My Secret Valentine

“Want a ride?”

She glanced out the glass door. It was bright, chilly, sunshiny—a good day to be out. “No, thanks. We’ll walk.”

“Mind if I walk with you?”

Yes, she minded. She minded tremendously. But she didn’t say so, maybe because he’d given her that regretful look in Mr. Markham’s office. Maybe because Golda had loved him, and she’d loved Golda. Maybe because he was a part of the daughter she also loved.

With a shrug for an answer, she picked up Katy again and waited for him to open the door.

“Whenever you’re ready to take Golda’s jewelry, let me know.” He spoke casually, as if they weren’t discussing a small fortune in gems, some that were family heirlooms, others that he’d given Golda himself. She knew people who would fight over a loved one’s prize ring, and yet he didn’t seem to care about these family diamonds at all.

“You don’t mind her leaving it to Katy?”

“It was her jewelry. She was free to leave it to anyone she chose.”

“Will the rest of your family see it that way?”

“The rest of my family will think you exerted undue influence on Golda in her doddering old age, but she never cared what the rest of them thought. As far as she was concerned, they could go to he—” With a glance at Katy, he bit off the word and substituted a shrug instead. “I have no doubt she made certain her will was airtight, just for their benefit.”

“I was sorry she couldn’t be closer to her family.”

He gave her a wry look as they waited for a car to pass before crossing the street. “You don’t get close to that bunch. Trust me, she was better off without us.”

“You…” Fiona drew a quick breath that smelled of Katy’s baby shampoo and warned herself that getting personal wasn’t a good idea. With Golda dead and her decision whether to tell him about Katy still unmade, the only connection between them was his investigation. It was purely professional, and she’d be a fool to change that in any way.

But she’d been a fool before. “You never talked about your family much.” He’d mentioned that his father lived in New York at the time, his mother in Monaco, that he rarely saw either of them and was an only child. He’d never actually admitted they were wealthy, but she knew from other things he’d talked about—prep schools, summer homes, winter homes, drivers and servants. She’d learned from Golda that his parents were self-centered and not fit to be parents, that the only fights they’d had over Justin weren’t to decide who got to have him but rather who had to take him. Other than a few disparaging comments about the family, as if neither of them were a part, they’d ignored them.

“They’re not exactly people you point to with pride and say, ‘That’s my mom and dad.’ Between them, my parents have been married eleven times and had plans to marry another dozen or so times. All my life one of them has been leaving someone or looking for someone else to eventually leave. My mother is currently married to an earl in London, though that could change any day. He’s about twice her age, rich as God and with any luck, she can force herself to stick around until he dies, leaving her with enough money to attract husband number seven. My father is living in Paris with his latest wife, Monique. She’s twenty-two, she eats nothing but lettuce, and when he brought her to the States on their honeymoon last fall, I went home from work one night and found her naked in my bed. She wanted to be ‘close’ to her stepson.”

Fiona couldn’t resist a smile at his very dry tone of voice, but it faded quickly. With the example his parents had set for him, the wonder wasn’t that he’d gotten cold feet about his relationship with her as soon as he’d left town, but that he’d been able to have a relationship with her at all. She tried to imagine stepparents coming and going with great regularity, or parents who took marriage vows so lightly, or fell in and out of love so easily. Her own parents had been married nearly forty years, and they were still deeply, passionately in love. They were committed to each other, their marriage and their family, and they’d passed on that same sense of commitment to their daughters.

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