Emma would have been roiled up as the rest of them, and she was relieved to hear that the reason for Caroline’s suicide attempt had finally come out in the open. Still, Garrett’s uncovering his sister’s secret stirred her own heartsick situation again. It was so like him to get that secret out of Caro no matter what it took. Garrett would go to the ends of the earth for those he loved. But knowing that only gave Emma a fresh taste of despair…until she suddenly realized that all conversation at the table had stopped.
That never happened. Not with the Debs. Even when there wasn’t a crisis of events, they talked each others’ ears off. So the sudden silence made Emma’s head shoot up. “What…?” she began to ask.
But then she saw the man wending his way from the doorway to their table. It was hard to guess why or how Garrett snared the women’s complete attention, but Emma wasted no time wondering about that.
He searched the crowd, searched all the faces-found hers.
Their eyes met.
He kept coming. His every footstep brought a new race to her heart. He never faltered, never looked away, never glanced at the other women. When he reached the table, he just reached out a hand and snagged her wrist.
“I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch, ladies, but I need Emma. Right now,” he said. “And this won’t wait.”
Twelve
Emma had no logical reason to feel her heart suddenly rush with hope. But it did. Just from seeing him. Just from feeling his hand clasped in hers. She didn’t know why he’d sought her out, didn’t care. For those few moments, just being with him seemed enough to stave off that awful despair chewing on her heart.
But when he ushered her into the passenger seat of his car, she couldn’t help asking, “Where are we going?”
“A place where we can talk with no interruptions, guaranteed. All right?”
“Yes.” It was more than all right. He wanted to talk to her-but she so fiercely wanted to talk to him.
She watched him, not the road, as he drove. For four days and four nights she’d pined for him. She’d hurt so badly to think he’d believe she was a gold digger.
But those same four days and four nights she’d done enough analyzing and agonizing to face some scary truths. The Debs’ lunch today had reechoed one of her discoveries. Garrett had discovered his sister’s secret, dug and dug and dug until he’d found a way to help Caroline-then gone after helping her whole hog. That was how he lived, who he was.
Emma had so fallen for the right man-a man who’d climb K2 and back for someone he loved.
She just hadn’t realized how his character directly applied to how he’d reacted to her days before.
“I’ve thought over a lot of things over the past few days,” he said quietly.
“So have I.” When he didn’t add anything more personal, she tried taking a different conversational track. “Caroline had a lot to say at lunch today. It sounds as if everything’s going to work out all right for her. Thanks to you.”
“There’s no happy ending in the bank yet. Nothing can be completely resolved until the blackmailer is caught. But…”
“But what?”
“But I’ve done all I can do. The rest is up to her husband. And the police.” Garrett shot her a quick glance. “I love my sister, but I have other things on my mind right now.”
That sounded ominous. When she’d thought about seeing him again, Emma had assumed she’d rush to say all the things she wanted and needed to. Yet the fear of his rejecting her, of losing him a second time, kept a thick knot in her throat. She couldn’t tell from his expression what he wanted to say or what he wanted.
They passed the town, the wealthy suburbs, hit the coast road. Less than five minutes later he turned in at a private airstrip. A silver Lear sat on the runway, stairs pulled up to the open door. A dark haired man stood in the doorway. Garrett drove the car right on the tarmac to the steps.
“What on earth-?”
“Just a private place to talk,” he assured her.
That was a lie. She could see it in his eyes. But the plane and location were so mystifying that she decided to just wait him out, see what he was up to.
Garrett climbed out of the car and spoke to the man who descended from the plane-Emma thought she heard the guy was called Doug. Then Garrett came back for her.
“This is my driver from New York, Emma. I have to trade this set of wheels for another.”
It seemed even more mystifying that he’d be fussing with car or business problems at this precise moment, but she went along. The minute she stepped out, Doug immediately climbed in and took off with the car. Which was fine. Only there wasn’t another vehicle in sight.
Garrett motioned her toward the plane. “I know it looks crazy. But it’s the one place in the universe where I can guarantee that no one, absolutely no one, will either interrupt or find us.”
She never saw nerves in his expression, his posture, yet something about him was so completely different that it finally registered: he was scared. Damn near too scared to breathe. At least, to breathe normally.
She climbed the steps ahead of him and ducked inside. She’d been in private planes all her life, but not this specific Lear. The inside had been customized to resemble a living room. The couches and easy chairs had seat belts, but otherwise, the white leather furnishings and polished cherry could have been in any comfortable den. Once they were inside, out of the bright sunlight, and she was finally completely alone with him, she whirled around. It was all she could take of mystifying mysteries and waiting.
“I was wrong, Garrett,” she whispered.
“No. Not you. I was the one who was wrong.”
She shook her head. “You assumed that money mattered to me. I wanted to deny that from here to Poughkeepsie. But when I looked at my life, really looked, I realized you had every reason to make that assumption.” She gulped, then spilled more out. “I’ve had everything I ever wanted. Just took it for granted. I’ve been spoiled.”
“No, you haven’t, Em. Everywhere I look, you’re giving something to others-”
“And I love giving. But it’s been easy for me, Garrett. Easy for me to keep taking handouts from my parents because I always had the excuse of the trust fund coming in. But the reality was that it was easy to spend, easy to live exactly how I wanted to live. I guess it should have been obvious to me, but a woman almost thirty who’s never lived within her means is darn spoiled. From your viewpoint, I’d be amazed if you hadn’t seen me as selfish.”
Finally that calm, quiet expression in his face seemed to crack. Suddenly his dark eyes looked liquid and naked, raw with vulnerability and something else. “Emma, you are positively the least selfish person I know.”
“Garrett, I’m trying to say that I understand. Why you thought I might have…pursued…you, knowing there was a threat to my inheritance. I realize now that you had every reason to think of me as materialistic-”
“Stop.” He scrabbled a hand through his hair. “I admit it, Emma. I did think that-for a short period of time. Where you saw that judgment as an insult, I just thought of it as life. The practical way people are in real life. But then I did some soul-searching, too. And realized that growing up, all the values I saw stemmed from money. No one in my family made a choice that didn’t include money. Value-all value-was defined by money.”
“I understand.”
“No. You can’t. It was a knee-jerk reaction for me to respond that way. I didn’t want you to need me only because of money. I didn’t want you to believe I gave a damn about your money, either. I just wanted there to be an
Emma jolted in shock when a stranger showed up in the cockpit door. She hadn’t realized anyone else was on the plane. The gray-haired man raised a hand in greeting, then said quickly, “We’ve been cleared for takeoff, Mr. Keating. Five minutes.” He turned, pulled the plane’s door shut then disappeared back into the cockpit after sealing that door closed, too.
Emma shot startled eyes at Garrett.
“Aw, hell,” he said. “If I were a knight in shining armor, I could pull this off the way it should be. But I’m not, Em. This is the thing-I can have you back before work tomorrow if you need to be, but there’s somewhere I want
