Free Fool Me Once by Fern Michaels Page B

chewed contentedly.
    With nothing else to do, Olivia made her way to the studio, where she reached for her appointment book. “I must be crazy,” she muttered over and over to herself as she called to cancel a month’s worth of appointments. She made the last call just as her father called her from the kitchen.
    Dennis poured coffee for them both. “Now, let’s talk seriously, Ollie. I can only imagine how you feel. I see the bitterness and sense of betrayal in your eyes. You have to leave that behind you—otherwise, it will fester like a bad sore. I want you to do whatever feels right to you, but be sure that whatever that turns out to be, you can live with it. When you hit a rough patch, you have to slow down and think it through. Whether you know it or not, you’re a very strong, capable person. You can deal with all this. You really can, Ollie. Plot out a course of action and go on from there. Do it the same way you plan a photo shoot. Set it up. You’re the one in control, and don’t ever forget it.” Then he started to laugh and couldn’t stop. “The first thing you have to do before you do anything else is figure out which dog is Cecil.”
    Olivia groaned, but she, too, started to laugh. “Hey, I hear a horn. I guess your taxi is here.” She ran to the window. “Yep, it’s here. He’s gonna love you—a trip to Reagan. Big fare, big tip.”
    Dennis zipped up his jacket, then hugged his daughter. “I love you, Ollie, and I’m sorry you have to go through this. Call me if you need me. If you want someone to come and stay with you, I’m sure Lea wouldn’t mind.” He squeezed her so hard she squealed for mercy. The horn blew again.
    And then he was gone, and Olivia was alone.
    Again.

    So much for good intentions, Olivia thought as she tossed the pictures from Adrian Ames’s Web site onto the coffee table. The letter followed, the one she knew by heart. She’d planned on burning the lot, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to drop the pages into the fire. She wondered why that was. There should be somebody she could ask, but there wasn’t. Her father would say the letter was the only thing she had of her mother’s, which was pretty damn sad if you considered that she was thirty-four years old. No, no, that was wrong. She had the bracelet. In the blink of an eye she ran down the hall to the desk where she’d thrown it. She reached for it and clutched it in her hand. Now she had two things. A letter and a bracelet. But the bracelet was hers . Some kindly, smiling nurse had probably put it on her wrist within minutes of being born. Such tiny beads. Today they put little plastic strips that passed for bracelets on babies. Today they put them on the baby’s ankle instead of the wrist. She’d read that in some dentist’s office.
    Olivia frowned. Didn’t her father tell her that Allison had never seen her, refused to see her after she’d given birth? Of course he’d said that. So how did she get my baby bracelet? And why did she keep it all these years? Her father had never shown it to her. He was sentimental and would have kept it if he’d had it. He’d kept her first baby booties and her pink blanket. Why wouldn’t he have kept the baby bracelet? She made a mental note to ask him the next time she spoke to him.
    Everything came back to one thing, the letter. Since she knew it by heart, Olivia folded it up and shoved it into the drawer of the coffee table. The pictures of the estate were shuffled into a neat pile, and she placed them on top of a stack of books. She dropped the baby bracelet into a crystal candy dish that had held Cisco candies until her father had eaten them all.
    Feeling churlish and out of sorts, she decided she shouldn’t be sitting there alone at eleven o’clock at night with only four dogs for company. But then her mood lightened when she