by Lucy Monroe
“Lied to you?” His pale blue eyes narrowed warily. “About what?”
“What’s the matter? Are there so many lies between us that you can’t guess which one I’m angry about?” she asked scathingly.
“I told Sandor not to mention the business deal. I knew it would only upset you.”
“I don’t care about the business deal between you two sharks.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“So, you’re going to marry him anyway?”
“Never!”
George Wentworth seemed to shrink, looking older than his fifty-four years. “I thought…”
“Whatever you thought, you were wrong. But I’m not here to discuss Sandor, or the almost disaster I narrowly avoided in marrying him.”
“You aren’t?”
“I’m here to discuss her.” Ellie threw a picture on the desk.
It was one in which her sister’s lover was difficult to recognize. Ellie had no doubt that her father would start looking for her sister, but the fact that he’d stopped looking at all and filed his lost daughter away with other bad business made her determined not to make it easy for him. She was perfectly capable of finding the other woman, or at least as capable of hiring a good detective agency as he was.
Her dad stared down at the picture and turned gray. “Where did this come from?”
“Ask Sandor.”
His head snapped up. “What does Sandor have to do with it?”
“He thinks I cheated on him.”
“But I told him you were in Spain.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“There are stalking laws in this state. Call off your security detail, or I will invoke them.”
“Damn it, Eleanor, you know I can’t do that. It’s not safe.”
“You mean like she was safe?”
If anything, his complexion turned more pasty. “There was nothing I could do once she was gone. No leads to follow.”
“You gave up.”
“It was the only way to maintain my sanity.” He made a visible effort to swallow. “How did you find out about her?”
“Certainly not from you.”
He flinched, but said nothing.
“I played a hunch and had a newspaper search done of the time near my birth. The kidnapping made the papers.”
“By the time it did, there was no hope left.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about her? I had a right to know.”
“What would have been the use? By the time you were old enough to understand, I knew we would never see her again. Knowing about her would only have hurt you.”
“Since when did you ever care whether or not I was hurt? You didn’t tell me about my sister because you didn’t want me to keep after you to find her. You knew I would. I’m stubborn that way about the people I love.”
“I couldn’t stand it. It hurt too much,” the admission came out in a low, tortured voice.
“What hurt exactly? Writing your daughter off like bad business?”
“I didn’t write her off. There was nothing to go on,” he practically shouted, surging to his feet behind the desk.
“Who said I was talking about her?” Ellie asked, then turned and left his office.
He called her name, but she ignored the plea in his voice, just as he had ignored her pleas for affection for twenty-four years.
When she got home, there was a message on her answering machine. It was Hawk.
She called him back, irritated all over again by men whose priorities didn’t match hers.
“I told your answering service it was an emergency,” she said after he picked up and without even identifying herself.
“Miss Wentworth?”
“Yes.”
“It has only been five hours since you called.”
“An emergency implies immediate reaction is necessary, Mr. Hawk. I’m surprised your clients are tolerant of your definition.”
“You are not one of my clients.”
“Nevertheless…”
He sighed. “I will admit that I would prefer not to have this conversation, but to clarify, the demise of a relationship due to information I provide is not a five-alarm fire in my book.”
“It should be when you got your facts wrong.”
“Please, Miss Wentworth. I’ve heard it all before. Tearful begging and bribery are going to meet with the same non-results. Nothing is going to convince me to call my client and tell him there was a mistake. There was no mistake.”
“You’re so sure of that?”
“Absolutely positive.”
She shook her head at his arrogance, but only said, “I have no interest in you calling the deceiving rat who employed you.”
“Then what do you want?” the man asked, sounding skeptical.
“I want to know where you, or your operative was, when these pictures were taken.”
“I cannot answer that question. My operatives are all very good at being discreet. Do not feel badly that you did not realize one was following you.”
“I don’t mean where the operative was in relation to the people in the pictures, I mean where he was geographically.”
“He was in Spain,” Hawk replied in a tone that said he was humoring her.
“Spain?”she choked out in disbelief.
The article had been in a Spanish tabloid, but the playboy with her sister was something of a Spanish celebrity, being a member of the family that ran one of the country’s largest privately held business conglomerates. The article did not give any information regarding location of where the picture was taken with the man’s mystery lady however.
“You know he was.”
“No, Mr. Hawk. I don’t know.” She felt sick. She’d been in the same country, even on the same coast from the look of things, with her sister. “What city was he in?”
“Is this game necessary?”
“Just answer my questions and then I’ll hang up and leave you in peace.”
“The pictures were taken in and near Barcelona.”
“If I’d stayed in the city, I might have seen her,” she breathed incredulously. Why had she taken the bus out of the city to the smaller town further down the coast? Because she’d been running from Sandor. Pain sliced through her and she cut those thoughts off midspate. “Did you follow this couple anywhere else?”
“No. My client told me to stop surveillance so I called my operative in from the field.”
At least she had a place to start. And a name. The playboy her sister had been seen with.
“Mr. Hawk, can you recommend an agency to help me find someone?”
“You’re asking me for a recommendation?”
She almost laughed at his incredulity. “Yes. Sandor used you, which means you’re the best there is. It follows you would know who I should call if I can’t use you.”
“Who do you want to find, Miss Wentworth, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“The couple in the pictures you took. Specifically the woman.”
“No agency I recommend is going to fabricate evidence of a second woman to get you off the hook.”
“I’m not on the hook. In fact, because of you…I’m off of it permanently. Which gives me two things to thank you for, Mr. Hawk.”
“Just Hawk,” he growled. “What two things?”
“If you hadn’t screwed up, Sandor never would have told me about the business deal he and my father intended to use me as the contract guarantee for. I might have married him. That’s the first thing. And because you took those pictures, I now know I have a sister and even where to start looking for her. If you weren’t in New York and I hadn’t come to the conclusion that all men were a waste of good DNA, I might be tempted to kiss you.”
Sandor stared down at the pictures of Ellie and the other man. When he’d first gotten the photos, he’d looked at them only long enough to assimilate what he was seeing and then he’d refused to look at them again. He’d meant to delete the imag
es off his computer after he printed them off, but he hadn’t.
Then he’d gone to Ellie’s and told her it was over. And now he sat like a moonstruck calf, looking at the pictures in obsessive, meticulous detail. Ellie looked thinner in the pictures, but that wasn’t right. Wasn’t the camera supposed to add ten pounds? And there was something different about her eyebrows.
He tried to think back to when he’d met with her earlier. Had she looked any different? He couldn’t remember. He’d been upset, damn it.
He didn’t like admitting that any more than he liked the fact that he couldn’t seem to look away from the pictures of his woman with another man. Shewas his woman. Ellie belonged to him. But if she’d gone to bed with another man, she wasn’t his. According to the way they’d left things when he’d walked out of her apartment, she wasn’t his. He’d even agreed to it.
His pride had. It had demanded he leave rather than push for explanations she was unwilling to give. Not that any explanation could make it okay. He was disgusted with himself for even wanting to know what she’d been thinking. For wanting tounderstand.
Only he couldn’t get past one salient fact. She’d come home prepared to marryhim. Why? Why, if she wanted to have sex with another man had she been willing to marry him? He knew it wasn’t the money. It wasn’t his position, either. Those things did not hold sway for Ellie. Or so he had believed.
But he had also believed her incapable of infidelity.
They were not married yet, but once she had taken him into her body, she had belonged to him. He crumpled one of the pictures in his hand as thoughts of her with another man tormented emotions he refused to acknowledge. He should not feel like this. If she wanted someone else, he should be able to deal with that the same way he did a business deal that fell through.
But he’d told her their relationship was not a business deal. And it wasn’t. It was more, damn it.
He stared down at the picture again. Why did his instincts keep telling him something wasn’t right about the photos? Obviously he didn’t want to see his woman with another man. That was what was wrong.
He stared at the one of the woman on the beach. Was it a trick of the camera, or did Ellie’s body look as different as he thought it did?
His phone rang and he picked it up. “Christofides.”
“Sandor, it’s Hawk.”
“Yes?”
“I just had a strange phone call from your fiancée.”
“We aren’t engaged.” Saying the words out loud made him feel hollow and he had to concentrate on ignoring the reaction.
“That’s what she said.”
“Was she angry with you?”
“No. Actually she thanked me.”
“You find that strange?” Actually he did, too. He wouldn’t have anticipated Ellie thanking Hawk for exposing her activities with the Spanish playboy.
“Not after she explained. She seems to think you and her father have messed her over royally.”
Sandor made a noncommittal male sound he knew Hawk would understand.
“She asked for a recommendation for a firm to help her find someone.”
“Who?”
“The woman in the picture.”
Everything inside Sandor froze. “She’s claiming it’s not her?”
“Yes.”
“And she wants you to find this other woman?”
“Not at first, no. She wanted me to recommend another agency. But if the woman in the photos is not your fiancée, then my operative made a mistake. That puts my agency at fault. I don’t like mistakes, Sandor.”
“I am aware of it. That is why I use your agency exclusively.” He paused. “Are you going to find the woman?”
“Yes, but I wanted to give you the courtesy of knowing I was looking.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Sandor?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
Sandor knew the words were hard for the other man to say. He and Hawk shared that trait. They both hated making mistakes and admitting them equally as much. But the words meant something more. Hawk would not be apologizing if he wasn’t convinced of Ellie’s claim. If he believed her, then the evidence she had against the photos being her had to be pretty significant.
A sensation like heady relief washed over Sandor and he had to fight to keep his voice level. “Who does Ellie say the woman is?”
“Her twin sister, kidnapped from the hospital almost immediately after their birth. There were no leads and the baby just disappeared. No request for a ransom was ever made.”
It took several seconds for Sandor to assimilate Hawk’s words because they were so different than anything he would have expected the other man to answer. “I did not know Ellie had a sister.”
“Neither did she.”
“Her father did not tell her?”
“No and I get the feeling he’s on her black list at the moment.”
“Along with me.”
“Afraid so.”
Sandor swore, but he still felt lighter than he had in a long time. Ellie had not gone to another man’s bed. Shewas his. “How did she find out?”
“She knew the pictures were not of her.”
“So, she immediately thought she had a twin?”
“No. She told me she tried to believe the woman was just a doppelgänger, but her instincts were telling her otherwise, so she searched her birth records.”
“And discovered another baby had been born?”
“Yes. I verified the birth records and newspaper accounts of the kidnapping as well as the fact that Miss Wentworth was staying in a small hotel in a town further along the coast than Barcelona during the time my agent was following her twin and Menendez around the city.”
Trust Hawk to have double-checked the facts to be sure.
“I see. What are the chances they would have been in Spain at the same time?”
“Slim, but in my line of work, you learn to accept that kind of thing does happen. A lot more often than people want to believe.”
“I believe.”
“It upset her.”
“You mean Ellie? What upset her?”
“That she was so close to her unknown sister and that they did not meet.”
“She is no doubt upset about a lot of things right now.”
Hawk’s silence was agreement enough.
“Have you spoken to Wentworth yet?” Sandor asked.
“He’s the next call I’m making.”
“Let me know what you find out.”
“No can do. Telling you I am looking is a courtesy, but in this case, Eleanor Wentworth is my client.”
“Understood.”
Sandor picked up the phone and dialed Ellie’s number. She didn’t answer and he wasn’t surprised. She had caller ID. He tried three more times before deciding his best alternative would be to do what they had both said they did not want for him to do ever…return to her apartment.
He’d changed his mind, but he was under no illusions that she was in a similar place. Getting through the door was going to be no easy task. She’d said she never wanted to see him again. And she’d meant it. But he had not gotten to where he was by giving up.
He was on his way to her apartment when his cell phone rang.
It was Hawk again.
“What is it?” he asked without preamble.
“When I called to try to talk to George Wentworth, I discovered he had been rushed to a nearby private hospital. He was found collapsed on his office floor two hours ago.”
“Did someone call Ellie?”
“She’s not answering her phone.”
“I am on my way to her apartment right now.”
“Good. When you see her, tell her I’m working on finding her sister.”
“Will do.”
He tried calling Ellie’s apartment again, but there was still no answer.
His next call was to his mother. That conversation was almost as difficult as the one he antici
pated with the woman he fully intended to claim once again.
Sandor knocked on Ellie’s door, having gained access to the building without her assistance. She hadn’t been answering her apartment buzzer, either.