Neils dropped the pad back onto the table and swilled down the rest of his cold beer. He’d have to call his silent partner in all this—see how she took the news. She might even give him a little insight.
And O’Rourke, his story should be interesting.
Licking his lips, Neils glanced at his coffee-stained desk calendar and saw that it was only two days until the holiday. It seemed fitting somehow. “Happy Thanksgiving, O’Rourke!” Grinning, he looked through his window with the crack in one corner. “Get ready to spill your guts.”
Chapter 19
When did the falls grow so cold? Robert wondered as he reached for his gloves. Snow hadn’t seemed to bother him this much when he was younger; ice and sleet were mere inconveniences, not such deep annoyances, and certainly not so bone chilling. Sighing, he reached for his hat. The driver was already warming the car when the phone rang.
“It’s a Mr. VanHorn,” his butler, Royce, said with a lift of a questioning brow.
Robert’s heart nearly stopped. Maybe there was news. “I’ll take it in the den,” he said and felt his hands begin to sweat. Each time VanHorn called with a report, Robert’s spirits soared and he experienced the same sense of anticipation he used to feel whenever he’d won a particularly challenging or expensive case, or the first time he’d called a new young woman to add to his string of mistresses.
“Yes?”
“Good news.” Neils VanHorn’s voice was smug, and Robert, still holding the receiver to his ear, sank into his desk chair.
“What?”
“I think I’m close.”
Disappointment choked off his premature euphoria.
“You think?”
“Let me be more specific. I’m in some podunk town in Montana. And believe me, I’m freezin’ my ass off here.”
“What’s in Montana?” he hardly dared to ask. “My grandson?”
He thought he heard a soft chuckle. “It’s not quite that easy, but Daegan O’Rourke owns a spread up in the foothills of the mountains—”
“O’Rourke? What’s he got to do with this?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” Robert listened as VanHorn filled him in on Bibi’s recent trip to San Francisco, and with each word he felt a mixture of elation and dread. O’Rourke had always been bad news, never good. If it weren’t for Frank’s bastard, Stuart would be alive today…Oh, Stuart, why, why, why? The old familiar emptiness caused him to hang his head. He felt like a husk of the man he was supposed to become, the man who had stepped into his dead brother’s shoes oh so willingly dozens of years before. What would William have done? he wondered as VanHorn prattled on. In these last few weeks, ever since his doctor’s prognosis, he’d thought about William more than he should have and realized what a great disservice he’d done to his older brother.
“…I’m not certain why they’re in cahoots, but I’m going to find out.”
“Wait a minute. Beatrice and O’Rourke?” he repeated, his wandering attention back on track. “What could they possibly have in common?”
“That’s what I intend to find out. I’ll call ya as soon as I know anything.” With that, the phone clicked and he was gone.
For the first time since he’d decided to find his grandson, Robert sensed a coming doom, a reckoning that he hadn’t expected. It caused ice to form in the marrow of his bones, but he slid his arthritic fingers into the smooth leather of his gloves. He’d weathered storms before, personal tragedies that had nearly ripped his heart out. Whatever VanHorn uncovered, he and the family would be able to withstand the shock, but he couldn’t help thinking of Pandora unlocking her box and releasing chaos.
“Stand firm,” he muttered to himself as he made his way to the garage. “Stay the course.” He passed by a crucifix mounted near the back door. Crossing himself with the deft moves of one whose sixty-odd years were blessed by the church, he tasted the bitterness of hypocrisy on his tongue and heard the vague and discordant ring of ruin in his ears.
“Where’s Daddy?” Wade’s eager eyes, as blue as her own, stared into Alicia’s. At eight he was tall for his age, blond, and incredibly bright.
That s a good question, Alicia thought. “He’s going to meet us at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.” Leaning on one knee, she adjusted his bow tie, made sure it was straight under his chin, then eyed his suitcoat, sweater, slacks, and shirt. Perfect. Such a little prince. Starched and pressed, his dress shoes shined to an impossible gloss. God, he was cute. She was thankful for all of Wade’s attributes because she never wanted to go through the hell of pregnancy again. It had taken a year of diet, exercise, and appointments with the right plastic surgeons to return her body to its normal size four.
“How come he doesn’t live here anymore?”
“He, does, honey, but his work in Washington keeps him there a lot. He’ll be here for the whole weekend.” She smiled, pretending not to grit her teeth, pretending that Wade’s father was a faithful husband and loving daddy. It didn’t matter anyway. Her marriage to Bryan had been a sham from the beginning, and she’d gotten what she wanted out of it, a son. A perfect, brilliant son who was her whole life, a son who would someday be in charge of all the Sullivan holdings. A son far superior to Stuart or Collin or anyone else. So Bryan could screw his brains out with his little secretary and she didn’t give a damn.
“Come on, the driver is waiting,” she said, smoothing a stubborn cowlick in Wade’s hair. “We’re going to have a good time and Daddy will be there.” If he wasn’t, if that son of a bitch disappointed his son again, then she’d just have to get rid of him. He wasn’t going to hurt Wade. No one was.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bibi said as she tossed back the rest of her champagne and left her fluted glass on a wicker table. She was trapped, cornered by Collin, who had torn himself away from his reed-thin and wary wife to confront her in the sunroom of his parents’ home.
Dusk crowded into the room, and outside, through a hundred panes of glass, the snow blanketing the flagstone veranda and Maureen’s once-lush gardens had melted only to refreeze as the sun set. Patches of grass speared through the white mantle, and icicles, looking like the jagged teeth of a huge crystal beast, hung from the eaves and dripped ever so slowly as the hours ticked by. The first beams of pale moonlight bounced off the ice crystals that had formed over the fountains and bird baths and gave a silver sheen to the darkened room.
Bibi shivered, wishing she could leave, but Collin, her once-precious savior, now stood leaning against the door, barricading it with his slim body. He seemed to have lost weight in the past few weeks, his skin appeared paler than normal, and his eyes had sunken deep into his head, as if he were in the throes of some kind of fever. Bibi had chalked up his declining appearance to the divorce that was whispered about between family members.
Alicia had told Bibi weeks ago that Collin’s marriage was on the rocks, that Carrie was demanding a divorce and that Frank was fit to be tied that his son was even considering breaking the union. There was even scuttlebutt about Collin being written out of the will, but Bibi dismissed that bit of news as malicious gossip or misplaced optimism on Alicia’s part.
“Don’t play dumb with me, Bibi,” Collin warned, glaring at her with intense eyes. “It’s not your style, and even if it was, I can read you like a book.”
“Can you?”
“Christ, yes!” He closed his eyes a second, leaned his head against the aging panels of the door. He seemed tormented, his face a mask of pain as he sighed. “Look, I know what you’re trying to do here, and—”
“I’m not doing anything,” she said, wishing she hadn’t left her cigarettes in her purse in the kitchen. God, she needed a smoke.
Muttering a curse under his breath, he stared at the edge of a Persian carpet, then raised his eyes to meet her gaze. “I know about the baby.”
“That’s hardly earth-shattering news, Collin. Everyone in the family knows now. VanHorn and my father have seen to it.”
br /> “Yes,” he admitted, his lips curling in on themselves as if he were in deep concentration. “But no one else knows who the father is.”
Involuntarily, she started. Collin knew? Oh, God. Fear congealed in her heart.
“Everyone bought your lie, Bibi, until now. Until VanHorn started nosing around and discovered that there was no Roy Panaker. Now the family’s guessing—who was Bibi sleeping with?”
His nostrils flared as if he smelled something foul, and the drip of the icicles seemed louder in the ensuing silence.
“Wha—what are you talking about?”
Collin’s patience was obviously worn thin. “I know the real reason you don’t want the boy found. It isn’t just because of Kyle and your intentions of marrying again. Nope.” Shaking his head, he pierced her with his cold blue gaze. “This goes deeper, doesn’t it?”
Her insides crumbled. How had he known? Oh, God, her world was falling apart and she didn’t even have a goddamned cigarette.
“I’m surprised you didn’t tell me, you know.” Hands flat against the door, hips pressed into the varnished panels, he stared at her in awe. “I—I could have helped.”
So here was the old Collin she remembered, the hero of her girlhood, the boy who had gotten his suit pants wet in Grandma’s creek and taken a beating for it. “I couldn’t tell anyone,” she whispered, knowing that even now, she had to protect her secret.
“But it was my responsibility. Bibi. You shouldn’t have borne all this shame alone.”
“Your what?” Again she felt as if she was missing something—something vital.
“I know when the baby was born and about the time he was conceived. Oh, Christ—” He rolled his eyes skyward.
“This is hard, but I guess it has to be said.” Stiffening his spine, he said, “You don’t have to pretend, at least not with me. I know the boy is mine.”
“Yours?” she whispered, disbelieving. Not only was the world starting to spin off course but a loud roar began to thunder in her ears. “You think he’s yours?”
“From the night in the pool house—”
“No!”
“No?” It was his turn to be stunned. “But—” Consternation darkened his features. “Then whose?”
“I’ve told everyone. Roy—”
“Bullshit, Bibi! I was there.”
“Do you remember anything about that night?” she asked. Did he really believe that he and she had…?
“Yes. Hell, I’ve lived with it all this time.” He shoved both hands through his hair and finally straightened away from the door, as if he knew that his words were strong enough to hold her prisoner now. He no longer had to resort to physically restraining her. Unnerved, he sank into a Queen Anne chair near a wicker and glass table. “God, Bibi, I’m sorry. Stu and I—”
“Were shits, I know.” She didn’t need to be reminded of her humiliation at their hands.
“But it’s more than that.” Dropping his head into his palms, he sat still, as if he couldn’t move, as if life had ceased to go on. “I would have done anything he asked, you know, and when he suggested that you and I…well, go at it so that he could watch, I argued with him.”
“But still you went along,” she said, the old pain climbing up her throat and threatening to choke her. She couldn’t hide the condemnation in her voice, the anger that knotted her stomach. “Did you have any idea that I was in love with you?”
His shoulders slumped farther.
“Did you?”
“Yes,” he said in the smallest of whispers, his voice tortured.
“And still you used me.”
“For him. I know it doesn’t explain things, but you don’t understand how much I wanted to please him.”
“Even if you hurt me?”
Raising his head finally, he stared at her with agonized eyes. “Believe me, I never wanted to cause you any kind of pain. In my own way I did love you, it…it just wasn’t what you wanted it to be. Eventually, I agreed.”
“Because Stuart thought it would be a good idea.” Her stomach curdled.
“Stu—he liked to watch.” Collin blinked hard.
“So you performed like some trained puppy?” She started backing away, furious with him, with herself. Her hands coiled into fists, and her fingernails dug into the heels of her hands. “You spineless bastard, I don’t believe—”
“You don’t understand. I loved him, Bibi. And not the same way I cared about you. I mean I really loved him—would have done anything, anything he asked.”
“That’s not love, that’s sick,” she whispered, hardly believing what she was hearing, silently praying that he would stop, but Collin seemed, after over fifteen years, to need her forgiveness. “When he died, a part of me died with him. I just wanted him to love me back.”
“Oh, God.” Revulsion spit through her as the full impact of what he was saying hit her in the gut. Suddenly every disjointed piece of her youth, of her friendship with Stuart and Collin, fell neatly into place. Her exclusion hadn’t been just an adolescent macho thing—it had been sexual as well. Stu and Collin had been lovers and they’d let her think, encouraged her to believe, that she could…Bile climbed up her throat and she nearly wretched. Oh, sweet Jesus, no!
“Just like you wanted me to love you,” Collin explained.
“Don’t. I don’t want to hear this,” she said, backing away. She died inside remembering how much she loved him, how she’d always believed deep in her heart that if they hadn’t been cousins, that there would have been a chance with him. Why hadn’t she known? And with Stuart. How they must have laughed at her naive and simple attempts at seducing Collin!
“That was the reason I couldn’t perform at first,” he went on, as if unburdening himself to a priest while she was still reeling from the magnitude of his secret. “Until I saw Stu standing in the hallway watching us as he drank—”
“Lurking, you mean,” she cried, nearly hysterical. In her mind’s eye she was back in the darkened pool room, hot and anxious for Collin to love her, knowing something wasn’t right. She relived all the humiliation, all the pain, all the sick, perverted embarrassment. “Stuart was lurking like a damned voyeur, getting his jollies by watching his sister try and seduce her cousin—his lover.”
“We were never lovers,” Collin admitted and tears starred his lashes. “He could never take it that far—never allow me to touch him. He wanted to, he was tempted just as he was with everything that was outside of what his father considered acceptable, but he couldn’t even kiss me.” Collin, as if inescapably weary, sagged in the chair. His voice shook with emotion. “He was, without a doubt, the love of my life.”
“And so, to please him, you agreed to fuck me,” she spit, repelled by the callousness, the pure vile malice, of their plan.
He nodded miserably. “I would have done anything.”
“Even screw a woman.” Wrapping her arms around her middle, as if to defend herself, she started to cry.
“Not just any woman,” he said, “but the only woman I really cared about, the one I didn’t want to hurt. That was why he wanted me to do it to you. It wasn’t a sense of nobility on his part, he wasn’t setting me up with you because he knew that you loved me.” He shook his head and anger destroyed some of his sadness. “The reason he wanted me to sleep with you was to confirm my utter and undying allegiance to him.”
“That’s sick—”
“Yes.”
“Stuart was into power. Control and power.” Collin swallowed hard. His jaw slid to one side and his eyes narrowed in regret. “He just wasn’t into love.”
“And so you agreed?” She dashed the damning tears away.
“Oh, God, yes,” he admitted, the words torn from his throat. “And I drank as much as I could hold and convinced myself that I wouldn’t hurt you, that I was doing what you wanted, what Stuart wanted, and it didn’t matter. It was just sex between people who cared for each other. Oh, hell, I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
?
??It didn’t,” she said, finally understanding and feeling pity for him instead of rage. He, too, had been a victim.
“Of course it did.”
“No, Collin,” she insisted, still caring for him enough not to want him to suffer for a crime he didn’t commit. She walked to his chair, laid a hand on his shoulder, felt him tense. Though he’d mortified her beyond words, he hadn’t fathered her son.
“Liar.”
“You just accused me of being a lousy one, of being able to see right through me.”
Slowly he raised his eyes to her and she kissed his cheek, tasted the salt from his silent tears.
“Do you remember that night, what happened?”
“Most. What I didn’t, Stu filled in later.”
“And he told you that you and I…we made it.”
“Yes.” A muscle worked at the side of his jaw.
“Oh, Collin, no.” Kneeling at his chair, she cradled his head against her. “Stuart lied. You couldn’t do it. Either you were too drunk, or not turned on enough. I—I tried everything to get you in the mood and then, then I saw my brother and…you fell asleep and Stuart and I had the fight of the century. I took off and…”
“And I woke up with Stuart’s arms around me. He smiled at me, told me I’d done well, and that even though you were furious with us both, he’d been turned on enough to want me. I tried to kiss him then, but he climbed out of bed, called me darling, and told me we’d be missed at the party. I stupidly thought there was still a chance for us. But as usual, he was stringing me along, playing with my emotions, oh, shit, he treated me the way I treated you and then, within the week…” Again tears tracked from his eyes, shining in the moon glow. His words were choked. “Within the week he was dead.” He moved a hand, raised it from his knee, only to let it fall again. “Now, years later, I find out that you were pregnant—that you had the baby nine months after that night. You had to have gotten pregnant—”