"I doubt it," Jordan said quietly. "And if I were going to worry about genes and hereditary, right now I'm thinking it's the Chambers genes that would have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up."
"You would say something ridiculous like that," Michael said acidly. "You never fitted into our family, Jordan. You've always stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb."
"Could be," Jordan said. "Although my grandmother sure seemed to think that I had a role to play in saving the Chambers family fortune."
Michael's mouth turned down in a bitter line. "I'll never in a million lifetimes understand why Grandmother Hunter left all her money to you. And as for Laurel Acres…it's totally outrageous that she tied Dad's hands, saying he could only use the land for a development project approved by you."
Jordan smiled, although there wasn't much mirth in it. "There's no mystery as to why Grandmother Hunter left her estate to me. She wrote her reasons right in the first paragraph of her will."
"Yes. She said you were the only member of the family who didn't give a damn whether you got her money or not. What kind of a reason is that? The old bat was as crazy as you are."
"Fortunately a doctor and two lawyers disagree with you. In the meantime, I've approved the Laurel Acres deal with the Suttons, and only the Suttons, so you'd better hope it's a success, since your income depends on it."
"Until I'm governor of Texas."
Jordan drew in a deep breath. "Yeah, until then. And since your campaign manager is probably chomping at the bit to get back in here and draw some more pretty colored charts, I'll get out of here as soon as you've answered two more questions for me. First, what's the name of Emily's birth mother, and second, where can I find her?"
"Her name is Maria Vasquez, and you can find her in the cemetery."
Jordan's head jerked up. "In the cemetery?"
"Yes, I guess she's buried somewhere in town. Maria Vasquez is dead," Michael said. "She died last month of lung cancer."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jordan's apartment in San Antonio was a converted loft on the top floor of a six-story building close to the Mexican Market. The brick walls had been painted white, and the two thousand square feet of space had been partitioned into living, eating and sleeping areas only by ficus trees, bookshelves and strategically placed pieces of large furniture. The two bathrooms were enclosed, but otherwise there were no interior walls to interrupt the flow of tiled floor and massive windows.
As a professional interior designer, Emily appreciated the practicality of the layout for a bachelor who lived alone and often worked at home on design concepts. As a wife in name only, she found the floor plan seriously deficient. It was hard to pretend you weren't living with someone when there was nowhere to escape except the closets and the bathrooms to avoid seeing him.
On returning from their honeymoon early yesterday afternoon, Jordan had insisted that Emily should take over the corner of the loft that had been set up as the master bedroom, but his courteous gesture afforded her almost no privacy, since the double-sided bookcases that served as a boundary between sleeping and living areas were less than four feet high and failed to blur her view of the leather sofa where Jordan had spent the night.
The guilt she felt at imposing this uncomfortable sleeping arrangement on her husband had done absolutely nothing to improve the quality of her rest. Which would, in any case, have been seriously impaired, given that every breath Jordan drew seemed to reverberate inside her body until she wanted to cry out with the frustration of being alone in the vast emptiness of his king-size bed.
Now it was Monday evening, bedtime was mere hours away, and they would soon have to go through the whole birdbrained procedure again. As they would tomorrow, and every night for however long their marriage lasted. In Colorado there had been two separate bedrooms for them to sleep in. Here in San Antonio, the inconvenience of their marriage of convenience was revealed in all its stark absurdity.
The trouble with the institution of marriage was that it demanded intimacy, Emily thought, as she painstakingly basted the chicken breasts and red peppers she was baking for dinner. A marriage in name only might have worked for aristocrats in the nineteenth century, when massive houses and hordes of servants imposed distance and formality. But as a method of coping with everyday living in the twenty-first century, it left a lot to be desired.
The sound of the old industrial elevator clanging to a halt produced a fluttering sensation in the pit of Emily's stomach. A sensation that she recognized immediately as excitement. She shut the oven door and gave up trying to pretend, even to herself, that she hadn't spent the past hour waiting on tenterhooks for Jordan's arrival.
He came into the loft, his too long hair rumpled, and the stubble of the day's beard already beginning to darken the line of his jaw. Emily's stomach performed its usual back flip, warning her that this was going to be another long, hard night of trying not to notice that Jordan was the most attractive man she'd met in this particular lifetime.
He tossed his portfolio of drawings onto the dining room table, and strode across the living room area to the kitchen.
"Something smells wonderful," he said, halting a couple of feet away from her. "Hi, Em. How was your day?"
Since they returned to San Antonio, Jordan had been scrupulous about maintaining a physical distance between the two of them, and Emily knew she ought to be grateful for his consideration. She wasn't, of course. Why would she expect the smallest trace of rationality in her reactions to Jordan?
"My day was very busy," she said, resisting the urge to reach out and touch him. Or lean over and kiss him. She turned away, occupying her hands by stirring the rice, which didn't need stirring. "I survived the usual quota of minicrises in the office, but otherwise things weren't too bad, given that I'd been gone for almost two weeks."
Jordan detoured past the oven before going to the fridge and pulling out a bottle of beer. He flipped off the cap with his thumb, then unfastened the buttons at the neck of his shirt before taking a long, thirsty swallow. "How about the lunch date with your parents?"
"Surprisingly, it went very well. Mom and Dad were so happy to see me they hardly asked any difficult questions at all." Emily fixed her gaze at a point somewhere to the left of Jordan's ear, since her eyes had apparently developed a defect that caused them to focus with laserlike intensity on the tanned and muscled expanse of her husband's chest.
Jordan took another swig of beer. "That's good news. I was afraid they might have been harassed by reporters looking for human interest stories to fill a few empty column inches."
"The only people who seem to have harassed them are my relatives. Apparently, my various aunts, uncles and cousins are all burning up with curiosity as to how I came to switch grooms hours before the wedding ceremony, and they've been bombarding my parents with questions. Mom and Dad think it's rude of them to be so inquisitive. They're fielding all inquires with variations on the theme of how you and I fell passionately in love at first sight, and are destined to live happily ever after for the next hundred years or so."
He smiled at her, eyes warm. "You must be relieved. I know you were dreading being cross-examined."
"I sure was. I hate lying to them, you know?" She pulled a face. "Unfortunately, Mom and Dad have now done such a great job of convincing themselves we're in love, I worry about how upset they're going to be when we get divorced."
"Don't buy trouble, Em. We have months before we need to decide what we tell your parents to explain our divorce."
Emily mentally added the word divorce to her lengthening list of words like honeymoon, bed, love, sleeping arrangement, sex and celibacy that caused instant acceleration of her pulse rate and a tightening of the permanent knot in her stomach.
"I know you're right," she said, trying to make light of the problems ahead. "Unfortunately, I have a twenty-seven-year history of obsessing about the future. You need to understand that you're looking at a woman who's so compulsive that she starts
out each business day making three copies of her schedule. And then revises the master copy at lunchtime."
"Three copies?" Jordan tipped his head in a question, then hastily shook it instead. "No, it's better if you don't try to explain."
She laughed. "Yes, it probably is. Anyway, how was your day? I expect you were even busier than I was. At least everyone at my office was prepared for me to be out of reach for a couple of weeks. You weren't able to give your people any warning."
"Yeah, it was your basic madhouse for most of the day. I fielded a lot of calls from customers wanting to be personally reassured that their furniture is going to be delivered in time for the holidays." Jordan ran his hand through his hair, frowning. "The general manager has done a great job keeping the standard production lines moving smoothly, but I'm seriously behind schedule on my signature pieces. I'm sorry, Em, but I'll have to work the next couple of weekends to catch up. Will that screw up any important plans of yours?"
So much for Jordan, the layabout, who never did any work, Emily thought. Did his family know anything about him at all? "No, of course it won't mess up my plans," she said quickly. "You aren't accountable to me for your time."
She meant only to reassure him that she wasn't about to turn into a nagging wife, constantly demanding his attention, but she was afraid her words came out sounding curt, and she tried to soften her response. "Having just said that, I have a big favor to ask. Are you free tomorrow evening by any chance? I realize this is really short notice to spring something on you."
He grinned. "You're asking so nicely that I bet I'd be real smart to say I'm completely tied up at work, can't get away, have to be in Timbuktu."
Her mouth quirked wryly. "I have a suspicion a quick trip to Timbuktu would be a lot more appealing to you than what I have in mind."
"Spit it out, Em. Tell me the worst."
"Tomorrow is the night your parents are opening up their house to the public and throwing a gala reception on behalf of the Texas Fund for Children. Cole Bishop has just been hired as the new executive director, so the board decided to throw a party, partly to introduce him to important donors, and partly to raise money. To be honest, what with one thing and another, I'd clean forgotten about it, but I really need to put in an appearance."
"Because you're a member of the board?"
She nodded. "And because Cole Bishop has a lot of new ideas he wants to introduce, and I support almost all of them. Given that the board is stuffed full of members who believe that anything new must be bad, Cole is going to need all the support he can get. The catch is that Michael will be there, along with a lot of your parents' friends, and I'm getting an acute case of cold feet. Would you mind very much coming with me? It's black tie, and I know how much you hate getting dressed up and making small talk for hours at a stretch, but it would make the whole evening so much easier for me."
"Of course I'll come with you," Jordan said quietly. "I don't mind getting dressed up for a good cause. Besides, if I get too bored, I'll just find you and make you dance with me until I'm in a good mood again."
Emily let out a breath, returning his smile. "Thank you, Jordan. I really appreciate this." She hadn't realized how much she'd been dreading his refusal until he accepted with such easy willingness.
He walked across the kitchen, breaking the invisible barrier that had kept them separated ever since they left Colorado. Crooking his finger under her chin, he tilted her face gently upward. "How could you think I would refuse, Em? Obviously all the gossipy tongues in San Antonio would start wagging if you turned up at such an important event minus your new husband. Especially since said husband isn't the groom everyone was expecting you to marry. Putting on a scratchy starched shirt for three or four hours doesn't seem like too high a price to pay to help you avoid that."
She was caught up in the way he looked, in the way the overhead light made his thick hair gleam and the way the shadow of beard darkened his skin, which was actually quite fair, despite his dark coloring. His skin would feel rough beneath her fingertips, she thought. If she just reached up her hand, she would be able to touch his cheek, stroke the line of his jaw…
Emily tried to speak, then had to swallow before the words would come out. "I really appreciate your willingness to help, Jordan."
"Don't mention it," he said. "It's not a big deal. Who knows? We might even enjoy ourselves." He dropped a fleeting kiss on her mouth and walked away before she could protest. Or return the kiss.
Thank God he hadn't given her time to return the kiss, Emily thought. So far this night was going worse than she'd anticipated. The knowledge that she had approximately three hundred more nights just like this one to get through didn't help lighten her mood one bit. At this rate, she would be a certifiable lunatic before the end of the month, let alone before the end of their marriage.
At what point, she wondered, did physical desire become such a driving physical need that a person just decided to give in, to hell with the consequences?
Better not pursue that line of thought. "Dinner's ready whenever you are," she said brightly. "I laid the table here in the kitchen because I thought the one in the living room looked as if you use it for your design work."
"I do." Jordan grinned. "I didn't have much use for a dining room table until I got real smart and found myself a wife." He yawned. "Geez, it's been a long day."
His yawn made Emily feel guilty all over again because she knew he hadn't slept properly on the sofa, and yet she didn't dare invite him to share her bed. She could predict, with exquisite clarity, exactly what would happen if the two of them ever ended up lying next to each other in a bed. And what would happen between them was some-thing she had dedicated the last six years of her life to avoiding.
Fortunately, bedtime was still a few hours away. Right now, they had dinner to enjoy, and that was likely to provide a pleasant hour for both of them. In Colorado, mealtimes had gone smoothly, whether they ate out at a restaurant or stayed home and cooked for themselves. She and Jordan always seemed to have a dozen different topics to talk about, and their rare moments of silence felt companionable rather than tense gaps that needed to be filled with chatter. In fact, Emily realized as she took the chicken from the oven, she'd been waiting all afternoon to share this time with Jordan.
Ever since her meeting with Dylan at Perk at the Park, she'd been mulling over the idea of telling him about her search for her birth mother. She wanted his opinion on possible reasons for the frustrating wall of silence that Dylan had encountered when he began to investigate. For obvious reasons, she was reluctant to talk to Raelene and Sam, and she didn't want to burden Carolyn St. Clair with a story that came loaded with unsorted emotional baggage. Not to mention the fact that Caro might find it uncomfortable to discuss her employer's work methods with a client.
Jordan, on the other hand, was likely to have a fresh perspective that would enable her to understand why she'd found today's interview with Dylan Garrett so unsettling. Somehow, she was optimistic that Jordan would have the power to put to rest her strange, restless sense of foreboding.
Emily served their dinner, determined to allow Jordan time to eat in peace before she burdened him with the details of her meeting with Dylan. She was still pushing her fork around a half-empty plate when Jordan reached out and covered her hand with his.
"Okay, Em, tell me what's wrong. You've been mauling that poor piece of chicken quite long enough."
With a rueful sigh, she put down her fork. "And here I thought I was doing such a good job of providing entertaining dinner conversation."
Tenderness came and went in his eyes before being replaced with impatience. "Em, you don't have to entertain me. You're not a hired companion, you're my wife—"
"Not really," she said quickly. Wife was another one of those words that hovered close to the top of her anxiety list.
"You're my wife," he repeated firmly. "At least temporarily. If something's bothering you, tell me. Don't wait for some mythical right moment to
slip the topic into the conversation."
"I'd wait forever if I did that," she said ruefully. "This isn't the sort of subject you can slip into a conversation. It's about my mother."
His eyes narrowed in immediate concern. "What's wrong? She looked so well at the wedding. I hope she didn't give you bad news about her health?"
"I didn't mean Raelene." Emily pushed her plate away, realizing she wasn't about to eat any more dinner. "I meant my birth mother."
Jordan put down his fork with what seemed to Emily exaggerated care. "Your birth mother?"
"Yes." Emily's mouth was desert dry, and she took a sip of ice water. "Nobody knows about this except Carolyn St. Clair, but a few weeks ago I decided I wanted to start a serious search for my biological mother. For some reason, I had the feeling time might be running out for us, and I wanted to see if we could find each other after all these years."
Jordan didn't answer immediately, and when he did speak, his voice was deeper and rougher than usual. "Have you ever tried to find your birth mother before, Em?"
"No," she said. "For the first twenty-six years of my life, I honestly didn't think much about her. Of course I remembered her on my birthdays, and wondered if she was thinking about me, too. But my adoptive parents are wonderful, and it seemed disloyal to consider making a serious search for her, even after I went away to college."
Jordan laid his hand next to hers on the table. "I can understand why you felt like that, Em, although Raelene and Sam might have been more understanding than you would expect. They're a remarkable couple."
She looked down at their hands, which were almost touching. "They are, but I think this might be difficult even for them. Especially my mom. In college I joined a support group for students who were adopted—"
His Brother's Fiancée Page 17
