by BETH KERY
And why, despite the feeling of betrayal she experienced at that thought, did she still desperately seek Dylan out for comfort in her disorientation?
She closed her eyes when her voice played back in her head, and she recognized it shook. She took a deep breath. “What did you find out?” she demanded. “Is he …” Nausea rose in her. She fought it back. “Is my father one of Sissy’s brothers?”
A ringing silence. “What?” Dylan’s harsh query shattered it.
“Is it?” she demanded, looking from Dylan to Sidney.
“No,” Dylan said heatedly, grabbing her hands. “Why would you think that?”
“It’s what I’ve always thought. Worried about. Suspected,” she mumbled the last, staring blindly at her knee.
“You thought one of your uncles was your father?” Dylan asked.
Shame wriggled its way in, even through her thick state of shock. “They were the most likely candidates, yeah,” she said a little defensively. It’d been the first time in her life she’d spoken aloud this deeply mortifying suspicion. Despite Dylan’s adamant denial, she felt no relief. Shame swelled in her like a living creature coming to life and writhing in her belly. “Are you sure?” she asked in a cracking voice.
“Alice, look at me,” Dylan said.
She recognized that steely tone. She fought her shame and stared up into his face, her mortification making eye contact difficult. Their gazes locked. She’d never seen him look so fierce.
“Dylan …” Sidney Gates said warningly.
“I won’t have her continuing to believe something so poisonous, not if I can stop it,” Dylan bit out, glaring defiantly at Sidney. He turned back to Alice. “I’m very sure. I knew your father.”
“You did?” she asked, amazed.
He nodded. “And he wasn’t one of the Reed brothers. Not by a long shot. He was a wonderful, brilliant, caring man. I knew your mother, too. And she was no Sissy Reed,” he said forcefully, tightening his grip on her hands. A muscle leapt in his cheek. “I know this may seem incredible, but I’ll try to explain—”
“Dylan, as a psychiatrist, I don’t advise this—
“Alice, your mother and father were Alan and Lynn Durand,” Dylan said.
NINETEEN
Both men stared at her like they expected her to transform into an alien right before their eyes. Strangely, Dylan’s ludicrous statement and their tangible anxiety served to steady her by contrast. She took a deep, even breath of air and smiled.
“Ha-ha,” she said with weary sarcasm. She noticed her discarded water glass on a side table. She stretched, reaching for it, and prepared to stand. Dylan caught her with his hand on her upper arm.
“Alice.”
She looked at his face. It struck her in that moment. The hint of some weight, of some intense pressure or burden, had always been cast over his handsome features. She only noticed it now because it was there in full force, undisguised. She read it in his eyes.
A spasm of some unnamable emotion went through her.
“I don’t believe you,” she muttered. “You’re crazy.”
“No,” he said emphatically, an apology softening his rocklike expression slightly.
Alice glanced up at Sidney Gates, not because she trusted him more than Dylan, but because he was an outsider. Surely he could offer some objectivity to these bizarre unfolding events.
“It’s true, Alice,” Sidney said gently instead. “Your real name is Adelaide Lynn Durand. You’re the daughter of Alan and Lynn Durand, and you were the center of their world. They absolutely adored you.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she said incredulously, turning to Dylan. It stunned her, to realize he would play this cruel joke on her. “Why are you two doing this to me?”
Dylan gave Sidney a flickering glance before he grasped her hands. He squeezed, and as always, she felt that sense of a center. Grounded by his touch … even when she shouldn’t be, given this bizarre situation.
“Alice, this isn’t some kind of a trick. I’ve never been more serious, but I know it must be overwhelming. Do you need to go lie down for a bit? Or do you want to know more now?” Dylan asked simply.
She gave a bark of mirthless laughter. “You can’t say something like that and then expect I’m going to drift off to sleep. You’ve got to tell me now, preferably the punch line of this joke.”
“It’s the opposite of a joke,” Dylan said grimly. He gave her hands one more squeeze and then stood. He crossed the room and opened one of the cabinet doors of the built-in bookcase. From her place on the couch, she caught a glimpse of several photo frames, stacked and laid on their sides on a shelf. Bewildered, she glanced at the many shelves in the room. There wasn’t one photo on them. Someone had removed the framed photos and put them in the cabinet, she realized dazedly.
Dylan removed a dark red leather box and grabbed the top frame. On the way back to his seat next to Alice on the couch, he snagged a small table with one hand. Sidney moved his chair aside to make room for the table, and Dylan plopped it down in front of Alice. Both men sat, Dylan next to her on the couch.
“I can only imagine how strange this all sounds to you,” Dylan said after he’d set down the box on the table. “But the fact of the matter is, I knew you a long time before our meeting at your interview.” He handed her the framed photo. The sunlight cast a glare on it, and Alice squinted to see.
The image resolved before her eyes.
It was a photo of a tiny girl sitting on the back of a shiny black pony. She wore khaki-colored riding breeches, a white blouse, black boots, and a little black riding helmet that was strapped under her chin. Two strawberry-blond wavy pigtails fell from beneath the helmet. She looked at the camera, her smile the most unguarded, innocent, blissful one Alice thought she’d ever seen in her life.
Standing next to the little pony and the girl stood a tall, thin, rangy young man who wore jeans, a T-shirt, and dusty boots. He looked like he might be fourteen or fifteen years old. His longish brown hair gleamed in the bright sunshine. His stance was a little stiff. Not awkward, necessarily. Wary, Alice recognized. He gave a half grin to the camera, a glint of amusement or even happiness shining through his guard. One hand was on the girl’s saddle, the gesture somehow joining the boy and little girl in the photo.
That … and the glow of pride on both of their youthful faces.
Alice couldn’t pull her stare off the boy.
“That’s you,” she whispered to Dylan.
“And you,” Dylan said.
The two words seemed to bounce right off her. She stared up at Dylan’s face. She could see the similarities to the photo. Both boy and man were beautiful, but in different ways. The boy’s innocence was still evident, despite his wariness. Despite his wounds. The man was everything the boy had promised to be, and more.
She swallowed thickly. “What happened?” she asked blankly.
He briefly closed his eyes. “You were kidnapped when you were four,” he said heavily. “Taken from the Durand estate. Taken from me.”
“From you?” Alice asked, hearing him, but not really absorbing what he was saying.
“You know how I told you that I met Alan and Lynn during the first summer I came here when I was twelve? They taught me to ride that summer, and we became friends. Alan saw how much I loved the horses, and he requested that the camp manager make a special assignment for me as an assistant to the stable manager. Late that next summer, I met you. Your dad would bring you down to the stables. You were three, and you loved the horses,” he said gruffly.
“You loved Dylan.”
Dylan stared down at the floor at Sidney’s interruption, his expression wooden. Alice blinked, her trance broken by Sidney’s voice. “Your father told me about it several times, before he died. You idolized Dylan. The two of you had a special bond. I remember Alan saying fondly many times that his daughter was usually a Sweet Adelaide, but occasionally she would be a Sour Citrus,” Sidney smiled, naming two ic
onic Durand Enterprises candies Alice recognized. “You could be headstrong, but you listened to Dylan. And Dylan came out of his shell a little, around you—a tiny, innocent girl who saw the world as fresh and beautiful as the first day it was minted. Seeing how much his little girl loved horses—and the boy at the stables—Alan purchased a gentle pony for you that following summer. That pony right there,” Sidney said, nodding at the framed photo she still clutched in her hand. “Both Alan and Dylan were there when you first mounted her.”
“Angelfire,” she said slowly, deliberately, as if attempting a foreign language. The name lingered on her tongue, strange and beautiful.
Dylan’s head jerked up. “Yes. That was your pony’s name. Do you remember anything else, Alice?”
Alice shook her head. On the contrary, her mind felt strangely blank. “No. It just came to me … like a shot in the dark.”
“Are you all right?” Dylan asked.
“Yes. I’m fine. Better than before, actually,” she said honestly. “Please go on with your story.”
“It’s your story,” Dylan said stiffly. “And it’s not a story. It’s your life, Alice.” He flipped off the lid on the dark red box and withdrew some folded newspapers. “On August second, almost twenty years ago, Camp Durand was in session. I was fourteen years old, and you were four. Alan and I were teaching you to ride Angelfire, and you were coming along.” He opened the newspaper. “Alan had been letting me take you out for short, early morning rides.”
“Alan trusted Dylan to the task,” Sidney said.
“Sidney,” Dylan growled ominously. Sidney seemed quelled.
Alice’s brow quirked at that tense exchange. Sidney had said the words with some weight, and Alice didn’t understand either his gravity or Dylan’s warning. Anxiety flickered in her belly. Not anxiety for her—because the story being told to her didn’t feel personal. It definitely felt a hell of a lot more distant than her long-held fear and shame about being a child of Sissy and one of her uncles. No, the nervousness she felt was for Dylan. She recognized that boy in the photo in some vague sense, certainly more than she identified with that glowing little girl. That girl was cherished and loved, the center of a radiant world that spun happily around her. She was entirely unfamiliar to Alice.
Dylan, though—she experienced a mysterious, charged tendril of connection to that wary, beautiful boy.
“One early morning, I was leading you and Angelfire on a path in the woods. Two men attacked us,” Dylan explained, his tone flat. Terse. He handed the newspaper to her and Alice’s fingers closed around the pages instinctively.
The first thing she saw was a color photo of a tall, handsome man with dark blonde hair and a receding hairline sitting beside a striking woman with shoulder-length auburn hair, large eyes, and a very pretty, delicate face. The couple held the same little girl between them who had been on the pony. They all looked so happy. So blessed.
The headline was a jarring counterpoint to the photo of the handsome family.
DURAND HEIRESS KIDNAPPED
MASSIVE HUNT UNDERWAY
Alice didn’t read the front-page article from the Morgantown Gazette. Her gaze stuck on the cuff bracelet the woman wore. It was made of exquisite filigreed metal depicting interlaced vines and leaves. She searched the woman’s face.
She abruptly handed the newspaper back to Dylan.
“Just tell me what happened to you when these men attacked you in the woods,” she said through a dry throat. “I want to hear your story.”
From the periphery of her vision, she saw Dylan sharply look at Sidney. Sidney nodded.
“That’s a good idea. Alice knows best,” Sidney said enigmatically. “Tell her your story, Dylan. That’s a good place to start.”
DYLAN examined Alice once again, at a loss. She was very pale still, but her large eyes looked clearer than before when she’d passed out. It worried him that he had no idea what she was experiencing on the inside. It was driving him to distraction that he had no ruler, no barometer to gauge what a “healthy” reaction to this situation would be.
Wasn’t a revelation like this by nature a huge blow to the psyche? How could it be healthy?
Even Sidney was cautious, he could tell. He was worried about Dylan telling her the truth. Dylan had reacted purely on instinct, however, when he’d witnessed firsthand the weight of Alice’s shame and anxiety, believing herself to be the child of incest. She’d been cringing, for Christ’s sake. Maybe it’d been wrong of him to tell her at that moment, but Dylan didn’t think so. The idea of Alice believing something so heinous about her origins for so many years didn’t sit well with him.
It didn’t sit well at all.
Still, he’d understood the psychiatrist’s reference just now, and was willing to play along. Sidney was guiding Dylan to follow Alice’s lead. She wasn’t ready to hear Addie Durand and herself referred to as the same person. But she was saying she wanted to learn about him—Dylan’s experience. It was safer for her, perhaps, to hear it from his point of view, to absorb it slowly as if from a distance.
“That stretch of path between the lake and the stables used to be a horse trail,” Dylan began, the words strange on his tongue. He hadn’t spoken much about that life-altering day since he’d been in therapy, and he’d stopped seeing Sidney sixteen years ago. “That was where we were when it happened. You were on Angelfire, and I was leading her. I had you on the lunge, still getting you used to the saddle. Alan and Lynn had talked to my counselor, and they’d all agreed to allow me to teach you after they’d watched us together for a week or so. The kidnappers must have been watching us from the woods for days, maybe weeks beforehand, waiting for their chance.”
“Did you want to do it?” Alice asked. He looked at her bemusedly at her change of topic. “Did you want to teach that little girl how to ride her pony?”
He opened his mouth, but only exhaled at first. He spread his hands, trying to find the words, struggling.
“I was a refugee in this paradise, an outsider. And then one day, I met Alan Durand. I came to respect him more than any other man I’d ever known. He might as well have been a different species than the other people I’d known in my life. He was warm. Wise. His kindness went so deep. Same with Lynn. Both Alan and Lynn treated me like an equal from the first minute I met them. I didn’t get why. But when their attitude held up over three summers—when their trust in me only seemed to grow—I started to believe in it. I started to believe in myself.” He paused, ironing the tension out of his forehead with his fingertips. “One day, Alan trusted me with nothing less than his universe.” He heard Sidney clear his throat and rustle in his chair. He met Alice’s stare. “There were two charges Alan gave me in his life that stand out as life-changing: when he asked me to run his company, and when he trusted me with his little girl. To answer your question? Of course I wanted to teach Addie Durand to ride.”
He saw her throat convulse as she swallowed. She nodded, as if signaling him to continue. For a split second, the memory of that day came back to him in a vivid flash of confused, horrific movement.
“I had my head turned and was instructing Addie and they hit me from behind. I went down, but I wasn’t completely knocked unconscious. I saw them. One of them went to grab Addie off the horse, but she panicked and struggled. She kicked the guy in the face with her riding boot,” Dylan said, a bitter smile tilting his lips at the memory—one impression of grim triumph interspersed with thousands of terrifying images. “He lost hold of her for a second, and Addie fell off Angelfire on the opposite side. I heard her hit the ground, saw she wasn’t moving.”
Dylan saw no spark of memory in Alice’s sapphire eyes when their stares met, but her gaze didn’t skitter away, either. At least she wasn’t afraid, which was something. “One of the kidnappers held Angelfire. As the other guy started to go around the horse to get Addie, I tackled his legs and brought him down. We fought.”
“What happened?” Alice asked.
I failed.
It was a voice from his past, a child’s voice resurfacing, one he thought he’d silenced forever. The circumstances had unearthed it again.
“The other man stabbed Dylan,” Sidney said when Dylan didn’t immediately respond. “He’s lucky he wasn’t killed.”
He felt Alice’s anxious stare on his profile. “I woke up in a hospital bed the next afternoon,” Dylan said gruffly.
“How bad were the injuries?” Alice asked.
He shrugged. “Pretty bad. But I was fourteen, and healthy, and I healed fast enough.”
“That’s where you got those scars,” Alice said, glancing down to the side of his torso. He nodded.
“I was afraid to ask you about them. Why didn’t I before?” she said almost to herself, shaking her head slightly. His concern mounted.
“Are you okay?” he asked her pointedly. She nodded and cleared her throat.
“Do you want some more water?” he asked.
“No,” she said distractedly. “Did you see them? The kidnappers?”
“They were wearing masks and hats. All I could give the police and the FBI was my best guess on their heights and weights and their clothing descriptions.”
“And a description of the damage you managed to give the man you tackled with your fist,” Sidney added dryly.
“It wasn’t enough,” Dylan said.
“It was more than most grown men could have done, being attacked like that unexpectedly by men willing to kill to accomplish their crime. You were only a boy, Dylan.”
A flash of irritation went through him at Sidney’s familiar litany. It’d been Alan’s regular speech as well.
“So the kidnappers were never caught or found?” Alice asked.
“Dylan found them,” Sidney said. “Just recently. One of them was dying, and the other was already dead. Both of them are dead now. They died in two different Michigan penitentiaries.”
“But I thought you said they weren’t caught.”