The Heiress

“But you and your twins are living here,” Daisy protested.

Kristy held up her hands with a helpless shrug. “Susie and Sally are eight. They just like being close to the beach, and being able to build sand castles and collect seashells every single day.”

“Where are they now?” Jack asked.

“Asleep for the night. Which leaves me free to resume my efforts to spruce up this place enough to get it open for business again. Hopefully, by October fifteenth. Meanwhile, I’m closed to guests.”

“I just need a place to lay my head,” Daisy told Kristy persuasively. “If there’s a pillow and a mattress or even a floor, that’s really all I need.”

Kristy studied Daisy. Understanding passed between them as Kristy realized how badly Daisy needed refuge. “Well, in that case…” Kristy stepped around the paint pan and roller and slipped behind the desk. She lifted a drop cloth, then came up with a key. “You can take cabin six. It’s at the other end.”

“Thanks,” Daisy said gratefully.

“Need help with your luggage?” Kristy asked.

Daisy shook her head. She turned to Jack and offered him a tight you-can-get-lost-now-that-you’re-no-longer-useful smile. “See you around,” she said, grabbing the handle of her wheeled suitcase once again. And then she was gone.

“SO DAISY CONFRONTED her biological father tonight, too,” Richard Templeton said shortly after midnight.

Iris looked at her parents grimly, nodding. Richard and Charlotte had been at a charity function and were still in their evening clothes. As always they made a very striking couple. Both were slim and fit, blessed with elegant, aristocratic looks and an inordinate sense of style, but Iris couldn’t help but note, only her mother looked her age. Mostly because Charlotte refused to take advantage of the latest plastic surgery techniques or dye her chin-length silver hair. Richard, however, had no such compunction. He’d had not one—but two—face-lifts over the years and had been “keeping” his dark-brown hair that hue with regular visits to the salon. All Richard’s efforts to retain his youthful visage had paid off. Although Richard and Charlotte were both sixty-seven, Richard looked a good ten years younger than his wife. Iris knew that bothered her father, but her mother didn’t seem to care.

Aware they were still waiting for her answer, Iris said, “Tom Deveraux called me half an hour ago and told me about the scene Daisy created at his home this evening.” Briefly, Iris explained about the family party Daisy had disrupted.

Charlotte Templeton removed her diamond and sapphire necklace and earrings, and put them back in the case. “And you say Grace Deveraux was there, also?”

“Yes.” Iris watched her father open the safe in the library and put the jewelry case carefully inside, with the others. “Apparently, Grace and the rest of the family were very upset.”

Charlotte frowned, her resentment of the man who had turned her eldest child’s life upside down, evident. “I imagine they would be.”

“Are the children going to tell anyone about this?” Richard demanded.

“Tom made them swear to keep it quiet. Apparently, they all agreed. None of them want to endure the public humiliation of a scandal.”

“That was decent of Grace,” Charlotte said.

Because she was among family, Iris made no effort to hide her dislike of the woman the media had once dubbed America’s Sweetheart. “There was nothing noble about what she did. Grace Deveraux was protecting herself, as much as Daisy and Tom and the rest of their kids,” Iris countered. After all, it was Grace’s fault Iris and Tom had never married. If Grace hadn’t been determined to save her marriage—a marriage that had ultimately failed anyway—Iris could have told Tom about the pregnancy and gotten him to marry her. She would never have had to marry Randolph Hayes IV to get the cash to fill the Templeton-family coffers and save her family from public disgrace. She wouldn’t have had to pretend all these years that she was Daisy’s adopted sister instead of her mother. And best of all, Daisy would’ve been brought up by her real parents.

“In any case, we need to talk to Daisy and make her see reason,” Richard said.

“I agree. And as soon as we find her, I plan to do just that,” Iris said, hoping that by then Daisy would be more willing to listen to their side of things, and continue to keep quiet about what had happened in the past.

“And you’re sure Daisy isn’t at your home?” Charlotte said, looking increasingly worried.

“Consuela has instructions to keep her there, and call me on my cell, if she does show up. So far, nothing.” Iris hadn’t heard from her housekeeper. Which meant Daisy could be anywhere, doing anything.

“What about Connor—has he seen her?” Richard asked, looking equally worried about what the unpredictable Daisy might do. They all knew Daisy was never more prone to act out than when hurting emotionally.

“Not yet. But I called him and told him to be on the alert.” Iris paused. “We’re going to have to tell him what we’ve done, too.”

“We’ll get to that,” Richard promised. “Not that we have anything to worry about when it comes to your brother. He knows how to see both sides of every issue, no matter how complex.”

That was true, Iris knew. Connor was the peacemaker in the family. But even he would probably have trouble dealing with this. Not to mention the fact that he, too, had been lied to many times over the years.

“We can’t let Daisy’s parentage become public knowledge,” Charlotte said. “It would ruin us socially, if people were to know just how we covered up your mistake.”

Which was, Iris thought, part of the problem. Even after all these years, of loving and caring for her, her parents couldn’t quite forget how Daisy had come to be.

Richard looked at Iris in disapproval. “This is your fault, you know. If you had let me instill more discipline in Daisy the way I did in you, Daisy would be following our orders without question instead of causing one episode after another.”

Iris’s insides twisted as she recalled the unrelenting pressure she had received from her father when she was growing up. Richard felt then—as now—he had been helping her to be a better person. And to an extent he was right. His continual upbraiding had made her stronger. Strong enough to save her family by marrying a man years older than herself whom she had never loved or even liked, and still present a happy face to the world. Strong enough to take the family antiques business that Richard had nearly ruined with mismanagement and neglect and turn it into a profitable operation once again. Strong enough to find a way to be happy and content in her life despite all of that.

But Daisy hadn’t needed to go through the same social and emotional regimentation she had. Iris had known that and taken steps to protect her, before giving her baby over to her parents to adopt and rear as their own. “That would have only made things worse,” Iris stated, knowing if she had done one good thing in her life, it had been to protect Daisy from being forced to select a mate and marry for money and social position rather than love. She hadn’t been able to keep her parents from cutting off all Daisy’s funds several weeks ago, but she still hoped—over time—to remedy that, too, and return Daisy to a position filled with choices, rather than one directed by an absence of funds.

“So you’ve said,” Richard returned coolly. He walked to the bar and poured a healthy splash of bourbon into his glass. His expression grim, he regarded her steadily over the rim of his glass. “We’ll see if you still feel that way if that bastard child of yours ruins your reputation—and ours—in the community.”

KRISTY HADN’T BEEN kidding when she said the place still needed an awful lot of work, Daisy thought as she let herself into cottage six and deposited the stack of threadbare linens and hotel-size bar of soap on the water-marked table. The paint was peeling off the walls, rust stains coated the sink and the shower, and the bed—well, lumpy didn’t begin to describe it, Daisy thought, sitting down on the edge of the mattress to test it out. But it was a place to sleep that she could afford. It faced the ocean. Daisy didn’t know why, but sitting and watching the timeless motion of waves rolling onto sand always soothed her. And after the past couple of days, she needed soothing more than she could say. Sighing wearily, Daisy removed her fringed suede boots and socks, grabbed enough change for the soda machine located between the lodge and the cottages, and headed back outside. And that was when she saw Jack Granger checking in to the cottage beside hers.

“What the hell are you doing?” She walked barefoot through the grass to confront him.

“Same as you. Bunking down here for the night.” Jack took the hotel-size bar of soap and stack of threadbare linens Kristy had given him and put them inside cabin five.

“Why?” Suddenly, Daisy was angry. Angrier than she had been the whole night.

Jack removed a cheaply made Paradise Resort toothbrush and tiny bottle of shampoo from his shirt pocket and tossed them onto the stack. “I want to be nearby in case you need anything.”

“Like what?” Daisy retorted, aware that the emotions she had successfully kept under control all evening were beginning to spiral out of control. Way out of control. “The truth?” Her pulse pounding harder with every second that passed, Daisy lingered in the open doorway of his cottage. She glared at Jack resentfully. She didn’t understand why she felt so betrayed by him. She just knew that she did. “You weren’t exactly instrumental in helping me get that in the weeks before I went to Switzerland.” Instead, he’d kept bumping into her, in a way that she now saw was anything but accidental. Kept striking up idle conversation, surreptitiously trying to get closer to her. Not because he was interested in her as a person, or her plight to uncover the mystery of her birth. But because he had been trying to subtly stay one step ahead of her while simultaneously running interference for his boss.

“You never asked me to do that.”

Daisy slanted a glance at the private home some one hundred yards down the beach. Unlike the resort, it looked expensive and brand new. And there was someone—a man maybe—seated on his deck, looking their way.

Annoyed at being observed without her consent yet again, Daisy turned back to Jack. “And if I had asked?” she wondered out loud.

Jack shrugged his broad shoulders and came back outside to stand in the warm, salt-scented breeze. “I couldn’t have helped you because I didn’t know until tonight exactly what the connection between you and Tom was.”

Daisy listened to the waves crashing into shore, on the other side of the sand dune. “But you knew there was a connection,” she said as the sea oats waved in the wind.

A guilty silence fell between them. Eventually, Jack looked back at her and said very carefully, “I knew for a fact that Tom was worried about you, that he’d heard from his daughter, Amy, that you had hired Harlan Decker to help find your birth parents. Tom knew those things sometimes went badly or turned out in ways people didn’t expect. Because of that, he felt you might need some help, and that if that was the case, he was prepared to give it.”

“Why?” Daisy asked doubtfully.

“Because he’s, by nature, a generous, compassionate man. Because you were friends with his children, moved in the same social circles, worked as a photographer for the entire Deveraux family and their various businesses. Maybe it was just due to the fact that he had watched you get into one scrape after another as you grew up and just didn’t want to see you get in any more! Who cares what precisely the connection might be or why he would want to help you get your life under control again? He just did.”

Daisy studied him skeptically. “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“Believe what you want,” Jack advised her roughly. “It’s the truth. Tom never told me you were—or might be—his biological daughter.”

But had Jack guessed as much on his own? Daisy wondered. And if Jack had, how did that figure into his feelings about her? Was he, like everyone else who knew the truth, seeing her as Tom’s bastard child—somehow less acceptable than Tom’s other kids? Was she a problem to be solved? A liability to be handled? Lawyer style, of course.