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“Nice, isn’t it?” Sutton said from the far end of the long room, where he waited in a doorway. “I used to live here myself.”
“You did?” Perhaps that accounted for his proprietary air. Still, Gillian didn’t like it. He rubbed her wrong; the vibrations he’d left behind would bother her, too. Frowning, she followed him into the bedroom, and stopped short in delight.
The end wall was mostly glass, a gigantic Palladian window that looked out on the side lawn, then over the distant back wall. Beyond that all was blue—robin’s egg sky, a slash of aquamarine sea.
“Yes, I rented this place for a month this spring, before I moved in with Lara.”
So their relationship was quite new. Must have blossomed almost overnight, given that Lara had spent most of her spring and summer in hospital. One of those sickbed romances—he’d wooed her when her resistance was at its lowest, chocolate and flowers and reading to the invalid? “I see,” she said evenly. He’d set her box of clothes down on the bed. The top flaps, which she’d interlocked, had somehow come undone. She dumped her own boxes beside it. “What did you mean by ‘a bad night’? Pain?” She straightened to find his eyes locked on her face.
“Nightmares,” he said bluntly.
“Oh.” Yes, she could imagine that. She shivered, and watched him note it. Why was he staring like that? The memory of his arm sliding around her returned abruptly: She’d put any notion that he might have been making a pass aside after his obvious attempt to block Lara’s hiring her. Rationally, one action didn’t follow the other. If Trace was attracted, then why would he object to her working at Wood- . wind? He wouldn’t. Since he had objected, therefore that fumble at the windows had not been a pass.
Now, with his eyes lingering on her mouth, she wasn’t so sure of her logic. “Er, there’s lots more in the car.” She ducked out the door.
They brought up a second load, Trace in the lead again. He swung her suitcase onto the bed, then opened a sliding door to reveal a closet. “There’re plenty of hangers. Why don’t you hand me your things and I’ll hang them up.”
Funny, he didn’t look in the least domestic. “Thanks, but I’d rather do it myself.” Later, without an unblinking audience.
Her words hung between them in the small room, a little too emphatic, a little too prim. Maybe she was wrong to take offense. Maybe this was no more than the kind of service a slightly younger man grew used to giving an older, richer woman. She found herself wondering for the first time what Sutton did for a living.
His smile deepened at the corners, but he didn’t rush to fill the uncomfortable silence. So she did. “It’s just that I’ve been living crunched into a tiny apartment with too many roommates.” When she’d taken the place back in May, she’d signed on to share a two-bedroom apartment with its original tenant. Then Debbie had lost her job. To pay the rent, she’d taken in another two girls, college sophomores in Newport to party for the summer. “Dirty dishes in the sink, people coming and going at all hours or, worse, declaring parties at all hours. Laundry hanging all over the bathroom.” And Michele, who’d decided she preferred Gillian’s clothes to her own and who borrowed without asking. “It’s been too much togetherness by half. So it’ll be heaven doing for myself for a change.”
Trace cocked his head. “Let me guess. You’re an only child.”
One minute he doesn’t like me, the next he wants to know all about me. She was tempted to brush him off, but she didn’t need an enemy at Woodwind. Lara’s desire to hire her had overruled her lover’s opposition. Still, Gillian didn’t know by what margin. Better to play it safe. Try to win him over, too.
“Not quite,” she said lightly, leading him out of the bedroom and back toward the stairs. “I have a brother.” By adoption. “Chris. But he’s fourteen years older than I.” And when her adoptive parents had divorced back when Gillian was eight, Chris had gone with his father. She had stayed with Eleanor Scott—her adoptive mother—and had wondered for years why her father, Victor Scott, had dropped out of her life so completely.
Because I was never his in the first place! Because it was Mom who wanted to adopt a child, not him—he had Chris by a previous marriage and Chris was quite enough. So many mysteries of her childhood had come clear when she opened that safe-deposit box.
“And Chris lives back in Houston along with the rest of your family?” Trace prodded, coming down the stairs at her heels.
Houston. She hadn’t told him she came from there. He read my résumé, which listed Houston as her previous residence and the location of her last two jobs. “Oh, he’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere,” she said with a smile over her shoulder. “He’s a delivery captain. Moves other people’s yachts around.”
There wasn’t much family beyond that to claim, in Houston or anywhere. Aunt Susan, Victor Scott’s sister out in San Diego. And Ed Mahler, the lovely loony man who had married her mother when Gillian was fifteen and had adopted her, never knowing she was adopted already. He had been as thunderstruck as she at Eleanor’s deception. Ed was an engineer in the merchant marine, and after her mother’s death, he’d signed on for a regular run on a tanker between Kuwait and New Jersey.
Reaching the car, Gillian found herself still smarting at Trace’s invasion of her privacy. It was silly to be so irritated. Perhaps he’d helped Lara cull all the applicants, deciding which were worth an interview. Still, his big hands on a paper that described her life...she didn’t like it. “So what about you?” she said recklessly as she opened the trunk. “Any siblings?” Two could play the prying game.
She looked up to find a distinct frown on his face. You’d rather question than be questioned? Good. She cocked her head at him inquiringly. I bet you’re the youngest brother, with two older sisters. You’re comfortable hanging around with older women. Pleasing them.
Trace accepted her challenge with a wry smile and said, “Three. A younger brother and two even younger sisters.”
So much for her betting instincts. “Then that makes you the responsible, conscientious one.” she observed. And it would account for his air of command. The eldest was always the kid left in charge. “And what is Trace, a nickname your family gave you?” Might as well keep him on the run once she had him there.
He pulled her portfolio and the big wooden box she used for a paint kit out of the trunk. “It’s short for Tracy,” he said amiably, and turned to face her. “And what does the S stand for—your middle name?”
Touché! she thought wryly. He wasn’t one to run far. S stood for two names in one. Sarah and Scott. But Sarah was the name Lara had given her at birth—Gillian knew that from the papers her adoptive mother had bequeathed her—and then apparently her adoptive parents had retained it. Simply because they liked the name Sarah? Or as some sort of salute to Lara’s wishes?
Scott was the surname of her adoptive parents at the time of Gillian’s adoption. The name she’d refused to give up in a fit of teenage defiance when her mother married Ed Mahler.
So Sarah Scott was how she’d signed her letter last year, when she first wrote to Lara asking if they might be related. And Gillian had no intention of risking exposure by giving it now. Probably she should have changed the S to something else on her job application, but all her ID showed her as Gillian S. Mahler.
She met Trace’s eyes and realized that her hesitation had stretched for a minute or more. That he stood motionless, his face as intent as a cat’s at a mouse hole.
“My middle name?” She smiled. “S stands for Seymour.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Now, TAKE A DEEP BREATH,” Lara laughingly advised, as she paused, hand on a doorknob. Despite the nightmares Trace had mentioned, she seemed in fine spirits this morning. Trace and Gillian had collected her from her bedroom suite, where she had taken a late breakfast. She’d led them on a leisurely tour of the public areas of the house, the high point of which, to Gillian, had been an exercise room, complete with lap pool, in the basement that she might use whenever she pleased. The conclusion of the orientation was Gillian’s new office, located upstairs in the same wing as Lara’s suite, all the way at its western end. “And remember,” Lara continued as she opened the door, “it isn’t as bad as it looks.”
“It’s worse,” Trace lazily assured her. Apparently having nothing better to do, he’d tagged along on the tour and Gillian wasn’t sure if she was grateful or annoyed. On the one hand, his presence diluted the intensity of her first extended interaction with her mother, so that she wasn’t constantly “onstage,” having to pick and choose her words every minute. But on the other hand, his presence prevented her from connecting with Lara on a more intimate level.
“Hush,” Lara commanded as she opened the door.
“If this is bad,” Gillian murmured, following her into the office, “I don’t know if I could stand good. It just might kill me!” The large room ended in a gigantic, three-sided bay window, with tiny stained-glass diamond panes trimming its upper reaches; at eye level, half-moon expanses of plate glass framed the outrageously splendid view. A long cushioned seat was built in below each facet of the window; a coffee table was placed in the alcove thus created. Gillian could see the tops of the rosebushes that edged Cliff Walk peeking above the estate walls, then 180 degrees of ocean glittering in the noonday sun.
“It is gorgeous, isn’t it?” Lara agreed. “This used to be Richard‘s—my husband’s—office. I never did understand how he could write here. But then, he used to sit with his back to the view.” Her smile wavered for a moment. She swallowed, tipped her head in a movement that seemed to say, Oh, well, and continued. “It was Joya—my stepdaughter—who turned the desk to face the windows last year when she took over.”
Her stepdaughter! Somehow Gillian had thought, if she hadn’t been told by now, that Lara had no children.
“Up until last year, I’d had the same assistant for nine years. But when Beckie left to be married, Joya asked for the job...” Lara went on, glancing around the room with a faint frown.
“And you can see what a good job she’s been doing,” said Trace, nodding at the boxes lined along one wall.
A dozen boxes at least, Gillian estimated, filled with—“Yikes! Is that all—”
“Fan mail,” Lara said with a look of comic guilt. “Still want the job?”
“Well, yes.” More than ever. Lara wasn’t like anything she’d expected. There was some mystery here that needed unraveling. “Who’s afraid of a little fan mail?” And now was probably not the time to admit that she had suffered all her life from mild—okay, moderate—dyslexia. Reading required intense concentration and exacted fierce headaches. “Am I looking at a week’s worth of mail or—”
“Oh, just today’s,” Trace assured her blandly.
Lara elbowed him in the ribs. “Sit down and hush up before you scare Gillian off the job, you brute!”
“Your wish, oh heart, is my...” Trace retired obediently to a window seat. He selected a catalog from a pile arranged on the coffee table, opened it, and seemed instantly absorbed.
Lara turned back to Gillian with a smile. “It’s six months’ or more accumulation. Joya fell behind some time before last Christmas and the poor darling never caught up again.”
“Though she tried valiantly,” Trace murmured without looking up. He turned a page.
“She was only working part-time,” Lara defended her stepdaughter. “She and Toby—her brother—were attending college here in town, at Salve Regina...”
A brother, as well! Gillian’s stepbrother, also, or was Toby Lara and Richard Corday’s son? Which would mean that he was Gillian’s half brother. She found herself hoping keenly for the second alternative. Her own adoptive brother had been plucked from her daily life with her parents’ divorce. She would have liked a full-time sibling or two.
“What with her midterms and a paper she had to write...” murmured Lara, still defending the absent Joya. Trace rustled his catalog too loudly. Lara shrugged. “Anyway, all these letters need answering. So here’s how you go about it.”
She selected a letter from the last box in line along the wall, opened it and pulled out a printed get-well card featuring a doleful rabbit on crutches, his ears bent, his head bandaged. She laughed to herself and held it out to Gillian. “They’re filming the fall season’s episodes of Searching for Sarah already. Since I won’t be returning for another six months or so, the scriptwriters have written me out of the story. They’ve decided that I had a dreadful accident while skiing in Switzerland, and no one knows if I’ll ever walk again—art imitating life, but not too closely, thank God.”
She lifted the card from Gillian’s fingers. “Anyway, somehow Soap Opera Digest got wind of that plot twist and ran it as their lead story last month. Ever since it came out, half my mail is get-well cards and the other half is outraged complaints.”
Either way, Gillian’s job was to respond. Lara switched on the computer on the desk and showed her the various form letters. As time and inspiration permitted, she should add a sentence or two to customize the form letter, thus making the fan feel she was receiving a personal response. “I wish there were time to send each of them an answer from scratch, but there just isn’t. Still I’m really grateful for their concern. For their...loyalty. Some of them have been writing me for years. Which reminds me—”
Lara showed Gillian how to check to see if the fan was new—in which case the name was to be added to a database Lara maintained, along with a code that showed which form letter she’d received—or if the fan was an old one, then Gillian should review the file to make sure a repeat response didn’t get sent.
Autographed photos of Lara were stored in this drawer, prestamped envelopes in that. “And that’s about it for the fan mail,” Lara said at last. “Except for the...special cases.”
“The reality impaired,” Trace murmured.
Lara rounded on him fiercely. “They’re not all—”
“There?” he supplied gently. “Any woman who thinks she might be Sarah? A fictional long-lost daughter of a fictional Dr. Daley, star of a prime-time soap opera? Anyone who believes that isn’t playing with a full deck, Lara.”
Gillian had wondered herself, of course. Dr. Laura Daley was fiction. Lara’s maiden name was Laura Bailey. Both women, the fictional one and the factual, had sold their babies—one for the money to go to med school, the other for a red sports car. And it was Lara’s own husband who’d created the Dr. Daley character. Why? The story was just too juicy to pass up? But how could Lara have allowed Corday to use her own life as fodder for a soap opera?
On the other hand, people did it all the time, selling their real-life tragedies or scandals to TV, to be dramatized as a movie of the week. So why couldn’t Lara sell her own story—sell me—all over again?
“They’re a little confused,” Lara admitted, regaining her good temper. “So we try to straighten them out gently, pointing out that Searching for Sarah isn’t based on reality.”
Except that it is. Almost. Gillian found herself nodding to hide her confusion.
“I have a form letter for the special cases,” Lara went on, “but those I handle personally. If you run across any letter where the fan thinks she might be Sarah, you bring that right to me and I’ll deal with it, okay?”
Straightening them out gently, she’d said. Except that when Gillian had written Lara a year ago to say that maybe, just maybe, she might be Lara’s birth daughter, Sarah Scott, Lara’s response had been ferocious, not gentle: If I didn’t want you when you were born, why would I want you now?
“Laaaara. Lara-darling?” The owner of that caroling soprano paused in the office doorway. Gillian recognized the blonde in the Range Rover, who had coolly nodded her through the gates on the day of her interview. This morning she radiated warmth. “Oh, there you are, darling!” Her blue eyes switched to Gillian and widened. “And you must be my poor, poor replacement!”
“Gillian, this is my daughter Joya,” Lara said, and completed the introductions while the girl glided across the hardwood floors to offer her hand. Her palm was marshmallow soft, her grip fashionably limp; her inch-long mauve fingernails made shaking hands a bit of a hazard. Gillian could see why she’d gotten behind in her paperwork.
“Did you need something, sweetie?” Lara asked.
The girl turned a dazzling smile upon her. “Just your car for a little bitty while? Stupid Toby took the Range Rover back to the dealer. He says it’s lost its new-car smell and the dealer should have some sort of spray to make it smell new again. I mean, I ask you, so it smells like it’s three months old instead of three days? Who cares? Anyway, I told Duffy and Pooh I’d meet them for lunch out at Bailey’s Beach, so could I pretty, pretty please take your—”
“No,” said Trace from the window seat. “I may need it.”
Sunshine gave way to storm clouds in the blink of an eye, as Joya whirled to face him. “Well, too bad! I asked first!” She glanced over her shoulder at Lara. “Didn’t I, darling?”
Lara bit her lip, glancing from one to the other. Trace shook his head slowly and Joya caught the movement from the corner of her eye. Her head snapped around.
“You stay out of this, Trace! It’s none of your business.”
“We could drive you, I suppose,” Lara said. She put a soothing hand on the girl’s arm.
Joya shook it off and backed away. “I don’t want to be driven to lunch like a snot-nosed child. I—”
“Then stop acting like one,” suggested Trace.
Joya stamped her foot. “You shut up!”
Gillian drifted back a step...another, then turned. If there had been some way to creep out of the room she’d have taken it gladly. Next best option was to act as though this ugly little scene wasn’t happening, go about her business. She stooped by the last box in line and examined its contents.
Behind her, Trace’s voice overrode Lara’s placating murmur. “If these so-called friends of yours can’t be bothered to drive a mile out of their way to pick you up, then call a taxi. You can afford it.”
“Trace—” Lara interposed on a note of pleading.
“At least I pay my own way here,” Joya declared in a vicious singsong, advancing on him. She snatched up the catalog he’d set aside, flipped its pages at random. “Unlike some of us who just lounge around, preening and flexing—”
Trace laughed aloud. Gillian chose a letter from the box at random. This one was a manila envelope and seemed to contain something thicker than a letter. A gift from an admiring fan? She could ask Lara to show her what to do in cases like that. Lara looked as if she’d welcome a distraction, but Gillian hadn’t the nerve. Joya was standing over Trace, her hands clenched as though she wanted to smash his upturned, gently smiling face but didn’t dare. Frustrated as the girl appeared, she might lash out at the next person who spoke or moved.
“Flexing and preening and sucking up to older women. Getting Lara to buy you goodies: What are you shopping for this time, Trace, another set of custom golf clubs? Or were you a very good boy last night? You deserve a gold Rolex this morning?”
“Joya, that’s enough!” Lara said sharply.
Gillian stood, opened the envelope. Any distraction was better than this.
“Enough? It’s not half enough,” Joya snarled. “It’s time somebody said something! If Daddy could see this—this big lapdog who’s taken his place. I bet he’s spinning in his grave! Spinning and puking!”
The package held something wrapped in several folds of a plastic bag. Pulling it out and unwrapping it, Gillian drifted to Lara’s side. From the bag she removed a mottled white-and-brown card, folded loosely around some oblong object. “Mrs. Corday, excuse me, but this letter contained some—”
“If you don’t mind, honey,” Joya snapped, “you can wait your turn! I’m—”
“Stop!” called Trace, lunging to his feet and swinging Joya out of his way—just as Gillian shook the item free of the card and into her hand.
Her gasp feathered out, loud in the sudden silence.
White fur...the hardness of bone beneath... the stench of rotten meat. Trace caught her wrist and turned it, flipping the object off her palm and onto the desktop.
“Oh, gross!” cried Joya.
“Oh,” said Lara, as she sank onto the office chair.
LARA’S “GIFT” WAS THE FOOT of some small animal. Rabbit’s foot, Gillian thought with revulsion. But not a commercial, sanitized rabbit’s foot you could buy on a key chain. Horrible as she thought those were, this was much worse. A homemade job, it looked like, with dark stains on the soft fur.
She became aware that Trace still held her wrist. Warm and oddly comforting, his fingers curled around her. She could feel her own pulse, slamming against the base of his thumb. And his slower, heavier beat, like an answer you could depend on.
“You’re not going to faint on me, are you?” he asked absently, looking up from the rabbit’s foot into her eyes.
“Of course not,” she said, though she did feel—detached. Floating a few inches off the floor. As if she could tip forward and fall into his deep hazel eyes—pools of slate green spangled with gold and gray. Aware, also, that even if her knees did buckle, he was strong enough to hold her upright.
“Of course you’re not,” he murmured on an odd note, something almost with an edge to it. “And what have you got there?” He reached and caught her other wrist and lifted it, scowled at the bloodstained card she still clutched. “Drop it.”
The wrapper fell to the desk and he released her at last. She stood, rubbing her wrists. Trace used the eraser ends of two pencils off the desk to push open the curled card and pin it flat to the blotter. Lara wheeled her chair up beside her to watch. Joya also crowded closer.
On the inner surface of the bloody card were printed the words:
Lara-mommy! I saw this and thought of YOU. You could use some luck—maybe more than you know? See you SOOOOOOON. Your loving SARAH XXX.
“Gross!” Joya repeated. She sounded more excited than repelled.
