She jiggled her knees in the narrow silk slacks, making sure the fabric fell just so.
What was she doing?
Her clothes were fine. Her makeup was fine. Even the matching pale blue lace bra and panties that she wore beneath the jacket and slacks were fine.
Gracious. Was anything more pathetic than a mature, thirty-year-old woman dithering over her appearance just because she had to go down to a room filled with her dominating big brothers…and an old lover?
Not just an old lover, her mind whispered.
Him. Brett Larson.
It wasn’t like it was the first time she’d seen him recently, either. It seemed that every time she turned around, he was at the house for one reason or another. To go over some detail with Cord or Rafe. So it wasn’t as if she was bracing herself for that first shock of seeing him after eight years.
Eight long years, her mind whispered.
She frowned. “Hush up.” The only reason she was so uneasy was that phone call.
The excuse didn’t convince her any more this time around than it did the first time. Yes, she was upset about the young patient who’d just been yanked from her program. But the true culprit was him.
She straightened her shoulders, dashed her fingers through the freshly cut and styled ends of her hair and strode out of her bedroom.
She was a Stockwell. Dealing with life’s curveballs was part and parcel of her existence.
So why did she feel as if every nerve inside her was frayed to the point of unraveling?
She could hear them talking before she entered the study and a fresh wave of nerves rippled uneasily down her spine.
Oh, really. Why was she torturing herself like this? She didn’t have to go in there. Didn’t have to put herself in this position where she felt awkward and useless and—
“Kate.” Jack spotted her hovering like a ninny outside the doorway and his lips stretched into a rare smile.
No escape, now. She focused on Jack—avoiding Brett—and walked into the room, going straight to him for a hug. “So, my favorite world traveler has returned yet again,” she said in a voice that was a little too husky.
Jack wrapped his strong arms around her, lifting her right off her feet and she swallowed hard, clinging a little too fervently. And realizing it, she pressed a smacking kiss lightheartedly to his hard cheek as he set her back on her feet.
He was big and broad and so dear to her. She loved all three of her brothers, but Cord and Rafe were twins and they shared a special closeness. It was Jack who’d been Kate’s rock when she’d needed him. After her breakup with—
“Hello, Kate.”
Jack gave her an imperceptible nudge of encouragement, and she swallowed past the growing knot that seemed determined to strangle her. Then she turned to face the other man.
Him. Her ex-fiancé.
“Brett,” she greeted smoothly. “How are you today?” Polite, meaningless words said across a bookcase-filled room to a tall, brown-eyed man whom she’d once thought she’d known as well as the back of her hand.
Now, after all these years, he was just a stranger.
A six-foot-three-inch stranger, with thick, dark messy waves that her traitorous fingers still remembered stroking back from his hard, long face, away from his chocolate-brown eyes as he leaned over her….
“Fine,” the “stranger” replied, a little twist to his lips. “You?”
That chocolate gaze was anything but melting and warm now, Kate noticed, and told herself she was glad.
“Touching as this is,” Rafe drawled, saving her from answering. “Why don’t we get down to business?”
“Yes,” Cord agreed. “I left Hannah with Becky waiting at the pediatrician’s office and I want to get back to them.”
Kate held her breath, embarrassingly grateful when Brett finally looked away from her, to focus on the others. She wished Hannah was here. The woman who’d become Kate’s friend, then Cord’s wife, after she’d brought sweet little Becky into the Stockwell home, would have provided some badly needed moral support.
“Guess that means I’m on,” Jack was saying, and Kate realized she’d been staring at Brett’s back. She mentally shook herself and focused on her brother. He’d propped a flat wrapped parcel across the arms of a wing chair and was peeling away the brown paper to reveal the whirls and curls of a fussy, gilded frame and the corner of a painting.
“I found this in France,” he said as he tore away the rest of the paper and let it drift to the floor beside his feet. He pointed at the artist’s signature in the lower corner. “Painted by Madelyn LeClaire.”
But Kate wasn’t looking at the signature. She stared at the portrait, feeling as if all the oxygen in the room had disappeared.
“Good Lord,” Rafe finally breathed, breaking the shocked silence that had filled the room.
“It looks just like Kate did when she was a girl,” Cord murmured.
“Yup.” Jack looked at the painting along with the rest of them, as if even he couldn’t believe it. And he’d been the one to find it. He’d been the one to call the rest of the family from France and tell them he’d picked up the trail of Madelyn’s from France to New England and that he was bringing back something astonishing that they all had to see. “I about fell over when I saw it.”
“You think we ought to take it to the old man’s room and show it to him?” Rafe didn’t look particularly enthusiastic about his suggestion.
“Shove it in Dad’s face as proof of the lie he raised us to believe?” Cord grimaced. “He’s so doped on pain meds for the cancer, it wouldn’t faze him.”
“Even if he is coherent, it wouldn’t faze him,” Jack murmured without emotion. His blue gaze settled on Kate. “Feel like you’re looking in a mirror, kiddo?”
She heard the words through a fog. “How—” Words wouldn’t come. She shook her head.
Jack seemed to understand, though. “It was hanging in a tiny art gallery outside of Paris. Cost a fair piece, too.” He stepped away from the painting, allowing room for his siblings to move in for a closer look.
Standing behind them, Kate listened to her brothers go off on the outrageous price of art until she wanted to scream. Then Brett slowly turned his head, his gaze pinning hers.
It was too much. Her eyes suddenly burned and she turned away, walking hurriedly out of the study.
Madelyn LeClaire had painted that portrait that uncannily resembled Kate.
Madelyn LeClaire…aka Madelyn Johnson Stockwell. Her mother.
Her mother who had supposedly died in a boating accident years ago.
Her father, Caine, who lay bedridden in his room in this very house had told them so. Until a few months earlier when, apparently in some attempt at cleansing his conscience that had to be weighted down with a lifetime of sins, he’d divulged that Madelyn may still be alive. And that, when she’d left her home and her children still in it, she’d been pregnant with another man’s child.
Since that moment, Kate’s brothers had been turning over heaven and earth trying to find out if it were true. And where she was now.
Had Madelyn had another daughter? A daughter who was the true subject of that painting? It made sense, considering Caine’s claim of her pregnancy, but so much of what Caine said these days was pure delusion.
Kate walked blindly through the house, her arms clasped around her body as if to hold her shakiness at bay. Well, she could keep the shakes at bay, but the tears flooding her eyes were another