what’s that?”
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “The woman I’m searching for has in her possession a piece of metal that looks like this.” He unfolded the paper and shoved it over to her.
With trembling fingers, Phoebe picked up the paper and stared at the object drawn there. It was a fourth of a pie shape, with intricate designs that were as familiar to Phoebe as the sound of her own heartbeat.
Instantly her hand grabbed her chest, fingers fumbling for the charm that hung on the silver chain and nestled between her breasts.
She pulled the charm from its resting place and half rose, leaning across the table to show him. Her heart crashed frantically against her ribs. “I’m the one you’ve been looking for, Kevin. You’ve found the right woman.”
Chapter Two
As Kevin compared the drawing on the paper to the actual piece of metal on the chain around her neck, a wave of excitement swept through him. The drawing on the paper perfectly matched the charm she wore.
He’d found her. After all his years of searching, after all the false leads and dashed hopes, he’d finally found one of the four he’d been hired to find.
In his exuberant high spirits, he reached across the small table and grabbed her hands in his. “We’ve got to get you to Southern California,” he exclaimed.
“Whoa…wait.” She pulled her hands from his, a touch of wariness…and something else in her sea-green eyes. She fumbled with her napkin in her lap, her eyes downcast. When she finally looked up at him again, her eyes sparkled overbrightly, as if she were on the verge of tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice slightly husky. “You have to understand, I long ago gave up on ever finding any of my family. I thought I was all alone in the world. I—I’m a little bit afraid to get my hopes up.”
In that instant Kevin had the ridiculous impulse to reach out and pull her to his chest, tell her that he would see to it that she was never alone in the world again.
He’d always been a sucker for vulnerable women.
However, a return visit to the hospital that afternoon had given him enough information to believe that Dr. Phoebe Jones was anything but vulnerable.
A loner, controlling, brusque, devoted, a rigid professional…those were just some of the terms her colleagues had used to describe her.
Still, there was no denying the well of emotions that now shone from her eyes, emotions that touched his heart. “You’re smart not to get your hopes up yet,” he said and speared a fry with his fork. “I’ve found you, but I haven’t found the other three yet.”
She shoved her barely eaten salad aside. “Tell me about the man who hired you. Is it possible he’s my father?”
Her beautiful spring-colored eyes held his gaze intently and he wished he could tell her that it was a possibility, but he couldn’t. “No, Loucan is far too young to be your father. He’s about my age…around thirty-four or so.”
“Loucan? Loucan what?”
“Just Loucan,” Kevin replied, then frowned. One of the most frustrating things about this particular job was the fact that he hadn’t been able to discover a thing about the man who had hired him. “Anyway, like I told you before, he hired me to find you and bring you to Santa Barbara.”
Her face paled slightly. “I left California eleven years ago when I was sixteen and I swore I’d never go back.”
“Loucan made it clear to me that he wanted you to come to him, and if not you, then I was to bring your necklace to him.”
Her fingers clutched around the necklace. “I’m not about to give up the only thing I’ve had since my childhood to a man I haven’t met. I don’t know this Loucan, and I don’t know you.”
Kevin grinned. “I can’t tell you much about Loucan, but I can tell you that I’m a good guy. I like children and animals and I only snore when sleeping on my back.”
He was pleased to see a hint of a smile tug at her lips. “I certainly can’t make a decision to take off for California based on whether you snore or not,” she replied.
He leaned forward. “But, you have to admit that you’re curious. I mean, maybe this Loucan is another brother, or a cousin. Can you really walk away from the opportunity to find out?”
He felt slightly guilty as he tried to decide if he wanted her to go to California to find her family, or if his sole reason for getting her there was the promise of an enormous payoff from Loucan.
“I don’t know.” She looked troubled. “I need some time to digest all this. I’m certainly not going to make a decision right now.”
“Fair enough,” he replied.
For the next few minutes they ate in silence. Despite the odors of cooking food that filled the café, Kevin could smell Phoebe’s perfume, a soft, floral scent he found incredibly attractive.
In fact, he found everything about Dr. Phoebe Jones attractive, from the shiny strands of her blond hair, to her intensely green eyes. She ate with a precision he found fascinating, all her bites of salad carefully cut with a fork and a knife. She then pushed her salad away and began eating her soup.
“You mentioned you left California when you were sixteen,” he said, breaking the silence that had grown to uncomfortable proportions between them.
She daintily dabbed her mouth with her napkin and nodded. “I graduated from high school when I was sixteen and petitioned the court for an order of emancipation. I had several scholarship offers for college and decided to come here and attend Kansas University, then transferred to KU med school and finished my residency at the hospital a little over a year ago.”
“Quite an accomplishment for somebody so young,” he observed.
She shrugged her slender shoulders. “I knew from the time I was young that I wanted to be a doctor. I just didn’t let anything or anyone distract me from my ultimate goal.”
“Any particular reason why you chose the medical field?” He wasn’t sure why, but he suddenly wanted to know everything about her, what made her tick, what things she liked, what experiences had made her who she was.
“I was very sickly as a child. It seemed that my body didn’t have the normal immunities to fight illness. All the childhood diseases hit me really hard and I spent much of my early years in hospitals for one reason or another.”
She looked down at her salad, but not before he thought he saw a whisper of pain in her eyes. When she looked back at him, whatever he thought he’d seen was gone. “But enough about me,” she said. “What about you? What made you decide to become a private investigator?”
“I heard it was a job that paid well for a small amount of work.” It was his stock answer to anyone who asked him about his career choice. He never told anyone that it was a job he had taken when his life had been shattered and all his dreams had been destroyed.
“Are you from
