Witchcraft
what gives you the right to be curious about my personal correspondence?" she flung furiously. He still appeared unperturbed. "In my experience letters from lawyers often spell trouble. Since you didn't seem interested in opening it I thought I'd better." She sat down weakly on the stool beside him, feeling more amazement than anything else. "I can't believe you had the nerve to do something like this." He slanted her a glance. "Who are the Marlands , Kim?"
"To blithely open someone else's private mail. It's incredible. There are laws against that sort of thing." she went on, ignoring his question. "Kim, who are the Marlands ? Why have they hired that law firm to contact you? Why are they asking you to meet with them?"
"Are you this high-handed with all those people you have working for you and living with you? If so, I don't see how you keep your employees. Your relatives must find you absolutely infuriating."
"Kim," he interrupted patiently. "Just answer my questions."
"Why should I?"
He muttered something short and explicit under his breath. "Because if you don't answer my questions, I'm liable to contact that law firm myself and find out what's going on. "First invasion of privacy and now threats," she gritted. "Kim, just be reasonable about this, all right?
I'm only trying to find out if you've got real trouble. Maybe it's got something to do with that character at the window last night. Maybe we're way off base thinking he was connected with the kidnapping."
Kimberly was too startled at his conclusions to restrain her answer.
"Good Lord, no! I assure you that Mr. and Mrs. Wesley Marland would never dirty their well-manicured hands in something as nasty as kidnapping."
"So who are they?" he persisted gently. "Why do they want you to get in touch with them?" Kimberly decided it really wasn't worth the battle. Besides, she reasoned, it wouldn't do any harm to tell him the truth. "My father's parents."
"Your grandparents?"
"Technically."
She shrugged and began lacing her eggs with hot sauce. "I don't really think of myself as being related to them except in a strictly biological sense. I've never even met them."
"From the sound of that letter they want to meet you."
"It's a little late for them to play the role of loving grandparents."
"What happened?" Cavenaugh asked quietly.
"Breakfast is hardly the time to drag family skeletons out of the closet," Kimberly parried brightly. "I've learned there aren't any good times to do it. Might as well be over breakfast," he retorted dryly.
Something in his tone caused her to send him a questioning glance.
Whatever lay beneath the surface of the remark was destined to remain a mystery for now, however. Cavenaugh was on the trail of her secrets and had no intention of being sidetracked into revealing any of his own.
Still, she found herself wondering suddenly about his past. What was it he had said last night? There had been some remark about him not always having made his living making wine. "Tell me, Kim," he broke into her reverie to prod softly. "It's short and sordid. Actually, given your own family background, you'll probably understand the Marlands ' position completely. My father was their only son and heir. The Marlands own a big chunk of Pasadena, California, and have sizable investments throughout the state. The family goes back for generations. All the way back to Spanish land grant days. Lots of pride of heritage and lots of money. They had raised my father to be a worthy inheritor of the money and the name. He had been perfectly groomed for his role in life, as I understand it. Private schools, the best of everything money could buy. And then one day the noble son and heir committed a serious judgmental error. He fell in love with my mother."
"Let me guess"' Cavenaugh inserted cool ly . "Your mother didn't come from the right background?"
"My mother was an underpaid, overworked nurse. She lacked any sort of background at all, let alone the right one. She was an orphan. She met my father when he went into the hospital for some minor surgery. You know what they say about men falling in love with their nurses."
"No. What do they say?" Cavenaugh inquired. "Never mind.
Apparently it's a regular nursing syndrome. It usually wears off as soon as the man is discharged from the hospital. Only in my father's case, it didn't. He knew he'd never get his parents' approval to marry my mother so one night in the heat of passion he ran off with her to Las
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