Fortune's Heirs: Reunion. Marie Ferrarella

to protectiveness. “He’ll call back when he has something to say.”

      Lips pressed together, she nodded. But when she spoke, there was despair in Gloria’s voice. “We might be dead by then.”

      Maybe he could kid her out of it, he thought. “You always exaggerate like that?”

      Instead of answering him, she turned desperate eyes up to his face. “Talk to me.”

      “I thought I was.”

      But she shook her head. “No, talk to me. Get my mind off this.”

      Maybe if he could get her to talk about her fears, it would help her to deal with the situation. “What is it with you and tight places?”

      Ordinarily she might have said something flippant, or even denied that there was a problem the way he was implying. But the man had eyes. He could see there was a problem. Could hear it, too. There was no disguising her reaction, no matter how hard she tried. “I don’t like them.”

      He laughed shortly. “That’s rather obvious. Any particular reason?”

      Instead of answering him immediately, Gloria took off her jacket, tossing it on top of her coat. She opened the top two buttons of her blouse. Even in this light, he could see the perspiration along her forehead and on her cheeks. It wasn’t that hot in here, he thought.

      Jack watched in fascination as she pulled her blouse out from the waistband of her skirt, fanning her middle with the shirttails.

      When she paused and raised her eyes to his, he said, “Don’t stop on my account.”

      She hated the feeling of desperation that was eating her alive. She should have outgrown it by now, risen above it. “It’s hot in here.”

      It wasn’t the heat she was feeling and they both knew it, but he let her have her lie.

      “And panicking is going to make it seem hotter.” He waited for a second, certain she would continue. But she didn’t. That alone told him that the situation was dire. The woman never missed a chance to talk. “You didn’t answer my question. Any particular reason confined spaces make you break out in a sweat?”

      “Yes.”

      They weren’t making any progress. “And that would be?”

      Gloria’s eyes shifted from his face. This wasn’t something she talked about, at least not to anyone outside of her own family and even that was rare.

      She glanced toward Jack. He was still waiting. Okay, maybe he deserved to know why she’d clawed his arm. At the very least, it would pass the time.

      She took as deep a breath of the increasingly hotter air as she could and began.

      “When I was a little girl, my family lived in Red Rock. My parents still live there.” A slight smile faintly crossed her lips. “It was as developed then as it sounds.” For just an infinitesimal second, she was that little girl again, free of the demons she had acquired. “Wonderful place to grow up,” she testified. “My brothers and sisters and I had no end of places to play.”

      And then her expression sobered. “There was this one field that ran behind an abandoned old house. We used to call the house the Spooky place—”

      “Very original,” Jack commented, never taking his eyes off her. Watching emotions cross her face in the dim light.

      “We were kids,” she reminded him. And then, as he continued to watch her, she seemed to brace herself before she went on. “One day, we were playing hide-and-seek.” Her breath began to grown audibly shorter. “The way we had a hundred times before.”

      She was going to stop. He saw it in her eyes. “And?” Jack prodded.

      Gloria raised her chin, a shaky defiance trying to take hold. And failing.

      “And I fell into this abandoned shaft. I found out later that it was an old well that had gone dry.”

      Suddenly she was there again, in that hole. The dirt walls threatening to close in on her with every grain of dust that fell. Tears rose to her eyes as she remembered the terror that had gripped her.

      “Christina ran for help while my brothers and Sierra talked to me, trying to keep me calm. Christina came back with my mother who’d called the fire department. More and more people kept coming, blocking out the light. It took what felt like forever for them to get me out. I was six at the time,” she whispered, more to herself than to him, “and convinced that I was going to die.”

      Gloria caught her lower lip between her teeth as she looked up at him again. “I stopped being fearless that day.”