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He must have frowned.
Because she explained, “The first most wonderful bein’ my aunt Cass. You know all about my aunt Cass, now, don’t you? Blythe told me how you sicced your detectives on all of her friends. How you keep files on folks, how you never, ever trust anyone.”
“Excuse me. There are people whom I trust.”
“Oh, sure. Maybe. After you’ve had your detectives on them, keepin’ track of their every move for ten or twenty years.”
He felt that urge again, to wrap his hands around her pretty neck and squeeze. He spoke more quietly than ever. “You have no idea the kind of precautions a man in my position has to take.”
“You don’t have to take precautions, Jonas. You just do. I mean, all those guards you have out there at that mansion of yours…”
He did not have guards. Not exactly. He employed a skilled and discreet security force to patrol the grounds at Angel’s Crest.
The woman was smirking. “Bel Air is a gated community, with security guards checking out anybody who tries to get in. And then you’ve got that big stone fence around your property. And did I mention that other locked gate smack in the middle of that high stone fence, that gate with the camera that zooms in on anyone who rings to be let in? And is that all? Oh, no. There is more. Because you’ve also got those guys straight out of Men in Black sneakin’ around in the jacaranda trees, talkin’ to each other on their walkie-talkies. I mean, pardon me, Jonas, but you are kind of paranoid.”
“No.” He spoke with extreme patience. “I am not paranoid. I am careful.”
“You are too careful. And I keep thinkin’ that, no matter how much you love Mandy—and I do know that you love her, Jonas—but no matter how much you care for her, she can’t help but be affected by the way you are, by the way you keep people away from you, the way you are so afraid to trust anybody.”
“I am not afraid.” He spoke more forcefully than he meant to.
She actually had the temerity to roll those just-about-green eyes.
Clearly, they were getting nowhere. He said, very quietly, “I want you to take a good, long look at that offer.” He turned to leave.
She spoke to his back. “Jonas, this is pointless. I am not goin’ to—”
“I’ll call you tonight.” He shut the door on her before she could finish whatever it was she had started to say.
He called her at midnight. She answered the phone on the first ring. “What?”
“Did you read it?”
“I did. All the way through to the part about how I give up all claim to custody of Mandy. And then I stopped reading.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not takin’ this offer—which I already told you this afternoon. If you’d only bothered to listen, you could have saved yourself a phone call tonight.”
At that moment, Jonas realized he was truly and completely fed up with this woman. So fed up that he said exactly what he was thinking. “I could ruin you, Emma Lynn Hewitt.”
She gasped. He found the small, shocked sound inordinately satisfying. “I guess that was a threat, huh?”
“Let’s call it a warning.”
“Call it what you want. It won’t work.” There was steel beneath the twang. “A person’s got to stand for somethin’ or she’ll fall for anything. My aunt Cass used to say that.”
Terrific. Now she was going to beat him over the head with clever little sayings from country-western songs. “I could care less what your aunt Cass used to say.”
“Well, all right. Then listen to this. This is what I say. You are not bullyin’ me into doing things your way.”
The problem, Jonas realized then, was that she meant exactly what she said. Damn her.
This couldn’t be happening to him. But it was.
Everyone had a price—except, apparently, Emma Lynn Hewitt. For Emma Lynn Hewitt, no amount would be high enough.
He could break her, financially, and she knew it. Yet even the threat of losing everything she’d worked for wouldn’t make her give in and see things his way. The woman had values. And she was determined to stick by them. She would come to her own decision, in her own time. And whatever that decision was, he was going to have to live with it.
“Oh, Jonas.” Her tone, all at once, had become insultingly gentle. “I do understand why you are how you are. Blythe told me all about it. And it’s no secret anyway. I know it was all over the newspapers back then. Such an awful, terrible thing. I am so sorry, that ugly things like that can happen, that sometimes evil never gets made right. And Blythe, well, you probably know that she blamed herself. She said that her breakdown took her away from you just when you needed her most.”
Jonas put the phone below his chin and sat back in his chair. He looked up at the intricately carved crown moldings overhead.
Emma Hewitt blathered on. “When she was better, she tried to reach out to you. But she said, by then, you’d spent so much time feelin’ all alone that you were used to it. You wouldn’t open up to her. You wouldn’t open up to anyone, you wouldn’t—”
Jonas had heard enough. Very quietly, while she was still talking, he hung up the phone.
After that, Jonas waited. He had finally understood that he had no other choice. He did not call Emma Hewitt or try in any way to contact her again.
Three more days went by. During that time, he found he was coming to grips with the fact that there would be a long court battle.
So be it. Possession was nine-tenths of the law. Mandy lived with him and she would continue to live with him. He could have his lawyers stall and negotiate for years. By the time Emma Hewitt won custody—if, in the end, she did win—Mandy would be all grown-up and running her own life, anyway.
By Monday, one week before the deadline set out in Blythe’s will, Jonas had become certain that he would not hear from the Hewitt woman until the deadline had passed and her lawyer got in touch with his lawyer to begin the custody suit.
That night, she came to him at Angel’s Crest.
Chapter 5
It was eleven-thirty at night and it was raining when Palmer got the call from the gatehouse. The butler found Jonas at his desk in the study.
“Ms. Emma Lynn Hewitt at the main gate, sir.”
Jonas shut the lid on his laptop, aware suddenly of the feel of his own blood, the hot surge of it through his veins. “Tell them I’m expecting her and let security know she’s on the way up.”
“Of course.”
“Show her in here when she gets to the house.”
“I’ll do just that, sir.”
Palmer left him.
Jonas got up and went to the bank of windows nearest the desk. He stared out at the night, at the lacy shadows of the jacarandas moving in the wind and the waving branches of the palms. The hard warm August rain pinged against the leaded-glass panes, glittering as it slithered down.
The study was at the front of the house. After a time, he saw her headlights cut the night. The lights slid past the window where he stood and stopped not far from the front portico. They went dark.
Jonas didn’t move. He waited, standing absolutely still.
Soon enough, he heard the door behind him open. “Ms. Hewitt,” Palmer announced.
Jonas turned.
She stood in the doorway, Palmer close behind her. She wore an ordinary gray raincoat thrown over a curve-hugging shirt of some sort of elasticized lace. The shirt didn’t quite meet the waist of her clinging white bell-bottomed pants. His glance moved down. She wore rain-wet platform sandals on her feet. There was purple polish—polish the same color as the tight lace shirt—on her toes.
“Hello, Jonas.”
He met her gaze. Her eyes were very green right then. And troubled. Raindrops glittered in her pale hair.
“Thank you, Palmer,” Jonas said.
The butler left them.
“I want to see Mandy,” Emma Lynn said.
“She’s asleep.”
“I’m not going to wake her up. I just…I have to see her.”
“Why?”
“I meant what I told you, Jonas. I have been making up my mind.”
“Fine. Why is it necessary for you to see my sister?”
She seemed at a loss for a reason, only looked at him, an urgent kind of look, through those troubled green eyes.
He left the window and approached her. Her eyes widened as he got close, as if she feared his nearness. But she didn’t step back.
He went past her. “This way.”
Emma followed Jonas out to the entry hall, with its ebony-inlaid walnut floor and its coffered and arched cathedral ceiling rising three stories high. The grand foyer, Blythe had always called it.
Jonas began to climb the curving staircase. Emma fell in step behind him.
Mandy’s rooms were on the second floor. Jonas went past the dark playroom and entered the bedroom. Lightning flashed once, bright and hard, outside. For a split second, the yellow and blue walls stenciled with dragonflies and dancing frogs were cast into sharp relief.
Then the room plunged into shadow again. The rain drummed away outside, a low sort of sighing sound.
Mandy had graduated from her crib to a big white four-poster several months ago. She lay in the center of the roomy bed, on her side, the quilted yellow and green comforter covering her to her waist, both hands tucked beneath her plump chin. Her thick, silky curls looked very dark against the yellow pillow.
Emma tiptoed to the bed and stood looking down, painfully aware of Jonas, so silent and watchful, in the shadows behind her.
Mandy yawned, then let out a small, contented sigh. She rolled to her back, flopping her arms up and out, so that her hands lay palms-up on the pillow at either side of her head. Her little fists tightened, then went lax again.
As Emma stared at those small, perfect hands, it almost seemed she could hear Blythe’s voice in her mind….
“Am I crazy, Em? Am I totally irresponsible, to want a baby so much at this time in my life?”
“No, you are not crazy. Not crazy at all.”
It had been a Saturday. The Saturday after Thanksgiving. They’d been Christmas shopping. And they’d stopped in at a Mexican restaurant on Melrose for lunch.
Blythe had leaned toward Emma across their table, her face earnest, her voice low. “I want…I guess I want a chance to do right by a child, to help someone grow up and to do a good job of it. I wasn’t there, when it mattered, for Jonas.” She sat back, her eyes suddenly far away and dark with pain. “And with my other baby, I never even had a chance.”
Emma was the one leaning closer then. “Blythe, don’t do this to yourself. What happened was not your fault. Not in any way.”
But Blythe shook her head. “I could have been stronger. I should have been stronger. Jonas needed me then. And I failed him terribly.”
Emma had said what Aunt Cass would have said. “You can’t live in yesterday. You can only live right now.” Then she’d added what she really thought. “And right now, today, you would make a wonderful mother.”
“Oh, do you think so?”
“You bet.”
Blythe looked so young at that moment, sitting back in the booth, a soft smile on her face—but then, she had always looked years younger than her real age. And she’d been blessed with lots of energy. Until the illness that claimed her so suddenly, she was a person who just brimmed with life.
Emma asked, “But could you? I mean, aren’t there laws about how old you can be?”
Blythe picked up her water glass and raised it, as if in a toast. “Money and influence do have their uses.” She set the glass down without drinking from it. “However, there is no getting around the problem of Jonas. He would be furious.”
Emma dipped a chip in salsa and popped it into her mouth. “Well, fine. Let him be furious. It is not his decision.”
“But if anything happened to me in the next few years, he could end up being the baby’s guardian.”
“Blythe. Nothin’ is going to happen to you.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But if something did happen, you and I both know that Jonas is not emotionally equipped to bring up a child. He would need help, Emma.”
Emma crunched another chip. “Now, come on. You weren’t listenin’ to me, were you? I said that nothin’ is going to happen to—”
“Would you be there? That is what I’m asking you, Emma. It’s a great deal to ask, and I know it. But it’s very important to me. To think that I could count on you to help out, to give Jonas a little…guidance, if something happened to me.”
On the bed, Mandy sighed again and turned her darling little face toward the far wall. Emma stared at the curve of her beautiful cheek.
Would you be there?
Emma had looked across the booth at her friend and said, “Yes. You know that I would. If it ever comes to that—which it will not—I will be there to help out.”
Emma had said yes. Yes, after all, is what a person should always try to say to a friend. It had been a promise. A promise she’d been foolishly certain that she would never have to keep…
Emma turned from the sleeping child. Jonas was waiting for her in the shadows. She nodded. He gestured for her to go ahead of him. She did, as far as the upstairs hall. Then he took the lead again. They went back the way they’d come, down the curving stairway, through the grand foyer, along another hallway to the room the butler had called the study, with its beautiful rugs, inviting velvet-covered chairs and pretty jewel-paned windows.
Jonas shut the door. “Take off your coat. Have a seat.”
“No. I won’t stay long.”
He stared at her, a probing, knowing look that caused her stomach to go all jittery. She shivered.
