The President's Daughter - Mariah Stewart [86]
“Would you? I’d like very much to go.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to get away from here for a bit. Just to clear my head. I’m afraid I’m getting a bit stir-crazy.”
“Do Betsy and Jude know what you’re doing?” He stepped around her.
“I left them a note. I told them we’d be back maybe by dinner. We will be back by dinner, don’t you think?”
Simon studied her face, the dark circles under the lovely eyes, the tension around her mouth.
Well, of course she’s tense, Simon reminded himself. Over the course of the past seventy-two hours, she’s found out that she isn’t who she thought she was, her mother isn’t her mother, her father was the President, and someone tried to kill her. Enough to wear down anyone.
“We should be back by dinner. Though I doubt Jude will be happy to find out that you’ve taken off with me. I can’t shake this feeling that she still looks at me as close kin to the Antichrist. And she may be worried if you disappear for a day.”
“She knows how to get in touch with me.” Dina held up her cell phone. “Besides, I have my bribe all prepared.”
Dina held the shopping bag open. “Coffee and warm blueberry muffins. Mrs. Brady thought we should have a little breakfast to take along.”
“We?”
“You will let me come, won’t you? I really need some time away from both my mother and Betsy.”
Simon reached for the bag.
“Does that mean you’re going to take me along, or are you planning on making off with the muffins?”
“I’d never pass up an opportunity to spend a day with you.” Simon opened the front door and held it aside. “You didn’t need the bribe, but as long as you’ve gone to the trouble, we can’t let Mrs. Brady’s muffins go to waste.”
A low gray mist hovered over the pastures. In another hour, it would be burned off by the rising sun, which was, at that moment, still easing its way into the morning. The air held a slight chill and a dense warm scent that wafted up from the barn.
Dina stepped past Simon, thinking that Blythe must have known such mornings in this place, once upon a time. The sense of connection was unexpectedly strong, and she tried to shake it off.
“So, what do you think of Betsy?” Simon asked to break the silence as they reached the main highway.
“I think she’s a nice lady who’s had a few bad cards dealt.”
“She seems delighted to have you at the ancestral home.”
“That would make one of us.” Dina opened the bag and took out napkins and a muffin, which she passed to Simon.
Simon raised an eyebrow. “I was beginning to think you were all right with this.”
“If by ‘this’ you mean all the lies I’ve been told over the past thirty years, no, I’m not all right with it.” Dina took a second muffin from the bag and began to nibble.
“But surely you understand why—”
“On an intellectual level, of course I do. I know that everyone did what they did out of love for me. But at the same time, the fact remains that I’ve been lied to about the most fundamental facts of my life. Even finding Betsy has been a bit of a shock, when I’d been told I had no family except my mother. . . .” Dina’s voice cracked with the layer of anger that lurked just below the surface. “I love my mother—Jude, that is. We’ve always been very close, and that’s what has made this all so difficult for me. It’s always been the two of us. You have no idea of what a wonderful parent she has been. Mother and father and best friend. Everything that’s happened”—she waved her hand—“can’t change the fact that she’s been an extraordinary mother. But what has changed is that she’s not really mine.”
Simon drove in silence. They had reached I-95 just above Wilmington, Delaware, before Dina spoke again.
“Even the money that I thought I’d inherited from my father was really from Blythe. It was money that Blythe had left to Jude for me.”
“Does it make a difference, which parent had provided for you?” Simon asked.
“It makes a difference because it was a lie, too.” Dina sighed. “Emotionally, this whole thing is much more complicated than you could imagine. The depth of the anger I feel is so great that it frightens me, but,