Книга - The Father Factor

The Father Factor
Lilian Darcy


THE SHOCK OF HIS LIFE!Shallis hadn't been expecting to find him sitting in his father's chair in the small-town law practice: Jared Starke. Devastatingly goodlooking. Hotshot big-city corporate lawyer. And the former Miss Tennessee had also not expected a meeting about the mysteries of her late grandmother's estate to lead to a sizzling secret affair….But it had. And how! And now Shallis was unexpectedly, accidentally, pregnant. With Jared's baby…Of course, she had to tell him. Only, she had no idea that Jared had just received another pretty major piece of fatherhood news. One that would rock his very foundations….









Her mouth stayed closed and motionless, its shape so perfect, its color so soft and pink. His center of gravity dropped low into his groin, which felt as heavy as base metal.


Kiss her, Jared.

Just once.

Goodbye, maybe.

Goodbye, more than likely.

Don’t think about that. Don’t think about anything. Just do it. Kiss her. She’s waiting for it, isn’t she? That’s what the frown and the big, troubled eyes and the still, expectant mouth are all about. That’s the reason for the little lap of her tongue tip at the seam of her lips. That’s the reason for the sharp in-breath.

Isn’t it?

No.

It wasn’t.

“Small complication in all this, Jared,” she said. “It’s only fair to tell you. I’m pregnant.”

Jared had never been sucker punched before. He’d had no idea that anything could flatten a man’s lungs so fast.


Dear Reader,

It’s hot and sunny in my neck of the woods—in other words, perfect beach reading weather! And we at Silhouette Special Edition are thrilled to start off your month with the long-awaited new book in New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber’s Navy series, Navy Husband. It features a single widowed mother; her naval-phobic sister, assigned to care for her niece while her sister is in the service; and a handsome lieutenant commander who won’t take no for an answer! In this case, I definitely think you’ll find this book worth the wait….

Next, we begin our new inline series, MOST LIKELY TO…, the story of a college reunion and the about-to-be-revealed secret that is going to change everyone’s lives. In The Homecoming Hero Returns by Joan Elliott Pickart, a young man once poised for athletic stardom who chose marriage and fatherhood instead finds himself face-to-face with the road not taken. In Stella Bagwell’s next book in her MEN OF THE WEST series, Redwing’s Lady, a Native American deputy sheriff and a single mother learn they have more in common than they thought. The Father Factor by Lilian Darcy tells the story of the reunion between a hotshot big-city corporate lawyer who’s about to discover the truth about his father—and a woman with a secret of her own. If you’ve ever bought a lottery ticket, wondering, if just once, it could be possible…be sure to grab Ticket to Love by Jen Safrey, in which a pizza waitress from Long Island is sure that if she isn’t the lucky winner, it must be the handsome stranger in town. Last, new-to-Silhouette author Jessica Bird begins THE MOOREHOUSE LEGACY, a miniseries based on three siblings who own an upstate New York inn, with Beauty and the Black Sheep. In it, responsible sister Frankie Moorehouse wonders if just this once she could think of herself first as soon as she lays eyes on her temporary new chef.

So keep reading! And think of us as the dog days of August begin to set in….

Toodles,

Gail Chasan

Senior Editor




The Father Factor

Lilian Darcy





www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




LILIAN DARCY


has written over fifty books for Silhouette Romance and Harlequin Mills & Boon Medical Romance (Prescription Romance). Her first book for Silhouette appeared on the Waldenbooks Series Romance Bestsellers list, and she’s hoping readers go on responding strongly to her work. Happily married with four active children and a very patient cat, she enjoys keeping busy and could probably fill several more lifetimes with the things she likes to do—including cooking, gardening, quilting, drawing and traveling. She currently lives in Australia but travels to the United States as often as possible to visit family. Lilian loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 381, Hackensack NJ 07602 or e-mail her at lildarcy@austarmetro.com.au.




Contents


Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue




Chapter One


“E xcuse me, I think you’ve given me a tad too much change.” Shallis Duncan held a handful of bills and coins toward the teenager at the checkout, but he continued to look goggle-eyed, openmouthed and blank-faced.

“Huh?” he said.

His glazed focus dropped to her where her cleavage would have been if she’d been wearing a bikini instead of a businesslike dove-gray suit. His mouth fell open a little farther, revealing his disappointment at such a chaste amount of fabric.

“Too much change,” Shallis repeated patiently. “See? I gave you five dollars on a two-dollar-and-six-cent item, and you’ve given me forty-seven dollars and ninety-four cents back.” She tried a teasing, big sister kind of smile. “I don’t think this is what your boss wants from you.”

“Oh. Right,” he answered vaguely. “Did you want to see him?”

Okay. Still not getting through.

She gave up.

“Here.” She took his hand, turned it palm upward and dumped two twenties and five ones into it. His hand stayed frozen in place as he stared down at it. “Put it back in the till, okay?” she coached him. “And you have a good day, now.”

Those last four words seemed to make some kind of low-wattage lightbulb click on in the young man’s head. He stopped looking at his hand. “Uh, yeah, have a good—” He frowned. Hadn’t someone just said that? “…uh, Miss Ameri—Miss Duncan,” he finished vaguely.

On her way out of the drugstore with the tube of lip balm still in one hand and a leather briefcase in the other, Shallis sighed. At some point, surely, this kind of thing had to stop.

But not yet, apparently.

“Well, hey, it’s Hyattville’s very own home-grown princess!” said the man who’d just emerged from the real estate office she was passing.

“Good morning, Mr. Delahunty,” she answered, digging the appropriate smile out of her extensive repertoire the way she might have dug the right lipstick out of a crammed makeup case.

The law office of Abraham Starke beckoned to her, several doors down. It had slatted cedar blinds in the windows, a polished brass knocker and name plate on the door, and a facade of pretty, cream-painted nineteenth-century brick, trimmed in Wedgwood-blue.

If she had pocketed that extra forty-five dollars in the drugstore like a felon, and left the unfortunate youth to explain the discrepancy to his boss, she would have missed crossing paths with Mr. Delahunty. By the time he’d appeared, she would already have gained the comparative safety of a private appointment with a man who was old enough to be her grandfather and was surely therefore not about to be impressed—or reduced to a gibbering heap—by former beauty queens.

Should she conclude that sometimes crime did pay?

Mr. Delahunty was her father’s assistant manager at the Douglas County Bank, so she couldn’t be rude. In fact, if she was ever rude, to anyone, anywhere in town, at any time, day or night, the story would probably make the front page of Hyattville’s weekly newspaper.

“Hyattville’s Very Own Home-Grown Princess says, ‘Scram!’ to Local Puppy,” or something.

It got wearing, after a while. Made some of life’s curlier issues a little harder to resolve. Who she was and what was really going to make her happy, for example.

Mr. Delahunty was asking questions. How did she enjoy being back in town? Three months, wasn’t it? How did it compare to L.A.? Didn’t she ever hanker for the bright lights and the celebrity lifestyle she’d left behind?

She couldn’t possibly give him a truthful answer. Even if he had all day, she didn’t. Abraham Starke would be expecting her at any moment, and she had to be back in her office at the Grand Regency Hotel right after lunch, to deal with a To Do list six feet long.

“Hyattville is a great little town,” she told him. “I don’t have any regrets about leaving L.A.”

Which was true as far as it went, but it didn’t go anywhere near all the way.

“Well, you have a great day, and I’ll tell your dad I ran into you. You know, if that Miss America had only turned out to be a prison escapee, or something…”

“I know,” Shallis drawled, smiling. “How unfair can you get, huh? How dare the woman have led such a blameless life!”

“Smart, beautiful and funny, too.” Duke Delahunty said to the April sky. His expression began to resemble the expression of the drugstore counter clerk a few minutes ago.

“It was good to see you, Mr. Delahunty,” Shallis said quickly.

Then she smiled at him again because, like almost every other citizen of Hyattville, he was genuinely proud of her and genuinely sorry that she’d so narrowly missed winning the Miss America crown. It would be ungracious to get angry about the level of support she’d always had here, when the cleavage gazers were well in the minority.

But the pageant was more than five years ago.

She wondered if Hyattville would ever let her move on.

An old-fashioned brass bell tinkled when Shallis open the front door of Abraham Starke’s law office, and his middle-aged receptionist looked up from her computer screen.

“Oh, Miss Duncan!” She beamed. “I’ll let Mr. Starke know you’ve arrived. He’s waiting for you.”

Instinctively, Shallis looked at her watch.

“Oh, no, you’re not late,” the receptionist said, fast and breathless. “I’m sorry, I just meant he’s expecting you.”

She pushed her swivel chair back too fast, stood up and stumbled over one of its wheels. A sharp curse word escaped her lips, and she threw a panicky look back at Shallis, as if a one-time first runner-up in the Miss America pageant had the right of citizen’s arrest over any woman who swore in public.

What next? Would Abraham Starke have an attack of hospital-strength heartburn at the sight of her, or something?

He’d been the Duncan family’s lawyer since before Shallis was born. Surely he might be one person who wouldn’t think of her in a ball gown with a pageant princess’s tiara on her head, but would have memories of some less exalted outfit from her past. A diaper and a sunhat, for example. Or a Girl Scout uniform. She’d seriously prefer either of those.

The receptionist rapped at the door of his private office, opened it and poked her head inside. “Miss Duncan is here to see you, Mr. Starke.”

“Yes, please show her in,” said a voice that didn’t sound like it belonged to someone in his eighties.

Two seconds later, Shallis came face-to-face with the man who six years ago had gotten dangerously close to ruining not just her sister Linnie’s wedding day but Linnie and Ryan’s whole marriage.

Jared Starke.

Not Abraham.

Oh, yeah, this Mr. Starke would have memories from her past, all right.

Her whole body went hot, and then cold. Reaction rushed through her, changed direction, rushed back again. She felt as if she’d been ambushed by ancient feelings she hadn’t enjoyed at the time and liked even less now. Surely it all should have gone away, after so long?

She’d felt so fiercely protective of her sister since getting back to Hyattville three months ago, when she’d learned the full story behind the fact that Linnie and Ryan weren’t parents yet, after six years as man and wife. She didn’t want anything to come along that might impinge on Linnie’s happiness any further.

If Jared still had the power to do that…

He was probably the one person in the world who could have made Shallis nostalgic for the princess treatment she regularly received from everybody else in Hyattville—everybody except her dad. She couldn’t stand the princess treatment, but at least she knew how to handle it.

She’d never known how to handle Jared. At best—as on Linnie’s wedding day—she’d only pretended.

He was Abraham Starke’s grandson, and she’d had no idea that he was back in town, let alone that he’d apparently taken over his grandfather’s law firm. He was sinfully good looking, impossible to trust, and she didn’t like him one bit.

No, really.

She didn’t.

She wouldn’t betray Linnie like that, and she wouldn’t be such a fool. She’d developed some pretty powerful instincts toward self-protection in recent years.

“Shallis,” he said, standing at once, and fast, so that he was on his feet almost before she’d fully entered the room. The Southern courtesy bred into him since childhood hadn’t been abraded by Chicago’s brasher style.

The noon sunshine reflecting into the office through its east-facing window caught the natural blond highlights in his hair and made them stand out against the thicker and darker strands beneath. His tan was no doubt the artificial result of frequent sessions on a big city tanning bed but it suited him all the same, even around the outer corners of his eyes, where a couple of fine, tiny wrinkles had begun to form.

His dark tailored pants and plain white shirt covered a strong male body that seemed at ease in its own skin, full of latent power but with nothing left to prove. He must already have proved himself plenty of times, with plenty of women. The electric aura of sensual success hovered around him, yet he acted as if he had no idea it was there.

Yeah, right. Like I’m buying that! Shallis thought. A man like him would always know it was there.

He must be around thirty-three years old by now, or maybe just turned thirty-four, against her own age of going on twenty-eight. He’d been her sister’s first serious boyfriend, starting from when Linnie was in senior year of high school and Shallis herself had hit thirteen. Thirteen was an impressionable age, and Shallis had been…

Yup, impressed.

Round-eyed.

Envious of what Linnie had.

In fact she’d had a wild hormonal crush on Jared that had lasted until she was sixteen. For most of those three years he’d hardly seemed aware of her existence, but, ohhh, had she ever been aware of his! The kind of aware that resulted in clammy hands and hot cheeks, clumsy outbursts and ill-timed episodes of tongue-tied silence, an obsession with certain hit tracks featured on MTV and the scribbling of secret, tortured and very, very bad poems. The way she’d behaved on the night he’d finally deigned to notice her was not exactly one of her proudest memories.

As if Jared sincerely had no notion that she might have any reason to feel hostile or negative toward him, let alone that her feelings might be a whole lot more complex and jumpy than that, he came around the side of his grandfather’s huge oak desk to shake her hand. His smile was as steady as his grip, and contained just the right amount of professional warmth. There was a respect in his golden-brown eyes that you sensed might eventually turn to friendship given the right encouragement and points of connection.

And there was nothing in his attitude or his body language that said, “Another blond bimbo, big yawn…or maybe a one-night stand,” which was the way she’d been treated in Los Angeles, and nothing that said, “Oh, wow, I’m in the same room as Hyattville’s beautiful prodigal princess,” which was the way she got treated here.

Not fair!

He was too good at all of this.

It was exactly the kind of behavior that Shallis wanted from every other citizen in town, but she didn’t want it from Jared Starke, not when she knew from Linnie’s experience and her own that it had to be part of some game plan of his that could lead to only one outcome—a win for Jared himself.

“Jared,” she answered him coolly, because sometimes an ex first runner-up in the Miss America pageant could be good at this, too. And she dropped his grip a little too soon. Deliberately. “I wasn’t expecting you to be here.”

“I wasn’t expecting me to be here, either, until a couple of days ago,” he drawled. “Please sit down.” He gestured not to one of the two upright chairs that faced the desk, but toward the leather armchairs positioned near the window, on either side of a low coffee table which matched the antique oak of the other furnishings.

Reluctantly, Shallis took a seat. Her lips felt dry, which was why she’d stopped into the drugstore to purchase the lip balm just now. She’d spent most of yesterday out in the open air at Linnie and Ryan’s thoroughbred stud farm and she’d gotten burned by the spring sun and wind, as if the weather itself wanted her to regret her recent attempts to wean herself away from full daytime makeup.

And why was she doing that?

The princess thing, again. New theory. Maybe if she looked a little more down-to-earth…

So far, it hadn’t worked.

“I arrived back in town Friday,” Jared said, “and Grandpa Abe basically pushed a bunch of keys into my hand, picked up his fishing pole and headed for the mountains.” He gave a bland kind of grin and turned his hands palm upward. “I thought I was here for a break, but he had other ideas.”

“So this is a temporary setup? Just a few days?”

Shallis let way too much relief show in her voice, and this time it wasn’t deliberate. She wished at once that she’d hidden her reaction better. Jared was definitely hiding something.

“That’s fine,” she went on. “I can arrange another appointment when your grandfather gets back.”

Jared looked at her in steady silence for a moment, reading every bit of her discomfort. Hopefully not reading all of the reasons for it. He gave another brief smile.

“Sorry, I guess I’m giving you the wrong impression,” he said. “My grandfather and I had a good talk before he left on his fishing trip, and I’ve agreed to take over his law practice for the next six months while we have a serious look at options for the future. He’s overdue to retire, but he wants to take some time to consider things. My dad’s death rocked him, six months ago.”

“Oh, yes, of course. It would have done. I was sorry to hear about it,” Shallis told him.

“It was hard,” he agreed. “We didn’t see each other all that often after he and Mom got divorced—he moved to Nashville, as you know—but we were still close.”

“Of course.”

She’d already noted the enlarged, silver-framed photograph on the most prominent shelf of the antique breakfront behind his desk. In the photo Jared, his father and grandfather all grinned toward the camera against a backdrop of the manicured green grass and foliage of Hyattville’s members-only golf course.

Jared didn’t look much like the two older men. The bone structure in his face was more angular, his jaw more prominent and determined, his build stronger and denser, but the closeness between the three of them was self-evident.

“Anyhow, we’re talking a lot more than a few days until my grandfather’s return, I suspect,” Jared continued. “I’ve looked at a couple of the relevant files and I’m sure your business can’t wait that long.”

“My grandmother’s estate. No, it can’t. My mother is finding it hard.”

“I can imagine.”

Once more, he seemed to know just how to pitch himself. His sympathy was sincere but not cloying. It had to be a professional skill, studiously worked at, part of the Attorney Ken act. It couldn’t be natural, not in a man like him, Shallis told herself. Surely his arrogant behavior at Linnie and Ryan’s wedding had given her all the warning signals she needed in that area.

“I’ve heard a few great stories about your grandmother,” he said. “Laughed at most of them. Of course it’s hard for your mom.”

Shallis stayed cool and wished her throat hadn’t gone so tight. She nodded. “They were very close. If I can get the practical, legal stuff taken care of for Mom, some of the decisions she needs to make about Gram’s possessions and so forth will be easier.”

“Well, you could go to Banks and Moore over in Carrollton, if you want,” Jared offered. Was that the glint of a challenge in his eyes? “Or you can deal with me.”

“I’m surprised you’re here,” Shallis said, stalling for time. Then she realized she sounded as slow on the uptake as the drugstore clerk who’d tried to give her too much change. Jared had just explained why he was here. She added quickly, “I mean, I’m surprised you were available to do what your grandfather wanted. You’ve been in Chicago for quite a while, now. I would have thought you had commitments there.”

“Taking a break,” Jared answered, offhand. He was confident that the complexity of his feelings on the issue didn’t show.

And he ignored Shallis Duncan’s cool tone, because he understood the reasons for it all too well. No doubt about it, he’d behaved very badly in the past. To Melinda Duncan—Linnie—and to Shallis, her baby sister. More than once. He didn’t like those memories.

“Thinking about a couple of opportunities,” he continued. “I don’t want to commit myself to the wrong choice.”

He knew that many people in Hyattville wouldn’t believe him on this. There was an element in the town that would love to see him crash and burn, and would interpret his return home as a signal that it was about to happen, big-time. He expected rumors about shady dealings, massive debts, financial scandals, or disbarment from the future practice of law.

That was the downside to being a self-proclaimed high flier, in a place like this, and unfortunately his ambition and his arrogance had led him into a few poor choices in the past, which would make the rumors more plausible.

Yep, no doubt about it, at times he’d been a jerk and he made sure he never forgot the fact. Grandpa Abe had put a slew of Jared’s old golfing and racquetball trophies on the breakfront shelves, “to put your own stamp on this office, since it’s yours, now.” Jared had added a trophy of his own—the fake one that a couple of old law school buddies had presented him with a few years ago.

Sore Loser it read, in beautiful copperplate engraving. The really telling point about the trophy was that when his friends had made the mock presentation, he hadn’t been able to laugh. Three years on, the trophy was the first touch of personality he gave to a space any time he shifted offices, and he laughed at himself a lot more often now.

The only thing he could do about his reputation, he knew, was to get his head down, take heart from his own growth and his family’s faith in him, and prove everyone else wrong.

No, not everyone.

Just the people who mattered.

The impossibly beautiful Shallis Duncan shouldn’t be one of them, and yet without a doubt she was. Six years since he’d last seen her face-to-face, and he still hadn’t been able to get her out of his head.

She stood up, and instinctively so did he. “Banks and Moore has a good reputation,” she said.

Her golden-blond hair bounced around her face, and her blue eyes looked as big and clear as pools of sea water. Her suit was neat and conservative and plain, but on her curvy, long-legged frame it somehow managed to look as pretty and feminine as a lace negligee.

She appeared to have almost no makeup on at all, apart from a translucent sheen across her lips, but her skin was so clear and fine and her coloring so perfect that Jared preferred her with the natural look, and every molecule of testosterone in his body refused to leave the subject alone.

“Your secretary will be able to arrange to have the files sent over to them, I assume?” Shallis finished.

Jared felt his stomach drop an uncomfortable couple of inches.

Shoot. Drat. Darn.

Or words to that effect.

She’d called his bluff.

Well, no, she didn’t look at it like that, of course, and neither should he. She was simply taking the perfectly reasonable way out he’d just offered her—but he might not have offered it if he’d thought she’d catch hold of it so smoothly.

Helplessly he let the rest of their short conversation unravel like a piece of yarn… I mean, sure, if she wanted, yes, she should go over to Carrollton, to Banks and Moore… And it wasn’t until she’d closed the outer office door behind her that the real Jared Starke took control of his actions again.

Jared Starke the winner.

Jared Starke the fourth generation lawyer.

Jared Starke who heard the word, “No,” the same way a bull saw a red rag.

Jared Starke who could laugh at his Sore Loser trophy now, but who still wasn’t going to let what would surely be his last chance to make something work out right with the Duncan family just walk out of his grandfather’s law practice on those sexy pale gray heels, while he stood here rooted to the floor, imprisoned by an agonizing rush of physical need as tangible as iron bands.




Chapter Two


“W ait!” said Jared’s voice, overtaking Shallis as she went back along the street toward her car, which was still parked in the drugstore’s lot.

She stopped and turned reluctantly, watching him catch up to her. His stride lengthened, strong and full of purpose, and then he stopped short, keeping safely out of her body space.

But whose safety was he concerned for, here?

“Do you really have to do this?” he said.

His voice stayed low, in an instinctive bid for privacy that Shallis appreciated. The intimacy that it seemed to weave around them she appreciated a lot less.

“It’s a half hour drive to Carrollton,” he went on. “Banks and Moore’s billing rate is considerably higher than my grandfather’s, and they have no familiarity with your family’s legal affairs. I’m not sure what’s making you so reluctant—”

She threw him a look that said, “Oh, really?” and his face changed.

“Okay. You got me.” He spread his hands, then he sighed.

His voice had gone husky, suddenly. Deeper, too. Its masculine notes curled around her legs and misted upward, as sneaky as the smoke from the cigarettes Shallis had tried a few times at fourteen.

“I know exactly what’s making you so reluctant, don’t I?” he said. “But this is a simple business relationship and I’m a good lawyer. My grandfather wouldn’t have handed the practice over to me if I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be considering partnership offers from three major Chicago law firms if I wasn’t.”

He stepped a little closer, and Shallis didn’t know if it was deliberate or not. She did know that she was far too aware of the movement, and of its results. She could see the tiny chips of gold deep in his brown eyes, now, and a couple of equally tiny freckles just above the corner of his mouth.

She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together, but couldn’t close off the effect he had on her. The effect he’d always had.

“At least let’s go through with our appointment this morning,” he continued. “We can set things in motion regarding your grandmother’s estate. You can talk it over with your mother later. And if either of you still has a problem about my involvement, I’m sure my grandfather will agree to handle the next phase when he gets back from his fishing trip, since your family has been with him for so long.”

“When is he getting back?”

Soon. Please let it be soon, so that I don’t have to deal with this. Again.

“He wouldn’t commit himself, unfortunately. I’d imagine it’s going to be at least a month, judging by the huge pile of gear and supplies in the back of his pickup when he left.”

“Why are you so keen about this, Jared?”

He studied her for a moment, and she got the impression he was sorting through his possible answers in search of the one she was most likely to believe. She’d seen a lot of men with that particular look on their face, as they sorted through their possible come-on lines in search of the one that was most likely to get a beauty queen into bed.

“I don’t want to be responsible for taking your family’s business away from my grandfather,” he said eventually.

“It’s a bread-and-butter estate settlement, isn’t it?” It hurt her to talk about her grandmother’s legacy this way, but she could put on a cool front just as successfully as Jared himself. What lay beneath the cool front was surely hotter in her case, however. “Your grandfather must deal with this sort of thing all the time. Losing one client isn’t going to bankrupt him.”

“Losing the Duncan family is going to send the wrong message around town, and he’ll lose other clients as well, as a result. Look, it’s up to you.” He shrugged. “I just don’t think it’s necessary, that’s all. It seems petty, or something.”

“Petty on my part?”

“Petty that either of us should feel that your grandmother’s estate has anything to do with a personal and much-regretted mistake I made six years ago. I’ve moved on. I’m sure you have, too.”

Oh, he had a good line in sincerity. The voice really helped, as deep and buttery, now, as a bottomless bucket of popcorn. So did the eyes. And the lashes. And the tiny glint of ironic awareness almost lost behind the lashes.

Shallis almost believed him—enough to consider that, yes, Banks and Moore would be more expensive and less convenient, and to finally decide to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was just a straightforward legal matter, after all, and it wasn’t fair to Mom to let it drag out longer than it had to, or get it tangled in personal feelings.

“All right,” she said. Her nerve-endings jumped and squealed, treacherous things, like giggling teenagers glimpsing their latest crush. “We’ll do what needs to be done today, and then I’ll find out how my mother wants to proceed.”

She would talk to Linnie about it, too, only Jared didn’t need to know that.

“Would you like coffee while we talk?” Jared asked as they entered the front office once again.

“Yes, please.” You could hide a surprising amount behind a steaming cup, Shallis knew, and she might need to do exactly that.

“Andrea?” he said to the receptionist.

She nodded. “Coming right up.” If she was curious about Shallis’s sudden departure and unexpected return, she didn’t let on. “How do you like it, Miss Duncan?”

“Cream and no sugar, thanks.”

“And I’m sorry, Mr. Starke, you made your own this morning and I didn’t see…”

“Just black.”

So he wasn’t too exalted to make his own coffee. Or maybe he was just softening Andrea up with a good first impression so he could load her down with unreasonable requests later on.

What, me? Cynical? About Jared Starke? Never! Shallis thought.

This time, he sat behind his desk while Shallis sat in front of it, which acted as a useful reminder that their meeting was purely business. He ran through the steps that had to be taken before the proceeds of the estate could be disbursed, and asked to see some of the papers and documents that Shallis and her mother had found amongst Gram’s things so far.

“She wasn’t a very organized person,” Shallis told him.

“But you forgive that in some people, don’t you? From what I’ve heard, your grandmother was one of them.”

“She was wonderful. Generous and fun and creative. Wicked sense of humor. Really surprising take on a whole lot of things. Cared a lot about people. Drove us totally nuts, sometimes, especially my dad, but the whole world always seemed that much fresher and more interesting when she was around. I—I actually can’t believe that she’s gone.”

“No, I bet,” Jared said quietly. “And it’s only been two weeks, right?”

“Just over.” Shallis couldn’t have said more than two words, at that moment.

She kind of hid in the coffee for a couple of minutes and Jared didn’t rush her, which she had to be grateful for, even though at some level she didn’t want him to have the slightest clue about how to behave so well. It would really have helped with this crazy nerve-ending problem if he’d been crude, insensitive, obvious and a flagrant con artist.

Why had she told him so much about Gram in the first place, she wondered. Because he’d paved the way by talking about his father’s death, earlier?

“Your mother didn’t want to wait a little longer on all this?” he finally asked. “Sorting through a person’s whole life can be very draining and difficult.”

“I think it’s helping Mom, in some ways. And she had a little time to prepare before Gram died. Gram was eighty, and the stroke was a severe one. We knew she wouldn’t want to linger for a long time without hope of recovery, and her wish was granted. She died in her sleep ten days after she first collapsed.”

“You said she wasn’t very organized. Did she at least keep all her papers in one room? Did she have any kind of a filing system?”

“Uh, no.” Shallis smiled a little. “There are boxes and stuffed envelopes and loose file folders all over the house.”

“Right.” He smiled back. “That kind of a filing system. I know it well.”

“And then there are all Gram’s wonderful knickknacks and souvenirs, precious memories folded away in tissue paper, bits of jewelry, old evening gowns, so much.”

“Some hard decisions. You’ll need to put aside anything you want valued. There are a couple of local valuers my grandfather recommends.”

He reached into a drawer of the desk and took out two business cards. He didn’t hand them to her directly, but reached across to put them down just in front of her. There was never any risk that they’d touch, and Shallis wondered if that was his intention.

“Thanks,” she said.

She picked up the cards and slipped them into a pocket inside the lid of the open briefcase, which she’d place on the desk to her left. Then she looked back at Jared and found him with his jaw propped on his two thumbs and his elbows on the desk for support.

He looked a little tired. Stressed out, even. She wondered what lay behind his decision to take a break from his jet-propelled ascent up the ladder of success in Chicago, but realized she might never know. She definitely wasn’t going to ask any searching questions that might bring the information out.

“Should we make an inventory as we go?” she asked.

“It might be better to sort through everything first.”

“There’s so much. We’re not tackling any of it systematically.”

“Room by room?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do, but Mom goes off on a tangent, sometimes. We keep getting distracted, and we still have a lot more to go through. I’m taking next week off work, but it’s not going to be enough.”

Shallis realized that once again she’d begun to unload a level of detail that Jared didn’t need. She hadn’t expected him to be such a good listener, in his new professional role.

“Anyway…” she added in a more businesslike tone.

“Yes, let’s take a look at the papers you’ve found so far,” Jared said. He sat up straight again and started paging through some of the sheets in front of him. “This is the deed to the house.”

“That’s right, but before you look at that, there’s one thing we found that we don’t understand and I wanted to ask you about it.”

Leaning forward, she slid a sheet of paper out of the file folder that came next in the pile. It was a property tax bill dated just a couple of months earlier, and it had a line of her grandmother’s distinctive spiky handwriting scrawled across it in the rich, royal blue ink she always used.

“Paid Feb. 20,” it said.

“Look at the address that this tax bill relates to, Jared. Chestnut Street. Gram’s never lived in that part of town, and we’re sure she doesn’t own rental property there or anywhere else. We can’t understand why she’d even have this bill in her possession, let alone why she’d have paid it.”

“Grandpa Abe lives on Chestnut Street.” He looked at the address more closely. “I’m staying there while he’s out of town. Just a half dozen houses down from this place. I’m trying to picture number Fifty-six, but right now I can’t.”

“It’s a very nice street, the whole length of it, with all those gracious old Victorians.”

“It’s beautiful,” he agreed.

“The grounds of the Grand Regency back onto a part of it.”

“That’s where you’re working now, right?” He looked up briefly from the paper he was still studying. Knowing he would be seeing her today, he must have done some research. “Their events manager? That’s a big job, at a place like the Grand.”

“See these gray hairs?” she joked.

“Oh, yeah, hundreds of them,” he drawled in mock agreement.

Their eyes met for a moment and they were ready to share a laugh, but then memory intervened and both of them looked quickly away—Jared down at the tax bill, and Shallis toward the window.

Linnie and Ryan had had their wedding reception at the Grand Regency Hotel six years ago. Jared had heard about their impending marriage, flown in from Chicago and gate-crashed the event, five years after he’d dumped Linnie and practically shattered her heart—she’d cried for months. He’d gate-crashed the church ceremony before the reception, also, hot off the airplane.

In fact, he’d tried to stop the whole wedding, right in front of the minister at the altar and the entire congregation. “You can’t marry him, Melinda Duncan. I know this is my fault. I’m an idiot. I always thought I had plenty of time, through law school and beyond. But you know it, don’t you? You’ve always known it. You have to marry me!”

Wrong, Jared.

Bad call.

You weren’t even serious, were you?

You were just testing your power.

Linnie and Ryan were made and meant for each other, but they’d had a whirlwind courtship and they really hadn’t known each other all that well, on the day of their wedding. Made and meant for each other didn’t always mean that things worked out. Ryan had seen Linnie’s flash of doubt.

“You know what we always had together,” Jared had claimed, and for a few long, horrible moments, Linnie had remembered all those tears she’d shed for him. She’d bought his whole act.

Jared had grinned at Ryan, already acting as if he’d won. “Sorry, buddy, but this woman belongs to me.”

Only then had Linnie been able to speak. “No, Jared, you’re wrong. I don’t.”

You could have cut the air with a knife, even after Linnie and Ryan had gone through with the ceremony as planned. It took the whole of the wedding reception and some important talks with other family members for the two of them to sort out what they really felt and what they really wanted. A couple of times, Shallis had seriously feared they were headed for an instant annulment or divorce.

She would never forget it, and she would never forget the way Jared had purely wanted to win, the way he’d selfishly wanted to prove he still had power over Linnie’s heart. Shallis had spent nearly an hour with him at the reception, decoying him safely away from Linnie—flirting outrageously, in fact—so she knew how he’d really felt. He hadn’t cared about her sister, and he hadn’t even pretended to care about Ryan’s feelings.

Winning was all.

Shifting the power balance in his favor.

Showing the whole town who was in control.

And even though he’d lost the game that day and Ryan had won, Jared had finally left the big hotel with the cocky attitude of a cheating gambler who knows his luck’s going to come around again one day, because he has the aces up his sleeve to prove it.

A part of her wished the subject of the Grand Regency had never come up, but another part of her was very glad that it had. She didn’t want to lose sight of the kind of man Jared Starke really was, beneath the smooth and adept professional facade, beyond the unwanted havoc he wrought with her woman’s needs.

What the heck was wrong with her?

“Back to this mystery property tax bill,” she said, making each word clipped and cool. “Will you follow it up for us? My mother is a little concerned that Gram could have been conned into parting with her money to cover some false tax claim.”

“If you find anything else of a similar nature, bring it in right away, won’t you? You’re right, there are people who’ll take advantage of an elderly woman living alone, and someone comes up with a new scam every week.”

“I can’t imagine Gram falling for something like that.” Shallis clicked her tongue and sighed between tight teeth. Jared’s gaze seemed to follow the sound of her escaping breath, and her lips felt dry again. She gathered her train of thought and kept speaking. “She still seemed so sharp in her mind, right up until the day of the stroke, and she was very vocal on the subject of men who preyed on naive women. But we’re definitely confused so, yes, anything else we find I’ll bring right over.”

She stood up and looked deliberately at her watch. It was after noon. “I’m sorry, I need to get back.”

“I’m about to order in a sandwich lunch.” Jared stood, also. He narrowed his eyes for a moment, then looked down at his thumbnail and pushed the cuticle back with his middle finger. His head came back up, his regard steady again. “Andrea can pick up something for you, too, if you want. It’ll only take twenty minutes.”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“You’re sure? There are a couple more things we could get through while we eat.”

He came around the desk and put a hand under her elbow. Suddenly their eyes were fixed on each other, locked together, giving off naked heat, drowning. A blast of awareness hit her—the same physical and emotional ambush Shallis had felt when she’d first found him here instead of his grandfather. Jared looked at her as if the chemistry of her physical response to him was written on her skin, as if it had made her whole body turn blue.

She froze, unable to pull away as she needed to, unable to stop looking at him or hide her reaction. It scared her to feel like this, when she so seriously didn’t want to, when she had so many reasons not to.

Whatever had happened to the strength of the human will?

“What do you want from me, Jared?” It came out on a whisper.

There was a tiny beat of silence before he spoke. “I’m just trying to do my job.”

“No. I don’t think you are.” She snatched her arm out of his grip, about thirty seconds too late. “I think there’s something more.”

And it wasn’t the princess thing.

“Do you?” His lids flickered, and a shuttered look came onto his face.

He was lying, evading the truth in some vital area, only she didn’t know what. The whole way he held himself right now, so stiff and wary and closed, reluctant and almost angry, in such contrast to the bland professional bearing he’d seemed to have in the beginning.

Everything had changed with her mention of the Grand Regency Hotel. The air itself seemed electric, crackling with complex tensions she couldn’t read.

“If you want me to tell you that I forgive you, and that Linnie and Ryan forgive you, and it’s all water under the bridge and we know you’ve changed, that’s not going to happen,” she told him. “If that’s what this is about, then you can have it straight, without the sandwich lunch.”

“Why, thank you, ma’am,” he drawled.

She ignored him. “I don’t believe you have changed. If you could behave that badly six years ago, on Linnie’s wedding day, you could behave that badly still. I love my sister, and she’s hurting right now, over Gram’s death and—and—other stuff. If she has anything whatsoever to do with why you’re back in town for the next six—”

“She doesn’t,” he cut in, hard and fast. “Okay? Let’s get that on the table right now. She doesn’t have anything to do with my being here.”

“No? Good.” If she believed him. What had she seen in his eyes? “Because some mistakes you just have to live with. You have to live with this one, Jared. Linnie doesn’t, Ryan doesn’t and I don’t.”

“I guess not.”

“We’re done here.”

“Sure…”

“Thanks for your time.”

He put on a crooked, cynical smile. “Thanks for the insights.”

“You’re more than welcome, if they’ve gotten through.”

“Oh, they have.” He glanced behind him toward the shelf where various polished trophies gleamed, as if reminding himself that he was still a winner. “I’ll keep you and your mother posted on how I’m doing with the estate.”

“Sure. And I can leave any messages or papers with your secretary.”

“Right. No personal contact necessary.”

But Shallis didn’t reward this barbed observation with a reply. She simply snapped her briefcase shut, picked it up and left.

Jared watched her go—the graceful walk, the squared yet feminine shoulders, the pretty, bouncing hair.

“You are such a damned idiot, Jared Starke,” he muttered to himself seconds after the door shut behind her.

It didn’t slam, because Jared couldn’t imagine that Shallis Duncan, ex Miss Tennessee, would ever slam a door.

She was far too perfect for that.

As perfect as a splinter stuck under his thumb. As perfect as a melody in his head that wouldn’t go away. As perfect as some twisted form of hell, in which a man didn’t see a certain woman for six years and when he did, he discovered that he still hadn’t gotten over a gut-level response to her that he’d never wanted, that maddened him and embarrassed him and confused him to the point where he could barely walk straight.

He ought to feel proud of his performance this morning. Professional and courteous and pleasant. Bland as vanilla pudding. For most of their meeting, he was positive she’d had no idea. Even when his guard had slipped a little and she’d seen something, she’d gotten it wrong. She still thought he was on some twisted quest to change the balance of power between himself and Linnie.

Thank heaven, he wasn’t. One thing to be grateful for, at least.

He’d behaved despicably toward Melinda Duncan Courcy in the past—twice—his arrogant ultimatum on her wedding day wasn’t the first time—but he was in no doubt as to how he felt about her now.

There remained a brotherly sort of affection which she’d probably never know about and wouldn’t value if she did. There was also a recognition that her wedding day had started a chain reaction of questions inside him that he was still trying to deal with.

But nothing more.

Nothing like what Shallis feared.

It was Shallis herself who twisted him up inside, and he was as appalled about it as she would be, too, if she knew.

Apparently she didn’t know, and he would make sure he kept it this way until he could somehow delete the unwanted attraction from his emotional hard drive like deleting a piece of e-mail spam.

“Yeah, and how’re you going to do that, tough guy, if you have to have a half dozen meetings with her over her grandmother’s estate,” he muttered again.

He should have let her go to Banks and Moore.

It was the same problem he’d always had. Against all good judgment, against everything the rational side of his brain understood, and even with the odds stacked monumentally against him, his instinct was always to try to win.

Frowning, he stepped over to the breakfront and moved the Sore Loser trophy to a more prominent position on the shelf, right next to his favorite golfing photo of Grandpa Abe, himself and Dad.




Chapter Three


“L innie, oh, no, what is it?” Shallis gasped out as soon as she saw her sister. “What’s happened?”

It was five-thirty in the evening, and Linnie had just opened the front door of her modest ranch house for Shallis, her pretty gray eyes reddened and swollen, and tears streaming down her cheeks. Her shoulders shook with suppressed sobbing.

“Oh, it’s just the usual,” she said, trying to smile. “Not pregnant. Again. Come in.” Her voice cracked into a high-pitched squeak as she struggled for normality. She looked down at the decorative wicker basket in Shallis’s hands. “Oh. Nice. You’ve brought fruit.”

“Left from a conference at the hotel on the weekend.”

“You’re good. It looks l-lovely, with the r-ribbons and all.” Her shoulders shook some more. “Ryan’s not in from the barn yet, thank goodness.”

The house was plain and small, but it was situated on a beautiful piece of land, part of the infrastructure of the horse-breeding business Ryan had been building for several years. He’d recently renovated a couple of old cabins on the property, also, and they would be open for paying guests this summer, with optional breakfast and dinner included in the package.

Ryan worked very hard, as did Linnie, and Shallis wasn’t surprised to hear that he wasn’t yet back at the house. She’d been counting on his absence because she wanted a sister-to-sister talk, but she didn’t understand why Linnie would be feeling the same.

Linnie stepped to the side and Shallis crossed the threshold. “You don’t want to see Ryan?” she asked carefully.

“I don’t want him to see me. Like this.” Linnie flapped her hands at her blotchy face and attempted another smile. It looked heartbreaking. She kicked the door closed behind her.

“Oh, Linnie.” Shallis put down the fruit basket and hugged her sister, burning with love and empathy that just had no place to go, no way to translate into the right words.

“I’m sorry,” Linnie whispered in her ear, her voice tight and harsh with a continuing effort not to cry. “It’s so stupid. It usually only lasts around twenty minutes, so I’ll be okay again soon.”

“Twenty minutes? What does, Lin?”

“The sobbing.” Her body shuddered suddenly, and went still. “There. See? It just stops. And then I sometimes laugh at myself a little bit, because it shouldn’t feel so…so…tragic, you know? Ryan and I love each other, we love the farm and the horses, I love my teaching job, we have great families, plans to extend the house, we have so much going for us. And still I’m sobbing like a maniac every month just because I don’t have a baby. What more do I want out of life? The moon and stars on a big silver plate?”

She threw the words over her shoulder at Shallis on their way down the short corridor toward the kitchen. Her golden-brown hair looked limp and tired, and so did her green-toned skirt and top.

“Of course you want a baby,” Shallis said, following her with the fruit basket. “Of course it’s hard. You had an appointment with the specialist last week. Weren’t there some test results coming in?”

“His nurse called today, just after I got in from school. Which is why I guess I was already a little upset, even before…you know. Nothing conclusive, she said.”

“But that’s good news, isn’t it?” Shallis felt so far out of her depth.

She’d been on the pill for six months. A doctor had prescribed it in Los Angeles when the stress she’d been under there had led to painful and wildly irregular cycles. She had no idea how it must feel to be so desperate to conceive.

“Oh, sure,” Linnie answered. “I mean, it’s better than, ‘Guess what, you don’t have any ovaries,’ or something. But it leaves us still in the dark, nowhere to go. Technically there seems to be no reason why, in more than three years, I haven’t conceived. And if there’s no reason, then there’s no action you can take to correct it, you know?”

“I get it. Oh, Linnie…”

“Hey, want a big, stiff drink? Please say yes, because I’m having one.”

“What’re you having?”

“Bourbon and Coke, nice and strong. Two weeks every cycle I don’t touch a drop of alcohol. You know. Just in case I’m— Then on this day each month, I pretend to myself that getting a little tipsy is just what I’ve been looking forward to. Woo-hoo!”

She sounded so cynical and self-mocking, so not like the sunny, caring, capable Linnie that Shallis knew Ryan had fallen in love with. It scared her a little. Until three months ago, she’d been caught up in her life in Los Angeles, and she’d had no idea.

She’d known Linnie had some kind of fertility problem, of course, but she’d never suspected her sister felt that badly about it. Linnie was only thirty-two. She had time, didn’t she? And modern reproductive medicine could do so much.

In her e-mails and phone calls, Linnie just hadn’t let on the full truth, and neither had anyone else. Protecting Shallis’s important career, as usual. The PR career she hadn’t even liked, in the end, which was one of the reasons she’d come home.

“Does—could—does the specialist think that tying yourself in knots about it might be making it worse?” she asked carefully.

“That’s the myth, isn’t it? Just relax, and you’ll conceive. If I had a dollar for everyone who’s told us to take a cruise or a trip to Paris and just do what comes naturally… I’m telling you, Shallis, it doesn’t come naturally, any more. It’s like an Olympic event, with training and warm-ups and electronic timing. Ryan is getting—” She stopped suddenly. “So, want that drink?”

With scary efficiency, she reached into the fridge, the freezer, and a couple of cabinets just above her head. Slosh went the bourbon, fizz went the Coke, crack went the ice cubes. She pushed one brimming glass in Shallis’s direction and took a huge gulp from the other. Then she stopped with the glass and her hand in midair.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s one day a month that I do this, and it’s one drink. But boy, do I need the effect!”

Shallis nodded slowly and took a much more cautious sip of her own. She’d had a stomach upset over the weekend and was still eating and drinking carefully. “You were, um, saying something about Ryan.”

“Oh. Yeah. But I rethought.”

“Rethink again. I’m your sister. And I care about you. So much, Linnie.” Oh-oh. Foggy voice alert. They’d both cried enough in the past couple of weeks, about Gram’s death. She swallowed.

“Oh, it’s just… He hates this,” Linnie said. “In a different way than I do, but he hates it just as much. He hates that I’m a mess. He hates the Olympic event mechanical sex. We’ve had a couple of—” she stopped again.

“Arguments,” Shallis suggested.

“Fights.”

“Fights?”

“Yelling. Ryan never yells. It reminds me of his dad.” Who was a difficult man, Shallis knew. “I don’t like it.”

“No, of course you don’t.”

“And I don’t think he does, either. He’s always hated the thought of getting like his father.” She took another gulp of her drink, let it roll around her mouth for a moment, then swallowed and squared her shoulders. “Okay, can we close this subject for the moment?”

“Well, if you want, but—”

“What I want is to hear about your appointment with Mr. Starke today.”

She only said Mr. Starke, ran Shallis’s thoughts. If she’d said Abraham, I would have been obligated to say, no, it was Jared. This way, I can let her think it was his grandfather, if I want.

Yeah.

Right.

That level of honesty between sisters? After Linnie had just more or less admitted to a serious fear that her marriage was in trouble, on top of everything else? When Shallis had come out here pretty much on purpose to tell her about seeing Jared?

No.

“Well, I convinced Mom not to come, in the end,” Shallis began. “She really didn’t need to. And that was good, as it turned out, because it wasn’t Mr. Starke, senior, it was his grandson, who’s taking over the practice for a while. Jared.”

“Jared,” Melinda echoed blankly. “Jared?”

“Yes.” Your old boyfriend, Linnie, whom I would have stolen from you at sixteen, if I’d had the power. The one who dumped you, then tried to get you back at the altar, when you were marrying the man who was perfect for you.

“But he lives in Chicago,” Linnie said. “City of big shoulders and hogs’ breakfasts, or whatever that poet said.”

“Carl Sandburg. But I don’t think the hogs’ breakfasts bit is quite right.” Although Jared’s shoulders were certainly big enough… “He’s taking some kind of break.” Shallis took a breath. “And he was pretty helpful, actually. Professional. Sensitive. He said we could take our business over to Banks and Moore in Carrollton if we wanted, or let him get things rolling and then hand over to his grandfather as soon as he gets back.”

“Where has he gone?”

“Smoky Mountains. Fishing trip. Lo-o-ong fishing trip, Jared thinks. I went with the second alternative, but I have to ask how you feel about it, Linnie. You’re the one whose life he tried so hard to mess up. I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want anyone in the Duncan family to have anything to do with him.”

“He’s probably not someone I’d enjoy having around, true,” Linnie agreed slowly. “In any personal sense, that is. You know, for fun family barbecues, and stuff. But the way I’m feeling right now, it would seem so petty and unimportant to sack the family law firm just because its temporary new partner spoiled a few of my wedding pictures six years ago.”

“He did a heck of a lot more than that, Linnie!” Shallis put down her drink, most of it untouched.

“You know what I mean. Jared didn’t change the bottom line. Ryan and I had a beautiful wedding, and we—” huge foggy voice alert “—love each other.” The words were barely even a whisper.

“He tried to tell you that you didn’t love Ryan at all!” Shallis’s indignation rose. “He hung around at the reception like a bad odor, with a nasty smile on his face.”

And I flirted with him to keep him away from you, and part of the time I enjoyed it.

“You sound as if you mind about it more than I do.”

“I’m just worried about you, Lin.”

“Thanks. But worry about the important stuff, okay? Our marriage, and our fertility, not Jared Starke. Keep him to deal with Gram’s estate, because it has to be more convenient that way. I expect he’s changed a lot now. Grown up. We all have.” Her face said very clearly that Grown-up Land wasn’t always a fun place to be. “You said he acted like a professional this morning?”

“Yes, he did.” And so did I, thank heaven.

“So give him the benefit of the doubt.”

This is not what I wanted you to say, Linnie. You were supposed to give me the perfect way out…

Shallis hadn’t realized until just now that this was what she’d been hoping for. So who was the person she really didn’t trust?

Herself?

Was that possible?

Ohhh, yeah!

“Did you get a chance to ask him about that strange property tax bill?” Linnie was saying.

“Yes, and he’s going to look into it.”

“Was he concerned?”

“He thought it seemed a little odd. But don’t start worrying about that…”

“…on top of everything else. No, I won’t. I think I hear Ryan. Are you staying to eat?”

“Can’t. I have a function at the hotel tonight. I’ll say a quick hi to your hubby, then I’ll head back to town.”

“So you only came out here to break it to me about Jared in person?” Linnie took another mouthful of her drink. She gave a wan smile which suggested it was sweetly funny of Shallis to think the issue important enough to warrant the price of the gas, and the wear and tear on the car.

Illogically this only made Shallis feel even more fiercely protective about her sister, and even more determined not to risk hurting her in any way. She said her hello to Ryan, and under the cover of a sisterly hug managed to whisper in his ear, “Look after her. She’s hurting today.”

“I know,” he answered, gruff and male and helpless. He’d never been big on fluent speeches, but his heart was in the right place. “I can tell just from her face.”

Shallis was back in town at ten after six.



This was the house on Chestnut Street. Number Fifty-six.

Shallis slowed the car and pulled close to the curb. She must have passed this place dozens if not hundreds of times in her life, but she’d never really looked at it before. The street contained a mix of Victorian architectural styles, and there’d been a mix of changes made to the original dwellings over the years, also. No two houses were alike.

Some of the best places in the street had been gorgeously restored for use as suites of doctors’ and dentists’ offices, elegant dwellings or the kind of bed-and-breakfast inns that featured in glossy travel magazines, but Number Fifty-six hadn’t. Made of a rust-colored brick, it seemed a little tired.

The guttering needed some attention, and so did the floorboards of the wraparound porch. The garden looked as if it received regular care, however. The lawn had been recently mown, and the shrubbery in front of the porch was free of weeds. But the bushes themselves were gnarled and old.

Was anyone living here?

From the street, Shallis couldn’t tell. She parked the car, then sat in it for a moment, debating her options. Several people at the Grand Regency would commence predictable panic attacks if she wasn’t back by six forty-five, but the hotel was only three minutes drive from here, right around the block, and everything had been under control when she left. She had a little time.

She climbed out and went to the small metal mailbox. Tentatively lifting the back flap, she saw two or three days’ worth of junk mail inside. Maybe whoever lived here was away. If the place was unoccupied, someone was definitely collecting the mail. The flap of the mailbox squeaked as she lowered it shut.

She walked up the slate path toward the front door, aware of the ambient sounds of the town around her. High overhead, a jet plane faintly roared, while closer at hand a car or two swished by, a dog barked and muffled radio music played. No sounds came from the house itself.

Stepping onto the porch, she felt like a trespasser. She rang an old-fashioned electric bell which seemed to peal inside the house like a fire station alarm, and she knew she probably wouldn’t have pressed that little black bakelite button if she’d really thought that anyone was home. After a two-minute wait and another press of the bell, she hadn’t sensed any sound or movement inside.

Time to leave.

Except that she couldn’t seem to do so just yet. She really wanted to know if the house was empty and unlived in, or just temporarily unattended. Its secrets seemed to whisper at her in the breeze that stirred the trees. The front windows were curtained, but she cupped a hand against her cheek and forehead and peered through the glass anyhow, in case there was a gap.

Yes. A couple of inches. It was dark inside the house, however, and she couldn’t see. Just a few dim shapes, edges and angles. Furniture? She thought so, but wasn’t sure.

She decided to make a quick trip around to the back of the place. Successful ex-beauty queens tended to be thorough. If there was anything to be learned here, she would learn it now and not need to make a second visit.

The back porch, like the one at the front, was wide and substantial and in need of repair, and a couple of the windows that looked onto it had raised blinds and no drapes. She saw a dining table through an open doorway and a primitive-looking kitchen with this year’s calendar on the opposite wall, still showing the February page.

Behind her, she heard footsteps and a voice. “Shallis, hi…”

Whirling around, she found Jared half way up the back porch steps. She took a too-hasty step and her dove-gray spiked heel rammed through a splintery crack between the old floorboards. She tripped, ending up on both hands and one painful knee, with the other foot bare and its shoe still jammed in the crack, some inches behind her.

“Shoot, this porch needs some work!” Jared dropped beside her and touched her shoulder. He didn’t let the contact linger, but his voice was resonant with concern. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Sure? Your foot—”

“Apart from the crowd of splinters having a family reunion in my knee.”

Shallis steeled herself for Jared to make the kind of comment that usually came next. Something along the lines of how lucky it was she hadn’t tripped like this on pageant night in front of the whole of America. She geared up to laugh and politely pretend she hadn’t heard variations on the same joke a hundred times here in Hyattville, on every occasion when she did anything even the slightest bit graceless or messy or natural.

But all Jared said was, “Let me have a look, okay? Got tweezers?”

“I possess tweezers, yes.” Go away. Stop looking at my knee like that. “But I don’t carry them around with me.”

This was another assumption she had to contend with on a regular basis—that she carried an elephant-size makeup and grooming kit in her purse everywhere she went, and did she happen to keep aloe vera tissues/a corkscrew/spare panty hose/a socket wrench set in it, by any chance?

“Mono-brow doesn’t grow back that fast, I guess,” Jared murmured, with such a straight face that it took her several seconds to react with a very unprincesslike snort of laughter. “You don’t look comfortable,” he added.

“I’m not.”

Still thrown off balance by a kind of humor she wasn’t used to, except maybe from Dad, Shallis rotated to a sitting position, and mentally added twenty minutes to her schedule so she could go home and change. The splintery wood had pulled several threads in the fabric of her skirt, and the gray of the porch dust wasn’t an exact match for the gray of the silk.

Since it was an expensive designer suit, she cared about the pulled threads a lot more than she cared about the splinters in her knee. Skin healed. Silk didn’t.

“Let me take a look,” Jared repeated. “Can I remind you that helplessness is considered an attractive quality in a Southern woman?”

“I can do it, thanks. I was an L.A. woman for five years. I don’t do helpless anymore.”

Especially not with you.

“People always wuss out on their own splinters. Splinters need tough love.” She felt the warmth of his breath on her knee, but he didn’t touch her. “None of these are stuck all the way under the skin, from what I can see. I can get them.”

“You don’t have tweezers.”

“We’ve already discussed this.” He looked up from his inspection. “Neither do you.”

“I have nails.”

And a gorgeous French manicure that would probably get as ruined as her skirt if she used her nails to get the splinters out. She’d counted five of them. Too bad. She wasn’t letting Jared’s fingers anywhere near her knee.

He’d gotten the message now, apparently.

Gritting her teeth, she scraped at her skin, pincered her nails and got four of the splinters out while Jared took out a pocket knife—not the kind equipped with tweezers, unfortunately—and used its strongest blade to lever the gap in the floorboards wide enough to pull her jammed shoe heel free.

“It doesn’t look too good,” he said, examining the piece of expensive Italian footwear. “The leather is all scraped.”

She glanced up from her inspection of a section of newly chipped nail polish. “It looks better than my knee.”

“How’re you doing, there? I haven’t heard any ouches.”

“I’m keeping them to myself. The last splinter wouldn’t come.”

“Okay, my turn.”

“I’ll get it out at home.”

“No, let me have a try.” He put the shoe down beside her, rested a hand on her knee before she could make another protest, and told her in a cheerful tone, “This is probably going to hurt.”

“Did you ever consider going into medicine?”

“For a couple of months when I was eighteen, but I dropped the idea pretty fast and took on the traditional Starke family career. Why?”

“Good decision. Because your bedside manner is way off. Ouch,” she added.

“Yeah, can’t help it,” was all he said, still cheerful.

How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways…

He pinched up her skin, scraped, pinched again. Shallis sat back on her hands and closed her eyes. She could hear his breath whistling softly between his teeth and over his firm lower lip. She could imagine the golden glint of concentration in his eyes. His hand was warm—ouch, again!—and confident. His knee pressed into her outer thigh, chafing her skin softly with the fabric of his summer-weight suit.

Focusing on the splinter, he probably wasn’t aware of the contact, but Shallis was. She felt like a traitor to Linnie and Ryan, but even more of a traitor to herself for the powerful and familiar tingle of physical response that built inside her.

He’d dropped the lawyer facade, and he was such a sexy man. A thousand women must have thought so. Chemistry on two legs. A dangerous assailant on at least four of her senses.

But he was the wrong man.

He always had been.

She’d met enough men with the same win-at-all-costs mentality in Los Angeles. And thanks to Linnie’s history with Jared she’d always recognized pretty fast what they were really like underneath the charming, sexy veneer, and that they hadn’t really wanted her, they’d wanted…

Well, take your pick.

Arm candy.

Another notch on their belt.

A passport to the next level of success.

She’d met losers, too, and they could be even worse.

Surely there had to be some kind of middle ground. A man of her own generation who had the same basic qualities as her dad. A man who knew what he wanted but had limits on what he’d do to get it. A man she could be attracted to for his strength and even, yes, his arrogance, but who knew how to laugh at himself, too. A man who hadn’t already proved himself to be a total jerk in the way he’d behaved to Linnie six years ago.

If she was crazy enough to give in to her chemical attraction to Jared Starke she could never say she hadn’t been warned.

She had been warned, so why didn’t this act as the perfect antidote to the delectable poison that was running through her veins?

She had little tingles chasing each other all the way up her legs and, darn it, a red-blooded woman needed a few tingles in her life. There had to be a couple of decent single men in this world who knew how to deliver them. If only she could get this man out of her system first.

“Got it,” Jared said, and his touch evaporated from her knee before she could open her eyes.

She wanted the contact back, and hated herself.

“Thanks,” she muttered, and sat forward again, to inspect what he’d done. There were a couple of pinprick sized droplets of blood forming. Jared produced a clean tissue, pressed it into her hand and stood up, watching her dab the blood away.

“That’s your car out front, I take it,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Nice.”

“It gets me from A to B.” The European-styled sports car was a part of her pageant winnings, five years old now but still widely admired. In the past, she’d had numerous dates with men who were more interested in the car than they were in her. “I had a few minutes, and I was curious about the house, so I stopped by,” she added.

“Same here. I walked down from Grandpa Abe’s place, in time to see you disappearing round the back.”

“It’s furnished, but do you get the same impression as me that no one’s living here? Not quite sure why the sense is so strong.”

“I know. Just a feeling, but you’re right, it’s definitely there.” He went and peered in the windows, just as she had. His body language was intent and focused. “Something about the stillness,” he murmured.

What was it? It wasn’t the words. It was the delivery.

“And the calendar in the kitchen, still on the February page,” she added. “Do you know any of the neighbors?”

“I don’t, but my grandfather must. I had a closer look at your grandmother’s files this afternoon, after you’d gone, but couldn’t find anything. I’ve tried calling him, but he only has a cell phone up at his cabin, and he has it switched off. So it doesn’t scare off the fish, I imagine.”

Shallis laughed. She kept doing that. He kept saying things that weren’t exactly hilarious, but somehow surprised her enough to tickle her funny bone, purely because they weren’t the same lame beauty queen jokes she’d heard dozens of times before. He was refreshingly different from most men in ways that didn’t really count, and exactly the same as the worst of the species in other much more dangerous ways that counted for everything.

“It’s twenty till seven,” he said. “I’ll try calling him again soon.”

“Oh, it’s that late?” She’d been here almost half an hour. Drive home to her garden apartment, freshen up, change. If anything was going wrong at the hotel…And speaking of cell phones, she’d left hers in her briefcase in the car, so if there had been a catering catastrophe, or something, she’d been out of contact. “I need to get home.”

He nodded. “It’s getting late. And there’s something about this place. It could get spooky after dark. Porch rocker starting to creak when there’s nobody there. Whispering voices echoing down the stairs.”

“Stop!” She went to slip her foot back in the damaged shoe. “You’re too good at creating atmosphere, Jared Starke.”

Various kinds of atmosphere, none of which she wanted.

“Don’t put on the shoe,” he said. He had that husky note in his voice again, that she’d heard earlier today. “Take off the other one and go barefoot. The path around the side of the house is pretty uneven, too, and I think you might have weakened the heel. Can’t guarantee I’ll be able to save you, next time.”

“You didn’t save me this time,” she pointed out tartly, bending a little and lifting her foot to scoop the second shoe off. The soft leather slid across the sensitive skin of her in-step and heel. “You didn’t even have tweezers.”

“True.” He watched her movement, his focus casual yet intent, as if her action with the shoe was significant.

Or sexy.

Her body warmed, as if beneath a row of hot stage lights.

“We’ll be in touch, then, as soon as either of us finds out more about this place,” he finished.

“Yes.” She walked ahead of him, since she knew he was hanging back so she could do so—her knight in shining armor, ready to be there for her if she stumbled.

No.

Not quite.

Ready to ogle the shimmy in her walk, more likely. Shallis hadn’t taken that kind of thing as a compliment since she was seventeen. And she couldn’t believe that she was even the slightest bit tempted to respond to it now.

The slate path felt cool under her feet, however, and she started thinking about the house again. It could be one of the grandest places on the street if it had the right treatment. It was three stories high, with a big round turret on one corner and a steeply sloping roof, made of slate that matched the path. Looking up, she saw that some of the slates were a slightly different color than the majority, as if the roof had been repaired with new stone, not too long ago.

Slate was expensive. A lot of people didn’t try to repair it anymore, just got rid of it altogether and put on a tar or wood shingle roof instead. Someone had cared about this place.

Her grandmother? Gram would have used slate. She wouldn’t have wanted this grand old lady to wear cheap tar when she was accustomed to being coiffed in elegant stone.

“If Gram owns this house, though, why on earth don’t we know about it?”

Turning to ask the question out loud, Shallis almost came to collision point with Jared. He’d about caught up to her, now, ready to head up the street toward his grandfather’s house. They both stopped, managed not to touch, and blurted awkward apologies.

“Can’t answer your question,” Jared said.

They were standing too close, he realized.

Again.

He stepped back, hoping it didn’t look too obvious that he was attempting to get himself safely clear of her space. With any other woman for whom he felt this powerful level of attraction, he would have used the opposite strategy—stepping closer, turning on the charm like turning on garden lanterns on a summer evening.

His history with Shallis and her sister was like the repelling force of two magnets pointing at each other the wrong way, and his questions about his own future and priorities only strengthened that force.

He wasn’t back in Hyattville to get involved in some disastrous, short-lived relationship with a blast from the past that would leave a sour taste in everybody’s mouth. He was here for some space, in order to work out, once and for all, who he wanted to be.

“No, I didn’t expect you to answer it,” Shallis said, cutting in on his thoughts. “If you’ll excuse me, Jared, I have a function at the hotel tonight and I really need to go home and change. But…uh…thanks for your help with the splinter and the shoe.”

“You’re welcome. Talk to you soon.”

He gave a short, careful nod, not too friendly, not too sharp—he hated controlling his every word and gesture this way—and set off along the sidewalk toward his grandfather’s house.

About thirty seconds later, he heard the smooth purr of her expensive car drift past him. They waved to each other again—casual hands, polite smiles—and he wondered what it was going to take for this to get easy.

Go back and erase the past, maybe?

Six years back, to Linnie and Ryan’s wedding, and then another five to the night of Shallis’s sixteenth birthday party, when he’d almost kissed her. That little word “almost” was the only thing that gave him any hope and any self-respect, when he looked back on his behavior that night.

He’d wanted to, and Shallis at that point in her life would have practically fainted with ecstasy in his arms. Yeah, her crush had been as obvious to him as the sweet champagne on her breath, and as innocent and doomed as a baby doe caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

She wouldn’t have turned him down, even though she wouldn’t have had a clue what was really happening. She’d have gone as far as he wanted, believed everything he said. The sweet-natured seventeen-year-old boy who’d been agonizingly and just as innocently in love with Shallis that year wouldn’t have had a chance.

And Linnie, who’d considered herself just about engaged to Jared at the time, would never have known…unless Shallis herself had told her. Jared would have gone on his merry way, feeling like a winner after an easy victory, as usual.

Two sisters wrapped around his little finger, when he didn’t have serious plans for either of them.

But he hadn’t done it. He’d run his fingers softly through Shallis’s golden hair. His mouth had come within an inch of hers. She’d sighed up at him, her eyes huge and awed and gorgeous, as she waited.

She was young enough to trust him, to have faith in her own feelings, and to believe that Linnie would forgive her such a betrayal, because this was love, and love conquered all.

He didn’t understand how he’d been able to read her layered feelings so clearly, but somehow he had.

Finally he’d muttered, “I can’t do this,” and he’d torn himself away, left with an enduring sense of protectiveness toward Shallis Duncan that he didn’t understand, either.

It was one of the few moments in his life that had had the power to convince him, over the past six years, that he had any sense of honor in him at all.




Chapter Four


“H ere’s another thing that doesn’t make sense,” Sunny Duncan said to her daughter.

“Show me, Mom.” Shallis hid a yawn behind her hand as she spoke.

Last night’s function at the Grand Regency had run until after midnight, and she hadn’t gotten enough sleep. To be honest, though, her serial yawns weren’t happening just because her job had kept her up late.

Instead, blame Jared.

No, blame herself for the fact that he’d stuck around in her head all night, along with memories of those tingles running up her legs when he’d worked on her knee. She was shocked at how powerful the memories were. Fingers were just fingers. A knee was just a knee. This shouldn’t happen.

With a quiet day at the hotel today, she’d taken the morning off work, but she’d known her mother was going over to Gram’s to sort through more of her things so she’d set her alarm for seven anyhow, and they’d both arrived at Gram’s house at eight.

Now it was just after ten, and the two of them had worked for two hours without a break. Even with the windows open, the place felt dusty and musty because of the things they’d unearthed, and Shallis craved coffee and some kind of carbloaded, totally unacceptable snack.

“It’s a bill for roof shingles,” her mother said, holding out a creased invoice. “From a slate company.”

“Fifty-six Chestnut has a slate roof,” Shallis said.

She shivered suddenly. What was that old saying? Someone is walking over my grave.

“So you’ve been past the house?”

“Yesterday evening. I didn’t tell you—” And I know why I didn’t tell you. Because I ran into Jared there, and I had his fingers on my knee all night. “—but I got out of the car to take a look at the place, and saw that the roof had been repaired with new slate. I actually thought—”

She stopped, because it sounded too strange, and her mother finished the sentence for her, looking a little spooked, also.

“—that your grandmother would choose slate if it was her place, even though it costs a bundle. I know. Of course she would.”

“But it can’t be her place.”

“Exactly. This is her place. My Lord, I grew up here, and I visited her here practically every day. I love this house, but good gosh, Shallie, it’s nowhere near as big and nice as the places on Chestnut Street. It doesn’t make sense that she’d own a house there that she never told us about, and never lived in, and never sold.”

“It doesn’t, does it?” Shallis frowned.

“Was anyone home?”

“I think it’s unoccupied. Although from what I could see it hadn’t been that way for long. Since February, maybe.”

“We need to take this invoice over to Mr. Starke’s office right away.” Sunny caught sight of her daughter’s expression. “Yes, and talk to his grandson. You managed it yesterday without hitting the man. I can probably do the same.”

There was the definite suggestion that this would be an act of heroic restraint on Sunny’s part.

Shallis hesitated for a moment, then asked, “Have you talked to Linnie since the weekend?”

Sunny sighed. “Oh, trust me, honey, I know her cycle as well as she does. I called her last night and I could tell just by the sound of her voice that she’s not pregnant again this month.”

“Nobody told me how bad it’s been hitting her.”

“Did you really need to hear it, out in L.A., with so much else to think about?”

“Yes, I did! I didn’t need to be shut out. She’s my sister. How can you stay close if you don’t know what’s going on? And nobody considered that. Not Ryan or you or dad. Nobody told me it was threatening her marriage.”

“Threatening her marriage? No!” Mom looked shocked. “Her and Ryan? No! It’s not doing that.”

“She seemed pretty upset about it last night, Mom. She stopped trying to pretend with me—the way you’ve all been pretending to me for months!”

“What? The same way you didn’t admit to us how miserable you’d gotten in L.A?”

Two points to Mom, to level the score.

“Okay… The thing is,” Shallis said, “is whether Linnie’s going to get even more upset about what’s happening with her and Ryan if she has to deal with Jared being back in town as well. She says she’s not.”

“But you don’t think we should believe her.”

“I’m not sure that we should risk having her find out the hard way that she was wrong,” Shallis said slowly. “And I want to know how you feel, yourself, about Jared being involved in dealing with Gram’s estate. We could go to another lawyer. He offered me that option himself, and I said I’d discuss it with you. If you want to bail out, now’s the time. If you think there’s any risk to Linnie at all…”

“I never trusted Jared when he and Linnie were going out. I wasn’t sorry when he dumped her, in my heart of hearts, even though she felt for a long time as if he’d broken hers.”

“Why didn’t you trust him, Mom?”

“Because he’s the type who does break hearts.”

“So it’s a lifelong habit?”

Did she really need to know Mom’s opinion?

“A habit or a hobby. It can be, honey, in my experience, unless a man is given a good reason to change. But I don’t think he could break Linnie’s heart anymore. She has her priorities in place, even if they’re painful ones right now. Let’s take this invoice over to Jared, and keep it businesslike.”

Another Duncan family member who didn’t seem to understand that Shallis wanted an easy way out, the way they’d never realized how miserable she was in L.A. while she was attempting to build a career in PR. Apparently thanks to her pageant years, she was simply too good an actress.

“How about we call first?” she suggested. “In case he’s—”

Left the country. Wouldn’t that be nice?

“—on another appointment.” Mom nodded. “Yes, let’s do that.”

She was already reaching for her neat little cell phone. She spoke to Andrea, then waited while the receptionist put her through to Jared’s office. And then…

Uh-oh.

The Voice.

The one that could probably shatter a champagne glass at twenty paces.

The one that said, loud and clear, I don’t like or trust you but you’ll never be able to pin me down on that in a hundred years because I’m wa-a-ay too well mannered and well raised.

Shallis was all too familiar with The Voice. It was high and cooing and polite, dripping with honey yet still somehow sharp as a razor and cold as Arctic ice. She’d heard it many times during her pageant years, when Mom spoke to another pageant mother whose daughter was, say, bitching about the other girls behind their backs, or wearing a gown that Mom considered inappropriate for her age. “Your daughter could pass for twenty instead of twelve in that outfit, couldn’t she, bless her heart!”

Shallis only focused on her mother’s tone, at first, but then the tone changed—got warmer by about five degrees, kept the honey but lost some of the razorlike edge—and she started to listen more carefully.

“Oh, you have?” Mom was saying. “And you want us to come in? Right away? Yes, because we’re very anxious to hear. We’ll be right down.”

She flipped the phone shut a few seconds later and looked at her daughter with raised brows.

“He’s found out something,” Shallis said.

“And he doesn’t want to discuss it over the phone. Doctors are like that, too.” Mom sounded edgy. “They want to see that you’re sitting down. What in the blue blazes could Gram have had going on in her life that we would need to hear about sitting down?”

Mom was already on her way to the bathroom with her lipstick in her hand. She tended to wear makeup the way medieval knights wore suits of armor. Shallis felt an instinctive urge to follow her and do some facial repair work of her own, but she resisted and simply retrieved her lip balm from her purse instead.

“You’re not going to change and do your face?” her mother asked. She looked shocked.

Shallis looked down at her jeans and top, and brushed away a few token specks of dust. “Nope,” she answered.

Put on full cosmetic battle dress for Jared Starke?

She wouldn’t stoop to such desperate measures.



Mysteries weren’t supposed to be this easy to solve. As soon as he’d gotten home from his exploratory visit to Fifty-six Chestnut Street last night, Jared had called his grandfather and found his cell phone switched on at last.

“Darn it, I meant to tell you about that place before I left. Too much else on my mind.”

“Like trout fishing flies, I’m guessing,” Jared drawled. He understood his grandfather pretty well. “So you know about it?”

“Of course I know about it. Find something in this town that I don’t know about and you can sell me the Empire State Building while you’re at it.” He clicked his tongue. “I wanted Caroline McLenaghan to do something about the place, but she didn’t feel ready, and then she had her stroke. I was her lawyer for fifty years. More to the point, I was Flip Templeton’s lawyer, too.”

Jared sighed. “Tell me the whole story, Grandpa Abe. I have a feeling none of this is going to make any sense until you do. Beginning, middle and end, please, in that order, and don’t make any assumptions about what I already know.”

So now Jared knew, and Sunny and Shallis Duncan were on their way to his office at this very moment to find out. He’d spent half the morning wondering when and how to give them the story. Mrs. Duncan’s phone call a few minutes ago had made the decision for him.

He didn’t know how they would take it. It wasn’t so much the fact that Caroline McLenaghan had secretly owned a very substantial Victorian dwelling for the past thirty years and more, it was the reason why she’d owned it that might knock the whole Duncan family for a loop.

This was what small town legal work was all about, he’d begun to discover, after just a day and a half on the job. Friends and enemies, rumors and facts, individuals and families, secrets that echoed down the generations.

Jared hadn’t known it would be so interesting…or such a responsibility. By his own admission, Grandpa Abe would have more stories locked away in file drawers and safes and his own memory than anybody but old Dr. Taylor, who’d finally retired at eight-five, just last year. As manager of the Douglas County Bank, Bob Duncan must know a good few town secrets, also, but his mother-in-law Caroline McLenaghan had always banked with Tennessee State and Main, so Bob hadn’t known this one.





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