“I’m fine, Basil. I just . . . I’m going to curl my hair and straighten my makeup. Go on back and help with the lists. I’ll be out in a bit.”
Basil shifted his feet, peered at the door and then back to his feet. She was hurting. He knew she was hurting. What they had suggested shocked her, rocked her world, in fact. He wanted to comfort her, but it seemed she didn’t want comforting. She really wanted to be alone.
Turning away from the door, he glanced around the room again and then gathered up their clothes. Folding them neatly, he set them on the chair, then turned his attention to making the bed. The entire time he did so, he listened for sounds from the bathroom, determined that if he heard what even vaguely sounded like a sob or weeping, he would break in and comfort her whether she wanted it or not.
He didn’t hear that, though. Instead, he heard the occasional metallic click and a clatter that he suspected came from her curling iron being used and then set on the counter while she gathered fresh strands of hair to wrap around it. She really was curling her hair, he realized, and shook his head. As he gave in and headed out of the room to leave her in peace, Basil acknowledged that he had no clue when it came to women.
A man would have beaten the hell out of someone or something after such news, but a woman? His woman? She didn’t weep and wail or beat up anything, she curled her hair.
“I told you she wanted to be alone,” Lucian said as Basil returned to join them.
“Shut up, brother,” Basil muttered.
In the bathroom, Sherry unplugged the curling iron and left it on the counter to cool as she began to brush her hair. Her mind was an utter blank. She’d wanted to be alone to absorb the possibility that her father wasn’t her father, and she’d known she wouldn’t be able to do that with Basil there. He would have hugged her, offering comfort, but it would have turned into passion and—It had just seemed better to be alone. But even alone, her mind didn’t seem to be absorbing it. It was like someone telling you that the sky was yellow when you have known and seen it as blue all your life. It just wasn’t computing.
Sherry turned and opened the door to walk out into the bedroom. She’d heard Basil moving around in the room so wasn’t terribly surprised to find it tidied up. Her gaze slid to the bed and she considered lying down, but Basil had just tidied the room. Besides, she wasn’t tired. In fact, she was actually feeling quite restless . . . and her mind was racing. Her father was not her father. She didn’t even know how to feel about that. Basil was right, it would explain why he had so easily withdrawn from her life, because while she’d been unresponsive to his few attempts to speak to her, he hadn’t tried very hard to overcome that . . . which had always hurt her. But if it was true, why had she not been told? She could understand why it might have been kept from her as a child, but once she was older . . . and especially when her mother was on her deathbed. She would have expected her mother to at least tell her then.
Her mother had been weak and hospitalized after her first heart attack, but survived a week before a second one had taken her life. Sherry had spent every night of that week with her, the two of them talking, sharing memories and so on. During those talks there had been many opportunities for her mother to tell her that Richard Carne wasn’t really her father. Why wouldn’t she do that?
Because it wasn’t true, Sherry decided. It couldn’t be. Her mother would have told her.
But Basil was right, it would explain a lot, she thought in the next moment. Why she was such a changeling. Why she’d grown up pretty much without a father from the age of eight on.
But Sherry just couldn’t believe that her mother wouldn’t have told her.
Unless her mother had been afraid that she would be angry or think less of her on learning it.
This not knowing one way or the other could make her crazy, Sherry thought grimly. She needed to know the truth . . . But the only one with the answers she needed was the immortal they all thought had been such an integral part of her life for so long.
And who the devil was that? she wondered with frustration.
The others seemed to think it was her Uncle Al during her younger years, and it was true that he had spent a good deal of time in her life. She’d seen him daily after her parents had split. Sherry’s mother had worked for social services, and while she’d dropped her off at school every morning, it was Uncle Al who collected her afterward while her mother was still at work. When she’d started ballet at nine, he was the one to take her to her classes after school. When she’d switched to gymnastics at twelve, again it was Uncle Al who had taken her. He even took her to dinner a couple times a week on nights when her mother worked late.
In fact, now that she thought about it, most of her time with Uncle Al had been spent without her mother there. Although there were occasions when he’d taken both her and her mother on outings, to the science center or the zoo on a Saturday or Sunday. Actually, he’d sort of stepped in and taken her father’s place, at least in her life if not her mother’s.
Funny how she’d forgotten that, Sherry thought now with a small frown.
But Uncle Al had faded from her life during her high school years, seeing her less and less often, until she’d hardly seen him at all the last two years before she went to university, and she hadn’t seen him at all that last summer. Wrapped up in school, prepping for university while enjoying a blossoming social life, she hadn’t really noticed his absence at the time . . . or perhaps she hadn’t because he’d messed with her head, she thought grimly now.
Lucian seemed to think that Uncle Al was the immortal in her life and that he had changed his appearance and then reappeared while she was at the university.
The thought made her sift through the people she’d known there. She’d had a couple of good male friends through university and afterward. She’d also had a couple of professors who mentored her. But the only person she’d seen daily during that period and for several years afterward was Luther.
They’d met during her first year of university, had several classes together and ended up hanging out, and then went in with several other people to rent a five-bedroom house during second year. They’d remained roommates throughout the rest of her time at university. While their other roommates had changed, they both stayed in that house until they got their MBAs, and then continued to be roommates after graduating into the work world. Luther had been her best friend and confidant. She’d cried on his shoulder, listened to his advice, and shared her life with him. He’d been rather like an older brother. Luther had worked a couple years before starting university and was twenty-four when they met, five years older than her.
At least he’d claimed to be twenty-four, she thought now. And then after her mother’s funeral, while Sherry had been busily settling her mother’s accounts and then buying and stocking her dream store, Luther had got the offer of a job in Saudi Arabia that paid so much money it would have been mad for him to refuse it. He hadn’t, of course, and disappeared from her life, just like Uncle Al.
The only males she’d seen daily since then were Allan, Eric, and Zander, who all worked at her store and had done so since she’d opened three years ago.
Sherry paced back to the bathroom, walked inside, checked that her curling iron was cool and bent to tuck it back in her bag where it sat on the floor. It was as she was straightening, everything finally clicked into place.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered, and stared at her reflection briefly, then whirled and hurried out and across the bedroom to the hall. She was moving quickly, eager to get to the others to tell them that she knew who the immortal must be, but slowed and then stopped as she heard what they were saying in the living room.
“Well . . .” Basil said, glancing over the notes he held. “According to the dates Sherry listed here, her university friend Luther and this Uncle Al are the people who have been in her life the longest, and as far as she can recall, her uncle was only in her life from seven to eighteen, and the roomie was around from eighteen to twenty-nine.”
“So both of them were in her life for eleven years,” Harper said thoughtfully.
“I suspect this Uncle Al is the father, and that he was around probably from the day she was born,” Basha said thoughtfully.