“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“How right now, nothing else matters,” she told him, running a fingertip down his cheek, tracing the path a water droplet had just taken before she repeated, “Nothing else matters. It’s as though there’s nothing down that path in the woods—no other place in the universe but this swimming hole—and we’re never going to leave, and the sun is never going to come up.”
But it is, and we are, he thought hollowly, then pushed away the melancholy thought.
She was right.
Tonight was all that mattered.
They would worry about the rest of it—all of it—in the morning.
CHAPTER SEVEN
On Monday morning, Mariel woke to the sound of a ringing telephone.
Dazed, she rolled over—and found herself face-to-face with Noah.
With that, last night came rushing back at her. She remembered making love in the water, and getting dressed and making their way back to the inn, only to undress each other hungrily once again and tumble into bed.
Whose bed?
She looked past him and saw yellow roses and buttercolored curtains at the window.
His bed. This was his room. That meant it was his phone, and he should answer it, which he was now rolling over to do.
“Yeah?” he asked, lazily picking up the receiver as he stretched.
She watched him listen, noticing that his eyes narrowed and his hand gripped the receiver more tightly. And she knew, as she saw the changes in his demeanor, that morning was here and, with it, the reality that had shattered their idyllic time together as she had known it would.
“When?” he asked sharply into the receiver. Then he said, “That would be fine. There are a few things I’d like to ask you, too.”
Silence again, as he listened. Then he said, “Don’t bother. I’ll tell her myself.”
As he hung up, he got up, rising from the bed in one swift movement. He stood naked, looking down at her, and she felt desire stirring despite the change in mood.
“Who was that?” she asked him.
“That,” he said, striding across the room and taking a T-shirt from the open suitcase on the floor, “was the private investigator the Steadmans have hired to find Amber.”
She gaped at him. “What did he want with you?”
“It wasn’t just me he was looking for. He wanted to talk to you, too. He said he was going to call your room, and I told him—”
“Not to bother. I know. I heard.” She sat up, pulling the pale yellow sheet with her so that it draped across her breasts. “I also heard what sounded like a plan to meet him.”
“It was. We’re having breakfast with him at a diner down the street in an hour.” He pulled on the T-shirt.
There. They were both sufficiently covered. No more naked skin to distract them from the matter at hand, or trick them into thinking that they were here together for any reason other than to find their missing daughter.
“What does he want?” Mariel asked, trying to keep her mind on the private investigator.
“What do you think he wants?” Noah picked up his shaving kit and took a clean, folded T-shirt, boxer shorts, and cutoffs from his suitcase. “I’m going to go down the hall and take a shower. I won’t be long.”
“I’ll go to my room and get my stuff. Knock when you’re out.”
“I will.”
With that, he was gone, leaving Mariel to lean back against the pillows, her mind whirling.
Mere hours ago, they had been lying in this very spot, cloaked in darkness and wrapped in each other’s arms, making love over and over again until one time melded into the next. Nothing else mattered; not the unrelenting heat that made their bodies slick and dampened the sheets, and not the fact that they were stealing forbidden moments together, pretending this was somehow right and okay.
Now she could pretend no longer.
It was time to deal with what was happening. Time to allow a stranger to intrude, no doubt with probing questions about their connection to Amber Steadman.
The full implication of what Noah had said hit her for the first time, and Mariel pressed a trembling fist against her mouth.
The Steadmans had hired a private investigator.
Did that mean that they didn’t believe the police assumption that their daughter was a runaway, and that they suspected a crime had been committed?
That Amber had most likely been abducted?
Numb with worry, Mariel chastised herself for getting sidetracked last night with Noah. She was here to find her daughter, period. Yet she had been dining out, having margaritas, romping in a swimming hole, making love, as though this were some kind of long-overdue vacation, and she had a future with the man she had never expected—never wanted—to see again.
Well, that was going to change.
She wouldn’t let her focus waver again, she vowed as she slid out of bed, threw on her rumpled clothes, and made her way back down the hall to her room.
“I’m Henry Brando,” the dark-haired, surprisingly young man said, rising from the table at the rear of the diner when he saw Mariel and Noah approach.
“And you know who we are,” Noah said, giving the guy a quick once-over. He wasn’t the rumpled, cigarettesmoking cliché he had expected. Henry Brando was clean-shaven and neatly pressed, and wore a dress shirt and slacks despite the near-hundred-degree heat outside.
Noah, on the other hand, wore a simple white short-sleeved pocket T-shirt and green khaki shorts, and Mariel had on a sleeveless red madras plaid dress with sandals. She had piled her hair on top of her head, and little tendrils spilled out of the clips. Every time Noah glanced at her, he found himself wanting to brush them back from her face.
He reached for a chair to pull out for her, but Henry Brando beat him to it. Noah fought back a twinge of jealousy as he watched the private investigator giving her an appreciative appraisal. Well, what did he expect? She looked incredibly appealing—so appealing Noah hadn’t been able to resist her himself.
But he would from here on in, he reminded himself. He couldn’t afford to get caught up in his emotions now, when he had finally detached himself from a draining mess of a marriage—and when his job was on the line besides, thanks to calling in sick this morning.
He didn’t know whether his boss, David Grafton, had believed him or not when he claimed to have eaten some bad shellfish yesterday. Probably not. And even if he had believed the lie, he would expect Noah to be over the food poisoning within a reasonable time frame. Like tomorrow.
That wasn’t going to happen. He should have come up with some illness that would take at least a few days’ worth of recovery…
Or the truth.
Why hadn’t he just told his boss the truth?
Because he had never discussed Amber’s existence with anybody. Not even Kelly, or his mother. Neither of them knew he had had a daughter and given her up for adoption, and he certainly hadn’t told any of his friends. Now he wondered why he hadn’t. Talking about it might have helped over the years.
Or maybe it would only have made the ache even deeper, and the longing more profound.
In any case, he wasn’t about to tell David that he was four hours away from New York City, searching for his missing teenaged daughter. Not unless he had to, to save his job. They didn’t take calling in sick lightly at the agency—not with the tremendous workload and demanding clients breathing down everyone’s neck twenty-four-seven. A few times, Noah had even been asked to postpone a vacation at the last minute.
Kelly had been understanding, given her own work ethic and dedication to her career—and the fact that it was she who had more or less pushed Noah into the corporate world. The first two times, she had rearranged her own schedule so that they could take their vacation at a later date. But the last time it had happened, a little over a year ago, she had said she wouldn’t be able to take time off later and that she was going to go alone. She had jetted off to St. Thomas solo, leaving Noah to wo
rk six straight days of overtime on a new last-minute campaign that the client ultimately decided wasn’t going to work after all, opting to go back to the original a few hours before Kelly landed at La Guardia with a fabulous tan and her designer luggage packed with souvenirs.
Frustrating business, advertising.
“Have a seat, Noah,” Henry Brando offered, and Noah realized he was the only one still standing.
He slid into the chair beside Mariel’s and eyed the private investigator across the table. A cup of steaming black coffee sat in front of him, along with three menus. Did the guy expect him and Mariel to actually eat at a time like this? Noah had completely lost his appetite.
As if to contradict that thought, the waitress materialized beside him. She was a cliche, from her red teased hair to her pink uniform with a white apron and the pen tucked behind her ear, which she removed now and held poised over her order pad.
“What can I get you?” she asked.
“Just coffee,” Mariel said.
“Same here.”
The private investigator handed over all three menus and said, “That’s it, then.”
When the waitress had walked away, Noah got down to business before Henry Brando had a chance to jump in first. “You said you’re working for the Steadmans. When did they hire you?”
“The second day into the police investigation,” Brando replied. “When they realized that the cops were treating this as a runaway case and operating on the assumption that their daughter had left willingly, and would probably turn up sooner rather than later on her own.”
“You don’t think that’s going to happen?” Mariel asked, a waver in her voice as she spoke for the first time.
Brando shrugged. “They don’t think it’s going to happen. What do you think, Mr. Lyons?”
Noah looked him in the eye. “I think you’d better do everything you can to find their daughter, Mr. Brando.”
“Which is exactly why I’ve asked the two of you to meet with me here this morning.” The private investigator stirred his black coffee and took a sip, directing his attention at Mariel. “Ms. Rowan, you told the Steadmans that you got an e-mail from their daughter. Would you be able to access that e-mail so that I can take a look at it?”
She shook her head. “I deleted it.”
There was a pause, and then Brando repeated, “You deleted it? You heard from the long-lost daughter you had given up for adoption when she was a newborn infant and you deleted the message?”
Mariel nodded, looking down at her hands for a moment. Noah wanted to put an arm around her slumping shoulders for support, but instinctively forced himself not to. The less this man saw of whatever it was that was going on between them, the better.
When Mariel looked up at the detective again, her gaze was unwavering. Almost defiant, Noah realized, and he couldn’t help but admire her.
“I deleted it because I didn’t want anybody in my family to stumble across it,” she told Brando. “Nobody knew that I was pregnant and gave birth while I was away at college.”
“You never told your parents?”
“My father was a minister. I was a freshman. No.”
“So it’s been a secret you’ve kept all these years? What about you, Mr. Lyons? Did you share this with anyone in your family?”
“There was only my mother,” he said. “And no, I never told her.”
“What about a spouse? Are either of you married?”
“I was,” Noah said as Mariel shook her head. “But not anymore.”
“And you never told your wife that you had a daughter?”
“No, never.”
The detective gazed intently at him for a long time. Noah forced himself not to lower his own gaze. Then Brando asked, looking from Noah to Mariel, “Do either of you have any idea who could possibly have had a reason to want to abduct or harm your daughter?”
“She isn’t our daughter,” Mariel replied. “She hasn’t been our daughter since we handed her over to the people from the adoption agency the day she was born.”
“We don’t know anything about her life,” Noah added. “We haven’t been in contact with her since we gave her up.”
“And you’ve never tried to locate her, or check on her?” Brando asked.
They shook their heads.
“And she didn’t contact you, Mr. Lyons? Only Ms. Rowan?”
“No, she didn’t contact me.” That stung. He couldn’t help it. If only Amber Steadman had reached out to him, he would have…
What? Would he have done anything differently than Mariel had? Would he have been able to prevent whatever it was that had happened to her?
“What brought you two to Strasburg and Valley Falls?” Brando asked abruptly, changing the tone of the conversation after the waitress had unobtrusively arrived to pour coffee for Mariel and Noah.
Noah glanced at Mariel, waiting for her to answer the question. After all, it was she who had arrived here first, and summoned him.
Mariel told the detective what she had told Noah—that she had wanted to respond to their daughter’s e-mail in person, knowing that the discovery of her birth mother was an emotional and possibly traumatic event.
“So you just happened to turn up here right around the time Amber disappeared, Ms. Rowan?”
“I turned up here more than a week later, Mr. Brando,” Mariel said succinctly. “And I had nothing to do with her disappearance, if that’s what you’re implying.”
Brando ignored that, turning to Noah, who was stirring creamer into his coffee. “How did you happen to be here, Mr. Lyons?”
“Mariel contacted me when she got here and found out what had happened.”
“So the two of you maintain a relationship after all these years?”
“No, we don’t,” Noah said quickly, in unison with Mariel. “We haven’t been in touch since we gave up the baby,” Noah added,
“Why not?”
It was a simple question.
There was no simple answer.
Again, Noah left it to Mariel.
“I returned to the Midwest,” she said with a shrug. “I got on with my life. Noah got on with his. We just …went our separate ways.”
The investigator seemed to consider this. Then he asked, “What did you think of the Steadmans?”
Caught off guard, Noah asked, “What do you mean, what did we think of them?”
Brando shrugged. “Did you think they were fit parents? Were you happy with what you saw? Were they the kind of people you had envisioned raising your daughter when you gave her up years ago?”
How do you answer a question like that? Noah wondered. He could no longer remember what he had pictured when he thought about his daughter. Mostly, he supposed, he had pictured the lost dream of what might have been—Amber living happily ever after with him and Mariel as her parents.
“Itwas hard to judge them under the circumstances,” Mariel spoke up. “They were under a tremendous amount of strain.”
“That’s true,” Brando agreed. “Amber’s disappearance and their separation have been extremely difficult for them—”
“Their separation?” Noah cut in, staring at the detective in disbelief. “They split up after their daughter disappeared?”
He looked at Mariel, who appeared just as startled as he was.
“Before,” Brando corrected. “They separated about two months ago.”
“Why?” Noah asked, remembering the clues that hadn’t registered yesterday when he and Mariel had been at the Steadmans’ house. He recalled the way they didn’t seem to be leaning on each other for emotional support, the way they didn’t touch each other and barely looked at each other. It was telling; he had been there himself, with Kelly. He knew all the signs of a marriage’s breakdown, yet he hadn’t even suspected.
“I don’t know the details,” the detective said.
Noah found that hard to believe. It would be this man’s job to investigate all the angles, to find out all he could about the pe
ople who had hired him.
“What do you plan to do now that you didn’t get what you came here for, Ms. Rowan?” Brando asked Mariel.
“My flight home was scheduled for tomorrow morning, but I plan to change that and stay as long as I can,” she said simply. “Hopefully, I can stay long enough to see Amber come home safely.”
“What kind of role do you expect to play in her life?”
Mariel hesitated. “I don’t know that I expect to play a role in her life,” she said. “I only want to make sure that she’s okay.”
“And you, Mr. Lyons?”
“I want the same thing,” he said, wishing it were the whole truth. But it wasn’t. He wanted the impossible. He wanted to change everything that had happened since that long-ago day in the dorm room. He wanted Mariel as his wife and Amber as his daughter. He wanted the family he had always imagined.
The family that had actually existed for a split second in that hospital room before fate had erased it, swept it into oblivion.
The day was overcast, the air so dense with moisture that Mariel felt drenched until she had spent twenty minutes in the air-conditioned rental car. She had insisted on driving today because Noah’s friend Danny’s car lacked air-conditioning, and Noah had quickly given up the argument. She knew why he preferred to do the driving. It was because he had always been an old-fashioned kind of guy, even back in college, when he had opened doors for Mariel and walked on the curb edge of the sidewalk. He was used to taking care of his mother, and he had taken care of Mariel the same way, back then.
One would think that might have bothered her when she was an eighteen-year-old college freshman, given her independent streak and her fierce desire to take care of herself at last after a lifetime with doting parents.
But she had never minded Noah’s gentlemanly ways—she had been charmed by them back then, and was charmed by them now.
That didn’t mean she couldn’t do the driving—or that she had changed her mind about not getting involved with Noah again. Her mind was made up about that—even if her body betrayed her every so often, when her gaze met his and her flesh tingled in remembrance of the way Noah had touched her last night.
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