Authors: Norah Wilson
CHAPTER 17
Hayden stretched luxuriously as she watched Boyd head to the bathroom to deal with the condom. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so blissed-out.
She had orgasms. Regularly. The mechanics of arousal, sex, and orgasm were no mystery. She was very good at taking care of herself. She owned a vibrator and knew how to use it. But there was just no comparison between that and sex with a talented, attractive partner you could trust.
And she did trust Boyd.
No, he wasn’t the kind of guy who hung around long. Even if Josh hadn’t bemoaned his twin’s chances of ever finding a woman he wanted to settle with, she’d have known that much. It was there for anyone to see. No doubt a lot of women had seen it and taken it as a challenge, imagining that they would be the ones to bring him to heel.
In that respect, he was the anti-Josh. But that’s what made him perfect for her. Or rather, perfect for right now.
So no, she couldn’t “trust” him to hang around after his investigation was done. But she didn’t want him to. She
did
trust him with her body, her person. She trusted him to be a considerate lover and to be discreet. Just as it was ingrained in him to walk on the traffic side of the sidewalk, he would treat her with respect.
And best of all, she liked him. They were connected too. Their love of Josh, their grief over his loss. Though they’d only known each other briefly, she felt as though she’d known him much longer.
“You’re looking pretty pleased with yourself, Dr. Walsh.”
She looked up to see Boyd approaching the bed. He was still naked, and she caught her breath at the sight of him.
“Do I?” She bit her lip. “I guess I am at that.”
He picked up the coverlet from the bottom of the bed and crawled in beside her. After positioning a pillow behind his head, he drew her close and tossed the throw over them.
“Good idea,” she said, snuggling into his chest, her head resting on his left arm. “I was starting to feel the chill.”
He made no reply, just brought his left hand up to stroke her hair. She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the moment. The lazy caress sent waves of pleasure shimmering through her. Not arousing—it would take some time before her system rebooted enough for that—but sensual.
Eventually, though, as the minutes ticked by with no sound but for the slowing beat of his heart beneath her ear, she began to worry. She tipped her head back to look at him, catching a pensive look on his face. Her stomach plummeted.
Was he having second thoughts about what they’d done? Was he wondering how to extract himself from the situation gracefully? Might as well be direct. He’d give her a straight answer.
She drew back so she could look at him. “What are you thinking about?”
“The damned telephone numbers.”
She almost wilted with relief.
“I know.” He grimaced. “Not very romantic talk, is it? It’s just where my mind goes, every moment it can. The investigation.”
“What about the phone numbers?”
He pulled her back against him. “So far, the ones we’ve chased down are pretty much the same players Morgan identified on his own. Obstetricians. Old ones, new ones who’ve taken over old practices. Most of them Morgan’s already talked to, and the others he’s planning to interview. The ones he’s already talked to all readily admitted meeting with Josh, but none of them could help him with his quest. Only two had records of identical twin boys born around the time we were.”
“I presume Morgan followed those up?”
“Yeah. One set of twins was Asian and, with the other set, one child had hydrocephalus, which led to cognitive developments.”
“Oh, poor thing.” She put her hand on his chest. “It must have been from injury sustained during childbirth. If it was congenital, both twins would have had it.”
He covered her hand with his, stroking it. “Yes, an unfortunate complication of birth, the doctor said.”
“But there are still numbers to explore?”
“Oh, yeah. But so far, we’re getting stuff like the car dealer and the Running Room. Restaurant take-out numbers. A whole bunch of them were calls he made in the course of his work at the newspaper—he didn’t carry a separate cell for work.”
“You’re scared you’re going to run all the numbers and come up with nothing?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “As soon as I saw there was nothing particularly helpful in the last couple of weeks’ calls, it’s been hard to sustain much optimism.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“You say Morgan has been chasing down obstetricians. Has he been looking at GPs too?”
His hand, which had been stroking hers, stilled. “I know deliveries by family doctors weren’t that unusual back then, but a multiple birth? I thought that automatically warranted an obstetrician.”
“It does. I’m sure it did thirty-five years ago too. But—”
“But if they were trying to keep the whole thing off the record, so to speak, why not use a GP? Or a midwife for that matter.”
“I don’t think there was a licensed midwifery program in New Brunswick at the time,” she said. “But yeah, sure. It might have been a home birth attended by either a doctor or someone qualified—or holding themselves out as qualified—to attend deliveries.” She tipped her head back to look at him. “Omigod. Josh might have been thinking in that direction. It was months ago, but he did ask me about midwifery back then. I told him they didn’t—and still don’t—have hospital privileges. We do have legislation, and I imagine privileges will come, but those births are and have been exclusively home births.”
“That’s good! Josh had probably exhausted the ob-gyns and turned his attention to the alternatives.”
She could feel the excitement in him. He was practically vibrating with it. It made her happy to see the discouragement banished. “I hope it was a GP. They’d probably be easier to find thirty-five years later than an unregulated midwife.”
“That’s where I’ll start,” he declared. “Morgan can chase the rest of the baby doctors, and I’ll start running down the family docs.”
“That’s a pretty sizeable pool,” she cautioned.
“I just need a way of figuring out who was practicing here when we were born, then figuring out where they are—if they’re still around, if they moved on, if they’re dead. I’ll start with the ones who are still here, and I’ll reach out to them.”
“Won’t that take a long time?”
“Not necessarily.”
She bit her lip. “It sounds like a pretty big job. And remember, Josh was an investigative journalist and it took him the better part of what?” She did the mental calculation. “Six months to get to the stage where you think he had a major breakthrough.”
“I may have mentioned this, but in my real life, I’m a detective.”
She rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t casting aspersions. But you need to explain the fast-track scenario. How can you get to the answers any faster than Josh did?”
“I figure out who he was likely to have talked to and visit them. Give them the hard candy.”
“Uh . . . hard candy?”
“Yeah. You know, I put on my stern face and say I know they talked to Josh about the circumstances of our birth and adoption, and they’d be well advised to tell me what they know before I find out through other means.”
She frowned. “What if they say they don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, that they never heard of Josh or never talked to him?”
He shrugged. “I’ll say something like, ‘I guess we’ll see when I get through all his notes and the boxes upon boxes of research records he left.’ Then I’ll watch them to see what they do.”
“The imaginary boxes of research records.”
“Naturally.”
Suddenly, her mind was awash with possibilities, none of them good. Yes, he might shake some information loose with that approach, but, holy crap, how much consternation it would cause. And how much danger would he set afoot?
“Boyd, that could be dangerous. If someone did kill Josh over his investigation—”
“Believe me, I know,” he conceded. “It could well be dangerous. But I can’t see any other way.”
She threw her legs over the edge of the bed and reached for her T-shirt from where it lay on the floor. She heard him sit up, felt his eyes on her as she pulled her shirt over her head.
“I can take care of myself, Hayden. And unlike Josh, I’m going in with eyes wide-open.”
She reached for her jeans, pulled them on, then found herself holding her panties and bra.
“Josh would do it for me,” he said, his voice soft. “If our positions were reversed, he wouldn’t quit digging until he knew the answers. Even if it was dangerous.”
Shit, shit, shit.
He was right and she knew it.
She sighed. “I know.” She tossed the underwear on the bed and sat back down. “I’m just unnerved.”
“C’mere.” He leaned back again and held out his arms. She went into them.
Instead of trying to kindle desire again, he just kissed her forehead and snuggled her close. His hand resumed the stroking of her hair, but she couldn’t settle into it this time. She pulled away.
“We should get started.”
“We?” He went up on his elbows.
“Yeah,
we
. I let Josh exclude me from his search. I don’t know whether I could have helped or not, but I could have tried, at least. I won’t let you do the same.” She got off the bed again and started pacing. “I’m plugged into the health system better than you are, and I’ll do whatever I can to help, as long as it doesn’t involve divulging personal information.”
He got up, found his jeans, and hauled them on. Even as preoccupied as she was, she couldn’t help but admire that fine butt and broad, muscular back.
“That would be fantastic.” He scooped up his shirt and put it on. “Maybe I’ll have another look from the legal end, although there’s precious little to work with.”
“That’s right. The legal part was very murky, wasn’t it? That whole thing about the birth certificates not matching up with any registered births or adoption records.”
“Murky would be a walk in the park. Unfortunately, it’s more like impenetrable blackout.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe I could track down the Fredericton lawyer’s secretary or something.”
“The one who handled the adoption from this end?”
“Yeah. We got his name from the Ontario lawyer who acted for my parents.”
“Why not ask the lawyer himself? Unless . . . Oh, crap, he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Long dead, in fact. He perished in a fire that swept through his office one night when he’d been working late. This happened the very same year we were born. The theory was he got drunk, passed out with a lit cigarette in his hand. Of course, all his records were destroyed in the fire.”
“That sucks.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“What about the Ontario lawyer? Didn’t he have a file?”
“Absolutely, complete with an order of adoption and consent of our birth mother, I’m sure, but even if he weren’t retired and in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, he can’t just give that information out. You need a court order to unseal that stuff. Josh did get a court file number, but when he petitioned the court, they didn’t have corresponding records, or at least not that matched our case. Nor could the courts locate a file or record of any kind for that time frame involving twins by the name of Holbrook, our supposed surname at birth.”
“Unbelievable.”
“You can see why Josh concluded that it was an out-and-out illegal adoption, propped up by falsified records. It’s almost like someone from this end was working right from the get-go, from the very freakin’ minute we were born, to obscure the trail.”
She frowned. “Could it be that you were misdirected to Fredericton? Might the adoption have happened in another jurisdiction? Nova Scotia, maybe? Prince Edward Island?”
He shook his head. “Josh checked with vital statistics in every province and territory across the country, and nothing turned up. Probably because our name wasn’t really Holbrook.”
Oh, shit. Of course.
“Speaking of vital statistics, what about other sets of identical twins born on your birthday? Have you checked into that?”
“Not the kind of information you can easily or legally draw out of the government records. It also presumes that whoever faked the birth certificates stopped at inventing the surname. If someone was that determined to erase the trail, they probably messed with the birth date too.”
“So if neither you nor Josh believed anything written on those birth certificates, why was Josh so convinced you were born here?”
“The one thing he did believe was that the lawyer who died in the fire here was the one who handled the adoption. Edward Bowlin, Esquire, had a reputation as a bit of a fixer, which fit with a shady adoption deal. I’m inclined to agree.”
“This is incredible,” she said. “I had no idea. I mean, yes, I knew there were irregularities. I knew the private adoption records couldn’t be located and unsealed, which is how most kids go about finding their birth parents. But either Josh glossed over that part or I wasn’t paying very close attention, because I had no clue it was so crazy and convoluted.”
“I’m sure it was the former. He didn’t want people thinking our adoptive parents participated in an illegal adoption.”
She chewed her lip a moment. “Did they?”
“Not knowingly.” His answer came without hesitation. “The deal was handled between the lawyers, as far as Josh could tell.”
“The deal?” She slanted him a look. “That sounds very businesslike.”
“That’s exactly what it was, a deal. A transaction. Frank and Ella McBride had a desperate need and the means to pay, and our mother clearly had the product.”
Hayden hoped that wasn’t the case, but she knew that adoptions like that did happen.
“I presume your parents must have known what Josh was doing here. I mean, he’d have to explain why he’d leave a national newspaper to come work for a tiny local one?”
“Yeah, they knew.”
“Did they mind?”
“Not at all. They totally supported him. Of course, they didn’t know it was probably illegal. Josh just told them there was some bureaucratic bungling involved.”
That made sense. People were quick to believe in the incompetence of civil servants. “You seem to know quite a lot. I thought you and Josh didn’t talk about this stuff.”