[Kate's Boys 04] - Travis's Appeal Read online

  Another vague movement of Susan’s shoulders told Shana what the woman thought of her protest. “Believe what you want. But I’d check that safety deposit box if I were you.” And then a malicious smile curved her lips. “So, ‘daughter,’ I guess I’ll see you in court.” When Shana stared at her, stunned, Susan mocked her. “There’s no way in hell that you’re going to get what legally belongs to me.”

  Travis was still holding his business card in his hand. Turning around to face him, Susan plucked the card from his fingers, tucking it into the bosom of her blouse. With a smug, superior expression, she patted it into place.

  “You’ll be hearing from me, lawyer-boy,” she promised. Turning on her heel, Susan walked out of the house. Nothing but the sound of her high heels clicking across the marble disturbed the silence.

  Shana stood there for a long moment after the front door closed. She was numb.

  Concerned, Travis tried to bring her around. He put his arm around her. “Shana—”

  It was as if suddenly a switch had been thrown and she came to life. Shana shrugged away his arm, but her eyes remained unfathomable as she raised them to his face.

  “Is it true?” she demanded. “What Susan just said, is it true? Did my father—did Shawn—” Damn, she didn’t even know what to call him. If he wasn’t her father, then he was her grandfather, but she was having a hard time thinking of him that way, reconciling what she’d just learned with what she’d always believed. “Did he tell you that Susan was my mother?”

  It was here. The moment he’d been instinctively dreading ever since Shawn had confided in him. Damn it, old man, why didn’t you listen to me and tell her right away?

  Where did he start? How did he make amends and still have her understand why he’d done what he had? Again, he tried to draw her into his arms.

  “Shana—”

  Shaken, feeling betrayed and more abandoned than she’d ever thought possible, Shana took a step back, keeping out of his reach.

  “Answer me,” she ordered, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. “Did he tell you that Susan was my mother?”

  If he said “yes,” would she let him explain? One look at her face told him the answer to that. But still he tried to calm her. “Shana—”

  There was an apology in his voice.

  And then she knew.

  Shana sucked in her breath. It felt as if she’d just been shot. She could have cried.

  “He told you. It’s true. Susan is my mother.” She shut her eyes. The pain only increased. “Oh God.” Opening them again, she saw that he was about to enfold her in his arms. She couldn’t bear to have him touch her. He’d lied to her. By not saying anything, he’d lied to her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she cried angrily. “Don’t you think I had a right to know?”

  “It wasn’t my secret to tell,” he answered simply, praying she’d understand. “Shawn was my client. Anything that he said to me in confidence had to remain that way.”

  She heard only one thing. “So you were loyal to him, but not me.”

  She was intelligent. She had to see the difference. “It’s not like that, Shana.”

  It was exactly like that, she thought angrily. Her eyes narrowed to slits.

  “Oh?” she retorted. “Then what is it like?” She didn’t wait for him to answer, even if he could. “You were sleeping with me, Travis. For God’s sake, you just proposed to me,” she shouted at him. “I thought that meant you cared about me.”

  That had nothing to do with his duty, didn’t she see that? For the first time since he’d made up his mind what he wanted to do with his life, he hated being a lawyer. “I did. I do—”

  “If you cared so much, why didn’t you tell?” she asked. “Why didn’t you warn me instead of letting me be hit right between the eyes? People who love each other look out for one another. They protect each other. They don’t let them walk through a minefield without at least giving them some kind of a warning.”

  If he could have played this out differently, he would have. He would have sold his soul to keep her from hurting like this. But all he could say in his defense was the truth. “Ethically, my hands were tied.”

  “Ethically?” Shana echoed in disbelief. “What about morally? What about me?” she demanded. Didn’t he care that her whole world had just been destroyed? That the very foundations had been shattered into little tiny pieces? “Did you laugh to yourself every time you heard me call him ‘Dad’?”

  “It wasn’t like that and you know it,” he insisted. “The moment he told me, I advised your father—your grandfather,” he amended, “to tell you.” He could see she didn’t believe him. “But he was afraid to. He’d promised his wife that he would never say anything to you about it, but that doesn’t mean that his conscience didn’t bother him. It did. He told me it did. And the longer he kept it from you, the more afraid he became that if the truth finally did come out, you wouldn’t forgive him for deceiving you.”

  Travis’s words did nothing to abate her anger. “That was his excuse, what was yours?” she asked.

  Now that he was living this dreaded moment, it was worse than he’d anticipated. He tried again to reason with her, to make her understand that he was shackled by the very rules he’d sworn to uphold.

  “Shana, I was his lawyer.”

  “And you were my lover,” she countered. And the latter was supposed to trump the former. “But I guess I see where your loyalty lies.” She took a breath. Her heart ached beyond belief. “No wonder no one likes lawyers.”

  He didn’t care about anyone else, he cared about her. “Shana—”

  She didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to hear excuses. Didn’t want to hear his voice. “Please leave,” she requested, her voice cold, distant.

  Travis was prepared to dig in. He needed to fix this before the damage hardened. “I don’t think you should be alone at a time like this.”

  The flat of her hand against his chest, she caught him by surprise as she pushed him back. “I don’t care what you think. Just go.” She looked at him, and she almost caved, but then she dug deep for resolve. “Now.”

  She was too angry, too hurt, to be reasoned with, Travis thought. He had no choice but to go. “All right,” he agreed.

  Travis left the house feeling worse than he could ever remember feeling.

  Chapter 14

  S hana hardly slept that night.

  Tossing and turning, she couldn’t find a place for herself, not in any position. She felt as if she was the victim of a one-two punch aimed straight to her gut. Her stomach physically ached and she felt lost, disoriented. Sick. She had no idea what to feel, what to think.

  It was awful enough to have lost her father once. But twice? Once to death and once to reality since he wasn’t really her father at all, but her grandfather. For the life of her, she couldn’t really say which left her more devastated.

  She’d grown up trusting him with her whole heart and soul. She would have bet her very life that he’d never lied to her.

  How could he have lied to her like that all these years? How could he not tell her that he was her grandfather instead of her father? She wouldn’t have loved him any the less for it. She wouldn’t have cared what he called himself. What she cared about was that he’d lied to her—and kept on lying, day in, day out.

  Could he have loved her at all and lied like that?

  And her mother, her mother was really her grandmother. What was she supposed to make of that?

  Up was down, black was white and nothing, nothing made sense anymore.

  Everything she thought she knew was a lie. The carefully crafted world she’d embraced was cracking apart on her, built on a foundation that didn’t exist, on a tissue of deceptions that broke apart and dissolved like snowflakes on the water.

  Who was she?

  Her mother, her real mother, hated her. She could see it in Susan’s eyes. Damn, how could she think of her as anything else but Susan after all this time? Susan, the
sister who never had any time for her.

  And then there was the biggest mystery of all. Her father. Her real father. Who was he? Did Susan even know? Was she ever going to find out?

  Did it even matter anymore?

  She was numb.

  Shana sat up in bed, hugging her knees to her chest. Too shell-shocked to even cry. Why hadn’t someone told her? Why hadn’t someone cared enough about her to tell her the truth? Or was she so insignificant to these people she’d spent her whole life loving that a lie served as much purpose as the truth?

  Travis.

  God, she’d actually thought she loved Travis. And that he loved her. What an idiot she was.

  Why hadn’t Travis told her the truth when he found out? Why had he gone along with this lie? Didn’t she matter enough even to him to deserve the truth? How could he align himself against her like that?

  Exhausted, Shana fell back against her bed. Grabbing her pillow, she hugged it to her and suddenly the flood-gates opened and the tears came again.

  She sobbed her heart out, feeling more alone than she ever had before in her life.

  She cried for a very long time, long after dusk, and then twilight crept into the room, followed by a moonless emptiness. Too exhausted to get up to turn on the light, she let the darkness blanket her. Praying for oblivion, Shana finally fell into a dreamless, restless sleep.

  Morning found her no better. She stumbled through a routine that had long been ingrained in her, going through the required motions to make herself presentable to the world. Showering, brushing her teeth, getting dressed.

  And somewhere in that time, she made up her mind what she needed to do.

  Within an hour, she was behind the wheel of her vehicle, driving to the suite of offices where her late father’s—no, her late grandfather’s lawyer, she amended, was located.

  God, but that was going to take forever to get used to, she thought gloomily. Even though she’d grown up thinking that the couple who raised her were old enough to be her grandparents instead of her parents, she’d come to accept their age as a badge of courage. She thought of them as two people who had ventured into territory normally reserved for the much younger, because God had blessed them with a child.

  Except that it wasn’t God, but Susan who’d “blessed” them, she thought darkly. Susan, who changed men as often as some people changed coffee filters.

  As she drove, moving in and out of traffic she hardly saw, Shana tried to remember if there ever had been even a single instance where Susan had behaved motherly.

  None came to mind.

  Instead, she remembered the snide remarks, the put-downs. But kind words? Those were so scarce, they were close to nonexistent. Mostly, if she and Susan interacted at all, she came away feeling that she was in the older woman’s way. An annoyance Susan had just as soon ignore than speak to.

  Now she realized just how much of a hindrance she’d actually been.

  Tears started to form again and she silently upbraided herself. You’d think she would be completely out of tears after last night. She wasn’t going to cry about this, she ordered herself fiercely. Crying wouldn’t change anything. She just needed to adjust and move on. There were no other options.

  Because she had always been so organized, practically from birth, appreciating order and always striving to tie up loose ends, Shana thought it was only fair for her to inform Bryan why his firm’s services would no longer be needed. She realized that she should actually be telling Travis, but she just couldn’t make herself face him. It would be like ripping open her wound all over again. His part in this hurt her most of all. Because his loyalty should have been to her and it wasn’t.

  Which meant he really didn’t love her, no matter what he said yesterday, and she had just been fooling herself all along.

  A lot of that going on lately, Shana mocked herself, her hands all but maintaining a death grip on the steering wheel as she drove.

  Those strings she’d initially denounced were strangling her. That’s what she got for allowing herself to get tangled up in them.

  Bryan was on his feet, swiftly crossing to his door the moment he’d been informed by the head receptionist that Shana was here to see him.

  “Hold any calls,” he told the young woman at the central desk as he ushered Shana into his office. “I don’t want any interruptions,” he added firmly, in case there was any doubt in the matter.

  A soft sigh escaped Shana’s lips as the door closed behind her. She deliberately locked her knees in place and remained where she was, afraid to take a step. Afraid of faltering if she did.

  “I take it Travis told you.”

  “Not in so many words, but I know that there’s some kind of problem that’s come up.”

  Travis had been more closemouthed than ever when he’d seen him this morning, only mentioning that there might be a lawsuit over O’Reilly’s will in the offing.

  Bryan looked at the young woman who had managed to capture his son’s heart and saw the troubled expression in her eyes.

  “Judging by your face, it’s a big problem,” Bryan surmised. “Bigger than the suit.”

  Tired and preoccupied with the upheaval in her life, Bryan’s words initially didn’t make sense to her. “Suit?”

  “The lawsuit.” When she still continued to eye him blankly, he elaborated. “Your sister is contesting your father’s will. She says he wasn’t of sound mind and was coerced into practically cutting her out.”

  “Oh, that.” Shana moved her shoulders in a vague shrug.

  That was the least of it, she thought. It wasn’t even part of the big picture that tortured her.

  And then suddenly, she played back Bryan’s words in her head. He’d referred to Susan as her sister and Shawn as her father. She was so accustomed to those labels that she hadn’t realized the man was wrong.

  Which meant that he didn’t know.

  Hadn’t Travis told him? “My father?” she echoed, looking at Bryan uncertainly.

  He saw no reason for her confusion. “Yes.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she studied Bryan’s face. Was he being polite? Lying? She was no longer a good judge of that. “Then you don’t know?”

  “Know what?” he asked quietly.

  “That Shawn O’Reilly wasn’t my father, he was my grandfather. And Susan is my mother.” Bryan seemed genuinely surprised by this revelation. “So, Travis didn’t tell you?”

  “No,” he answered, thinking that the news explained a lot—about a great many things. “And he wouldn’t have been able to if this was something that Shawn had told him in confidence.” For a moment, he stopped being a lawyer and switched to being a father. “I take it that this is the ‘something’ that has you so upset?”

  He was being kind. She didn’t want kind. Kind undid her, creeping through all the barriers she’d set up and tearing them apart.

  “Wouldn’t you be in my place?”

  “Probably.” He could see that his admission surprised her. It was hard maintaining distance from a woman who reminded him of his daughter. “Here, why don’t you sit down?” Taking her arm, he gently led her to the sofa that was against the far wall.

  Shana sat down on the edge of the cushion, as if bracing herself to spring up at any moment. Bryan sensed the aura of tension around her. “I came to tell you that I wouldn’t be needing your firm’s services any longer.”

  “I think you might,” he contradicted. For now, he attempted to appeal to her logical side. “Given the lawsuit.”

  Shana waved the words away. “I don’t care about the lawsuit, Mr. Marlowe. Susan—my mother—whoever she is,” she said in mounting frustration, “she can have it all.”

  “I don’t think that’s what your father—your grandfather,” Bryan softly corrected himself, hoping that her emotional turmoil wouldn’t cause her to do something rash, “would have wanted. Otherwise, he would have specified it in his will. I think he felt that of the two of you, you were the one most qualified to carry
on where he left off. You were the one who appreciated the sacrifices that he’d made to build up the restaurant. He probably felt that Susan would sell it the first chance she got,” he said pointedly, “and then squander the money. Judging from past experiences that seemed to be her usual way of operating.”

  Shana’s jaw hardened. She knew it. “So Travis did tell you.”

  Bryan shook his head. “Only what was common knowledge.” He looked at her closely, remembering how distressed Travis had seemed the other week, wrestling with the dilemma. “If Mr. O’Reilly told him something in strictest confidence,” Bryan repeated pointedly, “Travis was ethically bound to keep it that way. Private. Breaking that oath for any reason without leave to do so could have gotten him disbarred. Your grandfather trusted him.”

  Bryan saw tears shimmering in her eyes as she looked at him defiantly. “And what about my trust?” she asked. “Didn’t that count?”

  “It counts,” Bryan allowed. “But it should only be shaken if you discovered that Travis didn’t keep his vow not to repeat what was told to him in confidence.” He got down to the crux of that matter that he sensed she, in her hurt state, was missing. “Because once a man breaks his word, then how do you know if you can trust him the next time? There’s always that nagging doubt that he’ll break it again.”

  Shana laughed shortly. “Forgive me, Mr. Marlowe, but that’s lawyer double-talk.”

  “Is it?” Bryan challenged, his voice low and all the more powerful. “Think about it, Shana. Change the sequence around for a moment,” he suggested. “Just for now, put yourself in your grandfather’s place with this big secret to protect. What if it was you with a secret and you, for whatever reason, had confided it to your lawyer. To Travis,” he added for emphasis, underscoring his son’s professional capacity. “A secret that, once known, would have an effect on your grandfather’s life. An effect you might be afraid of it having. How would you have felt if Travis, once he was apprised of this secret, had turned around and told your grandfather?”

  Shana pressed her lips together. “You’re twisting it.”