“Who are you and what do you want?” Jennifer asked him, thinking it a pretty good guess that he hadn’t popped up out of the blue to help her with her unhappy daughter.
Maybe Ryan was right about what he had said that morning. He’d tried to convince her to keep working out of the house so that they could, um, pursue their personal interests as well as her business interests. He had also said she had bitten off a little more than she could chew. She sat up straighter, merely thinking the words making her feel combative. His overprotective tendencies both endeared him to her and irritated her. And those tendencies had quadrupled with the birth and his adoption of little Annie.
Of course Ryan was easily sidetracked if need be. A scrap of sexy lingerie and he was putty in her hands.
Jennifer’s mind began to drift to all things sexy and hot but she forced herself to concentrate on the matter at hand.
“I’m Zach Letterman,” the visitor said with a mid-western accent, a smile softening his striking features as he looked into Annie’s face.
“Is there another agency you could recommend?” Mrs. McCabe was saying insistently, making no secret that she found the intrusion insulting. “Someone who can handle the type of case I’m proposing?”
Letterman, Letterman, Jennifer thought, trying to place the name.
Another telephone line rang, only adding to the general state of chaos. She sighed and rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McCabe, but as you can see, I’m very busy right now. If you’d like to leave your card, I’ll contact you later with any possibilities I come up with.”
Jennifer’s gaze was again pulled to the stranger.
He quietly cleared his throat. “Lily recommended me to you.”
“Lily?”
“The job opening?” He grinned at her and she widened her eyes at the megawatt smile. “Looks like you could certainly use a hand around here.”
“Oh. Oh!” Jennifer nearly pushed the package of crackers from her desk in her rush to shake his hand. “You’re that Mr. Letterman. Lily’s cousin from Indiana. I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.” She checked her calendar. “Oh. Tomorrow is…well, today, isn’t it?”
She recalled the phone conversation she’d had with Lily last week. Lily Garrett Bishop and her brother Dylan Garrett had established Finders Keepers out of San Antonio, Texas, in honor of their great-grandmother Isabella Trueblood. Aside from being a good friend, Lily regularly sent work Jennifer’s way, doubling and sometimes tripling her workload. Her first case for Lily was also instrumental in her meeting and marrying her husband, Ryan. Lily had known Budnick and Morales Private Investigation desperately needed new blood and had recommended Zach Letterman to Jennifer.
And here he was now in the flesh…and what handsome flesh it was.
Mrs. McCabe slapped a postcard-sized piece of stiff paper filled with phone numbers onto the desk in front of Jennifer. “I expect to hear from you promptly with suggestions on who else I might consult.”
Jennifer made a face and forced herself to be polite.
“Mrs. Madison?”
The voice coming through the receiver nearly startled her, she’d been on hold for so long. Jennifer straightened the phone. “I’m still here.”
“Sorry to have taken so long, but someone misplaced your test results and it took some doing to find them.”
Jennifer waved her hand as she watched Mrs. McCabe huff through the front door. “And…?”
“And congratulations,” her ob-gyn told her. “You and your husband are going to have a new addition to your family in about eight months.”
Jennifer stared sightlessly at the blinking lights on the phone in front of her, and glanced at the man holding her infant baby. She and Ryan had talked of having several children. But so soon?
“Mrs. Madison? Jennifer? Are you still there?”
Jennifer was so distracted by the news she hung up the receiver without saying goodbye.
Then she turned toward Zach. “You’re hired.”
1
WELL, THINGS CERTAINLY WORKED differently down here, didn’t they?
In the two days since Zach Letterman had traded Indianapolis, Indiana, for first San Antonio, then Midland, Texas, that was his most remarkable discovery. Things worked differently in the Lone Star State. Sure, he’d expected some differences—the sweltering summer heat, the manner of speaking, the types of food. But he’d been unprepared for the generosity of character, the easygoing nature that each Texan he’d so far encountered had displayed as proudly as he wore his custom-made suits. The most remarkable people so far being his cousins Lily Bishop and Dylan Garrett.
From the moment he’d contacted Lily and Dylan a month ago with his proposal, they’d treated him like part of the family. It hadn’t mattered that he’d never seen them before. They’d accepted him as easily as if they’d had countless snowball fights in the backyard when they were kids. He glanced out the window at the Texas landscape, thinking maybe snowballs wouldn’t have been an option. Playing cowboys and Indians probably would fit better.
The infant in his arms wriggled. Zach gazed down at the bundle as if surprised to find he still held her. She was all pink and new and weighed next to nothing in his arms. He’d never held an infant before. Somehow he hadn’t expected them to be so…light.
Zach carefully put the now sleeping infant back in her carrier then wiped at a spot of drool on the front of his suit.
“How soon can you start?” Jennifer Madison asked. “Oh! I can’t believe I left Denton Gawlick on hold. Give me a minute.”
“I have all the time in the world.”
And he did. Zach crossed his arms over his chest as he watched Jennifer pick the phone receiver back up and punch at one of the red blinking lights. After ten years of grueling, twenty-hour days spent building up his tool and die company in Indianapolis, Indiana, he’d taken a good long look at his life and the way he was living it and decided it was time to make some changes. But it had taken his grandmother’s death six months ago to compel him to implement those changes.
Of course, becoming a private investigator hadn’t even been on the list of possibilities. He’d debated entering the Peace Corps, starting a charity to fight world hunger, traveling the world with little more than the clothes on his back, leaving his credit cards and tremendous cash resources at home. But losing his last, closest living relative, the woman who had raised him after his father disappeared and his mother died, had had a tremendous effect on him he was still trying to sort through. It had ignited in him a longing for family connections he no longer had. Stories Nana had told him as a kid sitting in front of the fireplace with her had come back to him, and he’d realized he’d absorbed every word and could probably recite them even now. And it had been the stories of his Texas relatives that had captured his imagination the most. And so had Trueblood, Texas, the town that had been named after his great-aunt Isabella Trueblood.
With Nana’s death, he’d felt adrift, in need of more than just the changes he’d wanted to make to his life that would send him in a direction toward a more fulfilling career. He’d needed to connect with someone. His family.
So he’d hired a local detective agency and found out that his cousins Lily Bishop and Dylan Garrett had continued on with the family legacy laid out by Isabella Trueblood by opening their own agency, Finders Keepers, a detective agency dedicated to reuniting family members and