Buch lesen: «Overnight Heiress»

One

Two plainclothes policemen stood at the end of the bar.

Meg stopped just inside the door and looked warily at the two strangers, knowing they were cops without ever having seen them before. Then, with her heart beating a heavy cadence to the beat of her footsteps on the hardwood floor, she made her way through the scrubbed-clean tables and upended chairs.

They’re not here for me. They can’t be here for me, she told herself as she schooled her features into an expression of concerned curiosity.

“Good morning,” she said pleasantly. “Is Patrick—” As she glanced around the brightly lighted room, her concern became real. “Patrick McBean is here, isn’t he?”

The younger of the two men flashed a smile and just as easily flashed his ID at her. “Yes. He’s in the back.”

Meg let an eyebrow climb a fraction of an inch. “Is there a problem?” she asked.

The older cop, a stereotype of her worst nightmares, raked a glance over the black tailored slacks and white pin-tucked shirt she wore on her angular body. “You a waitress here?”

“Day bartender,” Meg told him, and started to pass him to go behind the bar.

“Don’t touch anything.”

“What?” Meg stopped in her reach for her apron.

“Not until the print crew gets here. And we’re going to need your prints, too. For comparison.”

Oh, hell. Oh, God. Oh, no.

The detective’s eyes narrowed. “You got a problem with being printed, Miss—?”

Meg sighed. “Wilson. Meg Wilson. And yes, I have a problem in principle with workplace fingerprinting, workplace polygraph testing and random drug tests. But since my objections are based on my interpretation of constitutional rights, I don’t suppose those objections will carry any weight with you, will they?”

Shut your mouth, Meg. Shut it now. This isn’t the time to bait a bear. Too much is at risk.

“Isn’t she something?” Patrick asked, coming in from the back room and draping his arm affectionately over Meg’s shoulder.

“Night school. I swear, she can hold her own with anybody who comes in this joint. And they love it.” The bar’s owner squeezed her shoulder with a little more force than necessary. A warning? “Now tell these fine gentlemen you were only staying in practice, Meg, me darlin’.”

Back off. Meg’s silent warning to herself echoed Patrick’s. Your prints aren’t on file. They can’t learn anything. Don’t antagonize them. Don’t make them want to look past the obvious.

Meg had a wide and generous smile. She knew: she’d had to work at it. “I’m sorry,” she said, using that smile. “Wisecracks have gotten to be such a part of the job, I sometimes think I put on the personality when I put on the rest of the uniform.”

Meg turned toward her boss, but now her smile was genuine and concerned. “What happened this time, Patrick?”

Meg paced her minuscule living room, stopping sporadically in her marching to look out through the sliding patio door at the vibrant colors on the surviving trees in this older neighborhood—looking for peace in the panorama of changing seasons, finding none. Tulsa was big enough to get lost in, big enough to escape from, but not big enough to hide two persons from a concentrated search.

Three days had passed since the latest theft from Patrick’s upscale bar and grill, three days since her fingerprints had been sent to the FBI wonderland that cops worshiped. She’d never been printed before, but... but, but, but. There were too many unknowns in this equation, and Meg was so tired—tired of running, tired of hiding—exhausted from the effort of making a home that didn’t feel like they were running or hiding.

She glanced at her watch, as utilitarian as everything she wore, and grimaced. Twenty minutes; that’s all she had until the neighborhood filled with the laughter and noise of home-bound school children. Twenty minutes to pace, to wrestle with her conscience, to decide. She wouldn’t be able to use Patrick as a reference if she left—she’d probably never be able to contact him again.

That was what hurt: losing the friend, not the reference. But if she left without notice, would she become a suspect in this string of thefts from Patrick? Would the police look for her for that reason when they might otherwise overlook her if she stayed quietly where she was?

The doorbell squawked out half its two-note warning and crackled into silence. Meg twisted her watch face into view.

Twenty minutes. Damn it! She needed that time to pull her racing thoughts together, to drag her crumbling composure around her. Later she’d have time for the visit with her elderly neighbor, Mrs. Henson, that the woman was beginning to expect, but not now. Please, not now.

Two men stood on Meg’s tiny doorstep. They were dressed in conservatively styled, tailored and colored suits. FBI. Her mind had no trouble making that connection.

“Good afternoon. Miss Wilson,” one said as both men produced identification.

“Good afternoon,” Meg said through a suddenly and agonizingly dry throat. Yes. FBI. And it wasn’t an accident. They weren’t just canvasing the neighborhood. They knew her name.

“What... Is something wrong?”

One of them smiled, and she was sure it had to be a violation of at least one rule. “No, ma’am. But we’d like for you to come to our office with us.”

“Am I—am I under arrest for something?” FBI. Had he filed kidnapping charges? No. Even he wouldn’t do that. Of course he would!

“Oh, no, Miss Wilson. It’s just a problem that was brought out when you were fingerprinted last week. It won’t take long. You should be home—within an hour.”

With the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, Meg thought She opened the door wide and stepped back. “I need to get my purse,” she said. And I need thirty seconds alone in the bathroom. Please, please don’t come in.

Lucas Lambert was waiting in the interrogation room when the woman was brought in. He’d argued that interrogation wouldn’t be necessary, but the Feds seemed to think it would be. The woman was tall, at least five-ten, he suspected, even in the flat-heeled shoes she wore, angular—almost gaunt—with her dark hair cropped in a utilitarian, nocare style, and dark eyes that would have had him questioning her relationship to Edward Carlton even without the fingerprints.

Dark eyes that called too vividly to his mind the memory of another woman facing another roomful of unknown men, another interrogation that had a far different outcome from the one he expected here. With the constant regret that he had not been there for that woman, he forced his attention back to the woman in this room.

She was frightened, although she hid it well. She took the seat she was told to take and looked around the small room, focusing suspicious attention on him.

Hadn’t these idiots told her anything? He’d relayed Edward’s message to them, the same message Edward had given him when he first voiced his own suspicions. “We were rich kids,” Edward had told him. “Nothing was left to chance. We were measured and fingerprinted and tattooed. The fingerprints convinced me, but she might need a little extra persuasion.” And then Edward had given him childhood photographs showing a birthmark and a tattoo.

Scared. She was scared out of her skull, and hiding it well enough to fool most people, but not him. He focused on her hands, long fingered and slender, held loosely in her lap but trembling with the tension of not clenching them.

She visibly relaxed her hands, then lifted her chin in a cocky, do-or-die attitude. “Don’t you think it’s time for someone to tell me why I’m here?”

The two federal agents remained silent. Lucas stepped forward. They might not approve of his tactics later, but they had passed the ball to him. “Miss Wilson,” he said. “My name is Lucas Lambert. I’m sheriff of Avalon, New Mexico.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever been in your jurisdiction, Sheriff.”

He met her cautious smile with one of his own. “That isn’t surprising. Few have. But we have a new citizen of Avalon, a man who has become a good friend of mine. I’m here on his behalf.”

He saw the tension return to her hands. Curious. And still more curious.

“His name is Edward Carlton.”

Lucas saw no recognition in her eyes but he did note that once again her tension relaxed. “Actually, it’s Edward Willliam Renberg Carlton IV.”

He watched as she fought back a smile, the same response he had once made to the pomposity of Edward’s name.

“I hope he’s a big man,” she said.

“He is. Six-two, but lean. Dark hair. Dark eyes.”

He watched the confusion in her eyes for only two heartbeats. “Edward is thirty-five now,” he told her. “Twenty-five years ago his father, his mother and his younger sister went on an outing without him. Edward was left at home for some infraction—a punishment that saved his life.

“The family was kidnapped. A ransom note was received but as too often happens, somehow, someone slipped up. The bodies of Edward’s mother and father were found a month later. Nothing was heard from or about his sister Megan until last week when her fingerprints turned up in a routine screening in a burglary investigation.”

The tension whooshed out of her. She sank back in the chair, eyes wide, mouth open in a question she couldn’t seem to speak. Lucas passed an envelope containing two pictures across the table to her. Numbly she opened the envelope and examined the pictures Edward had provided.

“And I—oh. Oh, my.” She closed her eyes and turned the photographs facedown on the table, sitting silently for several seconds before she again looked up at him. For only a moment her eyes pleaded with him for—for what?—for information on who she had been, where she had lived, and what had happened to the brother she never knew?—before they shuttered.

“I suppose you want me to go with a matron or someone to prove I have those marks?”

Lucas shook his head. “No. Those photographs are for your assurance only. I’m sure there will be all sorts of formalities to go through later, but we’re satisfied with the fingerprints. And with your appearance. Would you like to see a picture of your brother, Miss Wilson?”

She didn’t answer. Lucas didn’t suppose that was too surprising considering the circumstances. The FBI report stated she worked as a day bartender in a popular downtown restaurant and lived in a neighborhood that was still safe but was well past its prime. She was wearing what had to be her uniform. Everything about her was squeaky clean but functional; there were no frills in Meg Wilson‘s—Carlton’s—life. That would change. That would definitely change.

Lucas considered the other photographs he had brought with him and handed her one of Edward and his new wife Jennie taken in the back garden of their home in Avalon.

Meg studied the photo, and for a moment Lucas saw what he could only describe as wistfulness play across her expression. Then her chin jutted and a cocky smile lifted her lips. “He seems to have survived his ordeal fairly well.”

What the hell was she so mad about? Because Lucas was sure that anger was what he saw in her—maybe unacknowledged, maybe even unwanted, but anger just the same.

“Perhaps you’d like this one better,” he said, fighting his own anger at her response. He handed her a studio portrait of Edward taken a year before, showing him as an ambitious, successful, driven—empty—man before Jennie had healed him.

Meg studied the portrait. For a moment her features, a feminine version of Edward’s—a stunningly beautiful feminine version of Edward’s, Lucas suddenly realized—became as bleak as those of the man he had first met only months before.

“So,” she said. “What’s my name?” She dropped the photo onto the table in front of her. “Who am I?”

Her name was Megan Elizabeth Carlton, and she would be twenty-nine years old in three months. Twenty-nine. It wasn’t often a woman got to celebrate her twenty-ninth and her thirtieth birthdays twice. Meg’s lips twisted against bitter anger. That explained so much. What was slow or backward or just plain stupid for a six-year-old—and she had been called all of those—or immature for a twelve- or an eighteen-year-old, was pretty remarkable for someone more than a year and a half younger.

No wonder she hadn’t been able to cope with Blake. She hadn’t been old enough to marry him when she’d divorced him.

Her parents—her adoptive parents—had some serious questions to answer. To her, and to the FBI. Had they known how young she truly was? Or had the lie about her age started before she was brought to them? It mattered; yes, knowing the answer to that question mattered. But letting them know who she was and where she was meant the possibility of Blake finding out, too. And she wasn’t ready for that yet.

Not yet.

Meg schooled her features to reveal none of her thoughts. Lambert’s attention seemed to be focused on the traffic as he guided his rental car back to her apartment, but more than once she had caught him studying her with more perception than normal suspicion. She ought to be terrified of him, being locked in the confines of this less-than-spacious rental car. He was dark, vaguely Native American, vaguely Arabic in appearance, and massive, but for some reason he wasn’t threatening in the way she had come to expect from her past history with cops. He didn’t look like a cop—maybe that was the difference.

And then Meg realized that he did. But he looked like a cop who had spent his life deflecting assaults and abuses away from those who couldn’t defend themselves and taking them on himself if necessary. Or a gladiator, maybe. With battle scars that not even the civilized veneer of expensive tailoring could hide.

“Have you about got it figured out?”

Lambert’s voice was still a surprise. His gravelly accent bore traces of the South—aristocracy, not Appalachia—and he spoke softly as though he had spent years allowing nothing more obvious than a whisper. And once again, his perception intimidated her.

“What?”

“Whatever it was that threw you into that poor, pitiful female, ‘I’m going to faint’ routine. Have you ever fainted in your life?”

Meg let out a deep breath and shook her head. “Turn left at the next light.”

“Who are you hiding from?”

Not a cop? This man was wasted on some hick town. “Turn left again and find a place about midblock to park.”

Lucas pulled the car to the curb and killed the engine, but when Meg reached for the door handle, he stopped her with a firm hand on her arm and an equally firm shake of his head.

“I know this is a shock to you,” he said. “I know there are going to be all sorts of changes in your life—changes that no one at this time can even imagine. But I also have to know if I’m taking trouble back to Avalon. If I’m taking more trouble back to Edward and Jennie. They don’t need it.

“You were scared spitless when they brought you into the interrogation room, you refused to go to Edward’s house until you learned about the publicity that’s sure to find you if you don’t, and you faked a faint so you wouldn’t have to give any details of your life beyond the past six months. That spells hiding to me. lady, and it’s time I had some answers.”

Meg sank back against the seat. Maybe Lambert wasn’t her friend, but at least he wasn’t her enemy. It wasn’t as though she could keep this secret forever, anyway.

“Wrong. I faked the faint to keep from talking and to get out of there. And I promise you all the answers you need, but first I have to go in that house.”

Lucas held her arm for perhaps a second longer. Then, with a nod, he released her. Meg scrambled from the car, had her key in her hand by the time she reached her door and went directly to the bedroom. The little stash of cash and credit cards on the top shelf of her closet was gone. She didn’t have to check for the rest; she knew it would have been taken, too.

Meg sagged against the door frame, allowing herself a moment’s weakness, and then went to find Lambert.

He had followed her into the house but had stopped at the open door to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet door stood at an angle, and the message she had scrawled on it was obvious even though she had only had cold cream to use.

“‘B’?” he asked.

“As in Plan B,” Meg told him. “Everyone talks about one. We actually had one. And an A and even a C. Today had all the earmarks of a B day.”

“Answers, Meg.”

She nodded, swallowed once and squared her shoulders. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to trust anyone, Lambert. It doesn’t come easily.” She took a towel from the hamper and began wiping the cold cream from the mirror.

Lucas stilled her motions, took the towel from her and rested both hands on her shoulders. “Answers,” he said in his whispery voice.

For a moment Meg accepted the comfort of tins man’s hands on her shoulders. He was strong enough for her to lean against if she but would, and for that moment she wanted very much to do just that, to let someone else fend off the fears and frustrations that had become her life. But she suspected that too many people had already done that to Lucas Lambert; she wouldn’t add unnecessarily to the burdens he carried. And besides, she remembered with a small start of surprise, he was a cop.

She stepped back, drawing her strength around her. “Your friend Edward isn’t just regaining his long-lost sister today,” she said. “He’s getting a little more family than that.”

“Meg—”

“Can I tell you the rest of it later?” she asked. “Right now we have to stop my son before he gets on a plane to Florida.”

Danny looked like her. Too thin, too intense, too competent in his escape plans to be a novice at Plan B or any other plan, and too world-weary to be the twelve Meg had told him.

Now the boy was asleep, curled up in a seat by a window of the Carlton executive jet—the aftereffects of too much adrenaline in too short a time. Lucas knew the symptoms well.

What he didn’t know was why these two were running, or how they had become so accomplished at it.

Megan had taken one quick, startled breath when she’d seen the interior of Edward’s private jet. Lucas thought that before that point the fact of Edward’s wealth hadn’t really penetrated through her shock at finding herself with family. She had sunk silently into one of the oversize chairs grouped for conversation at the front of the cabin. Now she looked up, catching Lucas in his study of the sleeping boy. He watched as the silent battle she waged with herself played through her expressive eyes, watched as she imperceptibly squared her shoulders and prepared herself physically for battle.

“How many times am I going to have to tell this story, Sheriff?” Meg finally said.

Lucas shook his head. “I don’t know. There is no statute of limitations on murder. And the Bureau is going to want to drag every possible bit of memory it can from you. Edward won’t push you, but he’s going to want to know what happened to you. And it seems to me that there are some things I will have to know, in order to protect you from whatever it is that has you running.”

Meg nodded. “Fair enough. But why don’t you make a note of the things you think are going to be important to the—to the past—and have them typed into a statement, or something, that I can sign and not have to go through this again?”

“We can try that,” Lucas told her. We can damn well try, he vowed. This woman looked like she had been through hell and was on the verge of being thrust back into it.

But this time he would make sure that nothing—nothing—got past him to harm her. It was a promise he now knew he had made the moment he had looked into her eyes and seen again the vivid reminder of the debt that was the only hope of redemption for his misbegotten life.

He could help this woman.

She was as fragile as his wife, Alicia, had been in those last few months after he’d come back to her, as fragile as Jennie had been when she first came to Avalon, although he suspected Meg would never admit to fragility—to weakness of any kind.

He could give her the security and protection she needed to discover who she was and who she could become. Her son would have the chance to be a child again, and in a few months, when she left, when she no longer needed him, he could deal with that, too.

Could he?

Giving was hard. Much harder than he’d ever dreamed when he’d promised that if he lived, he would learn to give. Give, rather than take. Give, rather than accept as somehow due.

Give, because if he never got anything else in return, he had already received more than he could ever give back.

But he suspected that Megan Elizabeth Carlton presented more of a challenge to his sanity and his soul than he had faced since he’d made that promise. Could he give to her and her son Danny without asking anything in return from them? Would he be able to let them leave—let her leave—without relinquishing a vital part of the soul he was trying so hard to redeem?

And even if he couldn’t, did he any longer have a choice?