Loe raamatut: «Rags To Riches: A Desire To Serve»

To the Elite Eight, and the wonderful times we’ve shared.

Thanks for giving me such terrific fodder for my books!

One

His fists balled inside the pockets of his tuxedo pants, Blake Dalton forced a smile as he stood amid the wedding guests jamming the black-and-white-tiled foyer of his mother’s Oklahoma City mansion. The lavish reception was finally winding down. The newlyweds had just paused in their descent of the foyer’s circular marble staircase so the bride could toss her bouquet. The couple were mere moments from departing for their honeymoon in Tuscany.

Blake was damned if he’d block their escape. His twin had waged a tumultuous battle to win the stubbornly independent pilot he’d finally finessed to the altar. Alex had earned these two weeks in Tuscany with his new bride, away from his heavy responsibilities as CEO of Dalton International.

Blake had no problem taking up the slack in his absence. An MBA, a law degree and almost a decade of handling the corporation’s complex legal affairs had honed the leadership and managerial skills he’d developed as DI’s CFO. He and Alex regularly took over sole control of the multibillion-dollar conglomerate during each other’s frequent business trips.

No, the job wasn’t the problem.

Nor was it their mother, who’d waged a fierce and unrelenting campaign to get her sons married and settled down for over a year now.

Blake’s glance cut to the matriarch of the Dalton clan. Her hair was still jet-black, with only a hint of silver at the temples. She wore a melon-colored Dior lace dress and an expression of smug satisfaction as she surveyed the newly married couple. Blake knew exactly what she was thinking. One son down, one to go.

But it was the baby peering over his mother’s shoulder that made his fist bunch even tighter and his heart squeeze inside his chest. In the weeks since person or persons unknown had left the six-month-old on his mother’s doorstep, Molly had become as essential to Blake as breathing.

DNA testing had proved with 99.99 percent certainty that the bright-eyed infant girl was a Dalton. Unfortunately, the tests hadn’t returned the same accuracy as to which of the Dalton brothers had fathered the baby. Although even identical twins carried distinctive DNA, there were enough similarities to fog the question of paternity. The report had indicated a seventy-seven percent probability that Alex was the father, but the issue couldn’t be completely resolved until the lab matched the father’s DNA with that of the mother.

As a result, the Dalton brothers had spent several uncomfortable weeks after Molly’s arrival tracking down the women they’d connected with early last year. Alex’s list had been considerably longer than Blake’s, but none of the potential candidates—including the woman who’d just become Ms. Alex Dalton—had proved to be the baby’s mother. Or so they’d thought.

A noisy round of farewells wrenched Blake’s gaze from the baby. He looked up to find his brother searching the crowd. It was like looking in a mirror. Both he and Alex had their father’s build. Like Big Jake Dalton, they carried six feet plus of solid muscle. They’d also inherited their father’s electric blue eyes and tawny hair that the hot Oklahoma sun streaked to a dozen different shades of gold.

Blake caught Alex’s eye and casually, so casually, shook his head. He had to forcibly blank both his face and his mind to block any more subtle signals. In the way of all twins, the Dalton brothers could pick up instantly on each other’s vibes. Time enough for Alex and Julie to hear the news when they got back from Tuscany. By then Blake would have dealt with it. And with the shock and fury it had generated.

* * *

He rigidly suppressed both emotions until the newlyweds were on the way to the airport. Even then he did his duty and mingled until the last guests finally departed. His training as an attorney stood him in good stead. No one, not even his mother, suspected there was fury boiling in his gut.

“Whew!” Ebullient but drooping, Delilah Dalton kicked off her heels. “That was fun, but I’m glad it’s over. Went off well, don’t you think?”

“Very,” Blake answered evenly.

“I’m going to check on Molly.” She swooped up her shoes and padded on stockinged feet to the circular marble staircase. “Then I’m hitting the tub to soak for an hour. You staying here tonight?”

“No, I’ll go back to my place.” With a vicious exercise of will, he kept his voice calm. “Would you ask Grace to come down? I’d like to talk to her before I go.”

His mother lifted a brow at his request to speak to the woman she’d hired to act as a temporary nanny. In the weeks since a baby had dropped into the lives of all three Daltons, Grace Templeton had proved indispensable. Become almost part of the family. So much so that she’d served as Julie’s maid of honor while Blake stood up with Alex as best man.

She’d also started the wheels turning in Delilah’s fertile mind. His mother had begun dropping unsubtle hints in recent days about how sweet Grace was. How well she interacted with Molly. And just tonight, how good Blake had looked standing beside her at the altar. The fact that he’d begun to think along those same lines only added to the fury simmering hot and heavy.

“Tell Grace I’ll be in the library.”

For once Delilah was too tired to pry. She merely waved her shoes and continued up the stairs. “Will do. Just don’t keep her too long. She has to feel as whipped as I do.”

She was about to feel a whole lot more whipped. Yanking on the ends of his black bow tie, Blake stalked down the hall to the oak-paneled library. The soft glow from the recessed lighting contrasted starkly with his black mood as he retrieved the report he’d stuffed into his pocket more than an hour ago. The facts were no less shattering now than they had been then. He was still trying to absorb their impact when Grace Templeton entered the library.

“Hey, Blake. Delilah said you wanted to talk to me.”

His eyes narrowed on the slender blonde, seeing her in a wholly different light. She’d changed from the lilac, off-the-shoulder tea gown she’d worn for the wedding. She’d also released her pale, almost silvery hair from its sophisticated upsweep. The ends now brushed the shoulders of a sleeveless white blouse sporting several large splotches.

“’Scuze the wet spots,” she said, brushing a hand down her front with a rueful laugh in her warm brown eyes. “Molly got a little lively during her bath.”

Blake didn’t respond. He merely stood with his shoulders rigid under his tux as she hitched a hip on the wide, rolled arm of the library’s sofa.

“What did you want to talk about?”

Only then did she pick up on his silence. Or maybe it was his stance. Her head tilting, she gave him a puzzled half smile.

“Something wrong?”

He countered her question with one of his own. “Did you happen to notice the man who arrived at the reception just before Alex and Julie left?”

“The guy in the brown suit?” She nodded slowly, still trying to gauge his odd mood. “I saw him, and couldn’t help wondering who he was. He looked so out of place among the other guests.”

“His name’s Del Jamison.”

Her brow creased. Blake guessed she was mentally sorting through the host of people she’d met during her stint as Molly’s temporary nanny. When she drew a blank, he supplied the details.

“Jamison’s a private investigator. The one Alex and I hired to help search for Molly’s mother.”

She was good, he thought savagely. Very good. Her cinnamon eyes transmitted only a flicker of wariness, quickly suppressed, but she couldn’t keep the color from leaching out of her cheeks. The sudden pallor gave him a vicious satisfaction.

“Oh, right.” The shrug was an obvious attempt at nonchalance. “He was down in South America, wasn’t he? Checking the places where Julie worked last year?”

“He was, but after Julie made it clear she wasn’t Molly’s mother, Jamison decided to check another lead. In California.”

She couldn’t hide her fear now. It was there in the quick hitch in her breath, the sudden stillness.

“California?”

“I’ll summarize his report for you.” Blake used his courtroom voice. The one he employed when he wanted to drive home a point. Cool, flat, utterly devoid of emotion. “Jamison discovered the woman I was told had died in a fiery bus crash was not, in fact, even on that bus. She didn’t die until almost a year later.”

The same woman he’d had a brief affair with. The woman who’d disappeared from his life with no goodbye, no note, no explanation of any kind. Aided and abetted, he now knew, by this brown-eyed, soft-spoken schemer who’d wormed her way into his mother’s home.

And into Blake’s consciousness, dammit. Every level of it. As disgusted by her duplicity as by the hunger she’d begun to stir in him, he stalked across the room. She sprang to her feet at his approach and tried to brazen it out.

“I don’t see what that has to do with me.”

Still he didn’t lose control. But his muscles quivered with the effort of keeping his hands off her.

“According to Jamison, this woman gave birth to a baby girl just weeks before she died.”

His baby! His Molly!

“She also had a friend who showed up at the hospital mere hours before her death.” He planted his fists on the sofa arm, boxing her in, forcing her to lean back. “A friend with pale blond hair.”

“Blake!” The gold-flecked brown eyes he’d begun to imagine turning liquid with desire widened in alarm. “Listen to me!”

“No, Grace—if that’s really your name.” His temper slipped through, adding a whiplash to his voice. “You listen, and listen good. I don’t know how much you figured you could extort from our family, but the game ends now.”

“It’s not a game,” she gasped, bent at an awkward angle.

“No?”

“No! I don’t want your money!”

“What do you want?”

“Just… Just…!” She slapped her palms against his shirtfront. “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Get off me.”

He didn’t budge. “Just what?”

“Dammit!” Goaded, she bunched a fist and pounded his chest. Her fear was gone. Fury now burned in her cheeks. “All I wanted, all I cared about, was making sure Molly had a good home!”

Slowly, Blake straightened. Just as slowly, he moved back a step and allowed her only enough space to push upright. Slapping a rigid lid on his anger, he folded his arms and locked his gaze on her face. Assessing. Considering. Evaluating.

“Let’s start at the beginning. Who the hell are you?”

* * *

Grace balanced precariously on the sofa arm, her thoughts chaotic. After all she’d been through! So much fear and heartache. Now this? Just when she’d started to breathe easy for the first time in months. Just when she’d thought she and this man might…

“Who are you?”

He repeated the question in what she’d come to think of as his counselor’s voice. She’d known Blake Dalton for almost two months now. In that time she’d learned to appreciate his even temperament. She admired even more his ability to smoothly, calmly arbitrate between his more outspoken twin and their equally strong-willed mother.

Oh, God! Delilah!

Grace cringed inside at the idea of divulging even part of the sordid truth to the woman who’d become as much of a friend as an employer. Sick at the thought, she lifted her chin and met Blake’s cold, unwavering stare.

“I’m exactly who I claim to be. My name is Grace Templeton. I teach…I taught,” she corrected, her throat tight, “junior high social studies in San Antonio until a few months ago.”

She paused, trying not to think of the life she’d put on hold, forcing herself to blank out the image of the young teens she took such joy in teaching.

“Until a few months ago,” Blake repeated in the heavy silence, “when you asked for an extended leave of absence to take care of a sick relative. That’s the story you gave us, isn’t it? And the principal of your school?”

She knew they’d checked her out. Neither Delilah nor her sons would allow a stranger near the baby unless they’d vetted her. But Grace had become so adept these past years at weaving just enough truth in with the lies that she’d passed their screening.

“It wasn’t a story.”

Dalton’s breath hissed out. Those sexy blue eyes that had begun to smile at her with something more than friendliness the past few weeks were now lethal.

“You and Anne Jordan were related?”

Anne Jordan. Emma Lang. Janet Blair. So many aliases. So many frantic phone calls and desperate escapes. Grace could hardly keep them straight anymore.

“Anne was my cousin.”

That innocuous label didn’t begin to describe Grace’s relationship to the girl who’d grown up just a block away. They were far closer than cousins. They were best friends who’d played dolls and whispered secrets and shared every event in their young lives, big and small.

“Were you with her when she died?”

The question came at her as swiftly and mercilessly as a stiletto aimed for the heart. “Yes,” she whispered, “I was with her.”

“And the baby? Molly?”

“She’s your daughter. Yours and…and Anne’s.”

Blake turned away, and Grace could only stare at the broad shoulders still encased in his tux. She ached to tell him she was sorry for all the lies and deception. Except the lies had been necessary, and the deception wasn’t hers to tell.

“Anne called me,” she said instead. “Told me she’d picked up a vicious infection. Begged me to come. I jumped a plane that same afternoon but when I got there, she was already slipping into a coma. She died that evening.”

Blake angled back to face her. His eyes burned with an unspoken question. Grace answered this one as honestly as she could.

“Anne didn’t name you as Molly’s father. She was almost out of it from the drugs they’d pumped into her. She was barely coherent… All I understood was the name Dalton. I knew she’d worked here, so…so…”

She broke off, her throat raw with the memory.

“So you brought Molly to Oklahoma City,” Blake finished, spacing every word with frightening deliberation, “and left her on my mother’s doorstep. Then you called Delilah and said you’d just happened to hear she needed a temporary nanny.”

“Which she did!”

He gave that feeble response the disgust it deserved. “Did you enjoy watching my brother and me jump through hoops trying to determine which of us was Molly’s father?”

“I told you! I didn’t know which of you it was. Not until I’d spent some time with you.”

Even then she hadn’t been sure. The Dalton twins shared more than razor-sharp intelligence and devastating good looks. Grace could see how her cousin might have succumbed to Alex’s charisma and self-confidence. She’d actually figured him for Molly’s father until she’d come to appreciate the rock-solid strength in quiet, coolly competent Blake.

Unfortunately, Blake’s self-contained personality had made her task so much more difficult. Although friendly and easygoing, he kept his thoughts to himself and his private life private. If he’d had a brief affair with a woman who’d worked for him, only he—and possibly his twin—had known about it.

Grace had hoped the DNA tests they’d run would settle the question of Molly’s paternity. She’d been as frustrated as the Dalton brothers at the ambiguous results.

Then they’d launched a determined search for Molly’s mother and thrown Grace in a state of near panic. She’d sworn to keep her cousin’s secret. She had no choice but to do just that. Molly’s future depended on it. Now Blake had unearthed at least a part of that secret. She couldn’t tell him the rest, but she could offer a tentative solution.

“As I understand it, Molly’s parentage can’t be absolutely established unless the father’s DNA is matched with the mother’s. She…Anne…was cremated. I don’t have anything of hers to give you that would provide a sample.”

Not a hairbrush or a lipstick or even a postcard with a stamp on it for Molly to cling to as a keepsake. The baby’s mother had lived in fear for so long. She’d died the same way, mustering only enough strength at the end to extract a promise from her cousin to keep Molly safe.

“You could test my DNA,” Grace said, determined to hold to that promise. “I’ve read that mitochondria are inherited exclusively through the female line.”

She’d done more than read. She’d hunched in front of the computer for hours when not tending to Molly. Her head had spun trying to decipher scientific articles laced with terms like hypervariable control regions and HVR1 base pairs. It had taken some serious slogging, but she’d finally come away with the knowledge that those four-hundred-and-forty-four base pairs determined maternal lineage. As such, they could theoretically be used to trace a human’s lineage all the way back to the mitochondrial Eve. The Daltons didn’t need to go that far back to confirm Molly’s heritage. They just needed to hop over one branch on her family tree.

The same thought had obviously occurred to Blake. His eyes were chips of blue ice as he delivered an ultimatum.

“Damn straight you’ll give me a DNA sample. And until the results come back, you’ll stay away from Molly.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I want you out of this house. Now.”

“You’re kidding!”

She discovered an instant later that he wasn’t. In two strides he’d closed the distance between them and wrapped his fist around her upper arm. One swift tug had her off the sofa arm and marching toward the library’s door.

“Blake, for God’s sake!” As surprised as she was angry, she fought his grip. “I’ve been taking care of Molly for weeks now. You can’t seriously think I would do anything to hurt her.”

“What I think,” he returned in a voice as icy as his eyes, “is that there are a helluva lot of holes in your story. Until they’re filled in, I want you where I can watch you day and night.”