скачать книгу бесплатно
Camilla frowned in disappointment. “It’s never what I think, and it’s not right, a pretty young woman like you eating alone every night.”
Phoebe smiled. “I don’t mind. Most evenings I’m too tired to make good conversation with anyone.”
“And I think you are selling yourself short, Dr. Jones,” Camilla replied, then excused herself to hurry to another table.
Phoebe took a sip of her iced tea and gazed out the window. Camilla was constantly harping on her to get a life. What Camilla didn’t understand was Phoebe had a life…a safe, comfortable life that revolved around her work.
There had been enough chaos in her life in the first eighteen years to last a lifetime.
Still, that didn’t stop her pulse from accelerating slightly as she saw Kevin across the street. As she watched, he crossed the street, sauntering with a kind of loose-hipped gait she couldn’t help but admire.
Although his legs were long and lean in his tight jeans, his upper body was muscular beneath the short-sleeved polo shirt. His bulging biceps peeked out just beneath the sleeves of the dark-blue cotton shirt.
As she watched, he paused just outside the front door of the café and quickly raked a hand through his light-brown hair, as if wanting to make certain he looked all right for his meeting with her.
Phoebe reached up and started to smooth her own hair, then jerked her hands back down as she realized what she was doing.
This meeting with Kevin Cartwright wasn’t a date. She simply wanted any information he might be able to give her about the possibility of her having siblings.
He walked through the café front door, bringing with him an energy that seemed to electrify the entire establishment. She’d noticed that earlier about him…the energy that seemed to emanate from him.
He gazed around the café, then he found her and a smile curved the corners of his lips. He had a devastating smile. It transformed him from a handsome man into a sexy devil.
“I see you found it,” she said as he slid into the chair opposite her at the small table.
“I’m not just a private investigator, I’m a good private investigator,” he said and flashed her another of his seductive grins.
At that moment Camilla stopped at the table. “Evening,” she said, then winked broadly at Phoebe, as if to indicate she approved of the way Kevin looked. “The specials this evening are meat loaf and barbecue chicken.”
Kevin looked at Phoebe expectantly.
“I already ordered,” she explained.
“She always gets the same thing,” Camilla said.
“Then I’d just like a cheeseburger and fries,” Kevin said as he handed Camilla back the menu. “And a cup of coffee to drink.”
As Camilla hurried away, Kevin returned his attention to Phoebe, gazing at her without speaking for a long moment. She picked up her glass of iced tea and took a sip, her mouth unaccountably dry. She suddenly realized she was nervous.
She told herself it had nothing to do with Kevin, but rather with the information he might give her, information that might unite her with members of her family.
She set her glass back down and looked at him. “All right, Mr. Cartwright, tell me again what brought you to me.”
“Please, make it Kevin,” he replied. He leaned back in his chair and studied her. She felt her cheeks pinken beneath his obvious appraisal. “You’re very pretty,” he finally said.
Her cheeks grew hotter. “Do you always speak your mind so freely?”
His grin widened. “Always, but I’ve made you uncomfortable and I apologize.”
She nodded stiffly, although she didn’t think he sounded apologetic in the least. Suddenly he irritated her with his sexy smile and broad chest, with his flirting long-lashed eyes and five-o’clock shadow of whiskers.
“Mr. Cartwright, I’m a busy woman and I don’t have time for nonsense. Now, you mentioned this afternoon that somebody had hired you to find a woman named Phoebe. What makes you think I’m the one you’re searching for?”
He shrugged, his smile fading away. “When I saw you on the news report, you looked to be around the right age of the woman I’m seeking.”
“I’m around twenty-seven.”
One of his eyebrows lifted. “Around twenty-seven?”
Their conversation came to a halt as Camilla arrived at their table with their orders. She served Phoebe’s salad and soup first, then gave Kevin his cheeseburger, fries and coffee.
“You said you were around twenty-seven,” he reminded her the moment Camilla had left them alone once again.
She nodded and broke apart the whole-wheat roll that had come with her salad. “I was raised in foster care and no birth certificate was ever found for me. Child protective services thought I was about two when I went into the system.”
Kevin chewed a bite of cheeseburger and chased it with a sip of coffee. “How did you get into the system?” he asked.
“From what I was told, I was brought to a hospital severely ill. The woman who brought me in was also sick and later died. She was never identified.” Phoebe stared down at her vegetable soup, fighting against the sadness that always threatened to overwhelm her when she thought of her past.
He leaned forward, so close that she could smell the scent of him, a spicy cologne tempered by spring sunshine and a hint of maleness. “So, you don’t know if her name was Trealla?”
“Trealla…” The name rolled off her tongue, unfamiliar and yet somehow not totally alien. “I don’t know…I really don’t remember anything about my early childhood.”
He popped a fry into his mouth and once again stared at her unabashedly. “There’s one way for me to know if you’re the woman I’m looking for,” he said after a long moment of silence.
“And 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 California?” she asked.
“Not originally. I was born and raised in Chicago and lived there until about five years ago when I moved to Los Angeles.”
“What made you move?”
He grinned. “The promise of sun and surf and women in bikinis.”
She eyed him intently. “Are you always so flippant?”
“Always. Life is too short to take anything too seriously.”
“Life is too short not to take everything seriously,” she countered.
She was gorgeous, and something about her filled him with a tension, but they obviously had nothing in common, he realized. All she was to him was a case that he wanted to see through to the end.
“Is there some way I can get in touch with you,” she asked, breaking into his thoughts. “I really need some time to think about all this.” She touched her lips with her napkin and placed the napkin next to her salad bowl.
“I’m staying at the Allis Plaza Hotel,” he replied and motioned to the waitress. “But I’ll walk you home.”
“That’s not necessary,” she replied, again a touch of wariness in her eyes.
“Phoebe, if you’re worried about me walking you home and discovering where you live, I already know where you live. Remember, I’m a private investigator.”
“So, what else do you know about me?” she asked, but at that moment the waitress returned to their table.
Phoebe fought with him over the check, but relented and let him pay when he reminded her he had an expense account. Then, together they left the café and stepped out into the deepening shadows of falling night.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she reminded him as they walked leisurely along the deserted sidewalk. “What else have you managed to dig up about me besides my address?”
“You don’t socialize with any co-workers. You’re highly respected for your skills as a surgeon, but nobody seems to know much about you as a person. As far as your neighbors are concerned, you never have visitors in your home.”
“You spoke with my neighbors?” she asked, a touch of outrage in her voice.
“It’s what I do,” he said without apology. “I use whatever means necessary to find out things about people. I speak to neighbors, go through garbage, stake out places. You were exceptionally easy to find out about because you are such a creature of habit.”
“And that’s bad?”
“That’s terrible if somebody is going to plan to perpetrate a crime against you. It makes you predictable.”
“Well, I like my life just fine, thank you,” she exclaimed with a touch of self-righteous anger. “And I would appreciate it if you didn’t talk to any more of my neighbors or co-workers and if you kept your nose out of my garbage. If you want or need to know something about me or my life, ask me.”
“It’s a deal,” he agreed easily as they came to her apartment building.
“Thank you for dinner,” she said.
