The same brutal dynamic was at work with Caro Cain. Hollister Cain, Portia’s ex-father-in-law, had had countless affairs. Somehow Caro had held her head up through it all. When Caro divorced him, people gossiped about her.
Of course, Hollister and Caro had paid the price for his many affairs. Just last year, when Hollister’s health had been so bad, he had received a letter from one of his past conquests. The woman had heard he was on his deathbed and had taunted him with the existence of a daughter he’d never known about.
Whoever had written the letter had known what a manipulative bastard Hollister was. She had known it would drive him crazy to learn he had a daughter he’d never met and couldn’t control. When he’d received the letter, Hollister had called his three sons to his bedside—Dalton and Griffin, his legitimate sons, and Cooper, his illegitimate son. He’d demanded that they find the daughter and bring her back into the family fold. Whichever son found her first would be Hollister’s sole heir. If she wasn’t found before Hollister died, he’d will his entire fortune to the state.
The quest he’d set his sons on had torn the family apart. It had destroyed his own marriage. And now, a year later, the missing heiress still hadn’t been found. And Hollister’s health had improved. The last time she’d seen him, he’d seemed as bitter and angry as ever, but he was no longer haunted by death. He was just as determined that someone find his daughter.
Maybe it was ridiculous for Portia to think that she might have just found the woman tonight.
As far as she knew, Dalton and Griffin had figured out that their sister was from somewhere in Texas, but that hardly narrowed it down. There were almost thirty million people in Texas.
But of all the people Portia had ever met, only five of them had Cain-blue eyes. Hollister and his sons and now Ginger. This woman with Cooper’s smirk and Dalton’s determination. She looked just like a Cain.
Not that it was any of her business.
So what if a waitress at a hotel in Houston looked like she could be Dalton’s sister?
It didn’t have anything to do with Portia.
Except that when Portia thought about Ginger—about the waitress’s petulant defiance, about the fierce way she talked about how families should treat each other, Portia felt oddly protective of her. If she was the missing heiress, someone would find her. Someday—maybe someday soon—one of the brothers would stumble on a piece of evidence and they would track her down. Everything about her life would change in a moment. And she was completely unprepared for it.
Ginger was about to be thrust into a world of cutthroat gossips where her every action and motive would be questioned, analyzed and criticized. Where mothers berated their daughters in public and where divorcées were ostracized when they didn’t get a lavish divorce settlement. It was a world of wealth and power, but it was also a crummy world.
But maybe there was something she could do to make this world a little less crummy.
Two
When she was young, Portia had had a reputation among her family for being impulsive, reckless, rash—qualities she had worked hard to banish from her personality in the past fifteen years. And she’d succeeded. No one who knew her now—well, almost no one—would call her reckless.
Now she was not the kind of girl who got a tattoo over summer break—even one of a completely inoffensive, beloved cultural icon like Marvin the Martian. She was not the sort to do headstands in fancy clothes. Those parts of her were gone. It was that simple.
So, a week after the Children’s Hope Foundation gala, when she packed her bags and hopped on a plane, it was part of a planned vacation. After all, it was perfectly reasonable for her to take a few weeks of vacation after the months of grueling work on the event. And the Callahans had a condo in Tahoe that she often visited. It wasn’t as if she was fleeing from Houston because she couldn’t stand the gossip—which hadn’t actually been that bad. This was a vacation. A well-thought-out event.
And if she tweaked her travel plans just a smidge so that they included a four-hour layover in Denver, that was totally normal. She’d never liked long flights. Or airports.
And it was also normal—and not at all impulsive—for her to stop by and visit the one person she knew in Denver. Her former brother-in-law, Cooper Larson. Cooper—once the snowboarding darling in the world of extreme sports—was now a successful businessman. He was the CEO and owner of Flight+Risk, which just happened to be headquartered in Denver. He was also possibly the one person who could help her untangle the identity of the Cain heiress.
This was a slight detour in her life. That was all. Visiting Cooper wasn’t impulsive or reckless. It was smart. Of the three Cain brothers, he was the least invested in finding Hollister’s missing daughter. He had the least at stake. And he was the most likely to know where the young woman was coming from. Visiting Cooper was only logical.
The litany of logical, sensible reasons echoed through her mind as she paid the taxi driver who’d taken her from the airport to Flight+Risk’s office in downtown Denver not far from the Sixteenth Street Mall. The building was an older one that had been refurbished. It was sleek and modern inside, while maintaining the sort of informality that suited Cooper’s snowboard accessory business. It was exactly what she’d expected of his office. It suited the black sheep of the Cain family.
The only thing that threw her for a loop was Cooper’s assistant. She’d expected some young blond snow bunny type. Someone with more style than sense. Someone she could easily talk her way past.
Instead, the woman—Mrs. Lorenzo, according to the nameplate on her desk—was nearing fifty, with a humorless smile and cold, assessing eyes.
“And what did you say your name was again?”
“Portia Callahan.”
“Hmm...” Mrs. Lorenzo looked her up and down, as if Portia might be lying. Then the older woman turned back to the computer, clicked her mouse several times and started typing.
Mrs. Lorenzo must have sensed Portia’s doubts, because she raised an eyebrow and made a disapproving mmm sound.
“I’m his sister-in-law,” Portia threw out hopefully.
Mrs. Lorenzo smirked. “Mr. Larson has one sister-in-law—Laney Cain. She’s a lovely young woman. And you are not her.”
Portia swallowed, suddenly irritated by this woman’s superior attitude. She so didn’t need one more person telling her how lovely Laney was. “I’m his former sister-in-law.”
“I see.” Mrs. Lorenzo’s mouth turned down as if Portia had just admitted to being pond scum. “Mr. Larson is in a business meeting out of the office this morning. Would you like to reschedule?”
Portia glanced down at her watch. If she’d done the math right, she had about two hours before she needed to head back to the airport. “No. I’ll wait.”
“Excellent,” Mrs. Lorenzo said grimly. “I’ll let him know when he gets in.”
With a sigh, Portia picked a chair in the reception area and settled down to wait. She pulled a magazine out of her travel tote and flipped it open, but didn’t actually read any of it. Instead, she stared blankly at the brightly colored pictures, her mind racing from the lies she’d been telling herself.
Here was the flaw in her logic: if today’s visit to Denver really was logical and not impulsive, she would not have ambushed Cooper at work, hoping to talk her way past his secretary. She would have called ahead and made an appointment. Or better yet, called him and asked to meet for lunch. Or even better yet, just called and talked through this on the phone.
He was her former brother-in-law. Calling him to chat was perfectly reasonable. She’d talked to him on the phone plenty of times during her marriage to Dalton. And even since the divorce,