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The wretched truth was that her flirtation with Liam had started out pretty much as something that sordid and that unforgivable. She’d just never intended to let the situation progress beyond mild flirtation. “You’re sounding very self-righteous,” she said quietly. “But I seem to recall that you were the person who put the moves on me, not the other way around.”
It was absolutely the wrong thing to have said. Liam leaned across the desk, his hands gripping the edge until his knuckles gleamed white. Probably so that he didn’t give in to the temptation to bop her one, Chloe thought wryly.
“You’re forgetting one minor fact,” Liam said, teeth clenched. “I had every right to solicit sex with you because I wasn’t married! I wasn’t even dating seriously. You, on the other hand, had a husband.”
“It was wrong of me, I know—”
“Wrong? A little more than that, Mrs. Hamilton. Do you happen to remember that annoying bit in the marriage vows where you promised to remain faithful and hang in there when times got tough? As I recall, there’s absolutely nothing in the wedding ceremony that says adultery is okay if the spouses have had a spat before they leave for a party.”
He was quite right. There was no defense for what she’d done, and Chloe felt her face burn with shame for the lies she’d told when they first met—and since. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Except that I can’t regret what happened that night because I have Sophie as a result.”
“Unfortunately, I can and do regret what happened that night, Mrs. Hamilton, precisely because you have Sophie.”
“If you’d ever met her, you’d know that she’s the most wonderful person—”
“But I haven’t met my own daughter, and that’s the point, isn’t it?” He looked at her with shriveling scorn. “Did your husband know that Sophie wasn’t his child? Come to think of it, why are you so sure Jason isn’t her father?”
There was no way to preserve Jason’s privacy at this point. “My husband is…he was sterile.”
“So how did you explain the fact of your pregnancy to him?”
“He was shocked when I told him, of course—”
“You have a gift for understatement, Mrs. Hamilton.”
She ignored his mockery and plowed on doggedly. “Jason was shocked and upset, but once Sophie was born, he fell in love with her. She is…she became Jason’s daughter in every way, except biologically. He loved her as much as I do.”
“As a divorce lawyer, I find that hard to believe. My experience strongly suggests that men have a difficult time accepting living proof of their wife’s infidelity.”
“Hard to believe or not, it’s the truth.” For once, the whole truth and nothing but. Jason had adored Sophie and been grateful for her existence.
“In case this hasn’t occurred to you, the cops are going to find your husband’s supposedly forgiving attitude impossibly hard to believe.” Liam sounded grim.
She stared at him, appalled. “Why do the police have to know Jason isn’t Sophie’s father? What on earth does my daughter’s biological background have to do with Jason’s murder?”
He shook his head, clearly impatient with her naiveté. “The cops have to know upfront. You’re setting yourself up for disaster if you let them discover this information for themselves.”
“Why would they find out?”
“The postmortem might easily reveal that Jason is sterile, depending on the cause of his sterility. Or the cops might subpoena his medical records and find out that way. Trust me on this, if you keep quiet and the truth comes out during the course of the investigation, the cops will interpret your silence as an admission that you consider Sophie’s paternity a dirty little secret. They’ll assume your husband was furious when he discovered Sophie wasn’t his biological child. They’ll imagine her existence caused bitter arguments between you and Jason. They’ll conclude the arguments escalated over the years and, after an especially violent disagreement, Jason ended up dead on your living room floor, with you wielding the murder weapon.”
His scenario sounded chillingly credible. “Is that what you think happened?” Chloe asked. “That I killed my husband because we were fighting about Sophie?”
“As a possible scenario, it matches all the known facts.” The complete lack of inflection in his voice somehow transformed his statement into an accusation.
“Nobody who’d ever seen Jason with Sophie would believe something so crazy.”
“But the cops haven’t seen your husband with Sophie,” Liam pointed out with infuriating calm. “Neither have the potential jurors if you end up being brought to trial. However, you were seen poised over Jason’s body with the murder weapon in your bloody hands. I can only hope for your sake that nobody heard you and Jason arguing last night?”
There was a definite question in his final words. Add one more person to the list of those who were already convinced she’d murdered her husband, Chloe thought wearily. She dropped her gaze. No doubt Liam would interpret her silence as an admission that she and Jason had been arguing last night. Unfortunately, his interpretation would be correct. Their disagreement had been about Jason’s political ambitions and how best to achieve them, certainly not about Sophie.
“Jason never regretted his decision to welcome Sophie as his daughter,” Chloe said finally. “She was a source of joy to both of us. I have no way to convince you of that, but it’s the simple truth.”
“Did Jason know I was the man who’d impregnated his wife?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you. How come he never confronted me? Why didn’t he demand an explanation as to why I slept with his wife?”
Chloe met Liam’s derisory gaze head on and a ripple of anger floated across the surface of her despair. “The truth is he considered the precise identity of our daughter’s biological father somewhat irrelevant. As long as you didn’t know the truth, he had no interest in confronting you.”
Her barb found its target and Liam’s mouth tightened. “As the man trapped into impregnating you, I can’t say that I agree with your husband’s point of view. I consider the fact that I have a child to be extremely important and I’m furious that you kept the information hidden from me.”
“I couldn’t tell you about Sophie,” she said, realizing there was almost no hope that Liam would understand why she’d felt compelled to remain silent. “If Jason was willing to accept Sophie as his daughter, I felt I owed him the courtesy of not telling anyone how she’d been conceived.”
“Not even the lucky father?” Liam’s voice vibrated with irony.
She shook her head. “Not even you. Perhaps especially not you.”
“I’m sure you agonized over the ethics of the situation.”
“Yes, I did,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm. “Especially when I decided to end the marriage and came to you for help with a divorce.”
“Let’s talk about that for a moment. Why did you choose—” The intercom buzzed again and Liam snatched the phone. “Yes?”
Chloe couldn’t hear the receptionist’s part of the conversation, but Liam responded by saying he’d be right there.
He hung up. “I have to end this conversation, Mrs. Hamilton. My client has been waiting for fifteen minutes—”
“For heaven’s sake, would you stop calling me Mrs. Hamilton!” she snapped. “My name, as you very well know, is Chloe. I think our acquaintance has reached a stage of intimacy where it’s okay for you to use it!”
“Nothing about our acquaintance has anything to do with intimacy,” he replied angrily.
“Whatever.” She lifted her shoulders, then let them fall, too exhausted to fight anymore. She stood up, struggling to regain at least a vestige of her old pride and determination. “I should leave. This has been a mistake and, as you keep reminding me, you have important clients waiting.” She turned to go, suddenly chilled by the air-conditioning. She wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold air and realized as she did so that she was still wearing the scruffy T-shirt that she’d grabbed first thing this morning when the police sergeant sent her upstairs to shower and change out of her blood-soaked robe. Apparently she’d been in such a state of mental turmoil when she prepared to leave the house that she’d changed into decent slacks but forgotten to put on the silk blouse that went with them. Good grief, she must look like a demented bag lady. Chloe felt a wave of embarrassment sweep over her.
With all that was going on right now, it was crazy to come unglued because her outfit was less than perfect, but somehow the knowledge that she was wearing a worn out T-shirt was the last straw. She hated the fact that she had been so overwhelmed by the police interrogation that she couldn’t even dress herself properly. She was annoyed by the fact that she wanted Liam’s approval, or at least his acceptance. Why did she care if he disapproved of her? He was an accidental sperm donor, nothing more. Still, if she’d looked a bit more elegant, maybe he’d have worked a bit harder to hide his contempt. Tears threatened to overflow, and she blinked them away, pride coming to her rescue when everything else failed. She wasn’t going to give in to self-pity, not in front of Liam, who so clearly had no interest in joining her sob party.
He walked around from behind his desk and came to stand between her and the door. She was relieved when he gave no sign that he realized how close she was to breaking down.
“Obviously there are a lot of things we still need to talk about,” he said. “I can’t spend any more time with you right now and I have to be in court right after lunch. Can you be back here at four?”
She hesitated for a moment. “If the police don’t arrest me, I’ll be here.”
“Go to the movies,” he said. “Pick a theater in a nice, family-oriented suburb. Movie theaters are great places to hide from cops.” He tapped briefly on a side door she hadn’t noticed before and a female voice responded.
He opened the door. “Hey, Helen, I have a client coming through if you don’t mind.” He turned back to Chloe. “This leads to my paralegal’s office. If you go out this way, you can access the main corridor directly. It’s probably better if you avoid exiting through the reception area. I think you and my next client probably know each other.”
“Thank you.” She walked towards Helen’s office, numb enough to follow his instructions without question.
“Chloe.”
She stopped and swung around to look at him, grateful for his small concession of using her name. “Yes?”
“Where is…your daughter…right now?”
“My sister came and picked her up early this morning. She took Sophie back to her house in Conifer.”
“How long can you leave…Sophie…there?”
“As far as my sister is concerned, forever. As far as Sophie is concerned—at least until bedtime. My sister has two preschoolers of her own, and Sophie loves to play with her cousins.”
He gave a quick nod to acknowledge her answer. “Then I’ll expect to see you here this afternoon at four. Try not to get arrested in the meantime, okay?”
Three
He had a child. Sophie was his daughter. Chloe Hamilton was the mother of his child. His daughter was three and a half years old.
However many ways he found to express the simple facts, Liam still couldn’t wrap his mind around the crazy notion that he was a father. A father, for God’s sake! If ever there was one role that he’d been determined never to take on, fatherhood would have to be it.
Among the worst of the unpleasant emotions accompanying the discovery that he had a child was the shame of knowing he’d behaved no better than his own father, the late, not-very-lamented Ron Raven. Ron had impregnated Avery Fairfax twenty-seven years ago, when his legal wife, Ellie, was already pregnant. Then Ron had solved the dilemma of two women simultaneously pregnant with his child by marrying Avery—without bothering to divorce Ellie first.
Ever since he learned about his father’s bigamy, Liam had derived a morbid satisfaction from heaping scorn on his father’s head for the idiocy of contracting a fake marriage. He’d harped on Ron’s carelessness in causing the pregnancy that had precipitated it. Now it seemed that he had been as careless as his father. Juggle the pieces of the Liam-Chloe-Jason triangle, toss them up in the air and you could watch them fall to the ground in a pattern humiliatingly close to the Ellie-Ron-Avery triangle. Like father, like son wasn’t a cliché he’d ever wanted to live up to, Liam reflected cynically, but it seemed he’d done just that.
Court, thank God, was over for the day, and he’d managed to focus on the Cellinis’ civil war, euphemistically described as their divorce petition, long enough to avoid disaster for his client. The financial decisions had gone in favor of Mr. Cellini, more because the legal facts were overwhelmingly on his side than because Liam had presented them with any special brilliance. Still, right now he’d take his victories any way he could get them.
He parked his car in the lot at the back of his office building and sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Five hours had passed since he learned he had a daughter and he still had no idea what he was going to say to Chloe Hamilton except that he wanted to see Sophie. He felt supremely ill-equipped to assume the role of father but, despite his fury at having been tricked into parenthood, he had no intention of taking out his anger on Sophie.
His child. His daughter. The unbelievable refrain started up again. Jesus, there was absolutely no way to make those words sound anything less than insane.
His cell phone rang just as he was getting out of the car and he answered automatically, his attention focused four years in the past on a sexual encounter with Chloe that—surprisingly—he could remember quite clearly.
“Liam Raven.”
A woman responded, her voice tinged with laughter. “Golly gee, big brother, your bark is getting worse by the day! If you always sound this fierce, it’s a wonder you have any clients left!”
“Megan! How are you doing? Sorry to sound so abrupt. I was distracted.” At almost any other time, Liam would have been delighted to hear from his sister. Megan was nearly nine years his junior, so their childhoods had followed separate paths, but he’d always loved her and he was pleased that she seemed so happy in her new relationship with Adam Fairfax. The Fairfaxes weren’t the family he’d have chosen for Megan to marry into, to put it mildly, but in his more rational moments, he realized Adam was no more responsible for the multiple sins of Ron Raven than anyone else caught up in the fallout from Ron’s bigamy. Adam, after all, couldn’t help the fact that he was Avery Fairfax’s younger brother.
Liam shook his head, trying to clear away the fuzziness of shock lingering from the morning’s revelations. He wanted to respond to his sister without alerting her that anything was wrong, but Chloe’s news was so much at the forefront of his thoughts that he was in danger of blurting out something about Sophie if he didn’t watch himself. He loved Megan and respected both her intelligence and her integrity, but he was more in the habit of protecting her than asking for her advice. Besides, he had no intention of telling anyone—friends or family—that he had a child until he’d decided exactly what he was going to make of his relationship with Sophie. He saw no point in adding more complications to an emotional stew that was already overspiced with his own neuroses.
He grabbed his briefcase and tucked the phone between his cheek and his shoulder, using his hip to shut the car door. “It’s good to hear from you, Meg. How are you?”
“Hmm, let’s see. Busy at work. Missing Wyoming. Hopelessly in love with Adam. Wishing he lived about a thousand miles farther away from his parents. Maybe a million miles farther away, actually.”
He made a sympathetic noise. “That would mean living on the moon, Meggie.”
“Yeah, well, that would work for me.” Megan’s laugh was rueful.
“I take it Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax Senior are still less than thrilled that their favorite son is engaged to Ron Raven’s daughter?” Liam pressed the button to summon the elevator, which was currently ten floors away.
“Less than thrilled barely begins to describe it. Try frothing-at-the-mouth furious, interspersed with occasional patches of icy disdain just for variety. They’d have a hard time reconciling themselves to the fact that their Southern gentleman son is living in sin with a damn Yankee, but the fact that I’m Ron Raven’s daughter sends them over the top.”
“They’ll come around, Meggie. Eventually, they’ll get tired of hating our father.”
“Will they?” She sighed. “Is that happy day going to arrive this century, do you think?”
“It’ll arrive when their daughter and granddaughter stop hurting because of what Dad did to them. You need to give everyone a few more weeks, Meg. It’s only three months since Avery Fairfax learned that her supposed husband was dead and that her marriage had never existed as a legal reality.”
“You’re right, I need to be patient, which is never my strong suit,” she said. “I guess I’m feeling extra sensitive because Adam and I were in Wyoming with Mom last week and the tension at the ranch just never let up. And then we flew back to Georgia and found even more hostility waiting for us. After a while, having your prospective in-laws fall silent every time you walk into the room gets kind of old. Adam gets it from Mom in Wyoming and I get a double dose from the Fairfaxes in Georgia.”
Liam was sorry to hear that their mother still wasn’t at ease with Megan’s choice of fiancé. He would have been more than willing to put in a positive word for Adam and his sister, but his own relationship with their mother was sufficiently rocky that interference from him was likely to do as much harm as good.
“Dad managed to mess with everyone’s emotions,” he said, giving another frustrated push to the elevator call button. “Even though Mom likes Adam and wants you to be happy, it still must seem to her as if you’re siding with the enemy.”
“You’re so right.” Megan smothered another sigh. “She tries hard, but she’s really uncomfortable when she has to spend time alone with Adam. If she finds herself in the same room with him, without a cushion of other people around, it’s obvious she’s thinking about just one thing—”
“The fact that Adam is not only a Fairfax, but Avery’s youngest brother.” Liam had no trouble finishing his sister’s sentence.
“You’ve got it. I know it’s hard for Mom to accept that Dad was the only villain in what happened, but he was. Avery and Adam were both his victims, just like she was.”
“Mom will accept that soon. She’s coming around.” Liam hoped he was speaking the truth. “Give it a bit more time, and I’m betting Mom won’t see Avery’s brother every time she looks at Adam. She’ll see Megan’s fiancé and a good guy.”
“God, I hope so. By the way, speaking of fiancés—” Megan’s voice turned a little breathless. “Adam and I are thinking of getting married at the beginning of next month. We thought we’d slip away for a few days over the Labor Day weekend.”
“Hey, congratulations! I’ll make sure to clear my calendar.” Despite his general disdain for the married state, Liam was surprisingly happy for his sister. He’d met Adam three times now and really liked the guy. “Will you have the ceremony in Wyoming? At the community church or at the ranch?”
There was a slight pause. “Neither place,” Megan said.
“In Georgia, then?” Liam was careful not to sound surprised by her choice. Megan loved Wyoming and the ranch; he’d simply assumed she would get married there.
“Adam and I can’t get married in Wyoming or in Georgia,” she said, and he could hear the regret in her voice. “And we can’t invite our families to the ceremony. Think about it. If we don’t invite the Fairfax clan, Adam will be sad and his family will be justifiably offended. If we do invite them, especially if we invite Avery, Mom is going to hate every minute of my wedding day.”
She had a valid point, Liam thought grimly. Jeez, what a mess. The elevator finally arrived and he stepped in, pushing the button for the seventh floor. In a perfect world, the Fairfaxes and the Ravens would be so happy for Megan and Adam that the past would have no importance. In the real world, Ron Raven’s bigamy cast a long and chilling shadow. It was unrealistic to expect the two widows to sit in church, smiling benevolently as Ellie’s daughter married Avery’s younger brother. And although Megan hadn’t mentioned anything about the media, unless they hired armed guards to surround the church and the ranch, the whole ceremony would probably end up being filmed for some sleazy tabloid TV show. Ron’s death had become one of those stories that the world of cable refused to let die.
“What are you going to do, then?” he asked. “Do you want to come to Colorado and get married in Denver? It would be easy for me to make all the arrangements and I might even be able to keep them secret, since I’m in the marriage business, so to speak…”
“Thanks. I appreciate the offer, Liam, but we’ve decided the best thing for us is to elope to Vegas.”
In normal circumstances, Vegas would have been just about the last place Megan would have chosen to get married and Liam felt a spurt of resentment on his baby sister’s behalf that the wedding of her dreams could never be. He was so taken aback at the thought of Megan in a wedding chapel on the Vegas strip that for a crucial moment he couldn’t come up with a damn thing to say.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said softly. “Don’t worry, Liam. I’m not regretting the white dress and the flower girls and the endless family conferences about who gets to sit at which table—”
“Why not?” he asked, sending a silent curse in the direction of his dead father, the most recent in a long and useless line of similar curses. “It’s a huge day in your life and it ought to be as special as you can make it.”
“It will be special.” Megan sounded completely sure of herself. “I’ll be marrying Adam, so it’s bound to be wonderful wherever we have the ceremony.”
The elevator clunked to a stop. Liam got out on his floor, amazed by his sister’s quiet exuberance. “You really love the guy, don’t you?”
“Yes, and fortunately he loves me, too.” She laughed. “That kind of puts the where-shall-we-have-the-ceremony issue into perspective. Before I met Adam, I used to fantasize about the perfect wedding. The only problem was that I had this huge hole where I was supposed to have a mental image of the groom. Now I realize the only thing that matters about a wedding is having the right person as your partner when you make your vows. The bridesmaids, the cake, the fancy dress and all the rest of it are basically irrelevant.”
