Free Legacy of Secrets by Elizabeth Adler Page B

darlin’.”
    But of course they never had and now that day would never come. Or would it?
    Shannon sat bolt upright in bed. The Nantucket cottage had been the place her mother and father visited together —“just as often as we could,” her father had said. And it had “a touch of magic.” Well, she could surely use a little magic right now! She had a place of her own, a roof over her head; somewhere to hide and be alone while she worked out what to do with the rest of her life. She would leave for Nantucket before the auction. Before they took away all her memories. She would look to the future, just the way her father would have wanted her to. A great feeling of relief swept over her, and she lay, exhausted, back against the pillows and was asleep within minutes.
    When she awoke the next morning, there was a note from J.K. pushed under the door.
Let’s have lunch?
it said simply. Shannon felt better; she would tell J.K. her decision and see what he had to say.
    He took her to a little country inn a half hour’s drive away. There were blue checked tablecloths and a bunch of white daisies in a yellow jug on their table. The place was crowded and there was a pleasant bustling air about it.
    “It feels normal here,” Shannon said, surprised.
    “And that’s just the way it should,” he said. “I know it’s going to be hard, Shannon, but that’s what you have to do.Try and get things ‘back to normal.’ I asked you out to lunch because I was worried about you. You’ve had one blow after another: your father, your stepmother, Wil. Everybody seems to be deserting you, and I wanted you to know that I am not. Whatever you want to do, I’ll help you.”
    She looked at him solemnly. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and a linen jacket and she knew he meant to look relaxed, but somehow it still seemed as if he were wearing a formal suit and tie. His brown eyes looked worriedly at her from behind his gold-rimmed glasses and she reached across the table and took his hand and squeezed it gratefully. “I never knew you were so
nice,
J.K.,” she said. “Now I know why my dad didn’t turn you down when you came for the job.”
    “When I came for that job he would have been perfectly justified in turning me down. I was brash, uncouth, and rude.” J.K. laughed. “Thank God he didn’t, I was down to my last ten bucks and no prospects. I’d banked everything on getting a job with Bob Keeffe. He had been my idol all through my teenage years: a man with nothing who had made a fortune. Your father had the American dream and I wanted it, too, or at least a part of it. I figured where better to learn how to get it than from the man himself. So there you are. Now you know the truth about me.”
    “I don’t really know anything about you, J.K.,” she said, surprised.
    “Probably because you’ve never given me a second thought,” he retorted, and they both laughed.
    “Well, now I am, so why don’t you tell me about yourself,” she said coaxingly. “Where you were born, your family, your girlfriends, everything. After all, you know everything there is to know about me.”
    He thought for a minute and then said, “My father was a bastard.” She stared at him, shocked, and he said, “He was a drunken bully who left his family more often than he stayed with it. Thank God, I barely knew him. I guess I didn’t know my mother too well either. I was mostlybrought up by my grandmother. She was a lovely woman, a doctor’s daughter. I adored her. I would have done anything for her.
    “But I’m sure you don’t want to hear my sorry tale,” he said with an apologetic smile, and she eagerly told him she did, so he thought for a minute and then said, “My grandmother married a charming rogue. She was a small-town girl who had never been more than forty miles from her Carolina home in her life. He was an older man, in his forties, and very good-looking in a different, rugged sort of way. She said he could charm the birds