Читать онлайн книгу «The Paternity Promise» автора Merline Lovelace
The Paternity Promise
Merline Lovelace
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“You want me to come back as Molly’s nanny?”
“Not as her nanny,” Blake replied. “As my wife.”
He could certainly understand Grace’s slack-jawed astonishment. She’d wormed her way into his life and Molly’s heart. She’d lied to him. Yet the hole she’d left behind had grown deeper with each hour she was gone.
Molly’s unexpected arrival had already turned his calm, comfortable routine upside down. This doe-eyed blonde had kicked it all to hell. So he felt a savage satisfaction to see his chaotic feelings mirrored on her face.
“You’re crazy! I can’t marry you!”
“Why not?”
“Because…because… What about love, Blake? And…sex?”
With a smooth move, he pushed himself off the sofa. Grace wasn’t prepared when he stopped mere inches away. With him standing so close, her chest rose and fell with every breath.
“That’s not a problem, Grace. The sex is definitely doable.”
Dear Reader,
When my husband and I spent a week in the small town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France, we absolutely fell in love with the place. And since I’m always on the lookout for exciting locales for books, I knew Saint-Rémy would eventually show up in one.
I didn’t, however, expect the road that led my characters there would be so bumpy and pitted with tension, sexual and otherwise. I had great fun overcoming the roadblocks with Grace and Blake—hope you do, too!
All my best, and happy reading,
Merline Lovelace
About the Author
A career Air Force officer, MERLINE LOVELACE served at bases all over the world. When she hung up her uniform for the last time she decided to combine her love of adventure with a flair for storytelling, basing many of her tales on her own experiences in uniform. Since then she’s produced more than ninety action-packed sizzlers, many of which have made the USA TODAY and Waldenbooks bestseller lists. Over eleven million copies of her books are available in some thirty countries.
When she’s not tied to her keyboard, Merline enjoys reading, chasing little white balls around the fairways of Oklahoma and traveling to new and exotic locales with her handsome husband, Al. Check her website at www.merlinelovelace.com or friend her on Facebook for news and information about her latest releases.
The Paternity Promise
Merline Lovelace
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To the Elite Eight, and the wonderful times we’ve shared. Thanks for giving me such terrific fodder for my books!
One
His fists balled inside the pockets of his tuxedo pants, Blake Dalton forced a smile as he stood amid the wedding guests jamming the black-and-white-tiled foyer of his mother’s Oklahoma City mansion. The lavish reception was finally winding down. The newlyweds had just paused in their descent of the foyer’s circular marble staircase so the bride could toss her bouquet. The couple were mere moments from departing for their honeymoon in Tuscany.
Blake was damned if he’d block their escape. His twin had waged a tumultuous battle to win the stubbornly independent pilot he’d finally finessed to the altar. Alex had earned these two weeks in Tuscany with his new bride, away from his heavy responsibilities as CEO of Dalton International.
Blake had no problem taking up the slack in his absence. An MBA, a law degree and almost a decade of handling the corporation’s complex legal affairs had honed the leadership and managerial skills he’d developed as DI’s CFO. He and Alex regularly took over sole control of the multibillion-dollar conglomerate during each other’s frequent business trips.
No, the job wasn’t the problem.
Nor was it their mother, who’d waged a fierce and unrelenting campaign to get her sons married and settled down for over a year now.
Blake’s glance cut to the matriarch of the Dalton clan. Her hair was still jet-black, with only a hint of silver at the temples. She wore a melon-colored Dior lace dress and an expression of smug satisfaction as she surveyed the newly married couple. Blake knew exactly what she was thinking. One son down, one to go.
But it was the baby peering over his mother’s shoulder that made his fist bunch even tighter and his heart squeeze inside his chest. In the weeks since person or persons unknown had left the six-month-old on his mother’s doorstep, Molly had become as essential to Blake as breathing.
DNA testing had proved with 99.99 percent certainty that the bright-eyed infant girl was a Dalton. Unfortunately, the tests hadn’t returned the same accuracy as to which of the Dalton brothers had fathered the baby. Although even identical twins carried distinctive DNA, there were enough similarities to fog the question of paternity. The report had indicated a seventy-seven percent probability that Alex was the father, but the issue couldn’t be completely resolved until the lab matched the father’s DNA with that of the mother.
As a result, the Dalton brothers had spent several uncomfortable weeks after Molly’s arrival tracking down the women they’d connected with early last year. Alex’s list had been considerably longer than Blake’s, but none of the potential candidates—including the woman who’d just become Ms. Alex Dalton—had proved to be the baby’s mother. Or so they’d thought.
A noisy round of farewells wrenched Blake’s gaze from the baby. He looked up to find his brother searching the crowd. It was like looking in a mirror. Both he and Alex had their father’s build. Like Big Jake Dalton, they carried six feet plus of solid muscle. They’d also inherited their father’s electric blue eyes and tawny hair that the hot Oklahoma sun streaked to a dozen different shades of gold.
Blake caught Alex’s eye and casually, so casually, shook his head. He had to forcibly blank both his face and his mind to block any more subtle signals. In the way of all twins, the Dalton brothers could pick up instantly on each other’s vibes. Time enough for Alex and Julie to hear the news when they got back from Tuscany. By then Blake would have dealt with it. And with the shock and fury it had generated.
He rigidly suppressed both emotions until the newlyweds were on the way to the airport. Even then he did his duty and mingled until the last guests finally departed. His training as an attorney stood him in good stead. No one, not even his mother, suspected there was fury boiling in his gut.
“Whew!” Ebullient but drooping, Delilah Dalton kicked off her heels. “That was fun, but I’m glad it’s over. Went off well, don’t you think?”
“Very,” Blake answered evenly.
“I’m going to check on Molly.” She swooped up her shoes and padded on stockinged feet to the circular marble staircase. “Then I’m hitting the tub to soak for an hour. You staying here tonight?”
“No, I’ll go back to my place.” With a vicious exercise of will, he kept his voice calm. “Would you ask Grace to come down? I’d like to talk to her before I go.”
His mother lifted a brow at his request to speak to the woman she’d hired to act as a temporary nanny. In the weeks since a baby had dropped into the lives of all three Daltons, Grace Templeton had proved indispensable. Become almost part of the family. So much so that she’d served as Julie’s maid of honor while Blake stood up with Alex as best man.
She’d also started the wheels turning in Delilah’s fertile mind. His mother had begun dropping unsubtle hints in recent days about how sweet Grace was. How well she interacted with Molly. And just tonight, how good Blake had looked standing beside her at the altar. The fact that he’d begun to think along those same lines only added to the fury simmering hot and heavy.
“Tell Grace I’ll be in the library.”
For once Delilah was too tired to pry. She merely waved her shoes and continued up the stairs. “Will do. Just don’t keep her too long. She has to feel as whipped as I do.”
She was about to feel a whole lot more whipped. Yanking on the ends of his black bow tie, Blake stalked down the hall to the oak-paneled library. The soft glow from the recessed lighting contrasted starkly with his black mood as he retrieved the report he’d stuffed into his pocket more than an hour ago. The facts were no less shattering now than they had been then. He was still trying to absorb their impact when Grace Templeton entered the library.
“Hey, Blake. Delilah said you wanted to talk to me.”
His eyes narrowed on the slender blonde, seeing her in a wholly different light. She’d changed from the lilac, off-the-shoulder tea gown she’d worn for the wedding. She’d also released her pale, almost silvery hair from its sophisticated upsweep. The ends now brushed the shoulders of a sleeveless white blouse sporting several large splotches.
“’Scuze the wet spots,” she said, brushing a hand down her front with a rueful laugh in her warm brown eyes. “Molly got a little lively during her bath.”
Blake didn’t respond. He merely stood with his shoulders rigid under his tux as she hitched a hip on the wide, rolled arm of the library’s sofa.
“What did you want to talk about?”
Only then did she pick up on his silence. Or maybe it was his stance. Her head tilting, she gave him a puzzled half smile.
“Something wrong?”
He countered her question with one of his own. “Did you happen to notice the man who arrived at the reception just before Alex and Julie left?”
“The guy in the brown suit?” She nodded slowly, still trying to gauge his odd mood. “I saw him, and couldn’t help wondering who he was. He looked so out of place among the other guests.”
“His name’s Del Jamison.”
Her brow creased. Blake guessed she was mentally sorting through the host of people she’d met during her stint as Molly’s temporary nanny. When she drew a blank, he supplied the details.
“Jamison’s a private investigator. The one Alex and I hired to help search for Molly’s mother.”
She was good, he thought savagely. Very good. Her cinnamon eyes transmitted only a flicker of wariness, quickly suppressed, but she couldn’t keep the color from leaching out of her cheeks. The sudden pallor gave him a vicious satisfaction.
“Oh, right.” The shrug was an obvious attempt at nonchalance. “He was down in South America, wasn’t he? Checking the places where Julie worked last year?”
“He was, but after Julie made it clear she wasn’t Molly’s mother, Jamison decided to check another lead. In California.”
She couldn’t hide her fear now. It was there in the quick hitch in her breath, the sudden stillness.
“California?”
“I’ll summarize his report for you.” Blake used his courtroom voice. The one he employed when he wanted to drive home a point. Cool, flat, utterly devoid of emotion. “Jamison discovered the woman I was told had died in a fiery bus crash was not, in fact, even on that bus. She didn’t die until almost a year later.”
The same woman he’d had a brief affair with. The woman who’d disappeared from his life with no goodbye, no note, no explanation of any kind. Aided and abetted, he now knew, by this brown-eyed, soft-spoken schemer who’d wormed her way into his mother’s home.
And into Blake’s consciousness, dammit. Every level of it. As disgusted by her duplicity as by the hunger she’d begun to stir in him, he stalked across the room. She sprang to her feet at his approach and tried to brazen it out.
“I don’t see what that has to do with me.”
Still he didn’t lose control. But his muscles quivered with the effort of keeping his hands off her.
“According to Jamison, this woman gave birth to a baby girl just weeks before she died.”
His baby! His Molly!
“She also had a friend who showed up at the hospital mere hours before her death.” He planted his fists on the sofa arm, boxing her in, forcing her to lean back. “A friend with pale blond hair.”
“Blake!” The gold-flecked brown eyes he’d begun to imagine turning liquid with desire widened in alarm. “Listen to me!”
“No, Grace—if that’s really your name.” His temper slipped through, adding a whiplash to his voice. “You listen, and listen good. I don’t know how much you figured you could extort from our family, but the game ends now.”
“It’s not a game,” she gasped, bent at an awkward angle.
“No?”
“No! I don’t want your money!”
“What do you want?”
“Just… Just…!” She slapped her palms against his shirtfront. “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Get off me.”
He didn’t budge. “Just what?”
“Dammit!” Goaded, she bunched a fist and pounded his chest. Her fear was gone. Fury now burned in her cheeks. “All I wanted, all I cared about, was making sure Molly had a good home!”
Slowly, Blake straightened. Just as slowly, he moved back a step and allowed her only enough space to push upright. Slapping a rigid lid on his anger, he folded his arms and locked his gaze on her face. Assessing. Considering. Evaluating.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Who the hell are you?”
Grace balanced precariously on the sofa arm, her thoughts chaotic. After all she’d been through! So much fear and heartache. Now this? Just when she’d started to breathe easy for the first time in months. Just when she’d thought she and this man might…
“Who are you?”
He repeated the question in what she’d come to think of as his counselor’s voice. She’d known Blake Dalton for almost two months now. In that time she’d learned to appreciate his even temperament. She admired even more his ability to smoothly, calmly arbitrate between his more outspoken twin and their equally strong-willed mother.
Oh, God! Delilah!
Grace cringed inside at the idea of divulging even part of the sordid truth to the woman who’d become as much of a friend as an employer. Sick at the thought, she lifted her chin and met Blake’s cold, unwavering stare.
“I’m exactly who I claim to be. My name is Grace Templeton. I teach… I taught,” she corrected, her throat tight, “junior high social studies in San Antonio until a few months ago.”
She paused, trying not to think of the life she’d put on hold, forcing herself to blank out the image of the young teens she took such joy in teaching.
“Until a few months ago,” Blake repeated in the heavy silence, “when you asked for an extended leave of absence to take care of a sick relative. That’s the story you gave us, isn’t it? And the principal of your school?”
She knew they’d checked her out. Neither Delilah nor her sons would allow a stranger near the baby unless they’d vetted her. But Grace had become so adept these past years at weaving just enough truth in with the lies that she’d passed their screening.
“It wasn’t a story.”
Dalton’s breath hissed out. Those sexy blue eyes that had begun to smile at her with something more than friendliness the past few weeks were now lethal.
“You and Anne Jordan were related?”
Anne Jordan. Emma Lang. Janet Blair. So many aliases. So many frantic phone calls and desperate escapes. Grace could hardly keep them straight anymore.
“Anne was my cousin.”
That innocuous label didn’t begin to describe Grace’s relationship to the girl who’d grown up just a block away. They were far closer than cousins. They were best friends who’d played dolls and whispered secrets and shared every event in their young lives, big and small.
“Were you with her when she died?”
The question came at her as swiftly and mercilessly as a stiletto aimed for the heart. “Yes,” she whispered, “I was with her.”
“And the baby? Molly?”
“She’s your daughter. Yours and…and Anne’s.”
Blake turned away, and Grace could only stare at the broad shoulders still encased in his tux. She ached to tell him she was sorry for all the lies and deception. Except the lies had been necessary, and the deception wasn’t hers to tell.
“Anne called me,” she said instead. “Told me she’d picked up a vicious infection. Begged me to come. I jumped a plane that same afternoon but when I got there, she was already slipping into a coma. She died that evening.”
Blake angled back to face her. His eyes burned with an unspoken question. Grace answered this one as honestly as she could.
“Anne didn’t name you as Molly’s father. She was almost out of it from the drugs they’d pumped into her. She was barely coherent… All I understood was the name Dalton. I knew she’d worked here, so…so…”
She broke off, her throat raw with the memory.
“So you brought Molly to Oklahoma City,” Blake finished, spacing every word with frightening deliberation, “and left her on my mother’s doorstep. Then you called Delilah and said you’d just happened to hear she needed a temporary nanny.”
“Which she did!”
He gave that feeble response the disgust it deserved. “Did you enjoy watching my brother and me jump through hoops trying to determine which of us was Molly’s father?”
“I told you! I didn’t know which of you it was. Not until I’d spent some time with you.”
Even then she hadn’t been sure. The Dalton twins shared more than razor-sharp intelligence and devastating good looks. Grace could see how her cousin might have succumbed to Alex’s charisma and self-confidence. She’d actually figured him for Molly’s father until she’d come to appreciate the rock-solid strength in quiet, coolly competent Blake.
Unfortunately, Blake’s self-contained personality had made her task so much more difficult. Although friendly and easygoing, he kept his thoughts to himself and his private life private. If he’d had a brief affair with a woman who’d worked for him, only he—and possibly his twin—had known about it.
Grace had hoped the DNA tests they’d run would settle the question of Molly’s paternity. She’d been as frustrated as the Dalton brothers at the ambiguous results.
Then they’d launched a determined search for Molly’s mother and thrown Grace in a state of near panic. She’d sworn to keep her cousin’s secret. She had no choice but to do just that. Molly’s future depended on it. Now Blake had unearthed at least a part of that secret. She couldn’t tell him the rest, but she could offer a tentative solution.
“As I understand it, Molly’s parentage can’t be absolutely established unless the father’s DNA is matched with the mother’s. She… Anne…was cremated. I don’t have anything of hers to give you that would provide a sample.”
Not a hairbrush or a lipstick or even a postcard with a stamp on it for Molly to cling to as a keepsake. The baby’s mother had lived in fear for so long. She’d died the same way, mustering only enough strength at the end to extract a promise from her cousin to keep Molly safe.
“You could test my DNA,” Grace said, determined to hold to that promise. “I’ve read that mitochondria are inherited exclusively through the female line.”
She’d done more than read. She’d hunched in front of the computer for hours when not tending to Molly. Her head had spun trying to decipher scientific articles laced with terms like hypervariable control regions and HVR1 base pairs. It had taken some serious slogging, but she’d finally come away with the knowledge that those four-hundred-and-forty-four base pairs determined maternal lineage. As such, they could theoretically be used to trace a human’s lineage all the way back to the mitochondrial Eve. The Daltons didn’t need to go that far back to confirm Molly’s heritage. They just needed to hop over one branch on her family tree.
The same thought had obviously occurred to Blake. His eyes were chips of blue ice as he delivered an ultimatum.
“Damn straight you’ll give me a DNA sample. And until the results come back, you’ll stay away from Molly.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I want you out of this house. Now.”
“You’re kidding!”
She discovered an instant later that he wasn’t. In two strides he’d closed the distance between them and wrapped his fist around her upper arm. One swift tug had her off the sofa arm and marching toward the library’s door.
“Blake, for God’s sake!” As surprised as she was angry, she fought his grip. “I’ve been taking care of Molly for weeks now. You can’t seriously think I would do anything to hurt her.”
“What I think,” he returned in a voice as icy as his eyes, “is that there are a helluva lot of holes in your story. Until they’re filled in, I want you where I can watch you day and night.”
Two
“Get in.”
Blake held open the passenger door of his two-seater Mercedes convertible. The heat of the muggy July evening wrapped around them, almost as smothering as the worry and fear that clogged Grace’s throat.
“Where are we going?”
“Downtown.”
“I need to tell Delilah that I’m leaving,” she protested. “Get some of my things.”
“I’ll let my mother know what’s happening. Right now all you need to do is plant your behind in that seat.”
If Grace hadn’t been so stunned by this unexpected turn of events, the brusque command might have made her blink. This was Blake. The kind, polite, always solicitous Dalton twin. In the weeks since she’d insinuated herself into Delilah’s home, she’d never known him to be anything but patient with his sometimes overbearing mother, considerate with the servants and incredibly, achingly gentle with Molly.
“Get in.”
She got. Even this late in the evening, the pale gray leather was warm and sticky from the July heat. The seat belt cracked like a rifle shot when she clicked it into place.
As the convertible rolled down the curved driveway, Grace fought to untangle her nerves. God knew she should be used to having her life turned upside down without warning. It had happened often enough in the past few years. One call. That’s all it usually took. One frantic call from Hope.
No, she corrected fiercely. Not Hope. Anne. Although her cousin was dead, Grace had to remember to think and remember and refer to her as Anne.
She made that her mantra as the Mercedes sliced through the night. She was still repeating it when Blake pulled into the underground parking for Dalton International’s headquarters building in downtown Oklahoma City. Although the clicker attached to the Mercedes’s visor raised the arm, the booth attendant leaned out with cheerful greeting.
“Evenin’, Mr. Dalton.”
“Hi, Roy.”
“Guess your brother ‘n his bride are off on their honeymoon.”
“Yes, they are.”
“Sure wish ‘em well.” He leaned farther down and tipped a finger to his brow. “How’re you doin’, Ms. Templeton?”
She dredged up a smile. “Fine, thanks.”
Grace wasn’t surprised at the friendly greeting. She’d made many a trip to Dalton International’s headquarters with Molly and her grandmother. Delilah had turned over control of the manufacturing empire she and Big Jake had scratched out of bare dirt to her sons. That didn’t mean she’d surrendered her right to meddle as she saw fit in either DI’s corporate affairs or in her sons’ lives. So Delilah, with Molly and her nanny in tow, had regularly breezed into boardrooms and conferences. Just as often, she’d zoomed up to the top floor of the DI building, where her bachelor sons maintained their separate penthouse apartments.
The penthouse also boasted a luxurious guest suite for DI’s visiting dignitaries. That, apparently, was where Blake had decided to plant her. Grace guessed as much when he stopped at the security desk in the lower lobby to retrieve a key card. Moments later the glass-enclosed elevator whisked them upward.
Once past the street level, Oklahoma City zoomed into view. On previous visits Grace had gasped at the skyline that rose story by eye-popping story. Tonight she barely noticed the panorama of lights and skyscrapers. Her entire focus was on the man crowding her against the elevator’s glass wall.
She hadn’t been able to tell which Dalton twin was which at first. With their dark gold hair, chiseled chins and broad shoulders, one was a feast for the eyes. Two of them standing side by side could make any woman drool.
It hadn’t taken Grace long to separate the men. Alex was more outgoing, with a wicked grin that jump-started female hormones without him half trying. Blake was quieter. Less obvious. With a smile that was all the more seductive for being slow and warm and…
The ping of the elevator wrenched her back to the tortuous present. When the doors slid open, Blake grasped her arm again and marched her down a plushly carpeted hall toward a set of polished oak doors.
Okay, enough! Grace didn’t get angry often. When she did, her temper flashed hot and fierce enough to burn through the fear still gripping her by the throat.
“That’s it!” She yanked her arm free of his hold and stopped dead in the center of the hall. “You hustle me out of your mother’s house like a thief caught stealing the silver. You order me into your bright, shiny convertible. You drag me up here in the middle of the night. I’m not taking another step until you stop acting like you’re the Gestapo or KGB.”
He arched a brow at her rant, then coolly, deliberately shot back the cuff of his pleated tux shirt to check his gold Rolex.
“It’s nine-twenty-two. Hardly the middle of the night.”
She wanted to hit him. Slap that stony expression right off his too-handsome face. Might have actually attempted it if she wasn’t sure she would crack a couple of finger bones on his hard, unyielding jaw.
Besides which, he deserved some answers. The detective’s report had obviously delivered a body blow. He’d loved her cousin once.
The fire drained from Grace’s heart, leaving only sadness tinged now with an infinite weariness. “All right. I’ll tell you what I can.”
With a curt nod, he strode the last few feet to the guest suite. A swipe of the key card clicked the lock on the wide oak doors. Grace had visited the lavish guest suite a number of times. Each time she stepped inside, though, the sheer magnificence of the view stopped her breath in her throat.
Angled floor-to-ceiling glass walls gave a stunning, hundred-and-eighty-degree panorama of Oklahoma City’s skyline. The view was spectacular during the day, offering an eagle’s-eye glimpse of the domed capitol building, the Oklahoma River and the colorful barges that carried tourists past Bricktown Ballpark to the larger-than-life-size bronze sculptures commemorating the 1889 land run. That momentous event had opened some two million acres of unassigned land to settlers and, oh, by the way, created a tent city with a population of more than fifty thousand almost overnight.
The view on a clear summer night like this one was even more dazzling. Skyscrapers glowed like beacons. White lights twinkled in the trees lining the river spur that meandered through the downtown area. But it was the colossal bronze statue atop the floodlit capitol that drew Grace to the windows. She’d been born and bred in Texas, but as a social studies teacher she knew enough of the history of the Southwest to appreciate the deep symbolism in the twenty-two-foot-tall bronze statue. She’d also been given a detailed history of the statue by Delilah, who’d served on the committee that raised funds for it.
Erected in 2002, The Guardian, with his tall spear, muscular body and unbowed head, represented not only the thousands of Native Americans who’d been forced from their homes in the East and settled in what was then Indian Territory. The statue also embodied Oklahomans who’d wrestled pipe into red dirt as hard as brick to suck out the oil that fueled the just-born automobile industry. The sons and daughters who lived through the devastating Dust Bowl of the ‘30s. The proud Americans who’d worked rotating shifts at the Army Air Corps’ Douglas Aircraft Plant in the ‘40s to overhaul, repair and build fighters and bombers. And, most recently, the grimly determined Oklahomans who’d dug through nine stories of rubble to recover the bodies of friends and coworkers killed in the Murrah Building bombing.
Grace and Hope… No! Grace and Anne had driven up from Texas during their junior year in high school to visit Oklahoma City’s National Memorial & Museum. Neither of them had been able to comprehend how the homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh could be so evil, so twisted in both mind and morals. Then, less than a year later, her cousin met Jack Petrie.
Frost coated Grace’s lungs. Feeling its sick chill, she wrapped both arms around her waist and turned away from The Guardian to face Blake Dalton.
“I can’t tell you about Anne’s past,” she said bleakly. “I promised I would bury it with her. What I can say is that you’re the only man she got close to in more years than you want to know.”
“You think I’m going to be satisfied with that?”
“You have no choice.”
“Wrong.”
He yanked on the dangling end of his bow tie and threw it aside before shrugging out of his tuxedo jacket. His black satin cummerbund circled a trim waist. The pleated white shirt was still crisp, as might be expected from a tailor who catered exclusively to millionaires and movie stars.
Yet under the sleek sophistication was an edge that didn’t fool Grace for a moment. Delilah bragged constantly about the variety of sports Blake and his twin had excelled at during their school years. Both men still carried an athlete’s build—lean in the hips and flanks, with the solid chest and muscled shoulders of a former collegiate wrestler.
That chest loomed far too large in Grace’s view at the moment. It invaded her space, distracted her thoughts and made her distinctly nervous.
“How many cousins do you have?” he asked with silky menace. “And how long do you think it will take Jamison to check each of them out?”
“Not long,” she fired back. “But he won’t find anything beyond Anne’s birth certificate, driver’s license and a few high school yearbook photos. We made sure of that.”
“A person can’t just erase her entire life after high school.”
“As a matter of fact, she can.”
Grace moved to the buckskin leather sofa and dropped onto a cushion. Blake folded his tall frame onto a matching sofa separated by a half acre of glass-topped coffee table.
“It’s not easy. Or cheap,” she added, thinking of her empty savings account. “But you can pull it off with the help of a very smart friend of a friend of a friend. Especially if said friend can tap into just about any computer system.”
Like the Texas Vital Statistics agency. It had taken some serious hacking but they’d managed to delete the digital entry recording Hope Patricia Templeton’s marriage to Jack David Petrie. By doing so, they’d also deleted the record of the last time Grace had used her maiden name and SSN.
A familiar sadness settled like a lump in Grace’s middle. Her naive, trusting cousin had believed Petrie’s promise to love and cherish and provide for her every need. As the bastard had explained in the months that followed, his wife didn’t require access to their bank account. Or a credit card. Or a job. Nor did she have to register to vote. There weren’t any candidates worth going to that trouble for. And they sure as hell didn’t need to talk to a marriage counselor, he’d added when she finally realized he’d made her a virtual prisoner.
Financially dependent and emotionally battered, she’d spent long, isolated years as a shadow person. Jack trotted her out when he wanted to display his pretty wife, then shuffled her back into her proper place in his bed. It hadn’t taken him long to cut off her ties with her friends and family, either. All except Grace. She refused to be cut, even after Petrie became furious over her meddling. Grace wondered whether those horrific moments when her gas pedal locked on the interstate were, in fact, due to mechanical failure.
Grace and Hope had become more cautious after that. No more visits. No letters or emails that could be intercepted. No calls to the house. Only to a pay phone in the one grocery store where Jack allowed his wife to shop. Even then it had taken a solid year of pleading before Hope worked up the courage to escape.
Grace didn’t want to remember the desperate years that followed. The mindless fear. The countless moves. The series of false identities and fake SSNs, each one more expensive to procure than the last. Until finally—finally!—a woman with the name of Anne Jordan had found anonymity and a tenuous, tentative security at Dalton International. She’d been just one of DI’s thousands of employees worldwide. An entry-level clerk with only a high school GED. Certainly not a position that would bring her into contact with the multinational corporation’s CFO.
Yet it had.
“Please, Blake. Please believe me when I tell you Anne wanted her past to be buried with her. All she cared about in her last, agonizing moments was making sure Molly would know her father, if not her mother.”
Or more accurately, that her baby would have the name and protection of someone completely unknown to Jack Petrie.
Grace prayed she’d convinced Blake. She hadn’t, of course. The lawyer in him wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d dug up and turned over every bit of evidence. But maybe she could deflect his inquisition.
“Will you tell me something?”
“Quid pro quo?” His mouth twisted. “You haven’t given me much of a trade.”
“Please. I… I wasn’t able to talk or visit with Anne much in her last year.”
She hadn’t dared. Jack Petrie was a Texas state trooper, with a cop’s wide connections. Grace knew he’d had her under surveillance at various times, maybe even bugged her phone or planted a tracking device on her car, hoping she would lead him to his wife. Grace had imposed on every friend she had, borrowing their cars or using their phones, to maintain even minimal contact with her cousin.
Jack didn’t know about Grace’s last, frantic flight to California. She’d made sure of that. She’d emptied her savings account, had a friend drive her to the airport and paid cash for a ticket to Vegas. There she’d rented a car for a desperate drive across the desert to the San Diego hospital where her cousin had been admitted.
Five heart-wrenching days later, she’d retraced that route with Molly. Instead of flying back to San Antonio with the baby, though, she’d paid cash for a bus ticket to Oklahoma City.
She hadn’t used her cell phone or any credit cards in the weeks since she’d wrangled a job as Molly’s temporary nanny. Nor had she cashed the checks Delilah had written for her salary. She’d planned to go back to her teaching job once Molly was settled with her father. The longer she spent with the baby, though, the more painful the prospect of leaving her became.
The thought of leaving Blake Dalton was almost as wrenching. Lately her mind had drifted to him more than it should. Especially at night, after she’d put Molly to bed. The increasingly erotic direction of that drift spurred pinpricks of guilt, then and now.
“Tell me how you and Anne met,” she pleaded, reminding herself yet again Blake was her cousin’s love, the man she’d let into her life despite all she’d been through. “How… Well…”
“How Molly happened?” he supplied.
“Yes. Anne was so shy around men.”
For shy, read insecure and cowed and generally scared shitless. Grace couldn’t imagine how Blake had breached those formidable barriers.
“Please,” she said softly. “Tell me. I’d like to know she found a little happiness before she died.”
He stared at her for long moments, then his breath eased out on a sigh.
“I think she was happy for the few weeks we were together. I was never sure, though. Took me forever to pry more than a murmured hello from her. Even after I got her to agree to go out with me, she didn’t want anyone at DI to know we were seeing each other. Said it would look bad, the big boss dating a lowly file clerk.”
He hooked his wrists on his knees and contemplated his black dress shoes. He must not have liked what he saw. A note of unmistakable self-disgust colored his deep voice.
“She wouldn’t let me take her to dinner or to the theater or anywhere we might be seen together. It was always her place. Or a hotel.”
It had to be that, Grace knew. Her cousin couldn’t take the chance some society reporter or gossip columnist would start fanning rumors about rich, handsome Blake Dalton’s latest love interest. Or worse, the paparazzi might snap a photo of them together and post it on the internet.
Yet she risked going to a hotel with him. She’d come out of her defensive crouch enough for that. And when she discovered she was pregnant with his child, she’d had no choice but to run away. She wanted the baby desperately, but she couldn’t tell Dalton about the pregnancy. He would have wanted to give the child his name, or at least establish his legal rights as the father. Hope’s false IDs wouldn’t have held up under legal scrutiny, and her real one would have led Petrie to her. So she’d run. Again.
“Did you love her?”
Damn! Grace hadn’t meant to let that slip out. And she sure as heck hadn’t intended to feel jealous of her cousin’s relationship with this man.
Yet she knew he had to have been so tender with her. So sensitive to her needs. His mouth would have played a gentle song on her skin. His hands, those strong, tanned hands, must have stroked and soothed even as they aroused and…
“I don’t know.”
With a flush of guilt, Grace jerked her attention back to his face.
“I cared for her,” he said quietly, as much to himself as to her. “Enough to press her into going to bed with me. But when she left without a word, I was angry as well as hurt.”
Regret and remorse chased each other across his face.
“Then, when I got the report of the bus accident…”
He stopped and directed a look of fierce accusation at Grace.
“I wasn’t with her when it happened,” she said in feeble self-defense. “She was by herself, in her car. The bus spun out right in front of her and hit a bridge abutment. She was terrified, but she got out to help.”
“And left her purse at the scene.”
“Yes.”
“Deliberately?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Grace shook her head. “I can’t tell you why. I can’t tell you any more than I have. I promised Anne her past would die with her.”
“But it didn’t,” he countered swiftly. “Molly’s living proof of that.”
She slipped off the sofa and onto her knees, desperate for him to let it go. “She’s your daughter, Blake. Please, just accept that and take joy in her.”
He was silent for so long she didn’t think he would respond. When he did, the ice was back in his voice.
“All I have right now is your word that Anne and I had a child together. I’ll send in the DNA sample you offered to provide. Once we have the results, we’ll discuss where we go from here.”
“Where I need to go is back to your mother’s house! She’s exhausted from the wedding. She told me tonight she was feeling every one of her sixty-two years. She can’t take care of Molly by herself for the next few days.”
“I’ll help her, and when I can’t be there I’ll make sure someone else is. In the meantime, you stay put.”
He pushed out of the chair and strode to the wet bar built into the far wall. For a moment Grace thought he intended to pour them both a drink to wash down the hurt and bitterness of the past hour, but he lifted only one crystal tumbler from one of the mirrored shelves. He returned with it and issued a terse command.
“Spit.”
Three
The melodic chimes of a doorbell pierced Grace’s groggy haze. When the chimes gave way to the hammer of an impatient fist, she propped herself up on one elbow and blinked at the digital clock beside the bed.
Oh, God! Seven-twenty! She’d slept right through Molly’s first feeding.
She threw the covers aside and was half out of bed before reality hit. One, this wasn’t her room in Delilah’s mansion. Two, she was wearing only the lavender lace bikini briefs she left on when she’d changed her maid of honor gown. And three, she was no longer Molly’s temporary nanny.
Last night’s agonizing events came crashing down on her as the fist hammered again. Scrambling, Grace snatched up her now hopelessly wrinkled khaki crops and white blouse. She got the pants zipped and buttoned the blouse on her way to the front door. She had a good idea whose fist was pounding away. She’d spent almost a month now with Blake Dalton’s often autocratic, occasionally irascible, always kindhearted mother.
So she expected to see the raven-haired matriarch. She didn’t expect to see the baby riding on Delilah’s chest, nested contentedly in a giraffe sling. Grace gripped the brass door latch, swamped by an avalanche of love and worry and guilt as she dragged her gaze from the infant to her grandmother.
“Delilah, I…”
“Don’t you Delilah me!” She stomped inside, the soles of her high-topped sneakers slapping the marble foyer. “Don’t you dare Delilah me!”
Grace closed the door and followed her into the living room. She wished she’d taken a few seconds to brush her hair and slap some water on her face before this showdown. And coffee! She needed coffee. Desperately.
She’d tossed and turned most of the night. The few hours she’d drifted into a doze, she’d dreamed of Anne. And Blake. Grace had been there, too, stunned when his fury at her swirled without warning into a passion that jerked her awake, breathless and wanting. Remnants of that mindless hunger still drifted like a steamy haze through her mind as Delilah slung a diaper bag from her shoulder onto the sofa and released Molly from the sling.
Grace couldn’t help but note that her employer had gone all jungle today. The diaper bag was zebra-striped. Grinning monkeys frolicked and swung from vines on the baby’s seersucker dress. Delilah herself was in knee-length leopard tights topped by an oversize black T-shirt with a neon message urging folks to come out and be amazed by Oklahoma City’s new gorilla habitat—a habitat she’d coaxed, cajoled and strong-armed her friends into funding.
“Don’t just stand there,” she snapped at Grace. “Get the blanket out of the diaper bag.”
Even the blanket was a riot of green and yellow and jungle red. Grace spread it a safe distance away from the glass coffee table. Molly was just learning to crawl. She could push herself onto her hands and knees and hold her head up to survey the world with bright, inquisitive eyes.
Delilah deposited the baby on the blanket and made sure she was centered before pointing an imperious finger at Grace.
“You. Sit.” The older woman plunked herself down in the opposite chair, keeping the baby between them. “Now talk.”
“You sure you wouldn’t like some coffee first?” Grace asked with a hopeful glance at the suite’s fully equipped kitchen. “I could make a quick pot.”
“Screw coffee. Talk.”
Grace blew out a sigh and raked her fingers through her unbrushed hair. Obviously Delilah had no intention of making this easy.
“I don’t know how much Blake told you…” She let that dangle for a moment. Got no response. “Okay, here’s the condensed version. Molly’s mother was my cousin. When Anne worked at Dalton International, she had a brief affair with your son. She died before she could tell me which son, so I brought Molly to you and finessed a job as her nanny while Alex and Blake sorted out the paternity issue.”
Delilah pinned Grace with a look that could have etched steel. “If one of my sons got this cousin of yours pregnant, why didn’t she have the guts or the decency to let him know about the baby?”
Grace stiffened. Shielding Hope—Anne!—had become as much a part of her as breathing. No one knew what her cousin had endured. And Grace was damned if she’d allow anyone, even the formidable Delilah Dalton, to put her down.
“I told Blake and I’ll tell you. Anne had good reasons for what she did, but she wanted those reasons to die with her. She didn’t, however, want her baby to grow up without knowing either of her parents.”
Delilah fired back with both barrels. “Don’t get uppity with me, girl!”
The fierce retort startled the baby. Molly swung her head toward her grandmother, wobbled and plopped down on one diapered hip. Both women instinctively bent toward her, but she was already pushing back onto her knees.
Delilah moderated her tone if not her message. “I’m the one who bought your out-of-work schoolteacher story, remember? I took you into my home. I trusted you, dammit.”
Grace didn’t see any use in pointing out that she hadn’t lied about being a teacher or temporarily out of work. The trust part stung enough.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you about my connection to Molly.”
“Ha!”
“I promised my cousin I would make sure her child was loved and cared for.” Her glance went again to the baby, happily drooling and rocking on hands and knees. Slowly, she brought her gaze back to Delilah. “And she is,” Grace said softly. “Well cared for and very much loved.”
Delilah huffed out something close to a snort but didn’t comment for long moments. “I pride myself on being a good judge of character,” she said at last. “Even that horny goat I married lived up to almost everything I’d expected of him.”
Grace didn’t touch that one. She’d heard Delilah say more than once she wished to hell Big Jake Dalton hadn’t died before she’d found out about his little gal pal. His passing would’ve been a lot less peaceful.
“Is all this you’ve just told me true?” the Dalton matriarch demanded.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Molly’s mother was really your cousin?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have proof of that soon enough. Damned lab is making a fortune off all these rush DNA tests we’ve ordered lately.”
She pooched her lips and moved them from side to side before coming to an abrupt decision.
“I’ve watched you with Molly. I don’t believe you’re some schemer looking to extort big bucks from us. You’ll have to work to convince Blake of that, though.”
“I can’t tell him any more than I have.”
“You don’t know him like I do. He has his ways of getting what he wants. So do I,” she added as she pushed out of the chair and adjusted the sling. “So do I. C’mon, Mol, let’s go see your daddy.”
Without thinking Grace moved to help. Swooping the baby up, she planted wet, sloppy kisses on her cheeks before slipping the infant’s feet through the sling’s leg openings. While Delilah tightened the straps, Grace folded the jungle blanket back into the diaper bag and handed it to the older woman.
“I’m sorry Blake doesn’t want me to help with Molly.”
“We’ll manage until this mess gets sorted out.”
If it got sorted out. Grace grew more antsy as one day stretched into two, then three.
Blake had her things packed and delivered along with her purse. She tried to take that as a good sign. Apparently he wasn’t afraid she would pull a disappearing act like her cousin had.
He didn’t contact her personally, though, and that worried Grace. It also caused an annoyingly persistent ache. Only now that she’d been banished from their lives did she realize how attached she’d become to the Daltons, mother and son. And to Molly! Grace missed cooing to the baby and watching her count her toes and shampooing her soft, downy blond hair.
She’d known the time would come when she would have to drop out of Molly’s life. The longer she stayed here, the greater the risk Jack Petrie might trace her to Oklahoma City and wonder what she was doing here. Yet she felt a sharp pang of dismay when Blake finally condescended to call a little past 6:00 p.m. with a curt announcement.
“I need to talk to you.”
“All right.”
“I’m downstairs,” he informed her. “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
At least she was a little better prepared for this face-to-face than she’d been for their last. Her hair was caught up in a smooth knot and she’d swiped on some lip gloss earlier. She debated whether to change her jeans and faded San Antonio SeaWorld T-shirt but decided to use the time to take deep, calming breaths.
Not that they did much good. The Blake Dalton she opened the door to wasn’t one she’d seen before. He’d always appeared at his mother’s house in suits or neatly pressed shirts and slacks sporting creases sharp enough to shave fuzz from a peach. Then, of course, there was the tux he’d donned for the wedding. Armani should wish for male models with builds like either of the Dalton twins.
This Blake was considerably less refined. Faded jeans rode low on his hips. A black T-shirt stretched across his taut shoulders. Bristles the same shade of amber as his hair shadowed his cheeks and chin. He looked tough and uncompromising, but the expression in his laser blues wasn’t as cold as the one he’d worn at their last meeting, thank God.
“We got the lab report back.”
Wordlessly she led the way into the living room. Electric screens shielded the wall of windows from the sun that hadn’t yet slipped down behind the skyscrapers. Without the endless view, the room seemed smaller, more intimate. Too intimate, she decided when she turned and found Blake had stopped mere inches away.
“Aren’t you going to ask the results?”
“I don’t need to,” she said with a shrug. “Unless the lab screwed up the samples, their report confirms Molly and I descend from the same family tree.”
“They didn’t screw up the samples.”
“Okay.” She crossed her arms. “Now what?”
Surprise flickered across his face.
“What’d you expect?” Grace asked, her chin angling. “That I would throw myself into your arms for finally acknowledging the truth?”
The surprise was still there, but then his gaze dropped to her mouth and it took on a different quality. Darker. More intense. As though the idea of Grace throwing herself at him was less of a shock than something to be considered, evaluated, assessed.
Now that the idea was out there, it didn’t particularly shock her, either. Just the opposite. In fact, the urge grew stronger with each second it floated around in the realm of possibility. All she had to do was step forward. Slide her palms over his shoulders. Lean into his strength.
As her cousin had.
Guilt sent Grace back a pace, not forward. He’d been Anne’s lover, she reminded herself fiercely. The father of her baby. At best, Grace was a problem he was being forced to solve.
“Now you know,” she said with a shrug that disguised her true feelings. “You’re Molly’s father. And I know you’ll be good with her. So it’s time for me to pack and head back to San Antonio. I’ll stop by to say goodbye to her on my way out of town.”
“That’s it?” His frown deepened. “You’re just going to drop out of her life?”
“I’ll see her when I can.”
After she was certain Jack Petrie hadn’t learned about her stay in Oklahoma City.
“There are legalities that have to be attended to,” Blake protested. “I’ll need Molly’s birth certificate. Her mother’s death certificate.”
Both contained the false name and SSN her cousin had used in California. Grace could only pray the documents would be sufficient for Blake’s needs. They should. With his legal connections and his family’s political clout here in Oklahoma, he ought to be able to push whatever he wanted through the courts.
“I’ll send you copies,” she promised.
“Right.” He paused, his jaw working. “I hope you know that whatever trouble Anne was in, I would have helped her.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”
His eyes searched hers. “Anne couldn’t bring herself to trust me, but you can, Grace.”
She wanted to. God, how she wanted to! Somehow she managed to swallow the hard lump in her throat.
“I trust you to cherish Molly.”
Saying goodbye to the baby was every bit as hard as it had been to say goodbye to Blake. Molly broke into delighted coos when she saw her nanny and lifted both arms, demanding to be cuddled.
Grace refused to cry until her rental car was on I-35 and heading south. Tears blurred the rolling Oklahoma countryside for the next fifty miles. By the time she crossed the Red River into Texas, her throat was raw and her eyes so puffy that she had to stop at the welcome center to douse them with cold water. Six hours later she hit the outskirts of San Antonio, still mourning her severed ties to Molly and the woman who’d been both cousin and best friend to her since earliest childhood.
Her tiny condo in one of the city’s older suburbs felt stale and stuffy when she let herself in. With a gulp, she glanced from the living room she’d painted a warm terra-cotta to the closet-size kitchen. She loved her place, but the entire two-bedroom unit could fit in the foyer of Delilah Dalton’s palatial mansion.
As soon as she’d unpacked and powered up her computer, Grace scanned the certificates she’d promised to send Blake. That done, she skimmed through the hundreds of emails that had piled up in her absence and tried to pick up the pieces of her life.
The next two weeks dragged interminably. School didn’t start until the end of month. Unfortunately, the open-ended leave of absence Grace had requested had forced her principal to shuffle teachers to cover the fall semester. The best he could promise was hopefully steady work as a substitute until after Christmas.
At loose ends until school started, Grace had to cut as many corners as possible to make up for her depleted bank account. Even worse, she missed Molly more than she would have believed possible. The baby had taken up permanent residence in her heart.
Only at odd moments would she admit she missed Molly’s father almost as much as she did the baby. Like everyone else swept up in the Daltons’ orbit, she’d been overwhelmed by Delilah’s forceful personality and dazzled by Alex’s wicked grin and audacious charm. Now that she viewed the Dalton clan from a distance, however, Grace recognized Blake as the brick and mortar keeping the family together. Always there when his mother needed him to pull together the financing on yet another of her charitable ventures. Holding the reins at Dalton International’s corporate headquarters while Alex jetted halfway around the world to consult with suppliers or customers. Grace missed seeing his tall form across the table at his mother’s house, missed hearing his delighted chuckle when he tickled Molly’s tummy and got her giggling.
The only bright spot in those last, endless days of summer was that she heard nothing from Jack Petrie. She began to breathe easy again, convinced she’d covered her tracks. That false sense of security lasted right up until she answered the doorbell on a rainy afternoon.
When she peered though the peephole, the shock of seeing who stood on the other side dropped her jaw. A second later, fear exploded in her chest. Her fingers scrabbled for the dead bolt. She got it unlocked and threw the door almost back on its hinges.
“Blake!”
He had to step back to keep from getting slammed by the glass storm door. Grace barely registered the neat black slacks, the white button-down shirt with the open collar and sleeves rolled up, the hair burnished to dark, gleaming gold by rain.
“Is…?” Her heart hammered. Her voice shook. “Is Molly okay?”
“No.”
“Oh, God!” A dozen horrific scenarios spun through her head. “What happened?”
“She misses you.”
Grace gaped at him stupidly. “What?”
“She misses you. She’s been fretting since you left. Mother says she’s teething.”
The disaster scenes faded. Molly wasn’t injured. She hadn’t been kidnapped. Almost reeling with relief, Grace sagged against the doorjamb.
“That’s what you came down to San Antonio to tell me?” she asked incredulously. “Molly’s teething?”
“That, and the fact that she said her first word.”
And Grace had missed both events! The loss hit like a blow as Blake’s glance went past her and swept the comfortable living room.
“May I come in?”
“Huh? Oh. Yes, of course.”
She moved inside, all too conscious now of her bare feet and the T-shirt hacked off to her midriff. The shirt topped a pair of ragged cutoffs that skimmed her butt cheeks.
The cutoffs were comfortable in the cozy privacy of her home but nothing she would have ever considered wearing while she’d worked for Delilah—or around her son. She caught Blake’s gaze tracking to her legs, moving upward. Disconcerted by the sudden heat that slow once-over generated, she gulped and snatched at his reason for being there.
“What did Molly say?”
“We thought it was just a ga-ga,” he said with a small, almost reluctant smile. “Mother insisted she was trying to say ga-ma, but it came out on a hiss.”
She sounded it out in her head, and felt her stomach go hard and tight.
“Gace? Molly said Gace?”
“Several times now.”
“I…uh…”
He waited a beat, but she couldn’t pull it together enough for coherence. She was too lost in the stinging regret of missing those first words.
“We want you to come back, Grace.”
Startled, she looked up to find Blake regarding her intently.
“Who’s we?” she stammered.
“All of us. Mother, me, Julie and Alex.”
“They’re back from their honeymoon?”
“They flew in last night.”
“And you…” She had to stop and suck in a shaky breath. “And you want me to come back and pick up where I left off as Molly’s nanny?”
“Not as her nanny. As my wife.”
Four
Blake could certainly understand Grace’s slack-jawed astonishment. He’d spent the entire flight to San Antonio telling himself it was insane to propose marriage to a woman who refused to trust him with the truth.
It was even more insane for him to miss her the way he had. She’d wormed her way into his mother’s house and Molly’s heart. She’d lied to him—to all of them—by omission if nothing else. Yet the hole she’d left behind had grown deeper with each hour she was gone.
Molly’s unexpected arrival had already turned his calm, comfortable routine upside down. This doe-eyed blonde had kicked it all to hell. So he felt a savage satisfaction to see his own chaotic feelings mirrored in her face.
“You’re crazy! I can’t marry you!”
“Why not?”
She was sputtering, almost incoherent. “Because… Because…”
He thought she might break down and tell him then. Trust him with the truth. When she didn’t, he swallowed a bitter pill of disappointment.
“Why don’t we sit down?” he suggested with a calm he was far from feeling. “Talk this through.”
“Talk it through?” She gave a bubble of hysterical laughter and swept a hand toward the living room. “My first marriage proposal, and he wants to talk it though. By all means, counselor, have a seat.”
She regrouped during the few moments it took him to move to a sofa upholstered in a nubby plaid that complemented the earth-toned walls and framed prints of Roman antiquities. As she dropped into a chair facing him, Blake could see her astonishment giving way to anger. The first hints of it fired her eyes and stiffened her shoulders under her cottony T-shirt. He had to work to keep his gaze from drifting to the expanse of creamy skin exposed by the shirt’s hem. And those legs. Christ!
He’d better remember what he’d come for. He had to approach this challenge the same way he did all others. Coolly and logically.
“I’ve had time to think since you left, Grace. You’re good with Molly. So good both she and my mother have had difficulty adjusting to your absence.”
So had he, dammit. It irritated Blake to no end that he hadn’t been able to shut this woman out of his head. She’d lied to him and stubbornly refused to trust him. Yet he’d found himself making excuses for the lies and growing more determined by the hour to convince her to open up.
“You’re also Molly’s closest blood relative on her mother’s side,” he continued.
As far as he could determine at this point, anyway. He fully intended to keep digging. Whatever it took, however he got it, he wanted the truth.
“That’s right,” she confirmed with obvious reluctance. “Anne’s parents are dead, and she was their only child.”
He waited, willing her to share another scrap of information about her cousin. It hit Blake then that he could barely remember what Anne had looked like. They’d been together such a short time—if those few, furtive meetings outside their work environment could be termed togetherness.
Jaw locked, he tried to summon her image. She’d been an inch or two shorter than Grace. That much he remembered. And her eyes were several shades darker than her cousin’s warm, caramel-brown. Beyond that, she was a faint memory when compared with the vibrant female now facing him.
Torn between guilt and regret, Blake presented his next argument. “I know you’re facing monetary problems right now.”
She bolted upright in her chair. “What’d you do? Have Jamison check my financials?”
“Yes.” He offered no apology. “I’m guessing you drained your resources to help Anne and Molly. I owe you for that, Grace.”
“Enough to marry me?” she bit out.
“That’s part of the equation.” He hesitated, aware he was about to enter treacherous territory. “There’s another consideration, of course. Something frightened Anne enough to send her into hiding. It has to frighten you, too, or you wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to protect her.”
He’d struck a nerve. He could tell by the way she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Regret that he hadn’t been able to shield Anne from whoever or whatever had threatened her knifed into him. With it came an implacable determination to protect Grace. Battling the fierce urge to shake the truth out of her, he offered her not just his name but every powerful resource at his disposal.
“I’ll take care of you,” he promised, his steady gaze holding hers. “You and Molly.”
She wanted to yield. He could see it in her eyes. He congratulated himself, reveling in the potent mix of satisfaction at winning her confidence and a primal need to protect his chosen mate.
His fierce exultation didn’t last long. Only until she shook her head.
“I appreciate the offer, Blake. You don’t know how much. But I can take care of myself.”
He hadn’t realized until that moment how determined he was to put his ring on her finger. His expression hardening, he played his trump card.
“There’s another aspect to consider. Right now, you can’t—or won’t—claim any degree of kinship to Molly. That could impact your access to her.”
Her back went rigid. “What are you saying? That you wouldn’t let me see her if I don’t marry you?”
“No. I’m simply pointing out that you have no legal rights where she’s concerned. Mother’s not getting any younger,” he reminded her coolly. “And if something should happen to me or Alex…”
He was too good an attorney to overstate his case. Shrugging, he let her mull over the possibilities.
Grace did, with ever increasing indignation. She couldn’t believe it! He’d trapped her in her own web of lies and half-truths. If she wanted to see Molly—which she did, desperately!—she would have to play the game by his rules.
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Merline Lovelace
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“You want me to come back as Molly’s nanny?”
“Not as her nanny,” Blake replied. “As my wife.”
He could certainly understand Grace’s slack-jawed astonishment. She’d wormed her way into his life and Molly’s heart. She’d lied to him. Yet the hole she’d left behind had grown deeper with each hour she was gone.
Molly’s unexpected arrival had already turned his calm, comfortable routine upside down. This doe-eyed blonde had kicked it all to hell. So he felt a savage satisfaction to see his chaotic feelings mirrored on her face.
“You’re crazy! I can’t marry you!”
“Why not?”
“Because…because… What about love, Blake? And…sex?”
With a smooth move, he pushed himself off the sofa. Grace wasn’t prepared when he stopped mere inches away. With him standing so close, her chest rose and fell with every breath.
“That’s not a problem, Grace. The sex is definitely doable.”
Dear Reader,
When my husband and I spent a week in the small town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France, we absolutely fell in love with the place. And since I’m always on the lookout for exciting locales for books, I knew Saint-Rémy would eventually show up in one.
I didn’t, however, expect the road that led my characters there would be so bumpy and pitted with tension, sexual and otherwise. I had great fun overcoming the roadblocks with Grace and Blake—hope you do, too!
All my best, and happy reading,
Merline Lovelace
About the Author
A career Air Force officer, MERLINE LOVELACE served at bases all over the world. When she hung up her uniform for the last time she decided to combine her love of adventure with a flair for storytelling, basing many of her tales on her own experiences in uniform. Since then she’s produced more than ninety action-packed sizzlers, many of which have made the USA TODAY and Waldenbooks bestseller lists. Over eleven million copies of her books are available in some thirty countries.
When she’s not tied to her keyboard, Merline enjoys reading, chasing little white balls around the fairways of Oklahoma and traveling to new and exotic locales with her handsome husband, Al. Check her website at www.merlinelovelace.com or friend her on Facebook for news and information about her latest releases.
The Paternity Promise
Merline Lovelace
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To the Elite Eight, and the wonderful times we’ve shared. Thanks for giving me such terrific fodder for my books!
One
His fists balled inside the pockets of his tuxedo pants, Blake Dalton forced a smile as he stood amid the wedding guests jamming the black-and-white-tiled foyer of his mother’s Oklahoma City mansion. The lavish reception was finally winding down. The newlyweds had just paused in their descent of the foyer’s circular marble staircase so the bride could toss her bouquet. The couple were mere moments from departing for their honeymoon in Tuscany.
Blake was damned if he’d block their escape. His twin had waged a tumultuous battle to win the stubbornly independent pilot he’d finally finessed to the altar. Alex had earned these two weeks in Tuscany with his new bride, away from his heavy responsibilities as CEO of Dalton International.
Blake had no problem taking up the slack in his absence. An MBA, a law degree and almost a decade of handling the corporation’s complex legal affairs had honed the leadership and managerial skills he’d developed as DI’s CFO. He and Alex regularly took over sole control of the multibillion-dollar conglomerate during each other’s frequent business trips.
No, the job wasn’t the problem.
Nor was it their mother, who’d waged a fierce and unrelenting campaign to get her sons married and settled down for over a year now.
Blake’s glance cut to the matriarch of the Dalton clan. Her hair was still jet-black, with only a hint of silver at the temples. She wore a melon-colored Dior lace dress and an expression of smug satisfaction as she surveyed the newly married couple. Blake knew exactly what she was thinking. One son down, one to go.
But it was the baby peering over his mother’s shoulder that made his fist bunch even tighter and his heart squeeze inside his chest. In the weeks since person or persons unknown had left the six-month-old on his mother’s doorstep, Molly had become as essential to Blake as breathing.
DNA testing had proved with 99.99 percent certainty that the bright-eyed infant girl was a Dalton. Unfortunately, the tests hadn’t returned the same accuracy as to which of the Dalton brothers had fathered the baby. Although even identical twins carried distinctive DNA, there were enough similarities to fog the question of paternity. The report had indicated a seventy-seven percent probability that Alex was the father, but the issue couldn’t be completely resolved until the lab matched the father’s DNA with that of the mother.
As a result, the Dalton brothers had spent several uncomfortable weeks after Molly’s arrival tracking down the women they’d connected with early last year. Alex’s list had been considerably longer than Blake’s, but none of the potential candidates—including the woman who’d just become Ms. Alex Dalton—had proved to be the baby’s mother. Or so they’d thought.
A noisy round of farewells wrenched Blake’s gaze from the baby. He looked up to find his brother searching the crowd. It was like looking in a mirror. Both he and Alex had their father’s build. Like Big Jake Dalton, they carried six feet plus of solid muscle. They’d also inherited their father’s electric blue eyes and tawny hair that the hot Oklahoma sun streaked to a dozen different shades of gold.
Blake caught Alex’s eye and casually, so casually, shook his head. He had to forcibly blank both his face and his mind to block any more subtle signals. In the way of all twins, the Dalton brothers could pick up instantly on each other’s vibes. Time enough for Alex and Julie to hear the news when they got back from Tuscany. By then Blake would have dealt with it. And with the shock and fury it had generated.
He rigidly suppressed both emotions until the newlyweds were on the way to the airport. Even then he did his duty and mingled until the last guests finally departed. His training as an attorney stood him in good stead. No one, not even his mother, suspected there was fury boiling in his gut.
“Whew!” Ebullient but drooping, Delilah Dalton kicked off her heels. “That was fun, but I’m glad it’s over. Went off well, don’t you think?”
“Very,” Blake answered evenly.
“I’m going to check on Molly.” She swooped up her shoes and padded on stockinged feet to the circular marble staircase. “Then I’m hitting the tub to soak for an hour. You staying here tonight?”
“No, I’ll go back to my place.” With a vicious exercise of will, he kept his voice calm. “Would you ask Grace to come down? I’d like to talk to her before I go.”
His mother lifted a brow at his request to speak to the woman she’d hired to act as a temporary nanny. In the weeks since a baby had dropped into the lives of all three Daltons, Grace Templeton had proved indispensable. Become almost part of the family. So much so that she’d served as Julie’s maid of honor while Blake stood up with Alex as best man.
She’d also started the wheels turning in Delilah’s fertile mind. His mother had begun dropping unsubtle hints in recent days about how sweet Grace was. How well she interacted with Molly. And just tonight, how good Blake had looked standing beside her at the altar. The fact that he’d begun to think along those same lines only added to the fury simmering hot and heavy.
“Tell Grace I’ll be in the library.”
For once Delilah was too tired to pry. She merely waved her shoes and continued up the stairs. “Will do. Just don’t keep her too long. She has to feel as whipped as I do.”
She was about to feel a whole lot more whipped. Yanking on the ends of his black bow tie, Blake stalked down the hall to the oak-paneled library. The soft glow from the recessed lighting contrasted starkly with his black mood as he retrieved the report he’d stuffed into his pocket more than an hour ago. The facts were no less shattering now than they had been then. He was still trying to absorb their impact when Grace Templeton entered the library.
“Hey, Blake. Delilah said you wanted to talk to me.”
His eyes narrowed on the slender blonde, seeing her in a wholly different light. She’d changed from the lilac, off-the-shoulder tea gown she’d worn for the wedding. She’d also released her pale, almost silvery hair from its sophisticated upsweep. The ends now brushed the shoulders of a sleeveless white blouse sporting several large splotches.
“’Scuze the wet spots,” she said, brushing a hand down her front with a rueful laugh in her warm brown eyes. “Molly got a little lively during her bath.”
Blake didn’t respond. He merely stood with his shoulders rigid under his tux as she hitched a hip on the wide, rolled arm of the library’s sofa.
“What did you want to talk about?”
Only then did she pick up on his silence. Or maybe it was his stance. Her head tilting, she gave him a puzzled half smile.
“Something wrong?”
He countered her question with one of his own. “Did you happen to notice the man who arrived at the reception just before Alex and Julie left?”
“The guy in the brown suit?” She nodded slowly, still trying to gauge his odd mood. “I saw him, and couldn’t help wondering who he was. He looked so out of place among the other guests.”
“His name’s Del Jamison.”
Her brow creased. Blake guessed she was mentally sorting through the host of people she’d met during her stint as Molly’s temporary nanny. When she drew a blank, he supplied the details.
“Jamison’s a private investigator. The one Alex and I hired to help search for Molly’s mother.”
She was good, he thought savagely. Very good. Her cinnamon eyes transmitted only a flicker of wariness, quickly suppressed, but she couldn’t keep the color from leaching out of her cheeks. The sudden pallor gave him a vicious satisfaction.
“Oh, right.” The shrug was an obvious attempt at nonchalance. “He was down in South America, wasn’t he? Checking the places where Julie worked last year?”
“He was, but after Julie made it clear she wasn’t Molly’s mother, Jamison decided to check another lead. In California.”
She couldn’t hide her fear now. It was there in the quick hitch in her breath, the sudden stillness.
“California?”
“I’ll summarize his report for you.” Blake used his courtroom voice. The one he employed when he wanted to drive home a point. Cool, flat, utterly devoid of emotion. “Jamison discovered the woman I was told had died in a fiery bus crash was not, in fact, even on that bus. She didn’t die until almost a year later.”
The same woman he’d had a brief affair with. The woman who’d disappeared from his life with no goodbye, no note, no explanation of any kind. Aided and abetted, he now knew, by this brown-eyed, soft-spoken schemer who’d wormed her way into his mother’s home.
And into Blake’s consciousness, dammit. Every level of it. As disgusted by her duplicity as by the hunger she’d begun to stir in him, he stalked across the room. She sprang to her feet at his approach and tried to brazen it out.
“I don’t see what that has to do with me.”
Still he didn’t lose control. But his muscles quivered with the effort of keeping his hands off her.
“According to Jamison, this woman gave birth to a baby girl just weeks before she died.”
His baby! His Molly!
“She also had a friend who showed up at the hospital mere hours before her death.” He planted his fists on the sofa arm, boxing her in, forcing her to lean back. “A friend with pale blond hair.”
“Blake!” The gold-flecked brown eyes he’d begun to imagine turning liquid with desire widened in alarm. “Listen to me!”
“No, Grace—if that’s really your name.” His temper slipped through, adding a whiplash to his voice. “You listen, and listen good. I don’t know how much you figured you could extort from our family, but the game ends now.”
“It’s not a game,” she gasped, bent at an awkward angle.
“No?”
“No! I don’t want your money!”
“What do you want?”
“Just… Just…!” She slapped her palms against his shirtfront. “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Get off me.”
He didn’t budge. “Just what?”
“Dammit!” Goaded, she bunched a fist and pounded his chest. Her fear was gone. Fury now burned in her cheeks. “All I wanted, all I cared about, was making sure Molly had a good home!”
Slowly, Blake straightened. Just as slowly, he moved back a step and allowed her only enough space to push upright. Slapping a rigid lid on his anger, he folded his arms and locked his gaze on her face. Assessing. Considering. Evaluating.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Who the hell are you?”
Grace balanced precariously on the sofa arm, her thoughts chaotic. After all she’d been through! So much fear and heartache. Now this? Just when she’d started to breathe easy for the first time in months. Just when she’d thought she and this man might…
“Who are you?”
He repeated the question in what she’d come to think of as his counselor’s voice. She’d known Blake Dalton for almost two months now. In that time she’d learned to appreciate his even temperament. She admired even more his ability to smoothly, calmly arbitrate between his more outspoken twin and their equally strong-willed mother.
Oh, God! Delilah!
Grace cringed inside at the idea of divulging even part of the sordid truth to the woman who’d become as much of a friend as an employer. Sick at the thought, she lifted her chin and met Blake’s cold, unwavering stare.
“I’m exactly who I claim to be. My name is Grace Templeton. I teach… I taught,” she corrected, her throat tight, “junior high social studies in San Antonio until a few months ago.”
She paused, trying not to think of the life she’d put on hold, forcing herself to blank out the image of the young teens she took such joy in teaching.
“Until a few months ago,” Blake repeated in the heavy silence, “when you asked for an extended leave of absence to take care of a sick relative. That’s the story you gave us, isn’t it? And the principal of your school?”
She knew they’d checked her out. Neither Delilah nor her sons would allow a stranger near the baby unless they’d vetted her. But Grace had become so adept these past years at weaving just enough truth in with the lies that she’d passed their screening.
“It wasn’t a story.”
Dalton’s breath hissed out. Those sexy blue eyes that had begun to smile at her with something more than friendliness the past few weeks were now lethal.
“You and Anne Jordan were related?”
Anne Jordan. Emma Lang. Janet Blair. So many aliases. So many frantic phone calls and desperate escapes. Grace could hardly keep them straight anymore.
“Anne was my cousin.”
That innocuous label didn’t begin to describe Grace’s relationship to the girl who’d grown up just a block away. They were far closer than cousins. They were best friends who’d played dolls and whispered secrets and shared every event in their young lives, big and small.
“Were you with her when she died?”
The question came at her as swiftly and mercilessly as a stiletto aimed for the heart. “Yes,” she whispered, “I was with her.”
“And the baby? Molly?”
“She’s your daughter. Yours and…and Anne’s.”
Blake turned away, and Grace could only stare at the broad shoulders still encased in his tux. She ached to tell him she was sorry for all the lies and deception. Except the lies had been necessary, and the deception wasn’t hers to tell.
“Anne called me,” she said instead. “Told me she’d picked up a vicious infection. Begged me to come. I jumped a plane that same afternoon but when I got there, she was already slipping into a coma. She died that evening.”
Blake angled back to face her. His eyes burned with an unspoken question. Grace answered this one as honestly as she could.
“Anne didn’t name you as Molly’s father. She was almost out of it from the drugs they’d pumped into her. She was barely coherent… All I understood was the name Dalton. I knew she’d worked here, so…so…”
She broke off, her throat raw with the memory.
“So you brought Molly to Oklahoma City,” Blake finished, spacing every word with frightening deliberation, “and left her on my mother’s doorstep. Then you called Delilah and said you’d just happened to hear she needed a temporary nanny.”
“Which she did!”
He gave that feeble response the disgust it deserved. “Did you enjoy watching my brother and me jump through hoops trying to determine which of us was Molly’s father?”
“I told you! I didn’t know which of you it was. Not until I’d spent some time with you.”
Even then she hadn’t been sure. The Dalton twins shared more than razor-sharp intelligence and devastating good looks. Grace could see how her cousin might have succumbed to Alex’s charisma and self-confidence. She’d actually figured him for Molly’s father until she’d come to appreciate the rock-solid strength in quiet, coolly competent Blake.
Unfortunately, Blake’s self-contained personality had made her task so much more difficult. Although friendly and easygoing, he kept his thoughts to himself and his private life private. If he’d had a brief affair with a woman who’d worked for him, only he—and possibly his twin—had known about it.
Grace had hoped the DNA tests they’d run would settle the question of Molly’s paternity. She’d been as frustrated as the Dalton brothers at the ambiguous results.
Then they’d launched a determined search for Molly’s mother and thrown Grace in a state of near panic. She’d sworn to keep her cousin’s secret. She had no choice but to do just that. Molly’s future depended on it. Now Blake had unearthed at least a part of that secret. She couldn’t tell him the rest, but she could offer a tentative solution.
“As I understand it, Molly’s parentage can’t be absolutely established unless the father’s DNA is matched with the mother’s. She… Anne…was cremated. I don’t have anything of hers to give you that would provide a sample.”
Not a hairbrush or a lipstick or even a postcard with a stamp on it for Molly to cling to as a keepsake. The baby’s mother had lived in fear for so long. She’d died the same way, mustering only enough strength at the end to extract a promise from her cousin to keep Molly safe.
“You could test my DNA,” Grace said, determined to hold to that promise. “I’ve read that mitochondria are inherited exclusively through the female line.”
She’d done more than read. She’d hunched in front of the computer for hours when not tending to Molly. Her head had spun trying to decipher scientific articles laced with terms like hypervariable control regions and HVR1 base pairs. It had taken some serious slogging, but she’d finally come away with the knowledge that those four-hundred-and-forty-four base pairs determined maternal lineage. As such, they could theoretically be used to trace a human’s lineage all the way back to the mitochondrial Eve. The Daltons didn’t need to go that far back to confirm Molly’s heritage. They just needed to hop over one branch on her family tree.
The same thought had obviously occurred to Blake. His eyes were chips of blue ice as he delivered an ultimatum.
“Damn straight you’ll give me a DNA sample. And until the results come back, you’ll stay away from Molly.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I want you out of this house. Now.”
“You’re kidding!”
She discovered an instant later that he wasn’t. In two strides he’d closed the distance between them and wrapped his fist around her upper arm. One swift tug had her off the sofa arm and marching toward the library’s door.
“Blake, for God’s sake!” As surprised as she was angry, she fought his grip. “I’ve been taking care of Molly for weeks now. You can’t seriously think I would do anything to hurt her.”
“What I think,” he returned in a voice as icy as his eyes, “is that there are a helluva lot of holes in your story. Until they’re filled in, I want you where I can watch you day and night.”
Two
“Get in.”
Blake held open the passenger door of his two-seater Mercedes convertible. The heat of the muggy July evening wrapped around them, almost as smothering as the worry and fear that clogged Grace’s throat.
“Where are we going?”
“Downtown.”
“I need to tell Delilah that I’m leaving,” she protested. “Get some of my things.”
“I’ll let my mother know what’s happening. Right now all you need to do is plant your behind in that seat.”
If Grace hadn’t been so stunned by this unexpected turn of events, the brusque command might have made her blink. This was Blake. The kind, polite, always solicitous Dalton twin. In the weeks since she’d insinuated herself into Delilah’s home, she’d never known him to be anything but patient with his sometimes overbearing mother, considerate with the servants and incredibly, achingly gentle with Molly.
“Get in.”
She got. Even this late in the evening, the pale gray leather was warm and sticky from the July heat. The seat belt cracked like a rifle shot when she clicked it into place.
As the convertible rolled down the curved driveway, Grace fought to untangle her nerves. God knew she should be used to having her life turned upside down without warning. It had happened often enough in the past few years. One call. That’s all it usually took. One frantic call from Hope.
No, she corrected fiercely. Not Hope. Anne. Although her cousin was dead, Grace had to remember to think and remember and refer to her as Anne.
She made that her mantra as the Mercedes sliced through the night. She was still repeating it when Blake pulled into the underground parking for Dalton International’s headquarters building in downtown Oklahoma City. Although the clicker attached to the Mercedes’s visor raised the arm, the booth attendant leaned out with cheerful greeting.
“Evenin’, Mr. Dalton.”
“Hi, Roy.”
“Guess your brother ‘n his bride are off on their honeymoon.”
“Yes, they are.”
“Sure wish ‘em well.” He leaned farther down and tipped a finger to his brow. “How’re you doin’, Ms. Templeton?”
She dredged up a smile. “Fine, thanks.”
Grace wasn’t surprised at the friendly greeting. She’d made many a trip to Dalton International’s headquarters with Molly and her grandmother. Delilah had turned over control of the manufacturing empire she and Big Jake had scratched out of bare dirt to her sons. That didn’t mean she’d surrendered her right to meddle as she saw fit in either DI’s corporate affairs or in her sons’ lives. So Delilah, with Molly and her nanny in tow, had regularly breezed into boardrooms and conferences. Just as often, she’d zoomed up to the top floor of the DI building, where her bachelor sons maintained their separate penthouse apartments.
The penthouse also boasted a luxurious guest suite for DI’s visiting dignitaries. That, apparently, was where Blake had decided to plant her. Grace guessed as much when he stopped at the security desk in the lower lobby to retrieve a key card. Moments later the glass-enclosed elevator whisked them upward.
Once past the street level, Oklahoma City zoomed into view. On previous visits Grace had gasped at the skyline that rose story by eye-popping story. Tonight she barely noticed the panorama of lights and skyscrapers. Her entire focus was on the man crowding her against the elevator’s glass wall.
She hadn’t been able to tell which Dalton twin was which at first. With their dark gold hair, chiseled chins and broad shoulders, one was a feast for the eyes. Two of them standing side by side could make any woman drool.
It hadn’t taken Grace long to separate the men. Alex was more outgoing, with a wicked grin that jump-started female hormones without him half trying. Blake was quieter. Less obvious. With a smile that was all the more seductive for being slow and warm and…
The ping of the elevator wrenched her back to the tortuous present. When the doors slid open, Blake grasped her arm again and marched her down a plushly carpeted hall toward a set of polished oak doors.
Okay, enough! Grace didn’t get angry often. When she did, her temper flashed hot and fierce enough to burn through the fear still gripping her by the throat.
“That’s it!” She yanked her arm free of his hold and stopped dead in the center of the hall. “You hustle me out of your mother’s house like a thief caught stealing the silver. You order me into your bright, shiny convertible. You drag me up here in the middle of the night. I’m not taking another step until you stop acting like you’re the Gestapo or KGB.”
He arched a brow at her rant, then coolly, deliberately shot back the cuff of his pleated tux shirt to check his gold Rolex.
“It’s nine-twenty-two. Hardly the middle of the night.”
She wanted to hit him. Slap that stony expression right off his too-handsome face. Might have actually attempted it if she wasn’t sure she would crack a couple of finger bones on his hard, unyielding jaw.
Besides which, he deserved some answers. The detective’s report had obviously delivered a body blow. He’d loved her cousin once.
The fire drained from Grace’s heart, leaving only sadness tinged now with an infinite weariness. “All right. I’ll tell you what I can.”
With a curt nod, he strode the last few feet to the guest suite. A swipe of the key card clicked the lock on the wide oak doors. Grace had visited the lavish guest suite a number of times. Each time she stepped inside, though, the sheer magnificence of the view stopped her breath in her throat.
Angled floor-to-ceiling glass walls gave a stunning, hundred-and-eighty-degree panorama of Oklahoma City’s skyline. The view was spectacular during the day, offering an eagle’s-eye glimpse of the domed capitol building, the Oklahoma River and the colorful barges that carried tourists past Bricktown Ballpark to the larger-than-life-size bronze sculptures commemorating the 1889 land run. That momentous event had opened some two million acres of unassigned land to settlers and, oh, by the way, created a tent city with a population of more than fifty thousand almost overnight.
The view on a clear summer night like this one was even more dazzling. Skyscrapers glowed like beacons. White lights twinkled in the trees lining the river spur that meandered through the downtown area. But it was the colossal bronze statue atop the floodlit capitol that drew Grace to the windows. She’d been born and bred in Texas, but as a social studies teacher she knew enough of the history of the Southwest to appreciate the deep symbolism in the twenty-two-foot-tall bronze statue. She’d also been given a detailed history of the statue by Delilah, who’d served on the committee that raised funds for it.
Erected in 2002, The Guardian, with his tall spear, muscular body and unbowed head, represented not only the thousands of Native Americans who’d been forced from their homes in the East and settled in what was then Indian Territory. The statue also embodied Oklahomans who’d wrestled pipe into red dirt as hard as brick to suck out the oil that fueled the just-born automobile industry. The sons and daughters who lived through the devastating Dust Bowl of the ‘30s. The proud Americans who’d worked rotating shifts at the Army Air Corps’ Douglas Aircraft Plant in the ‘40s to overhaul, repair and build fighters and bombers. And, most recently, the grimly determined Oklahomans who’d dug through nine stories of rubble to recover the bodies of friends and coworkers killed in the Murrah Building bombing.
Grace and Hope… No! Grace and Anne had driven up from Texas during their junior year in high school to visit Oklahoma City’s National Memorial & Museum. Neither of them had been able to comprehend how the homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh could be so evil, so twisted in both mind and morals. Then, less than a year later, her cousin met Jack Petrie.
Frost coated Grace’s lungs. Feeling its sick chill, she wrapped both arms around her waist and turned away from The Guardian to face Blake Dalton.
“I can’t tell you about Anne’s past,” she said bleakly. “I promised I would bury it with her. What I can say is that you’re the only man she got close to in more years than you want to know.”
“You think I’m going to be satisfied with that?”
“You have no choice.”
“Wrong.”
He yanked on the dangling end of his bow tie and threw it aside before shrugging out of his tuxedo jacket. His black satin cummerbund circled a trim waist. The pleated white shirt was still crisp, as might be expected from a tailor who catered exclusively to millionaires and movie stars.
Yet under the sleek sophistication was an edge that didn’t fool Grace for a moment. Delilah bragged constantly about the variety of sports Blake and his twin had excelled at during their school years. Both men still carried an athlete’s build—lean in the hips and flanks, with the solid chest and muscled shoulders of a former collegiate wrestler.
That chest loomed far too large in Grace’s view at the moment. It invaded her space, distracted her thoughts and made her distinctly nervous.
“How many cousins do you have?” he asked with silky menace. “And how long do you think it will take Jamison to check each of them out?”
“Not long,” she fired back. “But he won’t find anything beyond Anne’s birth certificate, driver’s license and a few high school yearbook photos. We made sure of that.”
“A person can’t just erase her entire life after high school.”
“As a matter of fact, she can.”
Grace moved to the buckskin leather sofa and dropped onto a cushion. Blake folded his tall frame onto a matching sofa separated by a half acre of glass-topped coffee table.
“It’s not easy. Or cheap,” she added, thinking of her empty savings account. “But you can pull it off with the help of a very smart friend of a friend of a friend. Especially if said friend can tap into just about any computer system.”
Like the Texas Vital Statistics agency. It had taken some serious hacking but they’d managed to delete the digital entry recording Hope Patricia Templeton’s marriage to Jack David Petrie. By doing so, they’d also deleted the record of the last time Grace had used her maiden name and SSN.
A familiar sadness settled like a lump in Grace’s middle. Her naive, trusting cousin had believed Petrie’s promise to love and cherish and provide for her every need. As the bastard had explained in the months that followed, his wife didn’t require access to their bank account. Or a credit card. Or a job. Nor did she have to register to vote. There weren’t any candidates worth going to that trouble for. And they sure as hell didn’t need to talk to a marriage counselor, he’d added when she finally realized he’d made her a virtual prisoner.
Financially dependent and emotionally battered, she’d spent long, isolated years as a shadow person. Jack trotted her out when he wanted to display his pretty wife, then shuffled her back into her proper place in his bed. It hadn’t taken him long to cut off her ties with her friends and family, either. All except Grace. She refused to be cut, even after Petrie became furious over her meddling. Grace wondered whether those horrific moments when her gas pedal locked on the interstate were, in fact, due to mechanical failure.
Grace and Hope had become more cautious after that. No more visits. No letters or emails that could be intercepted. No calls to the house. Only to a pay phone in the one grocery store where Jack allowed his wife to shop. Even then it had taken a solid year of pleading before Hope worked up the courage to escape.
Grace didn’t want to remember the desperate years that followed. The mindless fear. The countless moves. The series of false identities and fake SSNs, each one more expensive to procure than the last. Until finally—finally!—a woman with the name of Anne Jordan had found anonymity and a tenuous, tentative security at Dalton International. She’d been just one of DI’s thousands of employees worldwide. An entry-level clerk with only a high school GED. Certainly not a position that would bring her into contact with the multinational corporation’s CFO.
Yet it had.
“Please, Blake. Please believe me when I tell you Anne wanted her past to be buried with her. All she cared about in her last, agonizing moments was making sure Molly would know her father, if not her mother.”
Or more accurately, that her baby would have the name and protection of someone completely unknown to Jack Petrie.
Grace prayed she’d convinced Blake. She hadn’t, of course. The lawyer in him wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d dug up and turned over every bit of evidence. But maybe she could deflect his inquisition.
“Will you tell me something?”
“Quid pro quo?” His mouth twisted. “You haven’t given me much of a trade.”
“Please. I… I wasn’t able to talk or visit with Anne much in her last year.”
She hadn’t dared. Jack Petrie was a Texas state trooper, with a cop’s wide connections. Grace knew he’d had her under surveillance at various times, maybe even bugged her phone or planted a tracking device on her car, hoping she would lead him to his wife. Grace had imposed on every friend she had, borrowing their cars or using their phones, to maintain even minimal contact with her cousin.
Jack didn’t know about Grace’s last, frantic flight to California. She’d made sure of that. She’d emptied her savings account, had a friend drive her to the airport and paid cash for a ticket to Vegas. There she’d rented a car for a desperate drive across the desert to the San Diego hospital where her cousin had been admitted.
Five heart-wrenching days later, she’d retraced that route with Molly. Instead of flying back to San Antonio with the baby, though, she’d paid cash for a bus ticket to Oklahoma City.
She hadn’t used her cell phone or any credit cards in the weeks since she’d wrangled a job as Molly’s temporary nanny. Nor had she cashed the checks Delilah had written for her salary. She’d planned to go back to her teaching job once Molly was settled with her father. The longer she spent with the baby, though, the more painful the prospect of leaving her became.
The thought of leaving Blake Dalton was almost as wrenching. Lately her mind had drifted to him more than it should. Especially at night, after she’d put Molly to bed. The increasingly erotic direction of that drift spurred pinpricks of guilt, then and now.
“Tell me how you and Anne met,” she pleaded, reminding herself yet again Blake was her cousin’s love, the man she’d let into her life despite all she’d been through. “How… Well…”
“How Molly happened?” he supplied.
“Yes. Anne was so shy around men.”
For shy, read insecure and cowed and generally scared shitless. Grace couldn’t imagine how Blake had breached those formidable barriers.
“Please,” she said softly. “Tell me. I’d like to know she found a little happiness before she died.”
He stared at her for long moments, then his breath eased out on a sigh.
“I think she was happy for the few weeks we were together. I was never sure, though. Took me forever to pry more than a murmured hello from her. Even after I got her to agree to go out with me, she didn’t want anyone at DI to know we were seeing each other. Said it would look bad, the big boss dating a lowly file clerk.”
He hooked his wrists on his knees and contemplated his black dress shoes. He must not have liked what he saw. A note of unmistakable self-disgust colored his deep voice.
“She wouldn’t let me take her to dinner or to the theater or anywhere we might be seen together. It was always her place. Or a hotel.”
It had to be that, Grace knew. Her cousin couldn’t take the chance some society reporter or gossip columnist would start fanning rumors about rich, handsome Blake Dalton’s latest love interest. Or worse, the paparazzi might snap a photo of them together and post it on the internet.
Yet she risked going to a hotel with him. She’d come out of her defensive crouch enough for that. And when she discovered she was pregnant with his child, she’d had no choice but to run away. She wanted the baby desperately, but she couldn’t tell Dalton about the pregnancy. He would have wanted to give the child his name, or at least establish his legal rights as the father. Hope’s false IDs wouldn’t have held up under legal scrutiny, and her real one would have led Petrie to her. So she’d run. Again.
“Did you love her?”
Damn! Grace hadn’t meant to let that slip out. And she sure as heck hadn’t intended to feel jealous of her cousin’s relationship with this man.
Yet she knew he had to have been so tender with her. So sensitive to her needs. His mouth would have played a gentle song on her skin. His hands, those strong, tanned hands, must have stroked and soothed even as they aroused and…
“I don’t know.”
With a flush of guilt, Grace jerked her attention back to his face.
“I cared for her,” he said quietly, as much to himself as to her. “Enough to press her into going to bed with me. But when she left without a word, I was angry as well as hurt.”
Regret and remorse chased each other across his face.
“Then, when I got the report of the bus accident…”
He stopped and directed a look of fierce accusation at Grace.
“I wasn’t with her when it happened,” she said in feeble self-defense. “She was by herself, in her car. The bus spun out right in front of her and hit a bridge abutment. She was terrified, but she got out to help.”
“And left her purse at the scene.”
“Yes.”
“Deliberately?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Grace shook her head. “I can’t tell you why. I can’t tell you any more than I have. I promised Anne her past would die with her.”
“But it didn’t,” he countered swiftly. “Molly’s living proof of that.”
She slipped off the sofa and onto her knees, desperate for him to let it go. “She’s your daughter, Blake. Please, just accept that and take joy in her.”
He was silent for so long she didn’t think he would respond. When he did, the ice was back in his voice.
“All I have right now is your word that Anne and I had a child together. I’ll send in the DNA sample you offered to provide. Once we have the results, we’ll discuss where we go from here.”
“Where I need to go is back to your mother’s house! She’s exhausted from the wedding. She told me tonight she was feeling every one of her sixty-two years. She can’t take care of Molly by herself for the next few days.”
“I’ll help her, and when I can’t be there I’ll make sure someone else is. In the meantime, you stay put.”
He pushed out of the chair and strode to the wet bar built into the far wall. For a moment Grace thought he intended to pour them both a drink to wash down the hurt and bitterness of the past hour, but he lifted only one crystal tumbler from one of the mirrored shelves. He returned with it and issued a terse command.
“Spit.”
Three
The melodic chimes of a doorbell pierced Grace’s groggy haze. When the chimes gave way to the hammer of an impatient fist, she propped herself up on one elbow and blinked at the digital clock beside the bed.
Oh, God! Seven-twenty! She’d slept right through Molly’s first feeding.
She threw the covers aside and was half out of bed before reality hit. One, this wasn’t her room in Delilah’s mansion. Two, she was wearing only the lavender lace bikini briefs she left on when she’d changed her maid of honor gown. And three, she was no longer Molly’s temporary nanny.
Last night’s agonizing events came crashing down on her as the fist hammered again. Scrambling, Grace snatched up her now hopelessly wrinkled khaki crops and white blouse. She got the pants zipped and buttoned the blouse on her way to the front door. She had a good idea whose fist was pounding away. She’d spent almost a month now with Blake Dalton’s often autocratic, occasionally irascible, always kindhearted mother.
So she expected to see the raven-haired matriarch. She didn’t expect to see the baby riding on Delilah’s chest, nested contentedly in a giraffe sling. Grace gripped the brass door latch, swamped by an avalanche of love and worry and guilt as she dragged her gaze from the infant to her grandmother.
“Delilah, I…”
“Don’t you Delilah me!” She stomped inside, the soles of her high-topped sneakers slapping the marble foyer. “Don’t you dare Delilah me!”
Grace closed the door and followed her into the living room. She wished she’d taken a few seconds to brush her hair and slap some water on her face before this showdown. And coffee! She needed coffee. Desperately.
She’d tossed and turned most of the night. The few hours she’d drifted into a doze, she’d dreamed of Anne. And Blake. Grace had been there, too, stunned when his fury at her swirled without warning into a passion that jerked her awake, breathless and wanting. Remnants of that mindless hunger still drifted like a steamy haze through her mind as Delilah slung a diaper bag from her shoulder onto the sofa and released Molly from the sling.
Grace couldn’t help but note that her employer had gone all jungle today. The diaper bag was zebra-striped. Grinning monkeys frolicked and swung from vines on the baby’s seersucker dress. Delilah herself was in knee-length leopard tights topped by an oversize black T-shirt with a neon message urging folks to come out and be amazed by Oklahoma City’s new gorilla habitat—a habitat she’d coaxed, cajoled and strong-armed her friends into funding.
“Don’t just stand there,” she snapped at Grace. “Get the blanket out of the diaper bag.”
Even the blanket was a riot of green and yellow and jungle red. Grace spread it a safe distance away from the glass coffee table. Molly was just learning to crawl. She could push herself onto her hands and knees and hold her head up to survey the world with bright, inquisitive eyes.
Delilah deposited the baby on the blanket and made sure she was centered before pointing an imperious finger at Grace.
“You. Sit.” The older woman plunked herself down in the opposite chair, keeping the baby between them. “Now talk.”
“You sure you wouldn’t like some coffee first?” Grace asked with a hopeful glance at the suite’s fully equipped kitchen. “I could make a quick pot.”
“Screw coffee. Talk.”
Grace blew out a sigh and raked her fingers through her unbrushed hair. Obviously Delilah had no intention of making this easy.
“I don’t know how much Blake told you…” She let that dangle for a moment. Got no response. “Okay, here’s the condensed version. Molly’s mother was my cousin. When Anne worked at Dalton International, she had a brief affair with your son. She died before she could tell me which son, so I brought Molly to you and finessed a job as her nanny while Alex and Blake sorted out the paternity issue.”
Delilah pinned Grace with a look that could have etched steel. “If one of my sons got this cousin of yours pregnant, why didn’t she have the guts or the decency to let him know about the baby?”
Grace stiffened. Shielding Hope—Anne!—had become as much a part of her as breathing. No one knew what her cousin had endured. And Grace was damned if she’d allow anyone, even the formidable Delilah Dalton, to put her down.
“I told Blake and I’ll tell you. Anne had good reasons for what she did, but she wanted those reasons to die with her. She didn’t, however, want her baby to grow up without knowing either of her parents.”
Delilah fired back with both barrels. “Don’t get uppity with me, girl!”
The fierce retort startled the baby. Molly swung her head toward her grandmother, wobbled and plopped down on one diapered hip. Both women instinctively bent toward her, but she was already pushing back onto her knees.
Delilah moderated her tone if not her message. “I’m the one who bought your out-of-work schoolteacher story, remember? I took you into my home. I trusted you, dammit.”
Grace didn’t see any use in pointing out that she hadn’t lied about being a teacher or temporarily out of work. The trust part stung enough.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you about my connection to Molly.”
“Ha!”
“I promised my cousin I would make sure her child was loved and cared for.” Her glance went again to the baby, happily drooling and rocking on hands and knees. Slowly, she brought her gaze back to Delilah. “And she is,” Grace said softly. “Well cared for and very much loved.”
Delilah huffed out something close to a snort but didn’t comment for long moments. “I pride myself on being a good judge of character,” she said at last. “Even that horny goat I married lived up to almost everything I’d expected of him.”
Grace didn’t touch that one. She’d heard Delilah say more than once she wished to hell Big Jake Dalton hadn’t died before she’d found out about his little gal pal. His passing would’ve been a lot less peaceful.
“Is all this you’ve just told me true?” the Dalton matriarch demanded.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Molly’s mother was really your cousin?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have proof of that soon enough. Damned lab is making a fortune off all these rush DNA tests we’ve ordered lately.”
She pooched her lips and moved them from side to side before coming to an abrupt decision.
“I’ve watched you with Molly. I don’t believe you’re some schemer looking to extort big bucks from us. You’ll have to work to convince Blake of that, though.”
“I can’t tell him any more than I have.”
“You don’t know him like I do. He has his ways of getting what he wants. So do I,” she added as she pushed out of the chair and adjusted the sling. “So do I. C’mon, Mol, let’s go see your daddy.”
Without thinking Grace moved to help. Swooping the baby up, she planted wet, sloppy kisses on her cheeks before slipping the infant’s feet through the sling’s leg openings. While Delilah tightened the straps, Grace folded the jungle blanket back into the diaper bag and handed it to the older woman.
“I’m sorry Blake doesn’t want me to help with Molly.”
“We’ll manage until this mess gets sorted out.”
If it got sorted out. Grace grew more antsy as one day stretched into two, then three.
Blake had her things packed and delivered along with her purse. She tried to take that as a good sign. Apparently he wasn’t afraid she would pull a disappearing act like her cousin had.
He didn’t contact her personally, though, and that worried Grace. It also caused an annoyingly persistent ache. Only now that she’d been banished from their lives did she realize how attached she’d become to the Daltons, mother and son. And to Molly! Grace missed cooing to the baby and watching her count her toes and shampooing her soft, downy blond hair.
She’d known the time would come when she would have to drop out of Molly’s life. The longer she stayed here, the greater the risk Jack Petrie might trace her to Oklahoma City and wonder what she was doing here. Yet she felt a sharp pang of dismay when Blake finally condescended to call a little past 6:00 p.m. with a curt announcement.
“I need to talk to you.”
“All right.”
“I’m downstairs,” he informed her. “I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
At least she was a little better prepared for this face-to-face than she’d been for their last. Her hair was caught up in a smooth knot and she’d swiped on some lip gloss earlier. She debated whether to change her jeans and faded San Antonio SeaWorld T-shirt but decided to use the time to take deep, calming breaths.
Not that they did much good. The Blake Dalton she opened the door to wasn’t one she’d seen before. He’d always appeared at his mother’s house in suits or neatly pressed shirts and slacks sporting creases sharp enough to shave fuzz from a peach. Then, of course, there was the tux he’d donned for the wedding. Armani should wish for male models with builds like either of the Dalton twins.
This Blake was considerably less refined. Faded jeans rode low on his hips. A black T-shirt stretched across his taut shoulders. Bristles the same shade of amber as his hair shadowed his cheeks and chin. He looked tough and uncompromising, but the expression in his laser blues wasn’t as cold as the one he’d worn at their last meeting, thank God.
“We got the lab report back.”
Wordlessly she led the way into the living room. Electric screens shielded the wall of windows from the sun that hadn’t yet slipped down behind the skyscrapers. Without the endless view, the room seemed smaller, more intimate. Too intimate, she decided when she turned and found Blake had stopped mere inches away.
“Aren’t you going to ask the results?”
“I don’t need to,” she said with a shrug. “Unless the lab screwed up the samples, their report confirms Molly and I descend from the same family tree.”
“They didn’t screw up the samples.”
“Okay.” She crossed her arms. “Now what?”
Surprise flickered across his face.
“What’d you expect?” Grace asked, her chin angling. “That I would throw myself into your arms for finally acknowledging the truth?”
The surprise was still there, but then his gaze dropped to her mouth and it took on a different quality. Darker. More intense. As though the idea of Grace throwing herself at him was less of a shock than something to be considered, evaluated, assessed.
Now that the idea was out there, it didn’t particularly shock her, either. Just the opposite. In fact, the urge grew stronger with each second it floated around in the realm of possibility. All she had to do was step forward. Slide her palms over his shoulders. Lean into his strength.
As her cousin had.
Guilt sent Grace back a pace, not forward. He’d been Anne’s lover, she reminded herself fiercely. The father of her baby. At best, Grace was a problem he was being forced to solve.
“Now you know,” she said with a shrug that disguised her true feelings. “You’re Molly’s father. And I know you’ll be good with her. So it’s time for me to pack and head back to San Antonio. I’ll stop by to say goodbye to her on my way out of town.”
“That’s it?” His frown deepened. “You’re just going to drop out of her life?”
“I’ll see her when I can.”
After she was certain Jack Petrie hadn’t learned about her stay in Oklahoma City.
“There are legalities that have to be attended to,” Blake protested. “I’ll need Molly’s birth certificate. Her mother’s death certificate.”
Both contained the false name and SSN her cousin had used in California. Grace could only pray the documents would be sufficient for Blake’s needs. They should. With his legal connections and his family’s political clout here in Oklahoma, he ought to be able to push whatever he wanted through the courts.
“I’ll send you copies,” she promised.
“Right.” He paused, his jaw working. “I hope you know that whatever trouble Anne was in, I would have helped her.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”
His eyes searched hers. “Anne couldn’t bring herself to trust me, but you can, Grace.”
She wanted to. God, how she wanted to! Somehow she managed to swallow the hard lump in her throat.
“I trust you to cherish Molly.”
Saying goodbye to the baby was every bit as hard as it had been to say goodbye to Blake. Molly broke into delighted coos when she saw her nanny and lifted both arms, demanding to be cuddled.
Grace refused to cry until her rental car was on I-35 and heading south. Tears blurred the rolling Oklahoma countryside for the next fifty miles. By the time she crossed the Red River into Texas, her throat was raw and her eyes so puffy that she had to stop at the welcome center to douse them with cold water. Six hours later she hit the outskirts of San Antonio, still mourning her severed ties to Molly and the woman who’d been both cousin and best friend to her since earliest childhood.
Her tiny condo in one of the city’s older suburbs felt stale and stuffy when she let herself in. With a gulp, she glanced from the living room she’d painted a warm terra-cotta to the closet-size kitchen. She loved her place, but the entire two-bedroom unit could fit in the foyer of Delilah Dalton’s palatial mansion.
As soon as she’d unpacked and powered up her computer, Grace scanned the certificates she’d promised to send Blake. That done, she skimmed through the hundreds of emails that had piled up in her absence and tried to pick up the pieces of her life.
The next two weeks dragged interminably. School didn’t start until the end of month. Unfortunately, the open-ended leave of absence Grace had requested had forced her principal to shuffle teachers to cover the fall semester. The best he could promise was hopefully steady work as a substitute until after Christmas.
At loose ends until school started, Grace had to cut as many corners as possible to make up for her depleted bank account. Even worse, she missed Molly more than she would have believed possible. The baby had taken up permanent residence in her heart.
Only at odd moments would she admit she missed Molly’s father almost as much as she did the baby. Like everyone else swept up in the Daltons’ orbit, she’d been overwhelmed by Delilah’s forceful personality and dazzled by Alex’s wicked grin and audacious charm. Now that she viewed the Dalton clan from a distance, however, Grace recognized Blake as the brick and mortar keeping the family together. Always there when his mother needed him to pull together the financing on yet another of her charitable ventures. Holding the reins at Dalton International’s corporate headquarters while Alex jetted halfway around the world to consult with suppliers or customers. Grace missed seeing his tall form across the table at his mother’s house, missed hearing his delighted chuckle when he tickled Molly’s tummy and got her giggling.
The only bright spot in those last, endless days of summer was that she heard nothing from Jack Petrie. She began to breathe easy again, convinced she’d covered her tracks. That false sense of security lasted right up until she answered the doorbell on a rainy afternoon.
When she peered though the peephole, the shock of seeing who stood on the other side dropped her jaw. A second later, fear exploded in her chest. Her fingers scrabbled for the dead bolt. She got it unlocked and threw the door almost back on its hinges.
“Blake!”
He had to step back to keep from getting slammed by the glass storm door. Grace barely registered the neat black slacks, the white button-down shirt with the open collar and sleeves rolled up, the hair burnished to dark, gleaming gold by rain.
“Is…?” Her heart hammered. Her voice shook. “Is Molly okay?”
“No.”
“Oh, God!” A dozen horrific scenarios spun through her head. “What happened?”
“She misses you.”
Grace gaped at him stupidly. “What?”
“She misses you. She’s been fretting since you left. Mother says she’s teething.”
The disaster scenes faded. Molly wasn’t injured. She hadn’t been kidnapped. Almost reeling with relief, Grace sagged against the doorjamb.
“That’s what you came down to San Antonio to tell me?” she asked incredulously. “Molly’s teething?”
“That, and the fact that she said her first word.”
And Grace had missed both events! The loss hit like a blow as Blake’s glance went past her and swept the comfortable living room.
“May I come in?”
“Huh? Oh. Yes, of course.”
She moved inside, all too conscious now of her bare feet and the T-shirt hacked off to her midriff. The shirt topped a pair of ragged cutoffs that skimmed her butt cheeks.
The cutoffs were comfortable in the cozy privacy of her home but nothing she would have ever considered wearing while she’d worked for Delilah—or around her son. She caught Blake’s gaze tracking to her legs, moving upward. Disconcerted by the sudden heat that slow once-over generated, she gulped and snatched at his reason for being there.
“What did Molly say?”
“We thought it was just a ga-ga,” he said with a small, almost reluctant smile. “Mother insisted she was trying to say ga-ma, but it came out on a hiss.”
She sounded it out in her head, and felt her stomach go hard and tight.
“Gace? Molly said Gace?”
“Several times now.”
“I…uh…”
He waited a beat, but she couldn’t pull it together enough for coherence. She was too lost in the stinging regret of missing those first words.
“We want you to come back, Grace.”
Startled, she looked up to find Blake regarding her intently.
“Who’s we?” she stammered.
“All of us. Mother, me, Julie and Alex.”
“They’re back from their honeymoon?”
“They flew in last night.”
“And you…” She had to stop and suck in a shaky breath. “And you want me to come back and pick up where I left off as Molly’s nanny?”
“Not as her nanny. As my wife.”
Four
Blake could certainly understand Grace’s slack-jawed astonishment. He’d spent the entire flight to San Antonio telling himself it was insane to propose marriage to a woman who refused to trust him with the truth.
It was even more insane for him to miss her the way he had. She’d wormed her way into his mother’s house and Molly’s heart. She’d lied to him—to all of them—by omission if nothing else. Yet the hole she’d left behind had grown deeper with each hour she was gone.
Molly’s unexpected arrival had already turned his calm, comfortable routine upside down. This doe-eyed blonde had kicked it all to hell. So he felt a savage satisfaction to see his own chaotic feelings mirrored in her face.
“You’re crazy! I can’t marry you!”
“Why not?”
She was sputtering, almost incoherent. “Because… Because…”
He thought she might break down and tell him then. Trust him with the truth. When she didn’t, he swallowed a bitter pill of disappointment.
“Why don’t we sit down?” he suggested with a calm he was far from feeling. “Talk this through.”
“Talk it through?” She gave a bubble of hysterical laughter and swept a hand toward the living room. “My first marriage proposal, and he wants to talk it though. By all means, counselor, have a seat.”
She regrouped during the few moments it took him to move to a sofa upholstered in a nubby plaid that complemented the earth-toned walls and framed prints of Roman antiquities. As she dropped into a chair facing him, Blake could see her astonishment giving way to anger. The first hints of it fired her eyes and stiffened her shoulders under her cottony T-shirt. He had to work to keep his gaze from drifting to the expanse of creamy skin exposed by the shirt’s hem. And those legs. Christ!
He’d better remember what he’d come for. He had to approach this challenge the same way he did all others. Coolly and logically.
“I’ve had time to think since you left, Grace. You’re good with Molly. So good both she and my mother have had difficulty adjusting to your absence.”
So had he, dammit. It irritated Blake to no end that he hadn’t been able to shut this woman out of his head. She’d lied to him and stubbornly refused to trust him. Yet he’d found himself making excuses for the lies and growing more determined by the hour to convince her to open up.
“You’re also Molly’s closest blood relative on her mother’s side,” he continued.
As far as he could determine at this point, anyway. He fully intended to keep digging. Whatever it took, however he got it, he wanted the truth.
“That’s right,” she confirmed with obvious reluctance. “Anne’s parents are dead, and she was their only child.”
He waited, willing her to share another scrap of information about her cousin. It hit Blake then that he could barely remember what Anne had looked like. They’d been together such a short time—if those few, furtive meetings outside their work environment could be termed togetherness.
Jaw locked, he tried to summon her image. She’d been an inch or two shorter than Grace. That much he remembered. And her eyes were several shades darker than her cousin’s warm, caramel-brown. Beyond that, she was a faint memory when compared with the vibrant female now facing him.
Torn between guilt and regret, Blake presented his next argument. “I know you’re facing monetary problems right now.”
She bolted upright in her chair. “What’d you do? Have Jamison check my financials?”
“Yes.” He offered no apology. “I’m guessing you drained your resources to help Anne and Molly. I owe you for that, Grace.”
“Enough to marry me?” she bit out.
“That’s part of the equation.” He hesitated, aware he was about to enter treacherous territory. “There’s another consideration, of course. Something frightened Anne enough to send her into hiding. It has to frighten you, too, or you wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to protect her.”
He’d struck a nerve. He could tell by the way she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Regret that he hadn’t been able to shield Anne from whoever or whatever had threatened her knifed into him. With it came an implacable determination to protect Grace. Battling the fierce urge to shake the truth out of her, he offered her not just his name but every powerful resource at his disposal.
“I’ll take care of you,” he promised, his steady gaze holding hers. “You and Molly.”
She wanted to yield. He could see it in her eyes. He congratulated himself, reveling in the potent mix of satisfaction at winning her confidence and a primal need to protect his chosen mate.
His fierce exultation didn’t last long. Only until she shook her head.
“I appreciate the offer, Blake. You don’t know how much. But I can take care of myself.”
He hadn’t realized until that moment how determined he was to put his ring on her finger. His expression hardening, he played his trump card.
“There’s another aspect to consider. Right now, you can’t—or won’t—claim any degree of kinship to Molly. That could impact your access to her.”
Her back went rigid. “What are you saying? That you wouldn’t let me see her if I don’t marry you?”
“No. I’m simply pointing out that you have no legal rights where she’s concerned. Mother’s not getting any younger,” he reminded her coolly. “And if something should happen to me or Alex…”
He was too good an attorney to overstate his case. Shrugging, he let her mull over the possibilities.
Grace did, with ever increasing indignation. She couldn’t believe it! He’d trapped her in her own web of lies and half-truths. If she wanted to see Molly—which she did, desperately!—she would have to play the game by his rules.
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