His Brother's Fiancée

by Jasmine Cresswell

  "I thought you said you never thought much about your adoption?"

  "I didn't. But most kids want a group identity at that age, I guess, and I decided being adopted was going to be mine. The focus of the group was on searching for your birth parents, and we had quite a few experts come to talk to us. Detectives, psychologists, social workers, even a lawyer. The one thing every one of those experts agreed on was that searching for your birth parents was almost guaranteed to put stress on your relationship with your adoptive parents. I was curious to see if the experts were right. So when I came home for summer vacation at the end of my freshman year, I just hinted to Raelene that I might be interested in seeing if I could find my biological mother. She tried to hide her reaction, but I could see she was devastated."

  "So you abandoned the idea," Jordan said.

  "Yes. At that point, finding my birth mother wasn't nearly important enough to me to risk hurting Raelene and Sam. When I returned to college, I dropped out of the support group and took up volleyball instead. End of story till this year."

  Jordan's hand moved slightly, the tips of his fingers covering hers. "You're a kind daughter, Em."

  "Not really. You could just as easily say that I'm selfish. The Suttons poured out so much love, why would I be tempted to rock the boat?"

  "You're not giving yourself nearly enough credit."

  She sent him a sudden smile. "I think I told you the same thing about yourself just a few days ago."

  He returned her smile. "Hey, looks like we're both better people than we ever imagined. Anyway, what made you change your mind and decide to start looking for your birth mother?"

  "I began to dream about her." Emily shifted uncomfortably on her chair, shrugging off a sudden chill. "Suddenly, out of nowhere, about two months ago, these dreams started. I've never admitted this to anyone, Jordan, but for a couple of weeks, the dreams were so vivid they began to carry over into the day. I couldn't seem to escape from them. I got this weird notion stuck in my head that my mom was trying to contact me. Telling me I needed to find her." She gave a laugh that was intended to be mildly self-mocking and instead sounded scared. "How's that for spooky?"

  "Spooky," he agreed, but lightly as if it wasn't any big deal. "What did your birth mother say exactly, when she told you to start looking for her?"

  "I'm not sure. Not the exact message. That sounds strange, but the image of her that came in my dreams was nothing like the all-American college coed the adoption agency had described her as being. My dream mother was dark and petite and looked Hispanic. In fact, she spoke in my dreams in Spanish…"

  Emily's voice trailed away when she noticed that Jordan's expression sharpened into a new intensity the moment she mentioned that her mother spoke Spanish. "What is it?" she asked. "What have I said?"

  "Nothing important. Do you speak Spanish, Em?"

  She shrugged. "I've lived in San Antonio all my life, so of course I speak a little, but I'm not fluent. I had dreams of going to Italy to study fabric design, so I took Italian in college."

  "But you obviously understood enough of what your mother was saying to decide that she wanted you to start searching for her."

  Emily nodded. "You know what dreams are like. They have their own crazy internal logic. I always understood exactly what my mother was saying while I was asleep, even though part of my brain seemed to realize that I ought to be having difficulty grasping her Spanish. I even ''recognized' some of her words as being regional expressions from the Yucatan peninsula. How's that for weird? Then as soon as I woke up, I wouldn't be able to remember what her Spanish words meant, not exactly. I was just left with this compulsive need to start looking for her."

  Jordan's hand was completely covering hers now, but Emily chose not to move her own hand away. The warmth of his touch was comforting, dispelling the chill that always gripped her when she remembered those distressingly vivid dreams.

  The silence that greeted her confession gradually became oppressive, and she gave an uncomfortable laugh. "Okay, you don't have to sit there trying to find something polite to say. Go ahead and tell me how crazy it was to start searching for my birth mother because she was calling to me in my dreams."

  "It doesn't seem crazy to me at all," Jordan said. "That wasn't why I was silent."

  "What rational explanation could there be for my dreams? Much less the fact that I found them compelling enough to act on?"

  "I can think of several good, rational explanations. Here's one. Despite your protests to the contrary, you've been wanting to find your birth mother for a long time. You suppressed that desire for the sake of the Suttons, but it was a real sacrifice on your part. It's quite logical that if you censored all thoughts of your birth mother during the day, then your subconscious would take over and force you to confront your secret wishes while you slept."

  Emily smiled ruefully. "Well, thank you for that. I guess my subconscious sending me subliminal messages sounds less nutty than my mother's spirit wafting through the ether to invade my dreams with a plea for me to find her."

  "I have to get another beer," Jordan said abruptly, pushing back his chair. "Can I get anything for you?"

  "No, thanks. I'm fine."

  When he came back to the table, his expression seemed to Emily to be on the grim side for a man who'd just assured her that he didn't think she was even slightly crazy.

  "So tell me what you did once you'd decided to start searching," he said, taking a long swig of beer. "Did you try to go it alone, or did you hire professional help?"

  "I hired professionals," Emily said, explaining about Carolyn's job at Finders Keepers, and how she'd hired Dylan Garrett the day before the wedding on her friend's recommendation.

  "Dylan promised to get back to me as soon as he had anything to report, and he was as good as his word," she said. "He called me this morning at the office and asked if I could meet him at Perk at the Park, down on the River Walk, because he had some information he needed to review with me. I agreed to meet with him right after I finished lunch with my parents."

  "Did he have anything important to tell you?" Jordan asked, and Emily wondered if she was imagining the note of sympathy she could hear in his voice. What was there in the story she'd recounted to evoke his sympathy?

  "I'm not sure I'd call it important," she said. "His report to me was more puzzling than anything else, and it's been bothering me ever since I heard it." She explained how Dylan had contacted many of the people who'd once worked at Lutheran Family Services, and how all of the former employees had clammed up, refusing to speak to Dylan the moment they knew he was trying to track the mother of a baby born on March 16, 1974.

  "It seemed very strange that all these adoption professionals would remember my birth date the second Dylan mentioned it. It's almost thirty years since I was born, so why would they remember me? After all, they must have dealt with hundreds of adoptions in the course of their careers."

  "Did Dylan have an answer for you?" Jordan asked.

  "Yes, he did. But first I suggested maybe I was one of triplets, or quads, all farmed out to different families. I guess that would be memorable, even to adoption professionals. But based on the pattern of how his interviews developed, Dylan came to the conclusion that people were refusing to talk because they'd been bribed to keep silent. Bribed recently enough to remember instantly which birthday they weren't supposed to talk about. Or, even more likely, he suspected they'd been intimidated into keeping quiet."

  "Intimidated? As in threatened if they dared to speak out about what they knew?"

  "Yes," Emily said. "Apparently it would be easy to apply pressure to keep potential informants quiet, since it's technically against the law to disclose the details of sealed adoption records."

  Jordan took another long, slow swallow of beer. Emily could no longer ignore the fact that for some reason he was taking longer and longer to respond to what she was saying.

  "And that's all Dylan Garrett had to tell you?" he asked finally. "
That the agency employees he'd interviewed didn't want to cooperate."

  "Yes, that's all."

  "Then if his sources wouldn't cooperate, I guess Dylan didn't actually manage to find out anything concrete about your birth mother," Jordan persisted.

  "No, nothing." Emily struggled to explain why the afternoon's meeting with Dylan had troubled her so much. "It really bothers me that somebody might be intimidating those former employees into keeping quiet. Why? Who would care? What's the purpose? On top of the puzzle of why, it angers me that I'm being thwarted in my efforts to find my mother. When I started this search, I realized I might never find her, so I'm mentally prepared for failure. But I'll be damned if I'm going to sit back quietly and give up the search because some outsider, for reasons unknown, has decided to intimidate people into refusing to talk."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  He was going to have to tell her the truth, Jordan realized. He'd been debating all afternoon exactly how much he should tell Emily about his conversation with Michael. Driving home, he'd reached the conclusion that he would tell her nothing. The coward's way out, maybe, but he hadn't seen any purpose in thrusting information on Emily when she'd shown no signs of wanting it.

  But that decision had been based on the belief that Emily had never attempted to find her birth mother. Now he knew she had been secretly yearning to find her birth mother for years. Under the circumstances, silence was no longer an option.

  It was clear that he couldn't conceal the facts. What wasn't clear was how in hell he would find the words to tell Emily that the mother she'd finally started to search for was dead. In a coincidence he would very much like to have ignored, it seemed quite possible that Maria Vasquez had died soon after Emily started to be plagued by dreams of her birth mother. Now there was a psychic phenomenon that he was definitely not ready to explore.

  And that wasn't the worst of it. Hard as it would be to tell Emily that her birth mother had died, Jordan knew it would be even more difficult to explain how he happened to be in possession of this piece of information. Telling Emily what he'd found out this afternoon, while revealing only the barest minimum about Michael's role, was going to require some mighty fancy verbal flimflam.

  He sure as hell didn't want to reveal the part Michael had played in all this. He was ashamed that his brother had behaved so badly, but he was even more concerned about how devastated Emily would be to discover the real reason her fiancée had dumped her. There was no kind or tactful way to explain that Michael had called off the engagement because he found Emily's dead mother too offensive to be admitted to a perch on the branches of the Chambers family tree.

  Jordan realized that his fingers were drumming on the edge of the table, and that Emily was looking at him with visible concern. No more beating around the bush, he decided. It was time to speak up.

  "I went to see Michael this afternoon," he said.

  "Michael?" Emily looked at him, more puzzled than anything else.

  "Yes, we had some family business to take care of." What the hell could he say next? I asked my brother what his real reason was for dumping you, and he said it was because your birth mother was a whore, and you have tainted genes, unworthy for the production of a Chambers heir.

  Jordan gave up on preparing mental speeches and let his instincts take over. He pulled his chair next to Emily's, putting his arm around her shoulders and taking her hand into his.

  "I have some sad news to give you," he said quietly. "When I was talking with Michael today, he mentioned that he'd happened to come across some information about your birth mother."

  "About my mother?"

  No wonder she sounded incredulous. Jordan gripped her hands tighter. "Yes. It's an odd coincidence, but your dreams were right on about her being Hispanic, Em. Apparently she was a Mexican immigrant, and her name was Maria Vasquez."

  "Maria Vasquez." Emily murmured the name, her voice soft. Her mouth slowly broke into a small, radiant smile and joy sparked in her eyes.

  "My mother's name is Maria Vasquez." She changed his was to an is and laughed with pure delight, consciously or unconsciously ignoring his warning that he had sad news.

  Her smile widened. "Oh, my God, I know my mother's name! Where does she live? Can I go to meet her?" She was already half out of her chair.

  Gently, he tugged her back down. "I'm afraid not, Em." Jordan steeled himself to tell her the rest. "She's dead. I'm really sorry, sweetheart, but Maria died a little while ago."

  The joy disappeared from Emily's eyes, to be replaced by a bleakness that made Jordan ache. "My mother's dead?" she whispered.

  "Yes, she is. I'm so sorry, Em."

  She said absolutely nothing. Then a single tear splashed onto the back of their clasped hands, but she didn't seem to notice it.

  "I wish I didn't have to give you such sad news," he said.

  "I'm not really surprised," she replied, her voice remote. "At some level, it's what I've been dreading. All along I've had this sense of urgency. Like I had to find her really soon, or it would be too late." She took a shaky breath. "Now it is too late."

  He couldn't deny the simple truth of it, and Jordan had rarely in his life felt more powerless. Cursing silently, he watched as another tear fell onto their hands, and then another. There was no storm of tears, just a quiet, restrained grief that tore at his gut until he couldn't stand it any longer.

  To hell with keeping his distance and showing restraint. He pulled Emily to her feet and cradled her in his arms, stroking her hair, and rocking her gently back and forth, whispering words of comfort.

  Suddenly she was sobbing, her face turned into his chest, the sobs racking her body and soaking his shirt. He let her cry, and—since this was his own uptight Emily— the storm didn't last for long. In a very few minutes she had herself back under control. He reached behind him and found a box of tissues, handing it to her without speaking.

  "Thanks." She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "You must think it's silly to be so upset when I've never even met her, but I guess I'm crying for all the lost opportunities in our lives. For the chance to know each other that we'll never have."

  Jordan touched her cheek with the back of his hand. Her skin felt hot, as if all the emotion she wouldn't let herself reveal burned inside. "I can tell you one thing about her beyond a shadow of a doubt. She'd have been very proud of you, Em."

  The sadness in her eyes faded just a little. "Do you think so?"

  "I know so," he said with complete truth.

  She looked at him wistfully. "If only I'd started looking for her a little earlier. If only we could have met just once—"

  "Don't," he said, taking her hands and tugging her close again. "Don't do this to yourself, Em. The what-ifs in life can drive you crazy if you don't watch out."

  "You're right. There's no point." She broke away from him to reach for the glass of water standing on the table. Ever his practical Em, she drank deeply, set down the empty glass and started on the painful process of turning her grief into constructive action. "I guess I should call Dylan Garrett tomorrow and tell him to call off his search. Do you know where Maria is buried, Jordan? I'd like to visit her grave. It's nothing morbid or anything. But I need to go, just once."

  "I don't know where Maria is buried," Jordan said. "But I can pass on whatever information I have to Dylan Garrett and I'm sure he'll be able to find out your mother's burial site within a couple of hours. There aren't that many cemeteries in San Antonio, after all."

  "I'd appreciate that. I'd like to pay her my respects. I wonder what she died of? She must have been quite young."

  Michael had said something about lung cancer. Jordan decided not to pass on that fact. Better if any more details about Maria's death were left to Dylan Garrett to explain. As for Maria's life…if he could square it with his conscience, he would call Dylan tomorrow and ask him, man to man, to go easy on revealing the details of exactly how Maria Vasquez had made her living.

  Jordan watched as Emily carried
her plate over to the sink and scraped the remains of her meal into the garbage disposal. She suddenly looked up, her forehead wrinkled into a frown.

  Oh, hell, he thought. She's starting to wonder how Michael stumbled onto information about Maria Vasquez. After all, she'd been paying a top-notch investigator to conduct the same search, and he'd come up empty. Her mystification was almost inevitable.

  "I'm confused," Emily said, her plate sitting forgotten on the counter. "I know you told me Michael gave you this information about my mother, but how did he find out about her? Was it some amazing coincidence?"

  Could he risk claiming coincidence? Probably not, Jordan decided. Emily would want to know exactly what chain of events had led to such a curious twist of fate, and he couldn't think of any story that would withstand scrutiny. He needed to head her off with a plausible mix of omissions and half truths before she asked him a question he wasn't willing to answer. Emily didn't need to know that her birth mother had earned her living on the streets.

  "You probably know that Michael's campaign has access to teams of investigators who are experienced in digging up information on just about anyone and anything. He asked them to try to find your birth mother."

  "Why?" Emily's gaze was justifiably bewildered. "Why in the world would Michael do such an odd thing?"

  Jordan had a flash of inspiration. "He wanted to find your birth mother as a surprise wedding gift for you." He tried hard to make the lie sound convincing. "But when he learned that your mother was dead, he decided it was best not to say anything to anyone. He didn't know you were searching for Maria yourself, of course."

  Phew! That all sounded pretty reasonable, Jordan figured.

  "How unexpectedly thoughtful of Michael." Emily added detergent to the dispenser in the dishwasher while Jordan mentally wiped sweat from his brow and wondered what subject he could introduce to create a diversion.

  "Would you like me to brew us a pot of coffee?" he asked.

  "Sure, that would be nice." Having put her own dinner plate into the dishwasher, Emily wandered over to the table for his. She stopped halfway back to the sink and stared into the distance. With the relentless persistence of an incoming tide, she produced her next question.