back as good as he got, “because he never missed you. The daughter he does know and love more than compensated for your absence.”
“I have a…sister?” The concept struck a strangely unsettling, though not unpleasant note. She had been an only child who’d always wanted to be part of a big family, but there hadn’t even been cousins she could be close to. No aunts or uncles, and no grandparents. Just her mother and the man she’d known as her father. “We don’t need anyone else,” he’d often said. “The three of us have each other.”
Three, that was, until the September day ten months before, when a police officer showed up at her door and told her her parents were among the fatalities of a multivehicle accident on a foggy highway in North Carolina.
“Half sister,” Sebastian Caine said. “Natalie is Hugo’s child by his second marriage to my mother.”
“So what does that make you and me?” she asked, aiming to introduce a more cordial tone to the conversation. “Half stepbrother and sister?”
He cut her off in a voice as cold and sharp as the blade of an ax. “It makes us nothing.”
“Well, praise heaven!” she replied, stung.
“Indeed.”
They’d cleared the airport by then and joined the stream of traffic headed through the pouring rain for downtown Toronto. He was probably a very skilled driver, but the memory of her parents as they’d looked when she’d gone to make a positive identification remained too fresh in her mind, and the way Sebastian Caine zipped around slower vehicles left her bracing herself for disaster.
“Keep pumping an imaginary brake like that, and you’ll wind up putting your foot through the floor,” he observed, zooming up behind another car with what struck her as cavalier disregard for safety.
“I don’t fancy ending up in someone else’s trunk, that’s all.”
He sort of smiled. At least, she supposed that was what the movement of his lips amounted to. “Do I make you nervous, Ms. Talbot?”
She closed her eyes as he changed lanes and zipped past a moving truck. “Yes.”
“Then you’re wiser than I expected.”
Her eyes flew open again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I don’t trust you or your motives. It means I’ll be watching every move you make while you’re here. Put a foot wrong, and I’ll be all over you.”
“How exciting. Be still my heart!”
“I’m serious.”
“I can see that you are. What puzzles me is why I’m such a threat to your peace of mind. I assure you I don’t plan to run off with the family silver or murder people in their beds. I have questions that only Hugo Preston can answer, that’s all.”
“You didn’t have to come halfway across the country for that. The telephone was invented a long time ago.”
“I’m curious to meet my father face-to-face.”
“I just bet you are!” he sneered.
She shrugged. “So sue me.”
“Give me reason to, and I will.”
She stared at him, unable to fathom his hostility, but his expression gave nothing away and she wasn’t about to beg for an explanation. “I’m afraid you’re in for a terrible disappointment,” she said instead. “I have no hidden agenda in coming here.”
His mouth tightened.
“There’s nothing unnatural in a person wanting to meet her biological parent.”
He glanced in the rearview mirror, stepped on the accelerator and raced past a stretch limo. Prickles of sweat broke out along her spine as he took an off-ramp at alarming speed.
Thrusting both palms flat against the dashboard, she asked, “How many auto accidents have you had?”
The question was ill-advised, to say the least. He speared her with a chilly sideways glare, which glimmered with evil amusement. “None. But there’s a first time for everything.”
“Well, if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer you postpone the premiere performance until I’m not your passenger.”
“Your preferences don’t rank high on my list of priorities, Ms. Talbot. In fact, it’s safe to say they don’t register at all. As for your perceived sense of danger, let me assure you I don’t intend risking either life or limb on your account.”
They’d turned onto a street lined with elegant town houses by then. Braking to a stop next to a van, he shifted into reverse and began backing into a parking space so tight, it invited disaster. She opened her mouth to tell him so, then snapped it closed again as, without a moment’s hesitation or a single false move, he angled the car into place and brought it to rest parallel to the curb.
He reached behind her seat, leaning close enough that she got a pleasant whiff of his aftershave, and hauled out a briefcase. “Wait here,” he ordered, climbing out of the car. “I won’t be long.”
Lily watched as he loped across the street and up the steps to a door three houses down. Before he had the chance to ring the bell, a woman appeared. She was very pleased to see him, if the smile and hug she bestowed were anything to go by, and she was also very pregnant. He slung an arm around her shoulders and the two of them disappeared inside the house.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty. The clouds, which had been dense enough to start with, grew even darker. Not long after, a light came on at an upstairs window of the house into which Sebastian Caine had disappeared.
“Oh, fine thing!” Lily muttered resentfully. “I’m left cooling my heels in here while he has an assignation with his mistress. No wonder he told Hugo not to hold dinner!”
She twisted around and craned her neck, searching the narrow area behind the two front seats in the hope of finding something to wile away the time—a newspaper or magazine, even a map of the area. But the only item of interest was Sebastian’s passport lying open and facedown on the floor.
She prided herself on being an essentially decent person, the kind who returned her library books on time, held open doors for the elderly, and told little white lies only when absolutely necessary. She definitely did not consider herself to be the sort who snooped through other people’s medicine cabinets or read their mail. But that darned passport drew her like a magnet and before the full import of what she was doing could properly register, she found herself picking it up and sneaking a look inside.
In line with those of most other people she knew, her own passport picture made her look as if she belonged on North America’s Ten Most Wanted list, but Sebastian Andrew Caine might have commissioned a portrait photographer to produce his. His face stared back at her in all its direct-gazed, firm-jawed glory.
He’d been blessed with impeccable cheekbones, thick black hair, eyelashes to draw the envy of every woman alive and a disarming cleft in his chin. On top of that, as she knew from firsthand observation, he stood well over six feet and probably sent his tailor
