How could she word this so that the others would understand when she herself wasn’t all that sure she did?
Rosalind Jennings came to her rescue. “Upset and confused.” Flashing her a sympathetic look, Aunt Rosalind slipped a thin arm through Blair’s.
There was nothing judgmental or condescending in her tone. But then, none of the family was judgmental, Blair thought with a prick of guilt. Only she had been.
“And who wouldn’t be?” Rosalind continued easily, as if this had been only a minor misunderstanding and not a major family schism in the making. “You’ve gone through a great deal. The important thing is that you know that whatever you have to face, we’ll always be there for you.”
“Of course we will. Heck,” John Jennings said, joining his wife, dwarfing her with his girth and his booming laugh. “There are enough of us to populate a small town. Can’t make a move without one of us being underfoot.” The doorbell rang. “And our size is growing all the time.” He laughed, giving Blair’s elbow a little squeeze.
Like a treasured doll that had been lost for a time, only to be found again, Blair was passed from one set of arms to another to be hugged and fussed over, as each person in turn reaffirmed what she had always known somewhere deep in her heart, even in her darkest hour. What Devin had forced her to admit again on a conscious level. They loved her. And she loved them. No matter what.
“Hey,” the newest arrival, her cousin Lisa, cried as she, her husband and two children walked in. “Look who’s here, Jake!” Quickly, she passed the tw-year-old she was carrying to her husband and threw her arms around Blair.
There were more embraces, more tears, more mingling of voices as people tried to talk over one another and children vied for attention.
After several minutes more of this, Devin figured he’d waited long enough and finally worked his way to her side.
Head lowered so that he could whisper the question against her ear, he asked, “Do I get my turn?” Then, before she could answer, he slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her to him.
She liked resting against him like this, liked the feel of his hands around her. “For as long as you want.”
The words had slipped out, without reserve, without thought. And without any regret. It felt good to admit it, but she couldn’t help wondering if perhaps that uncalculated admission might frighten him off.
One look at his face told her that this was not a man to be frightened off easily.
“Well,” Beth decided, looking around the packed room and the family room appropriately full of family just beyond. “Looks like we’re all here. What do you say we begin?”
The thought of eating made Blair groan. “More turkey?” she whispered to Devin. She didn’t think she could even look at food, not after his mother had all but insisted on stuffing her.
He laughed. She was one shade away from turning green. “Take a few token bites,” he whispered back. “Your Aunt Beth knows that you already ate at my mother’s house.”
She turned to look at him, the full significance finally sinking in. He’d done this for her, for no other reason than because he sensed how unhappy she was without her family.
“You came up with this whole plan, didn’t you?” It really wasn’t a question.
He spread his hands wide, like a Good Samaritan who had been caught in the act. “Guilty as charged. I thought that being around my family might soften you up and make you miss yours enough not to be so damn stubborn.”
Her mouth quirked. “‘Damn’ stubborn?”
“Yeah, you are.” Devin allowed himself to nuzzle her neck just for a moment. He knew no one would mind. And if he had just a taste of her to whet his appetite, well, there was nothing he could do about it. Maybe right now, that was for the best, too. “But I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
Turning around, she began to lace her arms around his neck, her body brushing against his.
“Hey.” Uncle John’s booming voice came between them even before he did. “What are you two whispering about?” He arched one thick, black eyebrow, making it dance up and down comically for Alicia’s benefit. “Anything we should know? We have no secrets here.” He looked at Blair pointedly and added, seriously, “anymore.”
She understood what he was trying to say and was grateful for it. Grateful, too, that she could open her heart again and accept the apology in the spirit in which it had been tendered. That, too, was because of Devin.
Devin Quartermain was definitely some kind of man, she thought.
“You two wouldn’t have any sort of an announcement you want to make, now, would you?” Placing one hand on Blair’s shoulder and the other on Devin, Al joined in on his brother-in-law’s gentle ribbing. He looked expectantly from Devin to Blair.
“Leave them alone, Dad,” Hal chided. “You don’t want to say anything to scare Blair off again.”
“It’s not Blair we should worry about scaring off,” contradicted a slender brunette with just the tiniest flecks of gray through her sleek hair. Connie, Al’s wife and Hal’s mother, smiled broadly at Devin. “Although Devin looks pretty brave to me.”
“He’d have to be, to be part of this family,” John added his two cents.
Blair blushed. Once let loose, her family could get way out of hand. She mouthed, “I’m sorry,” to Devin and hoped that this wasn’t making him too uncomfortable.
“All right, all of you, into the dining room. And not another word.” The stern voice of Blair’s Aunt Stephanie, the oldest of the sisters, instructed the room full of people.
“Not another word, huh? Tall order, that.” Uncle John winked at Devin and Blair before preceding them into the dining room.
Aunt Beth came up behind them. “They’re harmless,” she assured Devin, very much aware of the pink hue on Blair’s cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” Blair repeated, this time whispering the apology to him as they followed the others. “Looks like your family and mine are bound and determined to match us up.”
“They might be on to something,” Devin whispered in reply against her hair just as they entered the dining room.
A warm shiver pirouetted through her. Blair looked up sharply at him, but his expression was unreadable.
And then the chance to ask Devin what he meant was gone as Beth gently ushered them to their places at the first table.
Because of the mad scramble for positions at mealtime, they had long ago taken to writing names down on place cards whenever the full family was assembled. Blair looked down at the one with her name on it, recognizing Beth’s thin, uniform script.
“I guess you were pretty sure I was coming.” Blair took her seat beside Devin.
“I was hoping,” Beth answered, taking her place at head of the table.
Beth paused, waiting until everyone was seated at one of the three long tables. When they were, they all joined hands in a ritual that had been ingrained in Blair’s life for as long as she could remember. Blair took Devin’s hand and smiled as he took her cousin Hal’s. Her other hand firmly held Alicia’s.
As words of thanks were offered by the youngest able member at the tables, Blair knew she had a great deal to be thankful for. Blinded by what she could regard now only as misguided pride, she’d lost sight of that for a while, but no more. She felt as if she had truly come home. Whatever happened from here on in, whether or not Devin managed to locate Claire, and whether or not he remained in her life, she would always be grateful to him for giving her back this.
* * *
It was past two in the morning when Blair got into Devin’s car again. All around them,’ the sound of cars being started up broke the silence of the long, steep cul-de-sac with its scattered homes full of sleeping people.
It had been some day, she thought as she buckled her seat belt.
“Sleepy?” Devin looked over his shoulder as he backed away from the curb. The black sedan behind him had parked only a hairsbreadth away.
She shook her head, taking
a deep breath. The evening was unusually mild for the end of November, even for California. Maybe they’d have Christmas on the beach this year. They’d done it before. Blair glanced at Devin and wondered if he’d come if she asked.
“I’m too wired to be sleepy.”
He could believe that. She’d spent the entire evening animated, glowing, and in constant motion. She’d made him tired just watching her. She made him other things, too, but he schooled himself to take one step at a time; if he moved too fast, one of them might trip over his feet.
Devin had been sitting on information all day, waiting for the right time to tell her. There really hadn’t been an opening until now.
“Then can you stand to hear a little more good news?”
She bolted upright just as he came to a stop sign at the edge of the development. Her eyes were wide as she looked at him.
“You found her?” Why hadn’t he told her sooner?
“Not that kind of good—yet,” he qualified, firmly convinced that no matter how long it took him, he was going to locate her sister. “But I managed to finally track down Wintergreen.” He didn’t have to look at Blair to know he had her undivided attention. “He was the lawyer involved in your adoption, just as we thought.”
Streetlights high overhead played hide-and-seek in the interior of the car, bathing them in light and shadow as they drove down the hill. She hardly noticed. Trying desperately not to get ahead of herself, Blair concentrated on what he was saying and the tone of his voice.
“But?”
She’d picked up on that, he thought. Clever. “He’s dead. Has been for ten years.”
“Oh.” Disappointment dripped heavily from the single word. Then she rallied. This wasn’t the end of the road for Devin. If it was, he wouldn’t have called it good news. And besides, she knew Devin now. He didn’t give up.
Devin was quick to try to neutralize the disappointment he heard in her voice. “It took me two weeks to find the name of someone who worked with Wintergreen. A secretary.” It had been like finding a bit of gold while panning through the sludge in a riverbed.
His accomplishment astounded her. She wouldn’t have known where to begin. “How did you manage to do that?”
He tried to make light of it, although he felt good about what the investigation had yielded “An employer has to file IRS papers and since Wintergreen had practiced law in the state, it was a pretty safe bet that he had to have someone working for him to help with the paperwork.”
Blair stared at his profile. “And you have access to that kind of information?”
Devin lifted a shoulder, letting it drop as he took a left turn. “That’s the part that took two weeks,” he said casually. “I got in touch with someone I know who works in the federal building in Sacramento and then had to wait until he—well, the less you know about it, the better,” he decided. His methods might not bear up to the strictest scrutiny, but it had been done for the best of reasons. “Let’s just say that I’m glad I never let old friendships slide.” And that he was very glad that a lot of his old acquaintances were now spread out in places and careers that proved useful to him.
“So?” she pressed eagerly. “What did you find out from this secretary?”
The streets before them were deserted and slick with the sudden, quick rainfall that had come down and vanished within fifteen minutes in the last hour. The area was almost eerily still.
Gave a man the feeling that he was all alone in the world, save for the company at his side, Devin thought. He could get used to that feeling.
“So,” he continued, “I went to see her. She’s in a nursing home now. Her name’s Jasmine Reed.” He paused only a second to get his facts in order. “She remembered the case because she thought it was such a shame that the babies, you and your sister, had to be separated. But neither set of adoptive parents could afford to raise two babies. And the time was growing short. She especially remembers your mother. Your birth mother.” The light up ahead turned red. He eased to a stop and glanced in her direction. Her silence, wrapped in hurt, was almost palpable. “Do you want to hear what I found out?” he pressed.
Her first inclination was to say no, that she didn’t want to know anything about the woman who had willingly given her and her sister away to strangers to be raised. There were single mothers everywhere now, managing to raise children by themselves, bucking the odds. Ellen Stephens had become a single parent herself when Blair was nine. She hadn’t given her away.
“Not particularly.”
She didn’t mean that, he thought, and he told her, because she should know. “Wintergreen’s secretary remembered your mother, Anne, because she was so heartbroken about having to give you up.”
“Then why did she?” Blair snapped. She’d thought, after tonight, that she was beyond the hurt, beyond the anger. But there was still enough to roll itself up into a hard little ball in the pit of her stomach. “Why didn’t she try to keep us? Didn’t she know how this would hurt, knowing we were rejected?”
“You weren’t rejected,” Devin told her quietly, “you were placed in a good home.”
This Anne woman, the woman who had smiled so easily in the single photograph she had, hadn’t been able to know that for certain. There were no guarantees that her daughters would have good lives, yet she still gave them away. Or rather, sold them.
“She could have tried to keep us,” Blair insisted.
Devin set his mouth grimly, knowing Blair would regret the animosity she was feeling once he told her what he knew. “She had to give you up. She had no choice.”
Ellen had taught her that there were always choices. “Why? Because raising two children was so expensive? That’s the usual reason people give,” she tossed off bitterly.
“No,” he replied, “because she was dying.”
Blair felt as if someone had just landed a hard punch to her abdomen. She swallowed, but her throat remained dry. “Dying?”
“Yes, dying. Of cancer. She didn’t know how much longer she had to live. Her doctor couldn’t pinpoint it for her. But it was not long, as it turned out,” he added grimly. Jasmine Reed had cried as she had recited the events to him, and he had held the frail old woman in his arms until her tears had stopped. “That twenty-five-thousand-dollar check? Most of it, I found out, was to defray her hospital costs. Anne Hudson, that was her last name, had no living relatives who were willing to take on her responsibility of two babies. Since she’d lost her husband the year before, she had no other options open to her. She had to give you up for adoption.” Devin saw the effect the words were having on Blair, but he had to teii her everything he knew. She had a right to the information, and not just because she had hired him to find out. She had a right to know so that she could bury the hostility that was festering within her once and for all. She was too warm and loving a woman to have something eating away at her indefinitely.
“She didn’t want to take any money, other than to cover the lawyer’s fee. It was Wintergreen who talked her into the amount, for the sake of the hospital bills.”
Blair pressed her lips together, trying not to cry. Anger melted away from her heart, to be replaced by sympathy and a strange feeling she couldn’t even put a name to. “Does this woman, this secretary you found—”
“Jasmine.”
“Jasmine,” she repeated hoarsely. “Does Jasmine know where my sister is?”
He shook his head. “No, she didn’t remember the names of either of the adoptive parents, not yours or Claire’s. Not even when I mentioned Ellen Stephens to her. She’s very old, Blair.”
Blair nodded numbly, trying to think. Now she had to find her sister to let Claire know what she found out. If Claire was living with the anger that she’d been harboring, even for a little while, Blair knew she couldn’t rest until she found a way to let Claire know how selfless their mother had actually been. She owed it to both of them.
And it was the only way to wipe away the shame she now felt. Shame for all the un
founded accusations she had silently hurled at Anne Hudson.
“But the records—”
It had been the first thing he’d thought of. “Long gone. There was a fire. We’re talking before the age of the office computer,” he reminded Blair. And then he looked at her and saw the tears sliding down her cheeks. Without a word, he pulled over to the side of the road.
“What are you doing?” She swiped at a tear, only to have more follow quickly. She didn’t even know why she was crying. After all, this was good news, wasn’t it? She hadn’t been abandoned the way she thought.
But she was still crying, crying for her mother. Her heart wrenched within her chest, going out to the woman she had never really known. What had Anne Hudson gone through? How had she felt; knowing that she was dying and that she had to give her babies away?
“Pulling over so you can cry,” he told her, taking her into his arms.
“I’m not crying,” she protested.
“Sure you are.” He stroked her hair. “And it’s okay. Get it out.”
“I don’t need you to tell me to cry, you know,” she sniffed, thinking that she had to look like an absolute mess.
“No,” Devin said, kissing the top of her head, still holding her, “you’re doing that pretty well on your own.” Sitting there, he rocked her against him and she found comfort in the simple motion. “And don’t worry,” he assured her, “I’m not about to give up. It’s just going to take more time, that’s all. I did warn you about that when we got started.”
“Yes, you did.”
But what he hadn’t warned her about, she thought, was that she would fall in love with him.
And she had.
10
This was absolutely her very favorite time of year, Blair thought as she deposited the final box of Christmas decorations on the sofa.
Having put the finishing touches on another necklace and matching earring set for Baylor’s late last night, she’d given herself today off. And she intended to spend Christmas Eve with the people she loved most, getting immersed in the heartwarming chaos of preparing for the festivities to come.
Desperately Seeking Twin... Page 12
