Every Breath You Take (Second Opportunities 4)

Olivia felt a rush of gratitude that Mitchell had come into the Wyatt family fold at exactly the right time to help Caroline and Cecil through their grief. Unfortunately, Olivia had the feeling Mitchell wouldn’t ” Cecil out of a burning house if he had a choice. He obviously had no desire to further a relationship with his family or meet any of their friends, and—worst of all—Olivia was quite certain he intended to leave Chicago very soon and without a word of warning to anyone except Caroline.

Olivia understood exactly why he felt as he did. The Wyatts had disposed of Mitchell as an infant as if he had been nothing but an offensive piece of litter cluttering up their perfect, tidy lives. She’d known a little about the fate of Edward’s unwanted baby long ago, and Olivia had done nothing to change it; therefore, she accepted Mitchell’s contempt for her as her just desserts. What she could not accept was the thought of his leaving Chicago too soon. She wanted him to get to know her first and realize he could trust her. She wanted him to call her Olivia” before he went away. Just one Olivia” before he left, and she’d be satisfied. But there was something else Olivia wanted much more, something she had to have from him before it was too late: forgiveness.

At the moment, however, her most pressing concern was that Cecil might stalk up behind her, yank open the doors to his study, and put an entirely wrong interpretation on the scene inside. Rather than barging in on the couple and, in so doing, make Caroline feel guilty and force Mitchell to give unnecessary explanations, Olivia decided to alert them to her impending arrival. Accordingly, she banged her cane on the heavy door as she fumbled with the latch, and then for good measure, she held her cane out in front of her like a blind person’s walking stick and entered the study, tapping and poking at the oak floor, her gaze fixed upon the old planks as if they weren’t to be trusted with her weight.

you need more light?” Mitchell asked.

Olivia raised her head as if surprised by his presence, but it was the irony in Mitchell’s voice that startled her. He stood in front of the fireplace, exactly where he’d been before, but Caroline had dropped into a nearby chair. Olivia’s heart ached at the sight of the dark smudges beneath her hazel eyes. poor child,” she said, laying her hand on Caroline’s golden hair.

Caroline tilted her head back and pressed Olivia’s hand to her cheek instead. Olivia,” she said in a forlorn voice.

Olivia would have stayed at Caroline’s side, but she realized Mitchell had stepped back from the fireplace and was idly surveying the study’s many portraits. The large room was a veritable shrine to the Wyatts, with framed portraits of every size and description crowding the walls and covering the mantel. This was the first overt indication she’d seen him give that he had any interest whatsoever in any of the Wyatts—or at least Olivia wanted to think this was an indication of interest. is your great-grandfather,” she told him, moving to his side and gesturing to the portrait above the fireplace. “Do you see the resemblance?”

what?” he said, deliberately mocking the notion.

you,” Olivia persevered stubbornly, but he shot her a cold warning glance—one that looked exactly like those warning glances of his great-grandfather’s; then he slid one hand into his pants pocket and strolled a few paces away. Olivia heeded his warning, but she watched him from the corner of her eye, hoping for another opportunity to chip away at his glacial defenses if he showed interest in a different portrait.

Cecil always kept people waiting; it proved his superiority over them. Normally it annoyed Olivia when he did it to her, but now she hoped he’d keep them waiting here for an hour. A few moments later, Mitchell paused to study another portrait, and Olivia hurried to join him; then she gaped at the picture he’d singled out. It was a portrait of a girl seated demurely on a garden swing, with pink rosebuds twined in her long hair and silk ones embroidered on the skirt of her white dress. Mitchell slanted Olivia a sidewise look. ?” he asked.

heavens!” she exclaimed. did you figure that out? I was barely fifteen at the time.”

Instead of answering, he nodded toward another portrait. that’s you as well?”

, I was twenty, and I’d just become engaged to Mr. Hebert. That’s him, right there. Our portraits were made the same day.”

don’t look quite as happy about the engagement as he does.”

wasn’t,” Olivia confided, forgetting that she had intended to draw Mitchell out and not the reverse. thought he and his family were a little . . . stuffy.”

That brought a fascinated smile from him. did you think they were ‘stuffy’?” he asked, turning the full force of his undivided attention on her.

—it seems silly now, but one of his ancestors signed the Declaration of Independence, and another ancestor was a general in the Civil War, and I felt his family made too much of that—you know, boasted about it in an unseemly way.”

behavior,” he agreed with amused gravity.

Basking in the glow of bantering with him, Olivia endeavored to do more of it. , it was. I mean, it wasn’t as if they came over on theMayflower!”

’m sure they tried,” Mitchell joked, it was a small ship, and they probably couldn’t get reservations.”

, if they couldn’t,” Olivia confided, leaning closer to him, ’s becausewe were already on it!”

He laughed, and Olivia lost her head and blurted out her thought: Wyatt men are a handsome lot, but in my day,we would have calledyou a dreamboat, young man.”

His expression chilled the instant she implied he was one of the Wyatt men, and Olivia was so desperate to recover the ground she’d lost that she pointed out a feature his forebears did not possess. “They all have brown eyes, too, but your eyes are blue.”

wonder how that happened,” he said in a bored drawl.

moth—” Olivia cut the sentence off; then she changed her mind and decided he had a right to know. Might even want to know. remember that your mother had beautiful, deep blue eyes. I’d never seen eyes as blue as hers before or since—until now.”

She waited for him to ask for more information about his mother, but instead, he folded his arms across his chest and stared down at her, looking coldly impatient and very bored. Olivia pulled her gaze from his and pointed to a small portrait just beyond the one of George Hebert. do you think of him?” she asked, drawing Mitchell’s attention to a portly gentleman wearing a starched shirt with a tie striped in shades of pink, blue, and yellow.