one questioned their story.”
White spots swam in front of her eyes, and the sounds of people talking and laughing suddenly seemed very far away. “I—I don’t believe you.”
“Come, sit down.” His voice was gentle as he touched her arm. “Just for a minute.”
Dazed, she let him lead her to a table where he pulled a chair out for her. She started to sit, then shook her head. “No. This is ridiculous.” She jerked her arm from his hand. “I do not believe you!”
Heads turned. Clair didn’t look at them, didn’t care. What did it matter if a hundred people stared? A thousand? The man—Jacob—reached into his back pocket, pulled out some folded papers, then handed them to her.
“I realize you need some time to think about this, Miss Beauchamp. These documents will explain what happened. Read them, ask your parents for the truth. Call me when you’re ready.”
The papers in his hand might as well have been snakes. She couldn’t touch them, wouldn’t touch them.
With a sigh, he slipped them into her shopping bag. Her heart pounded in her chest and the pain behind her eyes became unbearable.
She had to get out of here. Now.
She turned and ran…and did not look back.
“Clair, darling, please open the door. Please, baby.”
Clair lay on her bed inside her locked bedroom and ignored her mother’s persistent knocking. She’d been standing in the hallway for fifteen minutes, pleading, threatening, even crying, but Clair had refused to answer.
“I know you’re in there, sweetheart. Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong. Your daddy and I will fix it.”
Holding the papers that Jacob Carver had given her, Clair stared at the ceiling. The documents were from a lawyer named Henry Barnes: a copy of a birth certificate, a newspaper article describing the car accident, a photograph—enlarged and scanned—of Norah Blackhawk in a hospital bed holding a newborn, surrounded by her smiling family: a handsome husband and two little boys.
Clair had stared at the photograph for the past hour. Norah Blackhawk looked so much like herself, she thought. The same hair, the same high cheekbones, the same blue eyes.
And the most damning evidence of all, a copy of a contract between a lawyer named Leon Waters in Granite Springs and Charles and Josephine Beauchamp, a vague agreement to exchange an undisclosed amount of money if a certain “package” met with their approval.
Clair had come straight home after the P.I. Jacob had sucker punched her with this information. She hadn’t believed anything the man told her, she still didn’t believe it.
How could it be possible? How could any of this have happened? And why would her parents have done such a thing?
“Oh, Charles, thank God you’re here,” Clair heard her mother say on the other side of the door. “She was supposed to meet Victoria and me for lunch, but she never showed so I called the house and Tiffany said that she came in over an hour ago, looking as if she’d seen a ghost. She wouldn’t speak to Tiffany or Richard, just went straight to her room and now she won’t open the door.”
“Clair, this is your father!” A heavy knock rattled the walls. “Open this door at once! I haven’t time for this nonsense.”
With a sigh, Clair sat. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hold her father off for long. She was going to have to face her parents and it might as well be now.
A knot twisted in her stomach as she stood, and she stared at the papers still in her hand.
Jonathan and Norah Blackhawk are your real parents…killed in a car accident…Rand and Seth…
Rand and Seth. Those names meant something to her. Something important.
She sucked in a breath and swallowed hard. Whatever the truth was, whatever it was that happened twenty-three years ago, she had to know.
“Clair Louise! Open up immed—”
Her father’s fist was in the air, ready to knock again, as Clair opened the door. Wide-eyed, her mother rushed forward.
“Clair, baby!” Her mother hugged her.
“What’s happened?” her father demanded.
Her body stiff, Clair pulled away from her mother’s embrace, then stepped aside. “Mother, Father. Come in and sit down, please.”
It amazed Clair how calm her voice sounded, how calm she actually felt.
“What’s gotten into you?” Charles frowned. “Your mother dragged me away from a meeting, insisting you were ill. I demand to know what’s going on.”
“Stop yelling at her, Charles.” Josephine waved a dismissive hand at her husband. “Can’t you see she’s already upset?”
“Mother—”
“Clair, sugar.” Josephine reached out and cupped Clair’s face in her hands. “All brides are nervous before their wedding. It’s perfectly normal. Charles, run and get my sedatives from the medicine—”
“No!”
Charles and Josephine both went still. Clair had never spoken to her parents in that tone of voice in her entire life. She couldn’t even remember if she’d ever said no to them.
“Clair, you’re frightening me.” Her mother clasped a hand to her throat. “What is it? What’s—”
“Wolf River.”
“Wolf River?” Josephine whispered, then glanced at her husband.
And in that second, in that space between heartbeats, between breaths, Clair knew it was true.
Dear God.
Josephine’s deep-brown eyes filled with panic. She made a move toward her daughter, but Clair held out a hand and shook her head.
“It’s true.�
� Clair felt her heart slam against her ribs and her pulse pound in her head. “I am adopted.”
Charles pressed his mouth into a firm line. “Where did you hear such a thing?”
For the past hour, she’d been praying that someone had been playing a horrible joke on her, or that the private investigator had made a mistake.
I don’t make mistakes, he’d told her.
Based on her parents’ expressions, it appeared that he was right.
Her throat felt like dust, and when she finally found the words to speak, her voice was barely a whisper. “A man named Jacob Carver, a private investigator hired by a lawyer from Wolf River, approached me when I came out of Evelyn’s. He gave me a newspaper article about the car accident and a photograph of my birth parents and two brothers.” Clair held up the papers in her hand. “He also gave me a copy of a document, an agreement between you and a man named Leon Waters.”
Josephine gasped, then reached for her husband’s arm to steady herself. “Clair—”
“He told me my name—my real name—is Elizabeth Marie.” Clair moved to her bedroom window, stared out at the sprawling front lawn of the estate where she’d been raised. It was green and lush, surrounded by neat rows of thick azaleas and tall crepe myrtles. The house, a two-story brick tudor, with ten bedrooms and a grand, sweeping staircase guaranteed to present the most proper, the most elegant, and the most impressive entrance to any party, was the largest in the wealthy neighborhood.
“My…parents’ names were Jonathan and Norah Blackhawk. Jonathan was Cherokee and Norah was Welsh.”
“Please, come sit down,” Charles said tightly. “We need to talk about this.”
Clair turned sharply from the window. “You bought me. Just like one of your ships or houses or cars.”
“For God’s sake, Clair.” Charles shook his head. “You’re overdramatizing. It wasn’t like that at all.”
She held the papers to her stomach as if they were a shield. “Then why don’t you tell me what it was like?”
“Charles, please, let me.” Josephine looked up at her husband and squeezed his arm. When he nodded, she turned her gaze back to her daughter. “Shortly after your father and I were married, his business partner in Paris offered to sell his interest in the company. Though it meant moving to France for a few years and being away from the States, we both knew it was an opportunity we couldn’t let pass. It was a busy time for your father, and I was alone a great deal of the time. Two years later, when we found out I was pregnant, we were both thrilled.”
Josephine moved to Clair’s bed and sank down on the edge. “I miscarried at five months. There were complications. I…I had to have a hysterectomy when I was only twenty-eight.” Josephine closed her eyes. “I thought my life was over.”
Through her own cloud of confusion and anger, Clair’s heart ached for her mother. She moved to the bed and sat beside her. There were tears in Josephine’s eyes when she opened them again.
“When your father brought you home to me—” Josephine reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind Clair’s ear “—I didn’t ask how he found you. I didn’t care. All I knew was that you were the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, the most perfect little girl in the whole world, and you belonged to me. You were three when we came back to the States and since we’d been gone for over four years, there were never any questions.”
“Mr. Carver said the adoptions were illegal.” Clair looked at her father. “That a lawyer named Leon Waters sold me to you.”
“That vile man,” Josephine said with a shudder. “I never would have known his name if he hadn’t called six months after you came to live with us. He threatened to take you away from us if we didn’t give him more money. We gave him what he wanted, and then your father told me the truth after everything. About Wolf River and how your family had died.”
“Mr. Carver said my brothers didn’t die.” Clair handed the photograph of her birth family to her mother. “That they live in Texas and they want to meet me.”
Josephine shook her head. “That’s not true. There were death certificates on record for your brothers. Your father told me he saw them.”
“But the newspaper—” she drew in a deep, steadying breath “—the article said that the entire Blackhawk family was killed.”
“The lawyer assured me that was an error by an incompetent reporter,” Charles stated firmly. “Waters knew that I wanted to adopt without going through months—if not years—of paperwork, so when you were brought to him, he didn’t bother to correct the newspaper. He called me, I flew to the States, then I brought you back to France with me.”
“Clair.” Josephine took her daughter’s hand. “This man, this Jacob Carver, is lying about your brothers. He must have found out what happened and he wants money. That’s the only explanation why after all these years this has come to the surface.”
Clair shook her head. “He didn’t ask me for money.”
“Not yet, but he will.” Josephine’s face was ashen, her voice trembling. “A scandal like this three days before your wedding? He knows we’d do anything to keep this quiet for now. Promise me you won’t speak to him again.”
“I, I don’t know. I’m not—”
“Sweetheart.” Josephine’s chest rose on a sob. “Even if I didn’t carry you in my womb, you’re my little girl and I love you so very much. Please, Clair, forgive us for keeping the truth from you, and please, please tell me you won’t speak to that awful man again.”
Maybe she’s right, Clair thought. Considering everything she’d just learned, she supposed it was possible that Jacob Carver was lying, that he was looking for some easy money. The P.I. had been a bit rough around the edges. And even though he hadn’t appeared to be a blackmailer, you certainly couldn’t look at a person and know what was going on inside.
She, of all people, knew how true that was.
Numb, Clair settled into the warmth of Josephine’s embrace. This was the only mother she knew, the mother who’d played dress-up and dolls with her when she was little, brought her soup when she’d been sick, then tucked her in bed every night. The mother who’d fussed over her first date, cried at her high school and college graduation, worried when she came home too late.
Sooner or later, Clair knew that she would have to deal with the overwhelming reality of being adopted and the fact her parents had lied to her. It was too big, too huge, to be avoided or ignored.
And so was the fact that in seventy-six hours, thirty-three minutes and twenty-one seconds, Clair Louise Beauchamp was getting married.
Arms crossed, Jacob leaned against a thick marble column in the back of the one-hundred-eighty-five-year-old cathedral. Huge sprays of white and pink roses filled the church. A quartet played Handel’s water music while at least two hundred smiling, murmuring people sat watching a blond bridesmaid dressed in satin turquoise float down an aisle long enough to land a Cessna.
Jacob wondered what those two hundred people would be murmuring if they’d seen Blondie and Oliver slipping out of the Wanderlust Motel at 1:00 a.m. for the past two nights. Most likely they’d be wishing they hadn’t had their present engraved.
It had been completely by coincidence that Jacob had discovered Clair’s husband-to-be’s little peccadillo. Since Jacob hadn’t been able to get close to Clair’s gated estate, he’d decided to follow her fiancé instead, hoping the prospective groom might somehow lead him to Clair.
Only it wasn’t Clair that Oliver Hollingsworth met at the seedy motel just outside of town. It was Blondie. Out of habit, Jacob had snapped a few pictures, but he’d have no use for them. He wasn’t here to catch a philandering fiancé or husband. He was here to convince Clair to speak with her brothers, or better, to meet with them.
He’d thought for certain that she would have called him after he’d given her the documents proving his story was true. Though he’d just met her, and barely spoken to her for more than a few minutes, there was something about Clair that made him th
ink she was different from that rich, snobby crowd her family ran with. When she hadn’t known he was watching her, there’d been something in her eyes, something in her expression, that set her apart.
Obviously he’d been wrong.
At the sound of the quartet playing the “Wedding March,” Jacob straightened. Two hundred heads turned in the direction of the door where the bride would be entering the cathedral.
Damn. So much for catching the bride alone for five seconds. Once she walked down that aisle, it would be days, probably weeks, before he’d be able to get close to her again.
Damn, damn.
He watched the side door at the back of the church open, then, for one long, heart-stopping moment, he simply couldn’t think at all. Like a white cloud, Clair Beauchamp floated toward him, her face covered by her veil.
Oliver Hollingsworth might be a two-timing jerk, Jacob thought, but he was one hell of a lucky two-timing jerk.
Clair might have kept her carefully paced stride steady and even, might have kept her shoulders straight and her chin level, might have even remembered to breathe—if she hadn’t seen Jacob Carver leaning casually against a marble column when she’d come out of the bride’s anteroom.
He wore black—T-shirt, jeans, boots—and Clair thought he looked like the devil himself. When he grinned at her and touched two fingers to his temple, her step faltered and her icy hands clutched desperately at the elegant bouquet of white roses.
How dare he show up here! At her wedding, with two hundred guests in attendance. And how dare he look at her with such accusation in his eyes, such reproach.
So she hadn’t called him. Why should she? After twenty-three years, what difference did it make now that she’d been adopted? Her parents loved her. Oliver loved her. They had a wonderful, happy life ahead of them.
Only a few feet away, her father held out a hand to her. She glanced at him, then at Oliver, who stood at the front of the church, watching her, smiling calmly, waiting.
Oh, God.
Her heart pounding fiercely, Clair stepped up to her father and looked into his eyes. “Daddy, I—I’m sorry.”
That Blackhawk Bride Page 2