Crockett didn’t so much as glance at Jeremy. “When I asked you up here, Miss Wakefield, I assumed you could circumvent the bureaucracy.”

“Please call me Ashley. And I’m afraid I don’t work that way, Mr. Crockett. What was it about the You piece that prompted you to contact me?”

He grunted, appraising her. “Your attitude. Do you enjoy publicity, Ashley?”

“No.”

“Then why did you permit yourself to be interviewed by that magazine?”

She smiled. “I had my reasons.”

“It’s caused you nothing but trouble, hasn’t it?”

“Today was hardly trouble, Mr. Crockett.” Heavens, she thought, but I can be slick when I want to be. “But surely you didn’t invite me here to lecture me on how to deal with the press. That’s my business, you know.”

“And none of mine? You can be snippy, Ashley Wakefield. I could send you away empty-handed and make this entire trip a waste of your precious time.”

Snippy, Ashley thought. How easily he trivialized her anger.

Jeremy, she noticed, didn’t spring to her defense.

“Do you think this institute of yours could use an island like Jude’s Paradise?” Crockett demanded to know.

Swallowing a piece of torte, Ashley laid down her fork and adopted her trustee demeanor. “I’m sure we’d be interested in discussing it with you.”

“Nothing we say tonight could be considered binding or in any way the opinion of the entire board,” Jeremy put in, playing his part.

Crockett ignored him. “I’d want the name to remain the same and the ecology or whatever you want to call it to be undisturbed. No one but me needs to know it’s a memorial to my wife and daughter. That’s the way they’d want it, and it’s the way I want it. Interested?”

“Of course,” Ashley said, “but, Mr. Crockett, I don’t think you’re being entirely frank with me.”

“So? Where does it say I have to be frank?”

“I’m sure it doesn’t say anywhere, but it would make me happier.”

He snorted. “I’m not here to make you happy.”

Bastard. Under the table, Jeremy brushed her knee, and she could read his mind: go easy. Why didn’t she just up and ask the old buzzard if he thought he was her grandfather? If he hated her because she and David were all he had left of his daughter and they weren’t at all what he wanted, well, then, so be it.

Did he think Barky was her father? Did he think the man who had raised her and David, who had lived for thirty years the hard frugal life of a farmer, had seduced his daughter? Gotten her to run off with him, give him her jewels, her children?

But the trust.

Judith’s last, desperate attempt to free herself from a madman? Had she found out he had betrayed them on the border? That he was KGB? That he was a thief and a traitor?

No.

And she had contacted her father, fled to the Texas ranch where she’d grown up and, with the jewels and the Liechtenstein trust as her only consolation for failure, made her bid for freedom. And she had died.