knew—maybe he’d get lucky. At the very least, this Childress woman might be able to provide him with the name of someone else who could in turn give him some clue as to where Charlotte Robinson was currently hiding.
He’d had less to go on before, he thought as he rose from the desk and got ready for bed.
* * *
Connor was up early the following morning and got dressed quickly.
He looked at the address he’d left out on his desk. It was the address where he was going to find this Childress woman. Initially, for about a minute and a half, he considered calling her to tell her he was coming to see her today.
He decided against it.
A face-to-face meeting would be the better way to go. He needed all the help he could get and the element of surprise might very well be useful in this case. If this woman turned out to be as nefarious as Charlotte, calling her might cause her to flee. If this Childress woman was actually involved with Charlotte, the last thing he wanted to do was tip her off.
He knew nothing about Brianna Childress, which meant that there was no reason to suppose that she wouldn’t warn Charlotte that he was looking for her. That in turn would send Charlotte into even deeper hiding.
He wouldn’t put anything past Charlotte no matter how innocent his parents, especially his mother, thought she was.
Since it was rather early, Connor decided to just slip out of the house without waking anyone.
The sooner he was on the road, the closer he would be to possibly bringing all this to a satisfactory conclusion.
He had another reason to get out of the house without being noticed. He didn’t want to get involved in a possible discussion with his mother about Charlotte Robinson. Barbara Fortunado seemed reluctant to think badly of the other woman, but then, his mother had a tendency to view everyone in a good light.
However, there was no doubt in his mind that Charlotte was behind everything that had gone wrong in his family lately. She was a dangerous woman. The very fact that she had either tried to burn down Gerald Robinson’s estate or had hired an arsonist to do it for her said it all in his book.
The woman was evil and the sooner he found her, the sooner he would rest easy.
Connor made good his escape and got to his car without anyone seeing him. Loading the address he’d found for Brianna Childress—the location was unfamiliar to him—into his car’s GPS, he got started.
He turned on his radio but hardly heard any of the music coming out of it. He was completely focused on the encounter that was ahead of him.
* * *
Connor expected the address of the research company he was looking for to lead him to an office building somewhere in Houston. Instead, the address wound up leading him to what appeared to be a rather small, homey-looking cottage.
Puzzled, he stopped his car a few hundred feet away from the house, wondering if he had made some sort of a mistake copying the address down.
Still, he thought, he was here so he might as well check it out.
Who knew, maybe this Brianna Childress ran her business out of her house. She wouldn’t have been the first person to start out that way. The names of several computer companies and software firms came to mind.
Making up his mind, Connor started his car again. He brought it up closer to the cottage, then stopped a second time and parked.
Getting out, he made his way up the front walk. He noticed that there were some sort of bushes planted in the front yard. He wasn’t very good at recognizing plants, although to his credit he did know a rose from a lily, he thought with a disparaging smile.
He saw neither in the yard.
Walking up to the front door, he noted that it was in need of a fresh coat of paint. Shrugging, he rang the doorbell. In his mind, he rehearsed what he planned to say to Brianna Childress in order to get her to let him come inside her house.
His finger had no sooner pressed the doorbell than the front door flew open.
A rather frazzled young woman with reddish-brown hair and heart-melting brown eyes looked up at him as if he was her personal savior. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, both of which lovingly highlighted all of her curves and nearly made him permanently lose his train of thought.
He recognized the woman from her online photo. But to be honest, she could use a new head shot. That one didn’t do her justice.
“Oh thank goodness you’re here!” Brianna cried, a look of relief washing over her features. “It’s right in there!”
She pointed toward the back of the house where “it,” whatever that referred to, was.
Without waiting for a response from him, Brianna grabbed his hand and pulled him in her wake, quickly leading him toward the back of the house.
Given that she had rather a good grip for such a delicate person, Connor realized that at the moment, he had no choice but to follow her.
“I was at my wits’ end,” Brianna confided unabashedly. “Luckily, I saw your ad on TV the other day and remembered the phone number. Actually, I copied it down,” she confessed. “I had a feeling I was going to need you sooner rather than later and I was right. If you hadn’t come, I’d probably be underwater before noon.”
“Um—”
At a loss, Connor got no further. He had followed the woman into a bathroom. The “it” she was obviously referring to was a toilet. The water was rising precariously high within the bowl. It looked as if any second, the water was going to overflow and go all over the floor.
The sprightly redhead was standing in front of the toilet, her hands on her hips. “Kids,” she said to him by way of an explanation.
“Kids?” Connor echoed, unable to understand what she was telling him.
“Every time I turn around, one of them has decided that one of their stuffed animals or trucks or figurines is dirty and needs to be washed. I guess the toilet’s like a bathtub to them.” She sighed and looked at him plaintively. “So, can you fix it?” she asked, a hopeful look on her face.
It was a face, Connor realized, that he couldn’t bring himself to say no to.
Connor forced himself to focus on something other than Brianna Childress’s very expressive eyes. He knew that he couldn’t very well lie to the woman, not if he needed her help and wanted her to be truthful with him. If he lied, or omitted telling her the truth, that wouldn’t exactly be starting off their relationship, however short it might turn out to be, on the right foot. Lies just begat lies.
“I’m afraid that you’ve made a mistake,” Connor began.
Dismay washed over Brianna’s face as she took in what he had just said. “You can’t fix it like the commercial said?” she asked.
“It’s
