The Gazebo

“Maybe not. But finding my real father might.”

“The Captain is your real father,” Cade roared in exasperation. “He’s the one who taught you how to throw a baseball, who ran all over town looking for orange pop when you were sick!”

“Yeah, well, the military trained him to fall on a grenade if necessary,” Deirdre said. “Duty, honor, country and all that crap. When it comes right down to it, we should all be relieved! None of us have to pretend to be a big happy family anymore.”

She snatched the letter. Cade swore. He grabbed for her arm.

She wheeled on him, flames all but shooting from her eyes. “Leave me the hell alone!” she roared.

“Damn it, Dee, I’m sorry. Tell me…tell me what to do. How to fix things.”

Fix things…that’s what Cade had always been good at. But all the magic in the world couldn’t erase the letter’s contents from Deirdre’s mind.

“You want to know what hurts most of all?” Deirdre said. “You lied to me, all this time. Cade, I trusted you.” Tears pushed against her lashes. She turned, fled.

She could hear Cade start after her, heard Finn’s insistent voice. “Let her go. She needs time to sort this through.”

Finn probably thought once Deirdre calmed down everything would be all right. Finn and Cade would try to put the broken pieces of the family together again. They didn’t know it would never work.

The hurt of a lifetime finally made sense. She wasn’t a McDaniel. It was time to find out exactly who she was.

She raced across the garden that separated Cade’s cabin from March Winds, slipped around to the back door to avoid the newlyweds mooning over each other in the porch swing. She rushed into the private living quarters she and Emma called home and stumbled to the small office that was her haven, a room devoid of the antiques and Victorian furbelows that gave the rest of the old house its old-world aura.

Deirdre slammed the door and leaned against it as if a wolf were chasing a few feet behind her. She sucked in a deep breath, the tears finally falling free. Disgusted with herself, she scrubbed them from her cheeks with the back of her hand. She wasn’t going to waste any time crying. She was going to do something. But what?

How was she supposed to find this Jimmy Rivermont so many years later? Considering the letter was returned to sender it was obvious her mother hadn’t been able to find the man. And at least she’d known who she was looking for.

Deirdre didn’t have a clue how to begin. How did you find someone who’d disappeared?

She closed her eyes, her memory suddenly filling with a tall man in a long outback-style coat, a black cowboy hat on his head, his steel-gray gaze dangerous, ruthless. Six years had passed since she’d opened the door to find Jake Stone on the other side—the private investigator tracking down the small fortune Finn’s ne’er-do-well father had stolen. Obliterating the inheritance Finn had believed was proof her father had loved her enough to provide her with the home he’d never given her as a child.

Stone had shattered Finn’s illusions, all but destroyed Cade and Finn’s chance at happiness, then gone, leaving ugly scars in his wake. Finn had made peace with it as best as she could, she and Cade working hard to repay every penny, but her father’s betrayal still haunted her. Deirdre could sense it when no one else was looking.

She hated Stone for what he’d done. Let him know she thought he was lower than pond scum. What else could he be, digging into people’s lives, destroying them for a fee?

She recoiled inwardly from the man, what he did for a living. The ruthlessness in his eyes. He was a son of a bitch. But he was a talented son of a bitch. If anyone could find her real father, he could.

Deirdre grabbed the phone book from its perch on her desk, leafed through it and found the entry. “Jake Stone, P.I. By appointment only…”

Ripping the page out, she grabbed her purse and keys and headed out the back door. Forget making an appointment. It had been loathing at first sight between her and Stone. Face-to-face it would be harder for him to turn her down.

Considering what he’d done to Finn, it was obvious the man was willing to do anything for the almighty dollar. She’d pay him what he wanted. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

CHAPTER 3

DEIRDRE DID A DOUBLE TAKE as she pulled up to Stone’s office. She’d expected an anonymous-looking brick building where people could slink in to ask Stone to unravel secrets. Something from an old detective movie, not the immaculately kept Arts-and-Crafts-style bungalow, its fresh coat of café au lait paint with splashes of hunter green and deep red trim gleaming amid other, more down-at-the-heels houses nearby.

But if Stone’s office defied her expectations, the trio of Harley-Davidson motorcycles blocking the driveway fit the clientele she’d imagined Stone would associate with. Skulls and crossbones decked two of the machines, the other inscribed with the motto, “Born To Raise Hell,” amid an elaborate design of flames.

Stone’s clients? Or informants stopping by to ruin someone’s life? She didn’t have time to care.

She parked, climbed out of the van. Squaring her shoulders, she marched up to the porch. The door stood ajar, and from the sound of things, whoever was inside wasn’t happy. Good. She had wished Stone nothing but misery over the past six years as she’d watched her brother and sister-in-law struggle to pay back the remainder of a debt that wasn’t theirs.

The thought of Cade and Finn knifed Deirdre in the chest, their betrayal of her, and the anguish on their faces as she’d stormed away flooding through her. She shoved the image down, hard.

Angry masculine voices rang out from inside Stone’s office. A wiser person might have headed back to the car to wait until whoever was ruining Stone’s day stormed back out to their bikes. But the opportunity to see Stone under fire was too sweet to miss, and she couldn’t risk him locking the door behind these guys once the fun was over. Adrenaline kicked her pulse into high gear, as she slipped, unnoticed, through the dark green door, gauging the scene in a heartbeat.

Apparently Stone was having a very bad day.

Three men roughly the size of gorillas had Stone cornered between a mission-style desk, two Stickley-esque armchairs and a wall of glass-covered bookcases, but the P.I. didn’t seem to have the brains to realize he was about to get the stuffing kicked out of him.

He lounged against a sliver of wall like a model in some sexy blue jeans ad, all hard muscle, testosterone and mystery, his long black hair caught back from sharp cheekbones, a bored expression on his darkly handsome face. “…and here your momma thought you couldn’t read,” he said.

The gorilla with the shaved head and a swastika tattooed on his skull sneered. “I had plenty of time to work it out. You were front-page news for months. Got me all excited, thinking I’d get to see you out in the prison exercise yard.”

Prison? Deirdre puzzled.

Stone shrugged one broad shoulder, his black T-shirt clinging to muscles an Olympic athlete would have envied. “Life is full of disappointments.”

“Yeah, but you never can tell what fun might be waitin’ just around the corner.”

The other two men chuckled.

“There we were, Stone, on our way to Colorado, when we stop to suck down a cold brew. And plastered right there on the wall by the bar is a blow-up of the article about you getting thrown off the force.”

Deirdre caught her lower lip between her teeth. She had wondered what made Stone become a private investigator. Being thrown off the police force just might do it. But didn’t a cop have to do something pretty serious for that to happen? Stone didn’t even look ruffled.

“I wanted to do my Al Capone imitation for the camera that day,” he said, “but some people just can’t take a joke.”

Swastika scowled. “When I told the bartender you were the one who busted me, he was happy to give us your address.”

“Yeah, well, they say everybody needs a hobby. I happen to be his.”

“He said it was your fault his old lady left him.”

Stone grimaced. “I confess. I did it. I shoved his hands down that other woman’s pants.”

Rage fired in Swastika’s eyes. “Still acting so high-and-mighty! You’re no better than the rest of us cons! Any other poor son of a bitch would have had their ass thrown in prison for what you did! Fucking cold-blooded murder! But your father-in-law, the police chief, couldn’t stomach throwing the force’s golden boy to the animals.”

Deirdre waited for the explosion. Stone should be furious—the lowlife was accusing him of murder, for God’s sake! Cade would have broken the gorilla’s nose by now, and, Deirdre admitted, probably would be getting pulverized by Moe and Curly, there. But Stone examined a piece of lint on his black T-shirt as if it were the most pressing thing he had to deal with at the moment. He flicked the speck off his bunched biceps. “Due process is a beautiful thing. Gotta love truth, justice and the American way.”

A chill ran down Deirdre’s spine. Stone was all but admitting he’d killed someone. Murdered them, if Swastika’s accusation was to be believed. And Stone wasn’t denying it. For an instant she thought about quietly backing out of the door, but she dug in, stubborn. She didn’t know where else to go.

“Don’t talk to me about justice, Stone,” Swastika fumed. “You send me to prison for breakin’ someone’s neck in a bar fight, but you can gun down an unarmed man and your badge gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card?”

“Not free.” An edge crept into Stone’s voice, his tone even softer. “Never free.” Deirdre saw his eyes flash, then go flat again, emotionless. She wondered what darkness Stone’s words had betrayed.

“Face it,” Stone drawled. “I got dealt the lucky hand this game. Better cut your losses and walk away. Think about how you can play your cards better next time you end up in front of the docket. I might even be able to give you a few pointers.”