Mystery Heiress. Suzanne Carey

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СКАЧАТЬ over what the future would hold, was palpable. “Sterling, thank you!” she whispered. “Without you, the family would disintegrate. Whereas I…”

      Time was of the essence, and she didn’t finish the thought. “Call Erica before you go, will you, so she won’t worry too much?” she added, changing her tack. “She can get in touch with the children. Naturally, you won’t want to give her too many details.”

      At the hospital, Jess had remained by her daughter’s bedside, desperately trying to think of ways to contact the Fortune family while waiting for the first of Annie’s tests to come back from the lab. A nurse entered the room around 1:00 p.m. and noted that Annie was asleep. “You’ve been here all day, since early this morning, without rest or anything to eat, Mrs. Holmes,” she pointed out. “It won’t help your daughter if you get sick, too. We’ll keep an eye on her, and Dr. Hunter will page you when the test results become available. Why don’t you run down to the cafeteria and grab a bite?”

      If they could pull it off, Annie’s rehabilitation would take months. The nurse’s suggestion made sense. Realizing she was starved, Jess decided to take her up on it. She was seated in the brightly lit first-floor cafeteria, munching on a tuna-salad sandwich and drinking a cup of tea, when Stephen slid into the seat opposite her.

      “Is something wrong?” she asked, the panic that lay just below the surface of her thoughts staring back at him.

      She was so lovely. So distraught. And so alone in Minneapolis, unless he was very much mistaken. It was all he could do not to reach across the table and pat her shoulder. “Nothing we didn’t expect,” he replied.

      “Then…the results are in?”

      “Some of them are. Enough to know Annabel’s white-cell count is severely out of whack, with a large number of immature, ineffective cells circulating in her bloodstream. She’s going to need a transplant, and soon, to correct the situation. As an interim measure, until we can find a donor, I want to prescribe a mild form of chemotherapy. It’ll make her fairly sick for a couple of days. But then she should have a brief remission. We’ll have a respite in which to search.”

      Jess had dealt with the problem sufficiently by now to know they didn’t have any other choice. Reluctantly, because anything calculated to make Annie sicker was like a dagger in her heart, she gave her permission.

      “I’ve asked my office nurse to register Annabel with all known marrow sources, including one that’s previously turned up several donors for us in Australia,” he added. “It’ll take a few weeks, maybe longer, to find out if there’s an available match.”

      “And…if there isn’t?”

      “Unless her remission’s far stronger than I expect, your daughter’s not a good candidate for autologous donation, the process in which a portion of the patient’s own marrow is removed, cleansed of cancer cells and replanted after the remaining cancer is killed off with chemotherapy,” he said, his gaze unwavering though it was deeply sympathetic. “We could try it, I suppose, if all else failed. But it would be risky in the extreme.”

      Jess didn’t answer. There wasn’t much use in arguing the point. Annie’s doctors in England had advised strongly against the process in her case, as well.

      “Mind telling me why you decided to come to Minneapolis, of all places?” he asked, changing the subject.

      She supposed she might as well describe her possible connection with the Fortune family, though it hadn’t been proven yet. “When my family members—what few I have—were tested as possible donors for Annie,” she said, “those on my maternal grandfather’s side turned out to be so extremely wide of the mark that her doctors found it puzzling.

      “Shortly thereafter, I was going through some things that had belonged to my late mother. An old letter fell out of a book she’d read to me as a child. To my astonishment, it suggested that my true maternal grandfather wasn’t a man named George Simpson, as I’d always believed, but rather Benjamin Fortune….”

      She could tell from the look on Stephen’s face that he was taken aback and highly skeptical. Doubtless he’s convinced I’m grasping at straws, she thought. Or worse. “I have the letter right here, in my purse. I’ll be happy to show it to you,” she offered, determined that he should believe her search was motivated by Annie’s welfare, not greed, now that she’d opened up to him.

      “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

      Silently she took it out and handed it to him.

      From what Stephen could determine, the letter appeared to be genuine. It was entirely possible that the lovely, dark-haired Englishwoman seated opposite him was a long-lost Fortune relative. The physician in him leaped at the possibilities for his patient.

      “During the short time we’ve been here, I’ve done everything I could to contact someone connected with the family, to no avail,” Jess went on, when he didn’t speak. “They all seem to have unlisted numbers. Jacob Fortune’s secretary did promise she’d get a message to him. But I’m not holding my breath.”

      At that, Stephen regarded her quizzically. “I gather you didn’t realize that Dr. Todd, your daughter’s new pediatrician, is a Fortune,” he remarked.

      Caught by surprise, Jess could do little more than stare.

      “As a matter of fact, she’s Benjamin Fortune’s daughter,” he continued. “Granted, you wouldn’t have guessed it from her name. She went by Lindsay Fortune-Todd for a while after marrying Frank Todd, another of our doctors here, then simply dropped her maiden name….”

      For Jess, it was if a door had suddenly blown open on a host of possibilities. Twin spots of color blossomed in her cheeks. With a surge of excitement, she jumped to her feet. “Surely, if she knows of the connection, Dr. Todd will help us!” she exclaimed.

      “Not so fast,” Stephen advised, rising also. “Lindsay and the other Fortune children lost their mother, Kate—who, as you probably know, happened to be their only remaining parent—in a plane crash last year. To potential fortune hunters, the money they inherited is like a plum, ripe for the picking. At least one young woman whom most people regard as an imposter has turned up, claiming to be Lindsay’s long-lost twin, who was kidnapped shortly after their birth, and demanding a share. Long-lost relatives of any sort are bound to be something of a sensitive issue, especially with her.”

      “But…but…I don’t want money,” Jess protested. “I want…”

      Taking her hands in his, Stephen caused little ripples of awareness to flutter up her arms. “Take it easy. I believe you,” he said. “Lindsay and I are friends, as well as colleagues, and next-door neighbors. I think it’s fair to say she trusts me. Why don’t you let me talk to her?”

      Jess wanted to fling her arms around him. “Oh, Dr. Hunter…would you?” she asked.

      “Call me Stephen,” he said. “Thanks to Annabel, or Annie, as you call her, we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other. C’mon, let’s go upstairs and see how she’s doing before I have to check out of here.”

      Pale and wraithlike as she slept beneath her hospital blanket, Annie looked like a little-girl ghost. Her control slipping, Jess wept softly as she gazed at her daughter. “I’m so worried about her,” she confided. “She’s all I’ve got. I don’t want to lose her.”

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