Searching for Cate

As if she was looking into the mirror and seeing into the past.

Joan cleared her throat, her nervousness growing. “Can I help you?”

Cate kept looking at the woman in the bed, searching for some foolproof sign. All the while knowing that there wouldn’t be one. “That all depends.”

“On what?” Joan whispered the words, now clearly fatigued.

Cate took a step toward her then stopped. She was afraid that the woman would pass out if she came any closer. Did she know? On some instinctive level?

Cate put her thoughts into words. “On whether you’re willing to admit that you’re my mother.”

Dear Reader,

The Signature Select aims to single out outstanding stories, contemporary themes and oft-requested classics by some of your favorite series authors and present them to you in a variety of formats bound by truly striking covers.

We want to provide several different types of reading experiences in the new Signature Select program. The Spotlight books offer a single “big read” by a talented series author, the Collections present three novellas on a selected theme in one volume, the Sagas contain sprawling, sometimes multi-generational family tales (often related to a favorite family first introduced in series) and the Miniseries feature requested previously published books, with two or, occasionally, three complete stories in one volume. The Signature Select program offers one book in each of these categories per month, and fans of limited continuity series will also find these continuing stories under the Signature Select umbrella.

In addition, these volumes bring you bonus features…different in every single book! You may learn more about the author in an extended interview, more about the setting or inspiration for the book, more about subjects related to the theme and, often, a bonus short read will be included. Authors and editors have been outdoing themselves in originating creative material for our bonus features—we’re sure you'll be surprised and pleased with the results!

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The Signature Select Program

Searching for Cate

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dear Reader

What if, one day, you wake up to discover that everything you believed to be true, wasn’t? That the parents you’d always loved really weren’t your parents? How would you feel? These are the emotions that FBI Special Agent Cate Kowalski finds herself facing. She’d gone into law enforcement to honor and emulate the father she’d always adored, the father who was killed in the line of duty while she was still in her teens. Now, she finds the very reason for who and what she is has been based on a lie. This is the premise behind Searching For Cate. It is Cate who is searching for herself, the way that, in part, we all search for ourselves, except that in her case she has to begin from scratch. The search for her birth parents brings her to Southern California and eventually, into the life of Dr. Christian Graywolf, a selfless physician who is also one of the walking wounded. Together, slowly, they each heal the gaping hole in the other’s soul.

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. And, as always, I wish you love.

To Marsha Zinberg, who asked, and Patience Smith, who said yes.

Thank you.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Bonus Features

Chapter 1

“What do you mean it’s not compatible?”

Special Agent Catherine Kowalski stared at the short, husky lab technician before her. A basket filled with vials, syringes and other blood-letting paraphernalia was looped over his arm and he looked at her as if she were a deranged troll who had wandered out of a fairy tale.

The drone of voices in the hospital corridor outside her mother’s single-care unit faded into the background as she tried to make some kind of sense of what the man had just told her.

It’s a mistake, a voice whispered in her head. But still, there was this terrible tightening in the pit of her stomach, as if she was about to hear something she didn’t want to hear.

This was absurd, she thought. Just a small foul-up, nothing more.

“She’s my mother. How could my blood type be incompatible with hers? There has to be some mistake,” Cate insisted.

There was no sympathy on the technician’s rounded, pockmarked face, just a weariness that came from doing the same laboratory procedures day after endless day. There was more than just a touch of indignation in his eyes at being questioned.

His voice was flat, nasal. “No mistake. I tested it twice.”

Her stomach twisted a little harder. Somewhere in the distance, an alarm went off, followed by the sound of running feet. She blocked it out, her mind focused on what this new information ultimately meant.

No more surprises, I can’t handle any more surprises. Cate had graduated near the top of her class at Quantico. In the field, there were few better. But on the personal front, she felt as if her life had been falling apart for the past few years.

And this might be the final tumble.

Cate’s eyes narrowed. Her voice was low, steely. “Test it again.”

Submitting to the blood-typing test had been nothing more than an annoying formality in Cate’s eyes. She’d thought it a waste of time even as she agreed.

Time had always been very precious to her.

Ever since she could remember, for reasons she could never pin down, she’d always wanted to cram as much as she could into a day, into an hour. It was as if soon, very soon, her time would run out. Over the years, every so often, she’d tried to talk herself out of the feeling.

Instead, she’d been proven to be right. Because there hadn’t been enough time, not with the father whom she adored. Officer Thaddeus Kowalski, Big Ted to his friends, had died in the line of duty, protecting one of his fellow officers during the foiling of an unsuccessful liquor store robbery. She was fifteen at the time. It seemed like the entire San Francisco police force turned out for his funeral. She would have willingly done without the tribute, if it meant having her father back, even for a few hours.

When she was a little girl, they used to watch all the old classic westerns together, and her father always told her that he wanted to die with his boots on. She’d cling to him and tell him that he could never die. He’d laughed and told her not to worry. That he wasn’t prepared to go for a very long time.

He’d lied to her and died much too soon.

As had Gabe Summer.

Special Agent Gabriel Summer, the only man she had ever allowed herself to open her heart to. Gabe, who had stubbornly assaulted the walls she’d put up around herself until they’d finally cracked and then come down. Gabe, who somehow managed to keep an upbeat attitude about everything in general and humanity in particular.

Gabe, of whom nothing more than his arm had been found in the rubble that represented a nation’s final departure from innocence on that horrific September 11 morning in 2001.

Like her father, Gabe had left her much, much too soon. They never had the chance to get married the way they’d planned, or have the children he wanted so much to have with her. The lifetime she’d hoped for, allowed herself to plan for, hadn’t happened. Because there wasn’t enough time.

And now, with her mother diagnosed with leukemia and her bone marrow discovered not to be a match, Cate had thought at the very least she could donate blood to be stored for her mother so that when a match would be found—as she knew in her heart just had to be found—at least the blood supply would be ample.

But now here was this stoop-shouldered man myopically blinking at her behind rimless eyeglasses, telling her something that just couldn’t be true.

“I can’t test it again,” he informed her flatly. “I’ve got work to do.”

Lowering his head, he gave the impression that he was prepared to ram his way past her if she didn’t let him by.

Cate planted herself in front of him. At five foot four, she wasn’t exactly a raging bull. To the undiscerning eye, she might have even looked fragile. But every ounce she possessed was toned and trained. She was far stronger than she appeared and knew how to use an opponent’s weight against him.

She temporarily halted the technician’s departure with a warning glare.

“Look, a lot goes on in the lab. You people are overworked and underpaid and mistakes are made. I need you to test my blood again. And then, if you get the same results, test hers. Just don’t come back and tell me they’re incompatible, because they’re not. They can’t be.”

The small man stepped back, his eyes never leaving her face. “Lady, you’re AB positive. Your mother’s O. I don’t care how many tests you want me to run, that’s not going to change. You give her your blood, she dies, end of story.” He drew himself up to the five foot three inches he came to in his elevator shoes. The vials in the basket clinked against one another. Annoyance creased his wide brow, traveling up to his receding hairline. “Now, I’ve got other patients to see to.”

“Problem?”

Cate recognized the raspy voice behind her immediately, even before she turned around. It belonged to Dr. Edgar Moore.

Doc Ed.

Tall, with a full head of thick silver hair that added to the impression of a lion patrolling his terrain, Doc Ed had been her family’s primary physician long before the term had taken on its present meaning. It was Doc Ed who had held her and comforted her when she’d found out about her father’s death. And it was Doc Ed who had called her at the field office to tell her to come home, that her mother needed her even if Julia Kowalski was too stubborn to get on the phone and place the call herself.

Cate had gotten herself reassigned to the San Francisco field office, where she’d initially started her career. That allowed her to see to her mother’s care. It didn’t help. Her mother’s condition was worsening by the week. By the day. Time was slipping away from her and there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

On the verge of feeling overwhelmed, Cate sighed with relief. Reinforcements had arrived. Doc Ed would put this irritating person in his place.

She refrained from hugging the doctor, even though she felt the urge. Instead, fighting for control over her frayed emotions, banking down the scared feeling growing like an overwatered weed, Cate brushed aside a strand of straight blond hair that had fallen into her face.

“Doc Ed, could you please tell this man that his infallible lab has made a mistake.”

The doctor’s warm gray eyes looked from the annoyed technician to the young woman he’d known since her first bout of colic. “How’s that?”

Cate took a breath and collected herself. She hadn’t realized that her temper was so close to snapping. The restraint she’d always valued so highly was in short supply.

She gestured toward the technician and stopped to read his name tag. “Bob here is telling me that I can’t donate blood to my mother. That our blood types are incompatible.” The laugh that punctuated her statement was short and mirthless. And nervous. “We both know that can’t be true.”

The moment the words were out of her mouth, they tasted bitter. Like bile. Instincts honed on the job pushed their way into her private life. Once again whispering that something was wrong. Very, very wrong. That the twisting feeling in her gut was there for a reason. There were no planes flying into buildings, no bullets firing, no cells mutating and turning cancerous, but something was still wrong. She could feel it vibrating throughout her whole body.

Because Doc Ed’s affable face had taken on a look of concern.

Cate suddenly felt like throwing up. Like running down the hall with her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear anything, anything that would further shake up her already shaken world.

She did neither. But it was all she could do to hang on. She’d spent a good part of her life trying to be tough, trying to live up to Big Ted’s reputation. He’d had no sons and she felt she owed it to him, because in her eyes, he’d been the greatest father to ever walk the earth.

But she wasn’t sure just how much more of life’s sucker punches she could take and still remain standing, remain functioning.

“Can’t be true, right?” Cate heard herself asking quietly. Holding her breath.

Doc Ed sighed. “Cate, maybe it’s time that you and your mother talked.”

Every bone in her body stiffened, braced for an assault. She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck standing up.

“We talk all the time, Doc.” Her voice was hollow to her ear.

Behind her, Bob, the lab technician, took his opportunity to hurry away. She heard the rattle of the vials as he escaped down the hall. But her mind wasn’t on the other man. It was centered on the expression on Doc Ed’s face, which did nothing to give her hope.

She wasn’t going to like whatever it was that she was going to hear. She was willing to bet a year’s salary on it, and she had never been a betting person.

“At least,” she added, “I thought we talked. But I guess I thought wrong.”

Doc Ed made no answer. Instead, he lightly cupped her elbow and guided her back into the room she’d vacated several minutes ago when she’d seen the technician making his rounds. Her mother had been dozing off.

Cate had waylaid the lab tech in the hallway, once again stating her impatience. She wanted to begin donating blood, the first of what she intended to be several pints. Frustration had assaulted her even before he’d opened his mouth to tell her the bad news.

Ever since she’d learned that her mother had leukemia, Cate had felt completely frustrated. There was nothing she could do to change the course of events. When her bone marrow turned out not to be a match, it had just fed her impatience, making her that much more determined to be able to help somehow. She’d immediately taken it upon herself to spearhead a search amid the San Francisco bureau personnel and their families for a donor. So far, there had been none who matched.

More frustration.

And now, this, whatever “this” was.

“Julia.” Doc Ed’s gravelly voice was as soft as Cate had ever heard it as he addressed her mother.

The pale woman in the bed stirred and then turned her head in their direction. The look on Julia Kowalski’s face told Cate that her mother was braced for more bad news. Resigned to it.

Don’t be resigned, Mama. Fight it. Fight it!

Cate found herself blinking back tears as she approached her mother’s bed and took the small, weak hand into hers.

She could almost feel time slipping through her fingers. Her soul ached.

Julia tried to force her lips into a smile as she looked at her daughter. “Yes?” The single word came out in a whisper.

“Cate just found out that her blood doesn’t match yours.” Moving over to the bed, Doc Ed took his patient’s other hand and held it for a long moment. “Julia, it’s time.”

“Time?” Cate echoed. A shaft of panic descended, spearing her. She fought to push it away without success. Her heart hammering, she looked at the man who, over the years, she’d regarded as her surrogate grandfather. “Time for what?”

“Something that you should have been told a long time ago.” His words were addressed to her, but Doc Ed was looking at the woman in the bed as he said them. “I’ll leave the two of you alone now.” Releasing Julia’s hand and placing it gently on top of the blanket, Doc Ed made his way to the door. Pausing to look at them for a moment longer, he added, “I’ll be by later to look in on you, Julia. And Dr. Conner will be by shortly.”

Cate was vaguely aware of the reference to her mother’s oncologist as she watched the door close behind him.

Sealing her in with her mother and whatever secret the woman had kept from her all this time.

Chapter 2

Juanita Graywolf was nursing a cup of the black tar she liked to call coffee when her son, Dr. Christian Graywolf, entered the small house in Arizona where he’d grown up. Hearing the soft creak of the front door, Juanita Graywolf barely stirred in her seat. Instead, she looked at the reflection in the kitchen window directly opposite her. The window faced the garden, and west. Dawn was still making up its mind as to just how large an entrance it was going to make this morning. Darkness remained with its face pressed against the pane, helping to define her son’s image in the glass.

He was such a handsome boy, she thought. He looked like his father. Tom Graywolf had turned out rotten to the core, but he had been a handsome devil, there was no denying that. Christian was twenty-nine years old now, but he was still her boy. And once, he had been her golden child.

Until she had stolen his smile from him. His smile and his soul.

Her face gave away none of her thoughts as she took another sip of coffee. Juanita smiled at the reflection instead of at her second born. “You’re up early this morning, Christian.”

It was Monday morning and she’d risen early to have a little time with him before he returned to Bedford, California, which he and his brother now called home. But Christian’s bed was empty when she’d knocked and looked into the room. And she’d known where he had gone.

“So are you,” Christian Graywolf pointed out.

She sat up straight, like a young girl, he thought. People seeing them together mistook them for siblings, not mother and son. He was proud of her for taking care of herself. Proud of her for never giving up the way so many here did. She had always been the source of strength to him. She and Uncle Henry.

“I have a flight to catch,” he reminded her.

The flight had nothing to do with where she knew her son had been. For a moment longer, Juanita held her peace, even as her mother’s heart ached.

“And I have a schoolhouse full of students to prepare for,” she said. Turning around now to face him, she nodded toward the old-fashioned stove. It was the same one that had occupied that space when she was growing up in this same house. “Coffee’s hot.”

“And hard as usual,” he joked. Taking a cup, he filled it only halfway.

At the other end of the small house, they heard Henry stirring, mumbling to himself as he obviously ran into something in the dark. The words were all in Navajo and hard for Christian to catch. He saw his mother smiling to herself as she listened.

Henry Spotted Owl, his mother’s older brother, had come to live with them years ago, to take the place of the father he hardly remembered. And to help straighten out Lukas before his older brother was forever lost to them. Henry, an ex-boxer among other things, had done such a good job with Lukas, he’d decided to stay on and offer his own brand of rough-handed counseling to some of the other troubled teenagers on the reservation. He built a gym and gave them a way to work off their anger productively. In his late sixties and fifteen years’ his mother’s senior, the man gave no sign of letting up despite the emergency bypass surgery he’d received from Lukas some years back.

Grit and determination against all odds ran in the family. Henry had pulled himself out of a self-destructive lifestyle that would have killed him before he reached forty. Lukas had become the first of their family not just to graduate high school and college, but to become a doctor. And Christian was the second.

Christian’s mouth curved slightly. He and Lukas both owed a great deal to their mother, who had refused to follow a path of self-indulgence and self-pity, the way so many other of her contemporaries had. Just to put her sons through school, she’d worked two jobs without a word of complaint, behaving as if it was the norm.

At fifty-three, Juanita Graywolf looked younger now than he remembered her looking while he was growing up. Back then, he thought of her as just his mother, who was also a schoolteacher. Now she was principal of the school where she’d once sat in the back row as a student. It was the reservation’s only school, taking children from kindergarten to twelfth grade. His mother had almost single-handedly brought up the standard of teaching there, so that now the school was held up as an example to other reservations.

She was a remarkable woman, and he had grown up thinking that all women were that strong, that determined not to allow life to best them.

His late Alma had shown him how wrong he was.

Juanita suppressed a chuckle. “It sounds like your ride is grumbling,” she said as she nodded toward the rear of the small house.

There had been just three rooms when Henry had come to live with them, a combination living room and kitchen and two small bedrooms. The first thing Henry had done was add on his own room. After that, he’d built on another room and expanded the living room, then added a porch. Henry liked to say that he left his mark wherever he went. Truer words were never spoken.

Christian finished the remainder of the black pitch in his coffee cup and set it on the table. “Uncle Henry wouldn’t be Uncle Henry if he didn’t grumble.”

Juanita looked at her son, her mother’s heart tugging hard. He looked so sad, so different from the boy he’d once been. Her brain told her to avoid the subject, to let it slide, because to raise it would serve no purpose, heal no wounds. The fact that Christian had gone there told her that the wound he bore was far from healed.

Seasons had gone by. And it was time he let go of the past.

Long past time.

Juanita almost wished that Christian wouldn’t come home as frequently as he did. She dearly loved seeing him, loved seeing both her sons when they came to work at the clinic to tend to the sick and the forgotten. But whenever Christian came, he was also returning to the scene of his greatest heartache.

She would rather never see him again than have him relive his pain, time and again.

He needed to put it all behind him. And she couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. It wasn’t in her. She set down her cup again and looked into his eyes. “You went there, didn’t you?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” He met her gaze unwaveringly. Of her two sons, Christian was the more sensitive one. The one more like her.