Because she really did believe in education for poor kids, and she really was grateful he helped raise the money for the program. Why wouldn't he? It looked damned good to the public.
Governor Grant lifted his glass. "To the Oberlins-may they enjoy another twenty-five years of wedded bliss!"
Everyone at the party raised their glasses and drank, then applauded politely as Governor Grant descended the bandstand and made his way through the crowd, shaking hands and making political hay. If George had needed proof of his own importance, here it was—the most popular governor in a dozen years courting his favor. He hoped Kate noticed.
But damn Ramos. He had that expression on his face, the one a guy got when he was blindsided by lust. George usually liked to see that expression on other men, because men could be led by their peckers and blackmailed by their affairs. But he didn't like to see a Mexican looking at his sweet Kate that way.
In fact, his sweet little Kate seemed to be trying to get away from Ramos. She'd walk away, and Ramos would follow like a junkyard dog. She circulated among the legislators, held a conversation with Senator Martinez . . . but while Ramos spoke to the models who flocked to his side, he didn't flirt, and he never let Kate out of his sight. Never. It was enough to make George lose his temper—and that had happened only once before.
Only once before.
"Senator." Governor Grant shook his hand. "Congratulations. The wife and I are off to another social gathering. Thank you for your hospitality."
George accepted other congratulations on his long marriage. He smiled so much that when he got done with this evening, he would be a candidate for an Academy Award, and all the while he was hating Teague Ramos and lusting after Kate Montgomery.
"Excuse me, sir." The butler's smooth, English tones intruded on George's obsession. "Jason Urbano is here. I showed him to your office."
"Urbano?" George moved to the foyer for privacy. "Here now?"
"He says he wants to negotiate." Freddy was impassive.
"Urbano . . ." George reflected on the man he'd taken such care to blackmail and use. "Tell him I'll see him."
"Yes, sir." Freddy bowed and retreated.
George had had Freddy for more than a year now Freddy had claimed on his application that he was seventy years old, although George thought he looked more like eighty. George didn't care. Freddy came with impeccable references; he had an English accent, a bald head, nineteenth-century ideas of the proper way to run a household, and the authority to enforce his requirements. Furthermore, he provided George with such a facade of respectability all of Austin envied him, and George considered the exorbitant salary he paid the man a fair exchange for the status Freddy brought.
George ordered another round of champagne— champagne had a way of making guests ignore the disappearance of the host—and headed for his study. Entering the room, he shut the door behind him. "Urbane, good to see you. Thanks for responding to my invitation."
Urbano lifted his head.
George laughed aloud at his savage expression. Sobering, he said sternly, "I assume you showed up at my party with important news, or you wouldn't be here."
Urbano was large, broad-shouldered, about forty-five, and a former hockey player. His nostrils flared. His brows lowered.
It was like holding a slathering pit bull by a chain, and watching him choke himself on the iron collar around his neck. The sense of power George got from holding that chain couldn't be duplicated. "Well?" he prodded.
"Yeah. I've got news. Zack Givens's oldest daughter just turned eight, and she's having some kind of "— Urbano's fingers made quotation marks in the air— "identity crisis. So I spoke to Hope."
"Dear little Hope." The oldest Prescott daughter, the one who had been a thorn in George's side since the day she'd married Zack Givens. She had been fifteen when
her parents were killed. She'd seen her nine-year-old sister Pepper sent to a foster home. She'd seen her foster brother Gabriel returned to Texas state custody. And she'd cried when her baby sister Caitlin had been taken from her.
George should have guessed Hope would be a problem, but he had thought—naively, he now knew—that sending her to the far end of the country, to Boston where everything was alien, where she had no money, no family, no high school diploma, would neutralize her.
Nothing stopped that bitch. She had overcome every obstacle to marry a Givens, and not just any Givens. Zack Givens, the son and grandson of New England industrialists. She had made a shrewd move, trading her preacher daughter's virtue to a man who could help her find her siblings. George didn't know what magic she hid between her legs, but she'd kept Givens in such thrall he'd pursued her family as diligently as if it had been his own.
She'd found Gabriel right away, but she'd had no luck with the other two.
Of course not. Pepper had been rebellious and wild, and ugly to boot. George had sent her to Seattle, the far opposite corner of the country, and eventually she'd disappeared from the face of the earth.
George hoped she was dead. That would serve Hope right.
Hope had tried to trace her siblings through the records in the courthouse, but a fire had conveniently destroyed them.
She'd tried sending investigators to Hobart to talk to the people who remembered the Prescotts. But George had a grip on the town, and no one dared cross him. No one would talk. Most of them didn't even know what had really happened.
Actually, none of them knew for sure, not even Evelyn.
But Hope knew too much.
If she went public with her suspicions . . . well, no amount of influence and bribery could cover up all his actions.
He had been trying to figure out what he could do to divert their attention when they made a mistake. They sent Jason Urbano to do some underground investigation of him.
George had so many connections he'd caught on to Urbano's snooping almost at once, and he had hired an investigator to look into Urbano's past.
George still held Urbano's dossier under lock and key as one of the most precious documents in the world, equal in worth to the original copies of the Guttenberg Bible and the United States Constitution.
It turned out Urbano had been the legal counsel for Givens Industries since he'd graduated from law school. He was a good friend of Zack Givens, and Givens had a thing about loyalty. If he discovered Urbano had been skimming money out of the companies for almost as long as he'd been working there, Givens would have him strung up by his short neck. Added to that, Urbano had enjoyed a number of indiscretions, and his wife not only had a great prenup but an explosive temper. Of course, she didn't vent her anger in public, but when a man had enough money, influence, and the right investigator working for him, he could get all the information he needed.
Which was just as well, because George had suffered from the Boston Connection long enough.
George fixed Urbano with a cold eye. "So tell me what Hope said about her daughter's identity crisis."
"She said they're taking Lana to Europe—"
"Lana?" George swayed. "The kid's name is Lana?"
"Yes . Why?"
George poured himself a straight shot of whiskey, and downed it in one swallow. Hope's mother's name had been Lana. "So they're taking her to Europe?"
"Hope insisted that Zack go, too." Urbano's voice dropped to a low tone, as if he feared someone would hear. "Zack is leaving the company in my hands."
"So this is it." Slowly, George turned on Urbano.
"Yeah, this is it." Urbano swallowed and tugged at his tie. "With hints placed in the proper ears and a little judicious juggling of the books, I can topple the Givens empire."
"When I give you the word," George coldly reminded him. "You do nothing until I give you the word."
The clock struck midnight. The noise at the party hit an inebriated high and stayed there. The guests danced and laughed.
After a final survey, Teague decided none of these people were Kate's stalker. As they drank, they all became less interes
ted in her and more interested in themselves. They were, after all, politicians.
Beside him, Kate held his arm and took off one shoe, then the other. She stood on the cool marble next to him in her bare feet. "Nice," she sighed.
Her scent rose in subtle wafts from her hair.
He leaned close and inhaled, and imagined that scent mingling with his as they made love. The warmth of her hand seeped through his coat sleeve, and he visualized her heat against his, her eyes closed in bliss as he slipped into her welcoming body.
He leaned close to Kate's ear and spoke, and despite the cacophony around them, he knew she heard every word. "Let's get out of here. Let's go someplace where we can be alone."
And as he had imagined, she followed him without protest.
ELEVEN
Jason Urbano moved through his hotel room, discarding his coat, loosening his tie. He rubbed his eyes as if he were exhausted by his confrontation with Oberlin. With a curse, he pulled his cell phone out of the pocket, and dialed his wife. "Hi, honey," he crooned, his frown the exact opposite of his tone. "How are the kids?" He rolled his eyes as he pretended to listen. Then he said, "Yeah, everything went well. I should come home pretty soon. Yeah, honey, really. Nothing's wrong. Everything's great!"
If he did say so himself, he gave a masterful performance as the lying husband for the camera hidden behind the mirror. The camera he theoretically didn't know anything about.
Oberlin had great power, and no one could stop him when he wanted to place an observation camera in a hotel room. On the other hand, nothing could stop Zack Givens when he decided to sabotage Oberlin's efforts.
Stepping out of the lens, Jason kept talking, the kind of soothing nonsense a cheating man would give his stupid little wife.
Luckily for Jason, he wasn't really talking to her. The line was closed; he popped open his laptop, logged onto the cordless connection, and waited until he saw Gabriel's face on the monitor. Gabriel was in the next room tapping into Oberlin's system with the expertise of a man who had learned his business with revenge in mind; Gabriel was the Prescotts' foster son.
Gabriel inserted a tape that fed pretaped video and audio into the camera behind the mirror, then gave Jason a silent thumbs-up. The picture Oberlin now saw was of Jason, pacing back across the room, cell phone pressed to his ear. The sound he heard was Jason talking to his wife.
In reality, Jason pulled up the program that gave him a live video connection to Zack's study in the Givens mansion in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Zack's face came on first. Jason's wife said Zack was too handsome for his own good, and God knew Jason agreed. With black hair now threaded with silver and piercing dark eyes, Zack sent shivers of fear down the spine of every employee in Givens Industries . . . except some of them who had discovered he had developed a kind streak after fifteen years of marriage to Hope. "How did it go?" he asked tersely.
"He went for it," Jason said.
Hope's face moved into sight beside Zack's. She had recently added blond highlights to her brown hair, and a new chin-length cut accented her cheekbones and almost made a man forget the intelligence in her beautiful blue eyes.
Zack hated the cut.
Hope told him to get used to it—she respected his opinion, but not about feminine hairstyles. Jason had known her for sixteen years, and he still grinned whenever he saw Zack and Hope together—the conservative, self-contained executive and the liberal, strong-willed artist.
"How could he be so stupid as to believe you would betray Zack after all these years?" Hope asked incredulously.
"Because we've been very careful to set up a false trail of previous betrayals for Jason, both personal and professional," Zack reminded her.
"And because that's the kind of man George Oberlin is, so of course that's the kind of man he expects to find wherever he looks." The voice of Pepper Graham, Hope's younger sister, echoed across the connection, and she moved into camera range.
Her long black hair hung in waves around her face, and her smile reached her green eyes. She was much more street-savvy than Hope, much more inclined to recognize and accept the dark side of human nature.
Not surprising, since at the age of nine she'd been separated from her siblings and sent to live in foster homes. Although she never talked about that time, Jason got the feeling some of the homes had been cruel and Pepper's existence had been lonely. By the time Hope had found her, twenty-four-year-old Pepper had seen far too much of the grim side of life.
Now, eight years later, she lived on a ranch in Idaho with her husband, Dan Graham, their three children, a thousand head of cattle, and a highly successful mailorder-catalog gardening business. Urban-bred Jason considered that his idea of hell, but Pepper looked happy. Very happy.
When the family had been together brainstorming ways to twist Oberlin's ass into a pretzel, it was Pepper who came up with the plan they pursued.
Jason admired Pepper a lot.
"In your estimation, does Oberlin realize that if he's successful in bringing down Givens Industries, it will be a collapse as damaging to the country and to the investors as the Enron debacle?" Jason knew Zack wanted to be very, very clear on this matter, because for Zack, the idea that someone could so betray their country and its people was an anathema.
"If I were you, I'd check to see if he's bought competitors' stock," Jason advised. "You already know the answer, Zack," Pepper said. "Oberlin is a thief—and worse."
Everyone shared a moment of silence. They were so close to their goal of righting the wrong that had been committed long ago.
Twenty-three years ago, Bennett Prescott had been the minister of a church in Hobart, Texas. He and his wife, Lana, had disappeared and were found dead, their car a wreck, apparently on their way to Mexico, apparently abandoning their children.
Within days the church board discovered the treasury had disappeared with them. The Prescotts were declared criminals, and their children, three daughters and one foster son, disappeared from Hobart. Over the years, Hope, Pepper, and Gabriel had suffered, but eventually they had been reunited.
Yet their baby sister, Caitlin, had disappeared. No one knew where. Despite the best efforts of the reunited Prescott siblings, no trace of her had been uncovered.
It had all come down to one man. George Oberlin had been on the church board when Bennett and Lana Prescott had disappeared. Not long after, George Oberlin had begun his run for the Texas State Senate with a formidable campaign chest, and although he had documented donors, a brief Givens investigation proved he had lied about his financial backers. In fact, his father-in-law, a crusty rancher with fire in his eyes, swore a blue streak at the mention of Oberlin's name.
Yet according to the campaign documents, he had provided Oberlin half his campaign funds.
Griswald, the Givens family butler, Gabriel, and Jason had proved that George Oberlin had stolen the church treasury and been the driving force in separating the children.
They suspected he had had the courthouse burned down to destroy their records. And he had a way of commanding the silence of everyone in Hobart.
The focus for Zack and Hope, for Dan and Pepper, and for Gabriel, was finding the last child, Caitlin.
But the search always ended at George Oberlin, and George Oberlin would not cooperate, for to do so would be to admit culpability.
So with the help of Jason, Givens Industry chief legal counsel, they had put together a scheme brilliant in its simplicity. They had tricked Oberlin into thinking he could blackmail Jason, get him to do his bidding, and bring down Givens Industry. Oberlin was motivated to do it. Somehow he had to hide his wickedness. If he didn't, he would never be able to run for the U.S. Senate.
Like any man who let greed and evil rule his life, Oberlin couldn't see beyond the obvious. He didn't realize that not only could he manipulate, but he could be manipulated, and blackmailed, and destroyed.
When they had him trapped, they would offer a deal—provide them with Caitlin's whereabouts,
or face a scandal big enough to destroy his chance at winning national office.
"I so wish we could send him to prison," Hope muttered.
Jason laughed bitterly. "The man's an octopus. He's got tentacles everywhere. There're plenty of people who'd like to see him brought down, but they don't have the guts to face the consequences of helping us."
"We couldn't find a judge in Texas to convict him," Zack said.
"But, darling, if we can find out that Caitlin's alive and that she's happy, that would put our minds at rest." Pepper rubbed Hope's back.
Jason saw the glow of commitment light Hope's face. "And if we could be reunited with her . . ." Hope swallowed.
This family had waited so long to be whole. Too long. Jason almost couldn't stand to see the agony of their uncertainty.
While the women struggled with their emotions, Gabriel's face flashed across their screens. "Two minutes," he warned.
"We've got to finish up," Zack said.
"I wish we could be there!" Pepper exploded. "I hate staying here in Boston while you guys do all the work."
Hope swallowed back her tears. "If we did that and Oberlin saw us, recognized us—"
"I know," Pepper said bitterly. "It would ruin all our plans."
"We'll fly down when we get ready to close the trap," Zack promised. "Not too much longer."
"One minute," Gabriel warned.
"One last question—how is Griswald holding up?" Hope asked.
"Freddy?" Jason shook his head dolefully. "Freddy Griswald? Poor old Freddy?"
"I told Zack this project was too much of a strain on him." Hope sat straight up. "The man is almost eighty years old!"
Zack, who obviously recognized the expression on Jason's face from their years in college, asked patiently, "What's wrong?"
"He told me he now realizes he wasted his life being a butler," Jason said.
"Really?" Zack lifted his eyebrows. "And why is that?"
"He says he should have been a spy." Jason grinned. "He said he would have saved England a lot of trouble in World War II."
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