She opened her mouth to say no. Adamantly.
“How many more schools you going to go through before you realize you have to do something different?” Marcie pressed, her face close enough for Juliet to see the white flecks in her twin’s blue eyes.
“Different doesn’t have to mean telling Ramsden he fathered a kid nine years ago. Telling him won’t make any difference at all if he doesn’t want her. Mom pretended Dad wanted us and look how horrible it was when we found out the truth. I’m not going to risk putting Mary Jane through that.”
“But you’re considering telling him.”
As they’d been doing since they were babies sharing the same crib, Juliet and her sister locked gazes, speaking on a level more intense than words. A conversation that permitted nothing but the deepest truth.
“I don’t know.”
SHE WASN’T DOING anything more than sitting with her back to him behind a table at the front of the room, but Blake could still feel the energy pulsing around Juliet McNeil as he walked into the courtroom Monday morning. It had been that way in the bar on the beach all those years ago, too.
He didn’t know what it was about her, but the woman did not allow herself to be ignored.
Taking a seat in the last row of the courtroom, he leaned back, making his six-foot-two-inch body as inconspicuous as possible. Schuster had thought he’d be calling Blake to the stand about an hour into the one o’clock session. He’d waited until one-fifty to show up, hoping to be in and out in half an hour, forty-five minutes tops.
Having left for New York so unexpectedly, without an opportunity to prepare anyone to stand in for him, he still had catching up to do.
Two-thirty rolled around and still Blake sat. Schuster was better in person than the papers had ever painted him. Intelligent. Methodical. Bringing out every intricate detail that the jurors might otherwise have missed.
Details that meant nothing to Blake. The paper trail of mock companies, false invoices and nonexistent vendors that Schuster was laying was far too convoluted to follow without having started at the beginning.
That fact left Blake with far too much time and too little diversion to avoid the thoughts that continued to plague him in spite of his ordering himself to stop.
If he’d been here in San Diego five years ago, could he have prevented the events that followed? The deaths of his parents? If he’d come home when he’d originally said he would, could he have saved the life of the very beautiful and very lost free spirit he’d seen buried just two days before?
“I object! A personal land purchase made before my client was appointed director of the Terracotta Foundation is irrelevant to this case.”
The judge, an older, slightly overweight man who looked to be in his mid-fifties, looked atop his reading glasses toward Paul Schuster. “Counsel?”
“If it pleases the court, Your Honor, I am attempting to establish a pattern of business dealings that has followed the defendant through most of his adult life—a pattern that is directly related to the case at hand.”
Blake wasn’t sure that Schuster had said anything relevant at all, but figured he had when the judge nodded. “You may continue.”
Those were pretty much the same words Blake’s father had said to him the first time he’d called home—a year to the date from when he’d left—to tell his father he wasn’t through with traveling. The old man had taught Blake well and he’d presented his case so logically that there was no room for argument. He could feel his father’s displeasure from halfway around the world, and knew that the elder Ramsden’s acquiescence had been offered in a way meant to manipulate Blake right back to the fold.
He’d taken it at face value instead, thus successfully meeting one of the challenges he knew his time away had been meant to help him to master—standing up for what was right, even in the face of conflict.
Growing up under the thumb of Walter Ramsden had taught him to avoid conflict at any cost. It had taken Blake a long time to break the hold his father had over him. And more, to see that it wasn’t himself who was so lacking.
The time away, while much longer than originally intended, had been fraught with painful introspection, introspection that had taken him many places, taught him what mattered and what did not.
“Ms. McNeil, do you have any questions?”
Schuster had finished with his second witness of the afternoon.
Juliet stood, her long body as gorgeous as he remembered, even in the sedate brownish skirt and matching jacket. Her arms were long and slender and she moved with such conviction.
“Not at this time, Your Honor.”
Juliet sat, leaned over to whisper something to a suited man on her right. A member of her team?
Eaton James, the man Blake considered an accomplice with himself in his father’s death, was seated on her left.
The judge turned to the elderly man on the stand. “You may step down.” He asked Schuster to call his next witness.
Blake sat up, ready to go.
He leaned back with a deliberately deep inhalation as a name other than his was called. Lifting the sleeve of his jacket where it rested against his leg, he had to stifle the groan of frustration. It was three o’clock. If he didn’t get out of here soon, he wasn’t going to make it to the McGaffey site before work shut down for the day. The site check had been scheduled for the previous Friday.
He wondered what Juliet McNeil was thinking as she sat there watching the proceedings. What she’d whispered to her colleague. While Blake didn’t know her well, he’d bet a year’s income that her relaxed, almost bored, stance disguised a mind that was racing as fast as Schuster’s.
Amunet had had a mind that was unable to slow down. Always thinking, planning, wondering, she’d had a hard time staying in one place for long without growing bored. With a trust fund left by her long-deceased French father, and a wanderlust in her soul to match his, she’d quickly become travel companion to him, playmate, and then wife.
That tug at his stomach was back. It happened every time he thought of the irrevocable step he’d taken, so sure, in his youth and arrogance, that he was absolutely doing the right thing. He’d been honest with her; he was a man who was looking for meaning in the sometimes meaningless acts he saw, trying to understand violence, starving children, death. And love. A man looking for answers with no way to predict where they might lead…. So why did he feel guilty about being led back home?
This time when the judge asked Juliet if she had any questions, she shook her head. Then she began gathering up her papers, sliding them into a leather briefcase.
“Then this court is adjourned until tomorrow morning, 8:30 sharp.” The gavel came down hard, resounding around the courtroom, as if to emphasize the fact that Blake had just wasted an entire afternoon he couldn’t afford to waste.
As people rose around him and shuffled out, Blake felt impatient to be with them. Juliet McNeil was busy speaking with the men at her table. Blake looked for Paul Schuster.
“I’ll need you here first thing in the morning,” the man said after coming down the side of the courtroom and joining Blake.
Blake nodded.
“You’re next,” Schuster added, “so it should go fairly fast.”
With one last glance at the woman to whom he did not want to speak, Blake nodded again and, as a reporter approached Schuster, quietly left.
CHAPTER FOUR
“WHY ARE YOU CHANGING?”
With