Grayson by Delores Fossen Page B

brother.
    Mason lifted the papers he had in his hand and dropped them onto the table near the door. “Background reports on the Colliers and the dead girl. You should read them. There’s some interesting stuff in there.” He tipped his head to the laptop. “Anything with the photos?”
    “Not yet,” Eve and Grayson said in unison.
    If that frustrated Mason, he didn’t show it. He turned but then stopped. “Good to see you, Eve.” From Mason, that was a warm, fuzzy welcome.
    “It’s good to see you, too.” Eve’s was considerably warmer. Strange, most people steered clear of Mason, but Eve went to him and planted a kiss on his cheek.
    Now Mason looked uncomfortable. “Yell if you need me.” And with that mumbled offer, he strolled away.
    Both Eve and he hurried to the reports that Mason had dropped on the table, and Grayson snatched them up. There were at least thirty pages, and with Eve right at his shoulder, they started to skim through them. It didn’t take long for Grayson to see what Mason had considered interesting stuff.
    There was a photo of Claude’s first wife, Cicely, and it was the same woman in the photos taken in his office. So that was one thing cleared up. Claude’s ex had visited him. Nothing suspicious about that. Since she was the mother of his son, they would always have a connection.
    That required Grayson to take a deep breath because he couldn’t help but think that one day, soon, Eve and he might have that same connection.
    “Cicely had twins,” Eve read, touching her finger to that part of the background. “Sebastian and Sophia.”
    This was the first Grayson had heard of it, but then he’d only had a preliminary report of Sebastian before the interview at the Collier estate.
    Grayson read on. “When Sophia was six months old, the nanny, Helen Bolton, disappeared with her, and even though Helen turned up dead three months later, Sophia was never found.”
    On the same page of the report, there was a photo of baby Sophia that had obviously been taken right before she went missing.
    “You have a scanner in the house?” Eve asked, her attention nailed to the picture of the baby.
    “Sure. In my office.”
    Eve grabbed the laptop and headed up the hall. She practically raced ahead of him, and the moment they were inside, she fed the picture into the scanner and loaded it onto the laptop with the other photos they’d gotten from Annabel.
    “What are you doing?” Grayson wanted to know.
    While she typed frantically on the keyboard, Eve sank down in the leather chair behind his desk. “I have age progression software. It’s not a hundred percent accurate, but it might work.”
    Grayson watched Eve manipulate the copied image of the baby, and soon it began to take shape. The adult version of Sophia Collier appeared on the screen.
    Grayson cursed under his breath. The hair was different, but there were enough similarities.
    “Oh, God,” Eve mumbled. She leaned away from the laptop and touched her fingers to her mouth. “Do you see it?” she asked.
    “Yeah.” Grayson saw it all right.
    And it meant this investigation had just taken a crazy twist.
    Because the dead woman, Nina Manning, hadn’t been Claude’s mistress as they’d originally thought. She was Sophia Collier, Claude’s missing daughter.
     
     
     

Chapter Twelve
     
    “I wished you’d stayed at the ranch,” Grayson mumbled again. He kept his attention pinned to the San Antonio downtown street that was clogged with holiday shoppers and traffic.
    Eve ignored him. She’d already explained her reasons for tagging along for this visit to Cicely Collier. She wanted the truth about the dead woman, and when that happened, the danger would be over. She could go home and, well, wait until she could take a pregnancy test.
    It had been less than twenty-four hours since Grayson had agreed to have sex with her, but she’d read enough of the pregnancy books to know that conception could have already happened.
    She could