Finding Family

Rachel really was intriguing. Fresh-faced, Mark supposed some would call her. She looked younger than her thirty years, with her dimpled pink cheeks, flawless skin and clear gray-blue eyes. Average height, slender physique, light brown hair she tended to wear in an attractively messy low ponytail. Not beautiful, exactly. But darned close.

And speaking of close…

Mark glanced down at the hand Rachel had rested on his knee as she sat only inches away from him on the couch. This was most definitely not a come-on. Without unwarranted conceit, he acknowledged that as a single, young doctor, he’d been at the receiving end of enough insincere gambits to know when someone was pretending to be interested in his problems.

Rachel was different. No hidden agendas here. No self-serving angles. She was the real thing. Or at least, that was the impression he’d gotten of her. He would hate to find out that he was wrong. It actually surprised him a bit to realize how very much he would hate that.

He should politely shrug off her question. Assure her that her concern was appreciated but unjustified. After all, this was a woman he had hoped to impress. Wanted to get closer to. It would hardly help his cause for her to find out what a mess his life had just become.

“Thanks, but I’m okay,” he assured her. “Tell me more about this red dining room.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think you should be making decisions when you’re this distracted. You could be surprised to find yourself living in a house you absolutely hate.”

“I don’t think that will happen. I trust your taste. That’s why I hired you.”

She smiled. “I appreciate that. But you made it clear that this project is very personal for you. You said you wanted input at every stage, and I want to make sure you have that. So we’re not going to make any final decisions today. I’ll leave everything with you to go through when you can concentrate. And in the meantime, if there’s anything at all I can do for you—as a friend—I hope you won’t hesitate to ask.”

She really was a nice person, he thought, focusing on her sympathetic smile. Maybe she would understand if he told her about what had happened to him yesterday. As for her offer that he should let her know if there was anything she could do for him…

A glimmer of an idea formed in his mind.

“I had an unexpected visitor here yesterday,” he began slowly. “Two of them, actually. A man and a woman. I’d never met either of them before.”

Proving her assertion that she was a good listener, she merely nodded and waited for him to go on, her gaze focused on his face.

“The woman’s name is Aislinn Flaherty. She claims to be a psychic.” Before this statement could fully sink in, he cleared his throat and added, “The guy’s name is Ethan Brannon. And he says he’s my older brother.”

“Your brother?” she repeated in surprise. “You were raised as an only child, weren’t you?”

He nodded grimly. Being told that he had a brother was actually the least jarring of the news he’d been given during that encounter. “My, um, my mother told me that my father died while she was pregnant with me. She said she had no family of her own and that his family didn’t want anything to do with her or with me. We were on our own during my entire childhood, living pretty much hand to mouth, but generally happy.”

“This man, Ethan Brannon—do you believe what he said? Is there a possibility that he is your brother?”

“More than a possibility. He pretty much convinced me. As convinced as I can be before we get the results of DNA testing, anyway.”

“You’re going to be tested?”

“We both are. Ethan insisted, and I agreed.”

“So he claims he’s your half brother? The result of a relationship your father had before you were born?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

Her left eyebrow rose just a little. “Oh?”

“Ethan doesn’t claim to be a half brother. He says he’s my full brother—one of two, actually.”

Rachel looked understandably confused. “There are two of them? And Ethan said you have the same parents?”

“Yes.” He swallowed. “According to Ethan, my mother—er, the woman who raised me…”

Stopping abruptly, he shook his head. “Never mind. You don’t want to hear this. I think we should talk about decorating. What did you say you want to do in here? Add tables, I hope.”

“Definitely tables. But you were going to tell me what Ethan said about your mother.”

He sighed. Might as well get this over with, he thought. Rachel was bound to find out the truth if they became involved in a personal relationship, as he’d hoped.

“According to what Ethan told me, the woman who raised me kidnapped me from a loving family. Parents, and two older brothers. My—the woman I knew as my mother was the nanny. Thirty years ago, when I was barely two, she pushed her car into a flooded river and took off with me, leaving everyone to believe I was dead.”

Rachel looked as though she wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. “Your mother…?”

He nodded grimly. “Wasn’t my mother, after all. According to Ethan Brannon, my real mother is very much alive and living in Alabama with my father, an orthodontist. They are still unaware that their youngest son didn’t drown as a toddler.”

Chapter Two

Rachel had heard stories like this on television talk shows and in newspaper feature stories. She had never dreamed something so bizarre could happen to someone she actually knew. “This is…hard to believe. Did he have any proof?”

“His story was verified by one of my former patients last night. Posthumously.”

The tale was growing more convoluted by the moment. “Posthumously? I don’t understand. How—?”

Pushing a hand through his already disheveled hair, Mark grimaced. “Trust me, I know how strange it sounds. I’ll try to tell you from the beginning—at least as much as I’ve figured out, myself.”

Taking a deep breath, he began, describing a young married couple and their three boys who lived happily in North Carolina. The father was an orthodontist, the mother a housewife and active community volunteer, and because of their busy schedule, they hired a nanny to help them with their children, particularly the youngest son, Kyle.

The nanny, Carmen Thomas, became a part of the family, bonding closely with the children, especially Kyle. Explaining that she was alone in the world, she had seemed to find a purpose in her job and had been highly valued by her employers.

And then one day when Kyle was two, Carmen took the little boy out in a terrible storm. Flash flooding in the area had already claimed two lives, and no one knew why she’d left the house that day. Her car was discovered later, upside down in a flooded ravine. Though no bodies were found with the crushed vehicle, it was assumed that both the nanny and the child had been swept away, their remains buried beneath debris.

“Those poor parents,” Rachel murmured, imagining how devastating it must have been for the Brannons to lose their youngest child.

Mark didn’t seem ready to focus on emotions just yet. He was still struggling to deal with the facts of his past. “Unbeknownst to the Brannons, Carmen must have been planning the abduction for some time. The flooding proved to be a convenient cover for her disappearance. An acquaintance met her at the side of a mountain road that afternoon and helped her push her car into the water. The acquaintance then drove Carmen and the child out of the state.”

“An ‘acquaintance’helped Carmen kidnap a toddler?” Rachel shook her head in shocked disbelief. “No matter how close they were, what kind of a person would do that?”

“A person with serious emotional problems of her own. A woman who was told that she was rescuing a mother and her child from a violent domestic situation. During the ensuing few days, she began to suspect that she had been duped, but by then she felt that it was too late to change her course. She left the woman and child in Georgia and went on her way, trying to put them out of her mind. As I said, she had problems of her own.”

“That still doesn’t excuse what she did.”

“No. And it haunted her for years, despite her efforts to forget. Years later, fate or…something brought her back into my life several months ago. She was the nursing home patient I told you about. She died yesterday, leaving behind a letter describing the role she had played in my abduction.”

Growing more confused by the moment, Rachel shook her head. “Wait. How did she track you down? How did she know it was you? How did she become your patient in the nursing home?”

“Some of those questions I can’t answer. The rest aren’t really important right now. The fact is, I think I believe what she said. I think I am—or was—Kyle Brannon. Though I want the DNA tests to prove it, there’s just something about it all that feels, well, true.”

Maybe she was just naturally more skeptical than he. After all, she had a history of rescuing people from messes they’d gotten into as a result of being too gullible. Not that she thought of Mark as gullible, exactly, but still…

“If I were you, I would be very careful until after the DNA results become available. You said yourself that your former patient had emotional problems. The fact that Aislinn Flaherty claims to be psychic makes me very nervous. And you don’t know this guy who suddenly appeared on your doorstep, claiming to be your brother. For all you know, this could be some sort of elaborate scam.”