Pamela Toth - Secrets and Seductions

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid the buck stops with me.”

Suddenly she had an idea. “You can contact them for me. They have a right to know that I’m looking for them, so they can give you permission to show me my file.”

She was babbling, but she didn’t care. “I’ll swear on the Bible that I won’t bother them if they don’t want me to,” she promised. “But society has changed a lot in the last twenty-seven years. Maybe they meant to revoke the ‘no contact’ order, but they forgot all about it. You could ask them.”

“That’s not possible.” He looked genuinely regretful. “I’m sorry.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” she demanded, her frustration bubbling over.

“I know it sounds trite, but you have to accept the things you can’t change,” he said, spreading his hands wide. “I wish I could offer something more, but I can’t.”

“Accept?” Her voice rose like a hot-air balloon. “You want me to accept what I can’t change?” She leaped to her feet, barely noticing that her purse had dropped to the floor, and leaned over Morgan Davis to look right into his killer blue eyes.

They widened slightly.

“Let me tell you what I’ve had to accept lately.” She stuck her hand under his nose, fingers spread, and began ticking off items.

“I couldn’t change my miscarriages or the divorce that followed.” She tapped two fingers. “How about the layoff from my job as a school counselor? How was I supposed to change that?” There went another finger. “Unfortunately, none of the other districts around here are hiring, either, and I have bills to pay.”

She hesitated, then decided that deserved a finger, too. “Maybe my creditors will have to accept not getting any money from me until I find another job, huh?”

He opened his mouth, but she cut him off ruthlessly. “If all that wasn’t enough, I found out that I’m not even who I thought I was.”

She waggled her splayed hand at him. “How can you tell me that not knowing my parents’ names is just one more thing I have to accept?”

For just an instant he looked genuinely horrified before he quickly masked his expression. When he got to his feet, he was a head taller than Emma, who was forced to retreat.

“I wish there was something I could do,” he said with apparently limitless patience.

“But you’re the director,” she cried. “I know you could make an exception if you really wanted to.”

“No, I can’t.”

Stubborn ox! She had failed at so many things lately, being a wife, a mother, a successful counselor. How could she go away from here empty-handed?

Normally she hated whiners, but she was running out of options. “No one else would have to find out,” she wheedled softly. “I’d never let on where I got the information, I swear, please.”

“Ms. Wright,” he said.

Back to formality, she noticed.

“You may not believe me,” he continued, “but I truly can understand your disappointment. However, this agency has entered into a contract with the people who entrusted you to us for placement in the first place. It’s a binding legal document that I am not willing or able to violate.”

Emma began to steam. Why had he told her the information was only a few feet away—to taunt her? How sadistic was that?

How could this petty bureaucrat in his fancy suit, sitting in his corner office like some potentate in his ivory tower, claim to know what she was feeling?

She had to try one last time, just in case he was beginning to weaken. “Are you sure there’s nothing you can do?”

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks and rocked back on the heels of what were no doubt very expensive shoes. “If you want to send me your résumé, I could ask around,” he suggested with obvious reluctance. “Have you checked with the employment agencies here in Portland?”

“No!” Emma exclaimed, her frustration finally breaking through as she threw up her hands. “That’s not the help I meant, and you know it!”

He shook his head. “Eventually you’ll adjust to the idea that you were adopted by two people who wanted a baby very much,” he insisted. “They should have told you a lot sooner, but they didn’t. There it is and you can’t change it.”

If he said it was time to move on, she was going to slug him. Instead he shrugged.

“I’ve been doing this for a long while,” he continued, apparently encouraged by her silence. “The adoption process isn’t something that people go through unless they’re desperate for a child. It’s expensive and time-consuming. Their privacy is shredded, their lives picked apart.”

He paused for breath while she gave him her iciest glare. “It sounds as though you’ve had a heck of a bumpy ride lately,” he said, “but you look like a capable woman. Give yourself time to accept once again the identity that you’ve grown up with and the parents who raised you.”

Emma’s fuse, which had often been regrettably short, finally blew at the platitudes he was trying to heap on her poor head.

She picked up her purse. “You may think, just because you run this agency, that you’re so wise and all-knowing about how it feels to be adopted, Mr. Davis.” She grabbed the knob and yanked open the door, too angry to thank him for his time.

“As for your advice, your platitudes and your pseudo sympathy,” she continued loudly, pointing at the big vase, “you can stick them right into that cheap, tacky glass monstrosity you seem to be so proud of.”

Head held high, she sailed out the door and slammed it shut behind her.

Morgan stood in the suddenly silent office with his hands braced on his hips. He understood the reasons behind the agency’s confidentiality regulations; he agreed with them one hundred percent.

In this case, Emma would never know that he was protecting her as well as her biological parents. She had been through enough without having to deal with a father who would never acknowledge her because the personal cost to him and his career might be more than he was willing to pay.

Between the shouting and door slamming, Emma Wright’s exit had been a noisy one. At any moment he expected his assistant to burst into his office in order to reassure herself that he was still in one piece.

Absently he looked around, his glance landing on the large blown-glass vase that Emma had disparaged on her way out the door.

“It’s not tacky,” he muttered defensively as he studied the blue and purple sculpture. Created in the manner of Dale Chihuly, a prominent Northwest artist, the twisting, fluid shape resembled either a man-eating flower or a floppy hat, depending on the angle from which it was viewed.

“And it sure as hell wasn’t cheap.” Morgan winced as he recalled his winning bid at the recent charity auction. Even so, he would have willingly given up the vase in exchange for a magical elixir to remove that wounded, lost look from Emma Wright’s sad gray eyes before she got angry and they turned to fire.

He had plenty of experience reading people, and the most satisfying part of his job was being able to help them. Emma’s case was an unusual one, but she didn’t know that and he couldn’t tell her. It was part of the reason she stayed in his mind.

It had nothing to do with the fact that she was hot.

Portland was full of hot women wearing vividly colored cropped tops, tight miniskirts and miles of bare skin that replaced winter’s long, dark raincoats and high boots. Quite a few of them worked right here in the hospital complex, but he’d gotten good at ignoring them.

His mother was always nagging him about giving her grandchildren, but he had rules about mixing business and pleasure. His rules hadn’t protected him from Emma. Her red knit top hadn’t been especially snug, nor did her short khaki skirt expose an unusual amount of her long, attractive legs. It was those big gray eyes that grabbed him first, eyes a man could dive into and get lost. Wavy brown hair he wanted to plunge his fingers into and muss all up.