Daring Dylan (The Billionaire Brotherhood Book 2) (10 page)

She
disconnected before Dylan could say goodbye. He slumped deeper into the
overstuffed chair. She sounded fine, but that weight gain couldn’t be good.
Maybe he should call Linc and nose around. Or maybe not. Natalie wouldn’t thank
him for interfering. Of course, a medical problem sounded like Gracie’s area of
expertise. He could ask her opinion.

A thump
outside the house took Dylan to one of the windows. Pulling the drapes open, he
found Gracie perched precariously on top of an extension ladder, washing the
panes of glass.

Just the
sight of her, engrossed in her task, tongue peeking out, perspiration beading
her face and creating a damp spot between her breasts brightened his day. She
moved from one window to the next until she disappeared from his view.

Damn
.

Driving
into town, Dylan wondered what in the hell he thought he was doing. When he’d
decided to come to East Langden and investigate, the plan had been to discredit
Clayton. But in fact, the only thing Dylan knew how to investigate was an
interesting stock tip. He’d assumed he could come in and snoop around without
drawing much attention, but his presence in this small coastal community was
about as subtle as a hurricane.

He
considered the bits of information he’d gleaned from Gracie the night before.
David Collier had been Lana Harris’s cousin as well as Clayton’s guardian. The
good doctor hadn’t seemed eager to help, but he was a reasonable starting
point.

At
breakfast that morning, Mrs. Lattimer had passed along the news that her
son-in-law had suffered a heart attack the year before. Only recently had he
returned to work on a limited basis. Clayton had been all set to join a
practice in Boston. But with David in failing health and the town in need of
more than one physician, Clayton had agreed to handle David’s practice until
another partner could be recruited.

Dylan
turned onto a tidy street a block off Main and parked in a space in front of
David’s office. Behind a sliding window in the empty waiting room, a
no-nonsense female in stiff white cotton took Dylan’s measure.

“I’d like
to see Dr. Collier.” He flashed the disarming grin that usually worked to his
advantage.

“He isn’t
in yet, and he isn’t taking new patients.” Attila the Nurse appeared unphased
by the show-stopping grin. “Would you like to make an appointment to see Dr.
Harris?”

The thought
of allowing Clayton near him with pointed or sharp instruments was enough to
give him a case of hives. “It’s personal. Would you ask Dr. Collier to call
me?”

Dylan was
determined not to retreat, and the nurse seemed just as reluctant to relent.
Before a victor in the mental power struggle emerged, the older doctor strolled
in from the back of the building. Dylan detected a flicker of resignation cross
his normally expressionless face. Attila stood in the old man’s presence.

Dylan
cleared his throat. “Good morning, Doctor. Could you spare me a few minutes?”

The doctor
looked at his watch, and then at his sentry.

“You’re to
meet with the mayor in fifteen minutes,” she warned, taking a seat behind the
desk.

“This won’t
take long, Ethel. Let me know when he arrives.”

David
turned and exited. The nurse grudgingly gave Dylan permission to follow.

The doctor had
settled into a leather chair in his office before Dylan entered. Chock-full of
books, files, plants, charts, and even a skeleton hanging in one corner, the
room also contained a massive oak desk and a couple of well-worn chairs. An
ancient yellow cat with a bandaged paw lay curled up in one of them. He could
picture Gracie here. Her big heart and hometown charm would fit right in with
the cranky doctor and wounded cat.

Dylan took
the vacant seat. Doubting David had much patience for small talk, Dylan hesitated
over a starting point for their conversation. “How long have you been
practicing in East Langden?”

“Long
time,” the doctor said, as chatty as ever.

“Did you
know my father and uncle?”

He
shrugged. “Some.”

“And you
were Lana Harris’s cousin?”

“Right.”
The old man clasped his hands on the desktop.

“Before her
disappearance, did she confide in you about her personal life?”

“No.”

Dylan again
cursed his under-developed interrogation skills but pressed onward. “Do you
know the names of any men she used to go out with?”

The doctor
raised and lowered his scraggly eyebrows, the facial equivalent of a shrug. At
last! A reaction.

“Where do
you think she went when she disappeared?”

His
expression went from poker-faced to frozen. “I don’t think she went anywhere.”

Wow, a
complete sentence. They were on a roll. “Then where is she?”

He paused
before answering. “I think she’s dead.”

“Why do you
think so?”

Another
pause. “She never came back.”

Shifting in
his seat, Dylan thumped his foot against the adjacent chair leg, disturbing the
marmalade cat. Green eyes blinked open and stared up at him. He reached out to
pet it, but the cat preferred otherwise. It gingerly got to its feet then
stepped stiffly onto the desk and parked its rump beside David’s clasped hands.
The doctor’s absent stroking between the cat’s ears transformed the animal into
a purring machine.

Watching
the doctor with this ancient feline, Dylan noticed the gentleness in the old
man’s touch. His patients probably found his calm manner just as soothing and
relaxing as the cat. Dylan wondered if anyone else found his brevity as
annoying as he did.

“Do you
know who Clayton’s father is?” he asked, weary of the game.

David’s
hand smoothed rhythmically along the cat’s spine. “No.”

Dylan ground
his teeth in frustration. “Would you tell me if you did?”

The doctor
gave Dylan a long, undecipherable look. “If it would help Clay.”

Tired of
bashing his head against this brick wall, Dylan decided to take one more shot
before leaving. “Do you know anything that would help?”

David
closed his eyes and nodded. “I know that Lana’s house was paid for.”

Dylan’s
eyebrows shot upward. “What?”

“After she
disappeared, I found the deed in her name, along with a letter from a
Connecticut law firm. She didn’t make enough at the beauty shop to pay off a
house.”

“Do you
remember the name of the firm?” Dylan prodded.

“Latham,
Benning, and Brown.”

Bile rose
up from Dylan’s stomach, but he squelched it. Dwight Latham had been his
father’s personal lawyer. Not that that fact alone meant anything. He’d
probably had thousands of clients. Still, Dylan couldn’t deny the connection.

“I’ll look
into it,” he said, standing. “Thank you for seeing me.”

Dismissing
him without a glance, David scooped up the cat and placed it in his lap. He
lifted the animal’s injured paw and began unwrapping the gauze.

Before
stepping out the door, Dylan turned back in a move that was probably more like
Inspector Clouseau than Poirot, but still. “One more question. I understand you
were the one to find my father’s body after his death. What can you tell me
about that?”

The cat
yelped suddenly and dove to the floor. David’s jaw clenched. “Nothing that
wasn’t in the report I gave to the police.”

“I’d like
to hear the details from you.”

“I doubt I
remember anything new after all this time.”

Dylan
persisted. “Is it true that you and my father were friends?”

“Acquaintances.”

“You were
the company doctor for Old Maine Furniture.”

David
pursed his lips. “Yes.”

“What were
you doing—”

“Excuse me,
Doctor,” said a voice from behind Dylan. “The mayor’s here.”

A trip to
the county court-house fifty miles away revealed that Lana Harris’s Cordial
Street property was paid for the year Clayton was born.

Dylan
pondered the significance of that fact while tracing the whereabouts of Horace
Whitherspoon, the previous owner of the house. Unfortunately, Horace had died
ten years after the sale.

A call to
Latham, Benning, and Brown revealed Dwight Latham had passed away over a year
ago. Latham’s son assured him the firm would cooperate as much as they could
within the confines of attorney-client privilege. Meaning they wouldn’t
cooperate at all. He called Uncle Arthur to see if he could smooth the way, but
the senator was in a meeting.

Dylan’s
next hope hinged on the realtor having some recollection of the transaction,
but he struck out there, too. The realtor had retired to Phoenix three summers
ago.

Even though
Dylan had expected discrediting Clayton to be a no-brainer, the idea of sending
for the detective his mother had hired was starting to take on new appeal.

On a
separate and more aggravating issue, no one in East Langden was available to help
Dylan with the renovation of his cabin. They all claimed to be booked up with
the Spring Blossom Festival, an event that obviously required extensive
carpentry and full-scale participation of the local citizenry.

Dylan
reconsidered Uncle Arthur’s offer to send laborers up from Connecticut
immediately, but rejected it. If the locals decided to cooperate, they’d be an
invaluable source of information. He didn’t want to risk pissing them off by
hiring outsiders.

For the
second day in a row, Dylan drove back to Liberty House in defeat. After parking
his rental car beside the garage, he went around back to see if Gracie was
still washing windows. All of the panes of glass sparkled in the sunlight, and
the ladder was gone. To locate her, Dylan followed the sound of MacDuff’s bark.

He
discovered her planting a border of flowers along the garden path. The Scottie
bounded about, the end of his leash looped around a bench leg. A wheelbarrow
containing a flat of plants and a bag of potting soil sat nearby. A garden hose
curled beside Gracie’s knee and emitted a thin stream of water.

The
afternoon sun shone with unusual firepower for a spring day in Maine. Gracie’s
skin glowed pink around the edges of her tank top. Pausing to push the hair off
her forehead with her wrist, she stretched upward with an arch of her back. The
innocently erotic gesture left Dylan’s mouth watering.

The sudden
surge of interest annoyed him. “You’re getting sunburned.”

She spun
around at the sound of his voice. Her knee came down on the hose. The plastic
tube undulated like an angry snake. Its nozzle spit water onto her face and
chest.

“Well,
shoot.” Moving her knee off the hose, she pulled the soaked material away from
her skin. “Why is it that every time I’m around you I end up getting wet?”

And just
like that, Dylan got hard. He rejected his first six responses. Any one of them
was likely to earn him a slap in the face. “Basic chemistry?”

She
scrunched her nose in puzzlement for a moment and then her eyes widened. “Not
that kind of wet.”

Her
grinned. “You need a towel?”

“No,
thanks. The water feels good, and the sun will dry me off soon enough.” Turning
back to her task, she picked up a trowel and a pink flower.

“People
were planting those all over town.” He came to stand beside her.

“They’re
begonias. It’s this year’s spring blossom.”

“For the
annual festival?”

“Yep. It’s
always the weekend before Memorial Day. It used to be just an ice-cream social
for the town, but then someone came up with the idea of having a full-blown
event.”

She worked
as she talked, digging, planting, pressing the soil, scooting down a couple of
inches, and starting the process again. Tendrils of hair escaped her French
braid and curled on her neck and cheeks. Bees buzzed in and out of the colorful
perennials, and a hummingbird sipped at a feeder suspended from the gazebo.
Small birds flapped and chirped in a birdbath a few feet away while gulls
soared high off in the distance.

Dylan felt
a prickle in his brain and recognized this as one of those sensory moments that
would stay tattooed on his memory forever. A freeze frame in the video of life
that included feelings and scents, emotions and sounds. A déjà vu scene of
perfect clarity that he would revisit in the years to come.

He had a
few other mental snapshots that stayed in his brain. His father, windblown and
sunburned, on their boat the summer before he died. His mother engrossed in a
children’s theater performance of
The
Nutcracker Suite
. Natalie with her newborn son. Uncle Arthur being sworn
into office. At the peak of Mount Everest with The Brotherhood.

But those
instances all involved significant people in his life. The idea of retaining
the simple image of Gracie planting flowers made him squirm.

Looking up,
she caught him staring. “You might make yourself useful. If the terms of your
trust fund preclude getting dirt under your fingernails, there’s another pair
of gloves by the wheelbarrow.”

Dylan took
exception to her tone. Determined to dig the biggest and best hole she’d ever
seen, he surprised them both by dropping to his knees beside her. “I’ve gotten
my hands dirty before.”

He plunged
the trowel into the soil, putting some muscle behind the motion. She leaned
back on her heels to watch and admire. “I want to ask you about my sister’s
pregnancy.”

“I’m not an
obstetrician, you know.”

At the look
of interest on her face, he dug deeper. “But you’re a doctor, right? And a
woman. And I’m worried.”

“Then she
should see her own doctor.”

“She did,
but I want another opinion,”

“I won’t be
able to determine anything from a third-party consultation…” Gracie shrugged.
“Tell me what her problem is.”

“She’s
about eight months pregnant. Until recently, she was skinny as a rail with a
beach ball for a stomach. Now she’s having a sudden weight gain and lots of swelling.”
He enlarged the hole’s circumference as Gracie’s fascination increased. “Does
that sound normal?”

“Could be,”
she said. “Or it could be an indication of certain conditions that are common
in the last trimester.”

“Like
what?” Even this little bit of activity managed to release some of his pent-up
frustration. He dug with increased vigor.

Gracie
shook her head. “It’s impossible and unethical to make a diagnosis without
seeing her. I assume she’s getting pre-natal care from a reputable
obstetrician.”

“Yes, but—”

“Wait a
minute.” A gloved hand gripped his forearm.

He looked
up from his task. “What?”

“That’s
some hole.” She dislodged a plant from its plastic tray and held up the
one-inch root ball for him to see.

Maybe he
had been a tad enthusiastic. “Too big?”

“Not if
you’re planning on burying a body in there.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement.

“Just
yours.” He pushed her off balance and dumped her into the crater.