LITMIR.BIZ

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there because he was getting estimates to add on a coffee shop, or something. But I don’t think that’s really it.”

      Sawyer pushed away his empty plate. “We’ve invited him into the family, but apparently, he prefers to stay carefully on the fringe. Maybe he’s afraid of intruding.” Sawyer headed the Abbott Mills Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the family’s many holdings. He was a daredevil by nature and conducted every phase of his life like an extreme sport. At thirty-five, he was four years older than Campbell and two years younger than Killian.

      Janet had come to adore her brothers in the five weeks since she’d rediscovered them, but she did not want to have to talk Brian Girard into anything. She found him interesting and attractive, but he seemed to have little use for her. It was embarrassing.

      They saw each other at family get-togethers, and while she managed to be polite, there was always a certain testiness to his behavior that had started the day she’d first arrived at Shepherd’s Knoll, looking for China. She had accidentally run him over with a Vespa, though she’d apologized for that.

      “Why can’t Mom talk to him?” she’d asked with a pleading look around the table. “She and Brian are crazy about each other.”

      “She stays out of disagreements among her children.” Killian smilingly shot down that suggestion. “If he really were her son, maybe she could bully him into doing it. But she can’t. It’s up to you, Janby. We’re counting on you to make him change his mind.”

      He would have to call her Janby. It was what the family had created out of Janet, the name her adopted family had given her, and Abby, the name given her at birth. For the first few days after the DNA test had proven she was the Abbotts’ daughter, kidnapped from her bedroom at fourteen months, everyone had stumbled over her name. She’d arrived as Janet Grant, but she’d become Abigail Abbott. The composite name charmed her.

      “He likes to talk to you,” Sawyer added.

      “No, he doesn’t,” she denied. “It only seems that way to you because you can’t hear what we’re talking about. Usually, we’re disagreeing about something, or he’s pointing out my mistakes. He doesn’t like me.”

      And that was the real source of their antagonism—at least, on her part. She liked Brian, had been attracted to him from the first time she’d seen him. Unfortunately, that was after she’d run him over with the Vespa.

      She’d hoped that had been the cause of his antagonism and that he’d get over it. But they’d been in each other’s company half-a-dozen times since then, at one family function or another, and he showed absolutely no interest in her except to take the opposite position on whatever she talked about, or to illustrate how wrong she was about everything whenever he could.

      “That’s ridiculous,” Campbell said, disputing her. “Everyone likes you.”

      “Come on,” Killian coaxed. “Cordie and I are standing up for Sawyer and Sophie. If you and Brian are witnesses for Campbell and China, it’ll be the perfect family thing. And though Mom’s staying out of it, we know she’d love it, too. Help us do this.”

      Even Janet knew she was defeated. Killian, Sawyer and Campbell were the world’s most perfect brothers. They’d welcomed her home, done everything they could to make her comfortable, protected her from the press, explained to her with the clinical detachment of people accustomed to wealth that Killian had opened various bank accounts in her name—checking, savings, a healthy IRA, a trust fund, all of which amounted to a sum so staggering to the simple woman she’d been so far that she’d been unable to speak. And their father had put a block of Abbott Mills stock in her name when she was born, as he’d done for each of her brothers. Killian had added to it over the years as he’d added to their own—in faith that she’d be returned to them one day.

      And here she was. She loved them for their faith, not their wealth, and she didn’t see that she could deny them anything.

      “Fine,” she said, afraid she might fail but determined to try. “I’ll see what I can do.”

      She made her way to the estate’s vast garage and climbed astride the Vespa, determined to get Brian into a tuxedo for the wedding—whatever it took. As she sped down the lane and up the road that bordered the orchard, leaving the fanciful yellow Victorian mansion behind, the air was sweet with the promise of apples and tangy with the ever-present bite of the salty ocean that encompassed Long Island, New York, on this late-summer morning.

      The sun warm on her back, she turned onto the road that led to Brian’s General Store and Boat Rental, knowing he’d be open, since it was almost nine o’clock. She enjoyed the smooth ride, going over in her mind various ways to approach Brian about taking part in the wedding.

      She considered making an effort to charm him, but she usually did that and he failed to notice.

      She could attempt to approach him with subtlety, but he was a very direct man and probably wouldn’t even get the point.

      Heaping guilt on him seemed like her only option when she caught sight of a battered blue Trans Am turning off a side road and falling in line behind her. She recognized the car immediately. Souped-up and poorly kept, it belonged to Buzz Merriman, reporter-photographer for the Meteor, a tabloid determined to make something unsavory out of her return to Losthampton.

      Killian had explained to her that the Abbott policy toward the press was to treat them respectfully without revealing family secrets. He insisted the reporters were just doing their jobs and could be useful to the foundation’s efforts if the family had their goodwill.

      That might work with the reporter from the Lost-hampton Leader, with the one who’d been sent from the New York Mirror and the many radio and television reporters who’d been following her since she’d first come to Shepherd’s Knoll five weeks ago. But she was sure that didn’t hold for Merriman. For one thing, he had no goodwill to cultivate. His stories on Janet always focused on where she’d been and what she’d done in the least flattering way possible rather than on the facts behind her restoration to the family.

      His last piece suggested that she and China, though raised by an adoptive family as sisters, would now be at odds because Janet had been discovered to be little Abigail returned when everyone had first thought China was the long-missing heiress. China’s engagement to Campbell, the reporter wrote, was a creative way for China to get the Abbott name.

      Janet might have forgiven him for hurting her, but causing her sister pain was unpardonable.

      If the Vespa had been any match for the Trans Am, she’d have done a quick turn and taken Merriman on in a game of chicken then and there, but she saw evasion as the wiser move.

      She sped down another side road, knowing that the narrow strip ended at the high bank of sand at the back of a waterfront inn, and was pleased to see him follow. Just before the expanse of beach, she took a left through a thin grove of trees. The Vespa swerved in and out of the spindly trunks as she heard the Trans Am’s brakes screechingly applied.

      She chanced a glance over her shoulder just to see the car rock from the force of Merriman’s abrupt stop. She enjoyed her success a moment too long, though, and turned back in time to get a pine bough in the face, a pine cone down her shirt and a vicious bump to her backside as she rode over the exposed roots of several trees.

      She braked breathlessly at the edge of the grove, the back of Brian’s shop visible just ahead of her. It was a beautiful scene, with the rustic little shop in the foreground, a pier jutting out into the water, all his small rental boats tied to it.

      But she wasn’t in the mood to enjoy it. This was a fool’s errand and she was arriving to fulfill it in a bad mood from evading Buzz and taking a beating on her ride through the woods.

      She caught sight of Brian, tall and loose limbed, striding along the pier, his blond hair catching the sun. There was a natural arrogance in his bearing that was both appealing and annoying. She just didn’t understand him.

      She decided that if charm and subtlety were out in dealing with him,

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