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Ben’s material chronicled Gerald’s life from his founding of Robinson Tech, known until recently as Robinson Computers, his marriage to Charlotte Prendergast and the subsequent births of their children. It covered a lot of years. From the dates Ben had provided, Ella knew that Gerald and Charlotte had been married nearly three and a half decades. She drew out a visual time line of these known dates. On another sheet, she drew, contrastingly, the brief time line of Jerome Fortune’s life span. If Gerald was not Jerome, that young man had had a regrettably short life.
She idly traced her pen over Jerome’s time line, while studying Gerald’s. She hadn’t been hired to determine that the two men were one and the same. Ben already believed that they were. There wasn’t anything interesting of note on Gerald’s time line until he’d founded his computer company. Before that were just the basics. Birth date. The names of his supposed parents—both deceased.
“Lunch.”
She nearly jumped out of her skin when Mrs. Stone spoke.
Without asking, the housekeeper carried the tray she held over to the table near the windows. She set out the place setting, a plate with a silver dome covering it and a crystal glass filled with what look like iced tea. When she was done, she tucked the tray under her arm and headed back out the doorway. “I’ll collect everything in an hour,” she said as she left.
“Yes, ma’am,” Ella murmured under her breath. But curiosity as well as hunger pangs propelled her across the room to see what was under the dome. She was relieved to see a flaky croissant brimming with—she filched a tiny bit on her fingertip to taste—chicken salad, a steaming cup of some sort of soup and a glistening fruit tart.
Definitely beat out her poor little peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Knowing she’d spent more time that morning thinking about the Gerald/Jerome connection than hunting down any of his possible offspring, she carried the food back to the desk and ate while she began methodically searching the whereabouts of the women listed in Ben’s notes.
She was able to cross off the first two almost immediately. One had died childless in an automobile accident only a few months after the conference where she and Gerald had met. The other was now a United States senator with an eye toward the presidency, and Ella figured if there were any other children besides the high school–age twins she shared with her husband, the media would have ferreted them out long before now.
She made her notes next to their names and moved on to the third prospect. “You do get around, don’t you,” she commented and looked up to focus again on the computer monitor.
Ben was standing in the doorway, wearing an immaculate pinstriped suit and gray tie, and for the second time, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Who gets around?”
Over the course of the morning, she’d gotten comfortable sitting in his chair, but now she felt nothing but awkwardness and she hopped to her feet. “Sorry about the mess,” she muttered, quickly gathering the empty dishes that Mrs. Stone had yet to retrieve, and swiping croissant crumbs off the glorious desk onto the plate.
“What mess?” He rounded the desk from the other side and angled his dark head, studying her handwritten notes. Aside from Gerald’s time lines, which had numerous additions and comments jotted here and there, her notes were fairly neat. But nothing like his typed stack.
Rather than standing there, inhaling the intoxicating scent of him, she carried the dishes over to the table. She wondered if his thick, dark hair ever got mussed out of the severe way he combed it back from his face.
“Looks like you’ve been busy,” he said. “Mrs. Stone taking care of you?”
She hovered near the table. “Yes. Lunch was unnecessary, but delicious. Thank you.”
“Thank her. She fixed it.” He glanced at the computer monitor, then back at her again. “You’ve found everything you needed?”
She nodded quickly. “I’ve already eliminated two women from your list. If it continues this quickly, you’re definitely overpaying me for the job.”
He picked up her spiral notebook and read what she’d written. “It won’t always go that quickly. Nothing involving my father ever does. Where’d the notebook come from?”
“What?”
He lifted the notebook slightly before tossing it on the desk.
“Oh.” She gestured at her messenger bag sitting on the floor against the wall behind his desk. “I had it with me.”
“Reminds me of my school days,” he murmured. He walked over to her and reached out his arm, but only to open one of the built-in cabinets near where she stood. “Plenty of supplies for you to use,” he said, and moved away again. “No need to use up your own stuff for school.”
“It was just a few pages,” she pointed out. But she pulled out a legal pad from the well-stocked shelf behind the cabinet door and closed it again.
“School’s not in session for you right now.”
“Classes start up again in about a week and a half.” She set the legal pad on the desk, but then didn’t really know what to do. It was his office. Taking the seat behind his desk while he was there seemed too strange. Instead, she ended up just hovering there beside the desk, folding and unfolding her arms. “I, um, I only have one class right now that’ll be on campus. Intro to Taxation. The last class I took was online only.”
“Handy.”
“Depends. Sometimes things are easier in a classroom. But—” she shrugged and unfolded her arms yet again “—it’s what’s been working.” It was also hard knowing where to focus her attention. If she looked at him, she was very much afraid she might stare. Or drool. The man was that handsome. But it was also awkward not looking at him.
God help her. You’d think she’d never been around a guy before. She wasn’t a virgin, for heaven’s sake. She’d had a few boyfriends. Nobody serious enough to stick around through her busy schedule and the demands of her family. But still...
“Well, looks like you’re doing fine. I’ll leave you to it.”
“Mister!” Mrs. Stone appeared, unable to hide her surprise. “I didn’t know you were here. I’ll prepare you lunch immediately.”
“No. I had a few spare minutes but I’m heading back to the office. Make sure Ella leaves in a few hours.” His eyes slid over Ella’s face, a sudden glint of amusement in them. “I’m not paying her overtime.”
With that, he departed as unexpectedly as he’d appeared.
“He never comes home during the workday.” Mrs. Stone glared at Ella as if she was to blame. “I would have had a proper lunch for him prepared.”
“I don’t think he expected lunch,” Ella offered. “It was all delicious, though. Thank you.”
Mrs. Stone didn’t look soothed. As rocky faced as always, she loaded up her tray with Ella’s lunch dishes and strode out of the room. Ella was fairly certain she’d have slammed the door if the doorway had possessed one.
Fortunately, it wasn’t Mrs. Stone’s opinion about Ella that mattered.
And Ben had said she was doing fine.
Chapter Four
He showed up shortly after lunch the next day, too.
This time, though, Mrs. Stone was prepared.
As if she’d been hovering somewhere, waiting and watching for Ben to “sneak” into his own home, two minutes after he walked into the study, the gray-haired housekeeper appeared with a second lunch tray, which she set next to Ella’s on the round table near the windows. “You don’t eat enough,” she said before striding out of the office once more.
Ella was still sitting at his desk. And if she had perhaps done a little of her own preparing, too, by choosing to wear a green turtleneck and black slacks instead of the jeans and shirt she’d worn the day before, she was the only one who had to know.
Now, Ben gave her a wry look. “If I don’t eat it, I’m afraid she might poison me in my sleep or something.”
Ella couldn’t keep from smiling. “I think she’s just trying to be—” she hunted for a suitable word “—nurturing.”
“I’m pretty sure she ate her young,” he returned, but pulled off his suit jacket—pale gray today—and hung it over the back of the table chair. “You haven’t had a chance to eat yours, yet.” He gestured at the second dome-covered plate. “Come and keep me company and fill me in on your progress.”
Since he’d made a point of telling her he was never at his home office during the day, she figured he was more anxious to make progress on his search than he’d admitted. She’d been there two days so far, and so far, he’d appeared twice. She pushed out of his desk chair and joined him at the little conference table. But thinking of this as an impromptu business meeting was hard, considering the way he rose and pulled out her chair for her before she could do it herself.
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