The Accidental Bodyguard
The Accidental Bodyguard
Ann Major
CELEBRATION 1000 MAN OF THE MONTHMR. JUNE The Man: Lucas Broderick - powerhouse lawyer. The Job: Millions had been left to a conniving "goody-two-shoes." Lucas's mission? To break the will. Accident about to happen: Beautiful mystery heiress Bethany Ann Moran - a.k.a. Chandra. Lucas Broderick had been hired for the case of the century!The Moran family matriarch had died, leaving her fortune to Bethany Ann - the "dark horse" granddaughter. But Bethany never arrived to claim her inheritance… and coincidentally Lucas wound up with an alluring amnesiac hiding out in his house. Lucas knew the gorgeous stranger was trouble, but nothing would stop him from protecting her. Even though Chandra bore a remarkable resemblance to Bethany Ann Moran… .MAN OF THE MONTH: Can Lucas save her from the dangerous past? He has to - and this time he'll make Chandra his bride! Find out in this exciting Celebration 1000 MAN OF THE MONTH.
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u683a5ff2-dd21-53d1-bd7a-ce1e124e7fce)
Excerpt (#uadeeaa51-0426-5647-b83b-cada34e44e37)
Dear Reader (#u7206bb67-de78-578d-9ce9-422091e569f1)
Title Page (#u71e8953e-aed7-5d90-9327-a7aad408150d)
Ann Major (#uc06c827d-70ad-5cd8-a431-d361904ca8da)
Dear Reader (#ua6f5b3d9-810f-5d36-b7ed-54d866a862f2)
Prologue (#uea756da7-f3b2-57a4-94e5-9e3e8b1dd133)
Chapter One (#u3dd25a30-04ef-57eb-ab9d-7819aceeb41e)
Chapter Two (#uce2f0360-3404-538f-b1d3-c0af664c3511)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
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)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Where The Hell Had His Boys Found Her?
“Boys!” he shouted as he bunched the thick white terry cloth around his waist.
They were far too clever to answer.
She turned off the faucets and said quietly, “It’s not their fault, you know.”
“Don’t defend them. Who the hell are you anyway?” Lucas whispered, too hotly aware of her lithe golden body to be able to speak. “How long have you been living—”
But he already knew. “Eleven days?” he croaked.
Her face turned crimson. She nodded.
She was the pet. She was the mysterious angelic presence he’d sensed in the house who’d magically improved his life with his sons. Her spell was so powerful she’d even managed to insert herself into his dreams.
No wonder his boys had been determined to fire all those nannies and stay home and tend her…
Dear Reader,
It’s hard to believe that this is the grand finale of CELEBRATION 1000! But all good things must come to an end. Not that there aren’t more wonderful things in store for you next month, too…
But as for June, first we have an absolutely sizzling MAN OF THE MONTH from Ann Major called The Accidental Bodyguard.
Are you a fan of HAWK’S WAY? If so, don’t miss the latest “Hawk’s” story, The Temporary Groom by Joan Johnston. Check out the family tree on page six and see if you recognize all the members of the Whitelaw family.
And with The Cowboy and the Cradle Cait London has begun a fabulous new western series—THE TALLCHIEFS. (P.S. The next Tallchief is all set for September!)
Many of you have written to say how much you love Elizabeth Bevarly’s books. Her latest, Father of the Brood, book #2 in the FROM HERE TO PATERNITY series, simply shouldn’t be missed.
This month is completed with Karen Leabo’s The Prodigal Groom, the latest in our WEDDING NIGHT series, and don’t miss a wonderful star of tomorrow— DEBUT AUTHOR Eileen Wilks, who’s written The Loner and the Lady.
As for next month…we have a not-to-be-missed MAN OF THE MONTH by Anne McAllister, and Dixie Browning launches DADDY KNOWS LAST, a new Silhouette continuity series beginning in Desire.
Senior Editor
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
The Accidental Bodyguard
Ann Major
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ANN MAJOR
loves writing romance novels as much as she loves reading them. She is the proud mother of three children who are now in high school and college. She lists hiking in the Colorado mountains with her husband, playing tennis, sailing, enjoying her cats and playing the piano among her favorite activities.
Dear Reader,
I am very thrilled to be part of the CELEBRATION 1000 for the Silhouette Desire line, and I hope each of you will enjoy The Accidental Bodyguard.
My books always seem to me to be like patchwork quilts. I mix my experiences and reactions with the stories other people tell me and the things I read, and out comes a story. Not that this is an easy process. Not that when I am done I can’t still remember the agony of every bad idea and every ripped-out seam.
My husband is a doctor, and I had originally intended to write a story about the skeleton of an Indian girl that hangs in his office. I remember when a great big crate from India arrived—years ago—and we went up after work with the children and pried the lid off the carton. We found a beautiful, carefully packed skeleton inside. My husband said she couldn’t have been older than eighteen when she died. We were all deeply awed as he gently lifted the skeleton out and we all wondered who she had been and how she had lived.
This book began with my questions about that girl, and I thought I would be writing about a skeleton coming to life and changing a doctor’s life. But as I began to research the story and read about reincarnation, I began wondering about other mysteries.
Why do we sometimes feel we know a person instantly? Why do new patterns and new places sometimes feel so familiar? Why do some souls seem so much wiser than others? How can a person fall in love instantly? As you will see, there is no skeleton in my story. When I sat down to write, my imagination twisted and turned and I wrote an entirely different book than the one I had envisioned. But what stayed the same was my great curiosity about life and death and the boundaries of love.
Enjoy.
Prologue
“Chandra is a conniving little do-goody bitch!” Holly said.
The rest of the family, which included, among others, Holly’s parents, Ned and Sandra Moran, as well as her husband, Stinky Brown, and his brother, Hal, nodded in silent unison.
Lucas Broderick stopped scribbling on his legal pad and lifted his head to observe the young woman who spoke so vehemently against the cousin who was to gain control of the Moran fortune.
Holly Moran. had chocolate-dark curls, an hourglass figure and a flare for drama a trial lawyer such as Lucas couldn’t help but envy. She still had on the black sheath and the rope of pearls she had worn to her grandmother’s funeral. But the dark eyes that locked with Lucas’s were clear and lovely, unmarred by any trace of grief as she let him know that even though she was married, she was hot and…available.
A billion dollars was one hell of a turn-on. Well, almost a billion, give or take a hundred million or two.
Holly was as dropdead gorgeous and just as dropdead mean as his ex-wife, Joan, had been. Holly had that too-bright glow of a woman who hadn’t yet settled comfortably into marriage. For half a second, Lucas, who was lonely for the kind of pleasure a woman like Holly could provide, was tempted.
Then his rational mind clicked in.
Been there. Done that.
His steel-gray eyes glittered as he gave her an ironic smile. Been taken in by that act before, pretty lady.
The last thing he needed was another Joan. His ex-wife had given him the shaft and taken him to the cleaners as nobody had since he’d been a green kid. As no woman ever would again.
He’d given his heart to Joan, and she’d ripped it out while it was still beating. She had taken most of his money, and she’d done a number on their sons.
His enemies said he had no heart. Who needed one?
Holly’s silky voice grew more vicious, not that she was addressing anybody in particular. “I tell you her do-goody act was all fake. How could Gram have left everything to her?”
“Not quite everything,” Uncle Henry dared to object. “Gertie did leave each of us two—”
Of the four voices that shouted him down, Holly’s was the softest, and the angriest.
“She might as well have! You may be able to get by on a lousy million or two since you’re content to live in that miserable unair-conditioned shack on your godforsaken farm like a hermit.”
For three hours the Morans had been ranting about Gertrude Moran’s will in the ranch house’s richly paneled library while Lucas, their legal hired gun, had reposed in a deep leather armchair, listening impassively as he watched the clouds move in and thicken against the distant horizon. Occasionally he wrote down a note or two on his yellow pad, which he would probably never so much as glance at again.
Much had been written about the rugged, legendary lawyer who was now sprawled in the library’s most comfortable chair in scuffed boots, faded jeans and a crisp white shirt. But the majority of the press coverage was false.
Lucas could have told the Morans a thing or two about poverty, more than they wanted to know, more than he wanted to remember. For he had been born in India to an impoverished missionary. His father, a zealot and an idealist, had forced his family to live in the same dangerous, squalid slums as the people he helped. Then the old man had given all his love and attention to the impoverished Indians.
Left alone to fend for himself in dangerous neighborhoods, Lucas had been beaten by jeering gangs of bullies more times than he could count, his meager possessions stolen, his emerging male self-confidence shattered. His father’s response had been to feel sorry for the young criminals and to tell Lucas to turn the other cheek. Lucas had sworn that when he grew up he would be the fighter and the taker. He would hit hard. Others could turn the other cheek.
But Lucas’s real roots were something he worked very hard to conceal. He didn’t want anybody to know that he harbored a deep-rooted feeling of abandonment and poor self-esteem. He wanted people to think he was tough and cruel—a winner. So he manipulated his public image as ruthlessly as he manipulated the minds of jurors when he made them believe the most preposterous arguments, or as easily as he convinced clients like the Morans they couldn’t possibly get what they wanted without him. His profession was a highstakes game, which he always played to win.
Texas journalists loved to quote him. “God may have created the world, but the Devil put the spin on it.” “Ten thousand times more crimes have been committed in the name of love than in the name of hate.” “No good deed goes unpunished.” These cynical if less than original statements, which seemed to sum up his philosophy about life, had appeared in dozens of profiles of him in Texas magazines and newspapers.
He was widely hated and only grudgingly admired. Flamboyant quotes were hardly Lucas’s only talent. He was a superb athlete, and he excelled in mathematics. He automatically converted everything into numbers—especially his time, that being to him the most valuable of all commodities because, once it was gone, it was gone forever.
Since all Lucas’s clients bombarded him with tales of woe, he usually found these long preliminary consultations tiresome, especially if he was expected to fake compassion. But the Morans’ tale was too bizarre and their threatened fortune too huge for their story not to compel his full attention. He was struggling to pretend sympathy. What the hell? He’d sold himself before for a lot less than a billion.
While Holly attacked Stinky for always taking Beth’s side and not seeing her as a threat before today, Lucas reviewed his notes.
The family’s do-goody dark horse, a Miss Bethany Ann—he’d made a scribble that she wanted to be called Chandra—had come from out of nowhere and galloped away with the family fortune.
Both the girl and her story intrigued him. He furrowed his black brows as he tried to read his nearly illegible scrawl.
Bulk of fortune goes into charitable foundation. Complete control given to Miss Bethany Ann.
Weird little girl. Prematurely born in Calcutta when her mother and father were on a round-the-world tour.
India—so he and she had been born in the same hellhole.
An oddball from birth, she was claustrophobic. She was also a vegetarian who refused to eat beef. Never fit into the family. When she was two and had begun to talk, she’d told her family that her name was Chandra, not Beth. She had babbled frantically of memories of another life and of belonging to another, poorer family. When she grew older she said her enraged older sister, in an effort to save the family from shame, had shut her inside a box and buried her alive beneath a house when she found out Chandra had gotten pregnant by the town’s local bad boy whom she loved instead of her betrothed.
Under hypnosis Chandra had spoken in a foreign language that a language expert at the University of Texas had identified as an obscure dialect of Hindi. Upon investigation, a family in a remote area of India where this dialect was spoken had been found. Names, dates and facts of this family’s history exactly fit Chandra’s story.
Gertrude and all the Morans had flown to India. A seven-year-old Chandra had led everybody to a ruined house and insisted they dig up a brick floor. Chandra’s former sister, a woman by then in her midfifties, had burst into guilty tears when a crumbling box with the bones of a young girl and those of her unborn child had been discovered, and Chandra had accused her of burying her alive. The grave of the dead girl’s bad-boy lover was visited next. Apparently he had stepped in front of a train and had been sliced to death shortly after he’d been told that the dead girl had run away.
Weird. Lucas, who knew more than he wanted to about India and reincarnation, had underlined the word three times. This girl, Bethany, Chandra, whatever, had wanted to share the Moran money with those less fortunate. Understandably alarmed, the entire Moran clan had been determined to erase the inappropriate “memories” and eradicate such inappropriate attitudes. They had taken the little girl to countless doctors, psychologists, and finally to a hypnotist who was no help at all, since he had said this looked like a genuine case of reincarnation if ever there was one. He pointed out that Chandra’s claustrophobia was perfectly natural under such circumstances.
Gertrude Moran had fired the hypnotist on the spot and refused to take the child to any more “charlatans.” After Bethany’s parents had been killed in a car accident, the old lady had done everything in her power to make the girl forget her “former life” and mold her into a true Moran. But the impossible child had been kicked out of every fancy boarding school she’d been sent to, and the old lady had had to take charge of the girl’s education herself. Gertrude had taken the child everywhere and taught her about investments, real estate, bonds, ranching and stocks.
But apparently the shape of Bethany’s personality had been as difficult as the old lady’s. Not that the girl hadn’t appeared gentle and loving and generous and biddable. But no matter how intelligent and receptive she had seemed on the surface, her character had been as true to its own shape as the most uncarvable stone. She continued to sympathize with those less fortunate than she. At the age of twelve she had her name legally changed to Chandra. As she grew older she had a tendency to date bad boys—because she said she was looking for the man she had loved in her former life. When she was eighteen and on the brink of marriage to Stinky Brown, a slick charmer Gertrude Moran had considered totally unsuitable, she and her grandmother had had a disastrous quarrel. Chandra had broken off with Stinky and run away without a dime, never to be seen or spoken of or to again.
Until now.
For a fleeting moment Lucas felt an unwanted respect for a girl who could stand up to Gertrude Moran and walk away from such a huge fortune. Then he reminded himself there was no such thing as selfless good, that somebody always paid.
Lucas’s last words on the yellow page were Holly’s. “The conniving little do-goody bitch. I tell you her do-goody act was all fake.”
Could be, pretty lady. Fortune hunters and con artists damn sure came in all sorts of interesting shapes and varieties. But this kid with the innocent face and the freckles and the masses of golden hair was damn good.
Lucas lifted a picture of a seven-year-old girl standing before a hut in India with her “other family.” Next he looked at a grainy black-and-white newspaper picture of her standing beside some look-alike heiress buddy named Cathy Calderon. They both wore ragged jeans, steel-toed work boots and hard hats as they posed in front of a concrete blockhouse one of her church groups had recently completed for a Mexican family.
Couldn’t tell much other than the fact that Bethany Chandra damn sure had long legs and a cute butt.
Been there. Long legs and a cute butt had cost him big time. Joan had started by taking half of his estate. She’d won child support, lots of it. Then she’d dumped the boys back on him.
His housekeeper had quit the first day, shaking both fists and screaming, “Your sons are savages, Mr. Broderick. If you don’t pack them off to a military school, and soon, you’ll be sorry.”
No housekeeper he’d hired since had lasted more than a week, and his once elegant house was a shambles.
Forget Joan and the housekeeper problem.
The intriguing fortune hunter with the intriguing backside was living in an impoverished barrio and running a huge, privately endowed, highly successful, nonprofit organization called Casas de Cristo, which built houses for the poor all over northern Mexico. She had tribes of wealthy philanthropists who trusted her enough to donate their millions. She had church groups and college kids from all over the United States providing money and free labor.
Missionaries were a tiresome, impractical breed. He should know. His father had played at saving the world. What the hell? The more starving Indians he’d fed, the more babies they’d produced with more mouths to be fed. One thing was sure. The old man had damn sure failed to provide for his own sons. Lucas had had to work his tail off to get a start at the good life.
Thus, Lucas was mildly surprised that he felt such distaste at the thought of defaming this girl when such an immense fortune and therefore his own lucrative fee were at stake. All he had to do was drum up a few witnesses to say that Bethany was cheating her benefactors by building her houses for less than she said or that she was taking bribes from the poor families selected to have houses built for them.
He loathed do-gooders. Why should it bother him that there wasn’t a shred of evidence that she was anything other than what she appeared to be—that rare and highly bizarre individual like his father who actually wanted to help other people?
Odd that he didn’t particularly relish having to prove that Gertrude Moran had been senile when she’d drawn up her new will, either.
But that last part would be easier.
A flash of movement flickered across the golden urn that sat in the center of a library table. The urn, conspicuously located but now forgotten, was surrounded by stacks of legal documents, coffee cups, wineglasses, beer bottles and half-eaten sandwiches. Lucas glanced from it out the window, where he got a double surprise.
The sky was now an eerie green. A dark man in a black Stetson sat in a blue van parked beside his Lincoln. After studying the storm clouds and the newcomer for a tense moment, Lucas relaxed, dismissing them both as of no immediate importance.
Not that the Morans had noticed either the clouds or the van. And they had quit all pretense of interest in the urn that contained Gertrude Moran’s ashes immediately after the reading of her will, at which point they’d started hunting their lawyer.
Fortunately Lucas had been close by in San Antonio visiting Pete, his older brother, who was a doctor.
Lucas leaned forward in his chair and lifted the urn with his left hand. Whatever he had seen there had vanished. All he saw now was his own brooding dark face and his thick tumble of unruly black hair. Turning the urn carelessly with his other hand, he glanced at the portrait of the woman whose ashes he held.
Gertrude Moran’s sharp, painted eyes glinted at him with an expression of don’t-you-dare-try-to-mess-with-me-you-young-upstart. In old age with her soft snowy hair, she had remained a handsome woman. Holly had told Lucas that the portrait had been finished less than a month ago. Lucas found it hard to imagine someone who looked so forceful and intelligent not knowing exactly what she was doing when she’d drawn up her will.
Gertrude Moran had been shrewd all her life. The original Moran fortune had been in land and oil. She’d diversified, doubling her fortune while other oil people went broke. In an age when most rich people were stuffy and dull, she had been a hoot. The newspapers had been full of her stunts.
Lucas lowered his gaze. Well, she’d damn sure stirred the family brew by secretly changing all the ingredients in her will and leaving only a few million to these spoiled bastards.
“Well, Mr. Broderick, can you get us our money back or not?” Holly leaned forward and issued another invitation with her dark, glowing eyes and a display of cleavage.
Been there, he reminded himself, but he dropped the urn with a clang.
Stinky jumped as if he was afraid Gertrude’s spirit would spring out of the urn like a bad genie. A hush fell over the room, and for a long moment it did seem, even to Lucas, that those keen, painted eyes brightened with mischief and that some bold, alien presence had invaded the room.
He almost felt like clanging the urn again to break the spell.
His hard face tensed. “Can I get the money?” He leafed through the will. “It’s a crapshoot. It’s not too difficult to break a will that involves leaving one family member an entire fortune at the expense of the others. But charitable foundations with iron-clad, carefully thought out legal documents such as these are tricky, especially when the foundation will contribute substantially to several powerhouse charities who have teams of lawyers on their payroll.”
“But Beth bamboozled Gram into giving her everything—”
“Not quite everything. Your grandmother did adequately provide for you. At least most judges would see it that way. Technically your cousin won’t actually be inheriting the fortune, Ms. Moran. She would merely be managing the foundation.”
“For a huge salary?”
“A six-figure annual salary for overseeing such a vast enterprise would hardly be out of line.”
“Beth is a thief and a criminal.”
Lucas felt an insane urge to defend the absent heiress.
“Those are serious charges that might not be so easily proven. From the picture you’ve drawn of Beth—a goody-two-shoes Samaritan building houses for the poor in Mexico—it might be difficult and unpleasant to convince twelve disinterested people she wouldn’t sincerely honor your grandmother’s last wishes. If she’s a fake, we’ve got a chance. But if she’s not—” He paused. “Unfortunately juries and judges have a tendency to favor do-gooders. I suggest that you talk to your cousin. Try to persuade her it would be in her best interests to divide the money between all of you.”
“You have no idea how stubborn she is.”
“Maybe one of you will come up with a better idea.”
A pair of black-lashed, olive-bright eyes set in a gorgeous face met his, and Lucas was chilled when he sensed a terrible hatred and an implacable will.
The black clouds were rolling in from the west. The mood in the library had darkened, as well. Other faces turned toward him, and they were equally hard.
Lucas almost shuddered. No wonder the saint had run.
Strangely, his feelings of empathy for the girl intensified. He tried to fight the softening inside him, but it was almost as though he was on her side instead of the Morans’.
Ridiculous. He couldn’t afford such misplaced sympathies.
“If you take the case, how much will you charge?” Holly demanded.
“If I lose-nothing.”
“And—if you win?”
“I would be working on a contingency basis, of course—”
“How much?”
“Forty percent. Plus expenses.”
“Of nearly a billion dollars! What? Are you mad? Why, that’s highway robbery.”
“No, Ms. Moran, it’s my fee. I play for keeps—all or nothing. If you want me, and if I agree to take the case, I swear to you that if there is any way to destroy your cousin’s name and her claim to your fortune, I’ll find it. I am very thorough and utterly merciless when it comes to matters of this nature. I’ll study these documents and send my P.I. to Mexico to investigate Casas de Cristo and see what dirt I can dig up on her down there. She’s bound to have enemies. All we have to do is find people who’ll talk about her and get them talking. Fan the flames, so to speak.”
Lucas began gathering documents and stuffing them into his briefcase. “Just so you can reach me anytime—” He scribbled his unlisted home phone number and handed it to Stinky. “I’ll let myself out.”
Lightning streaked to the ground. Almost immediately a sharp cracking sound shook the house. Wind and torrents of rain began to batter the windows.
The drought was over.
But none of the ranchers who had prayed for rain rejoiced. They were watching Lucas’s large brown hands violently snap the locks on his briefcase as he prepared to go.
The mood in the library had grown as ugly and dangerous as the storm outside. The Morans were in that no-win situation so many people involved in litigation find themselves. They were wondering whom they disliked the most—their adversary, the family saint, or their own utterly ruthless but highly reputed attorney.
One minute Lucas was bursting out of the library doors into the foyer, intent on nothing except driving to San Antonio as fast as possible. In the next minute, Lucas felt as if he’d been sucked blindly into a cyclone and hurled into an entirely new reality in which an incredibly powerful force gripped him, body and soul. In which all his dark bitternesses miraculously dissolved. Even his fierce ambition to work solely for money was gone.
Unsuperstitious by nature, Lucas did not believe in psychic powers or ghosts. But this otherworldly experience was a very pleasurable feeling.
Dangerously pleasurable. Almost sexual, and dangerously familiar somehow.
All his life he’d been driven by anger and greed or by the quest for power.
And suddenly those drives were gone. What he really wanted was in this room.
He stopped in mid-stride. His huge body whirled; his searing gray eyes searched every niche and darkened corner of the hall.
The mysterious presence was very near. As he stood there, he continued to feel the weird, overpowering connection.
She was as afraid of this thing as he was.
She?
For no reason at all Lucas was reminded of the times he and his brother, Pete, had hidden together as children from the Indian slum bullies, not speaking to one another but each profoundly aware of the other.
“Hello?” Lucas’s deep querying drawl held a baffled note.
He held his breath. For the first time he noted how eerily quiet the foyer was. How the presence of death seemed to linger like an unwanted guest.
How the hall with its pale green wallpaper was heavy with the odor of roses past their prime. How these swollen blossoms, no doubt leftovers from Gertrude Moran’s memorial service, were massed everywhere—in vases, in Meissen.bowls. How several white petals had fallen onto the polished tabletops and floors. Holly had shown him the old lady’s rose garden and had told him she had loved roses.
Lucas’s senses were strangely heightened as he stood frozen outside the library doors, struggling to figure out what was happening to him. He inhaled the sicklysweet, funereal scent of the dying roses. He listened to each insistent tick of the vermeil clock.
The summer sunlight was fading. Much of the white and gilt furniture was cast in shadow. The threadbare Aubusson rug at his feet had a forest green border.
When he saw the closet with its door standing partially ajar, he felt strangely drawn to it. Oddly enough, when he stepped toward it, the connection was instantly broken. He was free.
All his old bitterness and cynicism immediately regained him.
He bolted out of the Moran mansion faster than before.
One (#ulink_0ada549a-5af3-52ab-92ec-03580f333c46)
“Kill!”
Sweet P.’s earsplitting voice blasted inside Lucas’s black Lincoln as he raced toward the hospital. The shrieks seemed to slice open his skull and shred the tender tissues of his inner ear as handily as a meat cleaver.
There should be a law against a three-year-old screaming in an automobile speeding sixty miles per hour on a freeway.
Just as there should be a law against a kid being up at five in the morning experimenting with her older cousin’s handcuffs.
Just as there should be a law against Peppin owning a pair of the damn things in the first place.
“You get off here,” Pete suddenly said as they were about to pass the exit ramp.
Tires screamed as Lucas swerved across two lanes onto the down ramp.
“Mommy! Carol!” Patti.yelled between sobs.
Too bad Mommy was out of town and Carol, her sitter, had called in sick.
Patti shook her hands violently, rattling the handcuffs.
Lucas’s temples thudded with equal violence.
It was Monday morning. Six o’clock to be exact. Lucas felt like hell. Usually he never dreamed, but last night a weird nightmare about a girl in trouble had kept him up most of the night. In the dream, he had loved the girl, and they’d been happy for a while. Then she’d been abducted, and he’d found himself alone in a misty landscape of death and stillness and ruin. At first he’d been terrified she was dead. Then she’d made a low moan, and he had known that if he didn’t save her, he would lose everything that mattered to him in the world. He’d tracked her through a maze of ruined slums only to find her and have her utter a final lowthroated cry and die as he lifted her into his arms. He’d bolted out of his bed, his body drenched in sweat, his heart racing, his sense of tragic loss so overwhelmingly profound he couldn’t sleep again.
The girl’s ethereally lovely face and voluptuous body had seemed branded into his soul. He’d gotten up and tried to sketch her on his legal notepad. Sleek and slim, she had that classy, rich-girl look magazine editors pay so dearly for. She had high cheekbones, a careless smile, yellow hair and sparkling blue eyes. He’d torn the sheet from the pad and thrown it away, only to sketch another.
Due in court at ten, Lucas had intended to be halfway to Corpus Christi by now. Instead Pete, Sweet P., the boys and he were rushing to the emergency room, where Pete was on call. Some girl had overdosed, and a doctor was needed STAT, medical jargon for fast. Gus, an emergency-room security guard, had volunteered to remove the handcuffs if Pete brought Sweet P. when he came.
Disaster had struck right after Lucas had loaded the luggage and boys into the Lincoln and Pete and Sweet P. had gotten into Pete’s Porsche. The Porsche wouldn’t start because someone had left an interior light on all night.
Someone had also removed Lucas’s jumper cables from his trunk. And that same mysterious someone had also lost the key to Peppin’s handcuffs. Thus, Lucas and the boys had to drive Pete and Sweet P. to the ER before they could head for home.
Why was Lucas even surprised? His personal life had been chaos ever since the boys had moved in. For starters, they must have dialed every nine-hundred number in America, because his phone bill had run into the thousands of dollars the first month they’d lived with him.
Lucas put on his right turn signal when he saw the blue neon sign for San Antonio City Memorial and swerved into the covered parking lot for the hospital’s emergency room. With a swoosh of tires and a squeal of brakes, Lucas stopped the big car too suddenly, startling Sweet P. into silence. Her watery blue eyes looked addled as she took in the blazing lights of the three ambulances and the squad car.
Lucas’s expression was grim as he lowered the automobile windows, cut the motor and gently gathered Sweet P. into his arms so Pete would be free to check his patient.
As he got out of the Lincoln with the squirming toddler, Lucas gave Peppin and Montague a steely glance. “You two be good.”
“No problem.” Peppin’s sassy grin was all braces. Huge mirrored sunglasses hid his mischievous eyes.
As always Montague, who resented authority, pretended to ignore him and kept his nose in a book entitled Psychic Vampires.
The emergency room was such a madhouse, Lucas forgot the boys. Apparently there’d been a fight at the jail. Three prisoners lay on stretchers. A man with hairy armpits and a potbelly wearing only gray Jockey shorts with worn-out elastic was standing outside a treatment room screaming drunkenly that doctors made too much money and he was going to get his lawyer if he didn’t get treated at once. In another room an obese woman was pointing to her right side, saying she hurt and that her doctor had spent a fortune on tests and that she was deathly allergic to some kind of pink medicine and that her medical records were in Tyler on microfilm if anybody cared about them. Six telephones buzzed constantly. Doctors were dictating orders to exhausted nurses.
In the confusion it took Lucas a while to find Gus. Meanwhile Sweet P. was so fascinated by the drunk and the fat lady, she stopped crying. Enthroned on the counter of the nurses’ station, she was having the time of her life. A plump redheaded nurse was feeding her pizza and candy and cola, which she gobbled greedily while Gus rummaged in a toolbox for the correct pair of bolt cutters.
“Now you hold still, little princess,” Gus said.
Suddenly Pete’s frantic voice erupted from an examining room down the hall.
“She’s gone!”
Lucas left Sweet P. with Gus and raced to the examining room, where an IV dangled over an empty gurney with blood-streaked sheets. Bloody footprints drunkenly crisscrossed the white-tiled floor.
“She has little feet,” Lucas whispered inanely, lifting a foot when he realized he was standing squarely on top of two toe prints.
Pete yelled, “Nurse!”
A plump nurse in a blue scrub suit, wearing a plastic ID, ambled inside.
“Oh, my God!”
Pete thumbed hurriedly through the missing patient’s chart, reading aloud.
“No name. A Jane Doe. Brought in by a truck driver who found her hitchhiking on the highway. Tested positive for a multitude of legal and illegal drugs. Head injury. Stitches put in by plastic surgeon. Contusions on wrists and ankles. Disruptive. Belligerent. Very confused. Amnesia. Possible subdural hematoma. Refused CAT scan because she went insane when we put her face inside the machine. Claustrophobic.”
“What does all that mean?” Lucas demanded.
“Not good. She’s high as a kite, badly confused.”
“Doctor—” The nurse’s whisper was anxious. “A while ago someone called about her. Said he was family. Sounded very concerned. Described a girl who could have been this girl. Sammy’s new, and I’m afraid she told him we’d admitted a girl matching her description. The caller said he was coming right over. But when Sammy told the patient that a family member was on his way, she became very agitated.”
“Get security on this immediately,” Pete ordered. “This young woman is in no condition to be out of bed. Check the entrances. The parking lots. In her condition she couldn’t have gone far.”
Fire and ice.
Chilled to the bone, burning up at the same time, the barefoot girl shivered convulsively in the parking lot. Her thoughts kept slipping and losing direction like a sailboat in rough waves.
She didn’t know who she was.
Or where she was.
Or who wanted to kill her.
When that freckled nurse had asked her her name, terrible images had rolled through her tired brain.
A name? Something as specific as a name?
“Oh, dear God,” had been all she could whisper brokenly.
She could remember the van rolling, catching fire. She kept seeing a gray face, its hideous vacant eyes peering at her through plastic.
Pain and terror shuddered through the injured girl.
They knew who she was, and they were coming after her.
Her head throbbed. When she tried to walk, her gait was wide. Her feet felt like they didn’t quite touch the ground, and she had the sensation she was about to topple backward.
Crouching low outside the entrance, the girl had tracked blood down the concrete steps because slivers of glass were still embedded in her heels. Her torn, blood-encrusted jeans and hospital gown clung to her perspiring body like a wet shroud.
Vaguely she remembered someone cutting her red T-shirt and her bra off. Patches of yellow hair were glued to her skull. Dark shadows ringed her blue eyes. She kept swallowing against a dry metallic taste in her mouth. She kept pushing at the loose bandage that hid the row of stitches that were yellow with antiseptic. What was left of a heparin lock oozed blood down her arm.
She had to get out of here.
But how? When ambulances and cops were everywhere?
When those two curious boys in the black Lincoln kept jumping up and down and staring restlessly out of the car.
Feeling muddled, she shut her eyes. Her entire life consisted of a few hours and less than half a dozen foggy memories that made no sense. It was as if she was a child again, and there were monsters in the dark.
Only the monsters were real.
She remembered huge headlights blinding her as she’d thrown herself in front of them. She remembered the frightened trucker, lifting her and demanding angrily, “Girlie, what were you trying to do?” Next she remembered the hospital.
The two boys in the Lincoln must’ve grown bored with leaning out the windows because all of a sudden they slithered into the front seat like a pair of eels. They leaned over the dashboard, fighting for control of the radio, holding the seek button down through several stations until they came to rap music. Gleefully they slapped their right hands together, turned the volume up and settled back to listen.
“Boys! That’s way too loud!”
A stout security officer edged between the girl and the Lincoln. The boy with the slicked-back ponytail and the shark-tooth necklace quirked his head out the window again. When his huge mirrored glasses glinted her way, she was afraid he’d spot her.
“Sure, Officer,” he said, clumsily faking a respectful attitude as he thumped the dash with his hand in time to the beat.
The officer lingered a minute or two till the volume was low enough. Only then did he stride away. When he had gone the boy leaned out of the car again, hand still thumping the side of the car as he stared fiercely in the direction of her shadowy hiding place. Twelve, thirteen maybe, he had the surly good looks of a wannabe bad-boy.
The fingers stopped thumping. He yanked off his mirrored glasses and wiggled so far out of the car, he nearly fell.
She heard more sirens in the distance as his gray eyes zeroed in on her.
Dear God.
His sulkily smirking lips mouthed, “Hi.” He started to wave.
She put a finger to her lips in warning as two more squad cars, sirens blaring, rushed into the lot. A dozen officers with hand-held radios jumped out.
She shrank more deeply into the shadows, her pleading eyes clutching the smiling boy’s as a fat cop shuffled over to the Lincoln.
“You been here awhile, kid?”
The sassy smile faded. He gave the cop a sullen nod.
“You seen anything suspicious?”
Sulky silence. Then slowly the black ponytail bobbed. “Yeah.” He pointed toward the alley at the opposite end of the parking lot. “I saw…a girl with a—a bandage on her head. Way over there.”
The cops shouted to the others and they took off in a dead gallop. When they had disappeared, the boys slapped their right hands together.
Then, ever so cautiously, they eased a door open and scuttled toward her. Hovering over her, their dark narrow faces seemed to waver in and out of focus.
They were so alike they could have passed for twins. Not that they were trying to pass. The taller and skinnier of the two had shorter hair, wire-rimmed glasses and pressed jeans. The huskier kid with the ponytail and the gold earring wore rumpled black clothes. A vicious shark tooth dangled from his necklace.
When they leaned down, their hands, shaking, a whirring sound beat inside her ears and made her feel so dizzy and sick, she almost passed out.
She barely felt their hands as they gently circled her. Or heard their frightened whispers.
“We have to help her.”
“But she’s hurt. Look at all those bruises, and her eyes—”
“And her feet! We should take her into the hospital so Uncle Pete—”
“No!” She grabbed their arms, her broken nails digging into their skin, her huge eyes pleading.
“Can’t you see how scared she is?” a young voice croaked hoarsely. “Somebody bad might be after her. We gotta save her.”
“What’ll Dad do?”
The whirring inside her head got louder. Halfcarrying, half-dragging her, they crawled with her to the car and made a bed of lumpy pillows and blankets for her on the floorboard of the back seat. The boys unfolded a blanket and covered her, whispering that if she was quiet they could smuggle her home and hide her in their room until she got well.
The girl lay there, trembling uncontrollably, terrified of the claustrophobic feeling she had because the blanket was over her face.
Only vaguely was she aware of footsteps hurrying, of car doors slamming, of men’s voices talking low in the front seat, of a little girl’s excited shouting. “See there! Got ’em off!”
“Oh-big deal.”
But the girl in the back seat instantly registered a man’s beautiful, gravelly drawl. “Peppin, the officer told me you helped them.”
There was something so familiar about the sound of his voice. Something so warm. It seemed to resonate in her soul.
She knew him. She had loved him. Somewhere. Some time.
“Yeah, Dad. Peppin really helped ’em,” the older boy said.
“Shut up, Monty!” Peppin slugged his brother.
“Hey!”
“Who are all the cops looking for anyway, Dad?”
“Some young girl got high on drugs and had a wreck. It’s a very serious situation. She could die without proper medical attention.”
The girl felt hot all over. Tears pooled in her eyes.
“Die?” Peppin croaked as a key turned in the ignition. His young face bleached a sickly white, he stared at his tearful hideaway.
She shook her head at him, tears escaping under her eyelids.
Peppin sucked in a long, nervous breath. “So— Uncle Pete, what sort of treatment would she need?”
“Hmm?”
“Your patient?”
Peppin bombarded his uncle with questions, demanding specific details.
Once again Peppin’s father praised his son in that deep melodious drawl of his—this time for his intellectual curiosity.
The man’s low voice was husky and somehow devastatingly familiar, and yet at the same time it lulled her. She wanted to go on listening to it, for nothing seemed left in the whole world but that voice wrapping around her.
Who was he? Why did she feel she knew him?
She was too tired for thought, and her eyelids grew heavy again, fluttering down and then rising as she fought to stay awake.
She slept soundly for the first time since the van had rolled and the driver had chased her into those blinding headlights.
She slept, knowing she was safe, because the man with the beautiful voice was near.
Two (#ulink_78c68b5e-431e-5427-8f64-f55c8fc26795)
Bluish flashes ricocheted in the boys’ bedroom.
It had rained like this the night the blue van had rolled and burned.
What van? Where? Why?
The girl lay rigidly awake, longing for Lucas as she listened to the surf and to the sharp cracking sounds of thunder. Torrents of rain beat a savage tattoo against the bedroom window.
He was two doors down from her. Peacefully asleep in his huge bed, no doubt. Unafraid of the storm and blissfully unaware of the strange woman sleeping in his sons’ bedroom closet.
He might as well have been on the moon.
She stretched restlessly, almost wishing she was as happily unconscious of him as he was of her. But she needed him because he made her feel safe.
Why did her demons always come alive when she closed her eyes in the dark?
She hated feeling shut in and alone, and she felt she was—even though the closet door was louvered and her darling boys were just outside, snugly tucked beneath quilts in their bunk beds, oblivious to the storm and her fears. She lay stiffly on her hidden pallet in their huge closet and stared at the ceiling, watching the lightning that flashed through the louvers and caused irregular patterns of blue light to dance across the walls and hanging clothes.
Her strength had returned rapidly, but, so far, not her memory. Vague illusive images from her past seemed to flicker at the edges of her mind like the lightning, their brief flares so brilliant they blinded her before they vanished into pitch blackness.
Her entire world had become Lucas Broderick’s coldly modern mansion perched on its bluff above Corpus Christi Bay. But more than the mansion’s high white walls and polished marble floors; more than its winding corridors and spiral staircases intrigued her. With every day that passed, she had become more fascinated by Lucas Broderick himself.
From almost that first moment when she had awakened in his sons’ closet to their rush of adolescent chatter, they had made her aware of him.
“What if Dad finds her?”
An audible gasp and then terrified silence as if that prospect was too awful to contemplate.
“You’d better not let him—stupid.”
She had opened her eyes and found their fearful, curious faces peering eagerly at her. She’d had no memory of who they were or how she’d gotten here.
But she’d quickly learned that they were Lucas’s adorable sons, and that they looked endearingly like him.
“She’s awake.”
“Told you she’d live.”
“We’ve got to feed her something or she’ll starve like your gerbil.”
“What’s your name?”
Her name? Blue lights flickered, and she shook her head and made a low moan.
“Pete said she had amnesia, dummy.”
Pete? Who was Pete?
“You hungry?”
“Maybe…some broth,” she whispered.
Their heads swiveled and they stared at each other in round-eyed consternation as if they’d never heard the word. “Broth?”
“Then water,” she managed weakly.
That started a quarrel over who got to fetch it, each of them wanting to.
For ten long days and longer nights those two wonderful boys had fought many battles over the privilege of nursing her. They had checked medical books out of the library. They had cleaned her wounds and doctored them with medicine from Lucas’s huge marble bathroom. They had painstakingly picked the slivers of glass from the soles of her feet with tweezers, plunking the jagged bits into a metal bowl. They had soaked her feet in pails of hot water, and she could almost walk without limping.
They took turns pretending to be sick themselves so that one of them could stay home from school with her. They had given her the antibiotics they tricked their uncle into prescribing for them. For the first few nights they’d coaxed their father into buying and cooking the few foods she could keep down—chicken broth, Jell-O and boiled vegetables, which they’d smuggled up to her.
At first she’d been too weak and ill to worry about the way her presence in their home had forced them to deceive their father. But as she’d grown stronger and more attached to her lively, affectionate nurses, she blamed herself for their burgeoning talent at duplicity. Nursing her wasn’t the worst of it. They were hard at work on a covert project they called Operation Nanny.
The boys didn’t want Lucas to hire a new nanny. “Because,” as Peppin explained, “we couldn’t fool one of those nosy old bags so easy as Dad. A nanny’d be up here all the time—she’d probably find you the first day.”
Thus, every time Lucas informed the boys of a home interview for a prospective nanny, Peppin, who could mimic Lucas’s voice to a T, phoned the woman and told her the job had been filled.
At first the girl had been too ill and too grateful and too terrified of being thrown out of the house to care, but now she felt stricken that she had become a corrupting influence on their characters.
Although Peppin and Montague bickered incessantly, they could be an incredible team. During the day, when Lucas was at work, the boys gave her the run of his huge house, with its soaring ceilings and skylights and views of Corpus Christi Bay. One wall of his bedroom was made entirely of glass. Sometimes she would step out onto his balcony and let the tangy sea air ruffle her hair.
Sometimes she showered in his pink marble bathroom that had both an immense enclosed shower and a bathtub as big as a small swimming pool. Sometimes she spent a languid hour buried beneath mountains of foamy bubbles in his tub. Sometimes she would pick out old clothes from his abundant closets to wear. Always she would linger in his room, studying his things, running his slim black comb through her hair and brushing her teeth with his yellow toothbrush. She would open his drawers and run her fingertips over his undershirts and cuff links, marveling that one man could have so much of everything. But what she loved best was lying in his bed and hugging his pillow to her stomach and imagining him there beside her, holding her. She gathered flowers from his gardens and arranged them in crystal vases everywhere, taking special pains with those that she left on the white table beside his bed. It pleased her when he picked a pale yellow rose from that vase and pinned it to the black lapel of his three-piece suit one morning before he rushed to his office.
She tried to think of ways to repay him for all that his boys had done for her. The endless stark hallways of his beautiful house had been strewn with everything from rumpled clothes, baseball bats, soccer gear and Rollerblades to newspapers when she’d arrived. Dirty dishes had overflowed from the white-tiled kitchen counters onto the ebony dining room table.
When she’d gotten better, she’d convinced the boys that maybe their father wouldn’t be so anxious to hire a nanny or a housekeeper if he didn’t feel the need for one so strongly. She had made a game of cleaning the house.
While they picked up, she would lie on a couch or a chair, perusing the tattered album that contained black-and-white pictures of Lucas’s childhood in India, wondering why he’d looked so unhappy as a boy. Wondering why the pictures of India especially fascinated her even as she prodded the boys to pick up.
Every time Peppin or Monty touched something, the rule was that they had to put it where it belonged. She began talking them through the preparation of simple meals, using the cans in the pantry and the frozen dinners in the refrigerator, so that Lucas always came home to a hot meal. At first they complained bitterly, but she just laughed and tried to motivate them by telling them they were learning basic survival skills.
Mostly they went along with her projects because she lavished attention on them. She walked with them on the beach, threw horseshoes with them and played games. The only thing she refused to do was to let them lead her into the tunnel that wound from the garage under the house down to the beach. When they had unlocked the doors to that weird, underground passage, and she had smelled the mustiness of the place, she had felt as if the black gloom was pressing in on her and she was being suffocated.
Ghastly minutes had crawled by before the feeling of claustrophobia subsided.
“I can’t go in,” she had whispered, clutching her throat, not understanding her terror as she wrenched her hand free of theirs.
“Why?” they asked excitedly, the beams of their flashlights dancing along the wall.
Suddenly she had some memory of being trapped in a box and knowing she was being buried alive. She remembered coughing as dirt sifted through the cracks of her coffin. She remembered kicking and clawing and screaming when the narrow box was black and silent.
“What’s wrong?” the boys demanded.
Blue lights flickered, and the memory was gone.
“I—I don’t know.” She edged away from them toward the open garage doors and brilliant sunlight. “Let’s go inside the house…and watch a video or something.”
How she ached for them when once more they were safely inside and they showed her their home videos and photograph albums with photos that had been taken of their family before the divorce. There were very few pictures of them. The boys told her that their parents had never had time for them, even when they’d been married. It was worse now, though, since their mother had run off and their father kept threatening to send them to military school.
She began to understand that maybe the reason they doted on her was that she was the first adult who ever enjoyed them and made them feel needed.
She encouraged them to go to their father and talk to him. Foolishly she had caused one quarrel between the father and sons by giving some of Lucas’s and the boys’ clothes to their yardman and his family. After Lucas had caught the poor man in a pair of slacks from one of his custom-made suits from London, he had yelled at the boys for an hour. She had wept for causing all three of them so much pain. But the incident had blown over, and Lucas had bought the slacks back from the man.
She had taken two pictures of Lucas from his albums to keep when she was in the boys’ room alone. One was a photograph of him as a man, the other of him as a boy unhappily perched on top of a huge elephant in India.
Lucas kept a box full of articles about himself in the den. She read them all. Apparently Lucas had a professional reputation for toughness and greed. She read that he never made a move unless it was to his financial advantage, that even the women he dated were always rich—as Joan, his first wife, had been. One reporter had likened his predatory nature to that of a barracuda.
The nights when Lucas was at home were difficult because she felt lonely and isolated in the boys’ closet, clutching the photographs of Lucas. But the worst hours were those when all the lights in the house were off and she fell asleep, only to have nightmares.
Most nights she would slip into an old chambray shirt of Lucas’s. After Peppin shut the louvered closet door for her, she would lie there while either Peppin or Montague read aloud. This week they had been reading a book called Psychic Voyages because she had found Psychic Vampires, their favorite, too terrifying. She would lie half-listening to the weird and yet compelling stories of people who believed they had lived other lives.
Eventually she would fall asleep, and it was never long before the dreams came—vivid, full-color visions that seemed so real and loomed larger than life.
Tonight was worse, maybe because it had stormed.
She was a little girl again, playing in a sun-splashed rose garden beside a vast white mansion with a dark-haired girl. At first they carefully gathered the roses, filling huge baskets with them. Then her dream changed. The sky filled with dark clouds, and the house was a blackened ruin. There was nothing in the baskets but stems and thorns. She was older, and her companion was gone. Suddenly a fanged monster with olive-black eyes sprang into the ruined rose garden and began chasing her. She knew if he caught her, he would lock her in a box and bury her alive. But as she ran, her speed slowed, and his accelerated, until she felt his hot breath on her neck and his hands clawing into her waist and dragging her into a dark cave. At first she was afraid she’d been buried alive. Then suddenly fire was all around her and she was struggling through the thick suffocating smoke, trying to find her way out. The last thing she saw was a dead man’s gray face.
She screamed, a piercing, ear-shattering cry that dragged her back to the lumpy pallet. The louvered door was thrown open instantly, and Peppin’s small compact body crouched over hers. His fingers, which smelled of peanut butter and grape jelly and of other flavors best not identified, pressed her lips.
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Ann Major
CELEBRATION 1000 MAN OF THE MONTHMR. JUNE The Man: Lucas Broderick - powerhouse lawyer. The Job: Millions had been left to a conniving "goody-two-shoes." Lucas's mission? To break the will. Accident about to happen: Beautiful mystery heiress Bethany Ann Moran - a.k.a. Chandra. Lucas Broderick had been hired for the case of the century!The Moran family matriarch had died, leaving her fortune to Bethany Ann - the "dark horse" granddaughter. But Bethany never arrived to claim her inheritance… and coincidentally Lucas wound up with an alluring amnesiac hiding out in his house. Lucas knew the gorgeous stranger was trouble, but nothing would stop him from protecting her. Even though Chandra bore a remarkable resemblance to Bethany Ann Moran… .MAN OF THE MONTH: Can Lucas save her from the dangerous past? He has to - and this time he'll make Chandra his bride! Find out in this exciting Celebration 1000 MAN OF THE MONTH.
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u683a5ff2-dd21-53d1-bd7a-ce1e124e7fce)
Excerpt (#uadeeaa51-0426-5647-b83b-cada34e44e37)
Dear Reader (#u7206bb67-de78-578d-9ce9-422091e569f1)
Title Page (#u71e8953e-aed7-5d90-9327-a7aad408150d)
Ann Major (#uc06c827d-70ad-5cd8-a431-d361904ca8da)
Dear Reader (#ua6f5b3d9-810f-5d36-b7ed-54d866a862f2)
Prologue (#uea756da7-f3b2-57a4-94e5-9e3e8b1dd133)
Chapter One (#u3dd25a30-04ef-57eb-ab9d-7819aceeb41e)
Chapter Two (#uce2f0360-3404-538f-b1d3-c0af664c3511)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
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)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Where The Hell Had His Boys Found Her?
“Boys!” he shouted as he bunched the thick white terry cloth around his waist.
They were far too clever to answer.
She turned off the faucets and said quietly, “It’s not their fault, you know.”
“Don’t defend them. Who the hell are you anyway?” Lucas whispered, too hotly aware of her lithe golden body to be able to speak. “How long have you been living—”
But he already knew. “Eleven days?” he croaked.
Her face turned crimson. She nodded.
She was the pet. She was the mysterious angelic presence he’d sensed in the house who’d magically improved his life with his sons. Her spell was so powerful she’d even managed to insert herself into his dreams.
No wonder his boys had been determined to fire all those nannies and stay home and tend her…
Dear Reader,
It’s hard to believe that this is the grand finale of CELEBRATION 1000! But all good things must come to an end. Not that there aren’t more wonderful things in store for you next month, too…
But as for June, first we have an absolutely sizzling MAN OF THE MONTH from Ann Major called The Accidental Bodyguard.
Are you a fan of HAWK’S WAY? If so, don’t miss the latest “Hawk’s” story, The Temporary Groom by Joan Johnston. Check out the family tree on page six and see if you recognize all the members of the Whitelaw family.
And with The Cowboy and the Cradle Cait London has begun a fabulous new western series—THE TALLCHIEFS. (P.S. The next Tallchief is all set for September!)
Many of you have written to say how much you love Elizabeth Bevarly’s books. Her latest, Father of the Brood, book #2 in the FROM HERE TO PATERNITY series, simply shouldn’t be missed.
This month is completed with Karen Leabo’s The Prodigal Groom, the latest in our WEDDING NIGHT series, and don’t miss a wonderful star of tomorrow— DEBUT AUTHOR Eileen Wilks, who’s written The Loner and the Lady.
As for next month…we have a not-to-be-missed MAN OF THE MONTH by Anne McAllister, and Dixie Browning launches DADDY KNOWS LAST, a new Silhouette continuity series beginning in Desire.
Senior Editor
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
The Accidental Bodyguard
Ann Major
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ANN MAJOR
loves writing romance novels as much as she loves reading them. She is the proud mother of three children who are now in high school and college. She lists hiking in the Colorado mountains with her husband, playing tennis, sailing, enjoying her cats and playing the piano among her favorite activities.
Dear Reader,
I am very thrilled to be part of the CELEBRATION 1000 for the Silhouette Desire line, and I hope each of you will enjoy The Accidental Bodyguard.
My books always seem to me to be like patchwork quilts. I mix my experiences and reactions with the stories other people tell me and the things I read, and out comes a story. Not that this is an easy process. Not that when I am done I can’t still remember the agony of every bad idea and every ripped-out seam.
My husband is a doctor, and I had originally intended to write a story about the skeleton of an Indian girl that hangs in his office. I remember when a great big crate from India arrived—years ago—and we went up after work with the children and pried the lid off the carton. We found a beautiful, carefully packed skeleton inside. My husband said she couldn’t have been older than eighteen when she died. We were all deeply awed as he gently lifted the skeleton out and we all wondered who she had been and how she had lived.
This book began with my questions about that girl, and I thought I would be writing about a skeleton coming to life and changing a doctor’s life. But as I began to research the story and read about reincarnation, I began wondering about other mysteries.
Why do we sometimes feel we know a person instantly? Why do new patterns and new places sometimes feel so familiar? Why do some souls seem so much wiser than others? How can a person fall in love instantly? As you will see, there is no skeleton in my story. When I sat down to write, my imagination twisted and turned and I wrote an entirely different book than the one I had envisioned. But what stayed the same was my great curiosity about life and death and the boundaries of love.
Enjoy.
Prologue
“Chandra is a conniving little do-goody bitch!” Holly said.
The rest of the family, which included, among others, Holly’s parents, Ned and Sandra Moran, as well as her husband, Stinky Brown, and his brother, Hal, nodded in silent unison.
Lucas Broderick stopped scribbling on his legal pad and lifted his head to observe the young woman who spoke so vehemently against the cousin who was to gain control of the Moran fortune.
Holly Moran. had chocolate-dark curls, an hourglass figure and a flare for drama a trial lawyer such as Lucas couldn’t help but envy. She still had on the black sheath and the rope of pearls she had worn to her grandmother’s funeral. But the dark eyes that locked with Lucas’s were clear and lovely, unmarred by any trace of grief as she let him know that even though she was married, she was hot and…available.
A billion dollars was one hell of a turn-on. Well, almost a billion, give or take a hundred million or two.
Holly was as dropdead gorgeous and just as dropdead mean as his ex-wife, Joan, had been. Holly had that too-bright glow of a woman who hadn’t yet settled comfortably into marriage. For half a second, Lucas, who was lonely for the kind of pleasure a woman like Holly could provide, was tempted.
Then his rational mind clicked in.
Been there. Done that.
His steel-gray eyes glittered as he gave her an ironic smile. Been taken in by that act before, pretty lady.
The last thing he needed was another Joan. His ex-wife had given him the shaft and taken him to the cleaners as nobody had since he’d been a green kid. As no woman ever would again.
He’d given his heart to Joan, and she’d ripped it out while it was still beating. She had taken most of his money, and she’d done a number on their sons.
His enemies said he had no heart. Who needed one?
Holly’s silky voice grew more vicious, not that she was addressing anybody in particular. “I tell you her do-goody act was all fake. How could Gram have left everything to her?”
“Not quite everything,” Uncle Henry dared to object. “Gertie did leave each of us two—”
Of the four voices that shouted him down, Holly’s was the softest, and the angriest.
“She might as well have! You may be able to get by on a lousy million or two since you’re content to live in that miserable unair-conditioned shack on your godforsaken farm like a hermit.”
For three hours the Morans had been ranting about Gertrude Moran’s will in the ranch house’s richly paneled library while Lucas, their legal hired gun, had reposed in a deep leather armchair, listening impassively as he watched the clouds move in and thicken against the distant horizon. Occasionally he wrote down a note or two on his yellow pad, which he would probably never so much as glance at again.
Much had been written about the rugged, legendary lawyer who was now sprawled in the library’s most comfortable chair in scuffed boots, faded jeans and a crisp white shirt. But the majority of the press coverage was false.
Lucas could have told the Morans a thing or two about poverty, more than they wanted to know, more than he wanted to remember. For he had been born in India to an impoverished missionary. His father, a zealot and an idealist, had forced his family to live in the same dangerous, squalid slums as the people he helped. Then the old man had given all his love and attention to the impoverished Indians.
Left alone to fend for himself in dangerous neighborhoods, Lucas had been beaten by jeering gangs of bullies more times than he could count, his meager possessions stolen, his emerging male self-confidence shattered. His father’s response had been to feel sorry for the young criminals and to tell Lucas to turn the other cheek. Lucas had sworn that when he grew up he would be the fighter and the taker. He would hit hard. Others could turn the other cheek.
But Lucas’s real roots were something he worked very hard to conceal. He didn’t want anybody to know that he harbored a deep-rooted feeling of abandonment and poor self-esteem. He wanted people to think he was tough and cruel—a winner. So he manipulated his public image as ruthlessly as he manipulated the minds of jurors when he made them believe the most preposterous arguments, or as easily as he convinced clients like the Morans they couldn’t possibly get what they wanted without him. His profession was a highstakes game, which he always played to win.
Texas journalists loved to quote him. “God may have created the world, but the Devil put the spin on it.” “Ten thousand times more crimes have been committed in the name of love than in the name of hate.” “No good deed goes unpunished.” These cynical if less than original statements, which seemed to sum up his philosophy about life, had appeared in dozens of profiles of him in Texas magazines and newspapers.
He was widely hated and only grudgingly admired. Flamboyant quotes were hardly Lucas’s only talent. He was a superb athlete, and he excelled in mathematics. He automatically converted everything into numbers—especially his time, that being to him the most valuable of all commodities because, once it was gone, it was gone forever.
Since all Lucas’s clients bombarded him with tales of woe, he usually found these long preliminary consultations tiresome, especially if he was expected to fake compassion. But the Morans’ tale was too bizarre and their threatened fortune too huge for their story not to compel his full attention. He was struggling to pretend sympathy. What the hell? He’d sold himself before for a lot less than a billion.
While Holly attacked Stinky for always taking Beth’s side and not seeing her as a threat before today, Lucas reviewed his notes.
The family’s do-goody dark horse, a Miss Bethany Ann—he’d made a scribble that she wanted to be called Chandra—had come from out of nowhere and galloped away with the family fortune.
Both the girl and her story intrigued him. He furrowed his black brows as he tried to read his nearly illegible scrawl.
Bulk of fortune goes into charitable foundation. Complete control given to Miss Bethany Ann.
Weird little girl. Prematurely born in Calcutta when her mother and father were on a round-the-world tour.
India—so he and she had been born in the same hellhole.
An oddball from birth, she was claustrophobic. She was also a vegetarian who refused to eat beef. Never fit into the family. When she was two and had begun to talk, she’d told her family that her name was Chandra, not Beth. She had babbled frantically of memories of another life and of belonging to another, poorer family. When she grew older she said her enraged older sister, in an effort to save the family from shame, had shut her inside a box and buried her alive beneath a house when she found out Chandra had gotten pregnant by the town’s local bad boy whom she loved instead of her betrothed.
Under hypnosis Chandra had spoken in a foreign language that a language expert at the University of Texas had identified as an obscure dialect of Hindi. Upon investigation, a family in a remote area of India where this dialect was spoken had been found. Names, dates and facts of this family’s history exactly fit Chandra’s story.
Gertrude and all the Morans had flown to India. A seven-year-old Chandra had led everybody to a ruined house and insisted they dig up a brick floor. Chandra’s former sister, a woman by then in her midfifties, had burst into guilty tears when a crumbling box with the bones of a young girl and those of her unborn child had been discovered, and Chandra had accused her of burying her alive. The grave of the dead girl’s bad-boy lover was visited next. Apparently he had stepped in front of a train and had been sliced to death shortly after he’d been told that the dead girl had run away.
Weird. Lucas, who knew more than he wanted to about India and reincarnation, had underlined the word three times. This girl, Bethany, Chandra, whatever, had wanted to share the Moran money with those less fortunate. Understandably alarmed, the entire Moran clan had been determined to erase the inappropriate “memories” and eradicate such inappropriate attitudes. They had taken the little girl to countless doctors, psychologists, and finally to a hypnotist who was no help at all, since he had said this looked like a genuine case of reincarnation if ever there was one. He pointed out that Chandra’s claustrophobia was perfectly natural under such circumstances.
Gertrude Moran had fired the hypnotist on the spot and refused to take the child to any more “charlatans.” After Bethany’s parents had been killed in a car accident, the old lady had done everything in her power to make the girl forget her “former life” and mold her into a true Moran. But the impossible child had been kicked out of every fancy boarding school she’d been sent to, and the old lady had had to take charge of the girl’s education herself. Gertrude had taken the child everywhere and taught her about investments, real estate, bonds, ranching and stocks.
But apparently the shape of Bethany’s personality had been as difficult as the old lady’s. Not that the girl hadn’t appeared gentle and loving and generous and biddable. But no matter how intelligent and receptive she had seemed on the surface, her character had been as true to its own shape as the most uncarvable stone. She continued to sympathize with those less fortunate than she. At the age of twelve she had her name legally changed to Chandra. As she grew older she had a tendency to date bad boys—because she said she was looking for the man she had loved in her former life. When she was eighteen and on the brink of marriage to Stinky Brown, a slick charmer Gertrude Moran had considered totally unsuitable, she and her grandmother had had a disastrous quarrel. Chandra had broken off with Stinky and run away without a dime, never to be seen or spoken of or to again.
Until now.
For a fleeting moment Lucas felt an unwanted respect for a girl who could stand up to Gertrude Moran and walk away from such a huge fortune. Then he reminded himself there was no such thing as selfless good, that somebody always paid.
Lucas’s last words on the yellow page were Holly’s. “The conniving little do-goody bitch. I tell you her do-goody act was all fake.”
Could be, pretty lady. Fortune hunters and con artists damn sure came in all sorts of interesting shapes and varieties. But this kid with the innocent face and the freckles and the masses of golden hair was damn good.
Lucas lifted a picture of a seven-year-old girl standing before a hut in India with her “other family.” Next he looked at a grainy black-and-white newspaper picture of her standing beside some look-alike heiress buddy named Cathy Calderon. They both wore ragged jeans, steel-toed work boots and hard hats as they posed in front of a concrete blockhouse one of her church groups had recently completed for a Mexican family.
Couldn’t tell much other than the fact that Bethany Chandra damn sure had long legs and a cute butt.
Been there. Long legs and a cute butt had cost him big time. Joan had started by taking half of his estate. She’d won child support, lots of it. Then she’d dumped the boys back on him.
His housekeeper had quit the first day, shaking both fists and screaming, “Your sons are savages, Mr. Broderick. If you don’t pack them off to a military school, and soon, you’ll be sorry.”
No housekeeper he’d hired since had lasted more than a week, and his once elegant house was a shambles.
Forget Joan and the housekeeper problem.
The intriguing fortune hunter with the intriguing backside was living in an impoverished barrio and running a huge, privately endowed, highly successful, nonprofit organization called Casas de Cristo, which built houses for the poor all over northern Mexico. She had tribes of wealthy philanthropists who trusted her enough to donate their millions. She had church groups and college kids from all over the United States providing money and free labor.
Missionaries were a tiresome, impractical breed. He should know. His father had played at saving the world. What the hell? The more starving Indians he’d fed, the more babies they’d produced with more mouths to be fed. One thing was sure. The old man had damn sure failed to provide for his own sons. Lucas had had to work his tail off to get a start at the good life.
Thus, Lucas was mildly surprised that he felt such distaste at the thought of defaming this girl when such an immense fortune and therefore his own lucrative fee were at stake. All he had to do was drum up a few witnesses to say that Bethany was cheating her benefactors by building her houses for less than she said or that she was taking bribes from the poor families selected to have houses built for them.
He loathed do-gooders. Why should it bother him that there wasn’t a shred of evidence that she was anything other than what she appeared to be—that rare and highly bizarre individual like his father who actually wanted to help other people?
Odd that he didn’t particularly relish having to prove that Gertrude Moran had been senile when she’d drawn up her new will, either.
But that last part would be easier.
A flash of movement flickered across the golden urn that sat in the center of a library table. The urn, conspicuously located but now forgotten, was surrounded by stacks of legal documents, coffee cups, wineglasses, beer bottles and half-eaten sandwiches. Lucas glanced from it out the window, where he got a double surprise.
The sky was now an eerie green. A dark man in a black Stetson sat in a blue van parked beside his Lincoln. After studying the storm clouds and the newcomer for a tense moment, Lucas relaxed, dismissing them both as of no immediate importance.
Not that the Morans had noticed either the clouds or the van. And they had quit all pretense of interest in the urn that contained Gertrude Moran’s ashes immediately after the reading of her will, at which point they’d started hunting their lawyer.
Fortunately Lucas had been close by in San Antonio visiting Pete, his older brother, who was a doctor.
Lucas leaned forward in his chair and lifted the urn with his left hand. Whatever he had seen there had vanished. All he saw now was his own brooding dark face and his thick tumble of unruly black hair. Turning the urn carelessly with his other hand, he glanced at the portrait of the woman whose ashes he held.
Gertrude Moran’s sharp, painted eyes glinted at him with an expression of don’t-you-dare-try-to-mess-with-me-you-young-upstart. In old age with her soft snowy hair, she had remained a handsome woman. Holly had told Lucas that the portrait had been finished less than a month ago. Lucas found it hard to imagine someone who looked so forceful and intelligent not knowing exactly what she was doing when she’d drawn up her will.
Gertrude Moran had been shrewd all her life. The original Moran fortune had been in land and oil. She’d diversified, doubling her fortune while other oil people went broke. In an age when most rich people were stuffy and dull, she had been a hoot. The newspapers had been full of her stunts.
Lucas lowered his gaze. Well, she’d damn sure stirred the family brew by secretly changing all the ingredients in her will and leaving only a few million to these spoiled bastards.
“Well, Mr. Broderick, can you get us our money back or not?” Holly leaned forward and issued another invitation with her dark, glowing eyes and a display of cleavage.
Been there, he reminded himself, but he dropped the urn with a clang.
Stinky jumped as if he was afraid Gertrude’s spirit would spring out of the urn like a bad genie. A hush fell over the room, and for a long moment it did seem, even to Lucas, that those keen, painted eyes brightened with mischief and that some bold, alien presence had invaded the room.
He almost felt like clanging the urn again to break the spell.
His hard face tensed. “Can I get the money?” He leafed through the will. “It’s a crapshoot. It’s not too difficult to break a will that involves leaving one family member an entire fortune at the expense of the others. But charitable foundations with iron-clad, carefully thought out legal documents such as these are tricky, especially when the foundation will contribute substantially to several powerhouse charities who have teams of lawyers on their payroll.”
“But Beth bamboozled Gram into giving her everything—”
“Not quite everything. Your grandmother did adequately provide for you. At least most judges would see it that way. Technically your cousin won’t actually be inheriting the fortune, Ms. Moran. She would merely be managing the foundation.”
“For a huge salary?”
“A six-figure annual salary for overseeing such a vast enterprise would hardly be out of line.”
“Beth is a thief and a criminal.”
Lucas felt an insane urge to defend the absent heiress.
“Those are serious charges that might not be so easily proven. From the picture you’ve drawn of Beth—a goody-two-shoes Samaritan building houses for the poor in Mexico—it might be difficult and unpleasant to convince twelve disinterested people she wouldn’t sincerely honor your grandmother’s last wishes. If she’s a fake, we’ve got a chance. But if she’s not—” He paused. “Unfortunately juries and judges have a tendency to favor do-gooders. I suggest that you talk to your cousin. Try to persuade her it would be in her best interests to divide the money between all of you.”
“You have no idea how stubborn she is.”
“Maybe one of you will come up with a better idea.”
A pair of black-lashed, olive-bright eyes set in a gorgeous face met his, and Lucas was chilled when he sensed a terrible hatred and an implacable will.
The black clouds were rolling in from the west. The mood in the library had darkened, as well. Other faces turned toward him, and they were equally hard.
Lucas almost shuddered. No wonder the saint had run.
Strangely, his feelings of empathy for the girl intensified. He tried to fight the softening inside him, but it was almost as though he was on her side instead of the Morans’.
Ridiculous. He couldn’t afford such misplaced sympathies.
“If you take the case, how much will you charge?” Holly demanded.
“If I lose-nothing.”
“And—if you win?”
“I would be working on a contingency basis, of course—”
“How much?”
“Forty percent. Plus expenses.”
“Of nearly a billion dollars! What? Are you mad? Why, that’s highway robbery.”
“No, Ms. Moran, it’s my fee. I play for keeps—all or nothing. If you want me, and if I agree to take the case, I swear to you that if there is any way to destroy your cousin’s name and her claim to your fortune, I’ll find it. I am very thorough and utterly merciless when it comes to matters of this nature. I’ll study these documents and send my P.I. to Mexico to investigate Casas de Cristo and see what dirt I can dig up on her down there. She’s bound to have enemies. All we have to do is find people who’ll talk about her and get them talking. Fan the flames, so to speak.”
Lucas began gathering documents and stuffing them into his briefcase. “Just so you can reach me anytime—” He scribbled his unlisted home phone number and handed it to Stinky. “I’ll let myself out.”
Lightning streaked to the ground. Almost immediately a sharp cracking sound shook the house. Wind and torrents of rain began to batter the windows.
The drought was over.
But none of the ranchers who had prayed for rain rejoiced. They were watching Lucas’s large brown hands violently snap the locks on his briefcase as he prepared to go.
The mood in the library had grown as ugly and dangerous as the storm outside. The Morans were in that no-win situation so many people involved in litigation find themselves. They were wondering whom they disliked the most—their adversary, the family saint, or their own utterly ruthless but highly reputed attorney.
One minute Lucas was bursting out of the library doors into the foyer, intent on nothing except driving to San Antonio as fast as possible. In the next minute, Lucas felt as if he’d been sucked blindly into a cyclone and hurled into an entirely new reality in which an incredibly powerful force gripped him, body and soul. In which all his dark bitternesses miraculously dissolved. Even his fierce ambition to work solely for money was gone.
Unsuperstitious by nature, Lucas did not believe in psychic powers or ghosts. But this otherworldly experience was a very pleasurable feeling.
Dangerously pleasurable. Almost sexual, and dangerously familiar somehow.
All his life he’d been driven by anger and greed or by the quest for power.
And suddenly those drives were gone. What he really wanted was in this room.
He stopped in mid-stride. His huge body whirled; his searing gray eyes searched every niche and darkened corner of the hall.
The mysterious presence was very near. As he stood there, he continued to feel the weird, overpowering connection.
She was as afraid of this thing as he was.
She?
For no reason at all Lucas was reminded of the times he and his brother, Pete, had hidden together as children from the Indian slum bullies, not speaking to one another but each profoundly aware of the other.
“Hello?” Lucas’s deep querying drawl held a baffled note.
He held his breath. For the first time he noted how eerily quiet the foyer was. How the presence of death seemed to linger like an unwanted guest.
How the hall with its pale green wallpaper was heavy with the odor of roses past their prime. How these swollen blossoms, no doubt leftovers from Gertrude Moran’s memorial service, were massed everywhere—in vases, in Meissen.bowls. How several white petals had fallen onto the polished tabletops and floors. Holly had shown him the old lady’s rose garden and had told him she had loved roses.
Lucas’s senses were strangely heightened as he stood frozen outside the library doors, struggling to figure out what was happening to him. He inhaled the sicklysweet, funereal scent of the dying roses. He listened to each insistent tick of the vermeil clock.
The summer sunlight was fading. Much of the white and gilt furniture was cast in shadow. The threadbare Aubusson rug at his feet had a forest green border.
When he saw the closet with its door standing partially ajar, he felt strangely drawn to it. Oddly enough, when he stepped toward it, the connection was instantly broken. He was free.
All his old bitterness and cynicism immediately regained him.
He bolted out of the Moran mansion faster than before.
One (#ulink_0ada549a-5af3-52ab-92ec-03580f333c46)
“Kill!”
Sweet P.’s earsplitting voice blasted inside Lucas’s black Lincoln as he raced toward the hospital. The shrieks seemed to slice open his skull and shred the tender tissues of his inner ear as handily as a meat cleaver.
There should be a law against a three-year-old screaming in an automobile speeding sixty miles per hour on a freeway.
Just as there should be a law against a kid being up at five in the morning experimenting with her older cousin’s handcuffs.
Just as there should be a law against Peppin owning a pair of the damn things in the first place.
“You get off here,” Pete suddenly said as they were about to pass the exit ramp.
Tires screamed as Lucas swerved across two lanes onto the down ramp.
“Mommy! Carol!” Patti.yelled between sobs.
Too bad Mommy was out of town and Carol, her sitter, had called in sick.
Patti shook her hands violently, rattling the handcuffs.
Lucas’s temples thudded with equal violence.
It was Monday morning. Six o’clock to be exact. Lucas felt like hell. Usually he never dreamed, but last night a weird nightmare about a girl in trouble had kept him up most of the night. In the dream, he had loved the girl, and they’d been happy for a while. Then she’d been abducted, and he’d found himself alone in a misty landscape of death and stillness and ruin. At first he’d been terrified she was dead. Then she’d made a low moan, and he had known that if he didn’t save her, he would lose everything that mattered to him in the world. He’d tracked her through a maze of ruined slums only to find her and have her utter a final lowthroated cry and die as he lifted her into his arms. He’d bolted out of his bed, his body drenched in sweat, his heart racing, his sense of tragic loss so overwhelmingly profound he couldn’t sleep again.
The girl’s ethereally lovely face and voluptuous body had seemed branded into his soul. He’d gotten up and tried to sketch her on his legal notepad. Sleek and slim, she had that classy, rich-girl look magazine editors pay so dearly for. She had high cheekbones, a careless smile, yellow hair and sparkling blue eyes. He’d torn the sheet from the pad and thrown it away, only to sketch another.
Due in court at ten, Lucas had intended to be halfway to Corpus Christi by now. Instead Pete, Sweet P., the boys and he were rushing to the emergency room, where Pete was on call. Some girl had overdosed, and a doctor was needed STAT, medical jargon for fast. Gus, an emergency-room security guard, had volunteered to remove the handcuffs if Pete brought Sweet P. when he came.
Disaster had struck right after Lucas had loaded the luggage and boys into the Lincoln and Pete and Sweet P. had gotten into Pete’s Porsche. The Porsche wouldn’t start because someone had left an interior light on all night.
Someone had also removed Lucas’s jumper cables from his trunk. And that same mysterious someone had also lost the key to Peppin’s handcuffs. Thus, Lucas and the boys had to drive Pete and Sweet P. to the ER before they could head for home.
Why was Lucas even surprised? His personal life had been chaos ever since the boys had moved in. For starters, they must have dialed every nine-hundred number in America, because his phone bill had run into the thousands of dollars the first month they’d lived with him.
Lucas put on his right turn signal when he saw the blue neon sign for San Antonio City Memorial and swerved into the covered parking lot for the hospital’s emergency room. With a swoosh of tires and a squeal of brakes, Lucas stopped the big car too suddenly, startling Sweet P. into silence. Her watery blue eyes looked addled as she took in the blazing lights of the three ambulances and the squad car.
Lucas’s expression was grim as he lowered the automobile windows, cut the motor and gently gathered Sweet P. into his arms so Pete would be free to check his patient.
As he got out of the Lincoln with the squirming toddler, Lucas gave Peppin and Montague a steely glance. “You two be good.”
“No problem.” Peppin’s sassy grin was all braces. Huge mirrored sunglasses hid his mischievous eyes.
As always Montague, who resented authority, pretended to ignore him and kept his nose in a book entitled Psychic Vampires.
The emergency room was such a madhouse, Lucas forgot the boys. Apparently there’d been a fight at the jail. Three prisoners lay on stretchers. A man with hairy armpits and a potbelly wearing only gray Jockey shorts with worn-out elastic was standing outside a treatment room screaming drunkenly that doctors made too much money and he was going to get his lawyer if he didn’t get treated at once. In another room an obese woman was pointing to her right side, saying she hurt and that her doctor had spent a fortune on tests and that she was deathly allergic to some kind of pink medicine and that her medical records were in Tyler on microfilm if anybody cared about them. Six telephones buzzed constantly. Doctors were dictating orders to exhausted nurses.
In the confusion it took Lucas a while to find Gus. Meanwhile Sweet P. was so fascinated by the drunk and the fat lady, she stopped crying. Enthroned on the counter of the nurses’ station, she was having the time of her life. A plump redheaded nurse was feeding her pizza and candy and cola, which she gobbled greedily while Gus rummaged in a toolbox for the correct pair of bolt cutters.
“Now you hold still, little princess,” Gus said.
Suddenly Pete’s frantic voice erupted from an examining room down the hall.
“She’s gone!”
Lucas left Sweet P. with Gus and raced to the examining room, where an IV dangled over an empty gurney with blood-streaked sheets. Bloody footprints drunkenly crisscrossed the white-tiled floor.
“She has little feet,” Lucas whispered inanely, lifting a foot when he realized he was standing squarely on top of two toe prints.
Pete yelled, “Nurse!”
A plump nurse in a blue scrub suit, wearing a plastic ID, ambled inside.
“Oh, my God!”
Pete thumbed hurriedly through the missing patient’s chart, reading aloud.
“No name. A Jane Doe. Brought in by a truck driver who found her hitchhiking on the highway. Tested positive for a multitude of legal and illegal drugs. Head injury. Stitches put in by plastic surgeon. Contusions on wrists and ankles. Disruptive. Belligerent. Very confused. Amnesia. Possible subdural hematoma. Refused CAT scan because she went insane when we put her face inside the machine. Claustrophobic.”
“What does all that mean?” Lucas demanded.
“Not good. She’s high as a kite, badly confused.”
“Doctor—” The nurse’s whisper was anxious. “A while ago someone called about her. Said he was family. Sounded very concerned. Described a girl who could have been this girl. Sammy’s new, and I’m afraid she told him we’d admitted a girl matching her description. The caller said he was coming right over. But when Sammy told the patient that a family member was on his way, she became very agitated.”
“Get security on this immediately,” Pete ordered. “This young woman is in no condition to be out of bed. Check the entrances. The parking lots. In her condition she couldn’t have gone far.”
Fire and ice.
Chilled to the bone, burning up at the same time, the barefoot girl shivered convulsively in the parking lot. Her thoughts kept slipping and losing direction like a sailboat in rough waves.
She didn’t know who she was.
Or where she was.
Or who wanted to kill her.
When that freckled nurse had asked her her name, terrible images had rolled through her tired brain.
A name? Something as specific as a name?
“Oh, dear God,” had been all she could whisper brokenly.
She could remember the van rolling, catching fire. She kept seeing a gray face, its hideous vacant eyes peering at her through plastic.
Pain and terror shuddered through the injured girl.
They knew who she was, and they were coming after her.
Her head throbbed. When she tried to walk, her gait was wide. Her feet felt like they didn’t quite touch the ground, and she had the sensation she was about to topple backward.
Crouching low outside the entrance, the girl had tracked blood down the concrete steps because slivers of glass were still embedded in her heels. Her torn, blood-encrusted jeans and hospital gown clung to her perspiring body like a wet shroud.
Vaguely she remembered someone cutting her red T-shirt and her bra off. Patches of yellow hair were glued to her skull. Dark shadows ringed her blue eyes. She kept swallowing against a dry metallic taste in her mouth. She kept pushing at the loose bandage that hid the row of stitches that were yellow with antiseptic. What was left of a heparin lock oozed blood down her arm.
She had to get out of here.
But how? When ambulances and cops were everywhere?
When those two curious boys in the black Lincoln kept jumping up and down and staring restlessly out of the car.
Feeling muddled, she shut her eyes. Her entire life consisted of a few hours and less than half a dozen foggy memories that made no sense. It was as if she was a child again, and there were monsters in the dark.
Only the monsters were real.
She remembered huge headlights blinding her as she’d thrown herself in front of them. She remembered the frightened trucker, lifting her and demanding angrily, “Girlie, what were you trying to do?” Next she remembered the hospital.
The two boys in the Lincoln must’ve grown bored with leaning out the windows because all of a sudden they slithered into the front seat like a pair of eels. They leaned over the dashboard, fighting for control of the radio, holding the seek button down through several stations until they came to rap music. Gleefully they slapped their right hands together, turned the volume up and settled back to listen.
“Boys! That’s way too loud!”
A stout security officer edged between the girl and the Lincoln. The boy with the slicked-back ponytail and the shark-tooth necklace quirked his head out the window again. When his huge mirrored glasses glinted her way, she was afraid he’d spot her.
“Sure, Officer,” he said, clumsily faking a respectful attitude as he thumped the dash with his hand in time to the beat.
The officer lingered a minute or two till the volume was low enough. Only then did he stride away. When he had gone the boy leaned out of the car again, hand still thumping the side of the car as he stared fiercely in the direction of her shadowy hiding place. Twelve, thirteen maybe, he had the surly good looks of a wannabe bad-boy.
The fingers stopped thumping. He yanked off his mirrored glasses and wiggled so far out of the car, he nearly fell.
She heard more sirens in the distance as his gray eyes zeroed in on her.
Dear God.
His sulkily smirking lips mouthed, “Hi.” He started to wave.
She put a finger to her lips in warning as two more squad cars, sirens blaring, rushed into the lot. A dozen officers with hand-held radios jumped out.
She shrank more deeply into the shadows, her pleading eyes clutching the smiling boy’s as a fat cop shuffled over to the Lincoln.
“You been here awhile, kid?”
The sassy smile faded. He gave the cop a sullen nod.
“You seen anything suspicious?”
Sulky silence. Then slowly the black ponytail bobbed. “Yeah.” He pointed toward the alley at the opposite end of the parking lot. “I saw…a girl with a—a bandage on her head. Way over there.”
The cops shouted to the others and they took off in a dead gallop. When they had disappeared, the boys slapped their right hands together.
Then, ever so cautiously, they eased a door open and scuttled toward her. Hovering over her, their dark narrow faces seemed to waver in and out of focus.
They were so alike they could have passed for twins. Not that they were trying to pass. The taller and skinnier of the two had shorter hair, wire-rimmed glasses and pressed jeans. The huskier kid with the ponytail and the gold earring wore rumpled black clothes. A vicious shark tooth dangled from his necklace.
When they leaned down, their hands, shaking, a whirring sound beat inside her ears and made her feel so dizzy and sick, she almost passed out.
She barely felt their hands as they gently circled her. Or heard their frightened whispers.
“We have to help her.”
“But she’s hurt. Look at all those bruises, and her eyes—”
“And her feet! We should take her into the hospital so Uncle Pete—”
“No!” She grabbed their arms, her broken nails digging into their skin, her huge eyes pleading.
“Can’t you see how scared she is?” a young voice croaked hoarsely. “Somebody bad might be after her. We gotta save her.”
“What’ll Dad do?”
The whirring inside her head got louder. Halfcarrying, half-dragging her, they crawled with her to the car and made a bed of lumpy pillows and blankets for her on the floorboard of the back seat. The boys unfolded a blanket and covered her, whispering that if she was quiet they could smuggle her home and hide her in their room until she got well.
The girl lay there, trembling uncontrollably, terrified of the claustrophobic feeling she had because the blanket was over her face.
Only vaguely was she aware of footsteps hurrying, of car doors slamming, of men’s voices talking low in the front seat, of a little girl’s excited shouting. “See there! Got ’em off!”
“Oh-big deal.”
But the girl in the back seat instantly registered a man’s beautiful, gravelly drawl. “Peppin, the officer told me you helped them.”
There was something so familiar about the sound of his voice. Something so warm. It seemed to resonate in her soul.
She knew him. She had loved him. Somewhere. Some time.
“Yeah, Dad. Peppin really helped ’em,” the older boy said.
“Shut up, Monty!” Peppin slugged his brother.
“Hey!”
“Who are all the cops looking for anyway, Dad?”
“Some young girl got high on drugs and had a wreck. It’s a very serious situation. She could die without proper medical attention.”
The girl felt hot all over. Tears pooled in her eyes.
“Die?” Peppin croaked as a key turned in the ignition. His young face bleached a sickly white, he stared at his tearful hideaway.
She shook her head at him, tears escaping under her eyelids.
Peppin sucked in a long, nervous breath. “So— Uncle Pete, what sort of treatment would she need?”
“Hmm?”
“Your patient?”
Peppin bombarded his uncle with questions, demanding specific details.
Once again Peppin’s father praised his son in that deep melodious drawl of his—this time for his intellectual curiosity.
The man’s low voice was husky and somehow devastatingly familiar, and yet at the same time it lulled her. She wanted to go on listening to it, for nothing seemed left in the whole world but that voice wrapping around her.
Who was he? Why did she feel she knew him?
She was too tired for thought, and her eyelids grew heavy again, fluttering down and then rising as she fought to stay awake.
She slept soundly for the first time since the van had rolled and the driver had chased her into those blinding headlights.
She slept, knowing she was safe, because the man with the beautiful voice was near.
Two (#ulink_78c68b5e-431e-5427-8f64-f55c8fc26795)
Bluish flashes ricocheted in the boys’ bedroom.
It had rained like this the night the blue van had rolled and burned.
What van? Where? Why?
The girl lay rigidly awake, longing for Lucas as she listened to the surf and to the sharp cracking sounds of thunder. Torrents of rain beat a savage tattoo against the bedroom window.
He was two doors down from her. Peacefully asleep in his huge bed, no doubt. Unafraid of the storm and blissfully unaware of the strange woman sleeping in his sons’ bedroom closet.
He might as well have been on the moon.
She stretched restlessly, almost wishing she was as happily unconscious of him as he was of her. But she needed him because he made her feel safe.
Why did her demons always come alive when she closed her eyes in the dark?
She hated feeling shut in and alone, and she felt she was—even though the closet door was louvered and her darling boys were just outside, snugly tucked beneath quilts in their bunk beds, oblivious to the storm and her fears. She lay stiffly on her hidden pallet in their huge closet and stared at the ceiling, watching the lightning that flashed through the louvers and caused irregular patterns of blue light to dance across the walls and hanging clothes.
Her strength had returned rapidly, but, so far, not her memory. Vague illusive images from her past seemed to flicker at the edges of her mind like the lightning, their brief flares so brilliant they blinded her before they vanished into pitch blackness.
Her entire world had become Lucas Broderick’s coldly modern mansion perched on its bluff above Corpus Christi Bay. But more than the mansion’s high white walls and polished marble floors; more than its winding corridors and spiral staircases intrigued her. With every day that passed, she had become more fascinated by Lucas Broderick himself.
From almost that first moment when she had awakened in his sons’ closet to their rush of adolescent chatter, they had made her aware of him.
“What if Dad finds her?”
An audible gasp and then terrified silence as if that prospect was too awful to contemplate.
“You’d better not let him—stupid.”
She had opened her eyes and found their fearful, curious faces peering eagerly at her. She’d had no memory of who they were or how she’d gotten here.
But she’d quickly learned that they were Lucas’s adorable sons, and that they looked endearingly like him.
“She’s awake.”
“Told you she’d live.”
“We’ve got to feed her something or she’ll starve like your gerbil.”
“What’s your name?”
Her name? Blue lights flickered, and she shook her head and made a low moan.
“Pete said she had amnesia, dummy.”
Pete? Who was Pete?
“You hungry?”
“Maybe…some broth,” she whispered.
Their heads swiveled and they stared at each other in round-eyed consternation as if they’d never heard the word. “Broth?”
“Then water,” she managed weakly.
That started a quarrel over who got to fetch it, each of them wanting to.
For ten long days and longer nights those two wonderful boys had fought many battles over the privilege of nursing her. They had checked medical books out of the library. They had cleaned her wounds and doctored them with medicine from Lucas’s huge marble bathroom. They had painstakingly picked the slivers of glass from the soles of her feet with tweezers, plunking the jagged bits into a metal bowl. They had soaked her feet in pails of hot water, and she could almost walk without limping.
They took turns pretending to be sick themselves so that one of them could stay home from school with her. They had given her the antibiotics they tricked their uncle into prescribing for them. For the first few nights they’d coaxed their father into buying and cooking the few foods she could keep down—chicken broth, Jell-O and boiled vegetables, which they’d smuggled up to her.
At first she’d been too weak and ill to worry about the way her presence in their home had forced them to deceive their father. But as she’d grown stronger and more attached to her lively, affectionate nurses, she blamed herself for their burgeoning talent at duplicity. Nursing her wasn’t the worst of it. They were hard at work on a covert project they called Operation Nanny.
The boys didn’t want Lucas to hire a new nanny. “Because,” as Peppin explained, “we couldn’t fool one of those nosy old bags so easy as Dad. A nanny’d be up here all the time—she’d probably find you the first day.”
Thus, every time Lucas informed the boys of a home interview for a prospective nanny, Peppin, who could mimic Lucas’s voice to a T, phoned the woman and told her the job had been filled.
At first the girl had been too ill and too grateful and too terrified of being thrown out of the house to care, but now she felt stricken that she had become a corrupting influence on their characters.
Although Peppin and Montague bickered incessantly, they could be an incredible team. During the day, when Lucas was at work, the boys gave her the run of his huge house, with its soaring ceilings and skylights and views of Corpus Christi Bay. One wall of his bedroom was made entirely of glass. Sometimes she would step out onto his balcony and let the tangy sea air ruffle her hair.
Sometimes she showered in his pink marble bathroom that had both an immense enclosed shower and a bathtub as big as a small swimming pool. Sometimes she spent a languid hour buried beneath mountains of foamy bubbles in his tub. Sometimes she would pick out old clothes from his abundant closets to wear. Always she would linger in his room, studying his things, running his slim black comb through her hair and brushing her teeth with his yellow toothbrush. She would open his drawers and run her fingertips over his undershirts and cuff links, marveling that one man could have so much of everything. But what she loved best was lying in his bed and hugging his pillow to her stomach and imagining him there beside her, holding her. She gathered flowers from his gardens and arranged them in crystal vases everywhere, taking special pains with those that she left on the white table beside his bed. It pleased her when he picked a pale yellow rose from that vase and pinned it to the black lapel of his three-piece suit one morning before he rushed to his office.
She tried to think of ways to repay him for all that his boys had done for her. The endless stark hallways of his beautiful house had been strewn with everything from rumpled clothes, baseball bats, soccer gear and Rollerblades to newspapers when she’d arrived. Dirty dishes had overflowed from the white-tiled kitchen counters onto the ebony dining room table.
When she’d gotten better, she’d convinced the boys that maybe their father wouldn’t be so anxious to hire a nanny or a housekeeper if he didn’t feel the need for one so strongly. She had made a game of cleaning the house.
While they picked up, she would lie on a couch or a chair, perusing the tattered album that contained black-and-white pictures of Lucas’s childhood in India, wondering why he’d looked so unhappy as a boy. Wondering why the pictures of India especially fascinated her even as she prodded the boys to pick up.
Every time Peppin or Monty touched something, the rule was that they had to put it where it belonged. She began talking them through the preparation of simple meals, using the cans in the pantry and the frozen dinners in the refrigerator, so that Lucas always came home to a hot meal. At first they complained bitterly, but she just laughed and tried to motivate them by telling them they were learning basic survival skills.
Mostly they went along with her projects because she lavished attention on them. She walked with them on the beach, threw horseshoes with them and played games. The only thing she refused to do was to let them lead her into the tunnel that wound from the garage under the house down to the beach. When they had unlocked the doors to that weird, underground passage, and she had smelled the mustiness of the place, she had felt as if the black gloom was pressing in on her and she was being suffocated.
Ghastly minutes had crawled by before the feeling of claustrophobia subsided.
“I can’t go in,” she had whispered, clutching her throat, not understanding her terror as she wrenched her hand free of theirs.
“Why?” they asked excitedly, the beams of their flashlights dancing along the wall.
Suddenly she had some memory of being trapped in a box and knowing she was being buried alive. She remembered coughing as dirt sifted through the cracks of her coffin. She remembered kicking and clawing and screaming when the narrow box was black and silent.
“What’s wrong?” the boys demanded.
Blue lights flickered, and the memory was gone.
“I—I don’t know.” She edged away from them toward the open garage doors and brilliant sunlight. “Let’s go inside the house…and watch a video or something.”
How she ached for them when once more they were safely inside and they showed her their home videos and photograph albums with photos that had been taken of their family before the divorce. There were very few pictures of them. The boys told her that their parents had never had time for them, even when they’d been married. It was worse now, though, since their mother had run off and their father kept threatening to send them to military school.
She began to understand that maybe the reason they doted on her was that she was the first adult who ever enjoyed them and made them feel needed.
She encouraged them to go to their father and talk to him. Foolishly she had caused one quarrel between the father and sons by giving some of Lucas’s and the boys’ clothes to their yardman and his family. After Lucas had caught the poor man in a pair of slacks from one of his custom-made suits from London, he had yelled at the boys for an hour. She had wept for causing all three of them so much pain. But the incident had blown over, and Lucas had bought the slacks back from the man.
She had taken two pictures of Lucas from his albums to keep when she was in the boys’ room alone. One was a photograph of him as a man, the other of him as a boy unhappily perched on top of a huge elephant in India.
Lucas kept a box full of articles about himself in the den. She read them all. Apparently Lucas had a professional reputation for toughness and greed. She read that he never made a move unless it was to his financial advantage, that even the women he dated were always rich—as Joan, his first wife, had been. One reporter had likened his predatory nature to that of a barracuda.
The nights when Lucas was at home were difficult because she felt lonely and isolated in the boys’ closet, clutching the photographs of Lucas. But the worst hours were those when all the lights in the house were off and she fell asleep, only to have nightmares.
Most nights she would slip into an old chambray shirt of Lucas’s. After Peppin shut the louvered closet door for her, she would lie there while either Peppin or Montague read aloud. This week they had been reading a book called Psychic Voyages because she had found Psychic Vampires, their favorite, too terrifying. She would lie half-listening to the weird and yet compelling stories of people who believed they had lived other lives.
Eventually she would fall asleep, and it was never long before the dreams came—vivid, full-color visions that seemed so real and loomed larger than life.
Tonight was worse, maybe because it had stormed.
She was a little girl again, playing in a sun-splashed rose garden beside a vast white mansion with a dark-haired girl. At first they carefully gathered the roses, filling huge baskets with them. Then her dream changed. The sky filled with dark clouds, and the house was a blackened ruin. There was nothing in the baskets but stems and thorns. She was older, and her companion was gone. Suddenly a fanged monster with olive-black eyes sprang into the ruined rose garden and began chasing her. She knew if he caught her, he would lock her in a box and bury her alive. But as she ran, her speed slowed, and his accelerated, until she felt his hot breath on her neck and his hands clawing into her waist and dragging her into a dark cave. At first she was afraid she’d been buried alive. Then suddenly fire was all around her and she was struggling through the thick suffocating smoke, trying to find her way out. The last thing she saw was a dead man’s gray face.
She screamed, a piercing, ear-shattering cry that dragged her back to the lumpy pallet. The louvered door was thrown open instantly, and Peppin’s small compact body crouched over hers. His fingers, which smelled of peanut butter and grape jelly and of other flavors best not identified, pressed her lips.
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Ann Major
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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