Shaking his head in disgust, Donovan muttered, “Grace is hardly one to be giving romantic advice. From what I saw, she’s a spitfire.”
“Grace isn’t so bad. She just genuinely wants what’s best for Chloe. And so do I. Chloe deserves to find someone who’ll love her and treat her right.”
“I can’t imagine she would find anyone who would treat her better than you would.”
“I’m touched.”
“I’m beginning to believe that you are,” Donovan muttered. “Look all you want for the perfect match, but you aren’t going to find anyone better than Chloe.”
Bryan chuckled. “Hell, D.C., if you feel that way about her, why don’t you marry her?”
To his chagrin, Donovan felt a wave of heat rise from the collar of his crisp white shirt. He looked away quickly, pretending interest in a silicone-busted blonde who was mincing past them, making an obvious play to get their attention. “As you said,” he muttered, “Chloe deserves the best.”
He was aware that Bryan was watching him closely, but he refused to look around. “We’d better get moving again,” he said, pushing himself off the sofa. “We don’t want to be late for the meeting.”
Feeling like a complete idiot, he headed toward the elevators.
This was what he got for trying to do something nice for two people he cared about, he thought irritably. He’d made such a botch of it that he had been left looking like a fool. God only knew what Bryan was thinking right now. He should have just stayed out of it—but he’d had an irrational hope that getting Bryan and Chloe back together might help him get her out of his mind. Out of his dreams.
Out of his heart, damn it.
He should have known better.
Bryan was sitting in his Little Rock office a couple of days later when the intercom on his desk buzzed. “Mr. Falcon? Ms. Pennington is on line two. Are you available to take her call?”
He looked up from the paperwork in front of him. “Yes, thanks, Marta.”
He picked up the receiver. “Good morning, Chloe. Is everything all right?”
“It isn’t Chloe, it’s Grace.”
That made him sit back in his chair, his eyebrows rising sharply. “Grace? What is it? What’s happened?”
He couldn’t imagine that Chloe’s sister would be calling him unless something was terribly wrong.
“No, everything’s okay. I just need to ask you a question.”
He relaxed—a little. A call from Grace Pennington was still fraught with peril. “What question do you want to ask me?”
“How’s Donovan?”
This call was becoming more intriguing all the time, Bryan thought, settling more comfortably into his chair. Perhaps he and Grace had been on the same wavelength recently—definitely an astonishing thought. “Why do you ask?”
“I still don’t know why you were so insistent that we needed to spend the day at the river house,” Chloe announced as she sat in her sister’s car one Wednesday morning in early June, watching Grace drive. “I really had quite a few things to do today.”
“I told you,” Grace replied, “I just needed to get away for a day and I didn’t want to come by myself.”
Grace had been working awfully hard lately, Chloe conceded. And she did seem in need of a vacation; she had been so tense and stressed.
“I’m surprised Mom and Dad didn’t want to come, too. They love to spend the day with us at the river.”
“Mom had that garden club thing this afternoon,” Grace reminded her.
Chloe sat back in the leather bucket seat of Grace’s two-seater, which bumped a bit roughly over the rural roads that led to their parents’ vacation cabin on the Little Red River. It had been quite a while since she’d made this trip. She’d been too busy before the kidnapping, and since then she’d been avoiding any reminders of vacation homes and woods and lakes and rivers—anything that made her think of the time she had spent with Donovan.
But she couldn’t spend the rest of her days hiding from her memories. She had to get on with her life—and she supposed this was as good a time as any to get started.
It was obvious that their parents had been to the river house recently, she noted when Grace drove onto the long gravel driveway. Their mother’s flower beds had been watered and weeded, and the many windows in the two-story log cabin had been washed until they sparkled in the bright sunlight. A large porch lined with swings and rockers and cooled by old-fashioned ceiling fans hinted of lazy summer days spent relaxing and watching the river roll by.