Everything but the Baby. Kathleen O'Brien

accepted the picture and studied it carefully. Allison knew what he would see there. Janelle Greenwood was young, even younger than Allison—midtwenties at most. She wasn’t plain, but she wasn’t beautiful—Lincoln’s favorite type. She had chin-length brown hair, a wide, honest face with almost no makeup, a snub nose and ears that stuck out just a bit. She was dressed in tennis clothes and sitting next to Lincoln, leaning toward him the way a plant leans toward the sun.

      The sparkle in her cute brown eyes said it all. Janelle Greenwood was already hooked.

      “Damn it,” Mark said. It was the first real emotion Allison had seen from him since she arrived. He turned the picture over, as if he hoped to find proof that it was a fake. It wasn’t. Looking at Janelle one more time, he ran his hand through his wet hair. “Damn it.”

      “Exactly. So here’s how I see it. We can race down there and you can beat him up while I warn her. That would mean we could save this one woman, just this one. But then Lincoln would disappear, maybe change his name or his looks. We might never find him again. We can see Janelle’s face, Mark. But what about the next one, the one we can’t save? How young will she be? How much will he steal from her?”

      He drummed his fingers along the mantel, still staring at the picture.

      She waited.

      Finally he looked up, looking more Batman than ever.

      “I’ll give you two weeks. On one condition.”

      She frowned. “What condition?”

      “I’m coming with you.”

       CHAPTER FOUR

      MARK HAD NEVER BEEN to Sole Grande before. As a lifelong Californian, he’d wasted many a teenage weekend surfing and snorkeling and checking out the bikinis, but he’d always been satisfied with the Pacific beaches.

      He’d done his homework, though, so he knew what to expect from this tiny barrier island in the Atlantic. Sole Grande was a short bridge ride across the intra-coastal from Fort Lauderdale, just far enough away to leave all the bustle behind.

      The mansions and hotels on the island were too expensive for the noisy riffraff to infiltrate. Sole Grande didn’t allow putt-putt golf or Dairy Queens, video arcades or tattoo parlors. Nothing that might mar the idyll of sleek sailboats, penthouse restaurants, Given-chy boutiques and day spas.

      The island was about twenty miles from tip to tip and shaped like an hourglass. The narrow center formed two bays: East Nook, which looked out onto the ocean and was, therefore, the more exclusive, and West Nook, which faced the intra-coastal and had lowered prices to match the diminished view.

      O’Hara’s Hideaway was in East Nook. Since Allison was determined to stay there, Mark had checked out their Web site and, in spite of its down-home name, it seemed up to East Nook standards.

      Mark and Allison shared a cab from the airport—rental cars would be delivered to the hotel later that afternoon.

      For the first twenty minutes they chatted easily enough about the differences between the two coasts. But as soon as they hit the bridge, she fell silent. She stared out the window, watching the stately rows of royal palms as if she were getting paid to count them. Her hands were clasped in her lap, every knuckle white. Her simple ruby ring looked like a drop of blood against that pale finger.

      He watched her a minute, then spoke. “Thinking about Lincoln?”

      She shook her head. “No. I was actually thinking about my grandfather. I’m not sure I’ll even recognize him after all these years.”

      She’d explained the whole story to him on the plane—how she’d come to Sole Grande two months ago hoping to reconcile with her mother’s family, who owned the Hideaway. How she’d chickened out at the last minute. And how that had left her vulnerable to Lincoln’s smarmy charm.

      She was clearly still nervous about meeting them, though Mark wasn’t sure why. Even if the O’Haras were rotten relatives who couldn’t let go of an old feud, they were obviously good businessmen. They wouldn’t turn away a couple of paying customers.

      “It’ll be fine,” he said, resisting the urge to put his hand over hers and chafe some warmth into it. “The quarrel was with your father, right? Why would they hold that against you?”

      She shrugged. “I could have contacted them. He told me he’d rather I didn’t, but he didn’t exactly have a gun to my head.”

      Mark wasn’t sure about that. Not a bullet-shooting gun, perhaps, but there were plenty of emotional weapons that could be just as effective. The subtle hint that, if a person went against your wishes, love might be withdrawn was a powerful threat. It had worked on his sister, when she was married to her first son-of-a-bitch husband. That guy had left her so uncertain of her own worth that she’d willingly signed it over to the second SOB—Lincoln Gray.

      “What exactly was the fight about? Did you father ever give you the details?”

      She glanced at him, which he considered a good sign. She looked wan, but at least she wasn’t counting palm trees.

      “He never told me the whole thing, from start to finish. But I got the general idea. Mostly I think it was a culture clash. My father was very dignified, very restrained. I guess the O’Haras are more—uninhibited.”

      “That’s it?”

      “Oh, no. That was just the beginning. Then my grandfather, Stephen, hit my father up for a loan. He already owned the land on Sole Grande, but he needed money to build the Hideaway. My father refused, of course.”

      “Why of course? Their hotel seems to be quite a success.”

      “My father didn’t believe in loaning money to relatives. He’d earned his, and he thought everyone else should do the same, including me.”

      Which she’d done. Mark had looked up Lullabies, too, while he was surfing the net and discovered that she already had nine franchises on the East Coast.

      “The real problem, though,” she went on, “the one that led to this total estrangement, was that my father blamed my uncle Roddy for my mother’s death.”

      “Why? How did she die?”

      “She took a bad fall from a horse. I think she was a good rider—I remember lots of ribbons from competitions she won as a child. But apparently this horse wasn’t fully broken yet. My father always said she wouldn’t have been foolish enough to ride it if Uncle Roddy hadn’t egged her on.”

      “So her death was completely unexpected. That must have been hard. How old were you?”

      Though her voice was composed, reciting the story as if it were a history lesson she’d learned in school, she had gone back to twisting the ruby ring.

      “I was only three, so I really didn’t understand much. Reading between the lines now, though, I get the impression that my mother—her name was Eileen—must have had a wild side, which my father was trying to correct. He said Roddy was criminally immature and a dangerous influence.”

      Mark wondered if she could hear how oppressive her father sounded. The idea of “correcting” a spouse was not only domineering, it was dumb. In his experience, people didn’t change unless they wanted to. They might pretend to change, either to please or appease, but what good did that do?

      Lauren, Mark’s ex-wife, had pretended not to want children, but the truth came out eventually.

      Eileen O’Hara Cabot had defied her husband and sneaked into the stables for one last, fatal ride on the back of a wild horse.

      But he wasn’t going to point that out. It wasn’t, in the end, his business.

      “Families are complicated, aren’t they?”

      She merely nodded at this platitude and went back to looking out the window.

      Mark