With a startled look at her, he stopped talking. “Sam, from the first your goal—or rather your father’s goal—has been to find out what happened to your grandmother. You’ve found out: She ended up in a nursing home plugged into machines. If you know that, then why did we go to Jubilee’s this morning? Why did you ask him questions about Maxie if you already knew the answers?”
“I know where she is but not why she’s there,” she said softly.
Mike groaned. “Samantha…”
She knew that he didn’t want her to do any more searching, but the more she found out about Doc and Maxie and Michael Ransome and Jubilee and everyone else, the more she wanted to find out what happened that night in 1928. At one point she’d thought of her grandmother mother with what was close to hatred for leaving her family, for leaving without so much as a backward glance. But she’d met her grandmother now, and she had seen the tears in Maxie’s eyes when Cal was mentioned, making Sam sure that Maxie had loved him very, very much. What’s more, Maxie loved her granddaughter. That was evidenced by the way she’d reacted when Mike had told her that someone had tried to kill Sam.
“I wish I knew what my grandmother liked to eat,” she said. “I wish I could take her…chocolate cake or something like that, whatever she really likes, something that’s bad for her, something that I was sure that insufferable place wouldn’t give her to eat.”
Putting his hands on her shoulders, Mike looked into her eyes. “Can I say anything to make you stay away? What if I told you that whoever tried to kill you might still be watching you and you might lead them to Maxie? I don’t think that woman’s body is strong enough to withstand an attack such as you had.”
Samantha had thought of that and had weighed the possibilities. “How long do you think she has?”
Mike wasn’t going to lie to her. “When I first contacted her, the doctor told me she had three months left, tops.”
Samantha took a deep breath. “If you were she and you had had no one for many years, and now you had a chance to spend a few weeks with someone you love, would you risk it?”
He wanted to point out that just because Maxie had left her family in Louisville twenty-seven years before didn’t mean that she had necessarily been alone since then, but he didn’t say that. In fact, remembering Maxie in that loathsome place, he wondered if maybe Sam wasn’t right and Maxie had been alone all those years. She may have run away because she was afraid of being discovered, so it wouldn’t have made sense for her to leave one place and become a social whirl and therefore highly visible elsewhere.
“Any pictures of you naked mixed in with those photos?”
Laughing, she moved away from him. “On a fuzzy rug when I was eight months old,” she said.
“How about eighteen years old? Young, nubile—”
“What does that mean? That I’m not young now?”
Mike shrugged. “Young body, old mind. Hey! you think Maxie would like caviar? We could stop at the Russian Tea Room and get blinis.”
Samantha was still thinking about his “young body, old mind” comment. “I would imagine she would love caviar, at least it sounds good anyway. I just hope the home doesn’t give us too hard a time.”
When what he hoped was an inspired idea occurred to Mike, his face lit up. “You leave the home to me. I’ll see that they let her eat whatever she wants and that she’s treated very well from now on.”
22
It was almost six o’clock when they arrived at the nursing home. Samantha was wearing her red Valentino suit and Manolo Blahnik high heels and carrying a red Chanel bag. Now that she knew how much her clothing cost, she was almost afraid to wear it and she dreaded getting into one of those filthy New York cabs. So she asked Mike if he was maybe, hopefully, going to hire a private car again, but he told her that no, he wasn’t.
Because of his answer, she was not prepared for the long black limousine that pulled up in front of the town house. Her mouth was still hanging open in astonishment when the uniformed chauffeur got out and she saw that he was Mike’s cousin, Raine.
“Good evening, Miss Elliot,” Raine said politely, tipping his cap to her.
“Get the blinis?” Mike asked, his arm around Samantha’s waist so tight you would have thought Raine was a pirate trying to kidnap her.
“Yes, sir!” Raine said smartly, clicking his heels together, then preceded them down the stairs and opened the back door for them.
“You’re sure you know how to drive this thing?” Mike asked his cousin, obviously doubting his ability to do so. “Frank will kill both of us if you so much as scratch it.”
“Who’s Frank?” Samantha asked as they got inside.
“My oldest brother.”
Once inside the car, Samantha tried her best to sit very still and behave herself, for she was sure that women who wore designer clothes were used to stretch limos and didn’t crawl all over them exploring, but Mike laughed at her. “Go on. Frank won’t mind.”
She opened little doors, looked in cabinets, and turned the TV on and off, then Mike sent a fax to Colorado and received one from his grandfather that said, “Michael, my boy, when are we going to meet your Samantha?”
Wide-eyed, Sam looked at Mike for an explanation as to what his family knew about her, but Mike just shrugged in reply.
After a while she settled back in the seat and thoughtfully looked at Raine so skillfully driving the car. She felt that she was beginning to know Mike and to understand a little about the way his family functioned. “If he’s doing this for you, what are you going to do for him?”