eyes. “Your office is calling,” she said.
Kate’s mind shifted to the calls she’d made earlier. She thanked the housekeeper and turned back to the sunroom and the phone extension there.
With any luck at all, the call would bring good news for her young patient, who was so close to a breakthrough if only his father would stand firm against his controlling family who seemed to want nothing more than to shut the boy in his bedroom and pretend he didn’t exist.
She didn’t want to fail little Bobby.
She knew it was unwise to become so emotionally vested in a patient, but there was something about the dark haired, sloe-eyed little boy that had stolen her heart.
Yes, as a woman, Kate was pretty well useless.
Which meant being a therapist was all she had left.
Chapter Two
Was there ever a woman put on this earth who drove him nuts the way Kate Stockwell did? If there was, Brett didn’t want to meet her.
He ran his hand down his face and battled down the annoyance inside him before walking back into the Stockwells’ study where Kate’s brothers were still discussing the portrait. If they’d even noticed his and Kate’s absence, they made no sign of it.
Then he realized that Jack was watching him. Kate’s oldest brother had noticed all right. But then Jack had always seemed to have an extra dose of protective instincts where his sister was concerned.
And even though Brett had once been as comfortable around her brothers as he’d been around her—when he’d been just one more of the gang—he knew those times were gone.
He was the ex-fiancé of their baby sister and he had no doubts that Kate hadn’t left any question in her brothers’ minds about who was at fault for the “ex” part of that particular equation.
He wasn’t part of their group any longer, if there even was a group. Jack seemed to spend most of his time in Europe, as far as Brett knew. Rafe was a Deputy U.S. Marshal now, and Cord had taken over the family business interests. And Kate. Well, Kate had returned from Houston a few years ago, after her divorce from a man who’d once been Brett’s friend.
Brett remembered the exact day he’d heard she was back in Grandview. That she’d moved back into Stockwell Mansion. He’d blown his cover on a case he’d been investigating and it had taken two solid weeks to regain the ground he’d lost that day.
No. Brett definitely wasn’t here because of his former ties to this family. He was only the investigator they’d hired to follow the leads they’d already discovered regarding their mother. And since that’s the way he liked it, he needed to stop thinking about his past and focus instead on Madelyn Johnson Stockwell’s past.
“Were there other paintings of hers in the gallery where you found this one?” he asked Jack.
The other man shook his head. “Not anymore. I’d just missed a seascape that he’d had for a brief time. Beyond that, what there was had already been sold. Her work seems to be in fair demand over there.” His lips twisted. “And has been for years. The only reason this portrait hadn’t been sold to a private party was that the gallery owner, Roubilliard, didn’t want to part with it.”
“Then why did he?” Cord asked.
“Made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
“Bought him off, you mean,” Rafe translated.
Jack shrugged. “It doesn’t belong hanging on an art gallery wall in France. It belongs hanging on the walls of this house, along with the other portraits of the Stockwells.”
“It would’ve been, too, if we hadn’t been fed that garbage about Mom drowning with Uncle Brandon,” Rafe said grimly.
Brett watched Jack’s face. He was the eldest and naturally would remember more of that day when Caine Stockwell had planted the seeds of a lifelong deception. But Jack’s expression didn’t change. He merely reached for a pile of brochures and held them out to Brett.
“Here,” he said. “Madelyn LeClaire’s work is listed in several of these catalogs. Private shows. Group shows. A couple of estate auctions.”
Brett took the items, fanning through them. Some dated back fifteen years. He suddenly knew Kate had entered the room behind them, but kept his attention front and center, where it belonged. On the job.
That lasted about half a second. He looked back at her. Frowned a little at the drawn expression on her face. She looked even worse than she had when he’d left her in the sunroom.
Dammit.
He didn’t want to care how all this was affecting Katy Stockwell. He deliberately looked down at the catalogs in his hand and paged through them once more. The job. Remember the job. “Quite a collection,” he murmured.
“People tended to hang on to them. And I think the owner of that—” Jack lifted his chin toward the portrait sitting against the wing chair “—had a bit of a crush on the artist. He’s the one who said he was certain she was living somewhere in New England and that she was being represented by a dealer in Boston. But that information is a few years old, at best.”
“But it proves something, at least,” Rafe said flatly. “Our mother is alive. She didn’t die in a boating accident. Not here. Not anywhere. Just like we figured after what Caroline and I found in her father’s papers. Did your smitten gallery owner happen to say what she looked like, since Caine saw fit to get rid of any photographs of her?”
“No. But we’ve all heard often enough from other people who knew our mother how much Kate resembled—resembles—her.”
“Well,” Brett said, “since you’ve brought me in on this, I’ve had my people checking the usual sources to locate a Madelyn LeClaire living anywhere in the New England area. No luck. If she is living there, she’s doing it very quietly. Most people leave some footprints of their life. Driver’s licenses, mortgages, property taxes, library cards. Something. But there’s been zilch, so far.” And in his experience, when people lived that quietly, it was for reasons they generally didn’t want to advertise.
He looked at Jack. “Are you sure your Roubilliard in France was certain of his facts?”
“The guy had a major case for her. I’m sure,” Jack answered.
“Then it’s time for a road trip to Boston. Check the art dealers in person,” Brett said. Although each of the brothers had done a lot of legwork, amassing enough information from the sketchy details they’d been given by their father in one of his rare lucid moments, he knew they had lives to lead. While his life was his work.
Which was why he’d been hired. The Stockwells had insisted that he personally take the case even though he had a half-dozen investigators on his staff who could’ve handled what was, essentially, a missing persons case. Even though it would have been easier, wiser, all the way around for someone else to deal with this family other than he.
“My office has already gathered information on the most likely galleries to be dealing with your mother. It’d be an easier task, except that she worked in so many mediums. Painting. Pottery. Sculpture.”
