Raw magnetism radiated from his tall and impressive frame while little other than cool detachment shone from the depths of those crystal-cut eyes. So commanding and assured. She could only imagine how ruthless he’d become.
“Your father would want me to make sure you’re all right,” he replied.
Her mask broke.
“You were the housekeeper’s son, Gage. My father gave you a bed, an education, and you left without so much as a goodbye. I’m sorry, but why do you think he would care what you said or did now?”
His eyes narrowed so slightly, so briefly, she wondered if she’d imagined it.
“If I thought it would make a difference,” he said, “I’d tell you.”
She pinned him with a jaded look then turned and sank onto the wooden slats of a nearby garden bench. “Whatever.”
If that sounded dismissive or rude, she simply couldn’t help it. What little energy she had left needed to be spent on one thing and one thing only.
Meg.
Guardianship.
What do I do now?
She was that little girl’s blood, not Leeann Darley. It was wrong that her stepmother should raise Meg, no matter what that stony-faced lawyer or those wills had said. True, these last ten years she’d had no fixed address, and at present she had no legal right to Meg.
She also had no intention of giving up.
Elbows on knees, Jenna gnawed around a thumbnail. When her restless gaze landed on a stick, she picked it up and tossed it for Shadow to fetch while Gage slowly circled her.
“You and your father always locked horns,” he said after a long, considering moment. “Everything was left to his wife, wasn’t it?”
A withering, dizzy sensation ran through her. Everything was right.
But then she studied him more closely. “What was that? A good guess?”
His mouth tilted. “Surely you’ve heard of my sixth sense where finances are concerned.”
She thought it through and had to concede. Of course Gage’s intuition with regard to money matters was well known. Aside from that, it wasn’t unusual for a husband to leave the majority of his worldly goods to his wife, including the family property and everything in it.
A dry eucalyptus leaf dropped into her lap. Jenna covered the leaf in her hand and broke it in her fist. The trees had been saplings when they’d first moved here. It seemed that as they’d grown taller, she’d grown more unhappy until one day she’d simply up and left. The frustration of trying to fit in with a blended family…the deep sense of loss whenever she thought of her mother…What she wouldn’t give to turn back time to when they really had been a family.
But fairy tales were for children. And sometimes even children missed out.
“I don’t care about my father’s possessions,” she said. There were things far more important than money.
“Tell me, Jenna, twelve years on, what do you care about?”
She gazed up into that strongly hewn face, at the faint scar nicking his upper lip. “If I thought it would make a difference,” she quipped, “I’d tell you.”
A lazy grin reflected in his eyes. “Try me.”
God help her, she was tempted.
She was light on friends—hopping from country to country didn’t nurture long-term anything—and she did have an overwhelming urge to confess to someone who knew her background that she’d forgiven her father for remarrying so soon after her mother’s death. It hurt like hell that she’d lost the chance to tell him that she loved him, despite their ongoing feud.
Worse, she would never talk to her sister again, the one person she’d truly trusted. Amy had been more than a sibling, more than a friend. She’d been a part of her. And an important part of her sister lived still.
The inescapable truth spilled out. “I have to fight for her child.”
His eyebrows nudged together and his hands emerged from his pockets. “What did you say?”
Jenna bit the inside of her cheek, but she couldn’t take it back, just as she couldn’t will away the salty trail curling around her chin.
She knocked the tear aside. “These last few days have been…difficult.”
His frown deepened. “What are you talking about? Whose child?”
“Amy has—” She swallowed against the wad of cotton clogging her throat and rephrased. “Amy had a three-month-old.”
He sank down beside her, too close and yet, in other unwelcome ways, not close enough. “He didn’t mention a baby.”
Jenna’s attention caught and she looked at him. “Who didn’t mention a baby?”
His preoccupied gaze blinked back from some distant point. “I mean the newspaper report my second-in-charge passed on. It only cited your father’s widow, yourself and the three passengers who’d flown out to survey a development site.”
She nodded as the details looped their well-worn groove in her brain. “Brad, Amy’s husband, wanted Dad’s opinion on some acreage he was interested in buying. They left at ten in the morning. Meg stayed with my stepmother.”
Jenna had originally booked a flight for her niece’s christening next month and had planned on staying a while. Amy had been so excited. The sisters saw each other regularly, but as Jenna had grown older—particularly now that she was an aunt—it hadn’t seemed nearly enough. But when she’d received news of the accident, she’d boarded the first flight to Sydney.
Before arriving last week, she’d seen photos of her niece. Since the accident, she gazed at them constantly. Her favorite was Meg’s first bright-eyed smile, hugging the panda bear her auntie had sent by Express Mail the day Margaret Jane had been born.
Now that little girl had lost both her parents and was living with a woman who cared more about facials and status symbols than lullabies and kisses good-night. At the funeral, Leeann had mentioned that she and Meg would be flying to San Francisco to visit her aging parents for Christmas; she wasn’t certain when they’d return.
Christmas was only three months away.
Jenna clutched the bench slats at her sides and prayed.
I’ll do anything, give anything. Just help me find a way.
Shadow trotted back and carefully placed the stick at Gage’s polished shoes. He stooped, cast the stick spinning with absentminded skill, then laid an arm along the back of the bench. The heat of his hand radiated near her nape and some crazy, needy part of her almost leant back to absorb it.
“Who has the baby now? Leeann?”
She nodded then forced her mouth to work. “She’s always wanted a child of her own.”
Leeann’s parents had shuffled her off to boarding school at a young age. Jenna and Amy had decided that because Leeann hadn’t felt loved growing up, there was a great gaping hole where her heart ought to be, and Leeann thought a child would fill it. A couple of years back, in her early forties, Leeann had faced the fact she might never conceive—which couldn’t be a bad thing. From what Jenna had sampled of Leeann’s parenting skills, a starving rat would treat its young better.
“Amy told me that Leeann was getting desperate,” Jenna continued. “She’d looked into in vitro fertilization and even adoption.”
After doing a story on an orphanage in the Jiangxi Province last year, Jenna had wanted to adopt every dewy-eyed child there…so vulnerable and innocent. Now there was another orphan in the world.
“She’s the testamentary guardian?”