“Oh, he’s fine. Just fine. His mama and him are hoping to buy their own place soon.”
Ella pocketed her pass again, grinning at the driver. “You’re not going to know what to do with yourself if they actually move out.”
The driver hacked out a laugh and put the bus into motion. “Reckon that’s true, missy.”
It was early yet, only a few other riders already on the bus, and she chose a seat midway back on the window. The trip to Ben’s house would take the better part of an hour, but she didn’t have to make any transfers to another route, and that meant she had a good forty-five minutes to study.
Unfortunately, when she pulled out her textbook for her Intro to Taxation course, she seemed incapable of focusing on it. Same way she’d seemed incapable of getting more than an hour of sleep at a stretch the night before.
All because she couldn’t get Ben Robinson out of her head.
Finally, she gave up on the textbook and put the heavy tome back in her messenger bag. She had nearly two weeks to go before the class started. Presumably she’d have her infatuated fascination with Ben under control by then. It wasn’t as if anything would ever happen between them. He was totally out of her league.
But a girl could daydream, couldn’t she?
Staring sightlessly out the window beside her, as the bus pulled up to one stop after another, letting people on and letting people off, that was exactly what she did.
* * *
“At least you’re not late this time.” Mrs. Stone greeted her at the front door again.
Ella almost wanted to ask the woman if she ever smiled but figured the question wouldn’t be taken well. So instead, she just offered a “good morning,” and followed the housekeeper inside. Even though Mrs. Stone had given Ella a spare key the afternoon before, Ella hadn’t been able to summon the nerve to actually use it. Instead, it remained unused on the key chain that held her own house key, tucked safely inside her bag.
Like the day before, the house was quiet as a tomb inside, and she followed Mrs. Stone up to the third-floor study.
“Mister has already left for the office,” the housekeeper finally said when she gestured at Ben’s empty desk. “I suppose you know what you’re supposed to do.”
Ella wondered if Mrs. Stone knew what Ella’s purpose there was. Not that it mattered. Mrs. Stone had a job to do, the same as Ella did.
She set her messenger bag on the floor behind the desk and tried to act as if she wasn’t totally intimidated simply pulling out the leather chair that Ben had occupied the afternoon before.
“Lunch will be at noon,” Mrs. Stone intoned. “I’ll bring you a tray.”
“Oh.” Surprised, she gestured toward the admittedly worn bag. “I didn’t know. I brought a sandwich.”
Mrs. Stone stared. “The Mister said to prepare lunch.”
“Which probably beats my PB and J all to pieces.”
“PB and J?”
“Never mind. Thank you. Lunch at noon will be great. But I can come down—” she realized she didn’t know where the kitchen was located because she’d never seen it “—or up,” she added ruefully, “to the kitchen. I don’t need waiting on.” The woman was still staring. Not quite a glare but definitely no humor there, either. Maybe she didn’t want interlopers in her kitchen. “But, whatever you’re used to,” she said weakly.
“Mister never has people working in his office,” Mrs. Stone said and turned to leave.
Presumably that meant she was delivering a lunch to Ella at noon just as she intended.
Nervously twisting her watch, Ella sat down in the leather chair. It was on casters. Surprisingly old-fashioned for a man who was firmly entrenched in a modern tech world. In fact, the entire study seemed steeped in old-fashioned touches. The clock on the wall behind her looked as if it had come out of an old railway station. The desk itself was gigantic, with warm inlaid wood on the top and worn metal corner braces that reminded her of a steamer trunk.
There was a manila folder sitting on the center of the desktop with her name scrawled on the front. When she hadn’t been stalking her new boss online the night before, she’d been reading whatever she could find on how to locate missing people. Not that his siblings—if there were any to begin with—were missing.
She’d decided the hunt wasn’t any different than doing a person’s genealogy. And these days, genealogy websites abounded.
She flipped open the folder. The notes inside were typed. Neat. Chronological. She had a hard time envisioning Ben preparing them himself. Probably had had a secretary do it.
There were also a couple of sticky notes stuck to the inside of the folder; handwritten in the same slashing style as her name on the front. That she had no trouble imagining as Ben’s. He’d written the password for his computer network on one. And on the other, a directive to make herself at home and help herself to drinks in the fridge.
She leaned back in the chair and looked around the study. If there was a refrigerator here, it was cleverly hidden. Besides, she had a bottle of water in her messenger bag.
She gingerly opened the center drawer of the desk and was glad to see it contained the computer keyboard and a few pens and pencils. The moment she tapped the keyboard, the sleek monitor on top of the desk leaped to life and she keyed in the password he’d left, opened an internet browser and turned back to read through all of Ben’s notes.
That task took longer than she’d expected, because there weren’t only notes about Gerald Robinson’s history. There were copious notes about the extensive Fortune family and the mysterious, supposedly deceased Jerome Fortune.
By the time she did finish, she decided she needed to make some of her own notes. Reading about Gerald Robinson’s life had been fascinating enough that she didn’t feel so odd when she began pulling open the drawers of Ben’s desk in search of a notepad. When she reached the last of the four drawers, she’d found everything from a bottle of Scotch and two crystal glasses to a single snapshot of a cute blond-haired toddler boy. But no blank paper. Rather than hunt through anything else of his, she retrieved the spiral notebook from her messenger bag that she used for school notes and flipped to a fresh page.
Ben’s material chronicled Gerald’s life from his founding of Robinson Tech, known until recently as Robinson Computers, his marriage to Charlotte Prendergast and the subsequent births of their children. It covered a lot of years. From the dates Ben had provided, Ella knew that Gerald and Charlotte had been married nearly three and a half decades. She drew out a visual time line of these known dates. On another sheet, she drew, contrastingly, the brief time line of Jerome Fortune’s life span. If Gerald was not Jerome, that young man had had a regrettably short life.
She idly traced her pen over Jerome’s time line, while studying Gerald’s. She hadn’t been hired to determine that the two men were one and the same. Ben already believed that they were. There wasn’t anything interesting of note on Gerald’s time line until he’d founded his computer company. Before that were just the basics. Birth date. The names of his supposed parents—both deceased.
“Lunch.”
She nearly jumped out of her skin when Mrs. Stone spoke.
Without asking, the housekeeper carried the tray she held over to the table near the windows. She set out the place setting, a plate with a silver dome covering it and a crystal glass filled with what look like iced tea. When she was done, she tucked the tray under her arm and headed back out the doorway. “I’ll collect everything in an hour,” she said as she left.
“Yes, ma’am,” Ella murmured under her breath. But curiosity as well as hunger pangs propelled her across the room to see what