Everything she’d worked for, everything she’d struggled to hold together for herself and her daughter, was falling apart, and all because of a lie. Whoever was causing the finger of suspicion to be pointed in her direction deserved to suffer for it. Since Jeb thought he already had his culprit, it was up to her to prove her own innocence.
Leaving Delacourt Oil wasn’t the solution. It had been a knee-jerk decision made out of pain and heartache. She had vowed to fight Jeb once today before she had even realized exactly what the stakes were. Now that she knew, the fight was even more critical. She couldn’t walk away from it. This wasn’t just about a job, it was about her reputation. It was about the one man on earth who should have trusted her selling her out when the chips were down.
But she couldn’t think about Jeb now. It hardly mattered that he had been her lover. What counted was the damage he could do to her future in the profession she loved. He had to be stopped from making these absurd accusations public before he destroyed her. Later she would shed whatever tears needed to be shed for losing a man she might have loved.
He went back there, spent a half hour in the parking lot debating with himself, then went inside.
“Could I see Emma O’Ryan?” he asked a willowy blond nurse behind the desk.
“And you are?”
“A friend of her mother’s, I work with Brianna at Delacourt Oil. I’m Jeb Delacourt.”
“Ah, the handsome prince. Emma talks about you all the time. I’m Gretchen Larson.”
“Emma talks about me? We’ve never met.”
“No, but her mother told her all about the ball you took her to. Emma was enchanted. She’s pretty sure you’re at least as handsome as the prince in
Cinderella.
Normally, I’d never let a stranger in to visit, but Emma will be thrilled to see you for herself.”
Jeb chuckled. “Think I’ll disappoint her?”
“Why Mr. Delacourt, are you fishing for compliments?”
“No, more like reassurance. I don’t want to scare the girl.”
“Believe me, she’ll be delighted to see you. She doesn’t get a lot of visitors besides her mother. She left a couple of hours ago, by the way.”
“I know,” Jeb said succinctly.
Gretchen came out from behind the desk to display a curvaceous body that once upon a time would have sent his hormones into overdrive. Now it did nothing. Only one woman seemed to have the key to his heart these days, and she was justifiably furious with him. Thinking about how anguished she’d looked when she realized he thought her guilty filled him with regret. He’d blundered badly, yet again, laying out suspicions instead of facts. He wouldn’t blame her if she never forgave him.
Was that what he wanted? Forgiveness, rather than the truth? It said a lot about the state of his heart that he thought it might be. In the meantime, there was Emma, and the feeling he had that he needed to know this child who was so important to Brianna.
When they neared the sunroom again, it occurred to Jeb that he should have brought along a present on his first visit. Such a momentous occasion called for one.
“Is there a gift shop?” he asked suddenly.
“I’m afraid not,” Gretchen told him. “But it’s okay. Your company is what matters. If you suggest a game of Go Fish, you’ll have a friend for life.”
Jeb couldn’t recall ever playing such a game, but he was willing to learn.
They found Emma in the sunroom, staring out the window with a despondent look that no child of five should ever have.
“Emma, you have a visitor,” Gretchen called out.
The girl struggled with the controls on her wheelchair, but eventually managed the turn. When she spotted Jeb, her eyes brightened with curiosity.
“Who’re you?”
Jeb held out his hand. “I’m Jeb Delacourt.”
Emma’s smile spread. “Mommy’s prince,” she said as she placed her fragile little hand in his.
“I don’t know about that, but I am her friend.” He gestured toward a chair. “Mind if I stay a while so we can visit?”
Gretchen leaned down to whisper in Emma’s ear, drawing another grin. Then the nurse winked at Jeb. “Call if she has you on the ropes. I’ll rescue you.”
“Thanks.” He turned his attention to Emma. “I hear you play a mean game of Go Fish.”
She nodded, curls bouncing. “It’s my favorite.”
“Want to play?”
She flipped up a tray on the wheelchair, then reached into a side pocket and whipped out a deck of cards. “I’m really, really good, you know.”
“So I hear. I’m afraid you’ll have to explain the rules to me. I don’t know them.”
“It’s really, really easy,” she said, as she awkwardly dealt the cards.
She launched a detailed explanation of the card game that left Jeb more confused than enlightened, but he was ready to try. When Emma had beaten him six games straight, he studied her intently. “You aren’t by any chance the national Go Fish champion, are you?”
“No, silly. They don’t have a championship for that.”
“Well, they should. You’d be a shoo-in.”
She patted his hand. “Don’t feel bad. I beat Mommy all the time, too.” She leaned close and confided, “I think she lets me win so I’ll feel better.”
“I doubt it. Your mother is a very competitive woman. I think the real truth is that she’s no match for you.”
Emma beamed. “Do you really think so?”
“Absolutely.” He cupped her tiny hand in his. “Thank you for teaching me, Emma. I had fun.”
“Even though you lost?” she asked doubtfully. “It probably wasn’t polite for me not to let you win at least once.”
“Never let someone win just to be polite,” he said. “It’s important always to do your best.”
She regarded him shyly. “Will you come to see me again?”
“I would like that very much.” He hesitated. “There’s just one thing.”
“What?”
“Could you not tell your mom that I stopped by?”
“You mean like a secret?”
Jeb nodded, swallowing back the guilty feeling that he had no business getting Emma to hide things from her own mother. But he knew Brianna wouldn’t approve. In fact, she was likely to blow a gasket if she learned he’d been by to see her daughter.
Something had happened to him in the past hour, though. He’d fallen in love with another of the O’Ryan women. Spending time with Emma had, in some way, reassured him about Brianna. Any mother would fight to save a child this incredible. It was a defense no jury on earth would ignore. He certainly couldn’t, and he had more reason than most to want Brianna to pay for her crimes against his family’s company.
“Can this be our secret, just for now?” he asked Emma.
She nodded, apparently intrigued with the idea of sharing a secret with mommy’s prince. “I won’t say a single word. Not to anybody. But you’d better tell Gretchen, too. She and Mommy talk a lot.”
Since that hadn’t even occurred to Jeb, he was grateful for the advice. “Thanks. I’ll talk to her on the way out. By the way, are you allowed ice cream in here?”
Emma grinned. “Uh-huh. Chocolate’s my very favorite in the whole world.”
“Then the next time I come, I’ll bring chocolate ice cream. Shall I bring enough for everyone, so we can have a party? You can be the hostess.”
Her eyes widened. “You would do that?”
If it meant seeing her surrounded by other children, instead of all alone staring out the window, he would bring anything she asked. “Absolutely,” he assured her.
“When will you come back?”
“As soon as I can,” he promised.
“Tomorrow?”
Why not? “Tomorrow, it is. I’ll make the arrangements with Gretchen on my way out.”
“Mr. Delacourt?” Emma asked, her expression vaguely worried.
“What, angel?”
“You won’t forget, will you? Like my daddy did?”
Jeb felt the unfamiliar salty sting of tears at the plaintive question. “No, I will not forget,” he vowed, leaning down to press a kiss against her forehead. “You can count on it. I will be here tomorrow.”
If he had to move heaven and earth—and one stubborn female—to make it happen.
Tired of the constant sound, the next time it rang, she snatched it up. “I have nothing to say to you,” she snapped before slamming it back down again.
Of course, that was a mistake. In answering it, she had proved to him that she was home. Moments later, he leaned on the doorbell, then pounded on the door.
“Brianna, I know you’re in there. We need to talk.”
She started across the room, then stopped. No, she thought to herself, talking was a waste of time. Nothing she said could possibly penetrate a skull as thick as his had to be.
“Brianna, dammit. Open the door.”
“No,” she said just as loudly. At this rate, they were going to disturb any neighbors not already rattled by the constant phone calls.
“Please,” he said, lowering his voice to a plea.
She leaned against the door, sighing heavily. As furious as she was, her heart still leaped at the sound of his voice. What sort of idiot did that make her?
“No,” she said again, this time in a whisper.
“What?”
“I am not opening the door.”
“This is silly. We’re two rational adults. We ought to be able to discuss this in a civilized manner.”
“One of us may be civilized. I’m not so sure about you,” she countered. “You’re trying to beat down a door in the middle of the night.”
“I am not trying to beat it down. I am simply trying to get your attention. Besides, it’s not the middle of the night. It’s barely nine o’clock. And I would have been here earlier, but you’ve apparently been sitting inside in the dark pretending you weren’t at home.”
“Have you been watching the house?” she asked, appalled by the idea that he’d been staking out the place in plain view of her neighbors.
“Pretty much,” he admitted unrepentantly.
“Jeb, this has to stop. Go away. I don’t want to talk to you. You made your opinion of me plain earlier today.”
“I was angry.”
“A lot of hard truths get spoken in anger.”
“Brianna, please, if you’ll just tell me what really happened, I’ll straighten everything out. I swear it.”
“How terribly sweet of you,” she said sarcastically. “Obviously, you assume there are things to straighten out. I, on the other hand, would prefer some indication that you realize I am innocent. Let me spell it out for you, Mr. Delacourt. I have done absolutely nothing wrong. Period. End of sentence. End of conversation.”
To emphasize it, she walked away from the door, went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of soda with lots of ice. Then she put on the earphones to her stereo and turned it up full volume, so she wouldn’t hear anything more than the muffled sound of Jeb’s voice and the ongoing pounding on her door.
To her astonishment, he was still at it an hour later, when she forced herself to go off to bed, where she knew she wouldn’t get a single minute’s sleep all night long. If persistence counted for anything, he would have gotten a lot of points tonight.
As it was, she would have preferred even a hint that he believed in her. Without that, they had nothing.
Jeb felt his father’s wrath and indignation almost as deeply as he’d felt Brianna’s the night before. “It was personal,” he said stiffly.
He had turned up here this morning to admit to the mess he’d made of things, not to hear a lecture. He should have known he couldn’t do one without being subjected to the other.
“But you still had to go digging around in her life,” his father accused. “I don’t blame her for being furious. What kind of man tries to incriminate a woman he supposedly cares about?”
“I didn’t try to incriminate her. Believe me, no one wants her to be innocent more than I do. As a matter of fact, I had dropped everything. I hadn’t checked out a lead in weeks.” He thought of the lengths he’d gone to just to be alone with her in London. “She mattered to me, Dad. She still does.”
“Then what the hell happened? Is this the way you treat someone who matters? No wonder you’re not married.”
Jeb ignored the assessment of his courting skills, or lack thereof. “I got a call from Michael about another deal that went south. The only person who knew about it outside of family was Brianna.”
“So that made it okay to go charging off with a bunch of half-baked accusations? Even though you knew this woman? Even though you should have known that she would never betray us? Even though you had very strict instructions from me to leave her be? What sort of judgment was that? And who the hell’s in charge around here, anyway?”
“You are, but—”
“But what? Did you get together with your brothers and conclude I’m not capable of making rational decisions anymore?”
Jeb winced. His father had hit all too close to the truth, but he wasn’t about to admit to it.
Fortunately, Bryce Delacourt didn’t wait for an answer. In fact, he seemed pretty much uninterested in anything Jeb had to say. He was more interested in trying to get his own point across.
“Well, let me assure you that I have all of my wits about me,” he said emphatically. “I also have the title that gives me the right to fire the whole blasted lot of you, which right this moment I am sorely tempted to do.”
“Dad—”
“Just stop it. I don’t want to hear your excuses. All I want to hear is that you intend to find some way out of this mess.”
“I tried to talk to her. She won’t listen.”
“Can you blame her? What did you intend to say? That you’re sorry, I hope.”
“I was going to repeat what I’ve already said, that I’d help her.”
“Help her?” his father repeated incredulously. “That’s what you said? How magnanimous. The only help the woman needs is to be protected from you. You’ve all but called her a spy. I’m surprised she didn’t wring your sorry neck.”
“I don’t think she wanted to get that close,” Jeb admitted ruefully.
“I can’t say I blame her. Let’s start with her supposedly incriminating decision to hide her daughter from you. Did it never once occur to you that she might have told you about her daughter in her own good time, that after being abandoned by Emma’s father she needed to know she could trust you? Well, you’ve certainly reassured her on that score, haven’t you?”
He shook his head. “The woman has been through hell the last year. Now you’ve gone and made it worse. You’ve twisted her secrecy into something ugly, when you should have been supportive. You’re every bit as bad as that no-account husband of hers.”
Being compared to Larry O’Ryan was about as insulting as anything his father could have said. Unfortunately, Jeb couldn’t come up with a ready defense of his behavior. When his father described it, even Jeb thought he was a louse.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry won’t cut it. I just pray I can talk her into coming back to work here,” his father said.
Even though he knew he’d handled things very badly, Jeb was stunned that his father was so readily dismissing the bottom line, that Brianna had betrayed Delacourt Oil. Wasn’t this a time for caution? Weren’t there issues that needed to be resolved first?
“Dad, you’re not thinking clearly,” he protested. “You can’t just bring her back. No matter how sorry you feel for her, it still seems more than likely that she’s been betraying the company. Maybe she thought she had to, maybe she was desperate, but you can’t ignore what she’s done.”
“I can and I will, because you don’t have squat in the way of proof. You’re supposed to be this hotshot investigator. You claim you’ve learned how to do the job from your brother, so I assume you know the rules. Do you have so much as a single shred of evidence to prove that Brianna has done anything wrong?”
He doubted that her secrecy, that mysterious locked room at her house, or any of the rest would satisfy his father. He thought of his conversations with the old codger who owned the last land they’d lost and with Dylan about Jordan Adams’s integrity. “No,” he finally admitted, “but—”
“But you went off half-cocked anyway. You accused Brianna of doing something so malicious, so totally out of character, that we’ll be lucky if she doesn’t file suit against us. Slander comes to mind, along with wrongful dismissal.”
Jeb tried to reclaim some of the high ground he’d obviously lost in the past few minutes. “She quit. She wasn’t fired. If she were innocent, wouldn’t she have fought back?”
His father scowled at him. “Now there’s a brilliant technicality if ever I heard one. In the end, we have the same result. We’ve lost one of the best geologists in the business and hurt the reputation of a woman who doesn’t deserve it.” His expression darkened. “You created this mess. Now fix it.”
Jeb stared. “Fix it? How?”
“I don’t give a rat’s behind. Crawl, if you have to. Just do it.”
Jeb was actually more than willing to try to patch things up with Brianna, at least on a personal level. He didn’t even question the incongruity of wanting to be with a woman he thought guilty of a crime. Somehow he’d made excuses for her that she hadn’t asked him to make. If he tried hard enough, he could rationalize everything she’d done. He just couldn’t figure out how to explain that to her when the woman flatly refused to talk to him.
As for repairing the damage and getting her back to Delacourt Oil, he figured there were miracles that had been pulled off more easily. He doubted a man in his precarious position with the Almighty had any right to call for assistance.