Rags To Riches: A Desire To Serve. Janice Maynard

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      Frost coated Grace’s lungs. Feeling its sick chill, she wrapped both arms around her waist and turned away from The Guardian to face Blake Dalton.

      “I can’t tell you about Anne’s past,” she said bleakly. “I promised I would bury it with her. What I can say is that you’re the only man she got close to in more years than you want to know.”

      “You think I’m going to be satisfied with that?”

      “You have no choice.”

      “Wrong.”

      He yanked on the dangling end of his bow tie and threw it aside before shrugging out of his tuxedo jacket. His black satin cummerbund circled a trim waist. The pleated white shirt was still crisp, as might be expected from a tailor who catered exclusively to millionaires and movie stars.

      Yet under the sleek sophistication was an edge that didn’t fool Grace for a moment. Delilah bragged constantly about the variety of sports Blake and his twin had excelled at during their school years. Both men still carried an athlete’s build—lean in the hips and flanks, with the solid chest and muscled shoulders of a former collegiate wrestler.

      That chest loomed far too large in Grace’s view at the moment. It invaded her space, distracted her thoughts and made her distinctly nervous.

      “How many cousins do you have?” he asked with silky menace. “And how long do you think it will take Jamison to check each of them out?”

      “Not long,” she fired back. “But he won’t find anything beyond Anne’s birth certificate, driver’s license and a few high school yearbook photos. We made sure of that.”

      “A person can’t just erase her entire life after high school.”

      “As a matter of fact, she can.”

      Grace moved to the buckskin leather sofa and dropped onto a cushion. Blake folded his tall frame onto a matching sofa separated by a half acre of glass-topped coffee table.

      “It’s not easy. Or cheap,” she added, thinking of her empty savings account. “But you can pull it off with the help of a very smart friend of a friend of a friend. Especially if said friend can tap into just about any computer system.”

      Like the Texas Vital Statistics agency. It had taken some serious hacking but they’d managed to delete the digital entry recording Hope Patricia Templeton’s marriage to Jack David Petrie. By doing so, they’d also deleted the record of the last time Grace had used her maiden name and SSN.

      A familiar sadness settled like a lump in Grace’s middle. Her naive, trusting cousin had believed Petrie’s promise to love and cherish and provide for her every need. As the bastard had explained in the months that followed, his wife didn’t require access to their bank account. Or a credit card. Or a job. Nor did she have to register to vote. There weren’t any candidates worth going to that trouble for. And they sure as hell didn’t need to talk to a marriage counselor, he’d added when she finally realized he’d made her a virtual prisoner.

      Financially dependent and emotionally battered, she’d spent long, isolated years as a shadow person. Jack trotted her out when he wanted to display his pretty wife, then shuffled her back into her proper place in his bed. It hadn’t taken him long to cut off her ties with her friends and family, either. All except Grace. She refused to be cut, even after Petrie became furious over her meddling. Grace wondered whether those horrific moments when her gas pedal locked on the interstate were, in fact, due to mechanical failure.

      Grace and Hope had become more cautious after that. No more visits. No letters or emails that could be intercepted. No calls to the house. Only to a pay phone in the one grocery store where Jack allowed his wife to shop. Even then it had taken a solid year of pleading before Hope worked up the courage to escape.

      Grace didn’t want to remember the desperate years that followed. The mindless fear. The countless moves. The series of false identities and fake SSNs, each one more expensive to procure than the last. Until finally—finally!—a woman with the name of Anne Jordan had found anonymity and a tenuous, tentative security at Dalton International. She’d been just one of DI’s thousands of employees worldwide. An entry-level clerk with only a high school GED. Certainly not a position that would bring her into contact with the multinational corporation’s CFO.

      Yet it had.

      “Please, Blake. Please believe me when I tell you Anne wanted her past to be buried with her. All she cared about in her last, agonizing moments was making sure Molly would know her father, if not her mother.”

      Or more accurately, that her baby would have the name and protection of someone completely unknown to Jack Petrie.

      Grace prayed she’d convinced Blake. She hadn’t, of course. The lawyer in him wouldn’t be satisfied until he’d dug up and turned over every bit of evidence. But maybe she could deflect his inquisition.

      “Will you tell me something?”

      “Quid pro quo?” His mouth twisted. “You haven’t given me much of a trade.”

      “Please. I…I wasn’t able to talk or visit with Anne much in her last year.”

      She hadn’t dared. Jack Petrie was a Texas state trooper, with a cop’s wide connections. Grace knew he’d had her under surveillance at various times, maybe even bugged her phone or planted a tracking device on her car, hoping she would lead him to his wife. Grace had imposed on every friend she had, borrowing their cars or using their phones, to maintain even minimal contact with her cousin.

      Jack didn’t know about Grace’s last, frantic flight to California. She’d made sure of that. She’d emptied her savings account, had a friend drive her to the airport and paid cash for a ticket to Vegas. There she’d rented a car for a desperate drive across the desert to the San Diego hospital where her cousin had been admitted.

      Five heart-wrenching days later, she’d retraced that route with Molly. Instead of flying back to San Antonio with the baby, though, she’d paid cash for a bus ticket to Oklahoma City.

      She hadn’t used her cell phone or any credit cards in the weeks since she’d wrangled a job as Molly’s temporary nanny. Nor had she cashed the checks Delilah had written for her salary. She’d planned to go back to her teaching job once Molly was settled with her father. The longer she spent with the baby, though, the more painful the prospect of leaving her became.

      The thought of leaving Blake Dalton was almost as wrenching. Lately her mind had drifted to him more than it should. Especially at night, after she’d put Molly to bed. The increasingly erotic direction of that drift spurred pinpricks of guilt, then and now.

      “Tell me how you and Anne met,” she pleaded, reminding herself yet again Blake was her cousin’s love, the man she’d let into her life despite all she’d been through. “How… Well…”

      “How Molly happened?” he supplied.

      “Yes. Anne was so shy around men.”

      For shy, read insecure and cowed and generally scared shitless. Grace couldn’t imagine how Blake had breached those formidable barriers.

      “Please,” she said softly. “Tell me. I’d like to know she found a little happiness before she died.”

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