Rags To Riches: A Desire To Serve: The Paternity Promise / Stolen Kiss From a Prince / The Maid's Daughter. Merline Lovelace
her bachelor sons maintained their separate penthouse apartments.
The penthouse also boasted a luxurious guest suite for DI’s visiting dignitaries. That, apparently, was where Blake had decided to plant her. Grace guessed as much when he stopped at the security desk in the lower lobby to retrieve a key card. Moments later the glass-enclosed elevator whisked them upward.
Once past the street level, Oklahoma City zoomed into view. On previous visits Grace had gasped at the skyline that rose story by eye-popping story. Tonight she barely noticed the panorama of lights and skyscrapers. Her entire focus was on the man crowding her against the elevator’s glass wall.
She hadn’t been able to tell which Dalton twin was which at first. With their dark gold hair, chiseled chins and broad shoulders, one was a feast for the eyes. Two of them standing side by side could make any woman drool.
It hadn’t taken Grace long to separate the men. Alex was more outgoing, with a wicked grin that jump-started female hormones without him half trying. Blake was quieter. Less obvious. With a smile that was all the more seductive for being slow and warm and…
The ping of the elevator wrenched her back to the tortuous present. When the doors slid open, Blake grasped her arm again and marched her down a plushly carpeted hall toward a set of polished oak doors.
Okay, enough! Grace didn’t get angry often. When she did, her temper flashed hot and fierce enough to burn through the fear still gripping her by the throat.
“That’s it!” She yanked her arm free of his hold and stopped dead in the center of the hall. “You hustle me out of your mother’s house like a thief caught stealing the silver. You order me into your bright, shiny convertible. You drag me up here in the middle of the night. I’m not taking another step until you stop acting like you’re the Gestapo or KGB.”
He arched a brow at her rant, then coolly, deliberately shot back the cuff of his pleated tux shirt to check his gold Rolex.
“It’s nine-twenty-two. Hardly the middle of the night.”
She wanted to hit him. Slap that stony expression right off his too-handsome face. Might have actually attempted it if she wasn’t sure she would crack a couple of finger bones on his hard, unyielding jaw.
Besides which, he deserved some answers. The detective’s report had obviously delivered a body blow. He’d loved her cousin once.
The fire drained from Grace’s heart, leaving only sadness tinged now with an infinite weariness. “All right. I’ll tell you what I can.”
With a curt nod, he strode the last few feet to the guest suite. A swipe of the key card clicked the lock on the wide oak doors. Grace had visited the lavish guest suite a number of times. Each time she stepped inside, though, the sheer magnificence of the view stopped her breath in her throat.
Angled floor-to-ceiling glass walls gave a stunning, hundred-and-eighty-degree panorama of Oklahoma City’s skyline. The view was spectacular during the day, offering an eagle’s-eye glimpse of the domed capitol building, the Oklahoma River and the colorful barges that carried tourists past Bricktown Ballpark to the larger-than-life-size bronze sculptures commemorating the 1889 land run. That momentous event had opened some two million acres of unassigned land to settlers and, oh, by the way, created a tent city with a population of more than fifty thousand almost overnight.
The view on a clear summer night like this one was even more dazzling. Skyscrapers glowed like beacons. White lights twinkled in the trees lining the river spur that meandered through the downtown area. But it was the colossal bronze statue atop the floodlit capitol that drew Grace to the windows. She’d been born and bred in Texas, but as a social studies teacher she knew enough of the history of the Southwest to appreciate the deep symbolism in the twenty-two-foot-tall bronze statue. She’d also been given a detailed history of the statue by Delilah, who’d served on the committee that raised funds for it.
Erected in 2002, The Guardian, with his tall spear, muscular body and unbowed head, represented not only the thousands of Native Americans who’d been forced from their homes in the East and settled in what was then Indian Territory. The statue also embodied Oklahomans who’d wrestled pipe into red dirt as hard as brick to suck out the oil that fueled the just-born automobile industry. The sons and daughters who lived through the devastating Dust Bowl of the ’30s. The proud Americans who’d worked rotating shifts at the Army Air Corps’ Douglas Aircraft Plant in the ’40s to overhaul, repair and build fighters and bombers. And, most recently, the grimly determined Oklahomans who’d dug through nine stories of rubble to recover the bodies of friends and coworkers killed in the Murrah Building bombing.
Grace and Hope… No! Grace and Anne had driven up from Texas during their junior year in high school to visit Oklahoma City’s National Memorial & Museum. Neither of them had been able to comprehend how the homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh could be so evil, so twisted in both mind and morals. Then, less than a year later, her cousin met Jack Petrie.
Frost coated Grace’s lungs. Feeling its sick chill, she wrapped both arms around her waist and turned away from The Guardian to face Blake Dalton.
“I can’t tell you about Anne’s past,” she said bleakly. “I promised I would bury it with her. What I can say is that you’re the only man she got close to in more years than you want to know.”
“You think I’m going to be satisfied with that?”
“You have no choice.”
“Wrong.”
He yanked on the dangling end of his bow tie and threw it aside before shrugging out of his tuxedo jacket. His black satin cummerbund circled a trim waist. The pleated white shirt was still crisp, as might be expected from a tailor who catered exclusively to millionaires and movie stars.
Yet under the sleek sophistication was an edge that didn’t fool Grace for a moment. Delilah bragged constantly about the variety of sports Blake and his twin had excelled at during their school years. Both men still carried an athlete’s build—lean in the hips and flanks, with the solid chest and muscled shoulders of a former collegiate wrestler.
That chest loomed far too large in Grace’s view at the moment. It invaded her space, distracted her thoughts and made her distinctly nervous.
“How many cousins do you have?” he asked with silky menace. “And how long do you think it will take Jamison to check each of them out?”
“Not long,” she fired back. “But he won’t find anything beyond Anne’s birth certificate, driver’s license and a few high school yearbook photos. We made sure of that.”
“A person can’t just erase her entire life after high school.”
“As a matter of fact, she can.”
Grace moved to the buckskin leather sofa and dropped onto a cushion. Blake folded his tall frame onto a matching sofa separated by a half acre of glass-topped coffee table.
“It’s not easy. Or cheap,” she added, thinking of her empty savings account. “But you can pull it off with the help of a very smart friend of a friend of a friend. Especially if said friend can tap into just about any computer system.”
Like the Texas Vital Statistics agency. It had taken some serious hacking but they’d managed to delete the digital entry recording Hope Patricia Templeton’s marriage to Jack David Petrie. By doing so, they’d also deleted the record of the last time Grace had used her maiden name and SSN.
A familiar sadness settled like a lump in Grace’s middle. Her naive, trusting cousin had believed Petrie’s promise to love and cherish and provide for her every need. As the bastard had explained in the months that followed, his wife didn’t require access to their bank account. Or a credit card. Or a job. Nor did she have to register to vote. There weren’t any candidates worth going to that trouble for. And they sure as hell didn’t need to talk to a marriage counselor, he’d added when she finally realized he’d made her a virtual prisoner.
Financially dependent and emotionally