by Lisa Childs
He chuckled, albeit with no humor. “That’s even less of a possibility now than it was before.”
“Because I know too much? Because I know who you are?”
“You don’t know anything,” he said as he put the contacts back in his eyes and fastened the mask back onto his face. She was as ignorant as he had once been. He unlocked and opened the door.
If she was smart, she would have run from him. But instead, she followed where he led her down the tunnel, to another secret room. The door was unlocked, but guards sat inside, staring at a wall of monitors playing security footage.
She gasped. “It looks like the editing room at the station.”
The guards gasped, too, with surprise at her intrusion. They glanced from her to Tobias. He nodded, silently assuring them that it was okay that she was here. That he had everything under control. But he wasn’t foolish enough to really believe he could control Jillian Drake.
“But the screens in your editing room are showing stuff that already happened,” Anthony, the young computer expert, remarked. “This is playing out now. Live.” He’d hacked into the security system at the estate, a system Tobias had just had installed before the imposter had taken over his life. But the system hadn’t been as high-tech as Tobias had thought; the kid had breached it with no trouble, allowing them access to the entire estate.
On one of the screens, the imposter sat in Tobias’s den, behind Tobias’s desk, drinking Tobias’s whiskey. The only comfort Tobias had was that it looked as if the man really needed the drink. Stubble darkened his jaw; his hair was mussed, as if he’d been running his hands through it. He looked like a man with few options left. Actually, although he didn’t know it yet, he only had one.
But yet the bastard struggled to accept that, struggled to accept that he wasn’t as smart and powerful as he’d believed he was.
“That’s him,” she murmured. “That’s…”
He caught her before she could reveal anything, jerking her closer to his side. Then he turned to his men. “Take a break. I can handle it for a minute.”
“With her?” one of them questioned. “You trust her?”
When she’d taken off his mask, she hadn’t left him much choice. “Yes.” But even as he made the admission, he recognized it for the lie it was. He wasn’t really capable of trusting anyone.
She waited until the men left the room, shutting the door behind them, before she turned from her intense scrutiny of those monitors and focused on him. “They claim this is a live feed. But how do I know they’re telling the truth? How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“That’s why I brought you here,” he explained. Although he wasn’t sure he understood his need for her to know that he wasn’t the imposter. He’d hoped no one, besides those who already knew, would learn the truth. But now…
JILLIAN BLINKED, unable to focus on the monitors before her, unable to accept what he claimed. She gestured toward all those security screens and said, “This proves nothing.”
“Just watch,” he advised as he clicked some buttons on a keyboard.
One of the screens changed to an image she recognized: Vicky’s young face flushed with nerves and pinched with concern. Then volume played through speakers mounted on the cement walls. “This is a live broadcast from Channel 13, WXXM. Investigative reporter Jillian Drake disappeared last night. Her car was recovered from the scene of the explosion that went off in the industrial area of River City just before dawn. While her car was badly burned, it was determined there was nobody in the vehicle. Authorities are searching for Jillian Drake. But if anyone has any information about her whereabouts, they should contact Channel 13 directly.”
“St. John—” she turned to him “—you bought WXXM.”
“I didn’t buy the station, and neither did he.” He tapped the screen that showed the image of him, drinking at his desk. With a click on the keyboard, the camera turned at an angle so that a television screen was visible inside the room; Vicky’s mouth was moving as she continued to report from the scene of Jillian’s disappearance.
“Oh, my God! So he’s really there…and you’re really here,” she said, her shock and confusion returning with a throbbing headache. “But that doesn’t tell me which one of you is the real Tobias St. John.”
“I don’t have to tell you,” he said. And she worried he was going back to keeping his secrets, but then he reminded her, “Tabitha told you.”
He’s not my daddy….
She shivered with the realization that the little girl had been right. “Tabitha—she’s your daughter.”
“And I’m her daddy,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
He’d betrayed that emotion before when he’d talked about the child, revealing that he’d had a connection to Tabitha St. John. Now Jillian understood exactly how deep their connection was.
“But I don’t understand,” she said, hating that she kept repeating that phrase. “Why are you down here, and that…that…”
“Imposter,” he supplied the word, his voice rough with disgust.
“Imposter is in your house?” Relief eased some of her confusion; that man who’d been so threatening and creepy hadn’t really been Tobias. That was why she’d been so disappointed that he wasn’t the man she’d been drawn to these past three years. He hadn’t been the myth or the man. At least, not the real one. “Even before Tabitha said anything to me, I knew something was strange about him—when he let me onto the estate, when he agreed to speak to me.”
“I would have never done that,” he agreed.
“Why not?” she asked. “Why did you never grant me an interview?”
“I value my privacy, Ms. Drake.”
Jillian gestured at the rough cement walls of the tunnel and then at his leather mask. “Isn’t this a bit extreme to protect it?”
“It’s not my privacy I’m trying to protect now.” A muscle twitched in his cheek as he clenched his jaw.
“Tabitha,” she whispered. “How can you protect her from here? By leaving her with him?”
“You think I left her there?” His voice finally rose above that raspy whisper to a shout, and she recognized the distinctive deep tone of it. “You think I had a choice?”
“So he’s taken her hostage?” she asked, fear gripping her. That poor little girl…
His jaw rigid with anger, he nodded.
“He’s the one who killed her nanny,” she realized. “And the other woman?”
“She must have been the nanny the agency sent to replace Mindy,” he replied.
“So the woman who’s there now is a fraud,” she said. Jillian had suspected Susan wasn’t a real nanny, and that the blonde had seemed too close to St. John to have only known him a couple of weeks. “She’s in on the kidnapping with him.”
He jerked his chin in a sharp nod. That rigid jaw, his massive build, the very magnetism of Tobias St. John’s larger-than-life personality—it was all there, enhanced by the mask instead of concealed. How could she have missed it?
Disgusted with herself, she shook her head. “I should have known…I should have known you were you.” Because she’d been drawn to him, just as she had before the imposter had assumed his life. “I’m not me,” he said, and the disgust was all his now. “I’m nobody right now. I’m that phantom your witnesses called me. A shadow of my former self. Like you said, Dante…”
In hell because of an imposter.
“But who is he?” she wondered. “How did he just…”
“Take over my life?” He stared up at the monitor, at the image of himself.
“That can’t be just the result of plastic surgery,” she said. “He doesn’t just look exactly like you. He sounds like you. He acts like you.”
“No.” That muscle jumped in his cheek again. “He doesn’t act like me.”
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “He fooled me. He’s fooled everyone. Your security force. The police.”
“None of them, especially you, rea
lly know me,” he pointed out. “He didn’t fool everyone, though. He didn’t fool the people who matter.”
Jillian’s breath caught over the little twinge of pain his words caused her. She’d made love with him, but she didn’t matter. She should have expected as much. She’d never mattered to anyone.
“Who is he?” she asked again, forcing herself to focus. “Over the three years since I started working at WXXM, I ran all kinds of background checks on you.
I didn’t find any relatives but Tabitha.”
“That’s what I thought, too.” He expelled a ragged sigh as he studied that man on the screen. “God, I wish that was really the case.”
“But it’s not.”
“I don’t have time for this,” he said with a groan of frustration.
“I thought you had no place to be until dark.”
“I’m still not going to grant you an interview,” he said. “You know as much as you need to know.”
“And more than you wanted me to know,” she surmised. “But I don’t know enough to understand any of it.”
“Why do you need to?”
“Because I care,” she admitted, her voice cracking with emotion. God, she had begun to fall for him. “I care about Tabitha.”
“You only talked to her once,” he reminded her.
But the child’s fear had touched her and had brought back all Jillian’s old fears and helplessness. “She asked me to help her then. And I want to help.”
“I have it under control.”
“You want me under control,” she said. It was probably why he’d made love to her, so she would lose her objectivity, which she had. “I swear—whatever you tell me, it’s off the record. I won’t report it.”
“Have you ever given that off-the-record line and actually meant it?” he asked.
“I only say what I mean.”
He sighed. “So what do you want to know?”
“How did this happen?”
“I had a mother until I was twelve,” he said, his deep voice curiously devoid of emotion. “Then social services deemed her unfit, took me away from her and put me in foster care. She never called, never tried to see me. I figured she was dead until she called me a few weeks ago. She had something to tell me, but I didn’t give her the chance.”
Jillian understood his unwillingness. Had her father ever called her, she wouldn’t have talked to him, either.
“I figured she just wanted some money,” he explained. “Then she died, leaving me listed as her next of kin. So I had to go back to Detroit to handle the funeral arrangements, and while I was gone, I got a call from my head of security. He warned me that someone was pretending to be me.”
Tobias flinched at the understatement. The man was more than pretending; he’d stolen his life from him.
“Someone? Who is he?” she asked.
He couldn’t trust that the reporter would really keep everything he told her off the record. But he found himself wanting to share the nightmare he’d been living with the woman who’d become his lover. He wanted her to understand why he’d done everything that he had.
So he replied, “Apparently he was what my mother wanted to tell me about.” To warn him about, he suspected now. “I wasn’t the only one she gave birth to in a crack house thirty-five years ago—I had a brother. A twin. But she didn’t keep him.”
This was information Jillian wouldn’t have found, no matter how good an investigative reporter she was. He hadn’t even had a birth certificate until he’d been put into the foster care system. The name used for his mother hadn’t even been her real one.
Her green eyes warmed with sympathy. “And I thought I had a terrible childhood.”
He shrugged. He hadn’t wanted her pity. “I don’t know what happened to him. But for me, it got better. It got good, actually. When I was twelve, I was placed in a foster home with a really nice family.”
A normal family, but of course he hadn’t realized that at the time. He’d never known normal before. Then it was all he’d wanted to provide for Tabitha; that was why he’d given his ex the money she’d wanted, to protect his little girl from her mother’s indifference and selfishness. But he’d failed his daughter.
“You didn’t remember him?” Jillian asked.
“I couldn’t have been very old—maybe hours—when she sold him.”
“Sold him?” Her eyes widened with shock.
Tobias nodded. “That’s what he told me. She sold him to a dealer for drugs. The dealer sold him to someone else. He didn’t say much more than that.”
“So you talked to him?”
“After Morris called me, he—Edward—called and warned me that if I tried coming home, he’d kill Tabitha.” Horror clutched at him with fear for his daughter’s life. “Said if I showed myself around River City, if I did anything that caused anyone to even suspect that he wasn’t me, he would kill Tabitha.”
“That’s why you didn’t call the cops.”
He expelled a ragged sigh. “I couldn’t take the risk.”
“But leaving her there…?”
He tapped the keyboard again, bringing up another camera view—this one of his little girl sitting in the middle of her bed playing with a doll. Her black hair tangled around her shoulders as if no one had brushed it, and she wore the pajamas she’d worn since she’d awakened.
“You can watch her.”
He spent much of his time in front of this monitor, watching over his baby and hoping she could sense his protection. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted to hold her and calm her fears. “Yeah.”
She reached out and squeezed his arm as if she knew his pain, as if she felt it, too. “You can see if she’s in danger, but how do you get there…”
“Before it’s too late?” His heart clenched at the possibility. “That’s the problem. Even with Morris there, there’re too many other guards.”
She shuddered. “Like the ones who grabbed me. The mercenaries. Morris wouldn’t be able to fight them all off alone.”
“No. But he could get her out of immediate danger, at least for a little while.” He lifted his fingertip to the screen and pointed at the closet doors. “In the back is a dummy panel that slides open to a secret room. A safe room.”
“But Morris will have to be able to get her past the nanny to get to it?”
He nodded. “And she’s working with Edward,” he said. “Mindy, Tabitha’s real nanny, was killed in the park the day I left for Detroit. Morris had an agency send someone else over, but Edward must have intercepted her, too.”
Edward had killed anyone who’d gotten in his way, even his own mother. During their phone conversation, the madman had taken great pride in claiming responsibility for her murder. Of course, Edward hadn’t actually known her since she’d sold him as an infant. He hadn’t spent his life tracking down his biological mother for a reunion, but for revenge. She’d failed him, just as she had failed Tobias—again—when she’d told Edward about him.
She shivered and nodded. “So Morris has to get Tabitha past Susan and Edward? He’s the only one who can get her into that secret room?”
“He’s the only one who knows about it. It’s new.” Tobias had installed it after his mother called because just hearing her voice on the phone had brought back all those old memories of the horrible people, drug dealers and criminals, that she’d brought into his life. His childhood fears had reinforced his vow to protect his daughter. Somehow he’d instinctively known his mother would bring someone horrible into their lives again. “It’s not stocked. They wouldn’t be able to hide in there for very long. So we had to work out a plan.”
“Your plan,” she said, her brow furrowing with confusion again. “The thefts, the explosions… You’re destroying everything that you spent your life building.”
“I built nothing. The money and the power and the possessions don’t mean anything. All I want is my daughter,” he said. “I don’t care about anything else.”
But Edward did. Tob
ias didn’t have to have grown up with him to know that only money and power mattered to the man. People—human life—meant nothing to him.
“I didn’t destroy everything,” he admitted. “I kept enough to persuade him to agree to an exchange—what’s left of my money and my meaningless possessions for my daughter.”
“How are you going to make the exchange?” she asked. “He’s dangerous. You can’t trust him.”
He snorted. “Of course I can’t trust him. But I can distract him.”
She nodded. “The power outage. The airfield. Do you think it’s enough?”
“It has to be.” His plan had already taken two interminable weeks to carry out. But he’d known Edward wouldn’t be ready to deal until he had nothing else left. Tobias focused on the view of the camera in the den.
Edward stood and hurled his drink across the room. The glass shattered as it struck the wall.
“What—what happened?” Jillian asked.
Tobias struck the key, turning up the volume on the news broadcast that Edward simultaneously watched with them.
The nervous young woman reported, “The man the state police apprehended with the dead bodies is none other than Tobias St. John’s chief of security, Nicholas Morris.”
“Damn!” Tobias’s gut tightened with frustration. He needed Nick, needed him to get Tabitha to safety. “Damn it…”
“What will you do now?” Jillian asked, her voice cracking with concern. “Can you put it off until he gets Morris out of jail?”
“I’m not sure he’ll try,” Tobias admitted, “or if he’d be successful.”
“You think Morris killed someone?”
Tobias shook his head. “No. I know Edward did. He killed the guards who were supposed to bring you to him.”
She gasped. “Oh, my God…”
The murders were on tape. But Tobias focused on the live feed as Edward summoned the car, then stalked out of the den. “He’s going to run.”
“But with the airfield…”