Rags To Riches: A Desire To Serve. Janice Maynard
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stance. Her head tilting, she gave him a puzzled half smile.
“Something wrong?”
He countered her question with one of his own. “Did you happen to notice the man who arrived at the reception just before Alex and Julie left?”
“The guy in the brown suit?” She nodded slowly, still trying to gauge his odd mood. “I saw him, and couldn’t help wondering who he was. He looked so out of place among the other guests.”
“His name’s Del Jamison.”
Her brow creased. Blake guessed she was mentally sorting through the host of people she’d met during her stint as Molly’s temporary nanny. When she drew a blank, he supplied the details.
“Jamison’s a private investigator. The one Alex and I hired to help search for Molly’s mother.”
She was good, he thought savagely. Very good. Her cinnamon eyes transmitted only a flicker of wariness, quickly suppressed, but she couldn’t keep the color from leaching out of her cheeks. The sudden pallor gave him a vicious satisfaction.
“Oh, right.” The shrug was an obvious attempt at nonchalance. “He was down in South America, wasn’t he? Checking the places where Julie worked last year?”
“He was, but after Julie made it clear she wasn’t Molly’s mother, Jamison decided to check another lead. In California.”
She couldn’t hide her fear now. It was there in the quick hitch in her breath, the sudden stillness.
“California?”
“I’ll summarize his report for you.” Blake used his courtroom voice. The one he employed when he wanted to drive home a point. Cool, flat, utterly devoid of emotion. “Jamison discovered the woman I was told had died in a fiery bus crash was not, in fact, even on that bus. She didn’t die until almost a year later.”
The same woman he’d had a brief affair with. The woman who’d disappeared from his life with no goodbye, no note, no explanation of any kind. Aided and abetted, he now knew, by this brown-eyed, soft-spoken schemer who’d wormed her way into his mother’s home.
And into Blake’s consciousness, dammit. Every level of it. As disgusted by her duplicity as by the hunger she’d begun to stir in him, he stalked across the room. She sprang to her feet at his approach and tried to brazen it out.
“I don’t see what that has to do with me.”
Still he didn’t lose control. But his muscles quivered with the effort of keeping his hands off her.
“According to Jamison, this woman gave birth to a baby girl just weeks before she died.”
His baby! His Molly!
“She also had a friend who showed up at the hospital mere hours before her death.” He planted his fists on the sofa arm, boxing her in, forcing her to lean back. “A friend with pale blond hair.”
“Blake!” The gold-flecked brown eyes he’d begun to imagine turning liquid with desire widened in alarm. “Listen to me!”
“No, Grace—if that’s really your name.” His temper slipped through, adding a whiplash to his voice. “You listen, and listen good. I don’t know how much you figured you could extort from our family, but the game ends now.”
“It’s not a game,” she gasped, bent at an awkward angle.
“No?”
“No! I don’t want your money!”
“What do you want?”
“Just… Just…!” She slapped her palms against his shirtfront. “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Get off me.”
He didn’t budge. “Just what?”
“Dammit!” Goaded, she bunched a fist and pounded his chest. Her fear was gone. Fury now burned in her cheeks. “All I wanted, all I cared about, was making sure Molly had a good home!”
Slowly, Blake straightened. Just as slowly, he moved back a step and allowed her only enough space to push upright. Slapping a rigid lid on his anger, he folded his arms and locked his gaze on her face. Assessing. Considering. Evaluating.
“Let’s start at the beginning. Who the hell are you?”
* * *
Grace balanced precariously on the sofa arm, her thoughts chaotic. After all she’d been through! So much fear and heartache. Now this? Just when she’d started to breathe easy for the first time in months. Just when she’d thought she and this man might…
“Who are you?”
He repeated the question in what she’d come to think of as his counselor’s voice. She’d known Blake Dalton for almost two months now. In that time she’d learned to appreciate his even temperament. She admired even more his ability to smoothly, calmly arbitrate between his more outspoken twin and their equally strong-willed mother.
Oh, God! Delilah!
Grace cringed inside at the idea of divulging even part of the sordid truth to the woman who’d become as much of a friend as an employer. Sick at the thought, she lifted her chin and met Blake’s cold, unwavering stare.
“I’m exactly who I claim to be. My name is Grace Templeton. I teach…I taught,” she corrected, her throat tight, “junior high social studies in San Antonio until a few months ago.”
She paused, trying not to think of the life she’d put on hold, forcing herself to blank out the image of the young teens she took such joy in teaching.
“Until a few months ago,” Blake repeated in the heavy silence, “when you asked for an extended leave of absence to take care of a sick relative. That’s the story you gave us, isn’t it? And the principal of your school?”
She knew they’d checked her out. Neither Delilah nor her sons would allow a stranger near the baby unless they’d vetted her. But Grace had become so adept these past years at weaving just enough truth in with the lies that she’d passed their screening.
“It wasn’t a story.”
Dalton’s breath hissed out. Those sexy blue eyes that had begun to smile at her with something more than friendliness the past few weeks were now lethal.
“You and Anne Jordan were related?”
Anne Jordan. Emma Lang. Janet Blair. So many aliases. So many frantic phone calls and desperate escapes. Grace could hardly keep them straight anymore.
“Anne was my cousin.”
That innocuous label didn’t begin to describe Grace’s relationship to the girl who’d grown up just a block away. They were far closer than cousins. They were best friends who’d played dolls and whispered secrets and shared every event in their young lives, big and small.
“Were you with her when she died?”
The question came at her as swiftly and mercilessly as a stiletto aimed for the heart. “Yes,” she whispered, “I was with her.”
“And the baby? Molly?”
“She’s your daughter. Yours and…and Anne’s.”
Blake turned away, and Grace could only stare at the broad shoulders still encased in his tux. She ached to tell him she was sorry for all the lies and deception. Except the lies had been necessary, and the deception wasn’t hers to tell.
“Anne called me,” she said instead. “Told me she’d picked up a vicious infection. Begged me to come. I jumped a plane that same afternoon but when I got there, she was already slipping into a coma. She died that evening.”
Blake angled back to face her. His eyes burned with an unspoken question. Grace answered this one as honestly as she could.
“Anne didn’t name you as Molly’s father. She was almost