Summer Secrets - Barbara Freethy [175]
He felt even more uncomfortable. "I'm sorry about your mother. Melanie was your mother?"
"Most of the time, except when a guy came around. Then we were sisters." Jessie tapped her unlit cigarette against her leg. "Got a light?"
"Aren't you a little young to be smoking?"
"Aren't you a little late to be playing dad?"
Her words cut to the quick. He stiffened and immediately shook his head against the accusation in her eyes. "I'm -- I'm not your father. I don't know what Melanie told you, but I am definitely not your father."
"How do you know?"
His mind raced to answer the question. How did he know? Because Melanie had told him the truth the day after Jessie's birth. After he'd invested nine months of his life taking care of Melanie and the baby, after he'd gone to sleep listening to the baby's heartbeat, after he'd fallen in love with the infant he believed was his -- Melanie had told him he was not the father. Melanie had also told him she wanted to raise her child with the baby's real father, Eddie Saunders.
He'd been furiously angry, but he'd never doubted Melanie's sincerity. Why would she lie? He'd been willing to take care of her. Hell, he had been taking care of her, working as a clerk at a local shoe store during the day and taking college classes at night.
During their nine months together, he'd fallen in love with her and her baby, only to have his love shoved back in his face. It was the last time he'd let himself get that close to anyone.
"I just know," he said to Jessie, then shifted his feet restlessly, wishing the receptionist would come back.
He wanted someone to tell him why he'd been ordered to appear on this day, at this time, for the reading of a will of a woman he'd been married to for nine months, thirteen years earlier. It didn't make sense that Melanie would leave him anything after the way they'd parted. They hadn't spoken since the day she'd taken her baby and left him all alone.
He checked his watch. It was ten minutes past three. He was tired, hungry, and irritated. He'd just finished a grueling ten-day business trip for his company, Top Flight Athletic Shoes, and he'd been hoping to get home early. Not that there wouldn't be problems waiting for him at home. According to his part-time housekeeper, his grandfather had arrived at his apartment the day before with a suitcase and a note from his doctor stating that his grandfather shouldn't live alone anymore.
A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows, and Alex's uneasiness increased as he saw the tree branches blowing restlessly against the panes of the old Victorian house that now served as an office building in the Marina District of San Francisco. Maybe it was the wind -- or the Carrigan curse, which had brought him here today. He could still hear his grandfather's deep, booming voice ...
And the winds will curse your life until you return to where it began ...
His grandfather had told him about the curse in the dark of the night, the wind howling through the trees like a hungry vampire. Alex had been eight years old at the time and his mother had just left his father -- because of the curse, his grandfather told him, because of something terrible his grandfather had done when he was a young man.
Alex had wanted desperately to believe it was black magic that had torn his family apart, but in the morning his father had told him that his mother was in love with another man. So much for the curse.
"Mr. Carrigan?"
He turned his head as the receptionist finally returned to her desk. A smartly dressed woman in her mid-thirties, she welcomed him with a cool smile.
"Mr. Monroe will be a few moments. He's on the phone."
Alex had the sudden urge to flee. Listening to the wind and thinking about the curse had drawn goose bumps down his arms. "Look, I've been on a business trip for the past week, and frankly I have no interest in anything Melanie Kane may have left for me. So if Mr. Monroe will be longer than five minutes, I'm out of here."
The receptionist frowned. "You really do need