"But Octavia is different, isn't she?"

So much for letting down his guard. "Mitchell sent for you, didn't he? That's why you're here."

"Mitch feels protective toward Octavia Brightwell."

"Octavia can take care of herself."

"What about you?" Sullivan asked quietly.

It took Nick a beat or two to grasp that. "Don't tell me that you're afraid that I'm the one who might be in trouble here."

Sullivan's gaze rested on Carson and Winston, who had moved on to explore the entrance of a shallow cave. "Got one question for you."

"What?"

"Did you give Octavia The Talk?"

"Damn. I'm starting to think that everyone in the Northwest knows all the details of my social life. A guy could get paranoid."

"You didn't answer my question. Did you give Octavia your patented lecture on the subject of keeping things light?"

"You know what? I'm not going to answer that question."

Sullivan nodded. "Things went wrong this time around, didn't they? Mitch was right."

"I think we'd better change the subject, Granddad."

"Probably a good idea. Relationship counseling isn't exactly my forte. But for what it's worth, I came here to see what was going on, not to put pressure on you. I figure you can handle your own love life without my interference."

Nick raised his brows. "I'm stunned. Since when did anyone in our family ever hesitate to apply pressure whenever the opportunity arose?"

Sullivan exhaled heavily. "I put enough pressure on you when you were growing up. Always figured you'd take over Harte Investments, you know."

"I know."

"I didn't handle it well that day when you came to me and told me that you were leaving the company. Lost my temper. Said some things I shouldn't have said."

"We both did," Nick said quietly.

"Hamilton cornered me in my office that same afternoon. He was mad as hell. Angrier than I'd ever seen him. Told me to back off and leave you alone. Told me that you and Lillian and Hannah all had the right to make your own choices in life the same way I'd made mine and that he wasn't going to stand by and let me pressure any of you into doing what I wanted you to do. He really let me have it that day."

"Dad said all that?" Nick was surprised. He had known that he'd had his father's support when he made the decision to leave the company but he hadn't realized that Hamilton had gone toe-to-toe with Sullivan over the issue.

"Yes. Looking back, I can see that he was trying to protect you and your sisters from the kind of pressure I'd put him under when he was growing up. I didn't mean to force anyone into a mold, you know. It's just that I had always had this vision of H.I. descending down through the family. I couldn't believe that my grandson didn't want what I had spent so much of my life creating."

"The thing is," Nick said, groping for the words he needed, "Harte was your creation. I needed something that was all mine."

"And you found it in your writing. I understand that now." Sullivan's jaw tightened. "Something I've always wondered, though."

Nick glanced at him warily. "What?"

"Was it your leaving Harte after your first book was published that put the strain on your marriage?"

Nick sucked in a deep breath. "How did you know?"

"I didn't. It was your grandmother who guessed that things weren't going so well between you and Amelia there at the end. She had a hunch that the problems started when you decided to quit Harte. She always felt that, for Amelia, the company was part of the deal."

He did not know what to say, Nick thought. He had never realized that anyone had known about the fault line in his marriage.

"Grandmother is right," he said after a moment. "Amelia was having an affair with the man who was flying the plane that day. I think that, if she had lived, there would have been a divorce. She wanted out."

"And you wouldn't have been able to handle her cheating. You're a Harte."

"Yeah."

"Figured it was something like that." Sullivan kept his attention on Carson and Winston. "That's the real reason why you've been so cautious about getting serious with another woman. Got burned once and you're a mite nervous about sticking your finger back in the fire."

"Shit. Seems like everyone is trying to psychoanalyze me these days."

Sullivan's brows bristled into a sharp frown. "Who's everyone? Far as I know, only Rachel figured out the problems between you and Amelia. We never mentioned them to anyone else in the family or outside, for that matter."

"I told Octavia about how it was between Amelia and me. She leaped to the same conclusion that Grandma did."

"Huh. Women. Always trying to analyze what makes a man tick."

"Yeah."

"If only they knew how simple we really are."

"Better to keep 'em guessing," Nick said. "Probably makes us appear more interesting."

"True." Sullivan dug the tip of his cane into the coarse sand and started walking again. "Well, I think we've exhausted that subject. Tell me about this missing painting. You really trying to play private eye like that guy, John True, in your books?"

"I got into it because Virgil, A.Z., and Octavia asked me to look around a bit." Nick fell into step beside him. "They didn't think Valentine was looking in the right places, and they may have had a point. He suspects one of the Heralds probably took it and arranged to unload it in Seattle or Portland. He figures it's long gone."

"Mitch told me that much."

"I got a lot more serious about the situation after I heard the rumor that Octavia had been voted Most Likely Suspect."

"Octavia?" Sullivan scowled. "Now, that's interesting."

"I thought so." Never let it be said that the old man was losing it mentally, Nick thought. Sullivan had grasped the implications immediately. "Especially when you consider that she's well-liked here in town. It would have been a lot easier to cast suspicion on the Heralds, who are viewed as the local weirdos and outsiders."

"You figure it's personal, don't you? Someone is out to pin the blame on Octavia for some specific reason."

"That's how it looks to me."

"You sure she hasn't managed to piss off someone here in town? Maybe refused to market some artist who's decided to get even?"

"I don't think so." Nick shot him a searching glance. "I'm starting to wonder if this could be coming out of the past."

"Claudia Banner."

"Yes."

"But the only folks who got hurt when Claudia pulled off her scam all those years ago were Mitch and me. And we're both a little too old for revenge, even if we had a notion to go after it."

"I doubt if anyone gets too old for revenge if the motivation is strong enough, but I agree that you and Mitch are not the ones behind this. What I want to know is, do you think there's anyone else in Eclipse Bay who might harbor a grudge against Claudia Banner that would be big enough to make him go after Octavia?"

Sullivan contemplated that in silence for a while.

"If there's one thing I've learned about business in the past sixty years," he said finally, "it's that it's always personal. And when the deal involves as much cash as Claudia's scam did, there's usually a fair amount of collateral damage."

"Meaning maybe someone besides you and Mitchell Madison got hurt?"

"Could be. It's possible. I can't give you any names but I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll go over this with Mitch. You know, he and I never really talked about the details of what happened when Claudia put us into bankruptcy. We were too busy blaming each other and firing up the feud. But maybe we can discuss it calmly now. Put our heads together and reconstruct events, so to speak."

"Thanks. Let me know if you come up with anyone who might still be so pissed off at Claudia Banner that he would go after her niece."

"All right. It's a long shot, though. You do realize that?"