then at the cemetery? How had she missed him?
“Conner?”
When Matt looked over toward the person she had called out to, Natalie felt him stiffening at her side. “If you want to have a word with him, I’ll wait for you by the car,” Matt offered, his tone almost formal.
The suggestion caught her off guard. “You don’t have to go, Matt,” she told him even as Conner was approaching them.
Matt shook his head. “Better this way,” was all he said as he retreated, then turned on his heel and walked away.
There was obviously no love lost between the two men, she thought. A lot of that going around, she mused.
Her cousin, Conner Rothchild, was a defense attorney for the family’s large, prestigious legal firm: Rothchild, Rothchild & Bennigan. Tall, with hazel eyes and dark brown hair, the thirty-three-year-old lawyer was the older son of her father’s younger brother, Michael. Though Michael Rothchild was a brilliant attorney in his own right, it was obvious to the family that he resented Harold and felt as if he could never crawl out from beneath his older brother’s shadow.
Lots of discord in this family, she thought sadly just as Conner reached her side.
“Hello, Conner,” she greeted him politely, deliberately dispensing with the obligatory air kiss that was so popular among the rich and famous. “I didn’t see you in the church,” she confessed.
“You had a lot to deal with,” he countered. “And I was in the back. I came late. I wasn’t really sure how Uncle Harold would react to my attending the service. You either,” he added with a smile that always had her guessing as to its genuineness.
But that was mainly because they had grown up as adversaries, thanks to the efforts of both their fathers. Until Ricky’s birth five years ago, Uncle Michael enjoyed rubbing her father’s nose in the fact that he had only females in his family while he, Michael, had fathered two strong, strapping sons: Conner and Michael Jr. The implication was not lost on her. To Uncle Michael, women were second-class citizens.
She remembered always feeling as if the family gatherings they had were merely excuses for some sort of competitive comparison. Birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, it didn’t matter. The agenda was always the same. Each brother tried to top the other, and neither was above using their offspring and pitting them against one another like some human form of cockfighting.
Time and again, she could remember being played against Conner and his brother. The competition turned more serious as they grew up. Then it was accomplishment against accomplishment, career against career. More than once, the criminals she had arrested wound up being put back on the street, thanks to the efforts of Conner and her uncle.
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