her. “Do we understand each other?”
She understood and it made her vaguely sick. No wonder he’d asked for a woman. The man thought that seduction was all part of the package. It wasn’t. “Of course,” she said. “I understand. Is he married, divorced, involved?”
“No, no and no. He had a girlfriend, Adrianna Barr, but that’s a thing of the past. She took a walk when he did.”
She’d heard of the woman, a society brat from all that she’d read about her, the daughter of a wealthy banker. She’d even seen pictures of the socialite out and about at society parties. Very blond, very pretty, very pale, very thin and very rich. And he thought she, Lauren, could seduce his son into coming back here? Wrong again.
She wasn’t any Adrianna Barr. If D. R. Bishop had bothered to really look at her, he’d see that even though she was tall enough, she wasn’t pale, she wasn’t skinny and she didn’t have long blond hair. And she sure as heck wasn’t rich.
Lauren was tanned, always was, winter or summer, with a generous amount of freckles. She had curves that refused to give her that popular boyish look in stylish clothes, and her hair was deep auburn, bordering on red, cut short and feathered around her face. On top of that, she had no society connections and her bank balance was laughable.
“Okay,” she murmured, making a show of writing something in her notebook. He wouldn’t know she was writing “Fat chance” in cursive, then underlining it. She closed the book and looked back at the man, barely able to hide her distaste. But she managed to. “Anything else you can think of?”
“No,” D.R. said as he held the box out to her.
She pushed her notebook into her purse, then put the strap over her shoulder and took the box, a bit surprised at how heavy it was. “Is there any family he’d go visit?”
D.R. shook his head. “None. He’s an only child and his mother’s been gone ten years.”
She held the box to her middle. “Any gut feelings about where he’d go, what he’d do?”
He shook his head again. “No.”
“In the entire six months there’s been no contact?”
“Not directly.”
“What does that mean?”
He motioned to the box. “It’s all in there. My people found him in Dallas and he took off.”
“They can’t find him again?”
“They could, but he’d just leave again. That’s why I need you. He won’t know a thing, until you work your magic.” He smiled at her, as if to ingratiate himself with her. “And my instincts tell me you can do it.”
She made herself nod and say, “I’ll do my best,” then ask, “How do you want the updates? Daily, weekly…?”
“Once.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just call me when he’s on his way home.”
“That’s it?”
“Unless you blow it, then file your report, let your boss bill me and that’s that.”
She paused. “Sir, one more thing?”
“Of course.”
“He ran away, like some teenager. I don’t get it.”
“He didn’t. He left. He cut off everything, and he left. He told me he’d never be back, and I won’t accept that. This is where he belongs. He’s my only heir, the person who takes over when I’m gone. I need him back here.”
She had the feeling that his last sentence was his most truthful. He needed his son back with him. Not only for professional reasons but because he missed him. “Okay, Mr. Bishop,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”
She carried the box down to the parking garage level and got into her car, an unmemorable blue compact. She put the box on the passenger seat, opened it and reached for the papers on top—newspaper clippings, a copy of a birth certificate, several photos.
Duncan Bishop was the spitting image of his father, only younger. He had the intense dark eyes. Every photo of the man had him looking right into the camera, as if he met the world head on and didn’t flinch. His features weren’t perfect, but the strong jaw and high cheekbones combined to make the man “interesting.” His hair was short enough, styled back from his face, a dark brown shot with gold highlights, and every photo had him in a business suit or tuxedo. In one picture she found the Barr woman with him, his arm around her, the woman smiling at someone nearby, the man looking at the camera, appearing faintly bored.
She sorted through, got to the newspaper clippings and wasn’t surprised to see they were all about the business, all about the father and son making a deadly team. All about the victories of the Bishops. She put them back in the box, then looked at the birth certificate. Duncan Ross Bishop. Son of Ellen Gayle O’Hara and Duncan Ross Bishop. His birthday was a month away, two weeks before Christmas. She glanced at the birthplace. Silver Creek, Nevada. She’d heard of the place, but only because of a posh ski resort located there, a very expensive, very in-demand and very private place. A place a Bishop could afford, and, coincidentally, Duncan Bishop’s home.
A lot of people went home when they “disappeared,” and she wondered if Duncan Bishop was that predictable. Would she find him at the fancy resort there, The Inn at Silver Creek? Maybe he was there partying. Or hiding.
Whatever the case, she’d find him. Her future depended on it.
Chapter Two
Lauren found Duncan Bishop in one week, and if there hadn’t been a weekend plunked down in there, she would have found him faster. She looked for hits on his credit cards, his social security card and bank withdrawals. The hits had been all over the country on a personal credit card that wasn’t associated with the company. She’d followed the pattern, and that pattern had ended up where she’d first thought to look—Silver Creek, Nevada. It had been almost too easy.
One week after she’d met with D. R. Bishop, she was picking up a rental car in Las Vegas, carrying no luggage and with a return flight to Los Angeles that night at ten o’clock. She drove north through the expansive desert, and finally climbed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, heading up into rugged country. The one thing she hadn’t discovered was where in Silver Creek he was. He wasn’t at The Inn at Silver Creek north of the town. He wasn’t holed up in an obscenely expensive grouping of cottages that the rich and sometimes famous rented. He wasn’t sitting around a roaring fire in the evenings sipping cognac and rubbing shoulders with people like him. But he was in Silver Creek.
She’d found one place where the credit charges repeated themselves, a place called Rusty’s Diner. She found out that the diner was in the oldest section of town, the part that had survived from the early days when Silver Creek had been part of the huge silver-mining industry in the area. Rusty’s was owned by Dwayne Altman, sixty-five, with a bank balance that showed the diner did okay, but wasn’t in the same league as the trendy restaurants and cafés in the newer section of town.
She had no idea what Duncan Bishop was doing at Rusty’s, but when she had called the place and asked for him, the woman who answered had said, “He’s not in right now. Want to leave a message?” Lauren had hung up. She hadn’t been able to find anything in the records of the town with Duncan’s name on it, so she had to assume that he was either a customer who came in so regularly that they took calls for him there, or he worked there. Neither made sense to her. So she headed to Silver Creek to find Duncan Bishop, figure out what he was doing there and form a plan of action.
By the middle of the afternoon, she’d made it to Silver Creek, found Rusty’s Diner and was sitting across from it at a coffee shop with benches and tables outside on the wooden walkway that lined both sides of the street. She held an untouched cup of