Las Vegas: Seduction: The Heiress's 2-Week Affair

Chapter 12

When the memorial service was finally over and Candace’s ashes had been placed inside the family mausoleum at the cemetery, Natalie was more than ready to put the whole ordeal behind her. Being around her family for any length of time always managed to exhaust her emotionally if not physically.

Not to mention the fact that the sadness had finally really hit her.

Candace was dead.

All of her life, she had always been accustomed to being one half of a whole. That was just the way things were. She and Candace hadn’t been identical, but there was no denying that there was still an indelible bond. Even when she didn’t see Candace for months at a stretch—other than the usual tabloid in-your-face stories that periodically featured her twin—she knew Candace was out there somewhere. Breathing. Doing. Being her other half.

Now that was gone, and she was no longer part of a set. She had to rethink her existence. Become accustomed to thinking of herself in the singular.

It was an odd, odd feeling. She sincerely doubted that anyone who had never lost a twin would understand, but there was this acute feeling of being lost, of something missing.

Almost, she thought ruefully, slanting a covert look toward Matt, like the feeling she’d had when she’d woken up that fateful morning and realized that he had left her for good.

She supposed that maybe that was her fate in life. To be left behind. Granted that Candace, as self-centered as her twin could sometimes be, hadn’t any control over severing their tie.

But Matt had.

As for now, there was no doubt in Natalie’s mind that, as fantastic as the lovemaking was, Matt was only here temporarily. He’d told her about being based in Los Angeles, and she knew that whenever whatever it was he was attending to for Montgomery was over, Matt would be on the next plane bound for L.A. and out of her life.

Again.

She couldn’t dwell on that now, Natalie told herself, couldn’t fixate on what was to be. She could only live in the moment.

That, and find Candace’s killer, no matter what it took.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Matt commented as he escorted her out of the mausoleum. Outside, the sun seemed particularly bright and the weather oppressively hot for that time of year.

Natalie stripped off her suit jacket. The sleeveless black-and-white silk blouse felt as if it was sticking to her spine. “Just thinking.”

It wasn’t a stretch to guess who she was thinking about. He couldn’t remember Natalie ever looking this sad before.

“About Candace?”

And you. But there was no point in mentioning that, so she merely nodded. “Yes.”

Compassion filled him. “I know what it’s like to lose somebody.” He didn’t seem aware of the quiet sigh he uttered before continuing. “It’s the kind of grief that sticks with you. Eventually, you make peace with it and go on, but it’s always there, somewhere in the shadows, no matter how small and manageable you think it’s ultimately become.”

Natalie stopped walking and looked at him. He sounded as if he was talking about someone he’d loved. Had Matt found someone else after he’d left her after all?

Of course he had, you idiot, she mocked herself. Eight years was a long time for a virile man like Matt to do without female companionship. He hadn’t been that self-contained monk she’d imagined.

A tiny sprig of jealousy sprang up inside her chest. With concentrated effort, she yanked it out by the roots. What was the matter with her? She was an independent woman. Her own person, not some moonstruck young girl—the way she had once been.

Her voice gave none of her feelings away as she asked, “Who did you lose?”

To be honest, she half expected Matt to shrug off her question, or at the very least, to change the subject. But instead he answered her.

“The only one I was ever close to in my family, my mother, Amy. The most selfless woman to ever walk the face of the earth. Even on her deathbed, she wasn’t thinking about herself, but of the family.” He sighed heavily. “She asked me to watch out for my older brother. Scott always had a tendency to get himself into situations that he couldn’t get out of.”

She heard the sadness in his voice. He was serious. “Your mother?” she repeated.

“Yes.” He noted the surprised look on her face. “What did you think I was going to say?”

She lifted her shoulders in a half shrug. “Some unforgettable love of your life.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “There’s only been one.” His tone of voice left no room for doubt. “There’s only one chance at the brass ring in this life,” he told her solemnly, taking her arm and continuing to walk. “If you’re lucky, you get it. If you’re not…” His voice trailed off, leaving it to her to fill in the blank.

They had almost left the cemetery grounds and Rothchild mausoleum, where her paternal grandparents and her mother were said to be buried, when she noticed him. Had he been there all the time? At the chapel and then at the cemetery? How had she missed him?

“Conner?”

When Matt looked over toward the person she had called out to, Natalie felt him stiffening at her side. “If you want to have a word with him, I’ll wait for you by the car,” Matt offered, his tone almost formal.

The suggestion caught her off guard. “You don’t have to go, Matt,” she told him even as Conner was approaching them.

Matt shook his head. “Better this way,” was all he said as he retreated, then turned on his heel and walked away.

There was obviously no love lost between the two men, she thought. A lot of that going around, she mused.

Her cousin, Conner Rothchild, was a defense attorney for the family’s large, prestigious legal firm: Rothchild, Rothchild & Bennigan. Tall, with hazel eyes and dark brown hair, the thirty-three-year-old lawyer was the older son of her father’s younger brother, Michael. Though Michael Rothchild was a brilliant attorney in his own right, it was obvious to the family that he resented Harold and felt as if he could never crawl out from beneath his older brother’s shadow.

Lots of discord in this family, she thought sadly just as Conner reached her side.

“Hello, Conner,” she greeted him politely, deliberately dispensing with the obligatory air kiss that was so popular among the rich and famous. “I didn’t see you in the church,” she confessed.

“You had a lot to deal with,” he countered. “And I was in the back. I came late. I wasn’t really sure how Uncle Harold would react to my attending the service. You either,” he added with a smile that always had her guessing as to its genuineness.

But that was mainly because they had grown up as adversaries, thanks to the efforts of both their fathers. Until Ricky’s birth five years ago, Uncle Michael enjoyed rubbing her father’s nose in the fact that he had only females in his family while he, Michael, had fathered two strong, strapping sons: Conner and Michael Jr. The implication was not lost on her. To Uncle Michael, women were second-class citizens.

She remembered always feeling as if the family gatherings they had were merely excuses for some sort of competitive comparison. Birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, it didn’t matter. The agenda was always the same. Each brother tried to top the other, and neither was above using their offspring and pitting them against one another like some human form of cockfighting.

Time and again, she could remember being played against Conner and his brother. The competition turned more serious as they grew up. Then it was accomplishment against accomplishment, career against career. More than once, the criminals she had arrested wound up being put back on the street, thanks to the efforts of Conner and her uncle.

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