need someone’s advice or you’re going to blow the best thing that ever happened to you.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” Tate said facetiously.
And then there were footsteps.
But only some of them moved away from the library.
The others were coming closer…
Too late to run.
Tanya ducked for cover, hoping that since she was behind the desk whoever was headed her way wouldn’t be able to see her when he reached in and turned off the lights.
“Tate hasn’t even been staying in the house since he got back. He’s living in the guest cottage…”
Tanya’s mother’s words flashed through her mind just then and it struck her that merely having the lights turned off might not be what was about to happen. That Tate might use the library route to go to the guesthouse that was also out back…
Tanya’s heart had begun to race the minute she’d heard the McCords’ voices. Now it was pounding. Because while she might have been able to explain her presence in the library at this time of night, how would she ever explain crouching behind the desk?
Or holding the papers she’d been looking through—because until that minute she hadn’t even realized she’d taken them with her when she’d ducked.
Please don’t come in here…
“What the hell?”
Oh, no…
Tanya had tried to turn herself into a small ball but when Tate McCord’s voice boomed from nearby, she raised her head to find him leaning over the front of the desk, clearly able to see her.
This was much, much worse than when she was six and had been caught with her fingers in the icing of his twin sisters’ birthday cake. His mother Eleanor had been kind and understanding. But there was nothing kind or understanding in Tate McCord’s face at that moment.
Summoning what little dignity she could—and with the papers still in hand—Tanya stood.
It was the first time she and Tate McCord had set eyes on each other in the seven years since Tanya had left for college. And even before that—when Tate had come home from his own university and medical school training for vacations or visits while Tanya still lived on the property with her mother—there weren’t many occasions when the McCord heir had crossed paths with the housekeeper’s daughter. Plus, Tanya had been very well aware of the fact that, more often than not, when any of the McCords had seen her, they’d looked through her rather than at her.
So she wasn’t sure Tate McCord recognized her and, as if it would make this better, she said, “You probably don’t remember me—”
“You’re JoBeth’s daughter—Tanya,” he said bluntly. “What the hell are you doing in here at this hour and—”
He glanced down at the papers and held out his hand in a silent demand for her to give them to him.
She did and he looked over what—before she’d been interrupted—she’d discovered to be some sort of mock-ups for ads for a suggested line of jewelry using canary diamonds set in old Spanish designs.
Tanya had taken the papers from a file that was still open on the desk in front of her. After Tate McCord’s initial look at them, he pulled the entire file toward him to see what else she might have gotten into.
While he sifted through what she already knew were similar pages, Tanya was wishing she wasn’t dressed in a shabby, oversize, cut-up old sweatshirt and a pair of drawstring black pajama pants with cartoon robots printed on them. She also wished she wasn’t completely makeupless and that her shoulder-length espresso-colored hair wasn’t pulled up into a lopsided ponytail at the top of her head. Looking as if she were ready for bed made her feel all the more at a disadvantage. When she realized that the wide neck of the sweatshirt had fallen from her shoulder, she tugged it back into place.
It was something Tate McCord saw because just as she did it, he raised his gaze from the file and eyes that were bluer than she remembered drifted momentarily in that direction.
Noticing did not, however, change his attitude toward her—his expression remained stern and angry.
“So, I repeat—JoBeth’s-daughter-Tanya, what the hell are you doing in here, at this hour, going through things that you have no right to go through?” Tate McCord finished by tossing the papers he’d taken from Tanya back in the open file.
“I know this can’t look good,” she said.
But he definitely did look good! Better even than she remembered him.
Unlike her in-for-the-night apparel, he was dressed in a dark suit that accentuated the fact that he was tall and lean, with broad shoulders and a more toned, muscular physique than he’d had in his earlier years. His face had matured into sharply defined angles that gave him a decisive chin and high cheekbones. His mouth at that moment was a stern line beneath a strong, thin nose and his penetrating, clear blue eyes seemed to have taken a bead on her, which should have kept her from thinking that she liked his dark blond hair slightly longish, the way he was wearing it now…
But it was the expression that said he was waiting for an explanation that she knew she really had to address.
“My mother dropped her sweater when she came through here today after she finished work—” Tanya pointed to the plain white cardigan that had been her excuse for this foray. She’d picked it up from the floor where it had fallen and tossed it across the back of a chair before beginning her snooping. “Mom likes to wear it when she walks over from the bungalow in the mornings. She was just going to leave it and get it tomorrow, but I thought I’d come back for it tonight so she’d have it.”
All true, but feeble at this point. Very feeble.
“And while you were here, you thought you’d take a look around, at things that you shouldn’t look at, and then hide under the desk so you didn’t get caught eavesdropping on what Blake and I were saying in the other room? Or are you going to pretend you didn’t hear anything?”
There was that facetious tone again. It could be harsh. And it didn’t help that his assumptions of what she’d done were right.
Maybe offense was the best form of defense…
“I heard enough to know that there’s a whole lot going on. That all the suspicions about McCord’s Jewelers’ business being way down have some foundation. That the rumors that the McCords came into possession of the Santa Magdalena diamond when you all got the Foley’s land and silver mines could also be the truth. I heard enough to know that your family does think the diamond can be found.”
“So you heard plenty.”
“And I’ll admit,” she continued, “that when I came for Mom’s sweater and saw the file, I got curious, and since it was open I looked at those pages—” That was a lie, not only had she opened the file herself, but she’d come to get the sweater hoping that there might be something of interest to her in the library where business was sometimes conducted. “But now that I know
