check in at the Quality Inn, and I’ll pick you up there?”
“Fine,” she muttered again.
He smiled and took out his phone. “Give me your number so I can call when I’m on my way.”
She told him. Apparently not trusting her, he touched Send and waited until the phone in her bag rang. Then, satisfied, he put his away. His hand emerged from his pocket with a business card, which he handed her. “My number.”
He insisted on walking her to her car. Bailey had no doubt he memorized the license plate number, just in case she ran for it. Then he let her go, but kept watching until she turned onto the main street and she could no longer see him.
At which point she pulled to the curb, put the car into Park and bent forward, resting her forehead against the steering wheel. And then she did her best to breathe as she struggled with the kind of roiling emotions she hadn’t let herself feel in something like ten years.
Strangely, it was a picture of the man she’d just left that she fastened on. His physical strength, his relaxed, purely male walk, the big hand he’d touched her with whenever he sensed she needed support.
How did he know?
Breathe.
He just did, she admitted. Somehow, those dark eyes saw deeper than she liked. Except today, she was grateful.
A new swirl of panic joined all her other fears. She couldn’t let herself depend on him. She shouldn’t have agreed to dinner. When he called, she’d make an excuse.
Bailey moaned, knowing she’d just lied to herself. Yes, she had to be careful where he was concerned, but right now, she needed him. She, who never let herself need anyone, wasn’t sure she’d get through these next few days without the man she’d met less than three hours ago.
* * *
EVE’S MOTHER—ADOPTIVE MOTHER—laid down her fork. “I keep thinking I dreamed it. But Hope really was here, wasn’t she?”
This was probably the tenth time she’d said something similar since they sat down for dinner. All she’d done was stir her food around.
Dad laid his big, scarred hand over hers in a gesture more tender than Eve remembered seeing. “She was. We’ll see her again in the morning.”
Eve didn’t have much appetite, either. She’d done a lot of scrambling to make up for opening her big mouth at the sight of her sort-of sister.
“I only meant biological,” she had explained.
Apparently that was good enough, because they immediately dropped the subject and went back to exclaiming in shock and awe.
Hope, Hope, Hope.
And I’m being such a bitch, Eve thought miserably. She should be grateful to Hope, whose disappearance had given her a chance to have a family. Nobody else had wanted the rail-thin, withdrawn eight-year-old she had been when the Lawsons had taken her in.
She’d always known the truth. They hadn’t taken her because they’d fallen in love with her, but rather as penance. They felt guilty because they had failed their perfect daughter. For their own spiritual salvation, they needed to save another child.
Which still didn’t mean she hadn’t been lucky to be that child.
She remembered her first visit to this house, when Kirk had opened a door partway down the hall and said, “This will be your bedroom.”
Now she knew it had been a guest bedroom before she had arrived. Then, given the way she’d lived before she got taken into the foster system, she’d been thrilled because she’d have a queen-size bed all to herself and her own dresser and closet and everything.
Karen had stepped into the room behind Eve and looked around. “We’ll paint and decorate once you’ve decided how you’d like it to look,” she said. “What is your favorite color?”
“Pink,” she had whispered, and then seen the expression on the face of a woman who was thinking about becoming her mother. “And yellow,” she said hurriedly. Yellow, she saw, was safe.
She had lived with them for a week before she worked up the courage to open the door to the other bedroom that nobody went in or out of. I want this bedroom, she’d thought, indignation swelling in her, but she never said a word, because she knew. It was her bedroom. The lost daughter the social worker had told her about. The Lawsons had insisted that of course they would keep Eve even if Hope was restored to them, but then, she wasn’t sure she believed that. She’d stared at the pink bedroom with furniture painted white and edged with gilt, and at shelves filled with dolls dressed in beautiful clothes, and most of all at the bed with tall posts and gilt-painted finials and a white lace canopy, and she had envied until she ached.
She had mostly been ashamed of that envy, because the pretty blonde girl in all the pictures was probably dead even though her parents kept her bedroom for her and told everyone that they knew she was alive and would come home someday. But the envy had crept into her heart and stayed no matter what she did to root it out, and today it had made her say, “The real daughter returns.”
Of course Mom and Dad were ecstatic. They’d been given a miracle. Eve loved them. She had dreamed of seeing them truly happy, and now they were.
Just not because of any accomplishment of hers, any gift she gave them. She’d always believed, in the back of her mind, that she was engaged in a competition. She’d just never let herself see that it was one she couldn’t win. Her bringing home a gold medal in athletics, being accepted to Harvard Law School or crowned Miss America, none of those achievements would ever have erased the grief that cast its shadow over both of them. Only the return of their precious Hope could do that.
And I am happy, Eve told herself. Just...envious, too.
She smiled at her mother. “Hope’s coming to breakfast?”
Karen Lawson’s face was both softer and younger than Eve had ever seen it. “Yes. But remember she asked us to call her Bailey. Oh!” She hugged herself. “I can’t believe it.”
Eve offered to come over and make breakfast, but no, Mom wanted to make it with her own hands, because she’d been cheated of the chance of feeding her daughter so many other breakfasts.
“Waffles,” she decided. “Or crepes. I have all those lovely raspberries. Oh, my. I should have asked her what she likes.” Her expression cleared. “But of course she loved raspberries. Do you remember, Kirk? That time we took her with us to pick berries, and lost sight of her for a minute?” That clouded her face momentarily, but the smile broke through again. “And when we found her she was stuffing herself with berries, and her hands and face were stained with the juice?”
He chuckled. “She tried to claim she hadn’t been eating them and was astonished we didn’t believe her.”
How touching, Eve thought. My little sister lied.
And I am a lousy human being.
* * *
DAMN, SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL.
