“When was this?”
When Shane Highwater spoke, his voice was deep and powerful, and for a moment all Sydney could think of was how he must sound when booming out orders. She shook it off and answered. “About a month ago. It took me this long to track down where Lucas had been sent.”
“And just how did you manage that?” Keller asked, and her head snapped round before she could stop herself.
“I researched,” she said. “Found the group home, where they knew that Lucas was in a foster home situation here.”
“And they just told you this?”
“Not by his name. They wouldn’t do that. It just came up in conversation that a boy whose family had been killed near the music festival was here.”
“Conversation? With who?”
“One of the workers there.”
“One of the workers at the group home?” the chief asked, sharply enough that she quailed a little inside.
“He was a gardener, actually.”
“Great,” Keller muttered, and she looked at him again. “So you turned those pretty golden eyes on him and fluttered those eyelashes and he told you everything you wanted to know, right?”
Pretty golden eyes?
She blinked those eyes, chastising herself inwardly for letting that statement take the breath out of her.
She risked another glance at the chief, who was looking across the table at his friend. Or, judging by both their expressions, at this moment it was the police chief who was looking. “I’ll have a little talk with them about loose lips,” the man said, his expression stern.
“Don’t mind that now, Sydney,” Lark said. “You were obviously on a mission.”
Grateful for the understanding, Sydney nodded. “I was. I had to find him. I just…had to find him. And now…now that I know he was lied to as well, I have to tell him the truth, so he won’t grow up like I did. Believing in a life that’s a complete lie.”
Keller shifted in his chair then, but she forced herself not to look at him.
“Go on,” Lark encouraged.
“Once I got here, it didn’t take long to find someone willing to talk about…things.”
Again Keller muttered something, and she couldn’t stop her quick look. He did not look happy about this, so Sydney was glad when Lark said lightly, “Ah, the Last Stand grapevine, ever-efficient. Let me guess. Mr. Diaz?”
She managed a smile. “Exactly.”
“That man never did learn how to keep his mouth shut,” Frank observed from the head of the table, the first words he’d spoken since they’d begun. “Remember about twenty years ago when someone made that sign that said Gossip Central and hung it over the doorway of the feed store?”
Sydney knew she hadn’t mistaken the way Keller and Chief Highwater looked at each other at that moment. Almost…guiltily.
“Ah-hah,” Frank said with a grin. “I always suspected that was you two.”
“Hey,” Keller said with a frown, “he ratted me out to my dad about taking his car for a drive when I was fifteen.”
“And burned me when I was trying to play it cool about liking Lisa Watters and wanting to ask her to prom,” Chief Highwater said.
And suddenly the hideous pressure inside Sydney eased. It was the normalcy of it, she guessed. These weren’t just a police chief and Lucas’s foster father, weren’t just her adversaries, they were two guys who had once been teenagers together and had apparently had the same problems most teenagers had.
And in that moment, she decided to change her mindset from adversary to simply someone with the same concern Keller had for Lucas’s welfare.
Because, in the end, that was what she was.
Chapter Nine
“Where are your parents now?” Lark asked.
When the golden-eyed woman didn’t speak, Keller found himself answering for her. “She doesn’t know.”
She looked at him then. And he sensed something had changed, although he had no idea what. All he was sure of was the sense he’d gotten of wire-drawn tension had eased. Perhaps it was Frank’s joking.
“That’s true,” she answered, and the tension was gone from her voice, too. “Do you always remember everything?”
He shrugged. “When it’s important. Lucas is important.”
“How did you leave it with them?” Lark asked, with a concern that was obviously genuine. Leave it to Lark to worry about the possible imposter in their midst. Although he had to admit he was less convinced of that now, if for no other reason than the story she’d told was too outlandish to expect anyone to believe.
He tried to imagine a family like that, but failed utterly. If something had happened to any of his relatives, leaving a child orphaned, his mother would have been first in line to take that child in.
Ms. Brock—he needed to keep thinking of her that way—turned back to Lark. “I…not well. They truly didn’t understand why I thought what they’d done was so wrong.”
“They sound charming,” Keller said dryly.
“What they are,” she said just as dryly, “is pathologically self-absorbed. They’re the perfect match for each other, and each other is all they’ve ever needed or wanted. Everything else is…extraneous.”
He was taken aback at both the cool assessment and the implications. He supposed that was what made him ask, “Including you?”
Something changed in her expression then, and a bleak, weary knowledge showed in her gaze. And although she didn’t respond directly, he knew the answer to his question was a grim yes.
“Especially me,” she finally said.
“Surely not,” Lark said, sounding distressed. No wonder she’d had to quit working at CPS, if every case got to her like this.
Ms. Brock turned to look at her. “When we landed in Slovenia—” she glanced at him, and he knew she was remembering telling him about the Lipizzans “—I loved it there. When they decided it was time to head out somewhere else, I didn’t want to go. So they offered to leave me there.”
He stared at her. Remembered what else she’d said. “You were twelve,” he said incredulously. She nodded. “They wanted to leave a twelve-year-old girl by herself in a country you’d only visited?”
“Sydney,” Shane said. When she turned to look at him, he held her gaze in that direct, sees-all way he had and asked, “What else was it you overheard your parents say?”
She sighed audibly. “I said it wasn’t relevant to this.”
“Wasn’t it?” Shane asked, and Keller frowned, wondering what his friend had latched on to. He didn’t doubt it was something, because there was no one he knew better at reading people than Shane, except his own mother. “They said they hoped they couldn’t be forced to take Lucas, and…?”
She grimaced and, surprisingly, glanced at Frank. He gave her a little nod, and Keller wondered what they’d talked about before he’d arrived.
Not looking at any of them but staring down at her hands, Ms. Brock said quietly, “They said it was bad enough they were stuck with me.”
“Son of a—” Keller bit back the oath. And looked at Shane. “I swear, if they showed up and tried to take Lucas—”
“We’d have another last stand in Last Stand,” Shane said wryly. “I know. Let’s hope they don’t, because I’ll be in a real pickle. Keeping the peace is hard when you loathe one side.”
Frank chuckled. “You’d come down on the right side,” he said. “And we all know which side that is.”
“Lucas’s side,” Lark said firmly. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? What’s best for Lucas?”
“Exactly,” Keller said flatly. “And having anything to do with a family like that is not what’s best for him.”
Ms. Brock murmured something, so quietly he couldn’t hear it. But he gathered from the way Lark again reached out and put a hand over the other woman’s that she had. “No,” Lark said, “you’re not like them. If you were, you wouldn’t have bothered to come for him.”
Keller felt a twinge of
sympathy. Something he didn’t want to feel, not now, with what was at stake. “That’s a big jump, Lark,” he said. “But even if she isn’t…like them, that doesn’t mean she’ll be good for Lucas. Especially since she was raised by them.”
Sydney—that jolt of sympathy made it hard to keep using that formal Ms. Brock in his mind—looked up sharply then. “Like…heck I was,” she said. “I was raised by whoever they could find wherever they were. Mostly good people, who had families like…like yours. Who cared, who loved their children.”
“How did that make you feel?” Frank asked, and Keller had the feeling he was, albeit subtly, letting them know he believed her, at least about this. And coming from Frank Buckley, with his decades of experience as a Ranger, that meant a lot.
The words came out in a torrent that made Keller suspect they’d been walled back for a long time. “It made me cry inside. Wonder what was wrong with me, why they didn’t want me. It took a long time for me to realize it wasn’t me, specifically, it would have been the same for any child.”
She turned away from Frank and closed her eyes, shaking her head as if she regretted letting that all out. Keller could understand that; if that had been his story, he’d never have wanted to tell anyone, let alone a roomful of strangers. And if this was a deft playing of the sympathy card, he couldn’t deny it had worked.
He tried to steel himself, but the pain in those golden eyes was getting to him. “So what is it, exactly, that you want?”
“I want to be…to make a family, with Lucas. A real one.”
“By all accounts,” Keller said, “he had one.” It came out almost gently, somewhat to his surprise. “A good one.”
Her brow furrowed, and her gaze went slightly unfocused. “Dead to me,” she murmured.
“What?” Keller asked.
She refocused on him. “I just realized that when I was a kid, really young, my father always said his brother was dead to him. I didn’t even understand what dead meant, yet, let alone that phrase. Only later did it become…just dead.”
“How did that happen?” Lark asked quietly. “The estrangement, I mean.”
Sydney—okay, he gave up on the Ms. Brock thing—turned back to the other woman. “Getting the truth was worse than pulling teeth, it was freaking brain surgery. But what he finally told me was that his parents were a couple of judgmental, holier-than-thou types who kept trying to keep him from doing what he wanted. Which is,” she said with a wry grimace, “my father in a nutshell. Anyway, he said he left home at sixteen, when his brother had only been a little kid. Later my mother said that he’d told her his father had disowned him after he got in some kind of trouble. She didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me what.”
“Just to be clear on all this,” Shane said, “you’re saying your father ran away at sixteen, perhaps after some misdeed, his then six-year-old brother was told he’d died, and when your father later had a child—you—he told you the same thing about that brother?”
Keller thought he heard an element of sympathy in Shane’s voice. Wondered if he was thinking about his youngest brother, Kane, who had been missing and feared dead for so long.
She nodded. “Yes. That he had died before I was born. I always thought maybe that was why my father…wanted to always be moving. Like he was trying to escape the memories.” She seemed to shiver slightly but said nothing more.
“And your mother was okay with this?” Keller asked.
She took in a long breath before saying, “She is a wanderer by nature. Or maybe a searcher would be a better term. Whenever we would pack up and leave a place, she’d be sad and say, ‘I really thought this might be it.’”
Keller remembered her passport. Her third passport, if that was true. “That must have gotten kind of old after the first hundred or so places,” he said dryly.
“It did,” she said simply.
“For the record,” Shane said, this time in the neutral tone Keller knew he used to make sure he didn’t influence the interview, “that passport is a US one?”
“Yes.” Her smile was a bit bitter then. “Funny how they spent their lives moving and saying how they would never come back here, but made sure they had all the paperwork in order just in case.”
“Sounds like they were real good at living a lie,” Keller said.
She turned back to him, met his gaze head on. “It gets worse. My father told me that a few years ago, after his parents died, he contacted his brother. To try and make it up, he said. And found out David had been lied to just as I had been all this time, told that his brother had died.” She grimaced. “He said David at first didn’t believe him, then accused him of only wanting money from the estate. There was a big blowup and that was the end of any relationship between them forever.”
“And what do you think of that accusation?” Shane asked, his tone still inflectionless. She took in a deep breath and said, with a look Keller could only describe as pained, “Contacting him after all those years? Coincidentally after his parents died? I think it’s probably true.” She sighed. “If any of it’s true. Not like my parents are particularly trustworthy.”
Keller found himself wanting to believe her. As outlandish as the story was, something of the pain in those golden eyes got to him. Because you’re a soft touch, Rafferty. Lucas proves that.
That thought brought him back to the bottom line and put the edge back in his voice. “That still doesn’t change anything. Your story isn’t proof that you’re related to Lucas.”
“I think we can resolve that easily enough,” Shane said.
“How?” Keller asked, looking at his friend of more than twenty-five years.
Shane shrugged. “DNA. We can do a test on them both.”
Keller’s gaze shot back to Sydney, and he wished he’d been looking at her when Shane had said it, so he could have seen her reaction. But there was no sign of fear or hesitation.
“Absolutely,” she said. She let out a disgusted, compressed breath. “Who knows, maybe my charming parents are still lying.”
And Keller had the thought that if even half of what she’d said about them was true, it was entirely possible. It was also the saddest damn thing he’d ever heard, in some ways even sadder than Lucas’s horrible story.
When he got back to the ranch, he was going to find his mom and give her the biggest hug he could.
Chapter Ten
“I hate sounding so pitiful,” Sydney exclaimed as she stared out at the creek streaming by.
Somehow the woman standing beside her on the deck seemed to get through her barriers, and she ended up talking to her as if she were a friend instead of someone who might be a part of a plan to keep her from ever even seeing Lucas, let alone becoming part of his life.
Lark Leclair gave her a sympathetic smile. “You care. That’s not pitiful.”
She turned to face her. She’d had the feeling from the moment she’d met this woman that she was someone who genuinely cared. So Sydney went with her gut. “You believe me?”
“I believe what you’ve said is what you believe,” Lark said.
“Nice equivocation,” Sydney said, unable to help the edge in her tone.
“But better than thinking you’re lying, I would hope.”
Sydney sighed. “Sorry. Yes. Much better. I’m not sure Mr. Rafferty or his friend the chief are convinced, though.”
“Shane will look for the truth. Keller will look for what’s best for Lucas. I’m not sure you could ask for anything more than that.”
“If I’m telling the truth.”
“Yes.”
Sydney studied the woman. She believed the concern she saw in those light green eyes.
Pretty golden eyes…
She shook off the memory, and another one took its place. “You know the…handyman at the Hickory Creek Inn, don’t you? I saw you with him when I arrived.”
“Kane?” To her surprise the woman blushed faintly. “Yes.”
“He’s…quite something.”
&nbs
p; Lark’s expression changed, and the soft smile that curved her mouth was warming. “He is that.”
“Why isn’t he a worldwide music star?”
“He’s happy to be the hottest thing in the county at the moment,” Lark said.
Sydney noticed her thumb was rubbing at the engagement ring on her left hand, as if she wasn’t quite used to wearing it yet. And the logical reason for the look in her eyes hit.
“And your fiancé?” she guessed.
If Lark was surprised, she didn’t show it. But the smile widened. “Yes. But that doesn’t affect what I think of his brother. I’ve known Shane Highwater most of my life, and he’s a rock.”
Sydney blinked. “Wait…the handyman is the police chief’s brother?”
“Yes. And that’s a very, very long story that’s not mine to tell. So let’s focus on you.”
“Actually, I have a question for you, if you don’t mind.”
“Me? I’m an open book. Ask away.”
“Where’d you get your bag?” she asked, nodding at the combination satchel and briefcase slung over Lark’s shoulder.
Lark’s eyebrows rose, but she smiled. “I found it in an online store, a great place where I’ve bought several things, for me and as gifts. They carry specialty items from around the world. In fact, it’s called—”
“The World in a Gift,” Sydney said.
“Yes! You know them?”
Sydney hesitated, then half shrugged. “I am them,” she said.
Lark blinked. “You’re…”
“Well, not just me anymore, but it was just me for a few years, when I started it.”
“You’re the founder of The World in a Gift?”
“I am.” Sydney couldn’t deny she was savoring the woman’s stunned expression a bit.
Lark smiled, an almost wondering smile. Then she suddenly looked thoughtful. “Are they—you—doing as well as I think?”
Sydney smiled widely. “We are doing quite well. Enough that I now have nearly a hundred people working for and with us, in fifty countries, and people trying to buy us every month.”
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