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said, tilting her head.

      She was still smiling, and he gazed at her, transfixed.

      “You’ve had a firsthand look at the Carroll family, now it’s your turn to cough up some personal information about the Corrigans.”

      Was she flirting with him? Flynt clamped his teeth together to keep his jaw from hanging agape like a starstruck idiot.

      And then her words filtered through the sensual clouds and abruptly quashed every amatory feeling. An abrupt transition, akin to being thrown into an icy lake. Which was a good thing, he concluded. He had been too distracted by her appeal, he’d lost his focus on the job at hand. That was unacceptable.

      “I’m here to talk about your father, not me.” His lips thinned to a hard, straight line. “To set up the initial meeting between the two of you, and the sooner, the better.”

      Angelica stared at him. His transformation was startling. For a few moments there, his mood had been light, almost playful, now he was strictly business.

      Fortune business. She flinched. “I have no desire to meet—”

      “You didn’t know Brandon was your father, did you?” Flynt lowered his voice and she leaned in closer to hear. “You don’t have to don the family mask, no one is here but me. Be honest, Angelica.”

      “No, I didn’t,” she confessed. “I guess there’s really no harm in admitting that.”

      “Any particular reason why you pretended that you knew?” He sounded almost amused.

      “I just did, that’s all.”

      “Because you were raised to automatically lie when faced with the unknown, according to your mother’s ‘trust no one’ philosophy?”

      Bingo! He’d hit it. Not that Angelica was about to tell him so. “Now who’s overindulging in psychology, Agent Corrigan?”

      “Ex-agent, remember?” he corrected. “And call me Flynt.”

      Their eyes met again, and Angelica felt her pulses jump queerly. He had an unnerving effect on her. A most unusual one. Because when she’d been holding him at gunpoint, when she suspected him of being sent here to investigate them, of being one of the enemy, she’d felt an unexpected, unwelcome sexual awareness of him.

      That had never happened to her before. Being attracted to a man who could bring their lives crashing down on them? Good Lord, it was something her mother might do! But not perceptive, practical Angelica, who had been blessed with an abundance of common sense. And a steely self-control dating back to her nursery school days.

      It occurred to her that somewhere along the line she’d begun to trust Flynt Corrigan, at least a little. Enough to believe he was telling the truth about why he’d come, that he actually was here representing her newfound father.

      If he were one of them, he wouldn’t have lingered so long talking in the vestibule; they liked to burst onto the scene like a SWAT team. Time was always of the essence in their hateful surprise searches.

      Most convincing of all, her mother didn’t view him as a threat, and her mother’s instincts in such cases were impeccable.

      “You’re a million miles away.” Flynt’s voice, deep and male, broke into her thoughts. “I know you must have plenty of questions about Brandon and how he found you, so just ask, Angelica. I’m here to give you the answers.”

      She was standing way too close to him, Angelica realized with a start. They were in each other’s personal space, within easy touching distance, and the longer she looked into his light blue eyes, the less clearly she was able to think.

      He had beautiful eyes, the palest of blue, a distinctive contrast to his dark brown hair and brows. Taken separately, his features were too irregular for him to be categorized as handsome, yet his face was one of the most interesting, arresting ones she’d ever seen. Masculine and unyielding, with the kind of virile sex appeal that probably caused a lot of women to throw themselves at him.

      He had said he wasn’t married. Angelica’s guard, so briefly dropped, was back in full force. He was probably one of those jerks who bounced from woman to woman, unwilling or unable to make a commitment. The type of man her mother was drawn to, with hapless moth-to-a-flame predictability.

      And from what she’d heard via media gossip, exactly the type of man her father Brandon Fortune was.

      Angelica’s stomach clenched and she took a sudden deep gulp of air. She felt like she’d been sucker punched. Her father! As if life weren’t complicated enough, now she had a father to deal with!

      “Are you okay?” Flynt was practically hovering over her now. Too close. Way, way too close.

      Angelica was excruciatingly aware of his vastly superior height—he was a couple of inches over six feet, effectively dwarfing her—and of his broad shoulders, his muscular frame not at all disguised by his jacket.

      He was tough and strong and looked it. She didn’t like tough, strong men. She remembered too well how one swat from a big man’s fist had sent her flying across the room. More than once.

      “Now you’re the one who looks strange.” Flynt cupped his hands over her shoulders to support her. “You’ve gone so pale, you look ready to faint.”

      Angelica jumped. His touch seemed to tripwire every nerve in her body. She felt her hair stand on end. “Don’t touch me!”

      She roughly jerked away from him and made a wild dash to the living room.

      Flynt’s reflexes were on red alert status this time. He easily beat her to the bookcase and retrieved the gun from the top shelf, tucking it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

      “Give that to me!” Angelica demanded thickly.

      “So you can shoot me with it? Not a chance, Miss Fortune.”

      “Don’t call me that!”

      Flynt folded his arms in front of his chest. “You’re going to have to deal with it, Angelica. You’ve been found, and your father’s family wants to claim you as one of their own.”

      “Oh, sure! I just bet they do,” she said sarcastically. Standing across the living room from him, with distance safely between them, her fighting spirits were revived…even if he did have her gun.

      She had no fear that he would use it, but it was annoying to be bested so easily by him after she’d done such a splendid job of holding her own earlier.

      “That’s why I’m here, Angelica,” Flynt said with commendable patience. “If you’ll allow me to explain the circumstances surrounding your father’s—”

      “Spare me. I remember when Monica Malone was murdered and the news broke that her son Brandon was really the missing Fortune child who’d been kidnapped as an infant,” Angelica interjected. “It was one of those sensational stories the media hyped to excess, especially since they wrongly believed Jake Fortune had killed Monica. A person would’ve had to be living in a cave in the remote Himalayas not to have heard about it.”

      “The Fortunes were all over TV and in all the papers back then,” agreed Flynt. “They told me how much they hated being trapped in that media circus. Even eight years later they’re still appalled by the memory of it.”

      “Are they still appalled by Brandon? You see, I also remember some of the more candid pictures and video clips back then. They were a real study in body language. That family looked anything but thrilled to have Monica Malone’s son dumped on them, blood relative or not.”

      “You picked that up from a few photos and video footage, did you?” mocked Flynt.

      She didn’t back down. “I’m right, aren’t I? Well, they’ll be even less happy to meet me. Not that I blame them, I don’t want to meet them, either. We might be related, but we’re strangers with nothing at all in common.”

      “Brandon’s

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