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Paradise Resort toothbrush and tiny bottle of shampoo from his shirt pocket and tossed them onto the stack. “I want to be nearby in case you need anything.”
    “Like what?” Daisy retorted, aware that the emotions she had successfully kept under control all evening were beginning to spiral out of control. Way out of control. “The truth?” Her pulse pounding harder with every second that passed, Daisy lingered in the open doorway of his cottage. She glared at Jack resentfully. She didn’t understand why she felt so betrayed by him. She just knew that she did. “You weren’t exactly instrumental in helping me get that in the weeks before I went to Switzerland.” Instead, he’d kept bumping into her, in a way that she now saw was anything but accidental. Kept striking up idle conversation, surreptitiously trying to get closer to her. Not because he was interested in her as a person, or her plight to uncover the mystery of her birth. But becausehe had been trying to subtly stay one step ahead of her while simultaneously running interference for his boss.
    “You never asked me to do that.”
    Daisy slanted a glance at the private home some one hundred yards down the beach. Unlike the resort, it looked expensive and brand new. And there was someone—a man maybe—seated on his deck, looking their way.
    Annoyed at being observed without her consent yet again, Daisy turned back to Jack. “And if I had asked?” she wondered out loud.
    Jack shrugged his broad shoulders and came back outside to stand in the warm, salt-scented breeze. “I couldn’t have helped you because I didn’t know until tonight exactly what the connection between you and Tom was.”
    Daisy listened to the waves crashing into shore, on the other side of the sand dune. “But you knew there was a connection,” she said as the sea oats waved in the wind.
    A guilty silence fell between them. Eventually, Jack looked back at her and said very carefully, “I knew for a fact that Tom was worried about you, that he’d heard from his daughter, Amy, that you had hired Harlan Decker to help find your birth parents. Tom knew those things sometimes went badly or turned out in ways people didn’t expect. Because of that, he felt you might need some help, and that if that was the case, he was prepared to give it.”
    “Why?” Daisy asked doubtfully.
    “Because he’s, by nature, a generous, compassionate man. Because you were friends with his children, moved in the same social circles, worked as a photographer for the entire Deveraux family and their variousbusinesses. Maybe it was just due to the fact that he had watched you get into one scrape after another as you grew up and just didn’t want to see you get in any more! Who cares what precisely the connection might be or why he would want to help you get your life under control again? He just did.”
    Daisy studied him skeptically. “And I’m supposed to believe that?”
    “Believe what you want,” Jack advised her roughly. “It’s the truth. Tom never told me you were—or might be—his biological daughter.”
    But had Jack guessed as much on his own? Daisy wondered. And if Jack had, how did that figure into his feelings about her? Was he, like everyone else who knew the truth, seeing her as Tom’s bastard child—somehow less acceptable than Tom’s other kids? Was she a problem to be solved? A liability to be handled? Lawyer style, of course.
    Daisy continued to study Jack, certain he was still withholding every bit as much as he was telling her. “And yet you were all too willing to stand guard in front of his mansion tonight,” she probed, wanting desperately to hear the rest of it, whatever it was. “Why?” Had Tom warned Jack there might be trouble? And left it at that?
    Jack sighed, his exasperation with her obvious. He gave her a censuring look. “I work for him, Daisy.”
    Once again, Daisy decided, that was only half the truth. The half Jack wanted her to know. “As