Free Birthright by Nora Roberts Page A

company and laughed at the same jokes.
    Her father liked to putter around the garden and pamper his roses and tomatoes. Her mother played the violin and collected antique watches. He donated four days a month to a free clinic. She gave music lessons to underprivileged children.
    They’d been married for thirty-eight years, and though they argued, occasionally bickered, they still held hands when they walked together.
    She knew her mother deferred to her father on major decisions, and most of the minor ones. It was a trait that drove Callie crazy, one she perceived as a developed subservience that fostered dependence and weakness.
    She was often ashamed of herself for viewing her mother as weak, and for viewing her father as just a bit smug for fostering the dependence.
    Her father actually gave her mother an allowance. They didn’t call it that, of course. Household expenses. But to Callie’s mind it came to the same thing.
    But if these were the biggest flaws she could find in her parents, it hardly made them baby-snatching monsters.
    Feeling foolish, guilty and ridiculously nervous, Callie let herself into the house, hit the foyer lights, then punched in the code for the security alarm.
    For a moment she simply stood, absorbing the feel. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d been alone in the house. Certainly before she’d moved out and into her first apartment.
    She could smell the faint drift of Murphy Oil Soap that told her Sarah, their longtime cleaning woman, had been there within the last few days. There was the scent of roses, too, strong and sweet from her mother’s favorite potpourri.
    She saw there were fresh flowers, some elegant summer arrangement, on the refectory table that ran under the staircase. Her mother would have told Sarah to see to that, Callie thought. She would have said the house enjoyed flowers, whether anyone was home or not.
    She crossed the unglazed checkerboard of tile and started up the stairs.
    She stopped in the doorway of her room first. Her childhood room. It had gone through numerous incarnations from the little-girl fussiness that was her first memory of it—and her mother’s vision—through the eye-popping colors she’d insisted on when she’d begun to have her own ideas and into the messy cave where she’d kept her collection of fossils and old bottles, animal bones and anything else she’d managed to dig up.
    Now it was an elegant space to welcome her or any guests. Pale green walls and sheer white curtains, an antique quilt on a wide four-poster bed. And all the pretty little whatnots her mother collected on shopping expeditions with friends.
    With the exception of vacations, sleepovers at friends’, summer camp and the summer nights when she’d pitched a tent in the backyard, she’d always slept in that room until she’d left for college.
    That made it, she supposed, in whatever incarnation, part of her.
    She moved down the wide hallway and into her father’s study. She hesitated there, wincing a bit as she looked at his lovely old mahogany desk with its pristine surface, the fresh blotter in its burgundy leather holder, the silver desk set, the charming folly of an antique inkwell with quill.
    The desk chair was the same rich leather, and she could see him there, as likely studying a gardening catalogue as a medical journal. His glasses would be sliding down his nose, and his hair, pale gold and shot with silver, would fall over his wide forehead.
    This time of year he’d wear a golf shirt and chinos, over a very fit frame. He’d have music on—probably classical. Indeed his first formal date with the girl who’d become his wife had been a concert.
    Callie had often come into this room, plopped down in one of the two cozy leather chairs and interrupted her father with news, complaints, questions. If he’d been really busy, he’d give her a long, cool look over the top of his