“I can talk to gallery owners just as easily as you can.”
“You’re right. Go hunting through the art world yourself. Spread that mighty Stockwell name of yours as far and wide as you like. And if your mother doesn’t want to be found, which seems kinda likely if you ask me after nearly thirty years, once she hears a Stockwell is looking for her, she could well go to ground and you and your brothers would be lucky to pick up her trail ever again.”
She blanched and swayed.
He swore and pushed her down on a chair, summarily pushing her head down. “I don’t need you passing out.”
She scrabbled at his hand. “Get your hands off me. I am not passing out.”
He was perfectly happy to remove his hand from the slick silk of her hair.
She shot out of the chair, her hair tossing about. Almost as if she was afraid he’d have the gall to put his hands on her again. “I’m going to Boston,” she insisted.
“Why?” Because she didn’t trust him to do his job. The knowledge sat like a bitter pill. “Or maybe you really are enamored of my company once again,” he needled.
Her eyes flashed. “Oh, please. Don’t flatter yourself. If you must know, it’s because…because my brothers have all done something to help find our mother, and I’ve done nothing!”
“Come again?”
She pushed her fingers through her hair and walked over to the portrait, her expression telling him that she already regretted her flash of honesty. But she surprised him when she didn’t clam up the way he expected her to.
“Cord was the one to discover that Daddy was sending huge sums of money to one of his attorneys and had been every month since our mother supposedly died when I was a baby.” She recited the details without emotion. “He’s also the one who found a letter from my mother’s side of the family, the Johnsons, in Daddy’s personal records implying that the Stockwell side had once swindled the Johnsons out of land on which the Stockwells eventually discovered oil. And he’s been looking into that so we can make it right again, if it is true.”
She rubbed her fingertip along the frame of the portrait. “Rafe, now, he followed the money. To Clyde Carlyle’s office. And between him and Clyde’s daughter, Caroline, they found the divorce papers between my parents which were dated months after Madelyn supposedly died. They’re the ones who learned that Madelyn, and Uncle Brandon, too, most likely, spent a considerable amount of time in France, moving here and there. And that, somewhere along the way, she’d apparently changed her last name to LeClaire.”
“And Jack, being the most familiar with Europe because of his travels, picked up the reins at that point,” Brett concluded. He’d heard it all before from her brothers. But he’d never really thought how Kate may have felt about not having as active a role in the discoveries as her brothers.
Then he reminded himself that he was no longer interested in what went on inside her pretty head. Which mattered not at all considering the way her oddly false calm gnawed at him. “You think you’ll be holding up your end by traipsing around Boston with me.”
She nodded silently.
Brett swore inwardly. He still didn’t know why he’d accepted this case in the first place. It was gonna be one huge headache. Not only did she not trust him, but she was trying to salve her conscience. “Kate. You and me…it’s not a good idea.”
Her lips pressed together for a moment. “Because we used to be engaged.”
Because you drive me nuts. “Because I’m used to working alone.”
“I wouldn’t get in your way.”
No, you’d just be a constant distraction. Things might be dead and gone between them, but he was still a man. And she was a beautiful woman. A woman who didn’t trust him, no matter what her other reasons were. “No.”
She made a soft sound, her gaze still on the portrait. And he made the fatal mistake of moving around from where he stood, so that he could see her face.
Confusion. Hurt. Longing.
All of that was written on her perfectly oval, perfectly formed face. It was in her eyes and in the soft lip that she’d caught between pearly teeth.
In the days since he’d become embroiled with the Stockwells’ case, Kate had consistently been cool and controlled whenever they’d encountered each other.
And now, in one day—hell, in one hour—he’d seen her blue eyes swimming in tears, her aching so clear on her face that it beat his better sense into dust.
Swearing a blue streak in his mind, Brett knew he was making a mistake. “All right,” he said, sounding anything but gracious. “We leave in the morning. I’ll have my secretary, Maria, call you with the time.”
Now her blue eyes were glistening again. And she was looking at him as if he’d just saved a kitten from the jaws of a rattlesnake.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He slapped the catalogs he still held against his palm. “Be ready on time,” he said abruptly. “And don’t go packing a dozen suitcases, either, princess. We’re going there to work, not so you can walk around looking like a fashion show in progress.”
Her expression changed. Her lips parted, furious.
But he was already walking out of the room, satisfied. Her fury he could handle. Her tears, obviously, he couldn’t.
Chapter Three
She was late.
Brett would be by soon and Kate had yet to finish packing.
Yet where was she? In her room packing?
No.
She was standing in the wide arch of her father’s bedroom, struggling with the urge to turn around and leave. The room was dark, the heavy velvet drapes at the windows drawn against the morning sky.
She shouldn’t have left this task so late, she thought. Visiting her father when she felt so uneasy about going to Boston with Brett was probably not the wisest course, but he was her father. She was a Stockwell. And Caine, for all of his many faults, had drilled into his children the fact that Stockwells looked after their own.
She moistened her lips and entered the room. She quietly greeted Gunderson, her father’s primary nurse, and approached the hospital bed that was situated in the center of the cavernous room. Caine lay back against the white bedding. The muscular, wide-shouldered build that he’d passed on to his sons was wasting away on Caine; he looked much older than his sixty years.
She sat down on the chair beside his bed. His eyes were closed, but when she tentatively touched his hand, his head moved and he looked at her. “Hi, Daddy.”
If Caine recognized her, he gave no indication. She’d visited him every day—except when he’d still been strong enough to tell her to go away. She’d told herself that his actions then had been because his pride didn’t want her seeing him
