of the former marine whom her mother had persuaded to protect Tehya.
How long ago had it been?
So long. The same month her mother had been killed in Nicaragua. Francine had called her parents out of desperation at that time, begging them to help her to send someone for her and her daughter. Sorrel had been so close, Tehya had learned, to both their locations.
Less than twenty-four hours later Bernard Taite had been killed in a hit-and-run on a Paris street. The next day his wife had been found in their bedroom, dead from an apparent overdose.
And her mother had died at the hands of a madman determined to find Tehya for reasons she still didn’t completely understand.
Sorrel claimed she was the child he had promised to his son, her half-brother. That all she had to do was return to him and he’d ensure she didn’t suffer her mother’s fate.
For months, Tehya had contemplated simply giving up and taking her own life. So many people had died trying to protect her that she hadn’t dared contact Stephen Taite, her grandfather’s brother. She had been terrified Sorrel would kill him and the rest of her family as well.
“After all these years do they actually believe I would contact my family?” she asked softly, keeping her back to the others as she laid the mugs out and pulled sugar and powdered creamer from another cabinet.
“When you aided the authorities in France in bypassing Sorrel’s computer security and locating the underground rooms in which he kept the young girls and women he kidnapped, your identity as his and Francine Taite’s daughter was revealed to the authorities,” Lilly continued. “I know for a few years Stephen tried to contact you, to learn if you were indeed the Taite heir, but you never answered the messages he sent to you through the French authorities.”
Tehya shook her head as she turned back to them, hoping she now had her emotions in check.
“I replied and I told him that I wasn’t related to him,” she said. “That he needed to search elsewhere for his niece and her daughter. He never tried to contact me after that but I had to leave days later when an assassin attempted to get to me while I was still at the estate.”
She hoped he had accepted her denial of their kinship. Her grandparents had been murdered because of their determination to help her and her mother. She had no desire to have more of her family killed, or to put them at more risk than when her mother contacted her own father.
“Evidently someone is aware of the connection, though, and believes you will make contact,” Lilly said. “I suspect thats why Arthur and Tenneyson are watching him while I suspect others have been keeping tabs on you.”
“The report our contact received states that there seems to be a rumor that you’ve been working as an agent for the goverment since leaving France until you were dismissed just before you staged your death.” Amusement gleamed in Bailey’s eyes. “Quite the industrious little thing, aren’t you?”
“So it would appear,” she murmured with a grimace as Jordan, John, and Travis came to the counter for the coffee.
“So, do we have a plan C,D, and E yet?” Bailey turned to the men, her tone patient and filled with amusement as she stared at them.
Jordan had always trained his men to have more than one plan. Tehya was aware she had shot his plans A and B to hell and back. Evidently the others were aware of it now as well.
“We’re getting there,” John said. The look he gave his wife was one filled with love, devotion.
Tehya had once dreamed of seeing Jordan gaze at her in such a way. It was a dream that had died the morning she left Texas.
It was the same look Travis Caine gave his wife, Lilly. She completed him, and it was more than apparent that he completed her as well. The two couples were the perfect examples of the relationship she had dreamed of having with Jordan.
“What about grabbing Arthur and Tenneyson and allowing Micah to interrogate them?” Tehya suggested, “Surely they would know who hired them?” She wondered if they could get that lucky? God, she just wanted this over this before Sorrel’s men had a chance to hurt her friends as Sorrel had once destroyed anyone who attempted to protect her and her mother.
Including the young nun who had taken her in at the convent just after Tehya