Page 44 of The Daring Times of Fern Adair
She was still holding the black receiver to her ear when the wood-paneled door swung open. Cal burst into the front office, surprise mixing with irritation in his copper-brown eyes. He gestured toward his office. “Inside.”
Bessy slowly lowered the receiver back onto its hook. “Should I stay, Mr. Rosetti?”
“Go home, Bessy. It’s fine.” His frown, however, said Fern’s being there was anything but fine.
Fern walked past him, into his office, and he shut the door, sealing them inside.
The office had a glass window that, had the blinds been open, would have looked out over the machinery floor. Papers and accountingbooks were strewn across his desk, the seat of a black leather chair still slowly revolving from when Cal had launched from it moments before. On the wall behind the desk, a few papers had been framed. Permits, it seemed. As well as a diploma from the University of Illinois College of Business. His name was inscribed along with the year 1916. Cal had gone away to university. He was an educated man.Unless the diploma was a fake.
“What the hell are you doing here?” His voice was restrained, as if he was trying not to shout.
She cut her eyes away from the diploma on the wall. “Why are you so angry?”
He stayed rooted near the door, his hands in his pockets. Not a single muscle twitched. “I’m not.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
He came forward a step, the torrent of surprise he’d shown before dissolving. “I don’t need Rod finding out you came here.”
Fern had wondered if she might cross paths with Rodney at the factory. As much as she loathed him, the risk had been necessary.
“Last night…my brother…when he…” Fern stumbled, her prepared words crumbling. All those hours, closed in her room, looking through newspapers, thinking of what Buchanan had said abouta sister for a sister, felt distant now. Being here, with Cal, on the other side of his intense stare, sent her mind into a spiral. Everything she wanted to say went spinning off in different directions.
He took a step forward, coming away from the closed door. “What did he do to you?” His attention shifted to her bruised eye.
“No. Nothing. It’s what he said. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” Her mouth went dry. “A sister for a sister.”
Cal stepped to the side, his eyes no longer pinned on her. He went to the chair behind his desk and stilled its sluggish turning with a firm hand. “You should have asked him instead of coming all the way down here.”
“I did. He refuses to speak to me.”
“What makes you think I’m gonna be any different?” He stayed standing and riffled through some papers, pretending disinterest.
Fern opened her purse and extracted the newspaper clipping, then slid it onto the cover of the spiral-bound ledger he’d just closed. Cal swore under his breath.
“Well, well, Detective Fern. Where’d you dig that up?”
“I have a lot of old newspapers, and when Buchanan mentioned a sister, I went through all of them.”
Cal picked up the clipping, spent a few seconds reading it, then tossed it back down. “We wanted the story buried.”
“Why?”
“None of your business.”
Fern slammed her purse down on his desk, knocking aside a paperweight and pen holder. “Stop saying that. Itismy business. You and your brother have used me as a pawn, and I don’t think it’s just because of who my father is.”
Cal stared, startled by her outburst. But like usual, he tamed his reaction. He braced his hands on his desk and leaned forward. It brought him closer, and Fern wasreminded of last night, when he’d trapped her against the wall and given her the love bite that was currently sweltering under the high neck of her dress.
“Your shit of a brother was screwing my sister Eugenia,” he said, his coarse language again setting off prickles of awareness along her arms and back. “He knocked her up, but hell if he was gonna do right by her. She was just a piece. A broad he couldn’t take home to Mommy and Daddy.”
Fern held her breath as fury twisted Cal’s features. This close, with fluorescent bulbs overhead, fine lines around his eyes stood out as he tensed. His thick, dark brows pulled together. “But he had no problem taking her to a doc near the Yards. A fuckin’ back-alley butcher.”
Fern shook her head, refusing to believe it, even as Sarah’s comment the other night about her brother sleeping his way around the city chose that moment to crop up. “He wouldn’t do that.”
The defense was out of her mouth before she’d even had time to think it over. Whatever she thought she’d known about her brother had dissolved the night he’d told her the truth about the dinners and the men their mother selected to attend. She’d also seen how little she really knew him when he’d entered their father’s study, peered at her crumpled on the floor, and hadn’t moved to help her.
“Yeah, my sister thought he was made of gold too.” Cal pushed off from his desk. He was like a caged animal as he went to the window and pried open two of the blinds to look out over the factory floor.
