Free Blood Ties in Chef Voleur by Mallory Kane Page A

available to the patrons and guests. But she thought if she had to stand there smiling and answering questions and listening to comments and critiques one more minute, she might have a psychotic break, right in the middle of one of the most prestigious galleries in the Warehouse District of New Orleans.
    She’d had all day to consider what she was going to do about what she’d found under the kitchen table, but she was no closer to an answer than she’d been that morning when she’d discovered the small, spiral-bound notepad.
    Since seeing it on the floor against one of the table legs and picking it up, she’d opened it at least a dozen times to flip through for one more look at the notes he’d made about his grandfather, about her grandfather, about her family—about her .
    Reading Jack’s notes had been painful, the way a sore tooth was. The kind of pain that kept the tongue coming back to test it, as if by repeatedly touching it, the pain would—what? Give up and stop hurting?
    But Jack’s notebook hadn’t given up. Nor had it stopped hurting her. No matter where she turned, no matter whose name she saw, whether it was hers or someone in her family or his, it hurt just as much. And yet she kept probing.
    She’d stopped time and time again all day long to look through the little spiral-bound book, after that first time, when she’d flopped down on the floor and read it cover to cover without stopping except to dry her tears. After that, she’d looked for something—a paragraph, a sentence, even a word or two, that Jack had written that told her he cared about her. So far, she hadn’t turned up anything.
    Jack’s sketchy notes were the antithesis of her grandmother Lilibelle’s poetic, flowing narrative. But both of them, in their way, were documenting history as it occurred.
    Jack had documented the history of how he’d pursued her, arranged to bump into her, and finally met and seduced her into falling for him.
    As she’d paged through the notebook for the first time, she’d come to a page where he’d written her name and age, the words fiber artist, and a list of her gallery showings and sales. He’d listed an interview she’d done a few weeks before and jotted a note about her working on a genealogy of the Delancey and Guillame families.
    On the next page he’d written the showing at the Donnelly Gallery a second time, along with its date, plus four scribbled words. Accidentally bump into her .
    She shivered, standing there in the art gallery just like she had the first time she’d read those words. On the following page were more scribbled notations.
    7/14—Spent the nite—her apt. Nice! Sexy!
    Likes pasta—a lot. Talks about family.
    Shouldn’t be hard.
    Biting her lip and feeling her cheeks turn hot with embarrassment at some of the things Jack had alluded to, she turned the pages until she got to the first thing that had caught her eye that morning. It was the name Con Delancey.
    It was over halfway through the pad, behind Jack’s notes. Dog-eared pages that held tiny sketches and dimensions and calculations, all of which she assumed had to do with Jack’s architecture business. She remembered flipping through, a small smile on her face as she looked at what she thought were her husband’s work notes. A small thrill had hummed through her at the anticipation of seeing her name in there, maybe with a note about what time to meet her for the fiber-art show opening, or a note to himself to pick up flowers or something for her.
    But when she’d seen her grandfather’s name, she’d stopped and read the entire page, and a knot of fear had lodged under her breastbone. That page and several others had been filled with notes that referred to Con’s death, Lilibelle’s obsession with journaling, and the address of the fishing cabin on Lake Pontchartrain.
    She flipped through the entire notebook, each page a hopeful encounter that gave her one more chance to find out that she was wrong. That