The Pregnant Heiress. Eileen Wilks
Читать онлайн книгу.
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