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Though she was pretty, she wasn’t beautiful. His sister, Tracy, wasn’t, either. That was apparently how Lincoln Gray liked it. He picked nice-enough-looking women so that it wasn’t a chore to bed them. But not true glamour queens, who might forget to be awed by his own golden charms.
Still, Allison Cabot had looked far more sexy and alive this afternoon, wearing her tilting pearl tiara and creamy wedding gown. Not beautiful, even then, but quite nice. Intensely female. Vulnerable. And strangely enticing, considering Mark was almost as allergic to brides as he was to babies.
She set the papers down on the desk. “The existence of a marriage certificate does not necessarily prove anything. There might be a divorce decree somewhere, as well.”
“There might be,” he agreed. “But there isn’t.”
“Mr. Travers—I mean, Mark.” She took a deep breath. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that I was about to—” She stopped and cleared her throat. “That if the wedding had gone as planned today, I would be married to a bigamist?”
“Yes.” A little blunt, perhaps, but he didn’t think it would help to sugarcoat the truth. Still, he did hope she wouldn’t start crying. He’d dried a million of Tracy’s tears in the past months and he’d run out of patience. And clean handkerchiefs.
To her credit, the Armani and the tight braid seemed to be doing the trick. Her eyes were bright, but she had no intention of falling apart.
“It’s—” Again she had to regroup and start over. “I just find it so impossible to—”
She bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry. I’m practically incoherent here. I must sound like a fool.” That made her flush, which brought out a few freckles she’d tried very hard to hide with makeup. “On the other hand, if what you say is true, I guess I am a fool.”
“It’s not that simple. My sister is an intelligent woman, but she fell for Lincoln Gray, too. She married him. She put his name on all her bank accounts and safety-deposit boxes.” He shook his head. “Apparently, the man is quite good at what he does.”
She looked down again. “Yes,” she said. “He is.”
“He picks his targets shrewdly, too. My sister is thirty-eight. She’s already been through one divorce and suffered two miscarriages. Her most recent relationship had ended badly, just weeks before Lincoln arrived on the scene, and I was out of the country. A lonely time for her. I also think her biological clock is ticking pretty loudly.”
He smiled. “Any of that sound familiar?”
Allison shrugged, but the pink hadn’t left her cheeks. “I’m afraid it does, a bit. My father died a few months ago. He was my only family.” She lifted one hand, palm up. “And, of course, we all have biological clocks.”
That interested Mark. Allison was at least ten years younger than Tracy. Was it possible that a woman in her twenties was already so desperate for a baby that she’d marry a jerk like Lincoln Gray just for the pretty blond genes?
He laughed inwardly at his own naïveté. Of course it was possible. He knew firsthand how baby-lust could trump common sense, self-preservation and even love.
“Did you love him?”
He could tell the question shocked her. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. With effort, she arranged her features as close to classic hauteur as her upturned pixie nose and freckles would allow.
“I’m sorry,” she said crisply, “but I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”
He smiled again. That tone might intimidate the handmaidens downstairs, but she still looked like a freckle-faced kid to him. He hadn’t forgotten the cockeyed tiara or her desire to slice off poor Lincoln’s puny banana penis.
“Which means,” he said, “that you didn’t.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Again, I fail to see why that angle concerns you.”
“It concerns me because I am going to continue looking for Lincoln. For me, this is just a setback, not the end. And I’m hoping you’ll help me in any way you can. But if you really were in love with him, you might not be as eager to see him get caught.”
She had picked up a pencil and was tapping the eraser absently against the polished-mahogany desktop. A fidgeter. Earlier, she’d been twisting her ruby ring so much he’d been surprised she hadn’t unscrewed her finger.
In PR you had to learn to read people quickly and he knew what that meant. In his experience, fidgeters were impulsive people, given to emotional decisions. Occupying their hands helped to slow them down, to sort things through in a more orderly fashion.
She brought the eraser to her lips and nipped it thoughtfully with her teeth. An oral fixation, too. He took a minute to admire her mouth, which was her sexiest feature. Full lips with a lot of rich natural color, a broad span and the beginning of a laugh line. Those lips were a neon sign, labeling her accessible, innocent and generous.
Lincoln Gray probably trolled the upscale resorts, searching for women with mouths just like that.
“I’m not sure I understand,” she said finally. “Caught for what? If your sister put his name on her accounts, that means the money was legally his, doesn’t it? Ethically it’s mean and rotten, but people don’t get tossed in jail for being morally bankrupt.”
“I don’t intend to toss him in jail. I just want to—” He hesitated. “Talk to him.”
To his surprise, she laughed. It was a decidedly non-Armani laugh—light, unaffected, hitting several musical notes that were easy on the ears.
He wasn’t sure exactly what had struck her as so funny, but he was glad she could laugh at anything today. Tracy hadn’t so much as smiled for weeks after Lincoln left and she still sometimes cried herself to sleep. Either Allison Cabot was stronger than she looked or her heart really hadn’t been bunged up much by her fiancé’s defection.
“Sorry,” she said, putting her pencil down so that she could wipe her eyes. “It’s just that men are so predictable. My father would have said exactly the same thing if he were alive today. I assume your talking will be done with your fists?”
He smiled. “I can’t imagine it would come to that. I never met the guy, but I’ve seen pictures. I don’t think he’d want to risk messing up his handsome face.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Little Lord Fauntleroy meets Batman. Not much of a match.”
It was his turn to laugh. No one had ever compared him to Batman before, though he assumed it had something to do with his coloring. But the vision of Lincoln Gray dressed up in black velvet knee pants, lace collar and ringlets was just too perfect.
And she was right about the rest of it, too. The primitive part of him would dearly love to kick Little Lord Fauntleroy’s ass.
“How much money did he take from your sister? Has he left her in serious financial trouble?”
“Not really. Luckily most of her assets aren’t liquid. It’s not easy to abscond with real estate and trust funds. But he cleaned out their joint account—a few hundred thousand—and her secondary safety deposit box, which had a lot of fancy jewelry. Not bad for less than two months’ work.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Were they heirlooms? I have a ring of my mother’s—” She frowned, touching the ruby ring again. “I might have hired a private detective and tracked him down myself, if he’d gotten his hands on this.”
“Yes, some of them were family pieces. One in particular is an irreplaceable loss. A large gold brooch, shaped like a peacock, with emeralds and sapphires in its tail. It’s tacky as hell. I’ve seen jewelry out of a gumball machine that was more restrained. But it’s a valuable piece with a long history.”
Mark tried to mask the fury that boiled in his veins every time he thought of that asinine Gray standing in the bank vault, stuffing the Travers peacock into his pocket like a kid stealing gum at the drugstore. That scum wasn’t capable of recognizing real worth—in women or in gemstones.
“It’s been in the family for almost four hundred years,” he finished. “I intend to get it back.”
“But it sounds quite valuable. What if he’s already sold it?”
He shrugged. “Then we’ll have a problem.”
The buzzer on her desk sounded. With an apologetic grimace, she turned and answered it. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Cabot, but the man from Cuddles is here and the order is all wrong. Mrs. Blakeley’s crib didn’t come and you know the baby is due in—”
“It’s all right, Sylvia. I’ll be right down.”
Allison clicked off the speaker and turned to Mark.
“I’m going to have to deal with this,” she said.
“That’s all right. I’ll wait.”
“No.” She wiped her hand over her eyes. “Honestly, I think I’ve talked about this all I can today. I’m feeling a little muddled. It has been—” Her voice trembled slightly and she coughed to hide it. “It’s been a strange day. I’m sorry for everything your sister has lost, but I’m not sure how I can help you. Lincoln didn’t leave me a forwarding address.”
“But he might have said something—some detail that could give us a place to start.” He tried to read behind those sad green eyes. She looked incredibly tired, as if all the fiery indignation of the knife-throwing episode had died away.
Maybe he could fan the flame.
“He made a fool of you, Allison. Even if he didn’t break your heart, he wasted months of your life. He left you alone again, with the biological clock ticking louder than ever. Wouldn’t you like to see him get what’s coming to him?”
She hesitated just long enough. Damn it—Mark had his answer. Just like Tracy, this woman was still soft in the head where Lincoln Gray was concerned. Was the guy really that good in the sack? If not, he must have been putting stupid-drops in their bottled water.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have to think.”
He made a small, harsh gesture with his left hand. Women didn’t think. They emoted and they dithered and they let bastards like Lincoln Gray get away and start this madness all over again with some other weak-minded female.
“Try to understand…” She sighed. “Just this morning, I woke up believing that this man would be my husband—my lover, for life. The father of my children. It’s a little difficult, a few hours later, to send the bloodhounds after him.”
He stood. He’d wasted enough time already. “I understand. But the bloodhounds are already after him. I’m not giving up. I just hope I find him before he insinuates his way into some other woman’s bank account—and her bed.”
She made a sound, but it wasn’t a word. It certainly wasn’t a denial.
He extracted a business card and lay it on the table. “If you think of anything that might help, call me.”
WHEN ALLISON GOT HOME that night, the brownstone was dark and cold and so empty it felt as if even the molecules of air had stopped moving.
She had come back here to change out of the wedding dress, but it had been about three o’clock. Her housekeeper, Loretta, had been bustling around making comforting noise with a vacuum and the June sun had been shining in through the tall foyer windows.
Tonight it was like a tomb.
In a way, she thought as she thumbed through the mail, not really seeing any of it, the house was exactly that. So many ghosts lived here already. Her mother’s was the palest, most insubstantial one because Allison had so few real memories of her. Mostly she was a wide, warm smile and a halo of red curls.
Her father’s ghost was disturbingly robust, his edicts echoing down the halls announcing what was acceptable and what was beyond the pale. Even now, when Allison dared to flout those edicts, she caught herself looking over her shoulder.
And now the ghost of Mrs. Lincoln Gray would float here, too, in her transparent Vera Wang gown. That contented young bride who had believed she’d never feel alone again. The happy wife who had planned to be pregnant within the year and had already picked out baby names from a book hidden in her nightstand drawer.
Amanda Anne and Michael Joseph Gray. They had become so real to Allison. In her mind, she’d already redecorated the study upstairs with all her favorite baby furniture from Lullabies. She wondered whether she’d ever be able to work in that study again without feeling haunted.
Allison, for pity’s sake, don’t become one of those superstitious Irish peasant women. She could hear her father now, wearily disdainful. It isn’t possible for the mere idea of babies to turn into ghosts.
She put her hand to her chest, where her heart seemed to be having trouble finding a steady rhythm. Big, painful squeezes alternated with fast, frightened trips.
She had to do something. Anything. She was going to fall apart. She was going to let her father down again, render futile his years of training. She couldn’t do that. He was, in the end, the only one who had stayed with her, who had loved her without leaving her. If she couldn’t be what he wanted, then she was nothing at all.
He believed in work. Emotions were just illusions, he’d said. Illusions that could be chased away by some nice, practical action.
She knew he was right. It had helped to be at Lullabies today, sitting in her office tallying columns of figures. The numbers had added up so cooperatively, so neatly. Her associates had glanced at her oddly, but so what? She had been clinging to the one firm log in a sea of confusion and self-doubt.
Work. Process inventory.
She bent down and opened a box that had come with today’s shipment from Cuddles, one of her favorite vendors. They had mixed up Jenny Blakeley’s order today, but ordinarily they were as reliable as—
The box opened. Her thoughts froze. The words disappeared.
Inside the box, nested on tufts of white popcorn packaging, were a dozen pairs of designer baby shoes. Miniature white Mary Janes, blue-striped sneakers, soft-pink leather ballet slippers…
She picked up the slippers, which fit in the palm of her hand. They were so little. What kind of magical being could wear such tiny shoes? How helpless, how fragile the creature would be, with toes the size of diamonds, whole feet not much bigger than her thumb.
So small…too small, really, to carry a big name like Amanda Anne or Michael Joseph…
And yet.
And yet…
She must be her mother’s child, after all. Because as she pressed the tiny pink slippers to her heart, she thought she heard a baby crying.
It wasn’t until the hot tears hit her knuckles that she realized they were her own.
CHAPTER THREE
THROUGHOUT HER SIX-HOUR FLIGHT from Boston to San Francisco, Allison shut her eyes to avoid chatting with the passengers on either side of her cramped last-minute coach seat and masochistically second-guessed herself.
Was she doing the right thing? Was she crazy? Could this plan even work? What would Mark Travers think when he saw her on his doorstep?
She hadn’t called him in advance to let him know she was coming. He probably would have told her to save them both the time, and stay in Boston.
She knew she hadn’t made a very good impression on him when they met the day of the wedding fiasco. She had been in shock, and she’d probably appeared irrational, inarticulate and not very bright. By the time he left her office, his disdain had been written all over his rugged face.
So he wouldn’t exactly be thrilled to see her, just one week later. She wondered if he’d even give her the time to explain her idea. And, if he did, what were the chances he’d trust her to successfully carry off a plan as bold as this one?
A million to one.
That’s why this couldn’t be done over the phone. She needed to show him, face-to-face, that she wasn’t being hysterical or vindictive or just plain dumb.
Somehow, she needed to convince him that she really did have the perfect strategy for dealing with Lincoln Gray once and for all—and the guts to make it work.
Surely Mark would be receptive. After all, she wasn’t asking for his help—or his permission. The only thing she wanted him to do was stay out of the way long enough to let her get the job done.
His house was easy to find, an impressive mission-style mansion high on a hill. His street was near enough to the bay that he could probably see his own sloop in the marina. Though he hadn’t mentioned it, she didn’t doubt for a minute that he did indeed have a sloop, along with fifth-generation memberships at the yacht, tennis and golf clubs. He probably had a basement full of scuba gear and water skis, a kayak on the wall.
She knew the physique of a sports fiend when she saw one. Mark Travers was the kind of guy who would be late for his own funeral because his pickup-football game went into overtime.
She dismissed the cab, though she took the driver’s number for the ride back to the airport. Then she climbed up the zigzagging front walk with its elegant mounds of boxwood, trails of deep green ivy and shooting plumes of cobalt-blue irises.
Obviously, Lincoln hadn’t made off with all the Travers money.
She rang the bell discreetly set into the stucco wall beside the carved wooden front door. She didn’t hear anything, but it must have emitted a sound only French maids could hear, because in about ten seconds a gorgeous brunette in an amply filled white apron opened the door and smiled.
The smile showed perfect white teeth set off by bright pink lipstick and a small wad of blue gum.
“Hello,” Allison said politely, though what she really wanted to say was, is this guy for real? Allison had a housekeeper, too, but Loretta was about sixty and cranky, and had a face like day-old oatmeal. “Is Mr. Travers in?”
The maid shook her head and enjoyed a quick chomp of gum. “Nope. He’s doing the Get Happy run. You know, for his client. He’ll be home in half an hour. if you’d like to wait.”
“That would be great,” Allison said eagerly.
She’d love to get an advance look at his house. You could tell a lot from the books people read and the knickknacks they collected. Take, for instance, her secret copy of Baby Names or the little plastic leprechaun whose joints jiggled and collapsed when she pressed on the base, which she’d kept all these years because it was the only toy her mother had given her that her father hadn’t thrown away. Anyone who saw those would certainly know that she wasn’t the hardheaded businesswoman she pretended to be.
“Okay, then,” the maid said, nodding and chewing. And then she shut the door in Allison’s face.
Allison stared a minute at the beautiful grapevines carved into the wood. Apparently Mark hadn’t bothered to check this lady’s references. Her last job had probably been at Naked-a-Go-Go, where you had to whisper the password at the cellar door or the bouncer would toss you out.
She wondered if slipping the woman a twenty might help. But it wasn’t worth it. It was only half an hour, and besides, it was beautiful out here. The San Francisco summer was crisp, with none of the suffocating humidity that blanketed Boston right now.
She perched on one of the terraced border stones in the shade of a spreading Japanese maple and waited.
She didn’t have to sit there long. Within fifteen minutes, a red vintage MGB hummed up to the curb, top down. Mark Travers, his dark hair tousled by the wind, unfolded his long legs, climbed out and began to take the front steps in twos.
Halfway up, he noticed her. He stopped, tilted his head and pulled off his sunglasses for a better view.
“Allison?” He looked surprised, but not stunned.
He also looked great. His T-shirt, on which a smiley face was surrounded by big yellow letters ordering her to Get Happy, was sweaty and molded to his torso. She had to admit it—that torso had probably made plenty of women happy this morning.
“What are you doing here?”
She stood up, brushing cedar-mulch shavings from her skirt. “I needed to talk to you. Do you have a few minutes?”
“Of course.” He hooked his sunglasses over the neck of his T-shirt and held out a hand. “Come on in. You should have rung the bell. Gigi would have let you in.”
Of course the housekeeper’s name was Gigi. It really was either that or Bambi. “I did ring. She told me you weren’t here and then pretty much slammed the door in my face.”
Mark leaned his head back and groaned. “God, I’m going to strangle my sister.”
Allison gasped. “Gigi is your sister?”
“No, no.” He seemed to shudder. “God, no. It’s just that Tracy thinks I should get married again and so she keeps sending women over. The last so-called housekeeper was a Yale graduate fishing for a rich husband.”
Okay, that answered one question. He wasn’t married.
Actually, it answered two questions. He’d said married again. If he’d been married before and it hadn’t worked out, that might account for that subtle hint of women-are-nuts in his attitude.
Allison wasn’t sure why his marital status mattered to her. Wasn’t she supposed to be in mourning right now? Nursing her broken, jilted heart?
Besides, even when it was seemly to think about such things again, she had no intention of getting involved with a slightly arrogant, Batman-esque super-jock who lived on the other side of the country.
If she ever got another man, he was going to be a quiet computer geek who had his own copy of Baby Names squirreled away in his nightstand drawer.
Mark motioned for her to follow him toward the door. “Come on in. Let’s get something to drink. I think I just sweat out about ninety percent of my bodily fluids.” He tugged at his shirt. “And then, before we do any serious talking, I’d better wash off some of this grime.”
In the end, she hardly had any time to explore the house. Amazingly, it took him only about fifteen minutes to do it all—toss back a full bottle of Gatorade, send Gigi home for the day, settle Allison in the library, shower and throw on a pair of old jeans and a crisp white shirt.
She was only on her third bookshelf when he walked back in, still slightly damp and steamy and smelling of expensive soap.
He buttoned his last button as he entered but didn’t tuck in the shirttail. His hair was wet and darker than ever.
“So,” he said as he leaned over and extracted two bottled waters from a small refrigerator built into the bottom bookcase that she hadn’t even seen. “I have to admit I’m curious. What’s important enough to bring you all the way across the country? I assume it has something to do with Lincoln Gray.”
She accepted one of the bottles, nodding. He was taking her arrival quite calmly. It was as if he’d never really doubted that she’d show up, sooner or later.
“It does,” she said. “I’ve found him.”
She had surprised Mark. It felt good. He was a very polite and civilized man, but all that confidence could get on your nerves.
“You did? How?” He frowned over the water, then took a long drink. “My P.I. hasn’t turned up a single lead.”
“Well…” She hesitated. “I had an idea about where to look.”
His dramatic black brows went up slightly. She’d known this was the tricky part. If she had a lead, why hadn’t she shared it with him a week ago?
And she had known, even back then, exactly where she’d start the hunt for Lincoln Gray. She decided to return to the spot where she’d met him in the first place—Sole Grande, the South Florida beach resort that catered to the rich and idle. He had a friend who wintered there, an older woman who occasionally loaned Lincoln her mansion during the summer.
It seemed like a long time ago—though really it had been only about two months. The day she met Lincoln, Allison had been sitting in the airport lounge, waiting for an overdue plane to take her back to Boston.
It was only about three months after her father’s death and she’d been feeling pretty low. Her mission in Sole Grande—to contact her mother’s family, from whom she’d been estranged for twenty-five years—had been a disappointing failure.
The O’Haras owned a luxurious beachside hotel called O’Hara’s Hideaway. Allison had made it all the way to the front door and then lost her nerve. How could she go in, announce her connection and expect the fatted calf? She hadn’t reached out to the O’Haras in the past twenty-five years. They’d be insulted if she did so now, as a last resort.