by Lisa Jackson
“I just wondered how much you were like Kat,” he said, his gaze raking over her uncombed hair, mussed sweater, and swollen lips. “How far you’d go.”
She didn’t believe him and her anger sparked. “So you expect me to believe that you kissed me out of curiosity?”
He shrugged. “I don’t give a shit what you believe.”
“Don’t lie, Zach. I didn’t. You kissed me because you wanted to. Hide it any way you like, but you felt what I did.”
“Christ, now you even sound like her!”
A sickening thought rolled through her mind as she pictured Zach, not quite eighteen, and Katherine, her mother, locked in a compromising embrace, bodies shining with sweat and hard with desire. Oh, God. Was it possible? Had they been lovers? “What are you trying to say?” she whispered as the horrid thought congealed in her mind. “That she came on to you—that she was your—”
“She was nothing to me!” He sliced her a glance that cut her to the quick.
“I don’t believe—”
“Believe what you want, Adria. As I said before, it’s no skin off my nose how you want to delude yourself.” He opened the door of the Jeep and cool air swept inside. She scrambled out and half ran to keep up with his long, furious strides. Rain peppered the ground and washed down her neck but she didn’t care.
“Wait—” Her fingers grabbed for the crook of his arm, but he tossed her hand aside and whirled upon her. His face was twisted into a mask of rage and he seemed larger than ever in the darkness. Rain caught in his black hair before trickling down the contours of his face and disappearing beneath his collar.
His lips flattened and the neon lights from the restaurant reflected red and blue in his eyes. “I don’t know what you want from me, Adria, but you’d better be careful. You might just get it!”
He turned and walked up two long, low steps to the porch of the log cabin.
Adria had no choice but to follow him. Slowly counting to ten, she followed his path, shouldered open the door, walked through a pine-paneled vestibule, and found him standing at the bar, one boot resting on a tarnished brass rail, his elbows propped on the battle-scarred surface of glossy cherry wood.
“I already ordered for you,” he said as the bartender, a slim woman with kinky blond hair and red lipstick, slid two frosted glasses of beer to him, then deftly snatched up the bills he’d left on the counter. His eyes met Adria’s in the mirror over the bar and his gaze had become cloudy again. “Come on. Let’s grab a table.” He cocked his head to an empty booth.
Adria tried to put a lid on her simmering temper. Though she was boiling inside, she slid onto the cushions and accepted the beer—his notion of a peace offering.
Zach gulped half his beer in one swallow. “Anything else you’d like to know about the Danvers family?” he asked with a scornful lift of his eyebrow.
“Whatever you want to tell me.”
“That’s the problem. I don’t want to tell you anything. I think it would be better if you just packed it all in and drove off to Bozeman—”
“Belamy.”
“Whatever.”
“Now you’re sounding like the rest of your family.”
“God forbid,” he muttered and drained his glass. He signaled for another drink, which a waitress, a heavier version of the blond bartender, brought over along with menus.
She winked at Zachary as if they were longtime friends, then smiled at Adria. “Refill?”
“Not right now.”
“I’ll give you a few minutes to decide.” She moved to a nearby table and Adria kept her voice low.
“You know,” she said, not really believing her own words, “despite what you said earlier, we could be friends if we tried.”
He made a sound of disgust. “Friends.” His lips curved into a smile without any warmth. “Is that how you treat all your ‘friends’?”
“Don’t do this—”
“You don’t do it! We can never, never be friends—I thought I already made that clear,” he growled, leaning over the table and grabbing her shoulders.
She threw off his hands and glared furiously at him. “Why are you trying so hard to hate me?”
He hesitated, then sighed and looked away. “Maybe it’s just easier that way.” Dropping back onto his bench, he studied the head of his beer and his jaw clenched. “For both of us.”
“You’re afraid I might end up with the Danvers fortune,” she said, realizing he was more like his family than he wanted to admit.
He snorted and rolled his glass between his fingers. “I don’t care if you end up with the whole damned lot of the inheritance—the logging company, the sawmills, the hotel, the house in Tahoe, even the ranch. If you did, I’d say good riddance. I’m not afraid of you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Your prerogative,” he said with a shrug.
“You can be a real bastard, Danvers. You know that, don’t you?”
One side of his mouth lifted insolently. “I work at it.”
“A true Danvers.”
His smile faded. “Let’s order.”
They didn’t say another word to each other and Adria watched while the waitress flirted outrageously with Zachary as she spouted off the specials of the day. In the end, they both ordered steak sandwiches.
Some country song about lost love and broken hearts was overshadowed by the clink of glasses, rap of pool balls, and murmur of differing conversations. More tavern than restaurant, the old log cabin seemed home to a dozen or so blue-collar types. Hard hats had been exchanged for baseball caps and cowboy hats, but it seemed as if the men sitting on stools in the bar were at home. It reminded Adria of Belamy.
“Why’d you bring me here?” she asked as the waitress slid their drinks onto the table.
“It was your idea, remember.”
“But out here—in the middle of nowhere?”
“You’d rather go to some restaurant downtown?”
“Not really.” She took a sip from her beer.
“Thought you wanted to know the real me.” His eyes glinted sensually. “Now you do.”
“I don’t think so. I think you’re hiding something, Zach. Trying to scare me off.” She stared him down. “It won’t work.” Leaning back against the tufted plastic upholstery, she said, “You were raised in Portland.”
“I try to forget about that.”
“Why?”
He hesitated and gazed at a point over her shoulder where, she suspected, he saw his own youth. “I was always in trouble. Gave the old man nothing but grief.”
“And you’re still cultivating that bad-ass attitude, aren’t you?”
He relaxed against the back of the booth and took a long drink from his glass. “Maybe.”
“No maybes about it.”
Lifting a shoulder, he said, “So what’ve you found out about my illustrious family?”
“Not enough.”
He pinned her with a look and she thought twice about answering. Finally, as the meals were delivered, she said, “Okay. The library was pretty much a bust. Sure, the microfilm from the newspapers had information on the kidnapping and on the family, but there wasn’t much…much substance to it all.”
“So you came up empty.”
“Almost. But I’m not done digging.” She started in on her salad and Zach muttered something about mule-headed women under his breath. She let the comment slide.
“Where are you going to look next?”
She smiled and took a sip from her glass, her eyes meeting his over the rim. “Lots of places. I’m going to talk to reporters and the police. Believe me, I’ve only just begun.”
“You’re going to wind up empty-handed.”
“Is that right? Why?”
“You’ve got one helluva hole in your father’s story. It’s about as big as all of Montana.”
“I’m all ears,” she invited, anxious to hear what he thought. Somehow it was important, as if his opinion would help.
He picked up half of his sandwich. “If everything you say is true—why did Ginny Slade take London in the first place?”
“Who knows?”
“No one, I guess,” he said thoughtfully. “But it wasn’t because she wanted a child or she wouldn’t have left you with the Nashes.”
“I know, but—”
“And it wasn’t for the money because she left some cash in her bank accounts in Portland and never demanded ransom.”
“Maybe she was paid off.”
“My father offered a million dollars, no questions asked, for the return of his daughter. In 1974 that was a helluva lot of money.”
“It’s a helluva lot of money today.”
“But Ginny didn’t claim it.”
“She could’ve been worried about prosecution. Your father—our father—wasn’t known to be as good as his word. He had a reputation for retribution.”
“The plain truth of the matter is you might not be London.”
“There is still one motive left,” she said as she finished her beer and set the empty glass on the table.
“Which is?”
“Revenge. Witt had made more than his share of enemies, Zach. He’d walked all over people, didn’t care who he stepped on to get what he wanted. Seems to me there were plenty of people who would have loved to see him hurt. I just have to figure out who it is. I was hoping you would help me.”
“Why would I bother?” he asked.
“Because London was your half-sister and a lot of people in town thought you were somehow behind her disappearance.”
“I was a kid at the time.”
“A kid who was always in trouble. A kid who had more than his share of run-ins with the law, a kid who suffered big-time at Witt Danvers’s hand, and a kid who was involved in some kind of mugging that night.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to London,” he growled, the skin over his cheekbones stretching tight.
“Okay, Danvers, now’s your chance to prove it. All you have to do is help me find out who I really am. If I’m London, then your name is in the clear—the little girl didn’t really die, she was raised in Montana.”
“And if you’re not?”
“You’re no worse off than you were before. At least your family and the people who care will know that you tried to find out the truth.”
“Except—” he said, nudging his plate aside.
“Except?”
“Except I don’t give a shit what the ‘people who care’ think.” He settled back in his chair and regarded her with eyes suddenly smoky with desire. “Your offer’s not good enough, Adria.” His gaze drilled into hers. “I’m not interested.”
Oswald Sweeny shivered in the breeze that roared off the mountains and cut through his coat. He drew one last warm lungful of smoke from his Camel and ground the butt into the gravel lot surrounding the rooming house. In his opinion, Belamy, Montana, was about as far from civilization as he ever wanted to be. He locked the car door and shuffled up the steps to the wide front porch.
Inside, heat and the smell of something cooking—soup or stew, maybe—enveloped him.
He heard the landlady rattling around in the kitchen, but didn’t bother with any chitchat just now. He hurried upstairs, snapped on the light, and yanked off his jacket. He hadn’t found more than he’d expected in Belamy, Montana, and that bothered him because he was already tired of this little town and its straight-arrow, salt-of-the-earth citizens.
He’d suspected Adria Nash was broke, and it looked like she was drowning in red ink—hospital debts, a large mortgage on the farm she owned, college loans, doctor bills. He had to do a little more checking to find out just how desperate she was for money—Danvers money.
For the last twenty-four hours he’d trudged around this podunk town and nearly frozen his butt clean off trying to pick apart Adria’s story. There were discrepancies, but not many, and the part about her growing up as the adopted daughter of Victor and Sharon Nash was absolutely true.
But there was more dirt yet to dig. He’d seen it in a few of the good citizens’ eyes when he started asking questions about the Nash family in general and Adria in particular. Sweeny was certain she was hiding something—he just didn’t know what.
The pieces as he’d put them together from the few people in Belamy who were willing to talk to him linked into a straightforward picture. Sharon Nash had once been a pretty girl who had married Victor, a decent farmer a few years older than she. All she’d wanted in life was to be a wife and mother, but her dreams had been stolen away when she wasn’t able to get pregnant and medical research in the fifties and sixties was more interested in preventing births than helping sterile couples conceive. She’d gone from doctor to doctor, becoming more desperate as the years passed. When medical technology had swung around and fertility pills were available, she was too old. Fertility pills didn’t work. She reluctantly accepted the fact that she was barren and she convinced herself that God, in keeping her from having children, was punishing her for not believing more strongly in Him.
The farming years had been lean and no adoption agency would offer the land-poor couple a child they couldn’t afford. A private adoption, because of the cost, was out of the question. It seemed as if Sharon was destined to be childless.
As the years passed, Sharon threw all her energy into the church. Though her husband rarely attended services, Sharon never missed a Sunday or a weekly prayer meeting. As everyone here on earth—her husband, the doctors and the lawyers—had failed her, she decided to trust in God completely and became nearly fanatic in serving Him.
Suddenly her prayers were answered, though not through the church, but through Victor’s brother’s law firm. A little girl—a relative, most people thought—had become available and, if Sharon and Victor asked few questions, the adoption could be handled. Sharon didn’t need to have any answers. There were no questions. In her mind this girl was sent from heaven. Victor was more hesitant, as he and his wife were getting up in years, but as much to help out the struggling mother of the girl—a shirttail relative, Sweeny had gleaned—as to keep his wife happy, Victor agreed. In the end, Adria became the apple of her father’s eye.
Sweeny pulled a small flask from his jacket pocket and took a warming swallow. Everything he’d found out so far was all just town gossip and speculation, the idle talk of neighbors and friends. There were no public records of the adoption and Ezra Nash, the lawyer who had handled the case, was dead, the paperwork in his office in Bozeman destroyed in a fire. It was frustrating as hell. All the information fit neatly into Adria’s story and matched the testimony of the pathetic man in the video, but Sweeny could smell a rat. Something didn’t quite mesh.
And it had to do with money. Money she didn’t have.
Ms. Nash could have all the good intentions in the world, but Sweeny was certain that she was after the Danvers family fortune. Somehow she’d managed to put herself through college and graduated at the top of her class with a double major in architecture and business, but she’d only worked for a construction company after graduation.
Tomorrow he’d ask for a simple credit report that would confirm the town gossip, then he’d request some information from the Department of Motor Vehicles that would give him some personal insight into the woman, help him find out what it was that made her tick.
He took another swallow from his flask and, without removing his shoes, dropped onto the bed. For the next couple of days he was stuck in Belamy, which was little more than a stoplight stuck in the middle of no-goddamned-where. The sooner he was out of here, the better.
His only lead was Ginny Slade, aka Virginia Watson Slade, and he’d have to track her down, but it wouldn’t be easy. It would take time and money. Lots and lots of Danvers money.
Adria rubbed the knots from the back of her neck as she peeled off her clothes. She tossed her sweater onto the bed, then stepped out of her slacks. Finger-combing the tangles from her hair, she walked
to the bathroom with its cool marble floor, gold-colored fixtures, and expansive mirrors. Plush robes emblazoned with “Hotel Danvers” in gold script hung on hooks near a shower big enough for two. She twisted on the faucets to the Jacuzzi and added bath oil from the tiny bottles the maid had left earlier.
“A far cry from the Riverview Inn,” she muttered as she unhooked her bra and stepped out of her panties. Within seconds she was immersed in the warm water, letting pulsating jets ease her tired muscles. With a sigh she closed her eyes and tried not to think of Zachary Danvers and the unwanted emotions he evoked in her.
He was too sexy and raw for his own damned good—or hers. She remembered him staring at the portrait of Katherine, his stepmother, in the hallway of the Danvers mansion. There had been secrets in his eyes, and what else—longing? Guilt?
“You’re making too much of it,” she told herself as lavender-scented bubbles surrounded her and the Jacuzzi rumbled, churning the warm water. How long had it been since she’d indulged in a bubble bath? Ten years? Twenty? It wasn’t the kind of luxury Sharon Nash believed in, not even for a child. How different her life would have been had she been raised as a Danvers, in the kind of opulence most people could only dream of, but the family seemed to take for granted. The family. Her family? God, that wasn’t a pleasant thought.
She’d already decided Jason was a snake, Trisha not much better, a bitter woman with her share of secrets. Zach was surly at his worst and sarcastically seductive at his best, and Nelson was unreadable, a man who seemed torn. But then, those had only been her first impressions.
“Probably only gonna get worse,” she told herself and smiled until she considered Zach again. He’d made the mistake of calling her “Kat.” Or had it been on purpose, some kind of test?
She lathered her arms and decided against that particular theory. Zach had slipped. Kat’s name had fallen from his tongue in a heated moment when they’d been kissing and touching…and…