A Self-Made Man (14 page)

Gwen frowned, and Adam saw the first hint of uncertainty flash through her expression. “Of course you'd have to say that.”

“He says that because it's true.” Lacy faced Gwen patiently. “This has nothing at all to do with you, Gwen. You have my word on that.”

“Your word?” Gwen muttered something unintel
ligible under her breath. “Fine. What
does
it have to do with?”

Adam wondered how Lacy would handle that question, which was thrust at her like a dare. But he shouldn't have worried. Naturally, the composed, articulate Mrs. Malcolm Morgan was equal to any challenge.

She put her hand gently on her stepdaughter's elbow. “It's personal, Gwen. I'm sorry, but just as it would be wrong for me to pry into your life, it would also be wrong for you to pry into mine, wouldn't it?”

For a moment Adam thought Gwen was going to refuse to back down. Not because she thought Lacy was lying. He could tell that, in spite of the rude mutterings, Lacy's word did carry a lot of weight with her stepdaughter. Still, Gwen clearly hated losing face.

Luckily, Teddy Kilgore chose that moment to come looking for a dance. “Gwen,” he called up from the base of the boardwalk. “Gwen, come on down! They're playing our song!”

Gwen wasn't stupid. She saw her safe exit, and she took it, though she cast one last daggered look at Lacy before haughtily descending the stairs to meet the boy waiting there.

But the resentment bounced off Lacy like the impotent nonsense it was. She turned to Adam. “Thank you,” she said formally. “Now if you'll excuse me, Mr. Frennick and I—”

Adam shook his head. “I think I'll stay. I want to hear what Mr. Frennick has to say.”

She frowned, and he could see the surprised annoyance racing through her mind. Was she going to have to fend him off as well?

“It's all right,” Adam said, cutting through the impending protests. “I know about Tilly's baby.”

“What?” She was good, but he noticed that she couldn't quite hide her shock. “You do? How?”

“Tilly told me tonight, when I went up to check on her. It seemed to be weighing heavily on her mind, perhaps because of the insulin episode. She told me she got pregnant sixty-two years ago and gave the child up for adoption. She said she had hired a private detective to locate her daughter, and that you were urging her to start the investigation. She wanted my advice.”

“Oh.” Lacy looked at Frennick. “Well, I—”

“She didn't seem to think any investigation had actually begun yet.” He raised one brow. “Apparently she was mistaken. I can't imagine Mr. Frennick would track you down here, in the middle of the night, unless he has news of some kind. I want to hear it.”

Obviously Lacy knew when she had lost an argument. She lifted her chin slightly, but she didn't in any other way exhibit discomfort.

“All right, Mr. Frennick,” she said. “Apparently Mrs. Barnhardt has confided in Mr. Kendall. So tell us both. Have you found Tilly's daughter?”

“Yes, I'm afraid I have.” The sad-eyed man took a deep breath. “Her adopted name was Caroline Scott. Up until two years ago, she was a nurse practitioner in the Boston area.”

Lacy's eyes grew very dark. “What happened two years ago?”

“Two years ago,” he said slowly, “she died.”

 

H
ER EVENING SHOES
in her hand, Lacy had covered at least a quarter of a mile along the wet sand before Adam caught up with her. Lost in her own unhappy thoughts, she had been blind to everything around her, deaf to all sounds, including apparently the one of a man running up behind her.

So she was surprised when he grabbed hold of her elbow, exerting just enough pressure to slow her down, then ease her to a complete stop.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Talk to me.”

She didn't turn around. She didn't have control of her face right now. “I don't want to talk,” she said. “I want to be alone.”

“Sixty-two years is a long time, Lacy,” he said. “Tilly knew this was one of the possible outcomes. You must have known that, too.”

“Of course I did.” But she hadn't ever really believed it. Fate would not be so cruel, she'd thought. After sixty years of regret, sixty years of longing, surely Tilly would get another chance. And now to learn that her daughter was gone forever—that there would be no reunion, no second chances…

Oh, she had been so naive. Lacy stared out at the ocean, which seemed massive tonight, swollen waves moving inexorably toward the shore, equally indifferent to the human pleasure going on back at the party, and to the suffering here in her heart. She had heard that some people were comforted by the im
mensity of it, the sense of something more eternal than trivial human concerns. But tonight it simply made her feel small and helpless.

“Tilly is tough,” Adam said bracingly. “She can take it.”

“I know.” Her breath hitched. “I know.”

And she did. She knew all about being tough. About enduring what you had to endure. But she had wanted something better than that for Tilly. She had wanted a rainbow, storybook ending. She had wanted laughter and joy, forgiveness and relief. She'd wanted Tilly to have a chance to shower her child with the millions of hugs and kisses she'd been holding inside her for sixty-two years. Since the day her child had been born—and then whisked away.

Lacy knew how all that love, locked inside you with nowhere to go, could swell and ache until you thought you'd go mad.

“I'm not going to tell her.” Lacy said, talking fast, as if she weren't sure her voice would hold out. “That's why I began the investigation secretly. So that if the news was bad in any way—if her daughter couldn't be found, or didn't want to be found…or if the worst happened…if she were…”

Her words seemed to strangle on themselves. Falling silent, she wrapped her arms over her chest, holding onto her own elbows as if she could keep herself from falling apart.

“Lacy.” Adam put his hands on her shoulders and turned her toward him, though she tried to resist. The moonlight fell full on her face, and, looking at her,
he groaned low under his breath. “Lacy, don't. Don't cry.”

“I'm not crying.” She shook her head angrily, ignoring the tracks of wetness that felt oddly cool as the evening breeze touched them. “I don't cry.”

He reached up with his fingers and brushed the wetness away slowly. He ran his thumbs under her eyes, drying them. But as soon as he had wiped away one wet streak, another appeared.

“I don't,” she repeated tonelessly. “I don't know what this is. I never cry.
Never.
”

“I know,” he agreed softly, still stroking the ever-renewing dampness with a velvet rhythm. “It's all right, Lacy. It's all right.”

Was it? Would it ever be all right again? She didn't believe it, but she discovered that she loved the sound of his voice saying so. She found herself leaning, by minute fractions of invisible inches, into the warmth of his palm. His drifting fingers offered a kind of comfort she craved without knowing its name.

Gently, as if following a diagram of tenderness, he touched his lips to her forehead, her temple, her closed eyelids, the trembling corner of her mouth.

And then, as though the map had led him to an inevitable destination, he kissed her. She felt his heat pulsing, poised above her, and then his soft strength pressing in, seeking some truth, some answer that only her lips could provide.

She tasted salt tears and ocean mist. And Adam. She tasted Adam.

Adam…
Whispering his name, she reached up and touched his hair. It was soft—she could feel cool
moonbeams sliding between the silken strands. She touched the pulse beating hard in his jaw. And then she found his shoulders. She clutched them as a sudden weakness swept away the strength to stand alone.

“Lacy.” He breathed the word against her wet mouth, and the heat tingled there until she pressed against his lips again.

A rushing need arced between them, and desperately the kiss deepened. She felt the stars move, caught somewhere in the deep, forgotten places of her heart.

Oh, God, she remembered this. And this was just the beginning. There was more. More melting, more surrender, more hot, shivering pleasure…

But after that, the pain.

And not just the simple pains—the trivial embarrassment, the disappointment, the gossip. No, after a complete surrender of the heart, you were at the mercy of an entire torture chamber of sophisticated suffering.

Rejection, which made you a lost child again. Loneliness that turned your blood to ice. Emptiness that gutted your soul.

No. She pulled back slightly. Never again. It wasn't that she wouldn't risk it. It was that she couldn't. She simply didn't have the strength anymore.

Somehow, ignoring every primitive instinct in her body, Lacy forced herself out of his arms.

“What is it?” Adam's voice sounded hoarse. “What's wrong?”

“I need to get back,” she said, taking another step away from him. She felt the cool water lick her hem,
and her toes sank into the firm, wet sand. But she picked up her poise like a shield and held it in front of her.

She smiled politely. Distantly, though her lips felt warm and swollen. “I know you were just trying to comfort me, and I thank you, really I do. But I'm fine now. And the others will be wondering where I've gone.”

On cue, the breeze shifted, and it brought with it a few silver notes from the band, as light and mystical as if unseen fingers played on chimes of glass. And then someone shrieked playfully, and other voices laughed.

Adam gave no sign at all of hearing any of it.

“That wasn't
comfort,
Lacy. That was sex. Or it soon would have been. You know as well as I do what was happening here.”

Lacy allowed herself a graceful laugh, so small and refined that she herself only half-heard it over the sound of the incoming tide.

“Oh, I don't think it would have gone
that
far,” she said. She gestured toward the distant flickering orange tiki lights. “This is hardly the time or the place for such…indulgences. It was foolish, though. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have kissed you. I can't imagine what I was thinking.”

“You weren't thinking at all.” Adam narrowed his eyes, but she knew he was angry. Even after all these years, she still knew every nuance of his voice. “You were
feeling.
Remember feeling, Lacy? You really should try it more often.”

L
ACY TRIED TO FOCUS
on the neonatal brochure that lay open on her desk. If she didn't get it right today, she'd never get it mailed out in time. And, since they were still about fifty thousand dollars short of their goal, it was important.

In the short term, it was even more important than the news Mr. Frennick had brought. And it was definitely more important than Adam Kendall, or any of the confusing emotions surrounding that foolish kiss. She tried to put all of it out of her mind.

“I'm not sure we have enough white space here yet,” she said, looking over at Kara Karlin, who had been working with the copywriter.

“Really?” Kara grimaced. “Oh, dear. I'm sorry.”

Lacy flipped the tri-fold paper, checking the other side. The pictures were great—happy mothers and their robust infants. Very upbeat, rather touching. But the type… “It's not a big problem. Could we just rewrite some of this text, using bullet points instead of full paragraphs? That ought to make it a little more readable.”

Kara frowned down at her own copy. “I'm sure we could.” She took a deep breath. “And I was won
dering—do you want to include a coupon for people to cut out and send in if they'd like to donate?”

Lacy shook her head. “That's not always a big success. Too many coupons get tossed in the trash.” She knew why Kara had suggested it, though, and she smiled over at her sympathetically. “Sorry, Kara. There's just no substitute for the face-to-face ask.”

“I know.” Kara sighed. “I just hate that. I'm so bad at it.”

“You're getting better all the time. Which reminds me. Has Mr. Seville made a decision yet?”

Kara shifted uncomfortably. She folded and unfolded her brochure. “No, and I'm a little worried about that. He was at the Stroll Saturday night, and when we were out at the beach, I heard his wife complaining about Gwen.” She looked up, her gaze apologetic for having to mention it. “You know how stuffy Mr. and Mrs. S are. And Gwen was—well, she was dancing, and… I just thought it might be a good idea for you to call Mrs. S. You know, see if you can smooth her feathers.”

Lacy almost laughed. “You mean I'm just stuffy enough to make her feel better about us?”

Kara looked stricken. “Of course not! I just meant that you were dignified. Calm and professional and—”

“And stuffy.” Lacy smiled. “Don't worry, Kara. I know what you meant. I'll call her. In the meantime, see what you can do about the brochure, would you? I'd like it to go out by Friday.”

As Kara exited, she nearly collided with Tilly, who had come barrelling through the doorway without
looking to the right or the left. Kara began to apologize as Tilly anchored her wig with one be-ringed hand, huffing indignantly.

“Well, just watch where you're going, for Pete's sake,” the older woman said irritably.

Lacy looked up. “What are you doing down here? Didn't you promise me you'd stay in bed today?”

Tilly waved health concerns away with her usual disdain. “I can't be in bed right now! I'm fine! And besides, we have a disaster.”

Kara paused, her own highly emotional temperament always ready to wallow happily in the gory details of a new crisis. But Tilly didn't want an audience. She glowered at Kara fiercely, and the woman hustled on, murmuring another apology.

Lacy folded the brochure calmly and slipped it into the next day's tickler file. “That's nice,” she said, swiveling back around to face her friend. “I hadn't had a disaster in the past ten minutes, and I was getting bored.”

Tilly flopped onto the sofa dramatically. “You think I'm exaggerating. But you'll be sorry you made fun of me when you hear how bad the problem is.”

“Okay. I'm ready. Tell me about the disaster, and then I'm taking you home.”

“You know how we've been counting on Howard Whitehead for twenty-five thousand?”

Lacy nodded. Howard Whitehead was an obscenely rich gentleman of about fifty-five, who had a rather lascivious eye for much younger ladies. In fact, Tilly had once nastily speculated that he'd agreed to help
build the neonatal wing because he expected to be using it on a regular basis.

But Lacy knew that he genuinely loved his native Pringle Island, which was why he had promised to be one of the wing's biggest individual sponsors.

Still. If Howard were backing out… Lacy began to feel nervous for the first time.

“Don't tell me,” she said, closing her eyes and leaning back in her chair. “Don't tell me we've lost him.”

Tilly waved her hand airily. “
We
haven't lost him, child.
You've
lost him.”

Lacy's eyes snapped open. “I have? How? I haven't even spoken to him in a week.”

“Exactly.” Tilly kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the chair in front of her. She tsked dramatically—and Lacy began to suspect that she was enjoying this. “Apparently the old lech is miffed because you ignored him at the Seafood Stroll. He says you didn't even say hello, and that halfway through the dance you just disappeared.”

Lacy groaned. “Oh, good grief.”

“Well? Did you?”

“Did I what? Forget to say hello to Howard?”

Tilly scowled. “No, you stubborn minx. Did you leave the party?”

“Yes.” Lacy pretended to be searching her mind. “Yes, I may have. I was tired. I needed a few minutes alone.”

Tilly eyed her carefully. “Alone with Adam Kendall?”

So that was where this was leading. “Tilly.” Lacy
thumped the desk softly in exasperation. “If you already knew I was with Adam, why didn't you say so?”

“I wanted to see if you'd tell me.”

“Well, I won't.” Growling under her breath, Lacy rotated her Rolodex to the
W
s, then picked up the telephone and began punching numbers. “So stop this infernal digging.”

“Who are you calling?”

Lacy turned sideways, facing the big floral poster on her other wall. She wanted Tilly's prying eyes out of her line of vision. The number was ringing. One. Two… “I'm calling Howard Whitehead. I'm going to invite him out to dinner to talk about the donation.”

“Okay,” Tilly said agreeably. “But not Friday night. You're booked for Friday night.”

Lacy set her jaw, then shifted slowly to glare at Tilly, the phone still cradled between her cheek and her shoulder. “I am?”

Tilly began arranging her pleated skirt carefully, as if everything important in life depended on it. She didn't look at Lacy. “Yes. I invited Adam to dinner Friday. At my house. Friday at seven. I told him you'd be there.”

“Why, you—” But Howard had finally answered the telephone. Lacy kept her most scorching glare fixed on Tilly while she chatted smoothly, explaining how sorry she'd been to miss Howard at the Stroll, and how eager she was to sit down and tell him all about the progress on the neonatal wing. Would he like to have dinner some night soon?

“Not Friday,” Tilly reminded her.

“You would? Well, that's lovely.” She didn't take her gaze from Tilly's for a single second.

“Not Friday,”
Tilly mouthed again in an urgent whisper.

“Why, yes. Yes, of course,” Lacy told Howard Whitehead sweetly. “Friday would be just fine.”

 

O
UTSIDE THE WINDOW OF
Adam's hotel suite, Pringle Island was enduring one of its famous summer monsoons. At only four o'clock in the afternoon, the sky was as dark as midnight, and the glass panes ran thickly with mud-colored rain.

Inside the suite, Adam was putting a golf ball into an overturned trash can. Travis sat at the desk, alternately watching their stock quotes flow across his laptop computer and sifting through a stack of real estate listings.

They should have been on the fifteenth hole by now. Adam missed a five-footer, which he tended to do when he was edgy. He hated being cooped up inside.

“What the hell is going on out there?” He set up for a two-footer, and he missed that, too.
“Damn it.”
He slapped the ball the last two inches, making the trashcan ring. “On the late news last night, the weatherman predicted zero percent chance of rain today.”

Travis chuckled, tapping his keyboard without looking up. “Oh, yeah. Like they ever get it right.”

“They ought to.” Adam leaned on his putter and stared out the window. “What a bloody mess.”

“How about this one?” Travis shuffled papers.
“Restored 1853 four-bedroom cottage, two acres, overlooks the Sound.” He squinted at the listing. “‘Hist Grk Rev.' What the heck is ‘Hist Grk Rev'?”

Adam didn't turn around. “It's real estate talk for ‘costs too much.' Nope—I'd rather be on the beach than the Sound. Besides, what would I do with four bedrooms?”

“Same thing you do with one, bro.” Travis waved the paper at him, leering. “Just four times as often.”

Adam took an imaginary swing at an ugly ceramic planter next to the window. “You seriously overestimate me, my friend. You always have.”

“The hell I do.” Travis turned back to the computer. “Whoops. Lost about ten grand while we weren't looking. Told you we should sell that pharmaceutical stock.”

He waited fifteen seconds for a reaction, which never came. Then he leaned back in his chair, put his bare feet up on the desk and sighed. “All right. Come on, out with it. What's the matter? I've brought you about maybe twenty terrific pieces of property here, and you've found something wrong with every one of them. What's eating you? Is it the Friday thing?”

Adam prowled to the window, idly swinging his putter. Not much to look at down there. What little he could see looked wet and distorted, as if it were viewed through a melting funhouse mirror.

But Travis was waiting for an answer. If only he had one. He was itchy, all right. He was in a royally bad mood. But what exactly
was
wrong with him?

The Friday thing.
Could it really be no more than that? Was he sitting up here pacing this hotel room
like a caged animal, acting unforgivably snarly and impossible to please—all just because Tilly had called to say that Lacy couldn't make it to the dinner?

Surely not. Surely he wasn't that far gone.

“No,” he said, swatting at the drapes, using his putter like a hedge clipper. Once, fifteen years ago, he'd used plenty of hedge clippers in this town. He'd probably mowed the lawns of half those houses Travis was now trying to talk him into buying. “Of course it's not ‘the Friday thing,' as you so quaintly put it. I don't give a damn where Mrs. Morgan eats dinner Friday night.”

Travis tilted his head, smiling dryly. “No? Well, what, then? Are you upset about the situation in the Middle East, maybe?”

Adam scowled over at him, but it was difficult to maintain his façade with someone who knew him so well. Too well. Travis looked just the way he always had—scruffy blond hair brushing the collar of his un-pressed Hawaiian shirt, blue eyes twinkling, knowing way too much.
God.
Adam would be paying for those drunken confessions for the rest of his life, wouldn't he?

He gave one last pretend swing at the planter. At least, it was supposed to be a pretend swing. Unfortunately, he miscalculated, and the hideous thing smashed into about fifty miserable pieces.

“Great,” he said through gritted teeth. “Just great.”

“Oh, well.” Travis shrugged. “I didn't like it, either.”

Disgusted, Adam dropped his putter in the bag,
came around the mess and lit restlessly on the arm of the sofa.

“Okay,” he said, as if Travis had interrogated him to the limits of his endurance. “So maybe it
is
getting under my skin a little.”

“Really?” Travis smiled. “You think so?”

“It's just that she's so damned predictable. Howard Whitehead is sixty if he's a day, and he's a lecherous old coot. But he's got the biggest checkbook in town, so…” Adam let his voice dwindle off, realizing that he had begun to sound a little too bitter.

Travis glanced back at the computer screen. “Whoops. Made twenty grand. Told you we should hang on to that pharmaceutical company.” He tilted his head, grinning.

Adam growled irritably. “Who cares about the damned drug company? You're the one who opened this topic, buddy. How about sticking to it for thirty seconds?”

Travis's grin deepened, until about a quarter of his freckles sank into his dimples. “I
am
sticking to it. What I'm saying is, are you
sure
that Whitehead has the biggest checkbook on the island? Our portfolios are pretty similar, and they're nothing to be ashamed of. Unless I'm mistaken, your wallet makes a fairly respectable bulge, if you follow my drift.”

Adam hesitated. “I'm not sure I do. Are you saying I should try to
buy
a date with Lacy?”

Travis heaved a long-suffering sigh that came from the depths of his soul. “I'm saying you're getting on my last nerve here. I'm saying you need to sort things out with this lady once and for all, before you drive
yourself stark raving insane, and take the rest of us with you.” He gestured toward the broken planter. “It might be cheaper, anyhow. In the long run.”

An hour later, still wearing his rain-sodden coat, his hair plastered to his head, Adam made his way to Lacy's office and dropped a check for fifty-thousand dollars on her desk.

She stood as he entered, but she stayed safely behind her desk. She was beautiful and remote, all dressed in gray, her hair tied back in a severe twist that showed off small diamond stud earrings. She glanced down at the check, and then, without betraying the least surprise, looked up at him, a silent question in her eyes.

“Double,” he said flatly. “I'm doubling Whitehead's bid.”

She didn't touch the check. She just looked at him, and her eyes were very dark, very large. Her face was icy pale.