Westmoreland's Way - Brenda Jackson [42]
“Good to hear. I plan on flying in for the ball this weekend,” Dillon said. A part of him really wasn’t ready to put distance between him and Pam, even for a short while.
“I heard Sheriff Harper talked you into taking his sister Belinda as your date,” Micah said in a teasing tone.
Dillon rolled his eyes. “It was either that or have Bane spend a night in jail for trespassing on the Newsomes’ property in the middle of the night.” He wasn’t sure he appreciated his brother finding his predicament with Belinda so amusing. His brothers and cousins knew Belinda had had her eye on him as husband number three for about a year.
“So how is the investigation into Raphel’s past coming along?”
“I’m finding out more and more information about our great-grandfather every day,” Dillon replied.
Micah chuckled. “Just as long as it’s nothing that can come back to haunt me with the State Department. I can barely handle the fact that he ran off with those other men’s wives.”
Dillon smiled. “I told you the real deal about Raphel and Lila. He did it to protect her.”
“Yes, but we still don’t know what was up with him and the second one, Portia Novak. It should be a rather lively discussion at Thanksgiving dinner this year and will be the first time in a long time everyone will be home.”
After a few more minutes of conversation with Micah, the phone was passed around to the rest of his brothers and cousins. Everyone wanted to know what information about their great-grandfather he’d been able to uncover so far. He didn’t tell them everything he’d found out, but he felt he’d told them enough for now.
It was close to six in the evening when he finally said goodbye to everyone and hung up the phone. He glanced over at the journal he’d been reading over the past two days. He was surprised no one in the Novak family had taken the time to ever read the journal. If they had they would have learned just why Raphel had taken Portia away, and why Jay had given him his blessings to do so.
He glanced around the hotel room. It was totally different from the one he’d had in Gamble. It was a lot more spacious and the furnishings were early American instead of Victorian. Although CNN was alive and well on the big-screen television and the reception for his cell phone was perfect, he would be the first to admit that he missed the huge bathtub at the Gamble hotel. But he needed to be in a hotel that had fax and Internet service. His firm was working on a huge multimillion-dollar deal and he needed to be available if a last-minute snag developed.
And he needed to be someplace where if Pam wanted to pay him a visit, it wouldn’t make the six o’clock news.
He walked over to the window and looked out. It was cold outside but nothing like it had been the night he’d met Pam at her drama school. He sucked in a deep breath when he remembered that night and how it had changed his life. He hoped she’d gotten his message about changing hotels. The one in Gamble was closer to her place, but this one was only ten miles away.
She hadn’t returned his call so a lot of things were going through his mind right now. Had she broken their rule about not having any regrets? Had Fletcher made it back to town? He didn’t have answers to those questions, but the one thing he did know for sure was that if he didn’t hear from her tonight, he would be making a trip into Gamble to see her. He still had her journal and tomorrow would be a good time to return it.
On the drive from Dream Makers back home later that night, Pam was trying, really trying, not to recall her conversation with Fletcher earlier that day. She was even trying, as hard as she could, to give him some slack and believe he had her sisters’ best interest at heart when he’d made the decision they should continue their education in Cheyenne and not in Gamble. But for him not to have discussed it with her was totally unacceptable.
He of all people knew how close she and her sisters were. Did he honestly think she would let them go off and live at some private school, leaving their family and friends behind? And as