Cate looked at him sharply. A Native American. Like Lydia’s husband. There was a resemblance, she realized. The same rugged planes and angles making up the face, the same high cheekbones and straight, almost blue-black hair, worn a little long, no doubt in tribute to their heritage. The only thing that threw her was that she would have expected his eyes to be brown or almost black. They weren’t.
“You have blue eyes.”
Christian shrugged casually. “Yes, I do.” His mother’s father had been only half Navajo. The other half had been an Italian woman who hailed from the northern region, where Italians were fair-skinned, fair-haired and blue-eyed, unlike their Sicilian brethren to the south.
The doctor looked comfortable in his own skin, she decided. And why shouldn’t he? Life probably held no surprises for him, threw him no curves out of nowhere. “I take it you know your family history?”
Christian thought it was rather a personal question, but given the situation, he allowed for it. When they were both younger, his brother had had no use for stories of the Dine, which was the name the Navajo gave themselves. At the time, heritage hadn’t meant anything to him. In one of the few times that he could remember, their mother had grown stern and laid down the law to him. He was to learn and be proud of who and what he was. The lessons had stuck.
He nodded. “Yes, I do.”
She laughed softly. He heard no humor in the sound. “That makes you one up on me. I thought I knew mine—until a month ago.”
As she spoke, he studied her. He had the impression that she ordinarily kept rigid control over her reactions. When people like that finally let go, it was a fearsome thing to witness. He wondered if she had some sort of a release valve.
“What happened a month ago?” he asked.
She pulled her shoulders back, as if bracing for a blow. “I tried to donate blood for my mother and the lab technician told me that mine wasn’t compatible with hers.”
Since he was a doctor, he honed in on the part of her statement that was most relevant to him. “What was wrong with your mother?”
“Leukemia.” The momentary hesitation and the slight press of her lips together was his only hint at the extent of her inner turmoil. The woman took a breath before she continued. “She died a little more than a week after that.”
“I’m sorry.” The words were not said automatically. Christian meant them genuinely. He had never learned how to separate himself from the sting of death, and though it made things difficult for him, he hoped he never could. If he were anesthetized to loss, it would rob him of his compassion.
Cate tried to shrug nonchalantly and couldn’t quite pull it off. The wound her mother’s death had caused was still too new, too raw. Even when she was angry with Julia Kowalski for the secret she had kept too long, there was still this huge hurt in her heart that her mother, the woman she’d loved and cherished, fought with and learned from for twenty-seven years, was gone. The thought, too, that she was no longer anyone’s child, but an adult in every sense of the word, was still new, still unwelcome.
“Yes,” she said quietly, “me, too.”
“Did your mother make a deathbed confession before she died?”
The irony of that still got to her. “She wouldn’t have even made that if it hadn’t been for the blood incompatibility.”
Not for the first time, she thought about how Julia Kowalski might have gone to her grave with the secret and she would have never known the truth. And subsequently she would have been at peace instead of feeling betrayed.
Maybe the truth was highly overrated. But now that she’d begun this, she couldn’t back away. She always needed to know. Everything. That had always been both her failing and her strength, the need to know, to fit in every piece of the puzzle.
Cate looked at him, her eyes capturing his. “How would you have liked to wake up one day to discover that your whole life was a lie? That you weren’t who you thought you were? That your parents weren’t your parents, that you weren’t a hundred percent Polish with just a hint of French, but God only knew what?”
Her eyes were stinging again. When was she going to get over this? she demanded silently. When was her anger going to burn away the tears?
“Do you have any idea how many stupid Polish jokes I had to endure while I was growing up? And I did it all for no reason. I’m not Polish. There was no great-great-grandmother who was an impoverished French countess. There’s nothing but this huge question mark,” she added.
She had an energy about her when she became animated. He found it difficult to look away. “So you’ve set out to erase that. The question mark in your life. What makes you think Joan’s your mother? Did your adoptive mother tell you?”
“No.” Cate’s mouth curved ever so slightly in a self-deprecating smile that did not reach her sad eyes. “I tracked her down. It’s what I do.”
And at least that much she was sure of. She was sure of her abilities. Everything else was up for grabs.
“Then you are sure.”
The deep baritone voice echoed in the room. Cate set down the coffee cup. There was a restlessness stirring within her. Cate attributed it to her less-than-successful encounter with her birth mother and was annoyed with herself. She usually had better control over herself than that.
She was also vaguely aware that the stirrings became more pronounced when Joan’s doctor was looking at her. It had been a long time since she’d even noticed a good-looking man.
Cate shifted in her seat. It did no good. She felt as uncomfortable in her own skin now as she did a moment ago. “I’d need a DNA test to be positive, I suppose. But Mrs. Cunningham didn’t exactly look inclined to submit to one of those.”
He could only imagine how having one bombshell after another dropped so quickly must have affected Joan. “This isn’t a good time for her.”
She looked at the doctor for a long moment. He hadn’t told her before when she’d asked, but the boundaries had changed. She tried again. “Why is she here?”
He was surprised that he was actually tempted to tell her. Christian attributed the momentary lapse to the sad look in the young woman’s eyes. A look he doubted if she even knew she possessed. A look he was particularly vulnerable to. But vulnerable or not, there were ethics to adhere to. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
Cate blew out a breath, banking down frustration. “Doctor-patient privilege, yes, I know all about that stumbling block.” If at first… She tried another approach. “What kind of a doctor are you?”
“A good one, I’d like to think.”
The hint of amusement in his eyes got to her for a second. It was almost as if there’d been a tiny tidal wave in the middle of her stomach. The meeting with her birth mother had really shaken her up more than she was willing to admit. She focused on fact finding, something she usually did well.
“From the sound of it, at least a slippery one. Normally I’d attribute that kind of an answer to a shrink, but psychiatrists generally don’t walk around with stethoscopes slung around their necks—unless they’re into shock therapy,” she added dryly.
The seconds ticked away and he had to be getting down to his office, but something about her made him linger just a few minutes longer. He saw no harm in telling her his discipline.
“I’m a gynecologist.”
Her mind quickly flipped through the conditions attached to his specialty. “Only two things would have a woman as upset as Mrs. Cunningham looked even before I told her who I was. A change-of-life baby…” Her voice trailed off as something far worse occurred to her. “Oh, God, it’s