Now, as he watched her gasp with each bite of Rosa’s lethally hot salsa, he was just as fascinated by her passion for the spicy food. Her eyes watered. Sweat beaded on her brow. He thought she had never been more appealing, though he wondered if she was going to survive the meal.
“They have a milder version,” he said, taking pity on her.
She waved off the offer. “This is delicious,” she said as she grabbed her glass of water and gulped most of it down before reaching for another chip and loading it with the salsa. “The best Mexican food I’ve ever had. I wonder why Erik never brought me here.”
Luke didn’t have an answer to that, but he couldn’t help being glad that they were sharing her first experience with Rosa’s Café, a place he’d always preferred to the fanciest restaurants in the state. Rosa, yet another of Consuela’s distant cousins, had been bossing him around since his first visit years before. Coming here felt almost more like coming home than going to White Pines. He was delighted that Jessie liked it.
In fact, he was discovering that he was captivated by her reactions to everything. It seemed to him that in many ways Jessie took a child’s innocent delight in all of her surroundings. Her responses to the simplest pleasures gave him a whole new perspective on the world, as well. Each time he was with her, his jaded heart healed a bit. Each time she chipped away at his resolve not to get more deeply involved with his brother’s widow.
Remembering his resolve reminded him at last of why he’d broken his vow never to return to White Pines. He had come not simply to see Jessie again and indulge his fantasies about her, but to ply her for information about her past. It was a mission from which he couldn’t afford to be distracted. He wanted to give her the gift of her family before he walked out of her life.
“It doesn’t bother you at all, does it?” she asked, snagging his attention.
“What?”
“The food.”
“Why? Because it’s hot? I grew up on Mexican food. Consuela put jalapeño peppers in everything. I’m pretty sure she ground them up and put them in our baby food.”
Jessie grinned. “No wonder you’re tough as nails. This stuff will definitely put hair on your chest, as my daddy used to say.”
There it was, Luke thought. The perfect opening. “Tell me about your family,” he suggested. “Did you always know you were adopted?”
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t have a clue until I was a teenager. One night I was talking about a friend who was adopted and who’d decided to search for her birth mother, and my mother suddenly got up and ran from the room. I had no idea what I’d said to upset her so. Daddy looked at me like he’d caught me torturing a kitten or something and went rushing after her. I sat there filled with guilt without knowing why I should feel that way.”
Luke couldn’t begin to imagine her confusion and hurt. “Is that when they told you?”
“Later that night. I’d cleaned up the supper they’d barely touched and done the dishes when they finally came into the kitchen and told me to sit down. They looked so sad, but stoic, you know what I mean?”
Luke nodded. He’d actually seen a similar look in her face the day before, when he’d sent her away. He wondered how much of this she’d shared with Erik. A pang of pure jealousy sliced through him, and he cursed himself for being a selfish bastard, for wanting more of her than his brother had had.
Oblivious to his reaction, Jessie went on. “Anyway, they told me then that they had adopted me when I was only a few days old. They said they didn’t know anything at all about my birth mother, that they hadn’t wanted to know. They’d made sure the records were sealed and never looked back.”
“You must have felt as if your whole world had been turned on its ear,” Luke suggested.
“Worse, I think. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t who I’d always thought I was—Dancy and Grace Garnett’s daughter. It was that they had lied to me for all those years. If you knew how Dancy and Grace preached about honesty above all else, you’d know how betrayed I felt when I learned the truth. It was as though they weren’t who they’d claimed to be, either.” She looked at him. “Am I making any sense here?”
“Absolutely.” Since she seemed to be relieved to be sharing the story with him, Luke remained silent, hoping that would encourage her to go on.
“I begged them to let me find my biological mother, but Grace started crying and Dancy got that same accusing look on his face again.”
Even now, she sounded guilt ridden, Luke noticed. “Do you realize that when you talk about them in casual conversation, you refer to them as Mother and Father, but just now, talking about that time, you instinctively started calling them by their first names?”
She seemed startled by the observation. “I suppose that’s true. Like I said, I started thinking about them differently then.” She gave him an imploring look. “Please, believe me when I say that no one could have had more wonderful parents. I loved them with all my heart. I grieved when they died. But something changed that night. I didn’t want it to, but it did.”
“Not because they were your adoptive parents, but because they’d lied.”
She nodded. “The very thing they’d always told me was one of the worst sins a person could commit.”
Luke felt a shudder roll through him and wondered if
