Free Follow the Sun by Deborah Smith Page A

“I hate competition. Tell me you married him for his money.”
    She laughed. ‘Of course. Isn’t that why all young women marry older men?”
    Jeopard watched her gaze at the destroyed scrapbook again. Tears pooled in her eyes and slid down her cheeks. She wiped them away hurriedly.
    “I’m an awful crybaby these days, I fear. Please don’t think I’m always such a faucet.”
    Royce’s money wasn’t what made her cry over a whimsical scrapbook
.
    “You really loved Royce,” Jeopard said simply.
    “Yes.”
    He believed her, and another knot of worry unwound inside him. He was thrilled that she’d adored her husband. Sometime later he’d have to consider the irony of his feelings.
    Jeopard paused, planning his next words. “How did his grown daughters feel about having a stepmother younger than they were?”
    “They thought their poor dad had gone bonkers, but they weren’t surprised by it. He was never a conformist. I only met them once. They were extremely polite to me.”
    “And after Royce died?”
    She smiled grimly. “They took their inheritance and bid me an extremely polite farewell. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
    “They didn’t resent you?”
    “Because of the inheritance? Hardly. Royce left everything to them.”
    Jeopard stared at her. He had just fallen off a cliff, but he was floating. He prayed that everything she’d told him was true. “How did you feel about that?”
    “Oh, I knew he wouldn’t leave me anything. He told me before we got married.”
    “But … honey, you took care of the man when he was dying. You suffered with him.”
    “Jep, I represented only four years in his life. Hardly anything in comparison to all of his family obligations. He helped me learn a marvelous profession, and I’m very comfortable financially because of that.Besides, I wasn’t a hired nurse, I was his wife. I didn’t resent having to take care of him toward the end.”
    Jeopard looked at her for so long that she shifted awkwardly and covered her face in mock embarrassment. She peeked through her fingers at him.
    “Sundance, rest assured that I’m no saint. Stop looking at me that way.”
    He pulled her hands to him and kissed each of them. His lips against her warm, smooth skin, he asked gruffly, “Want some help trying to put Royce’s scrapbook back together? I’m great with puzzles.”
    “Yes,” she whispered, delighted.
    Except in your case
, he added silently.
I’m more lost than ever
.
    T HE MORNING FOG had just lifted when Jeopard guided their rental car through the steep San Francisco streets. Tess hunched forward in the passenger seat, hands excitedly bending the sheaf of maps and written directions balanced on the knees of her aqua-colored chinos.
    He glanced at her and smiled. She was as eager as a kid on the way to Disneyland, and he enjoyed her enthusiasm. In the past few days he’d absorbed her unsullied view of life until he almost felt lighthearted. It was easy to forget that he had work to do, or that he’d failed to get answers to his most important questions.
    Did she have the Kara diamond? Had she been Royce’s accomplice?
    For today, he’d forget. He wanted to believe that this gentle, classy woman was everything innocent that he was not.
    “Drive faster,” she ordered, staring out the car window and impatiently tapping her white sandals on the floorboard.
    “It’s going to be at least an hour, Mario Andretti Gallatin. Sit back and take your gear off.”
    Her thirty-five-millimeter camera hung from a widestrap around her neck, indenting the abstract pastels on the chest of the fashionably huge white T-shirt she wore with a wide cloth belt. Also hanging around her neck were her gold medallion and her antler amulet.
    Her chocolate-colored hair was pulled back in a French braid. Next to her he felt rather ordinary in a white golf shirt, dusky blue slacks, and Docksiders.
    That was all right—in his business, it wasn’t wise to draw attention with