Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (30 page)
Read Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) Online
Authors: Kat Martin
“Why don’t we go out for some air?” Call asked gently, taking her arm and beginning to guide her in that direction. It was a good thing he did. Her legs felt like rubber bands and she wasn’t sure how long they were going to hold her up.
Her heart was hammering. If he had come to New York on business and expected her to spend a convenient night in his bed, it wasn’t going to happen. As much as she wanted exactly that, when he left she would feel even worse than she did already.
Call held open the door and she preceded him out into the warm night air. It was a little bit humid this evening, but not as bad as it had been the night before. She walked over to the rail, took hold of it to steady herself, and looked down into the crowded New York streets.
Call walked up beside her and she slowly turned to face him. “You were telling me why you were here.”
Call picked up her hand, lifted it, and pressed a kiss into her palm. “Like I said, there are a couple of different reasons.” Reaching into the inside pocket of his tuxedo, he pulled out a small canvas bag. The material was old and brown and water-stained, ancient-looking. She couldn’t imagine why he was carrying something like that in his pocket.
“What is it?”
Call placed the bag in the palm of her hand. It was heavier than it looked. “Open it.”
She gazed down, pulled the rotting string that held the bag closed, and poured the contents out into her hand. “Oh, my God—gold nuggets!”
“They belong to you.”
“Me? You found these on the Lily Rose?
“In a manner of speaking. After you left, I got worried about someone getting hurt in what remained of your cabin. It was pretty unstable, so Toby and I went over to pull some of the burnt walls down. When we did, we found a couple of small bags like this and four bigger ones filled with gold nuggets under the old wooden floors.”
“Oh, my God!” She studied the glittering hunks of metal in her hand, then looked up. “Wait a minute. Why would Mose leave his gold behind?”
“The gold never belonged to Mose. If you recall, the older portion of the cabin was built during the Gold Rush days. For years after that, the place sat empty. Mose bought it through some kind of an auction. He fixed it up and added on to the original structure but he never found the gold. Since you own the cabin now, it belongs to you.”
Charity stared down at the glittering nuggets in her hand, far bigger than any she had found on the Lily Rose. “I can’t believe this.”
“Some of them are even larger.”
She looked up at him. “If it’s really mine, I want to share it equally with Maude, Jenny, and Toby.”
Call seemed pleased. “I thought maybe you would.” He bent his head and very softly kissed her. “Congratulations.”
But finding the gold couldn’t make up for losing Call. And seeing him again only made the loss more painful. “Thank you for bringing it. How did you know I was here?”
“Your sister Hope told me.” He looked wonderful tonight. She’d never seen a man wear a tux with such aplomb or look so incredibly good in it … well, except maybe Max Mason.
“There’s something else,” Call said, taking the gold from her hand, dumping it back into the pouch, and setting the bag down on the railing. “The other reason I came. Something far more important than gold.”
There it was again, that little kernel of hope popping up just to taunt her. “What is it?”
“I came to apologize. I lied to you, Charity … that morning on the deck outside the house.”
“Lied? I don’t understand. What did you lie about?”
“That morning I told you that I didn’t love you. That was a lie. I knew it even before I said the words.” He took her hand. Call kissed her fingers and they trembled. “I thought once you were gone, I’d be able to forget you, but I couldn’t. I love you. I think I fell a little in love with you the first time I saw you on ol’ Mose Flanagan’s porch.”
“Call …” Her voice broke on his name. She went into his arms and simply clung to him. She didn’t ever want to let go.
“I knew I was in love with you,” he said beside her ear, “and I felt so damned guilty.”
She eased back to look at him. “Because of Susan?”
“Because I never loved Susan the way I love you.”
Tears stung her eyes. Charity went back into his arms and held onto him as tightly as he was holding onto her.
“I love you,” she whispered. “Every day has been torture without you.”
“I don’t want to be without you anymore,” he said. “Marry me. Come back with me.”
Charity bit back a sob. “I’d love to marry you.” Though she knew the life she was choosing would be hard. As much as she loved the Yukon, it was a solitary, rugged existence. She would do it for Call, do it because she loved him and she didn’t want to live without him.
Call kissed her. She had forgotten how fiercely he could kiss, the way his mouth pressed into hers, hard and taking, soft and giving, all at once. She forgot the heat that swept through her body, the powerful surge of desire she had never known with anyone else. She came up breathless and wanting more, wishing she were in bed with him instead of out here on the terrace. She could feel how hard he was and knew he wanted that, too.
“When?” she asked.
“As soon as we can make it legal.” Reaching into the pocket of his tuxedo, he pulled out a small, velvet box with a silver Tiffany’s label.
Charity opened the box with trembling fingers and her breath caught at the gorgeous, four-carat diamond engagement ring and diamond pavé wedding band.
“I thought about us a lot while you were gone. I figured if you said yes, maybe we’d go to Seattle. MegaTech is there and I’ve still got lots of business connections in the city.” He looked down at her. “I’ll never make the mistake I made before, Charity. I’ll never let work come between us. Family is the most precious thing a man can have. But it’s time I got on with my life. You helped teach me that.” He slid the engagement ring onto the third finger of her trembling left hand.
“Oh, Call, it’s beautiful. Magnificent.”
“It shouldn’t be hard for you to find an editing job if you decide that’s what you want to do. We’ll buy a house somewhere … Bainbridge Island, maybe. Not too far from the city but not too close, either. Someplace with a little room, maybe some acreage. The kind of place that would be good for raising kids.”
He wanted to have children! Happy tears glittered in her eyes. “That sounds perfect.”
“Come on,” Call said, taking her hand. “Let’s get out of here.” As they made their way back inside the ballroom, heading for the door and Call’s suite on the fourteenth floor, she saw Deirdre at the table sitting next to Jeremy.
Charity smiled at her best friend and held up her hand. She pointed to the ring and mouthed the words, “We’re getting married!”
Deirdre said a not-so-silent, “Yes!” And in a highly undignified moment, shot her arm up into the air.
Charity leaned back in the chaise longue on the deck of her sprawling ranch-style home on Bainbridge Island. The white-washed gray-cypress house overlooking Puget Sound had a heavy shake roof, wide wooden decks, and lots of glass. They lived on fifteen secluded acres of pines and sycamores yet were only a few miles by ferry from the city. Close enough to keep in touch with Aunt Mavis, room enough for Kodiak and Smoke to play. And a great place for children, whenever they decided they were ready.
Charity loved the house. She loved Seattle. She loved being married. Mostly, she just loved Call.
“Hey, Charity!” He was working in his office, which opened out onto the deck a little way from where she sat in her yellow flowered bikini, enjoying the late spring sun. “There’s something I want to show you.”
Curious, she got up from the chaise and padded barefoot down the deck. Call opened the sliding glass door a little wider to let her in.
His gaze took in the skimpy bikini that barely covered her breasts. “Lady, you look good enough to eat.” He hauled her into his arms. “Maybe this can wait till later.” He gave her a soft, nibbling kiss.
Laughing, she pulled away. “You know I’m putty in your hands when you do that. First, I want to know what you called me in here to show me.”
Dressed in jeans and a blue cotton tee shirt, he walked over to his computer and Charity followed. Call urged her down in the black swivel chair in front of the machine.
“I’ve been playing around with something. Take a look at this.”
She studied the computer screen and realized he had pulled up one of the many genealogical sites available on the Net. “Rachael Louise Fitzpatrick,” she read. “Born January 11, 1883. Died December 14, 1950.” He clicked the mouse, bringing up another name. “Frances Fitzpatrick, born March 12, 1880.” No news there. She wondered what Call had discovered.
He leaned over and clicked the mouse on a different site: www.marriageindex:Oregon.com. “Now look at this.” It was Frances’s marriage certificate.
“It says she married her husband, Thaddeus Baker, on August 10, 1902.” Charity turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder. “So?”
“So I couldn’t find a birth certificate for your great-great-grandmother, Frances’s daughter, Sarah Thankful Baker, but maybe she was born at home and the records were lost or something.”
“That wouldn’t be unusual.”
“No, but strangely enough, I turned up a record from a Boston hospital in 1903. It says a Sarah T. Baker made a visit there in May of that year. She came in with a broken arm. The record says she was three years old at the time.”
Charity frowned. “That’s impossible. Frances and Thaddeus had only been married a year. In those days, out-of-wedlock children were a very big scandal.”
“That’s right. But what if the records are right and Sarah really was three at the time? The only scandal your Aunt Mavis mentioned was the one Rachael and Ian Gallagher created by running away together. Combined with the fact that there is nothing that shows Rachael Fitzpatrick ever married, I’d say there’s a chance the baby wasn’t Frances’s child. I think it’s more likely little Sarah belonged to Rachael.”
Charity sat there staring, thinking of Rachael and Ian and their journey to the Yukon, thinking what might have happened to Rachael after Ian was killed. Had she been pregnant when her lover died? Was Rachael, not Frances, actually her long-dead great-great-grandmother? If she were …
“My God, Call, if Rachael was Sarah’s mother, then I’d be her direct descendant. We would share the same blood and … and …”
“And maybe you could have remembered something that happened to Rachael in the Yukon?”
“Yes, maybe I could have. Maybe that’s the reason I always felt so compelled to go there.”
“I guess you’ll never really know,” Call said. But in June they planned to return, to begin reconstruction of the cabin.
She would never know the truth about the past, but it no longer mattered. Rising from the chair, Charity turned and went into Call’s arms. “Thank you.”
“I love you,” he said.
Charity thought of the Yukon, the dream of adventure that had carried her so far from her home, and the turn of fate that had led to the place she stood now, in the arms of the man she loved.
And she smiled.
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2003 by Kat Martin
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ISBN: 978-1-4201-2823-9