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“But he didn’t tell me. Neither of them did, and that made it a big deal. That they couldn’t tell me the truth. And the truth I knew was a lie.” Restless, she ran her hand through her hair. “Now I’m not really sure about anything anymore, least of all who I am.”
Doc Ed reached for her hand and forced her to look at him. “You’re still Catherine Kowalski,” he told her firmly. “You can call yourself Watermelon, it makes no difference. You’re still Cate.”
Despite herself, her mouth quirked in a half smile. “Watermelon, huh?”
“Watermelon,” he repeated.
Her smile faded and she shook her head. “It’s not the name that matters, Doc. It’s the truth that makes a difference. And the truth is that someone else gave birth to me, that there are genes inside of me that didn’t come from the people who, until a couple of hours ago, I’d thought of as Mom and Dad. The truth is, I thought there was no secret in my family and there is. And it’s a whopper.”
Doc Ed folded his hands on the desk and looked at her over his glasses. “So what are you going to do? All the records that might have given you a clue are long gone.”
Maybe not, she thought. Maybe someone had claimed them, stored them. Something. But she wasn’t going to deal with that now.
“For the time being, I’m going to stay where I’ll do the most good, right here with my mother.” She noted how he smiled when she still referred to Julia as her mother. “I’m putting in for a leave of absence so I can be with her for as long as I can. After she gets well, we’ll see.”
Unlike his colleagues, he believed in dispensing hope if there was even so much as a shred to be had. But even he couldn’t find it within his heart to allow her to deceive herself like this. “Cate, you know that she might not get well.”
Cate squared her shoulders, the look in her eyes forbidding him to say anything more. “Please,” she whispered the word quietly, “I’m dealing with one truth at a time.”
Two and a half weeks later, Cate found herself standing at her mother’s gravesite. It was raining, which seemed somehow fitting. She’d been angry at the sun for daring to shine the day of her father’s funeral so many years ago.
She was only vaguely aware that her partner, James Wong, was holding an umbrella over her head, keeping her dry. Vaguely aware of the world in general. She felt as if she was walking along on the outside of a huge circle, looking in.
She’d refused the Valium Doc Ed had offered her just before the ceremony. She didn’t want to be any more numb than she already was. Numb from the loss of a woman she’d loved with all her heart and had thought of as her mother to the very end, despite everything.
Numb from the realization that she’d been lied to for the past twenty-seven years of her life.
Numb because there were no foundations beneath her feet, no walls around her to protect her. She was bare and exposed. Completely and utterly adrift in dark waters. And for the first time in her life, she had no sense of identity. She had no idea who she was, or who she might have been meant to be.
She wouldn’t know anything until she found the answers to the questions that had been battering her brain for the past two and a half weeks.
Ever since that day in her mother’s hospital room.
Just before the end, her mother had begged her to forgive her and of course she had. She bore no malice toward the people who had done everything in their power to make her feel loved and secure. But it didn’t negate her desire to discover her birth parents and, with them, her roots.
Cate realized that the priest had stopped talking. The ceremony was almost over. Someone handed her a white rose. She went through the motions, kissing a petal and then throwing the flower onto the deep-mahogany casket that lay nestled in the freshly dug grave.
As she looked down, she felt her heart tightening within her chest.
Julia Kowalski had died three days ago. And now she and Big Ted were together again.
And she was alone. Completely alone. With no family to fall back on.
Neither one of her parents had had any siblings. Cate had always thought of herself as the only child of only children. Now she no longer knew what to think, what to feel.
Except for alone.
Everyone gathered at her parents’ house after the funeral. Betsy Keller, her mother’s best and oldest friend, had taken over and handled all the arrangements. Had insisted on it.
“You have enough to deal with, poor thing,” she’d clucked sympathetically several times during the past three days.
The mother of six and grandmother of nine, Betsy took to traffic control easily. Rather than call in a caterer, she’d summoned the collective resources of all of Julia’s friends. The women had brought over casseroles, pies, cakes and enough food to feed two armies.
“You’ve got to eat something,” Betsy insisted. She paused to deliver the same entreaty every time their paths crossed within the crammed house filled with people who had loved Julia and Ted.
And each time, Cate would respond the same way. “Maybe later.”
Betsy would peer at her through her red-rimmed glasses. “All right, but I’ll be watching you.”
Cate forced a smile to her lips. She tried to cheer herself up with the fact that her mother had been well loved by a great many people. Both her parents had been. And she was going to miss them terribly, but it was going to take her some time to get over the fact that they had deceived her. That they hadn’t had enough faith in her to know that she wasn’t about to pick up and go searching for her birth parents the moment she knew of their existence.
She wouldn’t have then. But, she had to now. Now that she had no roots. No family to call her own. Maybe it was a failing, she thought, but she needed to feel part of something. Something other than the bureau.
She made eye contact with James, who was there with his wife and oldest son. Her partner started to come over, but she shook her head and James faded back, giving her space.
As she stood, looking at people exchanging pleasantries, catching up on one another’s lives, she became aware that someone had come up to join her. She began to move away but felt something being slipped into her hand.
“What’s this?” Cate looked down at the brown manila envelope Doc Ed had just given her.
“Everything that I know about your adoption. It’s not much, but it might give you a start.” Slipping his arm around her slim shoulders, he said, “I know you people at the bureau have ways of finding things out as long as you have some kind of starting point.”
The envelope was light. It couldn’t contain much. “We don’t use government resources for personal ends.”
His gray eyes twinkled for the first time in three days. He gave her a fatherly squeeze. “Yeah, and I’m sure there are ways around that, too, Catherine. Now, eat something before I have you strapped down to a gurney and fed intravenously.”
She looked down at the manila envelope again. The smile that rose to her lips was only slightly forced, far less than what she’d been displaying all day as well-wishers pumped her hand, gave their condolences and told her stories about her parents.
“Yes, sir.”
He took hold of her arm and steered her toward one of the two tables laden down with food. “If you think I’m going to be taken in by that, then you don’t really know me, either.”
She appreciated the irony he’d tossed her way.
Chapter 5
Dr. Lukas Graywolf quietly tiptoed up behind his wife in the Wedgwood-blue tiled bathroom of their modest Southern California home. He slipped his arm around her waist and buried his face in the nape of her neck. Taking a deep breath, he inhaled the fragrance that still clung to her skin from her morning shower, an event he sorely regretted missing.
“So how’s the bureau’s sexiest extra-special agent this morning?”
He’d startled her. Lost in thought and rushing, Lydia Wakefield Graywolf hadn’t realized that her husband was behind her until she’d seen his reflection in the slightly fogged mirror a second before he’d wrapped his arm around her waist.
Lucky for him that she had, otherwise he might have found himself sprawled out on the floor, flat on his back. She wasn’t trained for pleasant surprises, only the other variety.
Lydia had had every intention of going in to the office early today. Certain new things had come to light regarding the case she was working on and she wanted to go over the details. And they were getting in someone new today, a Catherine Kowalski from up north. The assistant director wanted her to take the woman under her wing as if she was some kind of mother hen instead of one of their top operatives.
She didn’t have time to babysit anyone.
She didn’t have time for this, either, Lydia thought, but she allowed herself to linger for a moment in the embrace of the man she loved more than life itself.
His bare chest pressed against her back and heat penetrated the bath towel she’d wrapped around herself. She could feel the heat stirring her. Tiny tongues of desire began to burn away at logic and resolve. Her mascara wand slipped from her fingers.
Lydia smiled at his reflection, their eyes meeting as she covered his arm with her hand. “The bypass surgery went well, I take it?”
He hadn’t mentioned the operation to her yesterday at breakfast. Their schedules were so busy lately, especially hers, that they barely had time to see each other. He didn’t want to waste what time they had together with shop talk. Neither did she.
He wished they could both take some time off and just spend it with each other, going away to some reclusive beach where the next warm body was miles away.
She’d probably go stir crazy within two days, he thought with a silent laugh. Lydia always had to be doing something. Most of the time that involved making the country safe for tomorrow.
Pressing a kiss to the side of her neck, Lukas thought for the umpteenth time how lucky he was to have found Lydia. Everything had changed since she’d come into his life, including him. He never knew he could feel like this, that love could be so uplifting, so empowering.
He felt her sigh as it rippled through her. “You add clairvoyance to your job description, Special Agent Graywolf?”
With a small laugh, Lydia turned around to face him, her body brushing against his as she did so. Her heart quickened a little, the way it always did when they were so close together.
Her husband had the vaguest hint of stubble on his rugged, handsome face, and there was still a trace of sleep in his vivid blue eyes. Right now, he looked more like a boy than the skilled surgeon that he was. She didn’t know who she loved more, the boy or the man.
Because her towel felt as if it was slipping, she tugged it back into place, then threaded her arms around his neck. “Not that I couldn’t use that kind of an added boost, especially with this case, but clairvoyance has nothing to do with it. You always act like this whenever a bypass goes well.”
He didn’t mind being predictable, but she’d aroused his curiosity. “Like what?”
She cocked her head. Her smile bathed over him. “As if you just won the brass ring and all’s well with the world.”
“All is well with the world and the brass ring I won doesn’t have anything to do with Mr. Sellers, the man whose life yours truly saved yesterday.” His sentence was punctuated with two light, almost chaste kisses, delivered to first one cheek, then the other.
A sound akin to a purr escaped her lips. Lydia moved her hips against his, her body silently teasing him, drawing him out.
“Oh?” There was nothing short of mischief in her eyes. “Then what?”
He’d started this, but now he was the one who was hopelessly trapped. Trapped by the look in her eyes, by the smile on her face. By the feelings that were always there, just a hairbreadth beneath the surface, waiting to be summoned and pressed into service.
“You know damn well, what.” Lukas pressed a kiss to her temple. “It has to do with a certain sexier-than-hell FBI operative.”
Gazing up at him, struggling not to melt right there in his arms, Lydia batted her lashes at Blair Memorial’s leading cardiac surgeon like an old-fashioned femme fatale. “Anyone I know?”
“Maybe.” Ever so lightly, he brushed her lips with his own and ignited a fire in his veins. “Someone I definitely know better than you do.”
Because she was so well trained, Lydia didn’t stiffen, didn’t react. Lukas had said that before. That he knew her better than she knew herself. Until recently, she wouldn’t have taken exception to the point.
Until recently, she would have been the first to say that Lukas could see into her very soul, a soul that had been driven and troubled until she’d allowed him into her life.
But now, well, now he didn’t know her as well as he thought he did. Didn’t know that she was keeping something from him and would continue to do so for at least a while longer, even though it killed her to do it. But there were reasons for what she was doing, reasons she knew that her husband wouldn’t understand.
“Speaking of which,” Lukas murmured, his words heating the hollow of her throat just before he kissed it, “something bothering you?”
It was a struggle to keep her eyes from fluttering shut. She really did need to get down to the Santa Ana field office and Lukas was making it very, very difficult for her to keep her mind on her goal. She’d been rigorously trained to withstand anything the enemy might have to throw at her. But this was torture of an entirely different variety. Lukas was her weakness as well as the source of her strength.
“Other than the chaos of the world as we know it?” Lydia could feel her very core tightening. Yearning. Her husband had one hell of a bedside manner.
She heard him laugh softly as he took another pass at her throat. “Other than that.”
His hand cupped her breast, pressing lightly. Her mind began scrambling. “No, why?”
“You were talking in your sleep last night. I couldn’t make out the words.” He raised his head to look at her, a faint line of concern between his eyes. “And you were tossing and turning like a top. That’s something new.”
Anyone else would have used a far more modern comparison, she thought. But Lukas had spent his childhood living on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. It was a life that had deprived him of so many things that children even in his generation had taken for granted. For lack of other toys, he had probably played with a top as a boy. It might have been something that had been handed down from generation to generation, because on the reservation there was nothing else to give a child beyond love, which she knew her mother-in-law did with abundance.
Without realizing it, Lydia caught her bottom lip between her teeth. The answer to her husband’s question was very simple. But she couldn’t give it to him. God, but she hated keeping anything from Lukas. Still, there might not even be something to tell him. She wasn’t certain. But there was no way she could share her thoughts with Lukas. She knew him. The second he found out, he’d want her to restrict her duties. As would the department. And she couldn’t, not yet. Not until this case was over.
She was personally invested in the case, had been right from the start. If she was taken off the case or relegated to some desk, it would probably kill her. Or come very close.
Lydia gave him a half truth. “Just the case,” she answered vaguely, then before Lukas could comment, she added, “and frustration.”
His eyes narrowed as he looked up at her, momentarily abandoning the slow-moving siege he was laying to her body. “What do you mean?”
Her mouth curved wickedly. “Well, there I was, lying alone in that big, empty bed. My husband was gone, working late—”
He’d had plans of being home by six. Instead, he’d gotten home after eleven. There’d been complications. When he’d walked into the bedroom, Lydia had already gone to bed and was asleep.
“The operation ran over. Way over.”
Lydia nodded. They’d made a promise when they were first married that neither would upbraid the other because of the demands of their careers. Each felt that what they did was of paramount importance.
She smiled seductively now, not wanting him to think she was complaining in the true sense of the word. An intentionally dramatic sigh escaped her lips before she said, “Maybe if I’d had someone there with me last night, I wouldn’t have been so tense or tossed around ‘like a top.’”
When she looked at him like that, there was very little he could do to resist her. And there was no desire to. He could feel his body hardening in response to the look in her eyes.
He’d been exhausted when he’d walked in last night. Exhausted, but exhilarated. There was nothing he’d wanted more than to make love with her then. Disappointment had nibbled away at him when he’d found Lydia asleep. But it never occurred to him to wake her to satisfy his own needs.
Right now, he pretended to lament the lost opportunity. “If I’d known that, I would have woken you up.”
Lydia sniffed. “Yeah, yeah, big words after the fact.” She placed her hands on his biceps, loving the way the muscles felt under her palms. “I guess I’ll just have to take a rain check.” Lukas dropped his hands from her waist and lightly tugged on the towel she had wrapped around her. She raised her eyes to his face, barely keeping hers straight. “What are you doing?”
“Unless I miss my guess,” he said, giving the towel a final tug, “preparing for rain.”
Lydia laughed as her damp towel hit the floor, pooling around her feet. Along with her resistance. Still, she was honorbound to make an attempt at a protest. “Luke, I have to get to the office.”
He filled his hands with her hair, bringing her mouth to his. She felt his breath on her lips as he promised, “You will.”
Everything inside of her was turning to the consistency of oatmeal. “I mean, like soon.”
Amusement etched itself into his features. “I’ll be quick, I promise.”
Any kind of resolve she might have been able to muster on short notice evaporated like icicles in the hot August sun. She had never been able to resist Lukas, not even from the very first. And then she’d been armed with determination, resolved not to allow herself to fall for the tall, dark, handsome surgeon. As if she had any say in the matter, even then.
They’d met under the most dire of circumstances. She’d burst into the hospital E.R., accompanying a man she’d shot not fifteen minutes earlier. He’d been the grief-stricken parent of a young girl who had overdosed on drugs she’d gotten from someone dealing at the mall. Extremists had tapped into his grief, making use of his knowledge of demolitions. Only timing and a huge amount of luck had allowed her and her former partner to partially foil his plot to blow up the mall.
She’d arrived at the hospital determined to bring her wounded “suspect” to justice. Lukas was only concerned with saving his life.
All in all, it hadn’t been the best setting for love to take root, but it had. Strongly. But then, she hadn’t counted on the determination of a man like Lukas. Despite their years of marriage, she could feel her head beginning to spin, her pulse beginning to race as his lips roamed over her shoulders. God, she hoped that would never change.
“Just not too quick,” she cautioned.
Stripping off the pajama bottoms that had just barely been clinging to his hips, Lukas caught her up in his arms.
“Your wish is my command,” he told her just before he brought his mouth down on hers.
And made the world disappear.
Chapter 6
The moment she got behind the wheel of her vehicle, Lydia transformed. She was no longer Lydia Graywolf, the proud, contented and very much in love wife of a prominent cardiac surgeon. She was Special Agent Lydia Wakefield Graywolf, a dedicated operative who had given her all to the bureau.
At times, she found the system restrictive, the regulations frustratingly binding. But when she came right down to it, no better system existed within the country, certainly not outside it. And until a better one did, she was determined to remain working for the bureau in one capacity or another. That meant being a field operative, and she wanted nothing to change that. Not yet.
Again, a pang of guilt slipped through her. She banked it down.
Not now, she told herself sternly. There was time enough for that later, when she was a hundred percent certain.
Lydia glanced at her watch. Silver-banded, blue-faced, it had been a gift from Lukas on their first wedding anniversary. The irony of it was, without knowing his choice, she’d bought a similar one for him.
Just showed that they thought alike, she mused. Kindred spirits that had found each other.
She wasn’t late—yet—but she certainly wasn’t going to be early the way she wanted to be, either.
Pressing down on the accelerator, Lydia gunned her engine. She made her way from Bedford to Santa Ana taking surface streets. The Santa Ana Freeway was a bear at this hour of the morning. Traffic was known to come to a dead stop with a fair amount of regularity. She didn’t have the patience for that this morning.
Lately, there was very little patience to draw on.
Periodically, Lydia glanced up in the rearview mirror, keeping an eye out for any policeman who might have a quota to fill. Luck was with her. She managed to fly through a number of amber traffic lights before they turned red and kept her from getting to the office on time. Any hope of getting there early died the second Lukas had kissed her that morning.
No, she amended, they’d died the moment he’d come up behind her.
She didn’t exactly hold it against him. Lydia knew she was one of the lucky ones. Like her mother had been before her.
Love was a funny thing. The right kind of love lit things up, made even the worst that life threw at you bearable. Made life exciting. She didn’t take it, or Lukas, for granted for one moment.
She realized that she’d had love all her life. First from her parents, from her mother who’d doted and from her father, whom she’d emulated by entering the world of law enforcement. And then from Lukas. She didn’t know if she would have turned out to be the same person had she grown up the hard way. Without love.
Main Street, which went from Bedford straight through to Santa Ana, lost a lane, when she entered the latter city. While every bit of Bedford was modern, Santa Ana was comprised of both the old and the recently renovated.
Traffic moved slowly on the older streets, and there was no use fighting it.
Her mind turned to the case, where some young girls’ lives were over before they had even begun. Their hope, their very souls, were stolen from them, leaving behind empty shells. Girls barely into puberty who did what they could to survive in a world they hated.
The task force she headed was trying to break up a teenage prostitute ring that had far-reaching tentacles. In some cases, the girls weren’t even teens yet. Just yesterday, it had come to light that kiddie porn was involved. Videos depicting awful, awful things that little girls shouldn’t even know about, much less take part in.
She knew most of the girls had either run away from intolerable conditions at home, or been sold into the life by a family member. Somebody needed crack but had no money, so he passed around a daughter, a younger sister, any means to an end. It happened more often than she wanted to acknowledge and made her sick to her stomach.
And if it was the last thing she did, she was going to break up the ring and send whoever was responsible to prison. But first, she wanted to hang them upside down by their genitals. And leave them there for a week. Maybe longer.
She owed it to her cousin Susan.
Traffic cleared up a block away from the civic plaza. The difference between the blocks that housed the federal buildings and their surrounding area was astounding, like going from one world to another. Every so often, like today, it hit her anew.