R.ELLIOTT WILL see you now, Miss Donovan,” the secretary said.

Kate stood up and followed her into his office. Yesterday, Kate had looked like a wreck, but today she’d paid careful attention to her appearance, striving for a feminine, summery look she desperately hoped would help offset her last, unpleasant standoff with the state’s attorney. Her sleeveless empire-waisted turquoise jumper concealed her pregnancy and was enlivened by the geometric print, in bright turquoise, lavender, and white, of her linen tote. The jumper was just short enough to be very stylish without revealing too much skin above the knee, and her high-heeled sandals showed off her legs.

To go with the mod sixties look of the jumper, she’d straightened her hair and pulled it back at the sides, holding it in place at the crown with a tortoiseshell clip.

Gray Elliott stood up when she walked into his office, and his brief, startled smile made her feel she definitely looked better than at their last encounter, and that small success was enough to buoy up spirits that had been at a low ebb for so many months.

“Why don’t we sit over there, Miss Donovan,” he said, coming around his desk and gesturing toward the sofa and chairs where she and Holly had sat before.

Kate gave him her best rueful smile and said, “Please call me Kate.”

“All right—Kate,” he said, but his brows drew together in mild suspicion.

Since he was already suspicious, Kate decided to try to outflank him and catch him off guard by firing a round of honesty at him. “I’m hoping that if we’re on a first-name basis,” she admitted with what she hoped was a charming smile, “you’ll be more inclined to agree to the favor I’ve come to ask you for. It’s terribly important, Mr. Elliott.”

“Please call me Gray,” he said courteously—and because he had little choice if she was going to allow him to call her Kate.

When they reached the coffee table, Kate deliberately sat down on a chair at the end of it rather than on the sofa in front of it, since the soft sofa cushions would have sunk beneath her weight and put her at a height disadvantage. Evidently, Gray Elliott was equally conscious of these subtleties, because instead of sitting on the sofa as she’d hoped he would, he walked around the coffee table and sat down in the opposite chair, facing her.

“Would you like something to drink?” he offered.

“No, thank you,” Kate said, crossing her legs. Watching him from beneath her lashes, she leaned to the right to put her tote bag on the sofa. His gaze went briefly to her crossed legs and quickly withdrew. He hadn’t meant to look, but he was definitely a leg man, she thought wryly; then a sudden memory of Mitchell, standing on the balcony in St. Maarten, slashed across her heart and vanquished her brief spurt of confident optimism.

Are you smiling because I look surprisingly nice, or because there’s something wrong with my dress? she’d asked.

I’m smiling because I just realized you have gorgeous legs, and I never saw them before.

I was wearing both of them earlier. In fact, I distinctly remember that they were attached to me when we were in bed.

Unaware that her hand was still on her tote and her gaze was locked on the back of the sofa, she started when Gray Elliott said, “Kate? Are you feeling all right?”

“Oh, yes, perfectly all right,” Kate lied hastily.

He nodded acceptance of her answer and got down to business. “What can I do for you?”

Wetting her lips, Kate drew a long breath and said, “When I was here the last time, you had a stack of files on one corner of your desk. The ones you took off the top had pictures in them of Mitchell Wyatt and me. Am I right that the files you left on your desk involved your actual investigation of him?”

He hesitated, mobile brows narrowing slightly over wary gray eyes. “Why do you ask?”

“Did you investigate him?” Kate said calmly but obstinately, then she answered for him. “Well, of course, you must have. I mean, surely you didn’t waste a small fortune of taxpayers’ money sending detectives to the Caribbean just to take licentious photographs of him seducing me—and whoever else he seduced,” she added as an afterthought.

“If that’s what you’re trying to find out by coming here today, the answer is that you were the only woman he showed any interest in while he was down there.”

“How lucky for me,” Kate said, then she shook her head to stop herself from betraying, or feeling, any bitterness. “Actually, he wasn’t interested in me at all—” she said, starting to explain the truth, but Gray Elliott’s incredulous smile stopped her in midsentence.

“He certainly looks interested in those photographs. I would even have said absorbed,” Gray replied.

“That’s what he needed me to think. Never mind, that doesn’t matter. I’m getting sidetracked,” Kate said, and decided to abandon her carefully thought out plan and go straight to what did matter. “I need to ask you something, but before I do, is there the slightest chance you’d be willing to give me your word that what I say here won’t leave this room?”

“That depends on whether what you’re going to say involves the commission of a crime,” he said half-seriously.

That struck Kate as funny and almost endearing, and she smiled at him—a natural, warm smile this time. “Unless bad timing and gullibility are crimes, there’s no problem. If they are crimes, get out your handcuffs.”

He returned her smile and leaned back in his chair, ready to listen. “You have my word that our conversation won’t leave this room.”

“Thank you. What I need is information about Mitchell Wyatt from your files, but I’m not interested in him as your murder suspect.”

“What is it that you’re curious about?”

“I’m not curious,” Kate said simply. “I’m pregnant.”

The words dropped like a bomb, sending shock waves rippling across the room. Finally, he said, “You could probably locate him yourself with some intense snooping on the Internet. However, I’ll give you his addresses.”

“I don’t want to locate him,” Kate said, and for the second time Gray Elliott was silent with shock.

“Why not? He has a right to know about this baby, and he also has financial obligations to you and to it.”

“Believe me, he would not want to exercise his rights to this baby. He made his first wife divorce him when she wanted to have a child. And as far as I’m concerned, he has no obligations to this baby. I’m the one who inadvertently had unprotected sex with him, and I’m the one who chose not to terminate this pregnancy. The responsibilities for the baby are all mine, and that’s fine with me.”

He studied her closely for several moments, as if her thinking struck him as almost too unusual to believe. “What do you think you’ll discover in our files?”

“Evan told me a little bit about the way Mitchell grew up and what the Wyatts did to him. Do you know anything about that?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I know all about it.”

“Are you also aware that Evan’s father orchestrated and supervised everything concerning it?”

To her surprise, Gray nodded.

“Then you should be able to believe this: Mitchell staged that whole seduction effort to get himself a little revenge against the Bartletts. I was just a gullible tool. When I met him in Anguilla, I had no idea he’d ever been to Chicago, let alone that he knew Henry and Evan. He knew who I was from the very beginning, though, and when he realized Evan wasn’t with me, he pulled out all the stops to get me into bed.”

She waited for all that to sink in, then she said with a sad laugh, “Mitchell got much more revenge than he hoped for: Evan and I aren’t together anymore, and I’m pregnant with Mitchell’s child.”

“How will looking through our files help you?”

“I need to learn about him so that I can understand why he did the things he did. Once I understand why, I’m hoping I’ll be able to forgive him, and then I’ll be able to love my baby. As it stands now, I can’t think of this baby without hating his father and hating myself for being such a fool over him.”

Tipping his head back, Gray Elliott contemplated the ceiling, and Kate held her breath. Finally, he looked directly at her and said, “William Wyatt spent a fortune on private investigators because he wanted to find out everything he possibly could about the little brother who’d been sent away to make his own way in the world. Caroline Wyatt gave us that file, thinking it might assist us in our own investigation.”

He got up, walked over to a built-in wooden file cabinet, and removed a fat file from it. “Technically,” he said, as he walked over to the conference table and laid the file on it, “this file of Caroline’s is separate from our own investigatory files, so I’m under no real burden of confidentiality. I don’t see why you couldn’t sit over here and look through it while I’m out to lunch.”

Any emotion, even relief, brought tears to her eyes these days, and she had to brush them away as she smiled at him and got up to walk over to the conference table. “Thank you very much,” she said achingly.

He stared at her face for a moment, then he returned to the file cabinet, took out an armload of additional files, and carried those to the conference table, too. “These files are strictly confidential,” he said with a meaningful smile. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“MISSDONOVAN IS still in your office,” Gray’s secretary told him.

Gray nodded, opened his office door, and walked inside. Kate Donovan was so engrossed in what she was reading that she didn’t even notice he’d returned. When he sat down at his desk, his leather chair made a noise, and she glanced up, completely startled. “In twenty minutes, I have a meeting scheduled here,” Gray said, “but you’re welcome to stay until then.”

“Thank you,” she said, and immediately lost herself in the file again.

Reaching for a tablet and pen, Gray started making notes for his meeting, but his gaze kept straying in her direction, and after ten minutes, he finally gave up and put his pen down to watch her. She was still working her way toward the bottom of William’s dark blue file, which, as he recalled, covered the first nineteen or twenty years of Mitchell’s life. There was nothing significant in that one; it contained mostly school transcripts, some letters and statements from those teachers who remembered him and were still employed at the boarding schools he’d attended, and copies of any pages from school periodicals or yearbooks that mentioned him.

And yet she was clearly finding items of import there, because at times she’d smile softly or frown, and a minute before, he’d distinctly seen her touch her fingertip almost tenderly to a newspaper photograph of him.

She was to his left, facing in his general direction, her head bent, her shining red hair spilling over her shoulders. She looked very young and very vulnerable, he thought, and very, very pretty, with her fair skin, long russet eyelashes, and the tiny cleft in her chin. Idly, he wondered why he hadn’t noticed how truly lovely she was before. She’d always seemed striking with her dark red hair, but he’d never really looked at her face. Now that he’d had a good long look at that face and that red hair, he realized the combination was stunning. And when he added in her emerald eyes and those legs of hers, she was downright fantastic looking.

Unfortunately for her, Mitchell Wyatt hadn’t overlooked her attributes and neither had that manipulative, two-faced schmuck Evan Bartlett. Bartlett had made sure everybody in their social circle knew that he’d dumped her and broken their engagement, but he’d neglected to mention that she’d cheated on him first. That would have made him look like less of a stud.

Getting up out of his chair, Gray perched a hip on the corner of his desk closest to the conference table and said, “Are you finding anything that’s helpful in all that stuff?”

She lifted jewel-bright eyes to his, nodded, and gave him a winsome smile. “He was an amazing athlete. He excelled at everything he tried, didn’t he?”

Surprised that athletic prowess would matter to her, Gray considered her question. “I guess he did. I remember there were a lot of school newspaper and yearbook photographs of him playing sports and getting trophies.”

“Did you notice anything else about those photographs?”

“No,” Gray said. “What was there to notice?”

Her voice caught. “He was always alone.” As proof, she flipped back a few pages in the file and took out the first photograph she came to. Gray shoved off the desk and walked the few steps to the conference table to see what she meant. In the photograph, Wyatt looked to be about sixteen, and he was getting a soccer trophy for breaking the school record for most goals in one season. “He isn’t alone,” Gray pointed out. “Two of his teammates who also won trophies are standing on either side of him.”

“Yes, they are,” Kate said softly. “But those two teammates’ parents are standing next to their sons. It’s the same theme in every photograph.”

She flipped slowly backward in the file—and in the chronological order of his life—to a photograph taken of him when he was about six during a cricket match. His bat looked way too big for him, and he was concentrating so hard he was scowling. “That is a kid who is focused on the ball,” Gray joked.

She nodded, started to say something, then shook her head and changed her mind. “Did you read this interview with the custodian of the grounds at his boarding school in France?”

“That sort of thing wasn’t of interest to me,” Gray admitted. “What does it tell you?”

“Mr. Brickley said Mitchell spent several Christmases with his wife and himself, rather than spending them with the headmaster’s family. He said Mitchell later wrote to them from the next boarding school he attended, but Mr. Brickley’s wife died and he stopped answering Mitchell’s letters.” Tears clogged her voice as she said, “Do you know why Mitchell was writing letters to a disinterested groundskeeper from his next boarding school?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“He was writing to him because it was mandatory at all these boarding schools for boys to write to a family member every two weeks. He didn’t have anyone else to write to.”

Leaning back in her chair, she said with a choked laugh, “I don’t blame him for despising the Bartletts and wanting revenge. In fact, I feel better knowing that—although I was badly used—it was actually for a very worthy cause.”

Gray grinned at her joke. “You missed the good stuff. His later years were filled with triumphs. In one of those files there’s a magazine article about Stavros Konstantatos. He called Wyatt ‘my left fist.’ ”

“His what?”

Leaning across her, Gray sorted through the top files, slid one out, and removed the article he’d shown to Jeff Cervantes and Lily Reardon. Kate read it, her smile faded, and she handed it back. “It’s a little easier for me to see him as a boy and young man than as a dynamic businessman. It’s harder for me to forgive a successful, intelligent man than it is to overlook the heartlessness of a boy who grew up with rich kids while he thought he himself was a charity case without a relative in the world.”

With a vague notion of trying to persuade Gray to let her have a copy of a picture of Mitchell to show her son someday, Kate reached for a file that obviously contained photographs.

The top photograph was a picture of Mitchell standing alone at the wharf in Philipsburg with the sun setting in the background. According to the date and time stamp in the lower right-hand corner, the photograph was taken at 5:45PM.

It was taken on the date she was supposed to meet him there at four o’clock.

Her hand shook as she picked it up and looked at the date and time again, unable to believe her eyes.

“Oh, my God!” she whispered, looking from the photograph to the one that had been beneath it. That one was taken at 5:15 on the same day in the same place. “Oh, my God!” she said again.

“Why are you upset about that shot? You’re not in it.”

“I was supposed to be there,” Kate said, swiftly sliding the next photograph aside and then the ones beneath it. They were in chronological order. The first shot taken of Mitchell at the wharf that day was time-stamped 3:30PM.

Not caring that Gray Elliott would think her demented, she touched Mitchell’s picture as if she could smooth back a loose black lock near his temple. “You were there,” she whispered achingly. “You were waiting there for me...” There was no mistaking that date—she’d gotten pregnant in the predawn hours of that day.

Gray straightened, taking in her flushed cheeks and overbright eyes. “Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

Kate started to laugh and ended up weeping.

“You’re scaring me, Kate.”

She went from weeping to joyous laughter and stood up, wrapping him in a quick, fierce hug with one arm, while she held the picture in her free hand. “You have nothing to be scared about—unless you try to pry this photograph out of my hand,” she warned him, with a beaming smile.

“I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. No one will ever know. It’s for his son to see someday.”

When he looked prepared to wrestle her to the ground for it, Kate sketched in the details of why it meant so much to her. When she was finished, he was a beaten man, and she knew it. “Phone me when you’d like to have dinner,” she said, “and I will see that you and your guests have a meal fit for a king.”

“That sounds like a bribe.”

She was so deliriously happy that she patted the arm of a man she barely knew and smilingly said, “Not a bribe, a payoff. ” She picked up her tote bag and headed for the door, then she stopped in the middle of his office and turned back. “Just out of curiosity, where did he go when he left the wharf?”

“He went directly to the airport and flew back here. His brother’s body had been found that day, and his nephew phoned him and pleaded with him to come straight home.”

“The same nephew who later confessed to killing William?”

Gray nodded, his expression turning grim. “The very same crazy little bastard who duped the most lenient judge in the juvenile court system and got off with a year in a psychiatric facility, followed by outpatient therapy, and three years probation.”

Outside on the sidewalk, Kate had to restrain the urge to throw her arms out wide and turn in slow, delighted circles. Mitchell had been waiting for her at the wharf. She wasn’t as naïve now as she’d been then, so she didn’t deceive herself into thinking he’d been in love with her and waiting there to carry her away with him.

The fact that he was there at the wharf didn’t negate the pretenses and secrets he’d built their brief relationship on. He’d pretended he knew nothing about Chicago, he’d pretended he knew nothing about Zack Benedict, and he’d sent her back to the villa to break up with Evan without ever admitting he knew who Evan was.

But he had not intended for her to trot back to the Enclave like an eager puppy only to find out that her master had checked out and vanished. He had not been going to let that happen. Maybe he had been waiting at the wharf just to say, “I’m sorry I’ve used you and hurt you—the Bartletts were my real target.”

It didn’t matter why he’d been waiting there for her. It only mattered that he’d been there. Holly might have been right after all—while he was executing his plan for revenge, he’d started to care for Kate a little, maybe enough to want to watch the sunrise with her. His behavior at the Children’s Hospital benefit rather negated that last thought, so Kate decided never to think about that awful night again.

In her heart a little voice pleaded with her to find Mitchell and see if she could make whatever feeling he’d had for her grow deeper and stronger. But then logic pointed out the futility of that. She was pregnant with his child, and Mitchell did not want anything to do with fatherhood. No doubt he felt that looking at his own child would bring back all the helplessness and pain of his own childhood. Kate felt an impulse to do real violence to Henry and Evan Bartlett and Cecil Wyatt, and everyone else who had put a beautiful, black-haired, blue-eyed little boy through a life of senseless misery.

Kate hailed a cab, slid into the backseat, and asked the driver to take her to Donovan’s restaurant. When she started to give him the address, he waved his hand and said, “Everybody in Chicago knows where it is.”

That was an exaggeration, but Kate didn’t argue. Sliding her hand protectively over her stomach, she whispered to the baby she’d been unable to accept until an hour ago. “Daniel Patrick Donovan,” she said, “you and I have a restaurant to run!”

Walking straight and quickly, Kate pushed the heavy door open and walked into Donovan’s; then she paused a moment and decided that Daniel Mitchell Donovan was the perfect name.