Secrets Rising (6 page)

"Do I?" Then he remembered her unanswered question. He cleared his throat. "No. Threatening phone calls are not typical for this sort of case. Do you want something to drink?"

She clutched the shirt tightly and nodded. He headed to the bathroom, the trip really an excuse to take himself away from her physical presence, to get his libido under control. "Sorry I can't offer you anything but tap water. These rooms don't come equipped with a mini bar."

"Water's fine."

When he returned, she seemed to have regained some of her composure, though her eyes were unusually bright and her skin extremely pale. She accepted the glass as graciously as if it were a crystal snifter of aged brandy. "Thank you."

He sat on the edge of the bed. If these meetings kept up, he was going to have to get another chair in here. Sitting on the unmade, rumpled bed put too many ideas in his head.

"All right, now tell me exactly what happened, what this caller said."

"I answered the phone." She hesitated, biting her lower lip.

"It's not unusual to have trouble recalling exactly what happened in a stressful situation. Just tell me what you remember."

She shook her head, the movement abrupt and jerky. "I remember every word.
Go away. Go back home and forget about finding your mother. She's dead and if you keep looking, you'll end up that way, too.
"

"Was the caller a man or a woman?"

She shook her head again, more slowly this time, allowing the shadows in her pale hair to shift in the harsh light from the lamp hanging above the table. "I don't know. The voice was muffled and I was half asleep. It could have been either."

"Any chance it might be our friend, the Mayor?"

"It's possible. But why would he do that? Why would anybody do something like that?"

"Most threatening phone calls are bluffs. It's pretty far-fetched to think somebody might want to kill you just because you're trying to find your birth mother."

She studied him silently for a moment. "So you're saying somebody is using empty threats to scare me into leaving before I find her."

"Or my mother doesn't want to be found. If the caller was lying, if she's not really dead, that could have been her on the phone."

She sat with her legs curled under her, his shirt pulled around her knees, her hands clenched in her lap. Without makeup, she lost all traces of a sophisticated veneer. She was young and vulnerable, a sapling bent to the earth by a hurricane, not strong enough to stand on her own.

Rebecca had so much to learn, and before this hunt for her mother was over, he suspected she'd learn a lot more than she expected or wanted to learn.

"You knew that going in." His words came out more harshly than he'd intended.

"Yes." She straightened abruptly, swinging her feet to the floor, lifting her chin defiantly even as her lower lip quivered ever so slightly. "Yes," she said. "I knew that, but it's still unpleasant to have it confirmed. When you're following somebody's husband or tracking down somebody's parents, doesn't it ever occur to you that what you find might change your client's entire life? Maybe for good, maybe for bad, but it's likely to have a strong effect, one way or the other."

"That's exactly why ninety percent of my business is done for corporate clients. Tracking down a missing heir, finding out who's dipping into the company till, those are the kinds of jobs where no innocent person gets hurt." Jake felt a little uncomfortable, aware he was taking out his irritation with himself on Rebecca, fighting that same need he'd felt the first time he saw her in his office...to go to her, wrap her in his arms, pull her against him, stroke her hair and reassure her that everything was going to be all right.

But that would be the cruel in the long run...for both of them.

He'd had his doubts about this case from the beginning, and that phone call confirmed that she was not going to have a happy reunion with her long-lost mother. She might as well be prepared.

As though suddenly deciding to fight, Rebecca stood, her bare feet wide apart, her entire stance a defiant gesture. His shirt was long. On a smaller woman, it would have been like a robe, loose and concealing. But on Rebecca it was suggestive, reaching only halfway down her thighs, the slits on each side rising up far enough to expose an edge of gauzy white gown and a lot of smooth, ivory thigh. "I'm going with you tomorrow to talk to Mrs. Jordan," she announced.

He rose from the bed and towered over her, aware of the intimidation advantage his height gave him. "The hell you say."

Surprisingly, Rebecca, who had seemed so defenseless a few minutes ago, refused to be intimidated. After recovering from her initial fright, she seemed galvanized by the mysterious phone call. "The hell I say. This is what I came for, to act instead of waiting and wondering, to retake control of my life."

While he had to give her credit for guts, he wasn't sure she was ready to hear what Mrs. Jordan might say. That phone call pretty much guaranteed a bad outcome to this whole thing. "Look, that call you got suggests we may be onto something. So why don't you go to the library and check newspapers for the months just before and just after you were born while I talk to Mrs. Jordan?"

"Why should I check the newspapers? You think my mother might have taken out an ad announcing she had a child to give away?"

Jake ignored her sarcasm. "This is a small town. There could be a mention of some teenage girl who left to spend several months with her aunt somewhere up north. Some kids could have run away to get married, then their parents had it annulled. There are a lot of possibilities for stories that might give us a clue."

"You want me to read through every newspaper for five or six months?"

Jake nodded. "That's what detective work is about, whether it's with the police force or private investigation. You search through a million grains of sand until you find the one that means something or maybe it only leads you to another one that means something. It's boring and tedious. On the positive side, the newspaper here won't be like the Dallas Morning News. Especially that long ago, it'll be a small paper, probably come out once or twice a week, and all you have to look for is the local news."

She shook her head stubbornly. "I wouldn't know what to look for, and you know I wouldn't. You're just trying to send me off while you question Mrs. Jordan."

He plowed his fingers through his hair. "Didn't we have this discussion earlier tonight? You either hired me to do a job or you're going to do the job yourself. Take your choice."

"That's a totally illogical thing to say. I may not know what questions to ask or what newspaper stories to look for, but I'm a woman. Another woman is much more likely to talk to me than she is to you. Unless you can give me a damned good reason why I shouldn't, I'm going with you."

She was a curious mixture of vulnerability and determination, of fears and courage, of blatant sexuality and dignified sophistication. And she was getting his mind and his body completely messed up.

Telling her she couldn't come with him, making every attempt to avoid her, wasn't the real solution to that problem. Getting his head back on straight was the only real and final solution.

He shrugged, as though the matter were of no consequence. "Fine. I can't stop you from coming with me, but you let me handle the questioning unless I ask for your help."

She stared at him for a long moment then her gaze hardened and her jaw firmed. Slowly, deliberately, never taking her eyes from his, she unbuttoned his shirt, slid out of it, handed it to him and strode away. With each step her long legs flashed in the darkness and her rounded rear moved enticingly below her slim waist, the wispy gown accenting more than it hid.

At the sound of Jake's voice, Rebecca lowered her copy of
The Edgewater Post
and looked up to see him standing there in a denim shirt—the one she'd worn last night?—and faded blue jeans. The jeans were snapped today, thank goodness.

She wasn't surprised to see him. The motel coffee shop—inappropriately called The Eat Rite Grill—was the only restaurant in the immediate vicinity. However, she was a little surprised to see him still looking so appealing in the light of day. She'd greeted a tired, drawn face in the mirror this morning, but Jake, in spite of—or maybe because of—an indefinable dishevelment, looked more rugged and sexier than ever.

"Good morning," she said politely. "Would you care to join me?"

"Thanks." He slid into the booth across from her, cast a quick glance at her half-empty coffee and picked up the plastic covered menu. "Are you eating or just pumping up on caffeine?"

He almost sounded as if it mattered to him whether or not she ate breakfast. Almost. After his callous treatment of her last night, she knew better than to expect any such thing from Jake.

When she'd impulsively run to him after the shattering phone call, he'd seemed reassuring and concerned at first. He'd wrapped her in his shirt that smelled of laundry detergent with a faint essence of Jake, and then brought her a glass of tap water. For those few moments he'd seemed human, his dark eyes warm like a summer night. For those few moments she'd leaned on him. Then he retreated from her, brushing aside her fears with a cold reminder that she'd known going in her mother didn't want to be found.

She'd lain awake the rest of the night regretting her impetuous flight to him.

"I've ordered eggs, bacon and biscuits," she said. "I had a rough night, so I figure I need something besides coffee to get me through the day."

A waitress appeared and refilled her cup, then poured coffee for Jake and took his order.

Jake smiled up at the woman, a warm smile Rebecca had never seen from him before. He certainly had never used it on her. "I'll have the same thing this young lady is having."

"Don't be surprised if you do get another one. If somebody is trying to keep you from finding your mother, they'll probably try again when they figure out the first attempt didn't work."

Jake was being so calm, so rational, so normal that she wanted to fly into his face, grab his broad shoulders and shake him until something sparked in those cold eyes.

She lifted the heavy mug and drank more of the muddy coffee.

The problem was hers, not his. He was doing the job she'd hired him to do. Nothing said he was supposed to get emotional about it.

She, on the other hand, had let her emotions get as much out of control as everything else in her life. The death of her parents had upset her, then finding the note about her birth mother had caused her even more distress. When she met Jake, she'd been in an extremely vulnerable state.

She was attracted to him. There was no point in denying it. He was an attractive man. More importantly, he was the man who was going to help her put herself back together. She'd let that factor confuse her, gotten everything all mixed up with the attraction and her dependence on his skills translating into an emotional dependence.

Thank goodness he'd brought her out of that fast enough with his brutal coldness. He'd snapped her back to reality, and she'd taken great delight in defying his objection to her accompanying him to Doris Jordan's house. The righteous anger had felt good, a relief from the emptiness she'd lived with since her parents' deaths...since she'd lost herself.

The anger was, she thought, the healthiest of her rampant emotions.

But she hadn't been able to stop herself from giving him back his shirt and flaunting her nearly-nude body in front of him as she went back to her room. In spite of her distress, she hadn't missed the desire in his eyes when she'd come to his room in the middle of the night. In her anger, the temptation to taunt him had been irresistible.

Though she hadn't looked back, she'd felt his gaze on her, hot and hungry, and she'd loved every second of it. She'd managed to take control of at least that much of her life.

The waitress arrived with heavy plates of eggs, bacon, hash browns and biscuits. Rebecca had lost her appetite when her parents died, but today she resolved to eat every bite. Today she had a feeling she was going to need all the strength she could find.

Chapter 5

Rebecca studied every house, every tree, every lawn of the small town of Edgewater as Jake guided his dark blue, nondescript sedan along the maze of streets toward Doris Jordan's house.

A young boy skated down the sidewalk on roller blades. Two girls sat on a front porch having a tea party with their dolls. A group of kids were shooting baskets in front of somebody's garage. An older couple rocked to and fro in a porch swing.