Her Bodyguard
Her Bodyguard
Peggy Nicholson
In a sumptious Newport Mansion…Gillian Mahler has a plan–take the job as soap opera star Lara Corday's personal assistant. Maybe she can endear herself to Lara first, then spring the news that Lara is her birth mother, who abandoned her as an infant twenty-eight years before.Trace Sutton has a plan, too–work undercover as a bodyguard, posing as Lara Corday's gigolo. Maybe then he can discover the identity of the faceless stalker who wants Lara dead.In Lara's sumptuous mansion high on a cliff above Newport, Rhode Island, Gillian and Trace meet–and attraction sparks right away.This certainly complicates their plans.Gillian can't possibly allow herself to fall for a man who's her long-lost mother's lover, and no way can Trace blow his cover as bodyguard–especially when some sleuthing reveals that Gillian has an excellent motive for murdering the woman he's guarding!
“S-stop!” (#ud39a67db-2c00-5a09-b976-0debba8e8f82)ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#ue506db20-c703-565a-915d-425dc076a1b4)Title Page (#u5945fa66-215a-5768-94da-09854a1aba52)CHAPTER ONE (#u604c6b27-2418-5dbe-8dbf-070ac3d91925)CHAPTER TWO (#ub0903779-b47c-5c9f-95b0-b7145c8a1c6e)CHAPTER THREE (#u916c8433-7a24-5a47-9845-8f7397e7c0dc)CHAPTER FOUR (#u5954f3c0-8778-5d11-a9b1-0823a033804f)CHAPTER FIVE (#u2443ae37-bed6-5f94-b104-0cb30608ca7e)CHAPTER SIX (#u8265c517-f21f-5198-b67b-7f3d4adb2c80)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“S-stop!”
Gillian tore her mouth away and moaned as Trace circled the delicate rim of her ear with his tongue.
“Mmm?” He rubbed his face through her fragrant hair. She could not possibly mean that.
“We’ve got to stop,” she insisted, but without conviction.
“Who says?” He kissed the tip of her nose. “You don’t want to stop. I don’t want to stop. So we’re stopping?”
‘Yes.“ She said the word softly, but with no compromise this time.
“Mind telling me why?”
She laughed incredulously. “Trace!” He could feel her shake her head. “In a word? Lara, that’s why.”
He swore silently, viciously, then tipped back his head to consult the invisible rocks above. let me explain! Except that he couldn’t He couldn’t break his cover while there was one chance in a million that Gillian was untrustworthy.
And he wouldn’t have done it even if he was entirety sure of her. Being undercover meant you lived the part night and day till you were done. People died when you broke that rule.
Which meant he could come to Gillian only as Trace Sutton, faithless gigolo, not Trace Sutton, heart-free bodyguard....
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For ten years Peggy Nicholson lived aboard a boat moored in Newport harbor. Nowadays, during southeast storms, she can hear the rumble of waves breaking against the Cliff Walk from her office window. She often runs the cliffs at dawn.
Her Bodyguard
Peggy Nicholson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
SHE TRADED YOU FOR A CAR. A shiny red Mustang—that’s all you ever meant to that little lady. Now, why would you want a mother like that?
“I don’t,” Gillian said to the door she stood facing. One of two double doors, twelve feet tall, carved from some golden wood varnished to gleaming perfection. They barred an entrance almost wide enough to admit a Mustang car, shiny red or otherwise. She clenched her hand to knock, but her arm stayed straight at her side. I don’t want her, she’d told the lawyer—a horrible little man—nearly two years ago. I want the facts. My facts.
Like the name of her father. Whether she had any brothers or sisters or grandparents. Whether she might be deathly allergic to anything else besides bee stings. Facts that it seemed, some days, the whole world was conspiring to hide from her.
The people who’d raised and loved her, the doctor who’d delivered her, the lawyer who’d arranged her adoption, the woman who’d borne her almost twenty-eight years ago—every one of them had lied or twisted or forgotten or lost or hidden her facts. Or simply refused to give them.
Her facts lay behind this door and she’d come to steal them, since asking politely had gotten her nowhere.
Had gotten her much worse than nowhere. Her letter of shy and hopeful inquiry last year had earned her a stinging, contemptuous response: “If I didn’t want you when you were born why would I want you now, Sarah, if that’s who you really are? So go get a life! And stay the hell out of mine!”
And so I will, Mother. Just as soon as I have my facts. Gillian Sarah Scott Mahler raised her fist, held her breath and knocked, then noticed the doorbell and jabbed that, too.
But of course a woman who owned a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, a millionaire by marriage and a queen of television soap opera in her own right, didn’t open her own front door. How idiotic to have expected it. Gillian blinked at the frowning older woman who swung back the door. “I...” She swallowed and tried again. “I have a ten o’clock appointment with Mrs. Corday. About the job. I’m Gillian Mahler.”
“And just how did you get in here? Nobody buzzed the front gates,” declared the woman.
Must be a member of the household rather than a maid, Gillian guessed, if she felt free to quiz visitors. She might even be a relative, an aunt or cousin, though Gillian could see nothing of herself in the dour and freckled face, the short square body, of her inquisitor. “I walked in,” she said as the woman tapped one foot impatiently. “Someone was driving out as I arrived, and waved me through.”
“Those kids!” The woman glared over Gillian’s shoulder toward the massive iron gates at the end of the driveway, although the couple, a blond young man and woman in a Range Rover, were long gone.
“I really do have an appointment,” Gillian insisted. She didn’t care if she’d broken some unwritten rule of the household. No one was turning her back now, not when she was this close.
“Well, come on, then.” Leaving her to shut the door herself, the woman marched away.
Gillian hurried after her, dimly aware of high, high ceilings, cool marble that clacked underfoot, a grand staircase that swept up to the floors above. Her mother’s house. Assuming Lara Corday—Lara Leigh to her adoring fans—was really her mother. And she is. Same birth date. Same high-school photo. Of course she is.
So why wouldn’t she acknowledge her own daughter?
Traded you for a car and never looked back, the lawyer assured her for the thousandth time in memory. That’s all I can tell you.
If that trade had set a girl named Lara Lee Bailey on the road from a ramshackle cabin in the hardscrabble mountains of West Virginia to this palace, maybe it had been the smartest deal a girl of fifteen had ever made. But why—
“Wait here and I’ll tell her you’ve come.” Gillian’s guide opened a paneled door, waved her inside and closed it firmly behind her.
“Whew!” Gillian leaned back against the door and pressed one hand to her thundering heart.
“Damn it all!” A golf ball rolled across the carpet before her. It bypassed a crystal vase laid on its side and disappeared under a sofa. “So much for my birdie!”
A man stood in front of the fireplace, glaring after his errant putt. He lowered his golf club and leaned on it, then turned his attention to her. “And who the devil are you to mess up a man’s game?”
“I’m G-Gillian. Gillian Mahler.” And who are you? Not Lara Corday’s husband, the famous TV writer and producer. Richard Corday had died in his sleep two years ago. And Corday had been in his late sixties, not mid-thirties like this man.
So friend of the family then, or even a relative—Lara’s relative and therefore hers? It was conceivable. Gillian was tall for a woman, yet he was taller. Six-one or -two easily. Hair darker than her own light brown. His eyes were too deepset to see the color from where she stood. Still, she felt an odd shock of... something. Recognition on some instinctive level?
Or maybe it was just the mood of him as he glared at her from under his black level eyebrows that made the impact, and her sense of kinship was entirely false. Everyone was a potential relative once you learned you were adopted. You found yourself staring at faces as you walked down the street.
He crossed one running shoe over the other and slouched more comfortably against his putting iron. “You sky-dive, Gillian Mahler? Or maybe you made your approach by sea.” He tipped his head toward the six pairs of French doors that formed the entire south wall.
Beyond them stretched the lawn, then the back side of the estate’s unbreachable granite wall, and then the cliffs, with Newport’s famous Cliff Walk meandering high above the blue waters. Gillian had strolled that path often enough these past four months, staring up at this mansion. And now she stood inside it, about to meet her mother. At last.
“You scuba?” the golfer prodded mildly. “Left your wet suit and fins out on the terrace?”
Why was everyone so intent on learning how she’d gotten in? “Helicopter, actually.” She edged away from him toward the windows. I don’t want to talk to you, whoever you are. I came to meet my mother.
“Funny, I didn’t hear it. Didn’t even hear the buzzer for the front gates.” He straightened and ambled across the room to the sofa, then stooped with ease to peer beneath it. “You climbed over?” he hazarded idly, and swept his well-muscled arm under it for his ball. “Grappling hooks and all that?”
The ball he sought had rolled out in front of the sofa. Gillian picked it up and toyed with the notion of stuffing it into his mouth. Would you please, please shut up? Her whole life was about to change. Knowingly and unknowingly, she’d been coming to this encounter for almost twenty-eight years, and now, just when she needed to savor the moment, prepare for it, rehearse the role she meant to play and the first cautious words of her script, this big babbling...jock wouldn’t leave her in peace. “I walked in the gates when a couple drove out, all right? They saw me. It isn’t as if I snuck in.”
They’d barely seen her. They’d been too busy laughing at some private joke to spare her more than a glance, their smiles fading for a moment, their cool eyes passing through her. The boy had flipped her a careless wave, then turned onto the avenue and roared away. Those two hadn’t been concerned about any intruders.
“Toby and Joya,” the man murmured, his trim rump in the air as he groped beneath the sofa.
“We didn’t introduce ourselves.” Gillian knelt and thrust the ball under the sofa, toward his sweeping fingertips. “Here.”
“Where?” His hand closed instead on her wrist—and tightened when she tried to withdraw.
She was suddenly angry out of all proportion to the act, whether he was teasing or only hopelessly dim. Their hands connecting in the dark, touch their only link—her skin shivered with the unexpected, unwelcome intimacy. “In my hand. Where do you think?”
He slid warm, surprisingly hard fingers down her wrist to trace the ball she clutched. “Oh.” Then he lifted it delicately from her palm. “Thanks.”
She sat upright, started to wipe her hand on her skirt, then chose a throw cushion, instead. Its silky chintz fabric didn’t wipe his touch away but seemed to drive it into her bones. She bounced to her feet and retreated to the wall of French doors, scowling through the glass at the lawn beyond. Such a velvety expanse of green, a symbol of wealth more potent than a Rolls or diamonds. Why didn’t he take his toys and go golf out there?
“I suppose you’re here about the job,” he said behind her. “We’ve been up to our chins in would-be companions all week. Short ones, tall ones, nice ones, crabby ones.”
If he’d been the welcoming committee, she didn’t doubt the crabbiness! Gillian swallowed and gripped her elbows. For some reason she hadn’t thought there’d be many applicants for the job. Somehow she’d seen it as...fated. Earmarked for her and her alone. But if there’d been that many applicants... And her qualifications—she was really reaching to think they’d do, but somehow she’d thought...
Wished. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, her aunt Susan—her adoptive aunt, Gillian corrected herself—had always said. She’d been foolishly wishing...
“Funny,” the pest said behind her. “You don’t seem very companionable.”
Could he possibly be coming onto her? “Companion to a woman was the job description, I believe,” she said coldly, without turning.
“Companion/personal assistant to a businesswoman” was the actual wording of the ad in the Newport Daily News. Responses to be directed to Mrs. Lara Corday, Woodwind, Bellevue Avenue, Newport. There had been no mention of the celebrity who lived at that address, who presumably required the assistant. That Mrs. Lara Corday was actually Lara Leigh, star of the long-running soap opera Searching for Sarah, was one of Newport’s best kept secrets. The locals might know it, but they were used to bumping into movie stars at morning coffee, presidents on the harbor launch, princes at the post office. To stare or to show yourself impressed was to mark yourself an out-of-town yokel, a tourist. And the locals didn’t tell secrets to tourists.
“Getting a bit stuffy in here, isn’t it?” A big hand slipped past Gillian’s ribs, reaching for the door’s brass handle. His tanned forearm rubbed along her waist. She gasped and shied to her right. And stumbled over her heels.
“Hey, easy!” His other arm hooked around her waist to steady her, then draw her upright again. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you like that. You could have jumped right through the glass.” His arm tightened around her for an unbelievable, outrageous moment, pulling her backward. Her hips bumped his crotch.
“I’m fine!” she snapped, jamming one elbow into his ribs. “Perfectly—He let her go instantly and she whirled around. ”F-fine.”
Or not. He hadn’t withdrawn one inch. Standing toe to toe with him, she was trapped by the door at her back. A pair of broad male shoulders filled her entire horizon. He wore his white golf shirt unbuttoned, showing her a curl of dark hair at the V. She tipped back her head and found him smiling.
“Sorry,” he said again, too softly. “I didn’t mean to...”
Right. She sidestepped along the wall, careful to give him no excuse to “help” her again. He opened the first pair of doors, then the next, heading her way. She shied off to the center of the room and scowled at his back. Could that have been an accident?
“You don’t need to be so nervous,” he said, swinging open a third pair. The whisper of distant surf filled the room. “It’s just a job like any other.”
“I’m not—” She stopped and shrugged. Did it show that much? Being on edge, maybe she had misread his actions.
Dark against the brightness silhouetting him, he turned back to study her. “I suppose you’re a local girl, a Vod-islander.”
That mockery of the upstate accent marked him as hailing from other parts, she thought absently. “No.” His expectant silence at her one-word response dragged more words from her. “I’ve been here since the spring.” She’d meant to stay only a day or two, a week at most. Still wounded by Lara’s letter of rejection, she’d intended only to catch a glimpse of her mother, see her in the flesh once, then go.
Oh, she’d seen Lara Leigh a hundred times or more by then watching reruns of Searching for Sarah. But she’d felt no sense of reality, no connection. That beautiful, mobile, weeping or laughing face on the TV screen hardly seemed a real person, much less a person connected to her as no other.
“Living here in Newport?” he prodded.
“Yes.” Her first week, she’d stayed at a bed-and-breakfast a quarter mile down the Cliff Walk. Had haunted that stunning path morning and night, sure somehow that if Lara was any relation to her, then this was where they would meet. Her mother would love the cliffs, too. Living so near, she’d be bound to stroll there, drawn by the cry of the gulls, the cool breeze off the glittering ocean, the rumble of the waves grinding the rocks below.
And her certainty had proved right—proof more clinching than any DNA test, to Gillian’s mind, that they were of one blood. Walking the cliffs on a misty dawn, her third in Newport, she’d looked eagerly toward Woodwind, its tall chimneys slowly taking shape through the fog. Looked—and had seen a slim figure step out through a wooden door hidden among the wild rugosa rosebushes that hedged the cliff side of the high estate walls.
The figure set off at a long-legged, floating run and vanished around a bend in the path. Gillian caught her breath and jogged after. Wait, Lara! Wait for me!
If the runner was her mother. Gillian rounded the bend and glimpsed silvery hair the same shade as Lara Leigh’s. Then more rosebushes intervened, black against the pearly mist.
But no hurry, she told herself. She was fifteen years younger and a runner herself. She could overtake Lara whenever she chose. Cliff Walk edged the ragged peninsula jutting out into Rhode Island Sound for another two miles or so. She had plenty of time.
Mist dewed her face, beaded in her lashes, as she ran. A loon called its weird laughing cry from the gray waters below. Gillian came to a set of mossy stone steps and bounded up them, then down another set, her ears straining for footsteps ahead, hearing in- stead the rip of a wave combing down the black pebbles of the shingle beach fringing the base of the cliffs, some seventy feet below. The path skirted the very rim of the drop-off, and here someone had built a waist-high chain-link fence to keep unwary sightseers from stepping out into echoing space. Wild white daisies softened the craggy soil, trailing downward from rock to rock. Elephant-high clumps of rugosas pressed in from both sides of the Walk now. Blossoms of magenta and white brushed her shoulders as she ran. Through gaps in the bushes Gillian snatched glimpses of the black silhouette of a lobster boat idling in toward a line of pots laid along the cliffs. On a clear day you could see twenty miles out to the islands, but not this morning, when visibility was measured in yards.
And somewhere ahead...Gillian stepped up her pace. She passed a trail that led up between the mansions on her right toward the avenue, but somehow she knew Lara wouldn’t stray from this path. A woman who lived most of her life in the public eye would surely treasure this gorgeous solitude.
And what do I do when I catch her? Glance sideways? Say something inanely pleasant, as runners often do when they pass each other—Nice day, huh? Or should she run a little farther, then wheel and confront her? Mother, it’s me, she could say, Sarah. But she never would dare. Not after that savaging letter. Gillian pulled up the hood of the orange sweatshirt she wore till it covered her hair. Tightened the string at her throat to keep the hood in place. There was no reason to think that Lara might recognize her, but still...
Mind focused on the bow she was tying and on the coming encounter, she rounded another bend and shied violently sideways, grazing the bushes, thorns plucking at her sleeve. For all her fascination with vistas, she had a healthy fear of heights, and this was a spot she never liked. Just as the path passed a wide gap in the bushes, it dipped, then tilted subtly toward the cliff edge. Here, water ran off from the hillside above, carving a notch in the cliff. Someday the path would be entirely undermined; the hillside would cave in and fall. Cliff Walk, Gillian had learned, had been crumbling for time out of mind, the sea taking the land inch by inch, the soft slate cliffs eroding year by year. The path was perfectly safe, but still, you could feel the abyss calling. Three wincing steps and she was by the gap, looking ahead again.
Lara? The path sloped downward; the highest cliffs were behind them now. The surf sounded louder and the fog was thicker, as if it had chosen this low spot to crawl onto the land. Gillian looked down, picking a route around a puddle in the path, looked up—and Lara burst out of the mist. Retracing her steps, homeward bound already.
No time to think at all. As their strides carried them closer, their eyes met and locked. Hers were a gray so light as to seem silver, fringed by lashes as dark as Gillian’s own. Lara’s lips parted, Gillian opened her mouth to speak, but the only word that sprang to mind was Why? Oh, why?
Gillian slowed, her steps faltering, her mind stumbling. That’s her! Near enough to touch! Near enough to question—if only she dared.
She didn’t. Not this time, anyway. So instead she ran on, reliving the moment, trying to hold that startled, questioning face in her memory. Seeking from it some likeness to her own.
Finding none—
CHAPTER TWO
A HAND WAVED BEFORE HER face, then dropped as she focused on it. “Do this often, do you?” inquired the man. His lopsided smile was whimsical; his eyes missed nothing.
They were hazel, she noticed for the first time. “Do what?” She’d entirely forgotten he was in the room! For only a minute or so? It might as easily have been an hour.
“Vanish down a rabbit hole. Not a very nice one, by the look of it.”
“I...was trying to remember if I’d turned off the stove.”
He didn’t buy it, but he cocked his head obediently, then one eyebrow. “Don’t hear fire engines.”
Newport wasn’t large. Whenever the trucks turned out, the whole town heard the racket. “I believe I did turn it off after all.”
“Ah.” He’d jammed his hands into the pockets of his chinos. Eyes fixed on her face, he strolled around her. She suppressed an urge to spin warily with him, and let him instead inspect her profile, then her backside. Clenching her teeth, she tipped back her head to study the chandelier above. She’d thought meeting her mother would be the ordeal of the day. Now she looked to Lara for rescue. Somebody deliver me from this... this... whatever he was.
Bad news, that’s what he was. Elegantly packaged bad news, from his sexily too-long, razor-cut dark hair, to his runner’s shoes, which probably cost more than her monthly rent. With all stops in between just as scenic. Not handsome exactly, but something more potent, topped off with a whiff of... unpredictability. Not a trait she cared for in someone who was shaping up to be an opponent.
“You know she’s been ill,” he said idly from somewhere behind her right ear.
Ill? That was hardly the word Gillian would have used to describe a fall off the Cliff Walk.
Shattered? her mind supplied, and she shivered suddenly. It had been two days after their encounter before she’d heard. She’d picked up a day-old Daily News in the Waves, the town’s favorite coffeehouse, and sucked in her breath at the headline: Woman Survives Fall From Cliff Walk! Somehow she’d known what had happened even before she’d read about it. “I heard she had...an accident,” she murmured, picturing for the hundredth time the stumble—a shoelace perhaps coming undone, or Lara catching the tip of a toe. Then the horrified nosedive, the frantic snatch at the brush on the rim, a flailing cartwheel into space, the rocks rushing upward, the ice-cold sea...
The article said the woman had been lucky, unlike others over the years. She’d fallen at half tide, when a few feet of water covered the jagged beach. Luckier still, a lobsterman tending his pots had seen her from his boat, and rowed frantically over in time to save her from drowning.
The woman had a fractured skull, the article went on to note, and broken bones. She’d been rushed to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, where the most critical cases were sent. Her name was being withheld pending notification of relatives.
Like me? Nobody told me!
Checking the date of the paper and counting backward, Gillian deduced the fall had occurred the morning of her encounter with Lara, probably within minutes after they’d passed each other. “Name withheld” was a dead giveaway. It took money and power to keep a person’s name out of the papers, especially when that person was a celebrity.
The newspaper had been circumspect, but still the rumors had made the rounds. Gillian had heard them from the women in her aerobics classes at the YMCA, heard them murmured over cups of coffee at the Waves. It was Lara Corday—you know, that Lara—who’d fallen—
She glanced up as a humming came from somewhere overhead. The crystal pendants on the chandelier trembled and a shard of rainbow danced across the ceiling.
“The elevator,” the man said at her elbow.
At last! Gillian swallowed and glanced desperately around the room. Her mind had gone utterly blank; all her endlessly rehearsed words had flown through the open doors and out to sea. There was a carriage clock on the mantel, she noticed, showing the time as ten-thirty. Half an hour, she kept me waiting.
But why should that surprise her? A woman who’d discarded her newborn baby like a worn-out shoe, who’d apparently made her climb to the top her highest priority—why should a woman like that worry that she kept others waiting? Whose time but her own would she value?
The door opened behind her and Gillian turned, dimly aware of the man beside her turning, as well.
“Darling,” he said warmly, and went to meet the woman framed in the doorway.
So that was his place in this household, Gillian realized at last with an odd jolt of dismay. The boyfriend. A virile courtier to replace the aging husband Lara had outlived. It explained his supreme confidence, his proprietary air. He put a hand to Lara’s elbow and led her into the room.
She barely spared him a glance. Her silvery eyes locked on Gillian, and it was the Cliff Walk encounter all over again. An awareness like a path of silver light, a moonbeam tunnel down which they both drifted, until only a few final feet divided them. “Do I—” Lara Corday smiled and shook her head. “I don’t know you, do I? My memory these days...” She gave a tiny, rueful shrug.
“Maybe you do,” suggested the man at her side. He’d advanced with her, one hand resting at the small of her back. “Newport’s a small town. You bump into everybody once a week or so.” His voice was tender, almost coaxing. His eyes flicked to Gillian and she could feel them bore into her.
Let him stare. It was Lara’s gaze that held her. “I don’t think so,” she answered cautiously. Oh, do you know me? But how could she? One of the few facts Gillian had pried from the lawyer was that Laura Lee Bailey had signed the relinquishment papers two days after Gillian’s birth. You saw me once or twice, maybe—that was it.
“Oh, well.” Lara smiled, dismissing the notion. “I know your name, of course, from your application, Gillian. I assume you and Trace have introduced yourselves?”
“More or less,” he said dryly. “Trace Sutton.” He clicked the heels of his running shoes and gave her a mock-formal nod.
A charmer when he wanted to be. Gillian didn’t trust charm.
Lara touched her elbow. “Come sit down and tell me all about yourself.”
I’m taller than she, Gillian realized for the first time, as they. moved toward the two couches that formed an L facing the French doors. By five inches or more. It was a measure of Lara’s presence that she hadn’t noticed till now. I’m too tall, with different hair. My eyes are light brown and hers are gray. Why, we’re nothing alike! What if she’d gotten it wrong somehow? A birth date and a photo—what did they prove? She’d wanted more than paper proof. She’d wanted resemblance, a physical explanation of who and what she was manifest in an earlobe, the shape of a chin, something... Instead all she had was this elusive sense of... connection.
“You said on your résumé that you’re working right now at the YMCA, teaching fitness,” Lara said gently, an actress nudging a forgetful understudy back toward her lines.
“Ah. Yes. I’ve been there since May.” She’d applied for the job the same day she learned of Lara’s accident. Somehow the accident-or perhaps their encounter on the cliffs—had changed her plans. She’d meant to stay in Newport no more than a week. After the accident she could not leave. Not till she learned that Lara was out of danger, she’d told herself.
But one month had slid into the next, and here it was September. “I taught aerobics, tai chi, weight-shaping classes while I worked my way through college. It was a good way to earn money and stay fit.” She’d thought it best to stick to the truth wherever possible. “So when I saw the opening here...” She let her words trail away. I grabbed it. A foothold in your town.
“But I’ve also worked as a secretary, through a temp agency,” she hastened to add, not mentioning she’d been less than a rousing success in the clerical world. What else to say? She should be selling herself, not simply staring. Lara had cut her hair since she saw her last, Gillian realized suddenly—or no, perhaps they’d shaved her head in the hospital. It was boy-short, making her lovely eyes seem enormous. Purple shadows smudged the delicate skin beneath. Her gaze also seemed shadowed, with pain or worry.
“That’s excellent,” Lara said. “I’m looking for someone to deal with my mail and other paperwork, but if you’re athletic, as well—I’m so out of shape—we could train together. An exercise buddy would get me off my duff, get me moving. Can you lay on the guilt? I’m hopelessly lazy!”
“Oh, I can guilt-trip with the best of them.” Gillian laughed. “I learned from an expert—my mom.” Her laughter jammed in her throat, turned to a fit of coughing that brought the tears to her eyes. Mom, how could I?
But it was true. Her adoptive mother, Eleanor Scott—her Real Mother any way you counted—had wielded that parental weapon with surgical deftness. Gillian couldn’t recall a single spanking in all her childhood years. A few well-chosen words of reproach, or one look of loving despair, was all it had taken to make her toe the line. She glanced up to find her own sorrow reflected in Lara’s eyes.
“You love your mother,” she said softly.
“Yes.” Gillian rubbed her lashes. “She died two years ago.” Why am I telling you that? Perhaps because that had started it all. After the funeral they’d found the key to the safe-deposit box. And the letter waiting there for Gillian, which had turned the first twenty-six years of her life into a lie. She wasn’t—never had been—who she thought. So who was she?
Only Lara knew, and in one savage letter she’d closed off all possibility of Gillian’s ever asking.
“I’m sorry,” Lara said. “I understand what it’s like to...miss somebody.”
She was nice! Gillian had expected anything but niceness. How could this woman have written that soul-crunching letter?
She’s an actress, she reminded herself. And a fine one, if winning an Emmy signified anything. Give her a role and presumably she could make it live. But still—
“You went to college. Where?” Trace Sutton cut in briskly. As if he’d heard enough emotional female meandering and it was time for some facts.
“University of Texas at Austin,” she answered in kind. “A double major—art and education.”
“So you should be teaching art in a public school,” he challenged. “Why earn a poor living doing jumping jacks at the Y?”
She could really dislike this man! “I...don’t have the temperament for teaching.” Not at the high-school level anyway, where she’d tried for three years, then resigned. She had no taste for the profession’s disciplinary side, and the paperwork had been a nightmare. “I hope to illustrate children’s books someday.” The truth again, though she’d turned the clock back. She already had three children’s books to her credit, was contracted to finish a fourth by Christmas. That didn’t pay her whole way, but supplemented by the exercise classes, she made do. “For now...” She shrugged. “I’m enjoying traveling around, seeing new parts of the country.”
“So you wouldn’t plan to keep this job long,” Sutton suggested gently. Drifter, his eyes jeered.
He really, really didn’t want Lara to hire her. Why? “On the contrary.” She gave him a look of limpid sincerity. “I’ve fallen in love with Newport. If I could find an interesting job that allowed me to stay here...”
“Then I doubt this position would suit you. Lara lives in New York whenever she’s acting.”
“But that won’t be for months, probably not this year at all,” Lara interjected. “They’ve written me out of this season’s scripts. My doctor doesn’t think I’m quite ready to—” Her shrug was apologetic, as if she’d willfully chosen her horrific fall in a fit of selfishness. Then she brightened. “Still, all this fan mail keeps pouring in, piling up in corners, and I really need to get back in shape, so when do you think you could start, Gillian?”
Trace Sutton coughed and bumped Lara’s shoulder.
She bit her lip. “If I decide to hire you,” she added like a good child reciting a lesson. A tinge of pink brightened her pale cheeks.
“I could start right away,” Gillian said promptly, refusing to even glance at the overbearing brute. “That is, if you don’t mind my juggling this job around my aerobics classes for a few weeks till the Y can find a replacement. I think I could swap some of my day classes with a woman who teaches nights and—”
“That sounds perfectly satisfactory.” Lara laid a slim hand on Trace’s arm as he stirred again. “Gillian, is there a phone number on your résumé I can reach you at? Good,” she continued decisively when Gillian nodded. “Then may I call you later today with my decision? I’m afraid it’s time for my physical therapy session at the hospital.”
“Of course.” But Gillian knew the verdict already. A lover’s word carried all the weight in the world. She searched her mind for something to prolong the interview, but short of crying I’m your daughter! You really ought to give me a chance this time! she could think of nothing to do.
Except swear to herself she would never ever forgive Trace Sutton for wrecking her best, probably her only, chance to learn the truth about her origins. Inwardly raging, she maintained a stony silence as he escorted her not only out of the house but all the way down the long, curving driveway to the front gates of the estate. What did he think—she might hide in the bushes, then pop out at Lara’s car when it passed?
“I figured you’d appreciate a boost over,” he said gravely as they arrived at the gates, an eighteen-foot barricade of ornately curlicued wrought iron topped off with vicious spikes.
He could joke while he snatched a job away from her? Maybe he didn’t realize what this meant to her, but still, for all Sutton knew she might desperately need employment. Terminally selfish, that’s what he was! All she could conclude was that he wanted Lara to himself. No doubt he’d make sure she hired some grim-faced old bag who typed a hundred and fifty words a minute.
“Or if you don’t want to climb,” Sutton continued when she refused to smile, “you walk between this electric eye and that one.” He nodded at two knee-high metal posts implanted at intervals along the driveway. “They decide you must be a car heading out and-voilà.” The gates swung majestically open. “Goodbye, Gillian,” he added gently. “And...don’t get your hopes up.”
“I—” She spun and stalked off, tears of rage gathering in her eyes. So close, so close! All but for that selfish... brute.
CHAPTER THREE
HANDS JAMMED IN HIS pockets, a reluctant smile quirking his lips, Trace Sutton watched her go.
Most people tightened up with rage. Gillian swung off on those long, long legs like a woman on a mission—a tiger to shoot or a city to sack. As if she’d just heard about a summer sale on silver platters. She needs one for my head, he acknowledged ruefully.
He leaned against the bars of the gates to keep her in sight as long as possible and crossed his arms. After a moment he noticed he was rubbing his right forearm. It still tingled where he’d snugged it around her waist. With a grimace, he shoved his hands back into his pockets.
She hadn’t been toting; he was reasonably certain of that. A weapon tucked in her waistband had been the logical assumption since she’d worn a loose, gauzy overblouse that hid the top of her skirt. But his lightning frisk had found no gun, no knife—only vibrant, willowy slenderness, a feminine shape that fit his arms as though molded to his personal specifications.
Given her skirt, there was only one other place Gillian might be packing. He’d pictured himself smoothing his hands up the inside of her long, honey-colored thighs—strictly searching for a shiv or a gun taped in place, of course. But try as he might, he hadn’t come up with an excuse for doing it that the lady would buy.
Except that I’m an oaf and she thinks that already.
Far down the street, he noticed, she reached a corner and turned left. Which checked out. That was the most logical route back to the address she’d given on her résumé.
He’d thought it was too damned convenient to Woodwind when he’d first noted her street. But Newport had a layout unlike most cities, where the rich lived on one side of town and the poor on the other. Situated on a long, meandering ridge that encircled a harbor, Newport divided its social classes not by horizontal miles but vertically. The “summer cottages” built at the height of the Gilded Age graced the top of the ridge, while the bungalows and triple deckers that had once housed the Irish maids, the gardeners and cooks and stable hands who had serviced those mansions occupied the lower slopes.
So in itself the proximity of Gillian Mahler’s place to Woodwind was no grounds for suspicion. Still... “Something doesn’t fit,” he murmured aloud. She’d looked like a winner to him, and that didn’t jibe with the profile.
But looks and manner aside, there was the fact that she’d drifted here from afar. And she lacked a steady, full-time job.
Which describes just about every kid in the city, he reminded himself. Newport had a well-earned reputation as a good-time town. The young swarmed here from all over the country, even from abroad, to work the summer jobs at the hotels, restaurants and bars. After hours they partied the night away, then spent their mornings drowsily perfecting their tans at the beach, before it was back to work again.
So explain away Gillian’s rootlessness and still he had that look she’d given him when he’d stopped Lara from hiring her. If looks could kill. And rage was definitely part of the profile.
Maybe she just needed the job. He squared his shoulders, shrugging off that twinge of guilt. He had one goal here and one goal alone, and nothing would deflect him from it.
So, put her on the shortlist?
His list was damned short. Twenty-seven applicants so far and he had only three candidates, losers all, but not one he’d bet his money on.
So, Gillian? Profiling was hardly an exact science. And those emotions he’d sensed once Lara had joined them... They’d raised the short hairs on the back of his neck.
Powerful, inappropriate emotions were definitely part of the profile—though oddly, he couldn’t quite swear which woman had been transmitting.
Or both? Did I miss something? Or add something that wasn’t there? Usually he trusted his instincts in these matters. This time, something seemed to be jamming the signals.
An image of long graceful legs, of smoldering lioness eyes, drifted across his mind. Trace grimaced. He didn’t like to think of sexual attraction crossing his wires, but he’d seen it happen to so many men in his business he’d be a fool to consider himself invulnerable.
And a greater fool to let it interfere with his job.
Well, the solution to that problem was easy. Keep her at a distance.
But put her on the shortlist, he decided also, and headed up the driveway. Maybe even the top of his shortlist.
LARA HAD GONE UPSTAIRS, Trace found when he returned to the mansion. He took the steps two at a time—she really did have a physiotherapy appointment within the hour. He entered her unlocked bedroom without knocking, then paused. “Lara?”
His pulse jumped a notch when she didn’t answer. His eyes swept the big sunny suite, half bedroom, half sitting room, then the balcony beyond, with its magnificent view of the sea. Nothing out of order. Nothing smashed or overturned. Lucy, the downstairs maid, had told him Lara was up here, but maybe she’d—
He sensed a presence and turned to find her standing in the doorway to her dressing room. Silent and unsmiling, she gazed at him for a moment, then withdrew.
So...he had offended her. She’d been so docile and subdued since her fall, he’d grown used to taking the lead. Surprised when she’d gone her own way during the interview this morning, maybe he’d brought her back into line a little too smartly.
“We need to leave in ten minutes,” he said, coming to stand in her dressing-room doorway, wondering whether to apologize or let it ride. The little room, lined with mirrors and louvered doors that hid her wardrobe of stunning simplicity, was empty. Lara had retreated all the way into her bathroom, a room that by unspoken agreement was off bounds to him. But the door was open and today wasn’t just any day, since they so rarely disagreed.
“Lara?” He stopped in the doorway to her bathroom. She stood brushing her hair before her mirror, a gesture that would have expressed her irritation beautifully four months ago, when those silvery locks had been a foot longer. In her imagination, they probably swirled around her shoulders still.
In reality, short as her hair was now, it stood up in silky tufts, then fell softly as the brush passed. She looked like an outraged downy fledgling. He had to work not to smile. “We’d better go.”
“I wanted that one, Trace,” she said with fierce determination, staring at herself in the beveled glass.
“You know it’s not in the plan.” He desperately needed a second person to spell him. Backup hadn’t been a problem those first two months after her fall, while she’d stayed in the nursing home. He’d brought in three capable private-duty nurses and alerted them to the danger. Whenever he’d left her bedside, he’d known she was in good hands and he could rest easy.
But these past two months back at Woodwind... There was too much ground here. Too many people for one man to cover. Even for a low-profile assignment, this was ridiculous, as he’d tried to tell her from the start.
A typical shift in his business was twelve hours. He was doing twenty-four, day after day after day. His concern wasn’t exhaustion so much as growing stale. No one could live at the pinnacle of alertness without stand-down time.
“So let’s change the plan,” Lara muttered.
Trace breathed in, held for a count of three, breathed out. A centering exercise in karate: achieve serenity first, then take action. “What was wrong with number seven?” he asked finally. “Liz Galloway?”
Galloway wasn’t a member of his own security firm, Brickhouse, Inc., but she’d come with the highest recommendations. To maintain her cover, she’d applied for the job in the same way as all the genuine applicants.
The brush paused midstroke. “She...intimidated me.”
Trace snorted. “Don’t be silly.” Lara was one of the bravest people he’d ever met, man or woman. The pain she’d endured without whimpering, those first few weeks after her fall... He remembered looking down at those big haunted eyes set in that swath of bandages and wishing she would cry out, complain, weep—anything but lie there bleakly accepting, as if pain were only her due.
“I’m not! I felt as if she was measuring my neck for a collar and leash. As if she’d expect me to heel every time we went out for a walk. Well, no, thank you. It’s bad enough having you—” Lara stopped, carefully set the brush aside. Reached for a bottle of lotion and fidgeted with the cap.
“Having me...?” he prompted mildly, though he knew what she’d say. It was the perennial problem between bodyguards and their clients, almost always the reason a bodyguard’s contract was terminated prematurely. Along with protection came loss of freedom. Spontaneity. Privacy. Once the client’s original fear diminished, resentment inevitably followed.
“Having you living on top of me,” Lara mumbled without meeting his eyes. “If I was stuck with Liz, as well, I think I’d go...” She shrugged. “Nuts.”
“I’m sorry. I try to not cramp your style.” Yet the requirements of the detail made it all but impossible. He was here under cover, and only one role allowed him to plausibly stay by her side day and night.
“Oh, Trace, I didn’t mean it that way! You’ve been—” She turned and smiled up at him. “I’m very lucky to have you—I can’t believe how lucky. But if I can’t have my privacy, at least I want to be...comfortable with the people around me. And besides,” she hurried on as he opened his mouth to argue, “we agreed that whoever was hired, she’d have to really function as my personal assistant. Liz Galloway just didn’t have the—the warmth or the tact the job requires. Some of those fan letters are so silly, the people who write them so—so desperately needy... The job takes somebody with sensitivity. A sense of humor.”
“Ouch, poor Liz!” But he could see what Lara meant. The ex-policewoman wouldn’t score high on the warm-and-fuzzy scale. “All right, then. I’ll see if I can find somebody else.” Inwardly he groaned. Female BGs were rare, and therefore in demand, and of the few available not just anyone would do. He’d hire only the best for Lara. And for himself. A partner he couldn’t trust was less than useless, endangered everyone. ,
Laura shook her head. “Don’t bother, Trace. I want her. Gillian.”
“Out of twenty-seven women you’ve interviewed, why her?” The one who worried him most.
Laura shrugged. “I don’t know. She...” She shrugged again. “I liked her.”
“Okay, well, let me tell you why not. For starters, Mahler’s not a bodyguard.” And that was only for starters.
Lara tipped her head in a tiny gesture that meant, “So what?” She reached for his wrist and turned it, making a comic face at the time on his watch, then nudged him ahead of her out the door—as if he were the one who’d been delaying them. “Does it ever occur to you,” she said lightly, following him into the bedroom, “that four months have passed since anyone tried to...hurt me?”
“I haven’t exactly given anyone a chance,” he reminded her. And if she hadn’t snuck out onto Cliff Walk without him that morning in May, no one would have laid a hand on her then. “But aren’t you forgetting your pen pal?” She’d received two letters since her fall, five before, for a total of seven.
Those disturbing letters, with their effusive admiration, their seething frustration, ominously mounting expectations, coy allusions to death and violence, had been sent by a fan who signed herself Sarah XXX, and had persuaded Lara to consult him in the first place.
Lara looked stubborn. “I’m not so sure they’re connected to...Cliff Walk.”
This was an old, old argument between them. “I’m not sure they’re not. And even if we do have two separate problems—two crazies—that only strengthens my point. You need another bodyguard, not a ditzy aerobics instructor.”
“If I’m to stay cooped up indefinitely at Woodwind, I’m more in danger of losing my girlish figure than my life! Gillian would be a big help there.”
“Any competent BG can train with you, if that’s what you—”
“I don’t want a drill sergeant, Trace. I want a—” She paused, tears gathering suddenly in her wonderful eyes, then blew out a big gusty breath and gave him a wavering smile. “I want a friend, okay? All my real friends are back on the set in New York, you know. Nowadays I only have you, and you’re useless for the girl stuff.”
“Thanks, I think.” He ushered her to the door of the suite, stepped out first and glanced both ways. She made her usual face at him. More and more she was considering him a worrywart, his precautions a nuisance. They walked down the hall to the tiny elevator installed in a dumbwaiter shaft and he waited till the elevator door had closed behind them. “Look, Lara, you hired me to protect you. Well, it’s my considered professional advice that you still need protection.”
She mulled that over while they walked through the house, out through the kitchen door to the carriage house that served as a garage. She waited obediently at a safe distance while he inspected, then started the car—he didn’t expect bombs with this kind of situation but why take the chance?—then she settled onto the front seat beside him. “You know, it...wouldn’t have happened if anyone else had been there to witness it or to scream. I mean, that was the act of a coward, wouldn’t you say—jumping out from behind me like that and...?” Her voice trailed away.
He nearly took her hand where it lay fisted on the seat between them, then suppressed the impulse. Brave girl, he applauded her silently. This was the first time she’d broached the fall of her own accord. Every other time, he’d had to lead her through it, word by halting word.
He didn’t agree with her assessment, though. Someone had jumped out of the bushes behind her as she jogged or had overtaken her silently. Had—in broad daylight!—gripped Lara’s hair with one hand, close to her nape so she couldn’t look back. Had grasped the waist cord of her sweatpants with the other hand, then forced her, step by struggling step, over the cliff edge. To his mind, the act took nerve, determination—and terrible hatred. It wasn’t the act of a coward, however it might comfort her to think so. It was the act of a risk taker.
Worse yet, a well-organized, premeditated risk taker, who’d chosen his or her place of ambush with intelligence and care—a gap in the bushes, a spot where the path skirted the drop-off, where twists in the trail blocked the view at both ends.
“Gillian’s a big girl,” Lara went on when he didn’t speak. “If she’d been there with me, no one would ever have dared...”
Yes, Gillian was a big girl—five-nine or -ten. And despite her slenderness, if she taught aerobics, tai chi, she’d be strong for her size... Strong enough to shove a smaller woman off a cliff? Definitely.
“How about a compromise?” he said, instead. “It may take me a week or two to find a female BG you can live with. In the meantime, why don’t you hire one of the other applicants—”
“No. I want to hire Gillian.”
As the gates swung ponderously inward, he studied her exquisite profile. Her chin was tipped in defiance, her arms crossed tightly across her chest. He swore to himself, then pulled out onto the avenue and stepped on the gas. For weeks he’d been silently rooting for her, hoping her spirit would mend along with her bones. But why did she have to regain her spunk today of all days? “Is there something you’re not telling me about Mahler?” he asked as they passed the Newport Casino, which had the oldest grass tennis courts in America. “You’re sure you’ve never met her before?”
“I...” Lara shook her head finally. “It’s f-funny, because that’s what it feels like, but no...I’m sure not.”
Under stress, she had a charming hint of a stutter. The question was what was he missing here? “Then why her, Lara? You didn’t even ask her how fast she types, whether she’s computer savvy, if she can—”
“I think she’d be good for me.”
Said with ominous finality. You could give a client advice, but you couldn’t make her take it, Trace reminded himself. The cardinal rule of his profession and the most frustrating. He could push no further. He could give Lara an ultimatum: insist on Gillian, and you’ll have to get yourself a new bodyguard. But he wasn’t ready to do that. For one thing, hiring Gillian Mahler might be no more than Lara’s harmless whim.
Or it might, just might, prove suicidal.
Either way, he’d stayed too long on this assignment to quit now. He meant to see it through till Lara was freed from danger. Unlike most security firms, the Brickhouse credo was that they solved the client’s problem; they didn’t just make their money off it.
And if Gillian was the problem?
Well, he’d meant to investigate her anyway. He just hadn’t expected his prime suspect to be dropped in his lap. Trace smiled at the image—couldn’t help himself—then glanced at Lara.
“All right. You’re the boss, boss.”
The smile she gave him was a fair trade—more than fair—for all the headaches this whim was bound to cost him in the end. They didn’t speak again until he turned into the parking lot across from the Newport Hospital.
“You asked me to tell you if I ever remembered anything else about that morning,” Lara murmured. “And something did come back to me a little while ago while I was brushing my hair. The runner I saw that morning out on Cliff Walk?”
The unidentified runner, sex unknown, wearing a hooded orange sweatshirt, who’d passed Lara only minutes before her attack. Trace’s best bet for her assailant. It would have been easy to spin around and follow Lara back through the fog, catch her just as she passed the fatal gap... “Yes,” he said without inflection. Come on, Lara. Give me the goods and I’ll nail the creep.
“I told you I thought it was a college sweatshirt, with University of something with an M—Michigan, Minnesota, Montana?—printed on the chest.”
“You did.”
“It was University of Miami.”
“You’re sure of that?” he said quietly. Her recall of the last few minutes before the accident was piecemeal and fuzzy, a result of either head trauma or sheer terror.
“Absolutely.”
He parked the car and turned to look at her. “So what brought it back to mind?” Sometimes the association that sparked the memory was more telling than the clue itself.
“D-don’t know. It just came to me.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Dearest Lara-Mommy,
Something told me that today I’d be SURE to get a letter from you!! I went to my mailbox four times—one. two, three, FOUR—but it never came. At least, the man behind the counter said it didn’t come. I’m starting to wonder about that guy. Could he be stealing my mail?!! He stares at me every time I come in now. But maybe that’s just because he thinks I look EXACTLY like the famous TV star Lara Leigh? People are always, I mean ALWAYS, staring at me on the street and thinking that. I stopped and gave one woman who was staring my autograph the other day. She thought that was so NICE of me to give it to her without her even asking.
But then, I’m not conceited like some people we know. And all I want to know is, WHY do I have to keep asking you for a letter? Asking and asking and asking and ASKING for one...CRUMMY...LETTER—what kind of mother makes her daughter beg for just the scraps—any old scrap—of her love? Just a crumb of attention? I guess the same kind of mom who sells her baby to finance her way through med school, huh?
Well, I’m getting very, very tired of asking. Tired of walking to my mailbox, then home again, then back again, then—I know every line in the sidewalk on the way to my mailbox. I play Step on a Crack and You’ll Break Your Mother’s BACK. Do you remember that game? It’s a children’s game. If you’d been there for me, Lara-Mommy, instead of devoting all your selfish life to your lousy CAREER, we could have played it together. And maybe then, if you’d been there to guide me I’d have amounted to something. Is that it? Is that why you won’t answer my letters anymore? Because you’re ashamed of me?
I promise you won’t be when we meet. Soon. It’s time for a mother and daughter reunion, don’t you think?
But till then,
WRITE ME, YOU BITCH! (HA-HA—Just kidding!!!) your loving Sarah XXX
WITH A SHUDDER of disgust, Trace dropped the letter on his desk. He stood, switched off the lamp, then moved to the window and leaned out, greedily breathing in the sweet night air, as if the letter’s cloying brew of need and hatred had contaminated his lungs as well as his mind.
His office looked out on the front grounds of Woodwind. Even with his thoughts elsewhere, his eyes roved automatically over the darkened lawn below, seeking movement, any shape that departed from the normal outlines of the lush landscaping. Nearly midnight and not even a skunk waddled across the lawn in search of grubs.
He glanced back to his desk. He’d been combing through Sarah XXX’s letters for the past hour, searching for any clue he might have overlooked. That letter was number four of the collection—rather, a copy of number four, since the original was filed with the Newport police. The stalking case against Sarah XXX had to be meticulously documented so that if—when, he corrected himself—Trace finally tracked her down, they could prosecute.
Like all the other notes, number four was a textbook example of the kind of mash note celebrity stalkers sent the objects of their twisted affections. Whatever the words, the underlying theme was the same: terrible, unappeasable neediness. The echoing emptiness of a person who has no identity in the normal sense of the word. Because for whatever pathetic reason—neglect, abuse, psychological dysfunction?—the typical stalker possesses no self.
Like Dorothy’s Tin Man, who realizes he lacks a heart, the stalker is still human enough to know he lacks something. Even if he can’t describe the problem, still he senses the void within—the black hole that in a normal person is filled by a sense of selfhood. By a soul.
And the stalker knows he needs to fill that void. Yearns most horribly to fill it. Believes with unshakable faith that to ever be happy, to ever be normal, he must fill it.
So just as the Tin Man set off to ask the Wizard of Oz for a heart, the stalker goes bumbling through life, searching and searching outside himself for a solution to the. problem that lies within.
Until one fine day the answer comes to him. He has a black, sucking hole where his identity should be? He’ll fill it with someone else’s identity! Someone else’s soul.
And since the void is so big, he’ll need a big identity to fill it. Somebody important, however the stalker defines importance.
A generation ago, importance was a politician. Today, importance is most often a celebrity. So one day, the stalker flips the pages of a magazine—and sees a photo. Or turns the TV channel just as a certain actress walks into a room—and wham!—there it is. A person staring into his eyes, seemingly speaking to him and him alone, promising him the solution to his whole rotten, lonely life. Promising recognition, belonging—identity.
All he has to do is win that person’s love, the stalker thinks. Except he doesn’t know what love is. His underlying urge is darker, deeper. He doesn’t want love; he wants possession. Wants to merge with. Become. Seize that soul and swallow it whole. To eat it.
Trace switched the lamp back on and sat again. So with zombies like that wandering the world, what does Richard Corday do for his new, beautiful young wife?
Already the creator of five hit TV shows, Corday sets out to create a showcase series for Lara. The perfect wedding gift for an actress, he must have thought. A role to die for. Like a master jeweler crafting the perfect setting for a matchless diamond, he creates an evening soap opera called Searching for Sarah.
In which, for the past thirteen years, Lara had played the part of beautiful young Dr. Laura Daley, who has a secret sorrow. At the age of seventeen, Daley sold her illegitimate baby in a black-market adoption and used the payment to finance her way through college, then med school. Lara had assumed the role when she was thirty—at that age, she could still play the part of a teenager—and she’d been playing it ever since. The role had evolved over the years, with Dr. Daley changing from career-driven girl, to brilliant med student, to sexy resident, to glamorous pediatric surgeon in a big city hospital. She needed only one thing to make her life perfect: reunion with her lost, never forgotten, deeply regretted daughter. Because, since episode three of the show, Dr. Laura Daley had realized her dreadful mistake. She’d been frantically searching for Sarah for thirteen years now.
The premise was guaranteed to speak to every wacko in the country—at least every female wacko, and doubtless some of the males. What could be more seductive to the loser nobody needs than a TV diva who needs you and you alone? For somebody lost to know that lovely Dr. Laura Daley is frantically searching for you?
Searching for Sarah was like a Help Wanted ad, broadcast one night a week for thirteen years. The one part waiting for an actor to fill it was the role of the missing, longed-for daughter.
Was it any wonder Sarah XXX wanted the position? The only wonder was that Trace didn’t have a dozen—a hundred—wannabe Sarahs to contend with. Lara had been damned lucky to escape a serious stalking as long as she had.
How serious a stalker was Sarah XXX? That was the question.
Six days after Sarah XXX mails this letter from Boston, promising—threatening—a mother-daughter reunion, somebody pushes Lara over a cliff. The simplest explanation wasn’t conclusive, but Trace firmly believed in starting with it first: one wacko, not two.
So all I have to do is find Sarah XXX.
And maybe he had. He reached for letter number five, then selected, instead, the top page from a thicker stack of papers. Gillian’s résumé.
He paused as the buzzer tucked in his pocket quivered soundlessly against his thigh. Lara. He waited, eyes unfocused, breath deepening, preparing himself for action if this was a call for help—then let out a little sigh of satisfaction when the buzzer stopped vibrating after three seconds. Good. And good night to you, too, Lara.
Buzzers were a bit of proprietary technology that Brickhouse used in any case where physical attack was a possibility. The client was instructed to wear a special locket on a chain around his or her neck at all times. Press the button concealed in the locket’s design, and a silent buzzer would alert the Brickhouse bodyguard that he was needed—and needed now.
He glanced at his watch. Midnight. Which meant it was nine in Seattle, not too late for his night-owl younger sister. He picked up his phone and dialed.
“Mmm, ‘lo?” a drowsy voice murmured in his ear.
“Asleep already?” he said easily. “Lazy bum.”
“Dozing,” Emily insisted. “I’m lying here on the couch with Duncan on my chest.” Duncan was one of her four tomcats, the surly orange one. “And he’s emitting sleep rays. I was fighting valiantly, but—”
“Well, throw him off and go look at your computer.” Trace had scanned Gillian’s résumé into his computer, then e-mailed it to Emily an hour ago. “Got somebody I want you to check out for me.” His younger sister was not a partner in Brickhouse, God forbid, but an associate. They farmed out much of their research to her, especially anything that could be learned over the Internet.
“Rush job or in my own sweet time?” she inquired around a yawn.
“Like prontissimo. I want it yesterday.”
“So my—lemme go, you cockleburr!” On the far side of the continent, something heavy hit the floor—twenty-two pounds of cat, Trace assumed. “So my brainstorm worked?” Emily continued. She’d suggested Trace run a want ad seeking a personal assistant for Lara, because if Sarah XXX had come to Newport in May, then maybe she’d stayed.
That wouldn’t be untypical—the stalker’s life spiraling inward in tighter and tighter circles around her target as her obsession grew. And if she’d stayed, then she’d be frantically seeking some way in past Woodwind’s unbreachable walls. “So offer her a way in,” Emily had urged. “Run a want ad with the Woodwind address and see who applies.”
“I don’t know if it worked,” he said, “but it turned up a few possibles. And this is the one I want you to start on.”
“Gillian S. Mahler,” Emily murmured, reading Gillian’s résumé on her screen.
“N. Mahler,” Trace corrected absently. “The first thing I want you to check out is—”
“S,” Emily interrupted, know-it-all kid sister to the end. “That’s an S. And I’d say your Gillian’s a leftie, correct?”
“S...” Trace stared at the spiky, backhanded letter. He’d taken it for a N in running script, not an S practically lying on its back. “By God, I believe you’re right!”
“That’s significant?”
“That, duckie, might be point, set and game. Okay, in that case here’s what I need from you, and I need it as quick as you can. What does the S stand for?”
“And if it’s Sarah?”
“Then bingo! I’ve found my pigeon.”
THREE DAYS LATER, on a morning as bright as her mood, Gillian leaned out her car window to study the device that apparently controlled Woodwind’s gates. Topping a metal post at a height convenient to the driver, it was an intercom of some sort, with a keypad and a speaker. Printed below the keypad was the instruction Press * To Call. She pressed the star sign, then waited.
“Yes?” the speaker said after a moment, in a metallic imitation of Trace Sutton’s voice.
It would be him, playing gatekeeper. “It’s G-Gillian. I’m here.” Lara had called her two days ago to say she was hired, and could she please report for work on Monday. So here she was at last, with all the possessions she’d acquired in Newport packed into boxes and suitcases that filled the trunk and back seat of her car. Because along with the job came an unexpected, quite wonderful bonus: a carriage-house apartment on the Woodwind grounds. Given Gillian’s recent problems with roommates, she might have accepted the job on those terms alone. Considering that the job and the housing gave her round-the-clock access to Lara, she couldn’t have asked for a better chance to get to know her.
There was no welcoming comment from Sutton, but slowly the gates swung inward and Gillian steered her ancient Toyota up the winding driveway. At the top of the low hill, the road divided. The right fork curved off grandly to lead front-door callers to the mansion’s covered portico. The left fork wound around back, past concealing shrubbery, to the carriage house built to one side of the mansion and a bit behind it.
On the raked gravel before the carriage house, Trace Sutton stood waiting, a sardonic half smile on his face, his hands jammed into the pockets of a pair of impeccable white tennis shorts. The very picture of a gentleman of leisure.
“That’s the door to your apartment.” He indicated a human-sized entrance to the left of the five garage bays.
She parked before it and stepped out. “Good morning.”
“Is it?” he said pleasantly.
Well, it was for me till now. Why did he dislike her so? She glanced past him toward Woodwind. “Where’s Mrs. Corday?”
“She’s not up and about yet. She had a bad night.” As he spoke, he opened the rear door of her car and lifted out a box. “So meantime I’ll show you your apartment and help you get settled.”
“Oh, that’s really not necessary!” She reached for the box, but he didn’t relinquish it. “If you’d just give me the key, I’m sure I can...”
But he’d already stepped around her and started off. “Nonsense. It’s no trouble at all.”
“But—” She didn’t want him intruding on her new space or on her new-job excitement. Fuming, she grabbed a couple of smaller boxes and followed him up the covered staircase that was built on the outer wall of the carriage house, then through a door at the top of the stairs. “Oh!” The slanted ceiling was set with skylights.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Sutton said from the far end of the long room, where he waited in a doorway. “I used to live here myself.”
“You did?” Perhaps that accounted for his proprietary air. Still, Gillian didn’t like it. He rubbed her wrong; the vibrations he’d left behind would bother her, too. Frowning, she followed him into the bedroom, and stopped short in delight.
The end wall was mostly glass, a gigantic Palladian window that looked out on the side lawn, then over the distant back wall. Beyond that all was blue—robin’s egg sky, a slash of aquamarine sea.
“Yes, I rented this place for a month this spring, before I moved in with Lara.”
So their relationship was quite new. Must have blossomed almost overnight, given that Lara had spent most of her spring and summer in hospital. One of those sickbed romances—he’d wooed her when her resistance was at its lowest, chocolate and flowers and reading to the invalid? “I see,” she said evenly. He’d set her box of clothes down on the bed. The top flaps, which she’d interlocked, had somehow come undone. She dumped her own boxes beside it. “What did you mean by ‘a bad night’? Pain?” She straightened to find his eyes locked on her face.
“Nightmares,” he said bluntly.
“Oh.” Yes, she could imagine that. She shivered, and watched him note it. Why was he staring like that? The memory of his arm sliding around her returned abruptly: She’d put any notion that he might have been making a pass aside after his obvious attempt to block Lara’s hiring her. Rationally, one action didn’t follow the other. If Trace was attracted, then why would he object to her working at Wood- . wind? He wouldn’t. Since he had objected, therefore that fumble at the windows had not been a pass.
Now, with his eyes lingering on her mouth, she wasn’t so sure of her logic. “Er, there’s lots more in the car.” She ducked out the door.
They brought up a second load, Trace in the lead again. He swung her suitcase onto the bed, then opened a sliding door to reveal a closet. “There’re plenty of hangers. Why don’t you hand me your things and I’ll hang them up.”
Funny, he didn’t look in the least domestic. “Thanks, but I’d rather do it myself.” Later, without an unblinking audience.
Her words hung between them in the small room, a little too emphatic, a little too prim. Maybe she was wrong to take offense. Maybe this was no more than the kind of service a slightly younger man grew used to giving an older, richer woman. She found herself wondering for the first time what Sutton did for a living.
His smile deepened at the corners, but he didn’t rush to fill the uncomfortable silence. So she did. “It’s just that I’ve been living crunched into a tiny apartment with too many roommates.” When she’d taken the place back in May, she’d signed on to share a two-bedroom apartment with its original tenant. Then Debbie had lost her job. To pay the rent, she’d taken in another two girls, college sophomores in Newport to party for the summer. “Dirty dishes in the sink, people coming and going at all hours or, worse, declaring parties at all hours. Laundry hanging all over the bathroom.” And Michele, who’d decided she preferred Gillian’s clothes to her own and who borrowed without asking. “It’s been too much togetherness by half. So it’ll be heaven doing for myself for a change.”
Trace cocked his head. “Let me guess. You’re an only child.”
One minute he doesn’t like me, the next he wants to know all about me. She was tempted to brush him off, but she didn’t need an enemy at Woodwind. Lara’s desire to hire her had overruled her lover’s opposition. Still, Gillian didn’t know by what margin. Better to play it safe. Try to win him over, too.
“Not quite,” she said lightly, leading him out of the bedroom and back toward the stairs. “I have a brother.” By adoption. “Chris. But he’s fourteen years older than I.” And when her adoptive parents had divorced back when Gillian was eight, Chris had gone with his father. She had stayed with Eleanor Scott—her adoptive mother—and had wondered for years why her father, Victor Scott, had dropped out of her life so completely.
Because I was never his in the first place! Because it was Mom who wanted to adopt a child, not him—he had Chris by a previous marriage and Chris was quite enough. So many mysteries of her childhood had come clear when she opened that safe-deposit box.
“And Chris lives back in Houston along with the rest of your family?” Trace prodded, coming down the stairs at her heels.
Houston. She hadn’t told him she came from there. He read my résumé, which listed Houston as her previous residence and the location of her last two jobs. “Oh, he’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere,” she said with a smile over her shoulder. “He’s a delivery captain. Moves other people’s yachts around.”
There wasn’t much family beyond that to claim, in Houston or anywhere. Aunt Susan, Victor Scott’s sister out in San Diego. And Ed Mahler, the lovely loony man who had married her mother when Gillian was fifteen and had adopted her, never knowing she was adopted already. He had been as thunderstruck as she at Eleanor’s deception. Ed was an engineer in the merchant marine, and after her mother’s death, he’d signed on for a regular run on a tanker between Kuwait and New Jersey.
Reaching the car, Gillian found herself still smarting at Trace’s invasion of her privacy. It was silly to be so irritated. Perhaps he’d helped Lara cull all the applicants, deciding which were worth an interview. Still, his big hands on a paper that described her life...she didn’t like it. “So what about you?” she said recklessly as she opened the trunk. “Any siblings?” Two could play the prying game.
She looked up to find a distinct frown on his face. You’d rather question than be questioned? Good. She cocked her head at him inquiringly. I bet you’re the youngest brother, with two older sisters. You’re comfortable hanging around with older women. Pleasing them.
Trace accepted her challenge with a wry smile and said, “Three. A younger brother and two even younger sisters.”
So much for her betting instincts. “Then that makes you the responsible, conscientious one.” she observed. And it would account for his air of command. The eldest was always the kid left in charge. “And what is Trace, a nickname your family gave you?” Might as well keep him on the run once she had him there.
He pulled her portfolio and the big wooden box she used for a paint kit out of the trunk. “It’s short for Tracy,” he said amiably, and turned to face her. “And what does the S stand for—your middle name?”
Touché! she thought wryly. He wasn’t one to run far. S stood for two names in one. Sarah and Scott. But Sarah was the name Lara had given her at birth—Gillian knew that from the papers her adoptive mother had bequeathed her—and then apparently her adoptive parents had retained it. Simply because they liked the name Sarah? Or as some sort of salute to Lara’s wishes?
Scott was the surname of her adoptive parents at the time of Gillian’s adoption. The name she’d refused to give up in a fit of teenage defiance when her mother married Ed Mahler.
So Sarah Scott was how she’d signed her letter last year, when she first wrote to Lara asking if they might be related. And Gillian had no intention of risking exposure by giving it now. Probably she should have changed the S to something else on her job application, but all her ID showed her as Gillian S. Mahler.
She met Trace’s eyes and realized that her hesitation had stretched for a minute or more. That he stood motionless, his face as intent as a cat’s at a mouse hole.
“My middle name?” She smiled. “S stands for Seymour.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Now, TAKE A DEEP BREATH,” Lara laughingly advised, as she paused, hand on a doorknob. Despite the nightmares Trace had mentioned, she seemed in fine spirits this morning. Trace and Gillian had collected her from her bedroom suite, where she had taken a late breakfast. She’d led them on a leisurely tour of the public areas of the house, the high point of which, to Gillian, had been an exercise room, complete with lap pool, in the basement that she might use whenever she pleased. The conclusion of the orientation was Gillian’s new office, located upstairs in the same wing as Lara’s suite, all the way at its western end. “And remember,” Lara continued as she opened the door, “it isn’t as bad as it looks.”
“It’s worse,” Trace lazily assured her. Apparently having nothing better to do, he’d tagged along on the tour and Gillian wasn’t sure if she was grateful or annoyed. On the one hand, his presence diluted the intensity of her first extended interaction with her mother, so that she wasn’t constantly “onstage,” having to pick and choose her words every minute. But on the other hand, his presence prevented her from connecting with Lara on a more intimate level.
“Hush,” Lara commanded as she opened the door.
“If this is bad,” Gillian murmured, following her into the office, “I don’t know if I could stand good. It just might kill me!” The large room ended in a gigantic, three-sided bay window, with tiny stained-glass diamond panes trimming its upper reaches; at eye level, half-moon expanses of plate glass framed the outrageously splendid view. A long cushioned seat was built in below each facet of the window; a coffee table was placed in the alcove thus created. Gillian could see the tops of the rosebushes that edged Cliff Walk peeking above the estate walls, then 180 degrees of ocean glittering in the noonday sun.
“It is gorgeous, isn’t it?” Lara agreed. “This used to be Richard‘s—my husband’s—office. I never did understand how he could write here. But then, he used to sit with his back to the view.” Her smile wavered for a moment. She swallowed, tipped her head in a movement that seemed to say, Oh, well, and continued. “It was Joya—my stepdaughter—who turned the desk to face the windows last year when she took over.”
Her stepdaughter! Somehow Gillian had thought, if she hadn’t been told by now, that Lara had no children.
“Up until last year, I’d had the same assistant for nine years. But when Beckie left to be married, Joya asked for the job...” Lara went on, glancing around the room with a faint frown.
“And you can see what a good job she’s been doing,” said Trace, nodding at the boxes lined along one wall.
A dozen boxes at least, Gillian estimated, filled with—“Yikes! Is that all—”
“Fan mail,” Lara said with a look of comic guilt. “Still want the job?”
“Well, yes.” More than ever. Lara wasn’t like anything she’d expected. There was some mystery here that needed unraveling. “Who’s afraid of a little fan mail?” And now was probably not the time to admit that she had suffered all her life from mild—okay, moderate—dyslexia. Reading required intense concentration and exacted fierce headaches. “Am I looking at a week’s worth of mail or—”
“Oh, just today’s,” Trace assured her blandly.
Lara elbowed him in the ribs. “Sit down and hush up before you scare Gillian off the job, you brute!”
“Your wish, oh heart, is my...” Trace retired obediently to a window seat. He selected a catalog from a pile arranged on the coffee table, opened it, and seemed instantly absorbed.
Lara turned back to Gillian with a smile. “It’s six months’ or more accumulation. Joya fell behind some time before last Christmas and the poor darling never caught up again.”
“Though she tried valiantly,” Trace murmured without looking up. He turned a page.
“She was only working part-time,” Lara defended her stepdaughter. “She and Toby—her brother—were attending college here in town, at Salve Regina...”
A brother, as well! Gillian’s stepbrother, also, or was Toby Lara and Richard Corday’s son? Which would mean that he was Gillian’s half brother. She found herself hoping keenly for the second alternative. Her own adoptive brother had been plucked from her daily life with her parents’ divorce. She would have liked a full-time sibling or two.
“What with her midterms and a paper she had to write...” murmured Lara, still defending the absent Joya. Trace rustled his catalog too loudly. Lara shrugged. “Anyway, all these letters need answering. So here’s how you go about it.”
She selected a letter from the last box in line along the wall, opened it and pulled out a printed get-well card featuring a doleful rabbit on crutches, his ears bent, his head bandaged. She laughed to herself and held it out to Gillian. “They’re filming the fall season’s episodes of Searching for Sarah already. Since I won’t be returning for another six months or so, the scriptwriters have written me out of the story. They’ve decided that I had a dreadful accident while skiing in Switzerland, and no one knows if I’ll ever walk again—art imitating life, but not too closely, thank God.”
She lifted the card from Gillian’s fingers. “Anyway, somehow Soap Opera Digest got wind of that plot twist and ran it as their lead story last month. Ever since it came out, half my mail is get-well cards and the other half is outraged complaints.”
Either way, Gillian’s job was to respond. Lara switched on the computer on the desk and showed her the various form letters. As time and inspiration permitted, she should add a sentence or two to customize the form letter, thus making the fan feel she was receiving a personal response. “I wish there were time to send each of them an answer from scratch, but there just isn’t. Still I’m really grateful for their concern. For their...loyalty. Some of them have been writing me for years. Which reminds me—”
Lara showed Gillian how to check to see if the fan was new—in which case the name was to be added to a database Lara maintained, along with a code that showed which form letter she’d received—or if the fan was an old one, then Gillian should review the file to make sure a repeat response didn’t get sent.
Autographed photos of Lara were stored in this drawer, prestamped envelopes in that. “And that’s about it for the fan mail,” Lara said at last. “Except for the...special cases.”
“The reality impaired,” Trace murmured.
Lara rounded on him fiercely. “They’re not all—”
“There?” he supplied gently. “Any woman who thinks she might be Sarah? A fictional long-lost daughter of a fictional Dr. Daley, star of a prime-time soap opera? Anyone who believes that isn’t playing with a full deck, Lara.”
Gillian had wondered herself, of course. Dr. Laura Daley was fiction. Lara’s maiden name was Laura Bailey. Both women, the fictional one and the factual, had sold their babies—one for the money to go to med school, the other for a red sports car. And it was Lara’s own husband who’d created the Dr. Daley character. Why? The story was just too juicy to pass up? But how could Lara have allowed Corday to use her own life as fodder for a soap opera?
On the other hand, people did it all the time, selling their real-life tragedies or scandals to TV, to be dramatized as a movie of the week. So why couldn’t Lara sell her own story—sell me—all over again?
“They’re a little confused,” Lara admitted, regaining her good temper. “So we try to straighten them out gently, pointing out that Searching for Sarah isn’t based on reality.”
Except that it is. Almost. Gillian found herself nodding to hide her confusion.
“I have a form letter for the special cases,” Lara went on, “but those I handle personally. If you run across any letter where the fan thinks she might be Sarah, you bring that right to me and I’ll deal with it, okay?”
Straightening them out gently, she’d said. Except that when Gillian had written Lara a year ago to say that maybe, just maybe, she might be Lara’s birth daughter, Sarah Scott, Lara’s response had been ferocious, not gentle: If I didn’t want you when you were born, why would I want you now?
“Laaaara. Lara-darling?” The owner of that caroling soprano paused in the office doorway. Gillian recognized the blonde in the Range Rover, who had coolly nodded her through the gates on the day of her interview. This morning she radiated warmth. “Oh, there you are, darling!” Her blue eyes switched to Gillian and widened. “And you must be my poor, poor replacement!”
“Gillian, this is my daughter Joya,” Lara said, and completed the introductions while the girl glided across the hardwood floors to offer her hand. Her palm was marshmallow soft, her grip fashionably limp; her inch-long mauve fingernails made shaking hands a bit of a hazard. Gillian could see why she’d gotten behind in her paperwork.
“Did you need something, sweetie?” Lara asked.
The girl turned a dazzling smile upon her. “Just your car for a little bitty while? Stupid Toby took the Range Rover back to the dealer. He says it’s lost its new-car smell and the dealer should have some sort of spray to make it smell new again. I mean, I ask you, so it smells like it’s three months old instead of three days? Who cares? Anyway, I told Duffy and Pooh I’d meet them for lunch out at Bailey’s Beach, so could I pretty, pretty please take your—”
“No,” said Trace from the window seat. “I may need it.”
Sunshine gave way to storm clouds in the blink of an eye, as Joya whirled to face him. “Well, too bad! I asked first!” She glanced over her shoulder at Lara. “Didn’t I, darling?”
Lara bit her lip, glancing from one to the other. Trace shook his head slowly and Joya caught the movement from the corner of her eye. Her head snapped around.
“You stay out of this, Trace! It’s none of your business.”
“We could drive you, I suppose,” Lara said. She put a soothing hand on the girl’s arm.
Joya shook it off and backed away. “I don’t want to be driven to lunch like a snot-nosed child. I—”
“Then stop acting like one,” suggested Trace.
Joya stamped her foot. “You shut up!”
Gillian drifted back a step...another, then turned. If there had been some way to creep out of the room she’d have taken it gladly. Next best option was to act as though this ugly little scene wasn’t happening, go about her business. She stooped by the last box in line and examined its contents.
Behind her, Trace’s voice overrode Lara’s placating murmur. “If these so-called friends of yours can’t be bothered to drive a mile out of their way to pick you up, then call a taxi. You can afford it.”
“Trace—” Lara interposed on a note of pleading.
“At least I pay my own way here,” Joya declared in a vicious singsong, advancing on him. She snatched up the catalog he’d set aside, flipped its pages at random. “Unlike some of us who just lounge around, preening and flexing—”
Trace laughed aloud. Gillian chose a letter from the box at random. This one was a manila envelope and seemed to contain something thicker than a letter. A gift from an admiring fan? She could ask Lara to show her what to do in cases like that. Lara looked as if she’d welcome a distraction, but Gillian hadn’t the nerve. Joya was standing over Trace, her hands clenched as though she wanted to smash his upturned, gently smiling face but didn’t dare. Frustrated as the girl appeared, she might lash out at the next person who spoke or moved.
“Flexing and preening and sucking up to older women. Getting Lara to buy you goodies: What are you shopping for this time, Trace, another set of custom golf clubs? Or were you a very good boy last night? You deserve a gold Rolex this morning?”
“Joya, that’s enough!” Lara said sharply.
Gillian stood, opened the envelope. Any distraction was better than this.
“Enough? It’s not half enough,” Joya snarled. “It’s time somebody said something! If Daddy could see this—this big lapdog who’s taken his place. I bet he’s spinning in his grave! Spinning and puking!”
The package held something wrapped in several folds of a plastic bag. Pulling it out and unwrapping it, Gillian drifted to Lara’s side. From the bag she removed a mottled white-and-brown card, folded loosely around some oblong object. “Mrs. Corday, excuse me, but this letter contained some—”
“If you don’t mind, honey,” Joya snapped, “you can wait your turn! I’m—”
“Stop!” called Trace, lunging to his feet and swinging Joya out of his way—just as Gillian shook the item free of the card and into her hand.
Her gasp feathered out, loud in the sudden silence.
White fur...the hardness of bone beneath... the stench of rotten meat. Trace caught her wrist and turned it, flipping the object off her palm and onto the desktop.
“Oh, gross!” cried Joya.
“Oh,” said Lara, as she sank onto the office chair.
LARA’S “GIFT” WAS THE FOOT of some small animal. Rabbit’s foot, Gillian thought with revulsion. But not a commercial, sanitized rabbit’s foot you could buy on a key chain. Horrible as she thought those were, this was much worse. A homemade job, it looked like, with dark stains on the soft fur.
She became aware that Trace still held her wrist. Warm and oddly comforting, his fingers curled around her. She could feel her own pulse, slamming against the base of his thumb. And his slower, heavier beat, like an answer you could depend on.
“You’re not going to faint on me, are you?” he asked absently, looking up from the rabbit’s foot into her eyes.
“Of course not,” she said, though she did feel—detached. Floating a few inches off the floor. As if she could tip forward and fall into his deep hazel eyes—pools of slate green spangled with gold and gray. Aware, also, that even if her knees did buckle, he was strong enough to hold her upright.
“Of course you’re not,” he murmured on an odd note, something almost with an edge to it. “And what have you got there?” He reached and caught her other wrist and lifted it, scowled at the bloodstained card she still clutched. “Drop it.”
The wrapper fell to the desk and he released her at last. She stood, rubbing her wrists. Trace used the eraser ends of two pencils off the desk to push open the curled card and pin it flat to the blotter. Lara wheeled her chair up beside her to watch. Joya also crowded closer.
On the inner surface of the bloody card were printed the words:
Lara-mommy! I saw this and thought of YOU. You could use some luck—maybe more than you know? See you SOOOOOOON. Your loving SARAH XXX.
“Gross!” Joya repeated. She sounded more excited than repelled.
“I’m sorry,” Gillian said, glancing at Lara’s troubled face.
“Why?” Trace snapped.
“What?” Swinging to face him, she found his eyes had gone darker, the pupils expanding like those of a cat when it sees a bird.
“Why are you sorry?” he demanded softly.
Bewildered by his intensity, she shrugged. “Of all the letters I had to choose...”
A two-heartbeat pause, then Trace looked down again. “Most unfortunate,” he agreed smoothly.
“I’ll say!” Joya sniggered. “First day on the job and the girl hits a home run! Way to go, Gillie.”
“It’s hardly Gillian’s fault,” Lara protested. “Not her fault at all! If anyone ought to apologize, Gillian, it’s me. I should have warned you. Once in a blue moon you’ll get a fan who’s a little...”
“Or a lot,” Trace observed wryly. He was using his two pencils now to maneuver the manila envelope across the desk to his side.
“Oh, pick it up, for Pete’s sake!” Joya reached for it. “Ow!” she yelped as he rapped her knuckles with the eraser end of a pencil. “Did you see that?” she demanded of Lara. “I’m supposed to put up with this crap?”
“Fingerprints, darling,” Trace murmured, bending to study the envelope. When he straightened again, there was a stillness about him that hadn’t been there before. “This envelope came from which box, Gillian?”
“Th-the one on the end.” Whatever Joya might think, this man was nobody’s lapdog. Gillian had met rottweilers with kinder eyes. “Why?”
“This is today’s mail. Postmarked Saturday in Boston. So today, Monday, is the first day it could have been delivered. So who brought it up to the house?” His eyes swung to Joya.
She squirmed, shrugged, looked up at him with an odd defiance. “Okay, so I did, so what? When Toby and I came in from breakfast, it was there in the mailbox, so I brought it up—brought it here to the office. So what?”
“I believe we had an understanding, Joya. I bring up the mail.”
“You think that’s all it takes to earn your keep around here?” she jeered, backing away from him toward the door.
“Joya!” Lara protested.
“Oh, spare me. I don’t want to hear it, okay? I’m late for lunch. Gillie, call me a cab and tell it to meet me at the front gates.” Joya stalked out of the room without a backward glance.
CHAPTER SIX
AT SEVEN-THIRTY IN THE evening, a rosy light still lingered in the western sky. Standing at his office window, Trace could see, beyond a hedge of lilacs, a shadowed stretch of the service driveway. “Come on, Gillian.” She’d told Lara that she taught an eight o’clock class at the Y Monday nights. Women’s weights, she’d said. “Get a move on.” She’d have to leave the carriage house any minute now to make it on time. And he couldn’t move till she did.
Just one more roadblock in a day filled with frustrations.
After that ugliness in the office, Lara had gone straight to bed. She’d claimed a raging headache and Trace didn’t doubt it. Since her fall she was subject to those, and stress looked to be a trigger. But it wasn’t just pain troubling her, he’d thought, when he brought her her lunch on a tray.
The lady was blue, it struck him, in spite of her brave front. Not frightened, which seemed the more reasonable response to such a blatant threat, but deeply depressed. And not willing to talk about it—at least not with him. Not till he’d apologized for thwarting Joya.
But Trace had no intention of apologizing to the silly brat. He’d explained to Lara that he didn’t want her car out on the street unsupervised, where it might be sabotaged. But he couldn’t say that to Joya, since she and Toby lived in a state of blissful ignorance, unaware that Lara was being stalked. Or that their stepmother’s “accident” on Cliff Walk was no accident. Only the chief of Newport police and his top detective, Jeremy Benton, were privy to that secret. Lara had wanted to avoid publicity. And Trace felt he had a better chance of nailing her assailant if no hue and cry was raised.
Since the last few minutes, even hours, before a traumatic head injury were often wiped from the victim’s memory, whoever had pushed Lara off the cliff had good reason to hope she’d forgotten the assault. Let him or her think so, Trace had urged. The better to catch you, you freak!
For the same reason, he lived at Woodwind under cover, with no one but Lara and his police contacts knowing his true role in the household. Because he didn’t want to deter a threat—postpone Lara’s troubles till he’d gone. He wanted to lull the stalker, lure him or her into his reach. Look, here’s poor little Lara, protected by no one but her bumbling gigolo. Come and get her!
Or be gotten.
TRACE STRAIGHTENED as headlights blossomed beyond the lilac leaves, then wheeled downhill toward the gates. Gillian’s little Toyota. He breathed a sigh of relief. Action at last.
He left the mansion by the kitchen door, checking that it locked behind him. Barbara Heath, Lara’s longtime cook and housekeeper, and Maureen, the upstairs maid, had both retired to their third-floor apartments. As had Harriet, Woodwind’s perpetual houseguest. The resident layabouts, Toby and Joya, were out for the evening. If they followed their usual pattern, they wouldn’t return till the bars closed at one o’clock. Or later, if they found an after-hours party.
And his client was locked in her impregnable suite with his locket buzzer around her neck. He didn’t like to leave her, but it was Lara’s choice to hire only one bodyguard. There was only so much he could do.
Nail Sarah XXX and he could stop worrying.
Trace circled the noisy gravel of the courtyard, then approached the carriage house through a flower bed on the downhill side. The copy of the key he’d made two days before—without telling Lara—fit sweetly into the lock and turned. At the top of the stairs, he glanced at his watch—7:55 p.m. He’d give himself till 9:00 to toss the place. It took longer when you meant to leave no signs of a search.
Inside, he paused, listening to the silence. Smelling it. Already the air carried a suggestion of Gillian. Lemons? New-mown hay? The same sunny, subtle perfume that clung to her tawny hair. He’d noticed it that first time he held her. Must be imagining it now, surely.
He padded into the room. After he’d disposed of Sarah XXX’s latest offering, Gillian had spent the rest of the morning working on the fan mail. In the afternoon she’d retreated to her apartment. To unpack and settle in, she’d said. Noting a vase of wild roses on the table in the window nook, Trace smiled in spite of himself. Whatever else she might be, she was all girl.
His smile faded. Whatever else she might be. He didn’t want Gillian to be his psycho. Found it almost impossible to imagine she could be. But if she was? Then the odds are very good that the lady owns an orange University of Miami sweatshirt, he reminded himself. Find that, and his search was over. Trace headed for the closet in the bedroom.
“GOT A NOTE TO YOU FROM your class,” said the front-desk attendant at the Y. “One of them called it in.”
Gillian unfolded it on her way up to the locker room:
Gillian, we forgot to tell you that it’s Jennifer’s BIG FORTY tonight. She opted for champagne instead of tummy crunches, so we’re carousing at Yesterday’s. Join us, why don’t you, and bring the rest of the class. The Rat Pack.
Gillian laughed and shoved on into the dressing room. The Rat Pack were five women friends who’d signed up together for her weight class. A good time was always their first priority; shaping their figures with small free weights ran a distinct second. With those five truant, she’d have only two students tonight.
She’d changed to her exercise togs before leaving the carriage house, but she stopped by her locker to drop off her thigh-length cotton sweater. “Well, blast!”
“Blast?” inquired Bobbie, the sixth member of Gillian’s class, sitting down on the bench behind her.
“I’m missing a sweatshirt and I was sure I’d left it here.” Her favorite orange sweatshirt, which her brother, Chris, had sent her years ago, when he was attending the University of Miami. She’d looked for it this evening to wear to class and not found it. But if it wasn’t back at the carriage house, wasn’t in her car and wasn’t here in her locker, then—Michele! “One of my roommates has struck again. She puts meaning on the word ‘borrow’ that would make a burglar blush. I’m down three pairs of earrings, a baseball cap, two T-shirts and a pair of 501 Levi’s, at last count. And now my favorite sweatshirt,” Gillian slammed the locker, then checked the clock on the wall. “Well, ready to hoist some metal?”
Bobbie glanced around the room. “Where are the others?” Two swimmers chatted quietly as they toweled off, but otherwise the place was empty.
“Birthday party for Jennifer at Yesterday’s, to which we’re invited after class. And looks like Nancy is a no-show tonight. So you get my full attention, kiddo.”
Bobbie responded with a wan smile and a shake of her head. “You know what, Gillian? I almost didn’t come tonight. I’m having cramps... Would you be hurt if I weaseled out on you and sat in the sauna, instead?”
“Not at all!” She’d be delighted to call it a day herself.
LEANING OUT THE WINDOW of her car to reach the keypad, Gillian punched in the code to open Woodwind’s gates. Lara had given her the number that morning, and a good thing, since the mansion was dark. Eight-thirty and everyone had gone to bed? Lights in Lara’s suite, situated on the oceanside of the house, wouldn’t show, though, come to think of it.
Bed sounded inviting. The day had been a long one, crammed with too many impressions, too much emotion. That horrible letter. If that’s life as a celebrity, Lara can have it! She shuddered and put the letter from mind while she parked the car.
After entering her apartment, she turned to lock the door, turned back—“Oh!” She flinched against the door, one hand to her stuttering heart.
Standing at the counter in her kitchen, Trace Sutton glanced over his shoulder. “I’ll have to buy you a decent corkscrew.” He held up the simple bartender’s device he must have found in her utensil drawer, then jabbed it into the cork of a wine bottle.
Her wine, she realized, recognizing the label. Her heart was still stampeding, but fright was giving way rapidly to rage. How dared he simply walk in like this? “Wh-what d’you think you’re doing here?”
The cork popped softly. He poured the bardolino into two glasses.
“Well?” she demanded, throwing her sweater on the couch and stalking toward him. The creep had kept a key to her apartment—that much was obvious!
He lifted the glasses, began to walk toward her—and stopped, his eyes dropping to her legs.
Which were bare below her nylon gym shorts. As were her arms, since she wore a sleeveless T-shirt. She swerved toward the sweater she’d abandoned too hastily, then stopped herself. Show no fear. With the thought, a twinge of alarm skated along her nerve endings. He was very large and already he’d proven he didn’t respect normal boundaries.
“I thought your first day at Woodwind was a little... rough and you deserved a drink.” Trace handed her a glass.
“Of my own wine?” If she dashed her drink in his eyes, would that slow him down enough? The distance to her door was twelve steps at least, and then she’d have to throw the dead bolt. Remembering the speed with which he’d crossed the office that morning, she abandoned the notion as soon as it formed.
“I’ll do better next time,” he assured her.
There won’t be a next time, buddy! Was he that vain that he thought he could simply barge into a woman’s apartment and be welcome? That with one smoldering look she’d fall into bed with him? Granted, no woman could deny his appeal, but still...
And what about Lara? God, she’d forgotten Lara! Trace wasn’t just a sexy lout; he was Lara’s lout. Too angry to speak, she took a gulp of the wine. And rattled as she was, she tipped the glass too far.
A drop dribbled past her bottom lip and fell. “Damn!” On the slope of her breast, a blood-red spot stained the white cotton.
She looked up to find his eyes aimed at her heart, his pupils gone wide and black as gun bores. His eyes lifted to hers, then slowly one of his dark eyebrows rose in a question. Well?
As she imagined his lips on her breast, his hands clamped on her waist, the pressure of his mouth bending her backward, a wave of raw heat washed through her. A tingling awareness spread from the back of her shaky knees and climbed. It didn’t matter that he was a vain and faithless brute—in his mind he was kissing her breast and in her mind she was responding helplessly. She turned away—felt his eyes caressing her hips and spun back again. “Get out!”
She stalked past him to the sink. Found a dishcloth and dabbed furiously at the spot. A useless effort, of course.
He came to lean on the counter beside her, so close she could feel the heat of his big body. Stood sipping wine and watching. “Seltzer?” he suggested huskily at last. “That’s what my sisters always use.”
Sisters, seltzer and spot removal. The sheer domesticity of the images banished fear. And there were rules at play here, even if she didn’t understand them. Trace wanted her, that was clear enough, but he wouldn’t use his size to take what he wanted—he’d have done so by now.
He expects me to give of my own free will? Oh, he was unspeakably vain! She threw down the dishcloth and wheeled. “I said, get out.”
He tipped his dark head in mocking acquiescence, then said, “May I finish my wine first?”
May I. Her sense of control grew with the question, and after a moment of icy silence, she nodded. She wanted him out—meant to have him out—but she didn’t need to make an enemy. Because faithless or not, Trace was Lara’s lover. She’d seen who won the battle over Lara’s car this afternoon. Trace had the clout at Woodwind. He could persuade Lara to fire her, if he really wanted to; of that she was certain now. So I walk a tightrope here.
He took another savoring sip. She watched his strong brown throat move as he swallowed. Another sip. He had a beautiful mouth, though very masculine. She could see why a woman might want him hanging around. Why he’d expect a woman to want him. Did Lara know he was unfaithful? Or was that simply an accepted part of the celebrity life-style? Maybe Lara didn’t care. Not everyone valued fidelity as Gillian did.
“You know, you’ve been worrying me,” he said softly, rousing her from her trance.
“Oh?” Her ever-ready sense of guilt came alive. She didn’t want to worry anyone at Woodwind. She’d come here to be the fly on the wall. To silently see all, then fly away. Bluff it out, she told herself. She lifted his empty glass from his fingers and set it emphatically on the counter, then tipped her head at the door and moved purposefully toward it.
He pushed off the counter and padded alongside her with the loose-limbed grace of a sleepy tiger. “I’ve decided that someone who...” He paused and let the silence stretch.
“Who...?” she prompted evenly. He’d noticed some discrepancy on her résumé? Or maybe—Reaching the door, she flipped the dead bolt and opened the door wide. Stood waiting for him to take the hint and go.
He moved one step into the doorway, then swung back, much too close to her. His hand rose slowly.
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Peggy Nicholson
In a sumptious Newport Mansion…Gillian Mahler has a plan–take the job as soap opera star Lara Corday's personal assistant. Maybe she can endear herself to Lara first, then spring the news that Lara is her birth mother, who abandoned her as an infant twenty-eight years before.Trace Sutton has a plan, too–work undercover as a bodyguard, posing as Lara Corday's gigolo. Maybe then he can discover the identity of the faceless stalker who wants Lara dead.In Lara's sumptuous mansion high on a cliff above Newport, Rhode Island, Gillian and Trace meet–and attraction sparks right away.This certainly complicates their plans.Gillian can't possibly allow herself to fall for a man who's her long-lost mother's lover, and no way can Trace blow his cover as bodyguard–especially when some sleuthing reveals that Gillian has an excellent motive for murdering the woman he's guarding!
“S-stop!” (#ud39a67db-2c00-5a09-b976-0debba8e8f82)ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#ue506db20-c703-565a-915d-425dc076a1b4)Title Page (#u5945fa66-215a-5768-94da-09854a1aba52)CHAPTER ONE (#u604c6b27-2418-5dbe-8dbf-070ac3d91925)CHAPTER TWO (#ub0903779-b47c-5c9f-95b0-b7145c8a1c6e)CHAPTER THREE (#u916c8433-7a24-5a47-9845-8f7397e7c0dc)CHAPTER FOUR (#u5954f3c0-8778-5d11-a9b1-0823a033804f)CHAPTER FIVE (#u2443ae37-bed6-5f94-b104-0cb30608ca7e)CHAPTER SIX (#u8265c517-f21f-5198-b67b-7f3d4adb2c80)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“S-stop!”
Gillian tore her mouth away and moaned as Trace circled the delicate rim of her ear with his tongue.
“Mmm?” He rubbed his face through her fragrant hair. She could not possibly mean that.
“We’ve got to stop,” she insisted, but without conviction.
“Who says?” He kissed the tip of her nose. “You don’t want to stop. I don’t want to stop. So we’re stopping?”
‘Yes.“ She said the word softly, but with no compromise this time.
“Mind telling me why?”
She laughed incredulously. “Trace!” He could feel her shake her head. “In a word? Lara, that’s why.”
He swore silently, viciously, then tipped back his head to consult the invisible rocks above. let me explain! Except that he couldn’t He couldn’t break his cover while there was one chance in a million that Gillian was untrustworthy.
And he wouldn’t have done it even if he was entirety sure of her. Being undercover meant you lived the part night and day till you were done. People died when you broke that rule.
Which meant he could come to Gillian only as Trace Sutton, faithless gigolo, not Trace Sutton, heart-free bodyguard....
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For ten years Peggy Nicholson lived aboard a boat moored in Newport harbor. Nowadays, during southeast storms, she can hear the rumble of waves breaking against the Cliff Walk from her office window. She often runs the cliffs at dawn.
Her Bodyguard
Peggy Nicholson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
SHE TRADED YOU FOR A CAR. A shiny red Mustang—that’s all you ever meant to that little lady. Now, why would you want a mother like that?
“I don’t,” Gillian said to the door she stood facing. One of two double doors, twelve feet tall, carved from some golden wood varnished to gleaming perfection. They barred an entrance almost wide enough to admit a Mustang car, shiny red or otherwise. She clenched her hand to knock, but her arm stayed straight at her side. I don’t want her, she’d told the lawyer—a horrible little man—nearly two years ago. I want the facts. My facts.
Like the name of her father. Whether she had any brothers or sisters or grandparents. Whether she might be deathly allergic to anything else besides bee stings. Facts that it seemed, some days, the whole world was conspiring to hide from her.
The people who’d raised and loved her, the doctor who’d delivered her, the lawyer who’d arranged her adoption, the woman who’d borne her almost twenty-eight years ago—every one of them had lied or twisted or forgotten or lost or hidden her facts. Or simply refused to give them.
Her facts lay behind this door and she’d come to steal them, since asking politely had gotten her nowhere.
Had gotten her much worse than nowhere. Her letter of shy and hopeful inquiry last year had earned her a stinging, contemptuous response: “If I didn’t want you when you were born why would I want you now, Sarah, if that’s who you really are? So go get a life! And stay the hell out of mine!”
And so I will, Mother. Just as soon as I have my facts. Gillian Sarah Scott Mahler raised her fist, held her breath and knocked, then noticed the doorbell and jabbed that, too.
But of course a woman who owned a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, a millionaire by marriage and a queen of television soap opera in her own right, didn’t open her own front door. How idiotic to have expected it. Gillian blinked at the frowning older woman who swung back the door. “I...” She swallowed and tried again. “I have a ten o’clock appointment with Mrs. Corday. About the job. I’m Gillian Mahler.”
“And just how did you get in here? Nobody buzzed the front gates,” declared the woman.
Must be a member of the household rather than a maid, Gillian guessed, if she felt free to quiz visitors. She might even be a relative, an aunt or cousin, though Gillian could see nothing of herself in the dour and freckled face, the short square body, of her inquisitor. “I walked in,” she said as the woman tapped one foot impatiently. “Someone was driving out as I arrived, and waved me through.”
“Those kids!” The woman glared over Gillian’s shoulder toward the massive iron gates at the end of the driveway, although the couple, a blond young man and woman in a Range Rover, were long gone.
“I really do have an appointment,” Gillian insisted. She didn’t care if she’d broken some unwritten rule of the household. No one was turning her back now, not when she was this close.
“Well, come on, then.” Leaving her to shut the door herself, the woman marched away.
Gillian hurried after her, dimly aware of high, high ceilings, cool marble that clacked underfoot, a grand staircase that swept up to the floors above. Her mother’s house. Assuming Lara Corday—Lara Leigh to her adoring fans—was really her mother. And she is. Same birth date. Same high-school photo. Of course she is.
So why wouldn’t she acknowledge her own daughter?
Traded you for a car and never looked back, the lawyer assured her for the thousandth time in memory. That’s all I can tell you.
If that trade had set a girl named Lara Lee Bailey on the road from a ramshackle cabin in the hardscrabble mountains of West Virginia to this palace, maybe it had been the smartest deal a girl of fifteen had ever made. But why—
“Wait here and I’ll tell her you’ve come.” Gillian’s guide opened a paneled door, waved her inside and closed it firmly behind her.
“Whew!” Gillian leaned back against the door and pressed one hand to her thundering heart.
“Damn it all!” A golf ball rolled across the carpet before her. It bypassed a crystal vase laid on its side and disappeared under a sofa. “So much for my birdie!”
A man stood in front of the fireplace, glaring after his errant putt. He lowered his golf club and leaned on it, then turned his attention to her. “And who the devil are you to mess up a man’s game?”
“I’m G-Gillian. Gillian Mahler.” And who are you? Not Lara Corday’s husband, the famous TV writer and producer. Richard Corday had died in his sleep two years ago. And Corday had been in his late sixties, not mid-thirties like this man.
So friend of the family then, or even a relative—Lara’s relative and therefore hers? It was conceivable. Gillian was tall for a woman, yet he was taller. Six-one or -two easily. Hair darker than her own light brown. His eyes were too deepset to see the color from where she stood. Still, she felt an odd shock of... something. Recognition on some instinctive level?
Or maybe it was just the mood of him as he glared at her from under his black level eyebrows that made the impact, and her sense of kinship was entirely false. Everyone was a potential relative once you learned you were adopted. You found yourself staring at faces as you walked down the street.
He crossed one running shoe over the other and slouched more comfortably against his putting iron. “You sky-dive, Gillian Mahler? Or maybe you made your approach by sea.” He tipped his head toward the six pairs of French doors that formed the entire south wall.
Beyond them stretched the lawn, then the back side of the estate’s unbreachable granite wall, and then the cliffs, with Newport’s famous Cliff Walk meandering high above the blue waters. Gillian had strolled that path often enough these past four months, staring up at this mansion. And now she stood inside it, about to meet her mother. At last.
“You scuba?” the golfer prodded mildly. “Left your wet suit and fins out on the terrace?”
Why was everyone so intent on learning how she’d gotten in? “Helicopter, actually.” She edged away from him toward the windows. I don’t want to talk to you, whoever you are. I came to meet my mother.
“Funny, I didn’t hear it. Didn’t even hear the buzzer for the front gates.” He straightened and ambled across the room to the sofa, then stooped with ease to peer beneath it. “You climbed over?” he hazarded idly, and swept his well-muscled arm under it for his ball. “Grappling hooks and all that?”
The ball he sought had rolled out in front of the sofa. Gillian picked it up and toyed with the notion of stuffing it into his mouth. Would you please, please shut up? Her whole life was about to change. Knowingly and unknowingly, she’d been coming to this encounter for almost twenty-eight years, and now, just when she needed to savor the moment, prepare for it, rehearse the role she meant to play and the first cautious words of her script, this big babbling...jock wouldn’t leave her in peace. “I walked in the gates when a couple drove out, all right? They saw me. It isn’t as if I snuck in.”
They’d barely seen her. They’d been too busy laughing at some private joke to spare her more than a glance, their smiles fading for a moment, their cool eyes passing through her. The boy had flipped her a careless wave, then turned onto the avenue and roared away. Those two hadn’t been concerned about any intruders.
“Toby and Joya,” the man murmured, his trim rump in the air as he groped beneath the sofa.
“We didn’t introduce ourselves.” Gillian knelt and thrust the ball under the sofa, toward his sweeping fingertips. “Here.”
“Where?” His hand closed instead on her wrist—and tightened when she tried to withdraw.
She was suddenly angry out of all proportion to the act, whether he was teasing or only hopelessly dim. Their hands connecting in the dark, touch their only link—her skin shivered with the unexpected, unwelcome intimacy. “In my hand. Where do you think?”
He slid warm, surprisingly hard fingers down her wrist to trace the ball she clutched. “Oh.” Then he lifted it delicately from her palm. “Thanks.”
She sat upright, started to wipe her hand on her skirt, then chose a throw cushion, instead. Its silky chintz fabric didn’t wipe his touch away but seemed to drive it into her bones. She bounced to her feet and retreated to the wall of French doors, scowling through the glass at the lawn beyond. Such a velvety expanse of green, a symbol of wealth more potent than a Rolls or diamonds. Why didn’t he take his toys and go golf out there?
“I suppose you’re here about the job,” he said behind her. “We’ve been up to our chins in would-be companions all week. Short ones, tall ones, nice ones, crabby ones.”
If he’d been the welcoming committee, she didn’t doubt the crabbiness! Gillian swallowed and gripped her elbows. For some reason she hadn’t thought there’d be many applicants for the job. Somehow she’d seen it as...fated. Earmarked for her and her alone. But if there’d been that many applicants... And her qualifications—she was really reaching to think they’d do, but somehow she’d thought...
Wished. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, her aunt Susan—her adoptive aunt, Gillian corrected herself—had always said. She’d been foolishly wishing...
“Funny,” the pest said behind her. “You don’t seem very companionable.”
Could he possibly be coming onto her? “Companion to a woman was the job description, I believe,” she said coldly, without turning.
“Companion/personal assistant to a businesswoman” was the actual wording of the ad in the Newport Daily News. Responses to be directed to Mrs. Lara Corday, Woodwind, Bellevue Avenue, Newport. There had been no mention of the celebrity who lived at that address, who presumably required the assistant. That Mrs. Lara Corday was actually Lara Leigh, star of the long-running soap opera Searching for Sarah, was one of Newport’s best kept secrets. The locals might know it, but they were used to bumping into movie stars at morning coffee, presidents on the harbor launch, princes at the post office. To stare or to show yourself impressed was to mark yourself an out-of-town yokel, a tourist. And the locals didn’t tell secrets to tourists.
“Getting a bit stuffy in here, isn’t it?” A big hand slipped past Gillian’s ribs, reaching for the door’s brass handle. His tanned forearm rubbed along her waist. She gasped and shied to her right. And stumbled over her heels.
“Hey, easy!” His other arm hooked around her waist to steady her, then draw her upright again. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you like that. You could have jumped right through the glass.” His arm tightened around her for an unbelievable, outrageous moment, pulling her backward. Her hips bumped his crotch.
“I’m fine!” she snapped, jamming one elbow into his ribs. “Perfectly—He let her go instantly and she whirled around. ”F-fine.”
Or not. He hadn’t withdrawn one inch. Standing toe to toe with him, she was trapped by the door at her back. A pair of broad male shoulders filled her entire horizon. He wore his white golf shirt unbuttoned, showing her a curl of dark hair at the V. She tipped back her head and found him smiling.
“Sorry,” he said again, too softly. “I didn’t mean to...”
Right. She sidestepped along the wall, careful to give him no excuse to “help” her again. He opened the first pair of doors, then the next, heading her way. She shied off to the center of the room and scowled at his back. Could that have been an accident?
“You don’t need to be so nervous,” he said, swinging open a third pair. The whisper of distant surf filled the room. “It’s just a job like any other.”
“I’m not—” She stopped and shrugged. Did it show that much? Being on edge, maybe she had misread his actions.
Dark against the brightness silhouetting him, he turned back to study her. “I suppose you’re a local girl, a Vod-islander.”
That mockery of the upstate accent marked him as hailing from other parts, she thought absently. “No.” His expectant silence at her one-word response dragged more words from her. “I’ve been here since the spring.” She’d meant to stay only a day or two, a week at most. Still wounded by Lara’s letter of rejection, she’d intended only to catch a glimpse of her mother, see her in the flesh once, then go.
Oh, she’d seen Lara Leigh a hundred times or more by then watching reruns of Searching for Sarah. But she’d felt no sense of reality, no connection. That beautiful, mobile, weeping or laughing face on the TV screen hardly seemed a real person, much less a person connected to her as no other.
“Living here in Newport?” he prodded.
“Yes.” Her first week, she’d stayed at a bed-and-breakfast a quarter mile down the Cliff Walk. Had haunted that stunning path morning and night, sure somehow that if Lara was any relation to her, then this was where they would meet. Her mother would love the cliffs, too. Living so near, she’d be bound to stroll there, drawn by the cry of the gulls, the cool breeze off the glittering ocean, the rumble of the waves grinding the rocks below.
And her certainty had proved right—proof more clinching than any DNA test, to Gillian’s mind, that they were of one blood. Walking the cliffs on a misty dawn, her third in Newport, she’d looked eagerly toward Woodwind, its tall chimneys slowly taking shape through the fog. Looked—and had seen a slim figure step out through a wooden door hidden among the wild rugosa rosebushes that hedged the cliff side of the high estate walls.
The figure set off at a long-legged, floating run and vanished around a bend in the path. Gillian caught her breath and jogged after. Wait, Lara! Wait for me!
If the runner was her mother. Gillian rounded the bend and glimpsed silvery hair the same shade as Lara Leigh’s. Then more rosebushes intervened, black against the pearly mist.
But no hurry, she told herself. She was fifteen years younger and a runner herself. She could overtake Lara whenever she chose. Cliff Walk edged the ragged peninsula jutting out into Rhode Island Sound for another two miles or so. She had plenty of time.
Mist dewed her face, beaded in her lashes, as she ran. A loon called its weird laughing cry from the gray waters below. Gillian came to a set of mossy stone steps and bounded up them, then down another set, her ears straining for footsteps ahead, hearing in- stead the rip of a wave combing down the black pebbles of the shingle beach fringing the base of the cliffs, some seventy feet below. The path skirted the very rim of the drop-off, and here someone had built a waist-high chain-link fence to keep unwary sightseers from stepping out into echoing space. Wild white daisies softened the craggy soil, trailing downward from rock to rock. Elephant-high clumps of rugosas pressed in from both sides of the Walk now. Blossoms of magenta and white brushed her shoulders as she ran. Through gaps in the bushes Gillian snatched glimpses of the black silhouette of a lobster boat idling in toward a line of pots laid along the cliffs. On a clear day you could see twenty miles out to the islands, but not this morning, when visibility was measured in yards.
And somewhere ahead...Gillian stepped up her pace. She passed a trail that led up between the mansions on her right toward the avenue, but somehow she knew Lara wouldn’t stray from this path. A woman who lived most of her life in the public eye would surely treasure this gorgeous solitude.
And what do I do when I catch her? Glance sideways? Say something inanely pleasant, as runners often do when they pass each other—Nice day, huh? Or should she run a little farther, then wheel and confront her? Mother, it’s me, she could say, Sarah. But she never would dare. Not after that savaging letter. Gillian pulled up the hood of the orange sweatshirt she wore till it covered her hair. Tightened the string at her throat to keep the hood in place. There was no reason to think that Lara might recognize her, but still...
Mind focused on the bow she was tying and on the coming encounter, she rounded another bend and shied violently sideways, grazing the bushes, thorns plucking at her sleeve. For all her fascination with vistas, she had a healthy fear of heights, and this was a spot she never liked. Just as the path passed a wide gap in the bushes, it dipped, then tilted subtly toward the cliff edge. Here, water ran off from the hillside above, carving a notch in the cliff. Someday the path would be entirely undermined; the hillside would cave in and fall. Cliff Walk, Gillian had learned, had been crumbling for time out of mind, the sea taking the land inch by inch, the soft slate cliffs eroding year by year. The path was perfectly safe, but still, you could feel the abyss calling. Three wincing steps and she was by the gap, looking ahead again.
Lara? The path sloped downward; the highest cliffs were behind them now. The surf sounded louder and the fog was thicker, as if it had chosen this low spot to crawl onto the land. Gillian looked down, picking a route around a puddle in the path, looked up—and Lara burst out of the mist. Retracing her steps, homeward bound already.
No time to think at all. As their strides carried them closer, their eyes met and locked. Hers were a gray so light as to seem silver, fringed by lashes as dark as Gillian’s own. Lara’s lips parted, Gillian opened her mouth to speak, but the only word that sprang to mind was Why? Oh, why?
Gillian slowed, her steps faltering, her mind stumbling. That’s her! Near enough to touch! Near enough to question—if only she dared.
She didn’t. Not this time, anyway. So instead she ran on, reliving the moment, trying to hold that startled, questioning face in her memory. Seeking from it some likeness to her own.
Finding none—
CHAPTER TWO
A HAND WAVED BEFORE HER face, then dropped as she focused on it. “Do this often, do you?” inquired the man. His lopsided smile was whimsical; his eyes missed nothing.
They were hazel, she noticed for the first time. “Do what?” She’d entirely forgotten he was in the room! For only a minute or so? It might as easily have been an hour.
“Vanish down a rabbit hole. Not a very nice one, by the look of it.”
“I...was trying to remember if I’d turned off the stove.”
He didn’t buy it, but he cocked his head obediently, then one eyebrow. “Don’t hear fire engines.”
Newport wasn’t large. Whenever the trucks turned out, the whole town heard the racket. “I believe I did turn it off after all.”
“Ah.” He’d jammed his hands into the pockets of his chinos. Eyes fixed on her face, he strolled around her. She suppressed an urge to spin warily with him, and let him instead inspect her profile, then her backside. Clenching her teeth, she tipped back her head to study the chandelier above. She’d thought meeting her mother would be the ordeal of the day. Now she looked to Lara for rescue. Somebody deliver me from this... this... whatever he was.
Bad news, that’s what he was. Elegantly packaged bad news, from his sexily too-long, razor-cut dark hair, to his runner’s shoes, which probably cost more than her monthly rent. With all stops in between just as scenic. Not handsome exactly, but something more potent, topped off with a whiff of... unpredictability. Not a trait she cared for in someone who was shaping up to be an opponent.
“You know she’s been ill,” he said idly from somewhere behind her right ear.
Ill? That was hardly the word Gillian would have used to describe a fall off the Cliff Walk.
Shattered? her mind supplied, and she shivered suddenly. It had been two days after their encounter before she’d heard. She’d picked up a day-old Daily News in the Waves, the town’s favorite coffeehouse, and sucked in her breath at the headline: Woman Survives Fall From Cliff Walk! Somehow she’d known what had happened even before she’d read about it. “I heard she had...an accident,” she murmured, picturing for the hundredth time the stumble—a shoelace perhaps coming undone, or Lara catching the tip of a toe. Then the horrified nosedive, the frantic snatch at the brush on the rim, a flailing cartwheel into space, the rocks rushing upward, the ice-cold sea...
The article said the woman had been lucky, unlike others over the years. She’d fallen at half tide, when a few feet of water covered the jagged beach. Luckier still, a lobsterman tending his pots had seen her from his boat, and rowed frantically over in time to save her from drowning.
The woman had a fractured skull, the article went on to note, and broken bones. She’d been rushed to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, where the most critical cases were sent. Her name was being withheld pending notification of relatives.
Like me? Nobody told me!
Checking the date of the paper and counting backward, Gillian deduced the fall had occurred the morning of her encounter with Lara, probably within minutes after they’d passed each other. “Name withheld” was a dead giveaway. It took money and power to keep a person’s name out of the papers, especially when that person was a celebrity.
The newspaper had been circumspect, but still the rumors had made the rounds. Gillian had heard them from the women in her aerobics classes at the YMCA, heard them murmured over cups of coffee at the Waves. It was Lara Corday—you know, that Lara—who’d fallen—
She glanced up as a humming came from somewhere overhead. The crystal pendants on the chandelier trembled and a shard of rainbow danced across the ceiling.
“The elevator,” the man said at her elbow.
At last! Gillian swallowed and glanced desperately around the room. Her mind had gone utterly blank; all her endlessly rehearsed words had flown through the open doors and out to sea. There was a carriage clock on the mantel, she noticed, showing the time as ten-thirty. Half an hour, she kept me waiting.
But why should that surprise her? A woman who’d discarded her newborn baby like a worn-out shoe, who’d apparently made her climb to the top her highest priority—why should a woman like that worry that she kept others waiting? Whose time but her own would she value?
The door opened behind her and Gillian turned, dimly aware of the man beside her turning, as well.
“Darling,” he said warmly, and went to meet the woman framed in the doorway.
So that was his place in this household, Gillian realized at last with an odd jolt of dismay. The boyfriend. A virile courtier to replace the aging husband Lara had outlived. It explained his supreme confidence, his proprietary air. He put a hand to Lara’s elbow and led her into the room.
She barely spared him a glance. Her silvery eyes locked on Gillian, and it was the Cliff Walk encounter all over again. An awareness like a path of silver light, a moonbeam tunnel down which they both drifted, until only a few final feet divided them. “Do I—” Lara Corday smiled and shook her head. “I don’t know you, do I? My memory these days...” She gave a tiny, rueful shrug.
“Maybe you do,” suggested the man at her side. He’d advanced with her, one hand resting at the small of her back. “Newport’s a small town. You bump into everybody once a week or so.” His voice was tender, almost coaxing. His eyes flicked to Gillian and she could feel them bore into her.
Let him stare. It was Lara’s gaze that held her. “I don’t think so,” she answered cautiously. Oh, do you know me? But how could she? One of the few facts Gillian had pried from the lawyer was that Laura Lee Bailey had signed the relinquishment papers two days after Gillian’s birth. You saw me once or twice, maybe—that was it.
“Oh, well.” Lara smiled, dismissing the notion. “I know your name, of course, from your application, Gillian. I assume you and Trace have introduced yourselves?”
“More or less,” he said dryly. “Trace Sutton.” He clicked the heels of his running shoes and gave her a mock-formal nod.
A charmer when he wanted to be. Gillian didn’t trust charm.
Lara touched her elbow. “Come sit down and tell me all about yourself.”
I’m taller than she, Gillian realized for the first time, as they. moved toward the two couches that formed an L facing the French doors. By five inches or more. It was a measure of Lara’s presence that she hadn’t noticed till now. I’m too tall, with different hair. My eyes are light brown and hers are gray. Why, we’re nothing alike! What if she’d gotten it wrong somehow? A birth date and a photo—what did they prove? She’d wanted more than paper proof. She’d wanted resemblance, a physical explanation of who and what she was manifest in an earlobe, the shape of a chin, something... Instead all she had was this elusive sense of... connection.
“You said on your résumé that you’re working right now at the YMCA, teaching fitness,” Lara said gently, an actress nudging a forgetful understudy back toward her lines.
“Ah. Yes. I’ve been there since May.” She’d applied for the job the same day she learned of Lara’s accident. Somehow the accident-or perhaps their encounter on the cliffs—had changed her plans. She’d meant to stay in Newport no more than a week. After the accident she could not leave. Not till she learned that Lara was out of danger, she’d told herself.
But one month had slid into the next, and here it was September. “I taught aerobics, tai chi, weight-shaping classes while I worked my way through college. It was a good way to earn money and stay fit.” She’d thought it best to stick to the truth wherever possible. “So when I saw the opening here...” She let her words trail away. I grabbed it. A foothold in your town.
“But I’ve also worked as a secretary, through a temp agency,” she hastened to add, not mentioning she’d been less than a rousing success in the clerical world. What else to say? She should be selling herself, not simply staring. Lara had cut her hair since she saw her last, Gillian realized suddenly—or no, perhaps they’d shaved her head in the hospital. It was boy-short, making her lovely eyes seem enormous. Purple shadows smudged the delicate skin beneath. Her gaze also seemed shadowed, with pain or worry.
“That’s excellent,” Lara said. “I’m looking for someone to deal with my mail and other paperwork, but if you’re athletic, as well—I’m so out of shape—we could train together. An exercise buddy would get me off my duff, get me moving. Can you lay on the guilt? I’m hopelessly lazy!”
“Oh, I can guilt-trip with the best of them.” Gillian laughed. “I learned from an expert—my mom.” Her laughter jammed in her throat, turned to a fit of coughing that brought the tears to her eyes. Mom, how could I?
But it was true. Her adoptive mother, Eleanor Scott—her Real Mother any way you counted—had wielded that parental weapon with surgical deftness. Gillian couldn’t recall a single spanking in all her childhood years. A few well-chosen words of reproach, or one look of loving despair, was all it had taken to make her toe the line. She glanced up to find her own sorrow reflected in Lara’s eyes.
“You love your mother,” she said softly.
“Yes.” Gillian rubbed her lashes. “She died two years ago.” Why am I telling you that? Perhaps because that had started it all. After the funeral they’d found the key to the safe-deposit box. And the letter waiting there for Gillian, which had turned the first twenty-six years of her life into a lie. She wasn’t—never had been—who she thought. So who was she?
Only Lara knew, and in one savage letter she’d closed off all possibility of Gillian’s ever asking.
“I’m sorry,” Lara said. “I understand what it’s like to...miss somebody.”
She was nice! Gillian had expected anything but niceness. How could this woman have written that soul-crunching letter?
She’s an actress, she reminded herself. And a fine one, if winning an Emmy signified anything. Give her a role and presumably she could make it live. But still—
“You went to college. Where?” Trace Sutton cut in briskly. As if he’d heard enough emotional female meandering and it was time for some facts.
“University of Texas at Austin,” she answered in kind. “A double major—art and education.”
“So you should be teaching art in a public school,” he challenged. “Why earn a poor living doing jumping jacks at the Y?”
She could really dislike this man! “I...don’t have the temperament for teaching.” Not at the high-school level anyway, where she’d tried for three years, then resigned. She had no taste for the profession’s disciplinary side, and the paperwork had been a nightmare. “I hope to illustrate children’s books someday.” The truth again, though she’d turned the clock back. She already had three children’s books to her credit, was contracted to finish a fourth by Christmas. That didn’t pay her whole way, but supplemented by the exercise classes, she made do. “For now...” She shrugged. “I’m enjoying traveling around, seeing new parts of the country.”
“So you wouldn’t plan to keep this job long,” Sutton suggested gently. Drifter, his eyes jeered.
He really, really didn’t want Lara to hire her. Why? “On the contrary.” She gave him a look of limpid sincerity. “I’ve fallen in love with Newport. If I could find an interesting job that allowed me to stay here...”
“Then I doubt this position would suit you. Lara lives in New York whenever she’s acting.”
“But that won’t be for months, probably not this year at all,” Lara interjected. “They’ve written me out of this season’s scripts. My doctor doesn’t think I’m quite ready to—” Her shrug was apologetic, as if she’d willfully chosen her horrific fall in a fit of selfishness. Then she brightened. “Still, all this fan mail keeps pouring in, piling up in corners, and I really need to get back in shape, so when do you think you could start, Gillian?”
Trace Sutton coughed and bumped Lara’s shoulder.
She bit her lip. “If I decide to hire you,” she added like a good child reciting a lesson. A tinge of pink brightened her pale cheeks.
“I could start right away,” Gillian said promptly, refusing to even glance at the overbearing brute. “That is, if you don’t mind my juggling this job around my aerobics classes for a few weeks till the Y can find a replacement. I think I could swap some of my day classes with a woman who teaches nights and—”
“That sounds perfectly satisfactory.” Lara laid a slim hand on Trace’s arm as he stirred again. “Gillian, is there a phone number on your résumé I can reach you at? Good,” she continued decisively when Gillian nodded. “Then may I call you later today with my decision? I’m afraid it’s time for my physical therapy session at the hospital.”
“Of course.” But Gillian knew the verdict already. A lover’s word carried all the weight in the world. She searched her mind for something to prolong the interview, but short of crying I’m your daughter! You really ought to give me a chance this time! she could think of nothing to do.
Except swear to herself she would never ever forgive Trace Sutton for wrecking her best, probably her only, chance to learn the truth about her origins. Inwardly raging, she maintained a stony silence as he escorted her not only out of the house but all the way down the long, curving driveway to the front gates of the estate. What did he think—she might hide in the bushes, then pop out at Lara’s car when it passed?
“I figured you’d appreciate a boost over,” he said gravely as they arrived at the gates, an eighteen-foot barricade of ornately curlicued wrought iron topped off with vicious spikes.
He could joke while he snatched a job away from her? Maybe he didn’t realize what this meant to her, but still, for all Sutton knew she might desperately need employment. Terminally selfish, that’s what he was! All she could conclude was that he wanted Lara to himself. No doubt he’d make sure she hired some grim-faced old bag who typed a hundred and fifty words a minute.
“Or if you don’t want to climb,” Sutton continued when she refused to smile, “you walk between this electric eye and that one.” He nodded at two knee-high metal posts implanted at intervals along the driveway. “They decide you must be a car heading out and-voilà.” The gates swung majestically open. “Goodbye, Gillian,” he added gently. “And...don’t get your hopes up.”
“I—” She spun and stalked off, tears of rage gathering in her eyes. So close, so close! All but for that selfish... brute.
CHAPTER THREE
HANDS JAMMED IN HIS pockets, a reluctant smile quirking his lips, Trace Sutton watched her go.
Most people tightened up with rage. Gillian swung off on those long, long legs like a woman on a mission—a tiger to shoot or a city to sack. As if she’d just heard about a summer sale on silver platters. She needs one for my head, he acknowledged ruefully.
He leaned against the bars of the gates to keep her in sight as long as possible and crossed his arms. After a moment he noticed he was rubbing his right forearm. It still tingled where he’d snugged it around her waist. With a grimace, he shoved his hands back into his pockets.
She hadn’t been toting; he was reasonably certain of that. A weapon tucked in her waistband had been the logical assumption since she’d worn a loose, gauzy overblouse that hid the top of her skirt. But his lightning frisk had found no gun, no knife—only vibrant, willowy slenderness, a feminine shape that fit his arms as though molded to his personal specifications.
Given her skirt, there was only one other place Gillian might be packing. He’d pictured himself smoothing his hands up the inside of her long, honey-colored thighs—strictly searching for a shiv or a gun taped in place, of course. But try as he might, he hadn’t come up with an excuse for doing it that the lady would buy.
Except that I’m an oaf and she thinks that already.
Far down the street, he noticed, she reached a corner and turned left. Which checked out. That was the most logical route back to the address she’d given on her résumé.
He’d thought it was too damned convenient to Woodwind when he’d first noted her street. But Newport had a layout unlike most cities, where the rich lived on one side of town and the poor on the other. Situated on a long, meandering ridge that encircled a harbor, Newport divided its social classes not by horizontal miles but vertically. The “summer cottages” built at the height of the Gilded Age graced the top of the ridge, while the bungalows and triple deckers that had once housed the Irish maids, the gardeners and cooks and stable hands who had serviced those mansions occupied the lower slopes.
So in itself the proximity of Gillian Mahler’s place to Woodwind was no grounds for suspicion. Still... “Something doesn’t fit,” he murmured aloud. She’d looked like a winner to him, and that didn’t jibe with the profile.
But looks and manner aside, there was the fact that she’d drifted here from afar. And she lacked a steady, full-time job.
Which describes just about every kid in the city, he reminded himself. Newport had a well-earned reputation as a good-time town. The young swarmed here from all over the country, even from abroad, to work the summer jobs at the hotels, restaurants and bars. After hours they partied the night away, then spent their mornings drowsily perfecting their tans at the beach, before it was back to work again.
So explain away Gillian’s rootlessness and still he had that look she’d given him when he’d stopped Lara from hiring her. If looks could kill. And rage was definitely part of the profile.
Maybe she just needed the job. He squared his shoulders, shrugging off that twinge of guilt. He had one goal here and one goal alone, and nothing would deflect him from it.
So, put her on the shortlist?
His list was damned short. Twenty-seven applicants so far and he had only three candidates, losers all, but not one he’d bet his money on.
So, Gillian? Profiling was hardly an exact science. And those emotions he’d sensed once Lara had joined them... They’d raised the short hairs on the back of his neck.
Powerful, inappropriate emotions were definitely part of the profile—though oddly, he couldn’t quite swear which woman had been transmitting.
Or both? Did I miss something? Or add something that wasn’t there? Usually he trusted his instincts in these matters. This time, something seemed to be jamming the signals.
An image of long graceful legs, of smoldering lioness eyes, drifted across his mind. Trace grimaced. He didn’t like to think of sexual attraction crossing his wires, but he’d seen it happen to so many men in his business he’d be a fool to consider himself invulnerable.
And a greater fool to let it interfere with his job.
Well, the solution to that problem was easy. Keep her at a distance.
But put her on the shortlist, he decided also, and headed up the driveway. Maybe even the top of his shortlist.
LARA HAD GONE UPSTAIRS, Trace found when he returned to the mansion. He took the steps two at a time—she really did have a physiotherapy appointment within the hour. He entered her unlocked bedroom without knocking, then paused. “Lara?”
His pulse jumped a notch when she didn’t answer. His eyes swept the big sunny suite, half bedroom, half sitting room, then the balcony beyond, with its magnificent view of the sea. Nothing out of order. Nothing smashed or overturned. Lucy, the downstairs maid, had told him Lara was up here, but maybe she’d—
He sensed a presence and turned to find her standing in the doorway to her dressing room. Silent and unsmiling, she gazed at him for a moment, then withdrew.
So...he had offended her. She’d been so docile and subdued since her fall, he’d grown used to taking the lead. Surprised when she’d gone her own way during the interview this morning, maybe he’d brought her back into line a little too smartly.
“We need to leave in ten minutes,” he said, coming to stand in her dressing-room doorway, wondering whether to apologize or let it ride. The little room, lined with mirrors and louvered doors that hid her wardrobe of stunning simplicity, was empty. Lara had retreated all the way into her bathroom, a room that by unspoken agreement was off bounds to him. But the door was open and today wasn’t just any day, since they so rarely disagreed.
“Lara?” He stopped in the doorway to her bathroom. She stood brushing her hair before her mirror, a gesture that would have expressed her irritation beautifully four months ago, when those silvery locks had been a foot longer. In her imagination, they probably swirled around her shoulders still.
In reality, short as her hair was now, it stood up in silky tufts, then fell softly as the brush passed. She looked like an outraged downy fledgling. He had to work not to smile. “We’d better go.”
“I wanted that one, Trace,” she said with fierce determination, staring at herself in the beveled glass.
“You know it’s not in the plan.” He desperately needed a second person to spell him. Backup hadn’t been a problem those first two months after her fall, while she’d stayed in the nursing home. He’d brought in three capable private-duty nurses and alerted them to the danger. Whenever he’d left her bedside, he’d known she was in good hands and he could rest easy.
But these past two months back at Woodwind... There was too much ground here. Too many people for one man to cover. Even for a low-profile assignment, this was ridiculous, as he’d tried to tell her from the start.
A typical shift in his business was twelve hours. He was doing twenty-four, day after day after day. His concern wasn’t exhaustion so much as growing stale. No one could live at the pinnacle of alertness without stand-down time.
“So let’s change the plan,” Lara muttered.
Trace breathed in, held for a count of three, breathed out. A centering exercise in karate: achieve serenity first, then take action. “What was wrong with number seven?” he asked finally. “Liz Galloway?”
Galloway wasn’t a member of his own security firm, Brickhouse, Inc., but she’d come with the highest recommendations. To maintain her cover, she’d applied for the job in the same way as all the genuine applicants.
The brush paused midstroke. “She...intimidated me.”
Trace snorted. “Don’t be silly.” Lara was one of the bravest people he’d ever met, man or woman. The pain she’d endured without whimpering, those first few weeks after her fall... He remembered looking down at those big haunted eyes set in that swath of bandages and wishing she would cry out, complain, weep—anything but lie there bleakly accepting, as if pain were only her due.
“I’m not! I felt as if she was measuring my neck for a collar and leash. As if she’d expect me to heel every time we went out for a walk. Well, no, thank you. It’s bad enough having you—” Lara stopped, carefully set the brush aside. Reached for a bottle of lotion and fidgeted with the cap.
“Having me...?” he prompted mildly, though he knew what she’d say. It was the perennial problem between bodyguards and their clients, almost always the reason a bodyguard’s contract was terminated prematurely. Along with protection came loss of freedom. Spontaneity. Privacy. Once the client’s original fear diminished, resentment inevitably followed.
“Having you living on top of me,” Lara mumbled without meeting his eyes. “If I was stuck with Liz, as well, I think I’d go...” She shrugged. “Nuts.”
“I’m sorry. I try to not cramp your style.” Yet the requirements of the detail made it all but impossible. He was here under cover, and only one role allowed him to plausibly stay by her side day and night.
“Oh, Trace, I didn’t mean it that way! You’ve been—” She turned and smiled up at him. “I’m very lucky to have you—I can’t believe how lucky. But if I can’t have my privacy, at least I want to be...comfortable with the people around me. And besides,” she hurried on as he opened his mouth to argue, “we agreed that whoever was hired, she’d have to really function as my personal assistant. Liz Galloway just didn’t have the—the warmth or the tact the job requires. Some of those fan letters are so silly, the people who write them so—so desperately needy... The job takes somebody with sensitivity. A sense of humor.”
“Ouch, poor Liz!” But he could see what Lara meant. The ex-policewoman wouldn’t score high on the warm-and-fuzzy scale. “All right, then. I’ll see if I can find somebody else.” Inwardly he groaned. Female BGs were rare, and therefore in demand, and of the few available not just anyone would do. He’d hire only the best for Lara. And for himself. A partner he couldn’t trust was less than useless, endangered everyone. ,
Laura shook her head. “Don’t bother, Trace. I want her. Gillian.”
“Out of twenty-seven women you’ve interviewed, why her?” The one who worried him most.
Laura shrugged. “I don’t know. She...” She shrugged again. “I liked her.”
“Okay, well, let me tell you why not. For starters, Mahler’s not a bodyguard.” And that was only for starters.
Lara tipped her head in a tiny gesture that meant, “So what?” She reached for his wrist and turned it, making a comic face at the time on his watch, then nudged him ahead of her out the door—as if he were the one who’d been delaying them. “Does it ever occur to you,” she said lightly, following him into the bedroom, “that four months have passed since anyone tried to...hurt me?”
“I haven’t exactly given anyone a chance,” he reminded her. And if she hadn’t snuck out onto Cliff Walk without him that morning in May, no one would have laid a hand on her then. “But aren’t you forgetting your pen pal?” She’d received two letters since her fall, five before, for a total of seven.
Those disturbing letters, with their effusive admiration, their seething frustration, ominously mounting expectations, coy allusions to death and violence, had been sent by a fan who signed herself Sarah XXX, and had persuaded Lara to consult him in the first place.
Lara looked stubborn. “I’m not so sure they’re connected to...Cliff Walk.”
This was an old, old argument between them. “I’m not sure they’re not. And even if we do have two separate problems—two crazies—that only strengthens my point. You need another bodyguard, not a ditzy aerobics instructor.”
“If I’m to stay cooped up indefinitely at Woodwind, I’m more in danger of losing my girlish figure than my life! Gillian would be a big help there.”
“Any competent BG can train with you, if that’s what you—”
“I don’t want a drill sergeant, Trace. I want a—” She paused, tears gathering suddenly in her wonderful eyes, then blew out a big gusty breath and gave him a wavering smile. “I want a friend, okay? All my real friends are back on the set in New York, you know. Nowadays I only have you, and you’re useless for the girl stuff.”
“Thanks, I think.” He ushered her to the door of the suite, stepped out first and glanced both ways. She made her usual face at him. More and more she was considering him a worrywart, his precautions a nuisance. They walked down the hall to the tiny elevator installed in a dumbwaiter shaft and he waited till the elevator door had closed behind them. “Look, Lara, you hired me to protect you. Well, it’s my considered professional advice that you still need protection.”
She mulled that over while they walked through the house, out through the kitchen door to the carriage house that served as a garage. She waited obediently at a safe distance while he inspected, then started the car—he didn’t expect bombs with this kind of situation but why take the chance?—then she settled onto the front seat beside him. “You know, it...wouldn’t have happened if anyone else had been there to witness it or to scream. I mean, that was the act of a coward, wouldn’t you say—jumping out from behind me like that and...?” Her voice trailed away.
He nearly took her hand where it lay fisted on the seat between them, then suppressed the impulse. Brave girl, he applauded her silently. This was the first time she’d broached the fall of her own accord. Every other time, he’d had to lead her through it, word by halting word.
He didn’t agree with her assessment, though. Someone had jumped out of the bushes behind her as she jogged or had overtaken her silently. Had—in broad daylight!—gripped Lara’s hair with one hand, close to her nape so she couldn’t look back. Had grasped the waist cord of her sweatpants with the other hand, then forced her, step by struggling step, over the cliff edge. To his mind, the act took nerve, determination—and terrible hatred. It wasn’t the act of a coward, however it might comfort her to think so. It was the act of a risk taker.
Worse yet, a well-organized, premeditated risk taker, who’d chosen his or her place of ambush with intelligence and care—a gap in the bushes, a spot where the path skirted the drop-off, where twists in the trail blocked the view at both ends.
“Gillian’s a big girl,” Lara went on when he didn’t speak. “If she’d been there with me, no one would ever have dared...”
Yes, Gillian was a big girl—five-nine or -ten. And despite her slenderness, if she taught aerobics, tai chi, she’d be strong for her size... Strong enough to shove a smaller woman off a cliff? Definitely.
“How about a compromise?” he said, instead. “It may take me a week or two to find a female BG you can live with. In the meantime, why don’t you hire one of the other applicants—”
“No. I want to hire Gillian.”
As the gates swung ponderously inward, he studied her exquisite profile. Her chin was tipped in defiance, her arms crossed tightly across her chest. He swore to himself, then pulled out onto the avenue and stepped on the gas. For weeks he’d been silently rooting for her, hoping her spirit would mend along with her bones. But why did she have to regain her spunk today of all days? “Is there something you’re not telling me about Mahler?” he asked as they passed the Newport Casino, which had the oldest grass tennis courts in America. “You’re sure you’ve never met her before?”
“I...” Lara shook her head finally. “It’s f-funny, because that’s what it feels like, but no...I’m sure not.”
Under stress, she had a charming hint of a stutter. The question was what was he missing here? “Then why her, Lara? You didn’t even ask her how fast she types, whether she’s computer savvy, if she can—”
“I think she’d be good for me.”
Said with ominous finality. You could give a client advice, but you couldn’t make her take it, Trace reminded himself. The cardinal rule of his profession and the most frustrating. He could push no further. He could give Lara an ultimatum: insist on Gillian, and you’ll have to get yourself a new bodyguard. But he wasn’t ready to do that. For one thing, hiring Gillian Mahler might be no more than Lara’s harmless whim.
Or it might, just might, prove suicidal.
Either way, he’d stayed too long on this assignment to quit now. He meant to see it through till Lara was freed from danger. Unlike most security firms, the Brickhouse credo was that they solved the client’s problem; they didn’t just make their money off it.
And if Gillian was the problem?
Well, he’d meant to investigate her anyway. He just hadn’t expected his prime suspect to be dropped in his lap. Trace smiled at the image—couldn’t help himself—then glanced at Lara.
“All right. You’re the boss, boss.”
The smile she gave him was a fair trade—more than fair—for all the headaches this whim was bound to cost him in the end. They didn’t speak again until he turned into the parking lot across from the Newport Hospital.
“You asked me to tell you if I ever remembered anything else about that morning,” Lara murmured. “And something did come back to me a little while ago while I was brushing my hair. The runner I saw that morning out on Cliff Walk?”
The unidentified runner, sex unknown, wearing a hooded orange sweatshirt, who’d passed Lara only minutes before her attack. Trace’s best bet for her assailant. It would have been easy to spin around and follow Lara back through the fog, catch her just as she passed the fatal gap... “Yes,” he said without inflection. Come on, Lara. Give me the goods and I’ll nail the creep.
“I told you I thought it was a college sweatshirt, with University of something with an M—Michigan, Minnesota, Montana?—printed on the chest.”
“You did.”
“It was University of Miami.”
“You’re sure of that?” he said quietly. Her recall of the last few minutes before the accident was piecemeal and fuzzy, a result of either head trauma or sheer terror.
“Absolutely.”
He parked the car and turned to look at her. “So what brought it back to mind?” Sometimes the association that sparked the memory was more telling than the clue itself.
“D-don’t know. It just came to me.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Dearest Lara-Mommy,
Something told me that today I’d be SURE to get a letter from you!! I went to my mailbox four times—one. two, three, FOUR—but it never came. At least, the man behind the counter said it didn’t come. I’m starting to wonder about that guy. Could he be stealing my mail?!! He stares at me every time I come in now. But maybe that’s just because he thinks I look EXACTLY like the famous TV star Lara Leigh? People are always, I mean ALWAYS, staring at me on the street and thinking that. I stopped and gave one woman who was staring my autograph the other day. She thought that was so NICE of me to give it to her without her even asking.
But then, I’m not conceited like some people we know. And all I want to know is, WHY do I have to keep asking you for a letter? Asking and asking and asking and ASKING for one...CRUMMY...LETTER—what kind of mother makes her daughter beg for just the scraps—any old scrap—of her love? Just a crumb of attention? I guess the same kind of mom who sells her baby to finance her way through med school, huh?
Well, I’m getting very, very tired of asking. Tired of walking to my mailbox, then home again, then back again, then—I know every line in the sidewalk on the way to my mailbox. I play Step on a Crack and You’ll Break Your Mother’s BACK. Do you remember that game? It’s a children’s game. If you’d been there for me, Lara-Mommy, instead of devoting all your selfish life to your lousy CAREER, we could have played it together. And maybe then, if you’d been there to guide me I’d have amounted to something. Is that it? Is that why you won’t answer my letters anymore? Because you’re ashamed of me?
I promise you won’t be when we meet. Soon. It’s time for a mother and daughter reunion, don’t you think?
But till then,
WRITE ME, YOU BITCH! (HA-HA—Just kidding!!!) your loving Sarah XXX
WITH A SHUDDER of disgust, Trace dropped the letter on his desk. He stood, switched off the lamp, then moved to the window and leaned out, greedily breathing in the sweet night air, as if the letter’s cloying brew of need and hatred had contaminated his lungs as well as his mind.
His office looked out on the front grounds of Woodwind. Even with his thoughts elsewhere, his eyes roved automatically over the darkened lawn below, seeking movement, any shape that departed from the normal outlines of the lush landscaping. Nearly midnight and not even a skunk waddled across the lawn in search of grubs.
He glanced back to his desk. He’d been combing through Sarah XXX’s letters for the past hour, searching for any clue he might have overlooked. That letter was number four of the collection—rather, a copy of number four, since the original was filed with the Newport police. The stalking case against Sarah XXX had to be meticulously documented so that if—when, he corrected himself—Trace finally tracked her down, they could prosecute.
Like all the other notes, number four was a textbook example of the kind of mash note celebrity stalkers sent the objects of their twisted affections. Whatever the words, the underlying theme was the same: terrible, unappeasable neediness. The echoing emptiness of a person who has no identity in the normal sense of the word. Because for whatever pathetic reason—neglect, abuse, psychological dysfunction?—the typical stalker possesses no self.
Like Dorothy’s Tin Man, who realizes he lacks a heart, the stalker is still human enough to know he lacks something. Even if he can’t describe the problem, still he senses the void within—the black hole that in a normal person is filled by a sense of selfhood. By a soul.
And the stalker knows he needs to fill that void. Yearns most horribly to fill it. Believes with unshakable faith that to ever be happy, to ever be normal, he must fill it.
So just as the Tin Man set off to ask the Wizard of Oz for a heart, the stalker goes bumbling through life, searching and searching outside himself for a solution to the. problem that lies within.
Until one fine day the answer comes to him. He has a black, sucking hole where his identity should be? He’ll fill it with someone else’s identity! Someone else’s soul.
And since the void is so big, he’ll need a big identity to fill it. Somebody important, however the stalker defines importance.
A generation ago, importance was a politician. Today, importance is most often a celebrity. So one day, the stalker flips the pages of a magazine—and sees a photo. Or turns the TV channel just as a certain actress walks into a room—and wham!—there it is. A person staring into his eyes, seemingly speaking to him and him alone, promising him the solution to his whole rotten, lonely life. Promising recognition, belonging—identity.
All he has to do is win that person’s love, the stalker thinks. Except he doesn’t know what love is. His underlying urge is darker, deeper. He doesn’t want love; he wants possession. Wants to merge with. Become. Seize that soul and swallow it whole. To eat it.
Trace switched the lamp back on and sat again. So with zombies like that wandering the world, what does Richard Corday do for his new, beautiful young wife?
Already the creator of five hit TV shows, Corday sets out to create a showcase series for Lara. The perfect wedding gift for an actress, he must have thought. A role to die for. Like a master jeweler crafting the perfect setting for a matchless diamond, he creates an evening soap opera called Searching for Sarah.
In which, for the past thirteen years, Lara had played the part of beautiful young Dr. Laura Daley, who has a secret sorrow. At the age of seventeen, Daley sold her illegitimate baby in a black-market adoption and used the payment to finance her way through college, then med school. Lara had assumed the role when she was thirty—at that age, she could still play the part of a teenager—and she’d been playing it ever since. The role had evolved over the years, with Dr. Daley changing from career-driven girl, to brilliant med student, to sexy resident, to glamorous pediatric surgeon in a big city hospital. She needed only one thing to make her life perfect: reunion with her lost, never forgotten, deeply regretted daughter. Because, since episode three of the show, Dr. Laura Daley had realized her dreadful mistake. She’d been frantically searching for Sarah for thirteen years now.
The premise was guaranteed to speak to every wacko in the country—at least every female wacko, and doubtless some of the males. What could be more seductive to the loser nobody needs than a TV diva who needs you and you alone? For somebody lost to know that lovely Dr. Laura Daley is frantically searching for you?
Searching for Sarah was like a Help Wanted ad, broadcast one night a week for thirteen years. The one part waiting for an actor to fill it was the role of the missing, longed-for daughter.
Was it any wonder Sarah XXX wanted the position? The only wonder was that Trace didn’t have a dozen—a hundred—wannabe Sarahs to contend with. Lara had been damned lucky to escape a serious stalking as long as she had.
How serious a stalker was Sarah XXX? That was the question.
Six days after Sarah XXX mails this letter from Boston, promising—threatening—a mother-daughter reunion, somebody pushes Lara over a cliff. The simplest explanation wasn’t conclusive, but Trace firmly believed in starting with it first: one wacko, not two.
So all I have to do is find Sarah XXX.
And maybe he had. He reached for letter number five, then selected, instead, the top page from a thicker stack of papers. Gillian’s résumé.
He paused as the buzzer tucked in his pocket quivered soundlessly against his thigh. Lara. He waited, eyes unfocused, breath deepening, preparing himself for action if this was a call for help—then let out a little sigh of satisfaction when the buzzer stopped vibrating after three seconds. Good. And good night to you, too, Lara.
Buzzers were a bit of proprietary technology that Brickhouse used in any case where physical attack was a possibility. The client was instructed to wear a special locket on a chain around his or her neck at all times. Press the button concealed in the locket’s design, and a silent buzzer would alert the Brickhouse bodyguard that he was needed—and needed now.
He glanced at his watch. Midnight. Which meant it was nine in Seattle, not too late for his night-owl younger sister. He picked up his phone and dialed.
“Mmm, ‘lo?” a drowsy voice murmured in his ear.
“Asleep already?” he said easily. “Lazy bum.”
“Dozing,” Emily insisted. “I’m lying here on the couch with Duncan on my chest.” Duncan was one of her four tomcats, the surly orange one. “And he’s emitting sleep rays. I was fighting valiantly, but—”
“Well, throw him off and go look at your computer.” Trace had scanned Gillian’s résumé into his computer, then e-mailed it to Emily an hour ago. “Got somebody I want you to check out for me.” His younger sister was not a partner in Brickhouse, God forbid, but an associate. They farmed out much of their research to her, especially anything that could be learned over the Internet.
“Rush job or in my own sweet time?” she inquired around a yawn.
“Like prontissimo. I want it yesterday.”
“So my—lemme go, you cockleburr!” On the far side of the continent, something heavy hit the floor—twenty-two pounds of cat, Trace assumed. “So my brainstorm worked?” Emily continued. She’d suggested Trace run a want ad seeking a personal assistant for Lara, because if Sarah XXX had come to Newport in May, then maybe she’d stayed.
That wouldn’t be untypical—the stalker’s life spiraling inward in tighter and tighter circles around her target as her obsession grew. And if she’d stayed, then she’d be frantically seeking some way in past Woodwind’s unbreachable walls. “So offer her a way in,” Emily had urged. “Run a want ad with the Woodwind address and see who applies.”
“I don’t know if it worked,” he said, “but it turned up a few possibles. And this is the one I want you to start on.”
“Gillian S. Mahler,” Emily murmured, reading Gillian’s résumé on her screen.
“N. Mahler,” Trace corrected absently. “The first thing I want you to check out is—”
“S,” Emily interrupted, know-it-all kid sister to the end. “That’s an S. And I’d say your Gillian’s a leftie, correct?”
“S...” Trace stared at the spiky, backhanded letter. He’d taken it for a N in running script, not an S practically lying on its back. “By God, I believe you’re right!”
“That’s significant?”
“That, duckie, might be point, set and game. Okay, in that case here’s what I need from you, and I need it as quick as you can. What does the S stand for?”
“And if it’s Sarah?”
“Then bingo! I’ve found my pigeon.”
THREE DAYS LATER, on a morning as bright as her mood, Gillian leaned out her car window to study the device that apparently controlled Woodwind’s gates. Topping a metal post at a height convenient to the driver, it was an intercom of some sort, with a keypad and a speaker. Printed below the keypad was the instruction Press * To Call. She pressed the star sign, then waited.
“Yes?” the speaker said after a moment, in a metallic imitation of Trace Sutton’s voice.
It would be him, playing gatekeeper. “It’s G-Gillian. I’m here.” Lara had called her two days ago to say she was hired, and could she please report for work on Monday. So here she was at last, with all the possessions she’d acquired in Newport packed into boxes and suitcases that filled the trunk and back seat of her car. Because along with the job came an unexpected, quite wonderful bonus: a carriage-house apartment on the Woodwind grounds. Given Gillian’s recent problems with roommates, she might have accepted the job on those terms alone. Considering that the job and the housing gave her round-the-clock access to Lara, she couldn’t have asked for a better chance to get to know her.
There was no welcoming comment from Sutton, but slowly the gates swung inward and Gillian steered her ancient Toyota up the winding driveway. At the top of the low hill, the road divided. The right fork curved off grandly to lead front-door callers to the mansion’s covered portico. The left fork wound around back, past concealing shrubbery, to the carriage house built to one side of the mansion and a bit behind it.
On the raked gravel before the carriage house, Trace Sutton stood waiting, a sardonic half smile on his face, his hands jammed into the pockets of a pair of impeccable white tennis shorts. The very picture of a gentleman of leisure.
“That’s the door to your apartment.” He indicated a human-sized entrance to the left of the five garage bays.
She parked before it and stepped out. “Good morning.”
“Is it?” he said pleasantly.
Well, it was for me till now. Why did he dislike her so? She glanced past him toward Woodwind. “Where’s Mrs. Corday?”
“She’s not up and about yet. She had a bad night.” As he spoke, he opened the rear door of her car and lifted out a box. “So meantime I’ll show you your apartment and help you get settled.”
“Oh, that’s really not necessary!” She reached for the box, but he didn’t relinquish it. “If you’d just give me the key, I’m sure I can...”
But he’d already stepped around her and started off. “Nonsense. It’s no trouble at all.”
“But—” She didn’t want him intruding on her new space or on her new-job excitement. Fuming, she grabbed a couple of smaller boxes and followed him up the covered staircase that was built on the outer wall of the carriage house, then through a door at the top of the stairs. “Oh!” The slanted ceiling was set with skylights.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Sutton said from the far end of the long room, where he waited in a doorway. “I used to live here myself.”
“You did?” Perhaps that accounted for his proprietary air. Still, Gillian didn’t like it. He rubbed her wrong; the vibrations he’d left behind would bother her, too. Frowning, she followed him into the bedroom, and stopped short in delight.
The end wall was mostly glass, a gigantic Palladian window that looked out on the side lawn, then over the distant back wall. Beyond that all was blue—robin’s egg sky, a slash of aquamarine sea.
“Yes, I rented this place for a month this spring, before I moved in with Lara.”
So their relationship was quite new. Must have blossomed almost overnight, given that Lara had spent most of her spring and summer in hospital. One of those sickbed romances—he’d wooed her when her resistance was at its lowest, chocolate and flowers and reading to the invalid? “I see,” she said evenly. He’d set her box of clothes down on the bed. The top flaps, which she’d interlocked, had somehow come undone. She dumped her own boxes beside it. “What did you mean by ‘a bad night’? Pain?” She straightened to find his eyes locked on her face.
“Nightmares,” he said bluntly.
“Oh.” Yes, she could imagine that. She shivered, and watched him note it. Why was he staring like that? The memory of his arm sliding around her returned abruptly: She’d put any notion that he might have been making a pass aside after his obvious attempt to block Lara’s hiring her. Rationally, one action didn’t follow the other. If Trace was attracted, then why would he object to her working at Wood- . wind? He wouldn’t. Since he had objected, therefore that fumble at the windows had not been a pass.
Now, with his eyes lingering on her mouth, she wasn’t so sure of her logic. “Er, there’s lots more in the car.” She ducked out the door.
They brought up a second load, Trace in the lead again. He swung her suitcase onto the bed, then opened a sliding door to reveal a closet. “There’re plenty of hangers. Why don’t you hand me your things and I’ll hang them up.”
Funny, he didn’t look in the least domestic. “Thanks, but I’d rather do it myself.” Later, without an unblinking audience.
Her words hung between them in the small room, a little too emphatic, a little too prim. Maybe she was wrong to take offense. Maybe this was no more than the kind of service a slightly younger man grew used to giving an older, richer woman. She found herself wondering for the first time what Sutton did for a living.
His smile deepened at the corners, but he didn’t rush to fill the uncomfortable silence. So she did. “It’s just that I’ve been living crunched into a tiny apartment with too many roommates.” When she’d taken the place back in May, she’d signed on to share a two-bedroom apartment with its original tenant. Then Debbie had lost her job. To pay the rent, she’d taken in another two girls, college sophomores in Newport to party for the summer. “Dirty dishes in the sink, people coming and going at all hours or, worse, declaring parties at all hours. Laundry hanging all over the bathroom.” And Michele, who’d decided she preferred Gillian’s clothes to her own and who borrowed without asking. “It’s been too much togetherness by half. So it’ll be heaven doing for myself for a change.”
Trace cocked his head. “Let me guess. You’re an only child.”
One minute he doesn’t like me, the next he wants to know all about me. She was tempted to brush him off, but she didn’t need an enemy at Woodwind. Lara’s desire to hire her had overruled her lover’s opposition. Still, Gillian didn’t know by what margin. Better to play it safe. Try to win him over, too.
“Not quite,” she said lightly, leading him out of the bedroom and back toward the stairs. “I have a brother.” By adoption. “Chris. But he’s fourteen years older than I.” And when her adoptive parents had divorced back when Gillian was eight, Chris had gone with his father. She had stayed with Eleanor Scott—her adoptive mother—and had wondered for years why her father, Victor Scott, had dropped out of her life so completely.
Because I was never his in the first place! Because it was Mom who wanted to adopt a child, not him—he had Chris by a previous marriage and Chris was quite enough. So many mysteries of her childhood had come clear when she opened that safe-deposit box.
“And Chris lives back in Houston along with the rest of your family?” Trace prodded, coming down the stairs at her heels.
Houston. She hadn’t told him she came from there. He read my résumé, which listed Houston as her previous residence and the location of her last two jobs. “Oh, he’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere,” she said with a smile over her shoulder. “He’s a delivery captain. Moves other people’s yachts around.”
There wasn’t much family beyond that to claim, in Houston or anywhere. Aunt Susan, Victor Scott’s sister out in San Diego. And Ed Mahler, the lovely loony man who had married her mother when Gillian was fifteen and had adopted her, never knowing she was adopted already. He had been as thunderstruck as she at Eleanor’s deception. Ed was an engineer in the merchant marine, and after her mother’s death, he’d signed on for a regular run on a tanker between Kuwait and New Jersey.
Reaching the car, Gillian found herself still smarting at Trace’s invasion of her privacy. It was silly to be so irritated. Perhaps he’d helped Lara cull all the applicants, deciding which were worth an interview. Still, his big hands on a paper that described her life...she didn’t like it. “So what about you?” she said recklessly as she opened the trunk. “Any siblings?” Two could play the prying game.
She looked up to find a distinct frown on his face. You’d rather question than be questioned? Good. She cocked her head at him inquiringly. I bet you’re the youngest brother, with two older sisters. You’re comfortable hanging around with older women. Pleasing them.
Trace accepted her challenge with a wry smile and said, “Three. A younger brother and two even younger sisters.”
So much for her betting instincts. “Then that makes you the responsible, conscientious one.” she observed. And it would account for his air of command. The eldest was always the kid left in charge. “And what is Trace, a nickname your family gave you?” Might as well keep him on the run once she had him there.
He pulled her portfolio and the big wooden box she used for a paint kit out of the trunk. “It’s short for Tracy,” he said amiably, and turned to face her. “And what does the S stand for—your middle name?”
Touché! she thought wryly. He wasn’t one to run far. S stood for two names in one. Sarah and Scott. But Sarah was the name Lara had given her at birth—Gillian knew that from the papers her adoptive mother had bequeathed her—and then apparently her adoptive parents had retained it. Simply because they liked the name Sarah? Or as some sort of salute to Lara’s wishes?
Scott was the surname of her adoptive parents at the time of Gillian’s adoption. The name she’d refused to give up in a fit of teenage defiance when her mother married Ed Mahler.
So Sarah Scott was how she’d signed her letter last year, when she first wrote to Lara asking if they might be related. And Gillian had no intention of risking exposure by giving it now. Probably she should have changed the S to something else on her job application, but all her ID showed her as Gillian S. Mahler.
She met Trace’s eyes and realized that her hesitation had stretched for a minute or more. That he stood motionless, his face as intent as a cat’s at a mouse hole.
“My middle name?” She smiled. “S stands for Seymour.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Now, TAKE A DEEP BREATH,” Lara laughingly advised, as she paused, hand on a doorknob. Despite the nightmares Trace had mentioned, she seemed in fine spirits this morning. Trace and Gillian had collected her from her bedroom suite, where she had taken a late breakfast. She’d led them on a leisurely tour of the public areas of the house, the high point of which, to Gillian, had been an exercise room, complete with lap pool, in the basement that she might use whenever she pleased. The conclusion of the orientation was Gillian’s new office, located upstairs in the same wing as Lara’s suite, all the way at its western end. “And remember,” Lara continued as she opened the door, “it isn’t as bad as it looks.”
“It’s worse,” Trace lazily assured her. Apparently having nothing better to do, he’d tagged along on the tour and Gillian wasn’t sure if she was grateful or annoyed. On the one hand, his presence diluted the intensity of her first extended interaction with her mother, so that she wasn’t constantly “onstage,” having to pick and choose her words every minute. But on the other hand, his presence prevented her from connecting with Lara on a more intimate level.
“Hush,” Lara commanded as she opened the door.
“If this is bad,” Gillian murmured, following her into the office, “I don’t know if I could stand good. It just might kill me!” The large room ended in a gigantic, three-sided bay window, with tiny stained-glass diamond panes trimming its upper reaches; at eye level, half-moon expanses of plate glass framed the outrageously splendid view. A long cushioned seat was built in below each facet of the window; a coffee table was placed in the alcove thus created. Gillian could see the tops of the rosebushes that edged Cliff Walk peeking above the estate walls, then 180 degrees of ocean glittering in the noonday sun.
“It is gorgeous, isn’t it?” Lara agreed. “This used to be Richard‘s—my husband’s—office. I never did understand how he could write here. But then, he used to sit with his back to the view.” Her smile wavered for a moment. She swallowed, tipped her head in a movement that seemed to say, Oh, well, and continued. “It was Joya—my stepdaughter—who turned the desk to face the windows last year when she took over.”
Her stepdaughter! Somehow Gillian had thought, if she hadn’t been told by now, that Lara had no children.
“Up until last year, I’d had the same assistant for nine years. But when Beckie left to be married, Joya asked for the job...” Lara went on, glancing around the room with a faint frown.
“And you can see what a good job she’s been doing,” said Trace, nodding at the boxes lined along one wall.
A dozen boxes at least, Gillian estimated, filled with—“Yikes! Is that all—”
“Fan mail,” Lara said with a look of comic guilt. “Still want the job?”
“Well, yes.” More than ever. Lara wasn’t like anything she’d expected. There was some mystery here that needed unraveling. “Who’s afraid of a little fan mail?” And now was probably not the time to admit that she had suffered all her life from mild—okay, moderate—dyslexia. Reading required intense concentration and exacted fierce headaches. “Am I looking at a week’s worth of mail or—”
“Oh, just today’s,” Trace assured her blandly.
Lara elbowed him in the ribs. “Sit down and hush up before you scare Gillian off the job, you brute!”
“Your wish, oh heart, is my...” Trace retired obediently to a window seat. He selected a catalog from a pile arranged on the coffee table, opened it, and seemed instantly absorbed.
Lara turned back to Gillian with a smile. “It’s six months’ or more accumulation. Joya fell behind some time before last Christmas and the poor darling never caught up again.”
“Though she tried valiantly,” Trace murmured without looking up. He turned a page.
“She was only working part-time,” Lara defended her stepdaughter. “She and Toby—her brother—were attending college here in town, at Salve Regina...”
A brother, as well! Gillian’s stepbrother, also, or was Toby Lara and Richard Corday’s son? Which would mean that he was Gillian’s half brother. She found herself hoping keenly for the second alternative. Her own adoptive brother had been plucked from her daily life with her parents’ divorce. She would have liked a full-time sibling or two.
“What with her midterms and a paper she had to write...” murmured Lara, still defending the absent Joya. Trace rustled his catalog too loudly. Lara shrugged. “Anyway, all these letters need answering. So here’s how you go about it.”
She selected a letter from the last box in line along the wall, opened it and pulled out a printed get-well card featuring a doleful rabbit on crutches, his ears bent, his head bandaged. She laughed to herself and held it out to Gillian. “They’re filming the fall season’s episodes of Searching for Sarah already. Since I won’t be returning for another six months or so, the scriptwriters have written me out of the story. They’ve decided that I had a dreadful accident while skiing in Switzerland, and no one knows if I’ll ever walk again—art imitating life, but not too closely, thank God.”
She lifted the card from Gillian’s fingers. “Anyway, somehow Soap Opera Digest got wind of that plot twist and ran it as their lead story last month. Ever since it came out, half my mail is get-well cards and the other half is outraged complaints.”
Either way, Gillian’s job was to respond. Lara switched on the computer on the desk and showed her the various form letters. As time and inspiration permitted, she should add a sentence or two to customize the form letter, thus making the fan feel she was receiving a personal response. “I wish there were time to send each of them an answer from scratch, but there just isn’t. Still I’m really grateful for their concern. For their...loyalty. Some of them have been writing me for years. Which reminds me—”
Lara showed Gillian how to check to see if the fan was new—in which case the name was to be added to a database Lara maintained, along with a code that showed which form letter she’d received—or if the fan was an old one, then Gillian should review the file to make sure a repeat response didn’t get sent.
Autographed photos of Lara were stored in this drawer, prestamped envelopes in that. “And that’s about it for the fan mail,” Lara said at last. “Except for the...special cases.”
“The reality impaired,” Trace murmured.
Lara rounded on him fiercely. “They’re not all—”
“There?” he supplied gently. “Any woman who thinks she might be Sarah? A fictional long-lost daughter of a fictional Dr. Daley, star of a prime-time soap opera? Anyone who believes that isn’t playing with a full deck, Lara.”
Gillian had wondered herself, of course. Dr. Laura Daley was fiction. Lara’s maiden name was Laura Bailey. Both women, the fictional one and the factual, had sold their babies—one for the money to go to med school, the other for a red sports car. And it was Lara’s own husband who’d created the Dr. Daley character. Why? The story was just too juicy to pass up? But how could Lara have allowed Corday to use her own life as fodder for a soap opera?
On the other hand, people did it all the time, selling their real-life tragedies or scandals to TV, to be dramatized as a movie of the week. So why couldn’t Lara sell her own story—sell me—all over again?
“They’re a little confused,” Lara admitted, regaining her good temper. “So we try to straighten them out gently, pointing out that Searching for Sarah isn’t based on reality.”
Except that it is. Almost. Gillian found herself nodding to hide her confusion.
“I have a form letter for the special cases,” Lara went on, “but those I handle personally. If you run across any letter where the fan thinks she might be Sarah, you bring that right to me and I’ll deal with it, okay?”
Straightening them out gently, she’d said. Except that when Gillian had written Lara a year ago to say that maybe, just maybe, she might be Lara’s birth daughter, Sarah Scott, Lara’s response had been ferocious, not gentle: If I didn’t want you when you were born, why would I want you now?
“Laaaara. Lara-darling?” The owner of that caroling soprano paused in the office doorway. Gillian recognized the blonde in the Range Rover, who had coolly nodded her through the gates on the day of her interview. This morning she radiated warmth. “Oh, there you are, darling!” Her blue eyes switched to Gillian and widened. “And you must be my poor, poor replacement!”
“Gillian, this is my daughter Joya,” Lara said, and completed the introductions while the girl glided across the hardwood floors to offer her hand. Her palm was marshmallow soft, her grip fashionably limp; her inch-long mauve fingernails made shaking hands a bit of a hazard. Gillian could see why she’d gotten behind in her paperwork.
“Did you need something, sweetie?” Lara asked.
The girl turned a dazzling smile upon her. “Just your car for a little bitty while? Stupid Toby took the Range Rover back to the dealer. He says it’s lost its new-car smell and the dealer should have some sort of spray to make it smell new again. I mean, I ask you, so it smells like it’s three months old instead of three days? Who cares? Anyway, I told Duffy and Pooh I’d meet them for lunch out at Bailey’s Beach, so could I pretty, pretty please take your—”
“No,” said Trace from the window seat. “I may need it.”
Sunshine gave way to storm clouds in the blink of an eye, as Joya whirled to face him. “Well, too bad! I asked first!” She glanced over her shoulder at Lara. “Didn’t I, darling?”
Lara bit her lip, glancing from one to the other. Trace shook his head slowly and Joya caught the movement from the corner of her eye. Her head snapped around.
“You stay out of this, Trace! It’s none of your business.”
“We could drive you, I suppose,” Lara said. She put a soothing hand on the girl’s arm.
Joya shook it off and backed away. “I don’t want to be driven to lunch like a snot-nosed child. I—”
“Then stop acting like one,” suggested Trace.
Joya stamped her foot. “You shut up!”
Gillian drifted back a step...another, then turned. If there had been some way to creep out of the room she’d have taken it gladly. Next best option was to act as though this ugly little scene wasn’t happening, go about her business. She stooped by the last box in line and examined its contents.
Behind her, Trace’s voice overrode Lara’s placating murmur. “If these so-called friends of yours can’t be bothered to drive a mile out of their way to pick you up, then call a taxi. You can afford it.”
“Trace—” Lara interposed on a note of pleading.
“At least I pay my own way here,” Joya declared in a vicious singsong, advancing on him. She snatched up the catalog he’d set aside, flipped its pages at random. “Unlike some of us who just lounge around, preening and flexing—”
Trace laughed aloud. Gillian chose a letter from the box at random. This one was a manila envelope and seemed to contain something thicker than a letter. A gift from an admiring fan? She could ask Lara to show her what to do in cases like that. Lara looked as if she’d welcome a distraction, but Gillian hadn’t the nerve. Joya was standing over Trace, her hands clenched as though she wanted to smash his upturned, gently smiling face but didn’t dare. Frustrated as the girl appeared, she might lash out at the next person who spoke or moved.
“Flexing and preening and sucking up to older women. Getting Lara to buy you goodies: What are you shopping for this time, Trace, another set of custom golf clubs? Or were you a very good boy last night? You deserve a gold Rolex this morning?”
“Joya, that’s enough!” Lara said sharply.
Gillian stood, opened the envelope. Any distraction was better than this.
“Enough? It’s not half enough,” Joya snarled. “It’s time somebody said something! If Daddy could see this—this big lapdog who’s taken his place. I bet he’s spinning in his grave! Spinning and puking!”
The package held something wrapped in several folds of a plastic bag. Pulling it out and unwrapping it, Gillian drifted to Lara’s side. From the bag she removed a mottled white-and-brown card, folded loosely around some oblong object. “Mrs. Corday, excuse me, but this letter contained some—”
“If you don’t mind, honey,” Joya snapped, “you can wait your turn! I’m—”
“Stop!” called Trace, lunging to his feet and swinging Joya out of his way—just as Gillian shook the item free of the card and into her hand.
Her gasp feathered out, loud in the sudden silence.
White fur...the hardness of bone beneath... the stench of rotten meat. Trace caught her wrist and turned it, flipping the object off her palm and onto the desktop.
“Oh, gross!” cried Joya.
“Oh,” said Lara, as she sank onto the office chair.
LARA’S “GIFT” WAS THE FOOT of some small animal. Rabbit’s foot, Gillian thought with revulsion. But not a commercial, sanitized rabbit’s foot you could buy on a key chain. Horrible as she thought those were, this was much worse. A homemade job, it looked like, with dark stains on the soft fur.
She became aware that Trace still held her wrist. Warm and oddly comforting, his fingers curled around her. She could feel her own pulse, slamming against the base of his thumb. And his slower, heavier beat, like an answer you could depend on.
“You’re not going to faint on me, are you?” he asked absently, looking up from the rabbit’s foot into her eyes.
“Of course not,” she said, though she did feel—detached. Floating a few inches off the floor. As if she could tip forward and fall into his deep hazel eyes—pools of slate green spangled with gold and gray. Aware, also, that even if her knees did buckle, he was strong enough to hold her upright.
“Of course you’re not,” he murmured on an odd note, something almost with an edge to it. “And what have you got there?” He reached and caught her other wrist and lifted it, scowled at the bloodstained card she still clutched. “Drop it.”
The wrapper fell to the desk and he released her at last. She stood, rubbing her wrists. Trace used the eraser ends of two pencils off the desk to push open the curled card and pin it flat to the blotter. Lara wheeled her chair up beside her to watch. Joya also crowded closer.
On the inner surface of the bloody card were printed the words:
Lara-mommy! I saw this and thought of YOU. You could use some luck—maybe more than you know? See you SOOOOOOON. Your loving SARAH XXX.
“Gross!” Joya repeated. She sounded more excited than repelled.
“I’m sorry,” Gillian said, glancing at Lara’s troubled face.
“Why?” Trace snapped.
“What?” Swinging to face him, she found his eyes had gone darker, the pupils expanding like those of a cat when it sees a bird.
“Why are you sorry?” he demanded softly.
Bewildered by his intensity, she shrugged. “Of all the letters I had to choose...”
A two-heartbeat pause, then Trace looked down again. “Most unfortunate,” he agreed smoothly.
“I’ll say!” Joya sniggered. “First day on the job and the girl hits a home run! Way to go, Gillie.”
“It’s hardly Gillian’s fault,” Lara protested. “Not her fault at all! If anyone ought to apologize, Gillian, it’s me. I should have warned you. Once in a blue moon you’ll get a fan who’s a little...”
“Or a lot,” Trace observed wryly. He was using his two pencils now to maneuver the manila envelope across the desk to his side.
“Oh, pick it up, for Pete’s sake!” Joya reached for it. “Ow!” she yelped as he rapped her knuckles with the eraser end of a pencil. “Did you see that?” she demanded of Lara. “I’m supposed to put up with this crap?”
“Fingerprints, darling,” Trace murmured, bending to study the envelope. When he straightened again, there was a stillness about him that hadn’t been there before. “This envelope came from which box, Gillian?”
“Th-the one on the end.” Whatever Joya might think, this man was nobody’s lapdog. Gillian had met rottweilers with kinder eyes. “Why?”
“This is today’s mail. Postmarked Saturday in Boston. So today, Monday, is the first day it could have been delivered. So who brought it up to the house?” His eyes swung to Joya.
She squirmed, shrugged, looked up at him with an odd defiance. “Okay, so I did, so what? When Toby and I came in from breakfast, it was there in the mailbox, so I brought it up—brought it here to the office. So what?”
“I believe we had an understanding, Joya. I bring up the mail.”
“You think that’s all it takes to earn your keep around here?” she jeered, backing away from him toward the door.
“Joya!” Lara protested.
“Oh, spare me. I don’t want to hear it, okay? I’m late for lunch. Gillie, call me a cab and tell it to meet me at the front gates.” Joya stalked out of the room without a backward glance.
CHAPTER SIX
AT SEVEN-THIRTY IN THE evening, a rosy light still lingered in the western sky. Standing at his office window, Trace could see, beyond a hedge of lilacs, a shadowed stretch of the service driveway. “Come on, Gillian.” She’d told Lara that she taught an eight o’clock class at the Y Monday nights. Women’s weights, she’d said. “Get a move on.” She’d have to leave the carriage house any minute now to make it on time. And he couldn’t move till she did.
Just one more roadblock in a day filled with frustrations.
After that ugliness in the office, Lara had gone straight to bed. She’d claimed a raging headache and Trace didn’t doubt it. Since her fall she was subject to those, and stress looked to be a trigger. But it wasn’t just pain troubling her, he’d thought, when he brought her her lunch on a tray.
The lady was blue, it struck him, in spite of her brave front. Not frightened, which seemed the more reasonable response to such a blatant threat, but deeply depressed. And not willing to talk about it—at least not with him. Not till he’d apologized for thwarting Joya.
But Trace had no intention of apologizing to the silly brat. He’d explained to Lara that he didn’t want her car out on the street unsupervised, where it might be sabotaged. But he couldn’t say that to Joya, since she and Toby lived in a state of blissful ignorance, unaware that Lara was being stalked. Or that their stepmother’s “accident” on Cliff Walk was no accident. Only the chief of Newport police and his top detective, Jeremy Benton, were privy to that secret. Lara had wanted to avoid publicity. And Trace felt he had a better chance of nailing her assailant if no hue and cry was raised.
Since the last few minutes, even hours, before a traumatic head injury were often wiped from the victim’s memory, whoever had pushed Lara off the cliff had good reason to hope she’d forgotten the assault. Let him or her think so, Trace had urged. The better to catch you, you freak!
For the same reason, he lived at Woodwind under cover, with no one but Lara and his police contacts knowing his true role in the household. Because he didn’t want to deter a threat—postpone Lara’s troubles till he’d gone. He wanted to lull the stalker, lure him or her into his reach. Look, here’s poor little Lara, protected by no one but her bumbling gigolo. Come and get her!
Or be gotten.
TRACE STRAIGHTENED as headlights blossomed beyond the lilac leaves, then wheeled downhill toward the gates. Gillian’s little Toyota. He breathed a sigh of relief. Action at last.
He left the mansion by the kitchen door, checking that it locked behind him. Barbara Heath, Lara’s longtime cook and housekeeper, and Maureen, the upstairs maid, had both retired to their third-floor apartments. As had Harriet, Woodwind’s perpetual houseguest. The resident layabouts, Toby and Joya, were out for the evening. If they followed their usual pattern, they wouldn’t return till the bars closed at one o’clock. Or later, if they found an after-hours party.
And his client was locked in her impregnable suite with his locket buzzer around her neck. He didn’t like to leave her, but it was Lara’s choice to hire only one bodyguard. There was only so much he could do.
Nail Sarah XXX and he could stop worrying.
Trace circled the noisy gravel of the courtyard, then approached the carriage house through a flower bed on the downhill side. The copy of the key he’d made two days before—without telling Lara—fit sweetly into the lock and turned. At the top of the stairs, he glanced at his watch—7:55 p.m. He’d give himself till 9:00 to toss the place. It took longer when you meant to leave no signs of a search.
Inside, he paused, listening to the silence. Smelling it. Already the air carried a suggestion of Gillian. Lemons? New-mown hay? The same sunny, subtle perfume that clung to her tawny hair. He’d noticed it that first time he held her. Must be imagining it now, surely.
He padded into the room. After he’d disposed of Sarah XXX’s latest offering, Gillian had spent the rest of the morning working on the fan mail. In the afternoon she’d retreated to her apartment. To unpack and settle in, she’d said. Noting a vase of wild roses on the table in the window nook, Trace smiled in spite of himself. Whatever else she might be, she was all girl.
His smile faded. Whatever else she might be. He didn’t want Gillian to be his psycho. Found it almost impossible to imagine she could be. But if she was? Then the odds are very good that the lady owns an orange University of Miami sweatshirt, he reminded himself. Find that, and his search was over. Trace headed for the closet in the bedroom.
“GOT A NOTE TO YOU FROM your class,” said the front-desk attendant at the Y. “One of them called it in.”
Gillian unfolded it on her way up to the locker room:
Gillian, we forgot to tell you that it’s Jennifer’s BIG FORTY tonight. She opted for champagne instead of tummy crunches, so we’re carousing at Yesterday’s. Join us, why don’t you, and bring the rest of the class. The Rat Pack.
Gillian laughed and shoved on into the dressing room. The Rat Pack were five women friends who’d signed up together for her weight class. A good time was always their first priority; shaping their figures with small free weights ran a distinct second. With those five truant, she’d have only two students tonight.
She’d changed to her exercise togs before leaving the carriage house, but she stopped by her locker to drop off her thigh-length cotton sweater. “Well, blast!”
“Blast?” inquired Bobbie, the sixth member of Gillian’s class, sitting down on the bench behind her.
“I’m missing a sweatshirt and I was sure I’d left it here.” Her favorite orange sweatshirt, which her brother, Chris, had sent her years ago, when he was attending the University of Miami. She’d looked for it this evening to wear to class and not found it. But if it wasn’t back at the carriage house, wasn’t in her car and wasn’t here in her locker, then—Michele! “One of my roommates has struck again. She puts meaning on the word ‘borrow’ that would make a burglar blush. I’m down three pairs of earrings, a baseball cap, two T-shirts and a pair of 501 Levi’s, at last count. And now my favorite sweatshirt,” Gillian slammed the locker, then checked the clock on the wall. “Well, ready to hoist some metal?”
Bobbie glanced around the room. “Where are the others?” Two swimmers chatted quietly as they toweled off, but otherwise the place was empty.
“Birthday party for Jennifer at Yesterday’s, to which we’re invited after class. And looks like Nancy is a no-show tonight. So you get my full attention, kiddo.”
Bobbie responded with a wan smile and a shake of her head. “You know what, Gillian? I almost didn’t come tonight. I’m having cramps... Would you be hurt if I weaseled out on you and sat in the sauna, instead?”
“Not at all!” She’d be delighted to call it a day herself.
LEANING OUT THE WINDOW of her car to reach the keypad, Gillian punched in the code to open Woodwind’s gates. Lara had given her the number that morning, and a good thing, since the mansion was dark. Eight-thirty and everyone had gone to bed? Lights in Lara’s suite, situated on the oceanside of the house, wouldn’t show, though, come to think of it.
Bed sounded inviting. The day had been a long one, crammed with too many impressions, too much emotion. That horrible letter. If that’s life as a celebrity, Lara can have it! She shuddered and put the letter from mind while she parked the car.
After entering her apartment, she turned to lock the door, turned back—“Oh!” She flinched against the door, one hand to her stuttering heart.
Standing at the counter in her kitchen, Trace Sutton glanced over his shoulder. “I’ll have to buy you a decent corkscrew.” He held up the simple bartender’s device he must have found in her utensil drawer, then jabbed it into the cork of a wine bottle.
Her wine, she realized, recognizing the label. Her heart was still stampeding, but fright was giving way rapidly to rage. How dared he simply walk in like this? “Wh-what d’you think you’re doing here?”
The cork popped softly. He poured the bardolino into two glasses.
“Well?” she demanded, throwing her sweater on the couch and stalking toward him. The creep had kept a key to her apartment—that much was obvious!
He lifted the glasses, began to walk toward her—and stopped, his eyes dropping to her legs.
Which were bare below her nylon gym shorts. As were her arms, since she wore a sleeveless T-shirt. She swerved toward the sweater she’d abandoned too hastily, then stopped herself. Show no fear. With the thought, a twinge of alarm skated along her nerve endings. He was very large and already he’d proven he didn’t respect normal boundaries.
“I thought your first day at Woodwind was a little... rough and you deserved a drink.” Trace handed her a glass.
“Of my own wine?” If she dashed her drink in his eyes, would that slow him down enough? The distance to her door was twelve steps at least, and then she’d have to throw the dead bolt. Remembering the speed with which he’d crossed the office that morning, she abandoned the notion as soon as it formed.
“I’ll do better next time,” he assured her.
There won’t be a next time, buddy! Was he that vain that he thought he could simply barge into a woman’s apartment and be welcome? That with one smoldering look she’d fall into bed with him? Granted, no woman could deny his appeal, but still...
And what about Lara? God, she’d forgotten Lara! Trace wasn’t just a sexy lout; he was Lara’s lout. Too angry to speak, she took a gulp of the wine. And rattled as she was, she tipped the glass too far.
A drop dribbled past her bottom lip and fell. “Damn!” On the slope of her breast, a blood-red spot stained the white cotton.
She looked up to find his eyes aimed at her heart, his pupils gone wide and black as gun bores. His eyes lifted to hers, then slowly one of his dark eyebrows rose in a question. Well?
As she imagined his lips on her breast, his hands clamped on her waist, the pressure of his mouth bending her backward, a wave of raw heat washed through her. A tingling awareness spread from the back of her shaky knees and climbed. It didn’t matter that he was a vain and faithless brute—in his mind he was kissing her breast and in her mind she was responding helplessly. She turned away—felt his eyes caressing her hips and spun back again. “Get out!”
She stalked past him to the sink. Found a dishcloth and dabbed furiously at the spot. A useless effort, of course.
He came to lean on the counter beside her, so close she could feel the heat of his big body. Stood sipping wine and watching. “Seltzer?” he suggested huskily at last. “That’s what my sisters always use.”
Sisters, seltzer and spot removal. The sheer domesticity of the images banished fear. And there were rules at play here, even if she didn’t understand them. Trace wanted her, that was clear enough, but he wouldn’t use his size to take what he wanted—he’d have done so by now.
He expects me to give of my own free will? Oh, he was unspeakably vain! She threw down the dishcloth and wheeled. “I said, get out.”
He tipped his dark head in mocking acquiescence, then said, “May I finish my wine first?”
May I. Her sense of control grew with the question, and after a moment of icy silence, she nodded. She wanted him out—meant to have him out—but she didn’t need to make an enemy. Because faithless or not, Trace was Lara’s lover. She’d seen who won the battle over Lara’s car this afternoon. Trace had the clout at Woodwind. He could persuade Lara to fire her, if he really wanted to; of that she was certain now. So I walk a tightrope here.
He took another savoring sip. She watched his strong brown throat move as he swallowed. Another sip. He had a beautiful mouth, though very masculine. She could see why a woman might want him hanging around. Why he’d expect a woman to want him. Did Lara know he was unfaithful? Or was that simply an accepted part of the celebrity life-style? Maybe Lara didn’t care. Not everyone valued fidelity as Gillian did.
“You know, you’ve been worrying me,” he said softly, rousing her from her trance.
“Oh?” Her ever-ready sense of guilt came alive. She didn’t want to worry anyone at Woodwind. She’d come here to be the fly on the wall. To silently see all, then fly away. Bluff it out, she told herself. She lifted his empty glass from his fingers and set it emphatically on the counter, then tipped her head at the door and moved purposefully toward it.
He pushed off the counter and padded alongside her with the loose-limbed grace of a sleepy tiger. “I’ve decided that someone who...” He paused and let the silence stretch.
“Who...?” she prompted evenly. He’d noticed some discrepancy on her résumé? Or maybe—Reaching the door, she flipped the dead bolt and opened the door wide. Stood waiting for him to take the hint and go.
He moved one step into the doorway, then swung back, much too close to her. His hand rose slowly.
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Peggy Nicholson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: In a sumptious Newport Mansion…Gillian Mahler has a plan–take the job as soap opera star Lara Corday′s personal assistant. Maybe she can endear herself to Lara first, then spring the news that Lara is her birth mother, who abandoned her as an infant twenty-eight years before.Trace Sutton has a plan, too–work undercover as a bodyguard, posing as Lara Corday′s gigolo. Maybe then he can discover the identity of the faceless stalker who wants Lara dead.In Lara′s sumptuous mansion high on a cliff above Newport, Rhode Island, Gillian and Trace meet–and attraction sparks right away.This certainly complicates their plans.Gillian can′t possibly allow herself to fall for a man who′s her long-lost mother′s lover, and no way can Trace blow his cover as bodyguard–especially when some sleuthing reveals that Gillian has an excellent motive for murdering the woman he′s guarding!