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Sydney looked up at Meg. “Thanks for catching— oh my gosh.”
“Wait. What?” Meg asked, scooting farther away. Her gaze darted from Sydney to Cooper and then to the three people still standing. “I didn’t—”
But when her gaze met Dalton’s, he muttered a low “damn.”
Now they were all staring at her. As in, she’d-grown-an-extra-head-or-two staring at her. Or, they-somehow-knew-she-was-here-to-blackmail-their-father staring at her.
Meg automatically got to her feet and held out her hands, palms out. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Yet.
The other woman, Laney—who had long dark hair and resembled a modern-day Snow White—sent a chiding look at the others. “For goodness’ sake, you’re scaring her.” Then she stepped forward, smiling. “No one thinks you did anything to hurt Portia. We’re glad you were here to catch her. Aren’t we?” She gave Dalton’s elbow a little nudge.
He stepped forward too. “Yes, absolutely.”
Meg looked warily from one sibling to the next. Gratitude for stopping Portia’s fall did not explain their behavior. Panic edged in under her confusion. She took a step back toward the door. “You know, I think I’m going to go.”
As one, Dalton, Laney, Griffin and Sydney took steps toward her as a chorus of protests echoed through the room.
Okay. This was getting weird.
She took a few more steps back toward the door. “I...um...”
“You can’t leave,” pleaded Laney. The rest of them stopped still in their tracks, as if Meg was some sort of spooked deer.
Great. She couldn’t leave. She had unwittingly made some rich pregnant woman faint and now they were trying to keep her contained so they could call the police or something. Okay, that was probably a bit paranoid.
Portia must have been slowly coming to, because she made a groaning noise and pushed herself up onto her elbows.
“Why can’t I leave?” Meg asked hesitantly.
“Not again.” Portia looked around the room, blinking. “Did I miss anything?”
Cooper cradled her shoulders, gently brushing her hair out of her eyes. “You weren’t out that long.”
Laney took advantage of the distraction by stepping forward to clutch Meg’s hand. “You can’t leave because you’re Hollister’s missing daughter. You’re their sister!”
“I know I’m their sister. How do they know it?”
Again, everyone turned to look at her and said, “You know?”
Thirty minutes later—after Meg had nearly fainted, herself—the Cains finally lured her from the foyer into an elegant office in one of the front rooms. Dalton had poured drinks all around. Everyone else he knew well enough that he hadn’t needed to ask what they wanted, but when he got to her, he shot her a look, his eyebrows raised in silent question.
“Just water, please.” She needed to keep her wits about her. If there was one thing her mother had taught her, it was that rich people were all venomous snakes and the Cains were the worst. Like coral snakes. More deadly than rattlesnakes and twice as aggressive.
Once Dalton handed her the glass of water, he gestured toward a wingback chair, but she didn’t sit down. Portia and Sydney were seated on the sofa opposite the chair. Laney was in another wingback chair beside it with Dalton standing behind her. The other two men were scattered around the room. The last thing she wanted was to be sitting in the hot spot.
“Okay, tell me again why you think I’m your sister.”
Again it was Portia who answered. “Your eyes, obviously.”
“My eyes?”
“You have the Cain blue eyes.” Griffin pointed to one of his own eyes. Then he winked at her. “Very unique. All the Cains have them.”
“You assume I’m your sister just because my eyes are blue? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! There have to be millions of people with blue eyes.”
“Something like five million people have blue eyes, actually.” Everyone turned to look at Portia. She shrugged. “I looked it up. The point is, eyes your exact color are unique.”
“But not a reason to assume I’m a Cain.”
Dalton leaned over to brace his elbows on the back of his wife’s chair. “But you are, in fact, a Cain. Aren’t you?”
She looked down at her glass of water and gave it a jiggle to move the ice around. “What if I am?”
“Then we’ve been looking for you.”
“And,” Portia added, “I think you’ve been poking around getting information about us, too.”
For a second, Portia held Meg’s gaze, before Meg looked back down at her water. Portia was right, of course. When she’d been in Houston a year ago, Meg had just wanted to get a feel for the Cains. She’d needed to gauge just how desperate she’d need to be before she went to them for money. She had even met Portia—introduced herself using a fake name, of course—and had a conversation with her. She’d been so sure that Portia hadn’t suspected anything!
She forced her gaze back up to Portia’s. She didn’t say anything—didn’t reveal that they’d met before—but there was a light of triumph in the other woman’s gaze.
After several moments of silence, Laney and Sydney exchanged a worried look. Then Sydney spoke up. “Do you know why we’ve been looking for you?”
“No.” All her life, she’d been told that her father had abandoned her and her mother and that no one in the Cain family wanted them. She couldn’t imagine how they could have been looking for her when she lived in the same town where she’d been born, less than five miles from the courthouse where Hollister had married her mother. “There’s no reason for anyone to be looking for me. I haven’t exactly been hiding.”
There was another tense moment as the Cains all looked at one another as if they were trying to decide who would be the best one to break the bad news to her.
Laney leaned forward. Okay, Snow White it was.
“I don’t know if you know this, but Hollister’s health has been declining for the past several years.”
“If he recently died, don’t feel like you have to break it to me gently.” The father she’d never even met dying mere days before she finally decided to contact him? Yeah. That sounded about right. Not that she minded not meeting him, but it seemed unlikely that anyone else would care about her blackmail demands.
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