Texas Heroes: Volume 1 (54 page)

Present Day

D
evlin Marlowe entered the ballroom late, pausing at the entrance to survey the crush of people. Houston glitterati had turned out in force. If the women assembled had merely donated the price of their designer gowns and gleaming jewels, no auction would be needed to raise funds.

He could afford the price of admission now, thanks to a series of shrewd investments, but beneath his skin, he still didn’t belong with these people. He might own his own tux, but inside him still lived the boy who’d barely escaped going on welfare.

This occasion gave him a golden chance to do what he wanted: to observe Lacey DeMille at close range before she saw him.

And he wanted that, he realized. Wanted time to assess her in the flesh. Wanted to see if there was anything left of the beautiful young girl he had wanted so badly to choose him.

Before he tore her life apart, he wanted to find the right way to handle it. He owed it to the Gallaghers. They had become more than clients—they were friends he didn’t want to see hurt.

But fate must be laughing up its sleeve at him. Dev sure wasn’t.

Even though he’d done all the investigating himself, a part of him still didn’t want to believe what he’d found.

Out of all the women in the world, what kind of loser luck had him turning up the Princess of River Oaks as the missing baby girl a family had hired him to find?

This wasn’t personal. He couldn’t let it be. Nothing he did could regain the lost years, could repair the awful sense of impotence…of teetering on the brink…of being one of the nameless, faceless poor after their precipitous fall from grace when his father suffered a fatal heart attack, one step away from being jailed for fraud.

They’d held onto their dignity with white-knuckled hands, but Dev still remembered all too well the nights the scared boy he’d once been had dug claws into his sides to keep from giving in to unmanly sobs. The angry teenager who had fought Charles DeMille’s disdain, his hold on Dev’s mother. The young lover whose perfect revenge had turned into his worst defeat.

The man he was now knew that he’d been forged in the fire of his family’s needs. He’d served his time in the military and come back to take them away to Dallas. He’d worked hard, two and three jobs, to support them. He’d built a business and made it successful. He’d found his way on his own and was better off for it.

All that was in the past. This was a job, a special duty for valued friends. Reuniting a woman with siblings she didn’t know she had. He would do it as cleanly as possible, and then go to the next case.

Lacey’s adoption had been done by less-than-legal means and covered up in a way only money and power could manage. Charles DeMille had plenty of both.

It was easy now to see why no one had known. Dev was almost certain that even Lacey had no idea she was adopted—the girl who had walked away because he wasn’t good enough for her blue blood. The girl who had betrayed him, who had chosen a life of ease over his love. Who had taught him a lesson so painful he remembered it still.

It was too rich that Devlin Marlowe would be the one to tell her that her blood was no better than his.

What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive
…Lacey DeMille’s whole life was defined by her parents’ lies. She stood on quicksand and didn’t even know it.

Sleeping Beauty was about to be awakened, one way or another.

But not with a kiss.

And no one had ever called Devlin Marlowe a prince.

Lacey stood with her date, Philip Forrester, and her parents, watching the auction as though she’d had no part in creating it. Her mind drifted to Christina, the little girl for whom she volunteered as a child advocate. To the contrasts between their lives…her own so privileged, so unearned.

The demands of that life sometimes choked Lacey. A part of her wanted badly to care nothing about how she looked or behaved, to run free like a ruffian and just be Lacey, not Lacey of the River Oaks DeMilles.

From her earliest days, she had known she must not. Never said aloud, nonetheless she had always known that she was held to a higher standard. That she had to be very careful not to slip.

But though she sometimes chafed at the propriety required, she loved her parents deeply and knew they loved her. It was bedrock. She was a DeMille.

“Agnes is pleased with your handling of the gala,” her mother Margaret murmured.

Her mother’s friend Agnes was a tyrant, but Lacey merely smiled. “I think things are going well.” It all seemed so superficial, after what she’d seen today—but the funds she raised would go to the Child Advocacy Center.

“You and Philip will drop by our little gathering week after next?”

Little gathering
didn’t quite do justice to Margaret’s annual cocktail reception for four hundred, held the night before a hospital fund-raiser. “Certainly,” Lacey responded. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

“You make a lovely couple.”

Of course they did. Margaret had hand-picked Philip as her latest bid for Lacey to marry and settle down to raise the next generation of DeMilles. A prominent young plastic surgeon with blue blood of his own, suave blond Philip Forrester was considered quite a catch.

Except by her. She couldn’t seem to convince her parents that they wouldn’t marry.

“Lacey, are you all right?” Philip asked.

“What?” She stirred. Around them the crowd buzzed, and Lacey realized that her item had been called as next up for bidding. “Oh—yes. Just fine.”

Philip leaned down and whispered, “So where shall I take this fabulous picnic you’re auctioning? Will you actually prepare it with your own hands?”

Lacey met his smile with one of her own. “You’d like it better if I let Clarise do the cooking.”

“You don’t need to learn to cook. We’ll have our own servants.”

“Philip, we aren’t—” He, like everyone else, assumed.

His glance grazed her. “Please, Lacey. Not tonight.”

There was nothing wrong with Philip. He was well-set financially, with a successful career and family money behind him. Impeccable manners, moved through the upper crust with aplomb, treated Lacey like a princess, but…

But what? What was she waiting for? She’d been through a number of beaux, had received her share of proposals from men her parents considered eminently suitable. She had accepted none. They all wanted what she brought to the table, not who she was.

She wanted something no one had offered. To be loved for herself, not her money or social position. Maybe she was a hopeless romantic, but Lacey had dug in her heels over this one requirement.

She’d been foolish twice, been impetuous and learned hard lessons. She would never again fall for a charming rogue. But she wanted that one great love, that grand passion.

Just then her father winked at her. “Want me to run up the bid, Princess?”

Lacey smiled and shook her head, rousing herself to tune into the bidding. Around her, discreet gestures raised the price by fifty or a hundred dollars.

“Fifteen hundred,” the auctioneer nodded toward Philip’s faint signal. “Do I have sixteen?”

A brief silence.

The auctioneer scanned the crowd. “All right. A gourmet picnic for four provide by Lacey DeMille going once, twice—”

“Two thousand,” came a voice from the back.

Lacey blinked. Who would do that? Around her, the crowd stirred. She couldn’t see over them to find the owner of the voice.

“Well, Ms. DeMille has not only created a marvelous occasion, but it appears that she’ll garner the highest contribution yet. Further bids?”

Philip glanced down at her, eyebrows lifted.

Lacey shook her head. “You don’t need to up the ante.” She was well aware that he was only here for appearances.

“Two thousand going once…going twice…”

Philip glanced across the crowd and frowned. “Twenty-one hundred.”

“Three thousand.” Same voice.

Lacey resisted the urge to stand on tip-toe. Around her, heads were craning to see the persistent bidder.

The auctioneer looked straight at Philip. “Do I have thirty-five hundred?”

She knew that Philip’s sense of thrift was screaming. He could easily afford it, but he considered economy a prime virtue. And this was her cause, not his. He didn’t like her choice of volunteer work. Like her parents, he thought she should be doing something more antiseptic.

After a long pause, he nodded, jaw clenched.

“Thirty-five hundred. Do I hear four thousand?”

The crowd fell silent. Expectation vibrated the air around them. Lacey wanted to slink out of the room as fervid glances darted her way.

“Who is it?” she whispered to Philip.

“I don’t know.” His eyes narrowed. “I can’t see where he is.”

Lacey cast a glance at her mother, whose face had gone stiff. Public spectacles were not part of the family code. Lacey had been on the receiving end of that reproof too often. Old South to the core, Margaret had a rigid code of behavior that her daughter had spent her life trying to meet. In this very modern age, Margaret stood for a way of life that had almost vanished. She’d fight for it with her dying breath.

Lacey rubbed one hand across her stomach and took another deep breath. Part of her wanted to push through the crowd and find the man who didn’t understand that such things weren’t done. Part of her wanted to hide.

The pause went on long enough that she thought she was safe, that Philip would win, though she had no doubt how much he’d hate paying the price for a picnic he could have just by asking.

“Going…going—”

“Five thousand.” Same voice. Same deep, decisive tones.

Around them the buzz rose. Her father was staring at Philip, waiting for him to take the lead.

She could see on his face that though pride was involved, pride would only take him so far.

The auctioneer stared at Philip.

Lacey held her breath.

Finally, Philip shook his head.

“Five thousand it is—a record for this event. Five thousand dollars for a gourmet picnic for four provided by our own Lacey DeMille.”

Around them clapping began, along with curious looks. Missy Delavant leaned across Philip with a stage whisper. “Did you get a look at him, Lacey? Do you have something going that we need to know about?”

Lacey recoiled from the woman who’d give anything to get her hooks into Philip. “I have no idea who it is.” She drew herself up in her best Margaret imitation. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to check on some details.”

She cast Philip a glance, seeing disapproval written on his face. A glance at her mother revealed a mirror image. Her father’s eyebrows lifted in dismayed surprise.

The burning in her stomach returned.

Lacey stood very straight and moved toward the front of the room.

Just shy of her destination, a man stepped out of the crowd and blocked her path.

“Hello, Lacey. Long time no see.”

Dev looked down into silvery eyes he’d thought never to see again. Fragile. He hadn’t expected fragile, but she looked like a doe caught by surprise, a sylph poised to melt away in the mists of the forest.

She was beautiful. More beautiful than ever. The woman had more than fulfilled the promise of the girl. Dressed in a column of lavender silk, she wore a slender silver ribbon at her throat, an amethyst pendant glowing against skin pale as camellias. Or white satin.