“Can you understand my happiness that day? I had a brother! Someone I shared a heritage with. I began to examine faces in a crowd. Each man of your age, I studied, wondering if he might be you. I won’t bore you with all the tedious details now, but I traced your adoptive parents. That was relatively simple since they had stayed in Los Angeles. I’m sorry about their demise. They were killed several years ago, I believe?”
“Yes.”
“I lost Dad, Mr. O’Shea, when I was in college. I hope you were as lucky as I with the family who adopted you. The O’Sheas loved me as if I were their own flesh and blood. And I love them.”
“Yes, my parents, or rather, the Lymans, were terrific.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” she enthused. “One of the agencies I was telling you about helped me trace you here. I know all about you, but not nearly as much as I want to know. I want to know everything about you, your life.”
The glasses were precariously clinging to the tip of his nose, and he stared at her over their frames. Now he took them off and placed them on the table at his elbow. “That’s quite a story,” he said. “We don’t look much like each other. Who would believe that we’re brother and sister?”
She laughed, glad now that they seemed to be sharing a normal conversation. The hard lines around his mouth had softened. She must be patient with him. After all, she had dumped quite a load on him today. “I thought the same thing when you answered the door. There’s no resemblance at all.”
His eyes were taking in each feature of her face and she sat still while he perused her, allowing him the same privilege she had afforded herself when she first saw him.
He scanned the tumbled sable curls that surrounded her head and fanned away from her face. Dark, smooth brows arched winglike over her eyes—Natalie Wood eyes, one of her high school sweethearts had dubbed them. They were round and large and as dark as ebony. When she lived in New York, she had consulted a makeup expert who taught her how to accent them with just the right touch of pencils and shadows. The result was heart-stopping to someone meeting her for the first time. Her eyes expressed more of what Erin felt and thought than words ever could.
It made her nervous for her brother to examine her with such keen interest. His eyes dwelt an inordinate amount of time on her lips which were soft and moist and accustomed to smiling.
As his eyes traveled from her chin down her throat, he seemed to take note that her smooth complexion, delicately fair in contrast to her dark hair and eyes, extended to her neck and beyond.
Erin smoothed imaginary wrinkles from the skirt of her white wool suit as he continued to appraise her. The emerald green silk blouse she wore under her jacket suddenly seemed stifling, especially when his eyes lingered on the single strand of coral beads that rested on her breasts. She uncrossed her legs self-consciously when his eyes raked them from her knees to the toes of her brown suede pumps.
His eyes returned to her face and he stood up, crossing the room to stand in front of her. “Not every man is fortunate enough to have a sister,” he said quietly as he looked down at her. “Learning of her existence in midlife is a phenomenon. Having her be as lovely as you is a rare pleasure indeed.”
She blushed happily. “Thank you, Kenneth.” He was proud of her! Perhaps in time she and this stranger could come to know and like each other—maybe even grow to love each other.
“Would you like something to drink?” He held out his hand and she accepted it unhesitantly as he helped her off the cushions of the couch. His hand was warm as he clasped her fingers fleetingly.
“Yes, thank you. The flight was crowded and I was too excited and in too big a hurry to stop for anything before coming here. I hope you don’t think it was rude of me to just drop in like this. I thought it best to meet you in person and not try to introduce myself over the telephone.”
“You were right. I’m glad you came straight here.”
He was propelling her through the house—down the main hallway, through a dining room—into a sunny kitchen. She looked at the view out the window. Kenneth’s house was situated on a hill, but unfortunately it didn’t provide a view of the bay, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or any
other distinctive landmark of this fabulous city. Instead, the view was dotted with the rooftops of houses on the lower slopes of the hillside.
Kenneth offered her a chair at the small round table that stood in the center of the kitchen. “What will you have? Coke? Beer? Wine?”
“Coke, please,” she said. “I’m anxious to meet your wife. Does she know that you were adopted?”
He ignored her question as he opened a can of the soft drink and reached for two glasses in the cabinet over the counter top. As he chunked ice cubes into the glasses he said, “Melanie should be back shortly. She went out to run a few errands.”
“How long have you been married?”
He paused as he handed her the glass of Coke. “Several years now,” he answered lightly. He smiled charmingly, and for the first time Erin saw two rows of perfectly matched, startling white teeth. He really was quite handsome when he wasn’t wearing that surly, suspicious expression. “You’re married, I see,” he commented nonchalantly as he took the chair across the table from hers.
She followed the direction of his eyes to the large diamond ring on her left ring finger. “No,” she muttered. “Just engaged.” For some reason, she didn’t want to tell him about Bart right now. Bart had a way of dominating a conversation, and she didn’t want even a mention of him to intrude on the special, rare intimacy of this first meeting with her brother. “Tell me about your work,” she blurted out in order to change the subject.
“What about it?” he asked evenly. Erin was alarmed to see that he was staring at her again with that narrow-eyed stare that made her feel like a laboratory animal under a glass.
“What exactly do you do? I know you work at a bank.”
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “I guess I do a little of everything.”
“I see,” she said, though she didn’t.
“You?” he asked. “What do you do?”