The morning wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as Bobbie had imagined it might be. As a matter of fact, it was the best she’d had in a long time. She woke up in Cade’s arms, tangled up in the sheets and pressed against his body. She laid there for quite a while, greedily hoping that he’d wake up and want her again. When she was finally sure that she couldn’t lie there any longer without waking him, she slid out of the bed, made a pot of coffee, and left him a note before going to her own room to shower. Her plan was to shower and come back to make him breakfast. She was feeling bad again that he hadn’t gotten to eat the night before. She took her time in the shower, though, recalling the night before and drifting through a myriad of emotions. By the time she was dressed, braided her hair, and returned to Cade’s room, he had breakfast ready on the table.
“Wow,” she said when he let her in and she saw what he’d accomplished. “I’m sorry. I planned on making you breakfast.” She looked at him then, seeing that he had showered also and was dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a dark green polo shirt that brought out his eyes. Her self-doubts began to sneak back in and she wondered if he’d been awake the whole time and waiting for her to leave. Cade quelled those doubts without her even voicing them aloud. He took hold of her face with both hands and pulled her up for a sweet kiss.
“I’m glad I beat you to it. I wanted to do something nice for you.”
Bobbie was touched and breathless from his kiss. “Thank you. I’m starving.”
They sat down and ate together, not talking about the night before or about finding evidence to get their son back. They talked about ordinary things like Nate’s pending wedding and Sadie and Marcus’s twins. It was nice and set the tone Bobbie hoped for the rest of the day.
After they cleaned up the dishes together, they got down to business. They drove to the attorney’s office in downtown New Orleans and Cade asked the receptionist for Vincent Sweeney. She invited them to have a seat, but half an hour later they were still waiting. By that time, Cade’s patience was beginning to dwindle. He tried to get the receptionist’s attention with a loud, heavy sigh, but she didn’t even look up from her computer. He looked like he was about to get up when Bobbie put her hand on his arm.
“Hey, patience,” she said. “Isn’t that what you’re always telling me?”
Cade looked at her and chuckled. “No fair using my own lectures against me.”
“I’m just quoting the wisest man I know. ‘Nothing good happens overnight.’ Isn’t that what you told me the last time I was on the verge of giving up?”
He nodded and put his other hand on top of hers. She didn’t know if it was her imagination because of the night before, but things seemed much more intimate between them than they were. Cade broke the seriousness of the moment by saying, “I did say that. I am so smart.”
Bobbie laughed, “Yes you are.” She wasn’t lying. He was the smartest man she knew. She always marveled at how this smart, sexy, beautifully perfect man came from a tiny little place like Blossom Hill. Cade had grown up nearly as wild as she and her siblings had, but there had always been something in him that was far too sophisticated for the little mountain haven they grew up in.
“Mr. Travers, Ms. Treager?” The receptionist stood up from behind her desk. “Mr. Sweeney will see you now.”
Cade and Bobbie stood and followed her from the small, but nicely furnished waiting room, through a set of dark cherry-wood doors. The office they walked into was expansive with a huge desk, a comfortable looking chair behind it, two dark leather chairs in front of it, a couch along one wall next to a large dark-wood bookshelf, and a conference table just to the left of a small kitchenette and what looked to be a wet bar. Bobbie was well aware that Cade despised attorneys. He thought they were all crooks. She was always impressed, however, by how well he hid his feelings.
The man behind the big desk stood up. He was in his mid- to late-forties and had dark hair and light brown eyes. His smile looked like it had cost him a lot of money and so did the Italian suit he was wearing.
“Mr. Travers,” he said, holding his hand out to Cade as he came around the desk. “It’s so nice to meet you. I’ve heard of your work.”
Cade didn’t look affected by the compliment. He shook the attorney’s hand and said, “This is Bobbie Treager. Thank you for seeing us.”
“Not at all,” he said, smiling at Bobbie. “It’s a pleasure, Ms. Treager. Please, both of you have a seat. Can I offer you a drink?”
“No thank you,” they both said.
The attorney looked at the receptionist and smiled. “That’ll be all for now, Janice.”
Once the woman left the room, Sweeney sat down behind his desk and said, “Janice tells me that you’re interested in knowing about the Marroquin Plantation?”
“Yes, anything you can tell us about the place or the owners would be great,” Cade said.
“Can I ask why you want this information?”
Instead of answering the question, Cade asked him, “Do you know what happened to Adele Marroquin?”
“Yes, of course. Her arrest was a big deal in this city since it involved baby brokering. She’s still in prison, I presume?”
“Yes, she is.” Cade looked at Bobbie and then back at the attorney and said, “We believe that Adele sold our baby, but we haven’t been able to get the proof we need to convince the courts.”
Sweeney furrowed his brows. “That’s terrible. I’m sorry for both of you. I’m not sure how I can help, though. All I did was probate the Marroquins’ will after first the husband passed and then the wife. The plantation was in poor shape. The old sugarcane fields were all overgrown and the only building on the property that wasn’t on the verge of crumbling was the small home that Adele and her grandmother were living in at the time. Adele was the primary heir to all of the land and everything on it. I remember that she wasn’t overly happy about that. She said something about it being worthless if she didn’t have the means to fix it up. She almost seemed angry with her grandparents as if their letting it go was an intentional slight toward her. Anyways, she wasn’t happy when she got here and she wasn’t happy when she left, but even though that was the last I ever saw of any of them, I did drive by the plantation several years ago and I saw what an amazing job she’d done of restoring it. I remember thinking that she should open it to the public for tours…” The lawyer seemed to be digressing, but something he said had Cade excited enough to interrupt him.
“Them?” Cade asked. “Does that mean there were other relatives or heirs involved?”
“Adele’s mother and sister had a small stake in the will as well.”
“Her mother…and sister?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been able to find any traces of her mother so I was assuming she had passed, and I never heard anything about a sister.”
The attorney raised an eyebrow. “Her mother was alive and well at the time of the reading of the will. If I recall correctly, the mother, Symone, and sister were living in North Carolina at the time. Maybe that’s why you haven’t been able to locate them.”
“Is Adele’s sister older or younger?”
Again, the attorney’s eyebrows went up. “Neither,” he said. Bobbie and Cade looked at each other, confused, until he added, “They are twins…identical twins.”
That was a big surprise to Bobbie and Cade both. Cade had a friend that worked at the prison keep tabs on Adele’s visitors and he’d reported that she hadn’t had a single visit from anyone. Her family could’ve just been disgusted by what she’d done, but it was still odd to Bobbie, being a twin herself. She couldn’t imagine what Becky could do that would make her cut her off for good. It would almost be like cutting off one of her own limbs.
“So her mother is alive and she has a twin sister, yet the grandparents left the property solely to Adele?” Cade asked.
The attorney nodded. “I don’t know all the circumstances, just that Adele was raised by her grandparents and her sister wasn’t. The mother and sister were left a small amount of cash each and a warehouse down on the docks. The warehouse was completely empty and if I recall correctly, they sold it to a doctor a year or two after receiving the inheritance.”
“A doctor?” Cade said, sitting forward in his seat. “Dr. Marshall, maybe?”
Sweeney shook his head and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t remember the name. I only know they sold it because Adele’s sister showed up here looking for a copy of the deed. We actually had the original in our safe; they’d never signed for it. She was given the deed by one of my associates, who is the one that told me the warehouse was being sold. She must have also told me it was being sold to the doctor. I never spoke to the sister or mother about it myself; like I said, I never saw any of them after the reading of the will.”
“Does her mother still go by Marroquin?”
He shook his head again and said, “No. She was married about a year before Adele went to live with her grandparents. I got the feeling that had something to do with why she wasn’t in the home with her mother. She seemed to have a lot of animosity toward her stepfather and even her mother. Her mother’s last name was Lafayette.”
Cade wrote that down on the little pad he was taking notes in and then said, “And the sister’s name?”
“Antoinette Lafayette. Apparently the stepfather adopted her. That’s really all I know, Mr. Travers. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been of more help.”
Bobbie could tell that Cade was thrilled with what they found out. He got to his feet and held his hand out to the attorney. Bobbie stood up as the men shook hands and Cade said, “You’ve been a great help. Thank you.” He reached for Bobbie’s hand and she said thank you and goodbye to the attorney as Cade pulled her toward the door. She could tell that his investigative juices were flowing and his excitement was almost palpable…and contagious.
Once they were outside she asked, “So what now?”
“We need to find out if Antoinette sold that warehouse to her father.”
“It wasn’t part of his estate.”
“No, but maybe that was the point.”
“You think maybe that’s where he kept his records?”
“Yeah, I hope so, anyway.”
“So how do we find out?”
“A stop at the records office is where we’ll begin,” he said. They were almost to the rental car when Cade’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Bobbie saw a look of concern cross his handsome features when he looked at the screen. She knew it was one of his team members before he even put it to his ear.