regarded her quizzically. “I gather you didn’t realize that Dr. Todd, your daughter’s new pediatrician, is a Fortune,” he remarked.
Caught by surprise, Jess could do little more than stare.
“As a matter of fact, she’s Benjamin Fortune’s daughter,” he continued. “Granted, you wouldn’t have guessed it from her name. She went by Lindsay Fortune-Todd for a while after marrying Frank Todd, another of our doctors here, then simply dropped her maiden name….”
For Jess, it was if a door had suddenly blown open on a host of possibilities. Twin spots of color blossomed in her cheeks. With a surge of excitement, she jumped to her feet. “Surely, if she knows of the connection, Dr. Todd will help us!” she exclaimed.
“Not so fast,” Stephen advised, rising also. “Lindsay and the other Fortune children lost their mother, Kate—who, as you probably know, happened to be their only remaining parent—in a plane crash last year. To potential fortune hunters, the money they inherited is like a plum, ripe for the picking. At least one young woman whom most people regard as an imposter has turned up, claiming to be Lindsay’s long-lost twin, who was kidnapped shortly after their birth, and demanding a share. Long-lost relatives of any sort are bound to be something of a sensitive issue, especially with her.”
“But…but…I don’t want money,” Jess protested. “I want…”
Taking her hands in his, Stephen caused little ripples of awareness to flutter up her arms. “Take it easy. I believe you,” he said. “Lindsay and I are friends, as well as colleagues, and next-door neighbors. I think it’s fair to say she trusts me. Why don’t you let me talk to her?”
Jess wanted to fling her arms around him. “Oh, Dr. Hunter…would you?” she asked.
“Call me Stephen,” he said. “Thanks to Annabel, or Annie, as you call her, we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other. C’mon, let’s go upstairs and see how she’s doing before I have to check out of here.”
Pale and wraithlike as she slept beneath her hospital blanket, Annie looked like a little-girl ghost. Her control slipping, Jess wept softly as she gazed at her daughter. “I’m so worried about her,” she confided. “She’s all I’ve got. I don’t want to lose her.”
All too well, Stephen knew how she felt. A moment later, he’d taken her in his arms. Her tears were soaking into his hospital coat. An unplanned act, the move was meant simply to comfort her, or so he told himself.
To Jess, his arms offered a place of sanctuary and trust—and, incredibly, of nurturance. She wanted to lean on him. Blend with him. Burrow against the warmth of his neck. Despite her fear and worry over Annie, she realized it was a wake-up call to the lonely, loving woman in her—a woman who’d built a fortress around her heart when she learned of her late husband’s faithlessness.
As their embrace held, Stephen found he didn’t trust himself to move, or speak. By some alchemy he’d thought long extinct, he was holding a woman who filled his arms—one who, with her obvious refinement and strong capacity for love, might be able to fill his heart, as well.
A moment later, he was withdrawing from her. He was her daughter’s hematologist, after all. Professional ethics forbade his getting involved with her, even if his track record as a comforter of women who stood to lose a child did not.
“Ummm…Mrs. Holmes, I’d better be going,” he said awkwardly, when she didn’t speak. “We’ll have a chance to talk again tomorrow. Try to get some rest.”
Settling in a chair by Annie’s bed after he left, Jess pondered the fact that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. By itself, of course, it didn’t mean anything. Yet, coupled with the air of loneliness she’d noticed at the zoo and her persistent impression that he was a man who’d known sorrow, she thought it might.
She was aware their physical contact had embarrassed him. While her reaction to it had been quite a bit different, to say the least, she hoped it wouldn’t interfere with his care of Annie. Or prompt him to forget his promise to talk to Lindsay Todd on her behalf.
Returning home to face an empty house and the remainder of a lonely, aimless Saturday afternoon, Stephen found himself going into David’s room. On impulse, he opened David’s toy box and picked up some plastic cowboys and Indians, complete with ponies, that his little boy had loved to play with. The ache in his heart was boundless.
Aside from bringing the impersonal cruelty of illness home to him in a very personal way, David’s death had also taught him something about his fitness for a man-woman relationship, particularly one that might have to survive an emotional crisis. Or so he believed. As they’d dealt with the crushing blow of David’s cancer and death, he and Brenda had failed each other.
“What are you doing even thinking about Jessica Holmes?” he asked himself.
Three
Sterling and his twenty-two-year-old companion, the son of a trusted neighbor, arrived at the Heart’s Desire Motel on Round Lake shortly after 3:00 p.m. While the young man waited in Sterling’s Lincoln, the attorney knocked at the door of Jake’s motel unit and collected the keys to his Porsche. One glance was all it took to measure the Fortune CEO’s physical and mental state. Crusty, experienced courtroom warrior that he was, it tugged at his heartstrings to see Kate’s aristocratic-looking son so thoroughly leveled by the sordid situation in which he found himself.
Sympathy won’t do him any good, he thought. What he needs is a good strong dose of tough-mindedness.
Reemerging, he instructed his assistant to drive the sports car back to Minneapolis and park it in a guest spot beneath their apartment building. Handing over the keys, he gave the young man a crisp hundred-dollar bill. “Put the keys in my mailbox,” he said. “If you’re stopped, you’re returning the Porsche to Minneapolis as a favor for a friend. That’s all you know. Call me on my mobile phone if the police give you any trouble.”
Chosen for his cool head and his lack of curiosity about other people’s business, the young man pocketed the money. “Will do, Mr. Foster,” he said with his typical nonchalance.
As he drove off, gunning the Porsche’s engine slightly, Sterling returned to Jake. “Okay,” he said, dusting off a somewhat grimy-looking chair and taking a seat, “let’s have it from the beginning. Tell me everything that happened last night. And I do mean everything.”
Still wretched and worse for wear, but with his wits more coherently gathered about him, Jake admitted going to Monica’s house and arguing with her over some stock he’d wanted to buy back from her.
“I was willing to pay a premium for it,” he said, bitterness permeating his voice. “She refused, using some of the foulest language I’ve ever heard. Suddenly, she came at me with a letter opener, and managed to stab me in the shoulder. When I struggled with her in self-defense, forcing her to drop it, she scratched at me with her fingernails. I didn’t actually push her until she picked it up and tried to stab me again.
“At that point…well, I did. I considered my life to be in danger. I guess I didn’t know my own strength, because she fell backward, hitting her head against that stupid marble fireplace of hers, the one with the naked dancing cupids. She was knocked out cold, but she came around pretty fast, and I helped her over to the sofa. Once she’d gotten her bearings, she started working up another head of steam. I was afraid she’d come at me again, and I’d had enough. I left and drove home…to Lake Travis.”
“Was anyone else in the house?”
Jake ran his fingers through his silver-brown hair. In that moment, the troubled edge he’d had for years showed very clearly. “Not that I know of,” he vowed.
“Was she expecting anyone?”
“If so, she didn’t tell me about it.”
A moment’s silence held as Sterling regarded him with a penetrating stare. If Monica had been blackmailing him, as Natalie’s