Sapphire Nights (Crystal Magic Book 1)(42)
Chapter 14
Edgy, Walker drank only one beer while Sam sipped white wine and admired the sunset. In jeans and jacket, she wasn’t dressed provocatively, but he was so aware of her that it was all he could do to keep from grabbing her hair and hauling her off to his cave.
Memories were tumbling out of her, and the story was fascinating, like a giant puzzle he needed to piece together. He ordered her another chardonnay.
“I was so sheltered,” she admitted with a gesture of self-deprecation. “It never occurred to me to wonder where the money came from. I knew my parents were established artists and assumed the income was theirs. When I turned sixteen, Wolf bought me the Subaru, nothing fancy. He said he didn’t want me driving icy roads in anything less than a four-wheel drive, and I just accepted that we had money for new cars. When it came time for college, I received a full scholarship at Brigham, so I never asked about the other costs of school.”
“Why environmental science?” He wanted another beer, but one thing led to another, and he was keeping his head on tight this time around. He wouldn’t let his caretaker neurosis mess with his head again, especially with a woman who was a mystery even to herself.
Sam shrugged. She’d removed her jacket and her slim shoulders lifted her breasts against her loose shirt in a way that had him sucking an empty bottle.
“I’ve always grown plants. I took care of the vegetable gardens and the flowers and it was just something I did. It kept me grounded, as you said earlier.” She paused, as if considering how much to tell him. “I knew agriculture wasn’t for me. I didn’t want a farm. But science. . . that offered possibilities. My parents were all for it.”
He waited while she gathered her thoughts. She had long, slender fingers and despite the work she’d been doing these past days, her nails were neat and well-shaped. His mind drifted to how they would feel. . .
“And then they were dead,” she said flatly, even though grief shadowed her eyes. “One day I was planning on going home for Thanksgiving, and the next, I had no one to go home to. They had filled my life so completely that I hadn’t realized I had no life without them.”
He remembered the day his dad disappeared, but at the time, he had hope he’d turn up. It wasn’t the same finality she’d suffered. “Painful memories. I can see where you might want to shut them out.”
“Cass was responsible for shutting down my memory,” she said without equivocation. “I loved my parents, and I know they loved me, even if I was adopted and didn’t think or look like them. I never tried to shut out their memory, even after I learned that they didn’t tell me the whole truth.”
“Which is?” He could listen to her all evening, which was probably safer than going back to the suite.
“It took me a while.” She sipped her wine as she worked through her thoughts. “After they died, a lawyer called to say he was executor of their estate and that he’d keep providing for my student housing and allowance as always. He suggested I sell the farm, though, because the artwork had a finite inventory and the income from it would eventually dry up.
“I was too grief-stricken to ask more.” She looked regretfully at the almost empty glass. “Are you sure you want to hear all this?”
“It’s the best bedtime story I’ve ever heard. What did you do with the farm?”
“I couldn’t bear to give it up, at first, but then I realized I couldn’t bear to live out there all alone either. So I had the lawyer sell it to an elderly neighbor who had adult children who wanted to live nearby. I thought my parents would approve of that. It was only at that point that I started questioning where my allowance came from.”
“You said it was in a trust?”
She nodded. “The Samantha Moon Trust, and it had been established shortly after my birth, which finally made me wonder about my birth parents. I knew I was adopted and had never cared to know more.”
“But you were suddenly without family and started looking around.” Everything she was saying was sensible. But somewhere, the crazy came in. “How did you do that and still keep up your studies?”
“Not well,” she admitted. “The Mormons have one of the biggest genealogy databases in the world, and I simply didn’t have time to sort through it. After I realized Jade and Wolf had been born in San Francisco, I wondered if maybe I had been too, so I checked California adoption records and discovered I was born to Zachary and Susannah Tolliver. But I couldn’t find anything in the database for either of them. That’s when I gave up and hired a professional.”
“A professional genealogy researcher? I wish I’d known you’d done that. I could have saved Sofia the trouble of digging.” Although would he have taken Sam’s word? He ran his hand up and down his empty bottle—until she abruptly stood up and almost fell.
“We need to read your laptop to see what your secretary found out about Cass.” She steadied herself on the table. “I know Cass raised my birth father as her own, because she told me so, but she didn’t give me the whole story.”
Standing, Walker laid down cash for the bill and grasped her elbow to lead her out. “You’re not used to alcohol.”
She laughed. “Mormons, remember? Only one of my friends drank, and we didn’t have money for anything except cheap beer. No matter how I tried, I never fit with the crowd anyway. By the time I graduated, I desperately missed my parents and their more liberal views. I hoped to find others like them.”