The Daddy Deal

“We’ve only your word for that, Taylor.” Before Taylor could let loose the oath that rose in his throat, Charlie put up a placating hand. “And don’t scowl at me like that. You know what I mean. I’m talking as your lawyer now, and legally it’s your word against theirs. It’s a damned good forgery—even the experts we hired can’t agree whether it’s a fake.”

“It is.” Taylor’s lips were tight, and the words sounded like a hiss.

“Well, we’re going to have to prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt if we expect a judge to take Justin away from the only family he’s ever known.” Charlie met Taylor’s gaze steadily. “Away from what is, by all accounts, a damn good mother.”

Taylor narrowed his eyes. “Tell me.”

“Okay, but it’s really just a bunch of negatives.” Charlie took another unnecessary swipe at his upper lip with the towel. “No record, except for a couple of parking tickets. No drugs, no alcohol, no wild nights at the local saloon.”

“Boyfriends?”

Charlie shook his head. “Nope. She spends all day with Justin. She works in her garden. Grows a lot of roses. Then at night, she’s still working as a nurse, mostly nights, mostly private duty. Not much time for a love life, actually.”

“Who’s home with Justin all night, then?”

“A nurse friend of hers, older lady.”

“What about her?” Taylor knew he was grasping at straws, but damn it, there just had to be some chink in Brooke Davenport’s armor. “Any chance this other woman isn’t fit....?”

Charlie smiled, obviously following Taylor’s line of desperation logic. “You mean is there any chance the old lady is really Ma Barker? Any chance she slips out at night to rob convenience stores, leaving Justin all alone in his crib?” He shook his head. “Sorry. We’ve already checked her out. She’s just a nice, semiretired nurse who rents a room from Brooke in return for a little baby-sitting.”

Taylor expelled a frustrated breath and pulled on his left earlobe. “God, Charlie—”

“I know.” Charlie’s eyes were sympathetic, though his tone was determinedly light. “All the wickedness in this heathen world, and we have to stumble into a nest of saints.”

Taylor frowned. Something about all this didn’t make sense. “There aren’t very many single, twenty-six-year-old female saints around today, Charlie. Why no boyfriends? Is she hideous?”

“Hardly!” Charlie laughed as if the word were a joke, and Taylor wondered just how attractive Brooke Davenport really was. He should have asked to see a picture of her. Though he was considered a tough and astute lawyer, Charlie McAllister was a notorious pushover for a pretty lady, and Taylor had noticed a definite softening in Charlie’s attitude toward the whole situation since they had finally located Justin and his adoptive mother.

“So why no men in her life? Surely that’s odd in itself.”

“No, no.” Charlie seemed irritable, as if he resented Taylor’s implications. “There’ve been men, naturally. She was engaged a couple of years ago to a lawyer named Westover. I checked him, too. Good-looking guy, but word is he’s a little short on ethics. Anyway, he didn’t approve of the adoption, didn’t want to be saddled with a damaged kid, I guess, so the relationship went sour.”

“Still—”

“And, of course, there was the teenage fiasco—” Charlie stopped himself abruptly, as if he had said something he hadn’t meant to say. He fussed with the laces on his jogging shoes. “Anyway, as I said, for our purposes there’s nothing. She’s normal, but temporarily celibate. She’s not a saint, I guess, but she’s darn close.”

But Taylor wasn’t so easily distracted. He straightened slowly. “What teenage fiasco?”

Charlie frowned. “Ancient history,” he equivocated, moving to his other shoe, grunting as he bent over farther than his paunch wanted to let him. “Irrelevant.”

Taylor frowned, too, glaring down at Charlie’s bald spot, which was pink with incipient sunburn. “Whose side are you on here, Charlie?” His voice was hard, even harder than he had intended it to be, and he took a deep breath of muggy air. This thing was really getting to him.

Charlie stopped pretending interest in the shoes. “Yours,” he said calmly, meeting Taylor’s eyes with the same guileless brown gaze Taylor remembered from childhood, the same straightforward honesty that had made Charlie the undisputed referee of all their crowd’s boyhood arguments. “Yours. You know that.”

“Then why are you holding back on me? If you’ve found out something we can use—”

“I haven’t.” Charlie leaned back with a sigh, wadding his towel up and tossing it roughly onto the bench beside him. “Look, Taylor, I’m telling you it’s old news. Ten years old, in fact. When Brooke Davenport was sixteen, she got pregnant. The boyfriend was only a little older—eighteen, I think. Parental apoplexy all around, as you can imagine. Turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, though, and the poor kid damn near died of it. Lost the baby, of course, and it messed her up so badly there probably won’t be any more pregnancies, planned or otherwise.”

Taylor could hear the edge that had crept into Charlie’s voice, an edge of pity for Brooke Davenport and irritation toward Taylor for pushing the issue. But though he knew it was a sad story, and his heart tightened in spite of himself, Taylor wouldn’t allow himself to lose sight of the main point.

“Well, I’m sorry she can’t have kids, but that doesn’t give her the right to steal someone else’s child, does it?”

Charlie’s eyes hardened, and suddenly he looked more like the tough opponent other lawyers met in court. “Listen here, Taylor—”

But Taylor ignored the dangerous flash in his friend’s eyes. He had a feeling his own eyes looked pretty dangerous right now, too.

“And besides,” he went on ruthlessly, “who says we can’t use the information? Maybe she’s developed an obsession. Maybe being sterile has given her a fixation about adopting, so that she’d do anything to get a baby, even forge my name to those papers. If that could be proved—”

Charlie cursed, an expression of frustration he rarely allowed himself. “God, Taylor, do you hear yourself?”

“What? I’m just being practical. This is no time to get squeamish, Char—”

Before Taylor could finish, a clamor broke out on the playground behind them. Someone was hurt. Above the scuffling of bodies and the confused tumult of voices, Taylor could hear the wailing of a child in pain. He spun around, a foreboding settling in his gut. And he was right—the swing was empty now, twisting crazily back and forth. The freckled little boy was finally on the ground, screaming in fear as his mother knelt next to him, trying to inspect the rapidly reddening scrapes on his cheeks, hands and knees.

Taylor watched the woman fold the kid in her arms, comforting and scolding all at once. Damn! He had known it was going to happen. He should have said something—he should have done something. But he hadn’t had the right to get involved. The child wasn’t his.

He tried to hold back the sense of impotence that threatened to overwhelm him. Somewhere in this town, his brother’s child might be in need, too, and Taylor had no right to get involved in that, either. He cursed under his breath. It was unendurable.

He wheeled back toward Charlie. “I’m going to get him,” he said, his voice sounding as if it had been scoured with sandpaper. “I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what anybody thinks. That boy is my nephew. My flesh and blood. And, by God, I’m going to take him back from that woman if it’s the last thing I do.”

To his surprise, Charlie’s gaze was once again sympathetic, drifting from the scene on the playground to Taylor, then back to the crying boy again. Finally, he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll think of something.”

“I already have,” Taylor said curtly, pulling his pen out of the breast pocket of his jacket. “Give me the woman’s address.”

Charlie recoiled subtly, his eyes narrowing. “Why? I thought you didn’t want me to approach her. I thought you didn’t want me to let her know we were investigating.”

“I don’t.” Taylor held out the pen and a slim black notebook, pointing them at Charlie’s chest like weapons. “Just give me her address.”

The lawyer took the pen reluctantly. “What the devil are you planning?” He began, very slowly, to write, and Taylor waited silently while he scribbled a few words on the page.

Sighing deeply, he handed the notebook to Taylor, who gave it only one short glance before flipping it shut. One glance was all he needed. 909 Parker Lane—he’d remember that address until the day he died.

Turning his head away from Charlie’s disapproving frown, Taylor watched the little boy hobble off the playground, sobbing inconsolably into his mother’s skirt. He could feel Charlie standing behind him, his anxiety and annoyance almost as palpable as the heat around them.

“I asked you a question,” Charlie said slowly. “What are you planning to do?”

Taylor turned his head an inch. He could just see the other man out of the corner of his eye.

“Whatever it takes,” he said grimly, sliding the notebook back into his breast pocket. “Whatever it takes.”

Was it just that she was so tired, Brooke Davenport wondered, or was the Eberson Theater looking particularly surreal tonight?

Ordinarily, Brooke loved the exotic old movie palace, which dated from the Roaring Twenties. The auditorium walls were covered with sculpted facades to suggest an open-air Mediterranean courtyard; its ceiling was painted violet, like a twilight sky, and dotted with electric “stars”.

Tonight, though, as she followed Clarke Westover through the glittering throng of wealthy Floridians who had gathered to raise money for the theater’s ongoing restoration, Brooke suddenly found the atmosphere unnerving. She swept her tired gaze across the walls that climbed up toward the artificial twilight. Not one square inch had been left uncarved. Scrolls, vines, flowers, birds and cherubs all twisted together in nightmarish intimacies. It was almost suffocating.

Or perhaps the auditorium was just too crowded. She took a deep breath of the stuffy, overconditioned air and tried to ignore the champagne that splashed over her knuckles as yet another tuxedo bumped into her. The seats had been removed—the latest phase of the renovation—and replaced for the evening with a temporary floor and small wrought-iron tables and chairs. Brooke looked longingly at every empty chair they passed. She was so tired—she had barely slept for the past week. If only Clarke had agreed to meet her in his office. This whole ordeal could have been over by now.