LITMIR.BIZ

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doesn’t claim to be a half brother. He says he’s my full brother—one of two, actually.”

      Rachel looked understandably confused. “There are two of them? And Ethan said you have the same parents?”

      “Yes.” He swallowed. “According to Ethan, my mother—er, the woman who raised me…”

      Stopping abruptly, he shook his head. “Never mind. You don’t want to hear this. I think we should talk about decorating. What did you say you want to do in here? Add tables, I hope.”

      “Definitely tables. But you were going to tell me what Ethan said about your mother.”

      He sighed. Might as well get this over with, he thought. Rachel was bound to find out the truth if they became involved in a personal relationship, as he’d hoped.

      “According to what Ethan told me, the woman who raised me kidnapped me from a loving family. Parents, and two older brothers. My—the woman I knew as my mother was the nanny. Thirty years ago, when I was barely two, she pushed her car into a flooded river and took off with me, leaving everyone to believe I was dead.”

      Rachel looked as though she wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. “Your mother…?”

      He nodded grimly. “Wasn’t my mother, after all. According to Ethan Brannon, my real mother is very much alive and living in Alabama with my father, an orthodontist. They are still unaware that their youngest son didn’t drown as a toddler.”

      Chapter Two

      Rachel had heard stories like this on television talk shows and in newspaper feature stories. She had never dreamed something so bizarre could happen to someone she actually knew. “This is…hard to believe. Did he have any proof?”

      “His story was verified by one of my former patients last night. Posthumously.”

      The tale was growing more convoluted by the moment. “Posthumously? I don’t understand. How—?”

      Pushing a hand through his already disheveled hair, Mark grimaced. “Trust me, I know how strange it sounds. I’ll try to tell you from the beginning—at least as much as I’ve figured out, myself.”

      Taking a deep breath, he began, describing a young married couple and their three boys who lived happily in North Carolina. The father was an orthodontist, the mother a housewife and active community volunteer, and because of their busy schedule, they hired a nanny to help them with their children, particularly the youngest son, Kyle.

      The nanny, Carmen Thomas, became a part of the family, bonding closely with the children, especially Kyle. Explaining that she was alone in the world, she had seemed to find a purpose in her job and had been highly valued by her employers.

      And then one day when Kyle was two, Carmen took the little boy out in a terrible storm. Flash flooding in the area had already claimed two lives, and no one knew why she’d left the house that day. Her car was discovered later, upside down in a flooded ravine. Though no bodies were found with the crushed vehicle, it was assumed that both the nanny and the child had been swept away, their remains buried beneath debris.

      “Those poor parents,” Rachel murmured, imagining how devastating it must have been for the Brannons to lose their youngest child.

      Mark didn’t seem ready to focus on emotions just yet. He was still struggling to deal with the facts of his past. “Unbeknownst to the Brannons, Carmen must have been planning the abduction for some time. The flooding proved to be a convenient cover for her disappearance. An acquaintance met her at the side of a mountain road that afternoon and helped her push her car into the water. The acquaintance then drove Carmen and the child out of the state.”

      “An ‘acquaintance’helped Carmen kidnap a toddler?” Rachel shook her head in shocked disbelief. “No matter how close they were, what kind of a person would do that?”

      “A person with serious emotional problems of her own. A woman who was told that she was rescuing a mother and her child from a violent domestic situation. During the ensuing few days, she began to suspect that she had been duped, but by then she felt that it was too late to change her course. She left the woman and child in Georgia and went on her way, trying to put them out of her mind. As I said, she had problems of her own.”

      “That still doesn’t excuse what she did.”

      “No. And it haunted her for years, despite her efforts to forget. Years later, fate or…something brought her back into my life several months ago. She was the nursing home patient I told you about. She died yesterday, leaving behind a letter describing the role she had played in my abduction.”

      Growing more confused by the moment, Rachel shook her head. “Wait. How did she track you down? How did she know it was you? How did she become your patient in the nursing home?”

      “Some of those questions I can’t answer. The rest aren’t really important right now. The fact is, I think I believe what she said. I think I am—or was—Kyle Brannon. Though I want the DNA tests to prove it, there’s just something about it all that feels, well, true.”

      Maybe she was just naturally more skeptical than he. After all, she had a history of rescuing people from messes they’d gotten into as a result of being too gullible. Not that she thought of Mark as gullible, exactly, but still…

      “If I were you, I would be very careful until after the DNA results become available. You said yourself that your former patient had emotional problems. The fact that Aislinn Flaherty claims to be psychic makes me very nervous. And you don’t know this guy who suddenly appeared on your doorstep, claiming to be your brother. For all you know, this could be some sort of elaborate scam.”

      His lips twitched in a pitiful excuse for a smile. “Trust me, Rachel, I’m not quite as naive as you seem to fear. I’ll insist on the DNA tests, and I won’t do anything until after I’ve seen the results.”

      She studied his face, trying to read beyond the wry expression. “How do you feel about all this?”

      After a rather lengthy pause, he cleared his throat. “I don’t know, exactly. I’m having trouble processing everything.”

      She nodded, completely understanding why he would feel that way. All-too-familiar words left her mouth then, her typical, knee-jerk reaction to seeing anyone in distress. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

      She couldn’t imagine anything she could do, of course. This was so far beyond her realm of experience. And it wasn’t as if she knew Mark particularly well, herself.

      “Actually, there is something…”

      She tried to hide her surprise. “Um, sure. What is it?”

      “Join me for dinner tonight?”

      “You want me to have dinner with you?” She couldn’t see how another dinner date would help him with his family problem.

      He nodded. “I’m supposed to meet Ethan and his girlfriend for dinner tonight. We all agreed it would be best to get together after I’d had a few hours to think about what they’d told me. It would be a really big help to me if you’d go with me tonight—you know, sort of moral support.”

      She cleared her throat. “I don’t know, Mark. That sounds rather awkward.”

      “It would be even more awkward for me to have dinner with Ethan Brannon and his girlfriend without having anyone there who’s on my side.”

      “Your side? You make it sound like a confrontation rather than a getting-to-know-each-other evening.”

      “I’m not expecting a confrontation. I just…well, I’d like to have someone there who knows me as Mark Thomas, you know? Not some missing kid named Kyle Brannon.”

      “You have plenty of friends you could ask. People who have known you much longer than I have.”

      “True. But you’re the only one I’ve told,” he replied

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