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Miranda smiled. “It might be easier to decide on a name if you’d let the doctor tell you what its sex is.”
“I like surprises.”
“That’s good, because I’ve brought you one.” She held out a small, silver-wrapped box the size that jewelry came in. Her lips still smiled, but her eyes were uncertain.
Emma felt a now-familiar stab of irritation. “That’s very nice of you, Miranda, but you really have to stop buying me things all the time. It makes me uncomfortable. You’re already giving me an allowance—”
“This isn’t anything expensive, truly.” She offered the box again. “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to wear it.”
Emma had long since realized that her idea of expensive and Miranda’s were vastly different. Reluctantly she held her hand out and summoned a smile. “How can I refuse?”
The box held jewelry, just as Emma had suspected—a necklace with a dainty silver chain. “Oh…how pretty!” She held it up. The pendant was a stylized yin-yang symbol.
“I hoped you would like it. You seem very interested in that sort of thing.”
Emma felt touched—and guilty. Miranda was trying so hard, and Emma hated to keep disappointing her. But what Miranda wanted from Emma wasn’t possible. “I’ll wear it tonight. Would you put it on for me?”
She sat back down at the dressing table. It was a pretty, totally feminine piece of furniture, covered at the moment with the detritus from Emma’s attempt at applying makeup. The mirror showed her Miranda’s face as the woman moved up behind her.
They looked nothing alike. Their hair was different, their eyes were different, their mouths, the very shape of their faces…but the nose on the older woman’s face was a lot like hers. Straight and a little too short.
It should have been a comforting discovery. After years of looking for her features on the faces of strangers, Emma ought to be glad to find her nose on the face of the woman who had given birth to her.
She wasn’t.
When Miranda bent to fasten the necklace, her fingers brushed Emma’s nape. Feelings rushed in—crowded, confused feelings that made her want rather frantically to get away. She summoned a smile. “I love it.”
“Maybe I could fix your hair.” Miranda touched one curl lightly. “You’d look lovely in a French braid, and I have a little silver clasp we could use.”
Something strong and ugly flashed through Emma. Something she had no intention of acknowledging or encouraging. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Great. I can never do anything with my hair.”
It was going to be a long night.
The party was being given by her uncle, Ryan Fortune, at his ranch outside the city in Red Rock, Texas. Emma rode there in the comfort of plush leather seats with classical music throbbing gently from the car speakers.
Miranda didn’t speak much once they got in the car, and Kane and Allison spoke mostly to each other. and Emma was glad. Making conversation could be a strain with all those undercurrents swirling around.
There would be undercurrents at the party, too, but not such personal ones. It was a big “welcome to the family” bash for her, Justin, and two other Fortune cousins—Sam “Storm” Pearce and Jonas Goodfellow—that the family had recently discovered, thanks to the efforts of Flynn Sinclair.
That man sure got around. He’d made his way into Emma’s thoughts far too often in the past eight weeks.
It was only natural that she would think of him sometimes, she told herself as the lights of San Antonio faded behind them. He’d been the catalyst for some important events in her life. It was no wonder she kept remembering that deep, laconic voice.
Elmo—or maybe Abigail—gave her a hard kick in the ribs in rebuttal.
Okay, so maybe she thought of Flynn a little too often. But there was no harm in a fantasy or two. She wasn’t really interested in the man, no matter what effect he’d had on her unruly hormones. He was a P.I., for heaven’s sake. One step removed from a bounty hunter.
Like Steven.
Emma’s shoulders tensed against the rush of fear. She had to stop reacting that way. It had been months since she’d fled San Diego in the dead of night, and Steven was very good at finding people who didn’t want to be found. Surely, if he had been determined to track her down, he would have done it by now.
No, she wouldn’t think about Steven. He was part of her past, not her present or her future. Better to think about all her new relatives. Fortunately, she’d already met a few of them—like her uncle, Ryan Fortune.
She tasted the phrase in her mind: her uncle, Ryan Fortune. Uncle Ryan. It had an odd ring to it. Odd, but pleasant.
He had come to see her soon after she arrived in San Antonio. There was something very solid about Ryan Fortune, a grounded quality she hadn’t expected in a man with his wealth. She liked him. He didn’t push. He hadn’t so much as raised an eyebrow over her being pregnant and unmarried, either.
She glanced at the woman sitting beside her in the silver Mercedes sedan. Miranda didn’t mean to push. Whatever she had been like when she was young, back when she ran away from home and gave birth to two babies she didn’t keep, she was a nice woman now. A bit too perfect, maybe, but Emma didn’t hold that against her. And Miranda was clearly delighted about the baby.
All in all, Emma thought she could like Miranda, too—if only the woman would stop trying to be her mother. It was too late for that. Years and years too late.
Ryan and Lily Fortune’s house at the Double Crown Ranch looked like an old-time Spanish hacienda. It was large, lovely and easy to get lost in.
Not that she was really lost, Emma assured herself as she paused at one end of a hallway she was almost sure she’d seen before. Just turned around. She could hear voices, the sound muted by the thick walls of the house into a sort of human ocean, rising and falling in the distance. She must be headed in the right direction.
Of course, she could have asked for directions. She’d stumbled across the kitchen in her wanderings; she should have asked one of the people who’d been clattering pans and dishes. But she hadn’t. Instead, she’d hurried off in another direction. It was absurd, but she hadn’t wanted to be seen. She felt guilty for having misplaced herself. As if she had no business being here—not here in this house, not here with these people.
Well. She paused and shook her head. It didn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out what that meant.
Emma trailed her fingers lightly over the stuccoed wall beside her. Would she ever feel as if she belonged in these grand surroundings? As if these strangers were really family?
Probably not, she thought wistfully. She wasn’t good at making permanent connections with people. But…her hand stole to her stomach, her fingers spreading to cup the curve protectively. A tiny knee or elbow butted against her palm as her baby shifted inside her.
Emma might never belong here. But her baby would.
She smiled. Alice—or maybe Edward—would grow up knowing these people, maybe running down this hall when the two of them came for a visit, small, bare feet slapping the tile floor. Emma’s child wouldn’t even notice the niches in the thick walls that displayed pottery and other art objects, much less think about what they cost. They would all be familiar. As with all familiar things, they would be comfortingly invisible.
But it was foreign to Emma, strange and obtrusive. She remembered the objects better than the people—like the solid oak front door, the huge fireplace. She’d tried to keep track of faces and names, but there were so many of them, an overabundance of strange new relatives.
Not that everyone here was related to her. Some were relatives by marriage, others were friends or neighbors of the family. But there were an awful lot of Fortunes. Some, like her, were Fortunes by birth, but they bore other names. Like her new cousins, “Storm” and Jonas.
They had been fathered by her Uncle Ryan’s black-sheep brother, Cameron, who had died several years ago. Emma had yet another new cousin, courtesy of her Uncle Cameron’s womanizing, but Holly Douglas wouldn’t be at the party tonight. She refused to leave her home in Alaska.
Jonas had brought a bottle of port for their host—no, for Uncle Ryan, she corrected herself mentally. It was a courteous gesture…and one that hadn’t occurred to Emma.
She sighed. She didn’t know how to act with these people.
The sound of voices was growing louder, reassuring her that she was on her way back. She turned a corner and caught a glimpse of someone vanishing into one of the rooms that opened off the next short stretch of hallway.
She grimaced. Maybe a lot of the names and faces had blurred, but she had no trouble matching that particular brassy blond head to a face and a name. Thank goodness Leeza hadn’t seen her. One encounter with Lloyd Carter’s current wife had been more than enough. The woman was as sticky-sweet as strawberry jam, with big, bouncy breasts and big, sly eyes shadowed by inch-thick mascara.
Leeza had cornered Emma earlier and made a big deal about how she’d urged her husband to hire Flynn Sinclair to find Emma and Justin. She’d cooed about how her heart had been wrenched to think of “you poor little things” growing up without a mother.
Phooey. That woman had never done anything for anyone unless there was something in it for her.
Emma hurried down the hall, wanting to be somewhere else when Leeza came out of that door. What was the woman doing, anyway? Maybe she was lost. That was the charitable explanation; Leeza must be as much of a stranger to this house as Emma was. Somehow Emma doubted it, though. More likely, she was prying. She was the sort who would make an excuse to use your bathroom so she could peek inside the medicine cabinet, hoping to find some interesting dirt to sling.
Emma had nearly reached the arched entry to the great room, where people in fancy dress were milling around, talking and laughing and making Emma’s head pound.
Oh, Lord. She really didn’t want to go back in there. Normally Emma made friends easily. New faces, new places—she was used to both, and good at making herself at home wherever she was. And she genuinely liked people. She considered mingling with strangers an opportunity, not a chore. Normally.
But nothing seemed to be normal anymore.
Well, she wasn’t going to hang out in the hallway all night. She took a deep breath and plunged back into the crowd.
She made it three feet before someone stopped her.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you.”
She knew that voice—deep, rumbly, as if each word rolled up from somewhere deep inside the big, broad chest of the man. She turned, her heartbeat picking up speed. “Flynn. I mean, Mr. Sinclair. I wondered if you would be here tonight. Ryan told me you’d been invited.”
He was too big. That was, once again, the first thing she noticed about the man—his size. Emma didn’t like oversize men with tough-guy faces. Not even when they had Superman hair, black and shiny as wet Magic Marker, with an unruly curl that parted company with the rest of his hair to make an adorable little squiggle on his forehead.
“Flynn works fine.” The corner of his mouth kicked up in the cocky grin she remembered. “I’ve been hoping I’d see you tonight.”
He had? “Well—that’s flattering.” An elbow jabbing her rib cage from inside made her rub her stomach soothingly, reminding her that he hadn’t meant that the way she wanted to take it. He couldn’t have, she thought wryly. Not when she was doing her seven-month impression of a blimp. “I was hoping to see you, too. I never thanked you.”
His eyebrows lifted slightly. “No thanks needed. I did what I’d been hired to do. But I’m curious. When I, ah, talked to you at the truck stop, I didn’t get the impression that gratitude was one of your reactions.”
“I was a little spooked at the time,” she admitted. No need to tell him that she’d felt uneasy from the moment he’d sat down in her station, long before he’d scared her by telling her he was a P.I. Flynn Sinclair simply did not have a reassuring face. His nose had been broken at least once; his cheeks were sunken, dark with beard shadow, and his eyes were set too deeply beneath thick black eyebrows.
But they were green, those eyes. Not hazel, not even grass-green, but the bright, hard color of an old 7-Up bottle.
And they were laughing at her right now. “I figured that out.”
“You probably wondered why.”
He shrugged those oversize shoulders. “I figured that out, too. You were running scared of someone—Steven Shaw. The man who got you pregnant.”
“I—how did you—did I mention him?”
“Yeah.” There wasn’t a trace of a smile left on his face now, and his eyes had that hard, unwavering focus that unnerved her and made something inside her tingle. “Are you glad I found you now? And dragged you kicking and screaming into your family?”
“Not kicking and screaming,” she protested. “But—yes, I’m glad.” Amusement mixed with pleasure. “I’ve got a brother now. Two of them, actually. Not to mention a half sister, two aunts by marriage, an uncle and more cousins than I’ve been able to count.”
“And a mother.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Kane says you and Miranda are having problems.”
They’d discussed her? She didn’t like that.
“Well, he’s wrong. Miranda and I get along fine. I’m afraid Kane and Gabrielle don’t entirely approve of me. I guess that’s natural—I’m living, breathing proof that their mother isn’t quite the perfect person they’d like to think. Kane, especially, is protective of her.”
“Funny. I didn’t get the impression that Kane disapproves of you. Maybe you’re having trouble warming up to him and Gabrielle because you’re jealous of their relationship with Miranda.”
“I don’t know Miranda well enough to be jealous of her. Besides, jealousy is a very destructive emotion.”
“I’d call it a very human emotion. If you don’t know Miranda well, that’s because you never had the chance, while Kane and Gabrielle had her all these years. Stands to reason that you’d be jealous of that.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you are a very annoying man?”
“Once or twice.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to see you so we could argue about family relationships, though. I’ve checked out that boyfriend of yours, and—”
“You’ve what?” Annoyance boiled over into temper.
“Checked out Steven Shaw. He’s bad news.”
“Tell me something I don’t know! What right did you have to go digging around in my personal life?”
“I’m a P.I. If I waited until people gave me permission to dig around, I wouldn’t get much work done.”
“And were you working?” she demanded. “I thought your job ended when you found me!”
“I guess it did, technically. But I got a call a few days ago from a man named Mathers. He said he’d heard I was looking for you. Pretended he had information for me, while he tried to pump me for information.”
The blood drained from her head. “Richard Mathers is Steven’s friend,” she whispered.
“That’s what I discovered when I checked him out. And that’s why I decided to find out more about your old boyfriend.”
“Former fiancé,” she corrected absently. Had Flynn’s meddling tipped Steven off?
“Whatever.” He shook his head. “I should have gone with my itch to start with. Loose ends have a way of snapping back on a man.”
“What did you tell Richard?”
“Not a damned thing. You think I’m an idiot, or just unscrupulous?”
“Are you sure? Steven used to say that people don’t realize how much they’re giving away once he gets them talking. He’s…very good at that sort of thing.”
His voice turned dry. “I’m not bad at it myself, so I recognize the tricks when someone tries to play them on me. Besides, it wasn’t your boyfriend I talked to. It was his buddy, and Mathers isn’t all that good.”
Her head was spinning with possibilities, each more frightening than the last. “Stop calling Steven my boyfriend. He never was, not really—”
“That baby didn’t get started all by itself.”
“You know, when you lift one eyebrow that way, your whole face gets sarcastic. You don’t even have to change your voice. It’s very annoying. What I meant was that I object to the word ‘boyfriend.’ It’s so silly and juvenile. Steven and I were engaged.”
“You do know how to pick ’em, don’t you?”
How could she have entertained even one fleeting fantasy about this man? “I think I’ll go talk to someone else for awhile. Someone who will make more of an effort not to insult me.”
“Ah—sorry. I didn’t mean to—hey, don’t walk off. I need to ask you a couple of questions.” He wrapped one big hand around her arm.
She jerked her arm away. “I don’t like being grabbed.”
“Okay, okay. Is Shaw likely to trash my office looking for my case file on you? How fixated is he?”
