The Heiress (23 page)

Jack absorbed that as he put milk and juice in the refrigerator. “What did you tell him about us?”

Daisy set her chin. “To mind his own business.”

“Good.” Jack braced his hands, palm down, on the center island between them. His gaze roved her face, lingering briefly on the faint tinge of sunburn across her nose. “Is it possible there’s something not on the up-and-up with the family business?”

“With Iris running things out there?” Daisy re-stacked the videos and pushed them away from her. “I hardly think so.” The business was Iris’s whole life.

“Then…?”

“I don’t know.” Daisy slid off the stool, aware she was beginning to feel tense and uneasy again. As though she couldn’t quite trust the man who’d raised her as her father. There was no concrete reason for her to believe anything Bucky had hinted at, of course. And yet, on a gut level, she wasn’t as sure of Richard’s ethics as she was of Iris’s. Why that would be, Daisy didn’t know. It wasn’t as if she had ever seen him do anything illegal or immoral. To the contrary, Richard had been so completely uptight in his behavior, he had made her and everyone else in the family miserable.

“Jerome upset you, didn’t he?”

Yes, but not for the reasons you think.

Jack’s mouth tightened dangerously. “I’m going to talk to him and make sure he leaves you alone.”

“Don’t.” Daisy caught Jack’s arm, her fingers curling around the swell of his bicep, before he could make good on his threat. “It would just make matters worse. Bucky’s a very nosy guy. The last thing we want to do
is make him even more curious.” And if Jack went to see him, that was exactly what would happen, Daisy knew.

Jack’s muscles tensed. He pivoted toward Daisy and braced his hands on his waist. “That’s still no excuse for him coming here.”

Daisy brushed it off. “He’s just trying to figure out what happened, why we got married, why I was in the hospital, everything.”

Jack’s golden-brown eyes narrowed all the more. “It’s none of his concern,” Jack declared flatly.

“Agreed,” Daisy said hastily, “but that won’t stop Bucky from trying to make a name for himself at my expense if you give him the impression we’re hiding something. Besides, I imagine that practically everyone has figured out what happened with us, anyway. Now they’re just waiting for us to split.”

Jack cupped her shoulders between his hands. “Only we’re not going to do that.”

Not yet anyway, Daisy thought. Given the way they were getting along, maybe not ever. Knowing she had to tell him the rest, she said, “Bucky also knows I went to Switzerland.”

Jack gave her a long, searching look. “Do you think he knows about Tom and Iris?”

Wondering idly who Jack’s first allegiance was to—the Deveraux or her—Daisy shook her head and said confidently, “There’s no way he could know unless he figures out how Iris and my parents really brought me into the country.”

Jack accompanied Daisy back to the bedroom. “How did they manage that?”

“By lying, and quite cleverly covering their trail, of course.” Daisy headed to the bedroom to snatch a pair
of drawstring shorts and a T-shirt out of the dresser, and disappeared into the bath. Leaving the door ajar, she stepped out of her swimsuit and into a pair of bikini panties. “The official story was that Iris, who was soon to take over the family business, had gone over to Europe to cultivate the international antiques dealers and learn the business from the masters in the trade. Charlotte and Richard went over to visit, and when Iris came back to Charleston, to run Templeton’s Fine Antiques, Charlotte and Richard stayed on in Europe and took an extended tour of Scandinavia. In Norway, they came across a small orphanage that was closing and fell in love with one of the babies—they brought me home and adopted me.”

“Only, none of that was true.”

“No.” Daisy slipped the T-shirt on and stuck her head around the edge of the door. His head propped on his arm, Jack was lounging crossways on the bed. “I wasn’t born in Norway,” Daisy explained as she stepped into her shorts and padded barefoot out into the room. “I was born in the convent in Switzerland, where I was named Edith Rose Wood at birth. Edith after my great-grandmother. Rose and Wood after the family’s country estate. My parents had my passport issued in that name, and then took me to Upstate New York, where they had conveniently established a residence, and had my name legally changed to Daisy Templeton and another social security number assigned to me.”

Jack watched as Daisy took her hair out of the scrunchy and began brushing it out. “That must have cost a pretty penny.”

“I’m sure it did.” Finished, Daisy put her hair up again in a loose but tidy knot on the back of her head. “But they wanted me brought up as a Templeton, and
I’m guessing they knew that in order to do that they had to keep Tom from finding a paper trail that would prove I was his child. Which is why I had such a hard time trying to track down my birth parents.” Daisy went back into the bathroom and picked up a bottle of facial cleanser. She squirted a little on the flat of her palm and began smoothing it carefully over her face. “The orphanage in Norway I had supposedly come from had been closed for years, any records relating to me allegedly misplaced. And there was no record of me being adopted over there, or coming into this country under a passport in my name or my social security number now, as my parents claimed.”

Jack watched while Daisy wet a washcloth with warm water. “You must’ve confronted Richard and Charlotte about this.”

Daisy nodded as she removed the cleanser from her face. “They blamed the lack of a paper trail on bureaucratic mix-ups.”

“But you didn’t buy it,” Jack guessed.

Daisy dried her face. “All I had to do was look into their eyes to see they were hiding something.” She paused to pick up a tube of lip balm and applied it liberally. “I probably never would have found out the truth had Harlan Decker not thought to look through passports issued in other countries in the region, figured out I was Edith Rose Wood and sent me to the convent in the remote Swiss Alps.”

“Harlan’s good, all right.” Jack scooted over, making room for her on the king-size bed.

Daisy dropped down beside him and, maneuvering through her lingering post-op stiffness, sat cross-legged on top of the neatly made bed. “Anyway, there’s no
way Bucky could figure out any of that on his own, unless he had copies of my papers.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Where are your papers, by the way?”

Daisy pointed to the closet. “In the red expanding file, in the outside zipper pocket of my luggage.”

“Given Bucky Jerome’s curiosity, perhaps that’s not the best place for them.”

“Agreed. I’ll hide them until I can get to the bank and put them in a safe-deposit box.”

Jack stood, looking restless, uneasy again. “Hide them where?” he demanded.

Daisy shrugged. “If I told you,” she explained, “they wouldn’t be hidden.”

D
AISY AND
J
ACK WENT OUT
to rustle up a lunch of soup and sandwiches. Since he did most of the cooking, she insisted on doing the dishes then stretched out on the family-room sofa with the book she had been trying to read on the beach. Jack went off to his study to check in with his secretary at Deveraux-Heyward Shipping. She waited until Jack was busy returning calls before she went back into the bedroom. She knew Jack thought she was crazy, not to let him put her red expanding file in a safe-deposit box immediately, for safekeeping, or let him take her to the bank so she could do it on her own. While they were eating lunch, he had come right out and said he thought that Bucky Jerome was the kind of reporter who would or could cross the line in pursuit of a story. And Daisy knew that was true. But there was a reason she couldn’t let the documents and photos in her red file out of her immediate possession just yet.

Touching the papers, looking at them, made it all real. When she saw her birth certificate that had been issued to her as Edith Rose Wood in Switzerland, or
the legal papers that changed her name to Daisy Edith Templeton in Upstate New York, she felt at peace, and was able to say with confidence: This is who I am. This is where I was born. This is the whole of my life—my past, my present, my future. When she looked at the photo of the convent where she had spent the first six months of her life, or saw the picture she’d had taken of herself with the nun who had been with Iris when she gave birth to Daisy, she realized it was all true. It wasn’t just a dream.

Sadly, the papers hadn’t—just yet, anyway—made Daisy feel finally as if she belonged somewhere, to someone.

But she had realized finally that this might never happen. Even if all the Deveraux welcomed her with open arms, Daisy knew she might still feel, as she suspected Jack often did, as if she was allowed to come so close and no closer, as if she was, and always would be, on the outside looking in.

As for her “adoptive family,” Daisy knew that Iris would be, in many ways, just her sister, that Charlotte and Richard would remain the parental figures in her life.

Initially, she had
not
been okay with that. She had wanted to replace them with loving, fantasy parents.

Now, of course, she knew that wouldn’t happen. And maybe it shouldn’t happen. Because the truth was, Tom and Iris hadn’t brought her up. They might yet be a part of her future, Daisy acknowledged as she slid the photos and papers back in the red cover, and closed the Velcro clasp. But for now, Daisy was still in limbo. Struggling to figure out where—and with whom—she belonged.

R
ICHARD
T
EMPLETON WATCHED
, from the back of his sleek black limousine as Ginger Zaring stepped away
from the open-air marketplace and into his waiting car. The beautiful redhead was dressed just as he had requested, in a white silk halter dress with a pleated skirt and heels. It wasn’t as easy, with his advancing age, to become aroused, but her lack of proper undergarments was definitely doing the trick. “Slide over there.” He patted the seat opposite him. “And part your knees for me.”

Ginger did as he asked, as he knew she would.

“I want to talk to you first.” She regarded him steadily.

Richard smiled, reached into his jacket and withdrew a stack of one hundred dollar bills. Ginger leaned forward to get them and stuffed them into the zip lining of her purse.

“No thank-you?” Richard taunted.

Her showgirl legs spread dutifully apart. “I still need another twelve thousand by next week.”

Richard slipped his foot out of his shoe and pushed it across her lap, lifting her skirt nearly to her waist. “Then we’ll have to see what we can do about giving you the opportunity to earn it, won’t we?”

Ginger grabbed her skirt, and was in the process of shoving it back down, when Richard quirked his eyebrow, letting her know, with a silent shake of his head, that just wouldn’t do.

“Drop both your hands to your sides,” he said quietly.

Swallowing hard, she did.

He toed her skirt back up until she was naked to the waist. Liking what he saw, he leaned back to admire the view.

Shaking with what he recognized as silent fury, Gin
ger said, “I’ve been sleeping with you for months, on the promise you would pay Alyssa’s college expenses.”

“Yes.” Richard motioned, indicating he wanted her to part her legs more. “You have.”

Reluctantly, Ginger moved her knees even farther apart. “You promised you would help me financially.”

Richard watched as she nervously wet her lips. “And I shall.”

Richard looked beyond her, to the lights on King Street. He waited until they were nearly even with Templeton’s Fine Antiques, then rapped on the glass. “The back entrance.”

Nigel, his chauffeur, turned the limo into the alley and pulled over. Ginger hastily pulled down the skirt of her dress, managing to make herself presentable mere seconds before Nigel opened the rear car door. Richard emerged from the limo and helped Ginger out, too. “We’ll need an hour,” he told his chauffeur.

Her head held high, Ginger allowed Richard to escort her into the building that had been in his family for generations. At 10:00 p.m., the shop was closed for the day and the shades were all pulled. It was eerily dark, quiet. He walked into the office and switched on the overhead light. Amused by the uneasy way the spirited Ginger was looking around, he took her by the arm, guided her inside and shut the door. “I don’t know about this,” she said, rubbing the goose bumps on her arms. Beneath the white silk of her dress, her nipples were pearling. “What if someone comes in?”

Richard let go of her, and slowly, methodically, took off his jacket. “What if they do?”

“Your daughter—”

“Won’t say a word. Now…” Richard nodded at her
autocratically, enjoying the power he had over her, and said, “Let’s see how you look without that dress.”

Ginger’s full breasts were heaving with each breath she took, but for a long stubborn moment, she did not move to obey him. Richard merely smiled, knowing full well who was going to win this battle of wills in the end. “Unless you’d prefer to go out in the alley and finish there,” he said.

Ginger’s exquisitely made-up eyes spit fire, but her hand went to the clasp behind her neck. Richard wasn’t surprised to see the halter come down, the Marilyn Monroe look-alike dress land in a silky white circle at her feet. He’d found women would do anything when there was something to be gained. Enough money, especially the tax-free kind, and there was practically no limit on what was possible.

Of course, it helped if they had a cause bigger than themselves, say, a kid to put through college or a sick spouse. Although that could be a little risky, as he’d found out the hard, expensive way, since people in highly emotional situations could react quite nonsensically. But that wasn’t a mistake he planned to make again.

Richard knew how to pick his lady friends these days. Knew how to court and cajole and convince and persuade. The higher the stakes, the more willing they were to do whatever turned him on. And these days, sad to say, it took more and more to arouse him. He needed risk. The thrill of discovery. A sense of the forbidden. He needed constant servicing in the age-old, time-honored, lord-of-the-manor way that he had been born to receive, he thought as Ginger fell to her knees, and slowly, patiently, gave him what he wished.