Star Bright

by Catherine Anderson

  “Parker’s a big boy. Let him decide if he wants to take that chance.”

  “He won’t understand how ruthless Peter is.”

  “Do you mistakenly believe that Parker can’t be just as ruthless if a situation calls for it? Don’t let that laid-back, country-boy manner of his fool you. He’s as tough as a pine knot and sharp as a tack. Peter is wealthy and very influential. I’ll give him that. And I can understand your fear of him. Just remember one thing: This isn’t Seattle. It’s Harrigan territory. Don’t underestimate Parker—or this family. If Peter shows his face around here, his ass will be grass, and Parker will be a lawn mower.” At Rainie’s startled look, Loni smiled and shrugged. “Sorry. After a time, the Harrigan figures of speech have a way of rubbing off on you. Maybe I should say that Peter will be a mud hole, and Parker will stomp him dry.”

  Rainie could almost hear Parker saying that. She rubbed her cheek against the top of Mojo’s head. The puppy had fallen asleep, a warm, limp bundle tucked under her chin. “As I said, I need to think about it.”

  “Just don’t think about it too long.” Loni turned for the door. “I won’t say anything to anyone about this, not even to Clint. You have my word. It’s your life, after all. But in my opinion, going to Parker is the only smart choice you can make.” After placing her hand on the doorknob, Loni turned her dark head to look back. “Trust him. I know you’re scared. I know it’s hard. But I’d bet my last dollar that he won’t let you down. Peter Danning’s high-priced investigator could locate you at any time, and the next thing you know, Peter will be setting you up to have a fatal accident or to become the victim of a random act of violence. If you don’t believe me—if you refuse to listen—you could die. Don’t do that to me. Okay? I can’t take that again.”

  The pain in Loni’s expression told Rainie that someone, at some point, hadn’t listened and had died as a result. The thought filled her with cold terror. She remembered the night that Peter had almost thrown her over the balcony railing, how frantically she’d fought to survive. To this day, she didn’t know what had stopped him. It certainly hadn’t been her superior strength. Now this woman was telling her that Peter might be only one step behind her.

  “I’m scared,” Rainie blurted out. “I’m so scared. You just can’t know.”

  “Oh, but I do know, Rainie. I saw. Peter Danning is a monster, and he will never let you go. He has to make certain that you’re dead. That’s why he hired the private investigator, because he suspects that you aren’t, and if he allows you to remain alive, you might decide to take your chances with the law and file for divorce someday. You’d be able to take half of his assets. He killed two women to attain that wealth. He’ll never let you get your hands on a penny of it.”

  “A good amount of that money is mine—my inheritance from my father.”

  “Do you think he cares? It’s his money now. You’ve inconvenienced him with your little disappearing act. That’s how he sees it, you know, as an irritating inconvenience that he now has to rectify.”

  Every word Loni said rang true. Peter was just that cold and ruthless. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Ask Parker. Peter’s investigator is going over passenger logs as we speak. Even if it takes him a while to find you, how long do you think it will take before he discovers that your best friend, Janet, works for that cruise line and frequently works aboard the Ocean Jewel?”

  Rainie stared at the closed door for a very long time after Loni exited the office.

  Parker was in Montana’s stall wrapping the stallion’s injured hind leg when Rainie entered the enclosure. He’d seen her feed Montana treats from the opposite side of the gate, but she was still a little too nervous with equines to give up the safety barrier. Or so he’d thought. Now, here she was, standing behind him in an occupied stall, bold as brass.

  He straightened from his task and turned. The moment he settled his gaze on her, his heart jerked. She looked as if someone had just punched her in the solar plexus and almost collapsed her lungs. Her chest heaved with every jagged breath she took. Her face was stark white, her eyes huge puddles of hazel against her pale skin. But what really grabbed hold of him was her mouth. It quivered convulsively, which told him she was clinging to her composure by sheer force of will.

  “What?” he asked with an edge in his voice.

  He immediately regretted the sharpness of his tone. It just frightened him to see her like this. She had solid ground under her feet, but she stood with her boots set wide apart, as if she were bracing herself for a magnitude-six earthquake.

  “I’m in trouble,” she said thinly. “Why didn’t you warn me not to shake her hand? Now she knows everything.”

  Parker went over that like a drunk presented with an algebraic equation. What the hell? “I’m sorry, honey. I’m not followin’.”

  Her thin shoulders lifted in a helpless shrug. “Loni. I let her touch me, and now she knows all of it. All of it, Parker.”

  Parker had been treated to Loni’s unsettling ability to divine personal details about his past by merely touching his hand. He’d just never stopped to think that the same thing might happen to Rainie. “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes!” she cried. “She came over this morning to meet me.” She pressed trembling fingertips to the base of her throat. “I shook hands with her, and now she knows everything about me, Parker! Why on earth didn’t you warn me?”

  “I should have. I’m sorry. I just didn’t think.”

  “You didn’t think? My whole life could be destroyed, and you didn’t think? You’ve known from the start that my real name isn’t Anna Pritchard. Did it never occur to you that maybe I have secrets I don’t want other people to know?” She cupped a hand over her eyes. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t be yelling at you. It’s just . . . I’m just so scared. I can barely think straight.”

  “She won’t tell anyone what she saw,” Parker assured her.

  “Her telling someone isn’t my only worry,” she informed him shrilly. “She says he’s about to find me.”

  Parker’s stomach dropped. “Peter, you mean?”

  Her eyes welled with tears, and he felt as if he were drowning in the pain he saw there. “I’m scared, Parker. I am so scared. If he finds me, he’ll kill me.” Her mouth finally lost the battle and began to quiver so violently that her chin got into the act. “He killed his first two wives. And now he’ll kill me.”

  Parker dropped the roll of bandages on the stall floor. Rainie wasn’t keeping her voice down, and he was afraid someone in the stable might hear her. “Toby!” he shouted. “I need you over here.”

  When his stout, aging foreman appeared at the stall gate, Parker clasped Rainie’s elbow and steered her from the enclosure. To his foreman, he said, “I’ve got business. Take over for me, would ya?”

  “Sure, boss,” Toby said.

  Parker barely heard him. He was too focused on the violent trembling of Rainie’s body as he guided her across the arena to the personnel door. When they spilled outside, she flicked a tear-filled glance at him. “Where are we going?”

  Damned if he knew. “To the house, I guess. No one can overhear us there.”

  She stumbled, and he barely managed to catch her from falling. As upset as she was, Parker wasn’t surprised that she lost her footing on the uneven ground, but when she bumped against him and didn’t jerk away like an offended virgin, he found it alarming. It told him just how shaken up she actually was. She leaned in as if he were her only anchor in a storm. Afraid she might trip again, he curled his arm around her shoulders, pulling her even closer.

  “Talk to me, darlin’. Why does Loni think Peter’s about to find you?”

  “He’s hired a private investigator,” she said shakily. “They’ve checked the passenger logs, and now the investigator is trying to locate me. It won’t be long before he discovers that my friend Janet works for the cruise line. Once that comes to light, he’ll quickly figure out that she boarded t
he ship with a fake ID, pretending to be the new me.”

  None of this was clicking for Parker. Cruise line? Janet? Pretending to be the new Rainie? Maybe he was just dense, but he felt as if he’d opened a book at the middle and couldn’t make sense of the convoluted plot. He quickened his footsteps, wanting to get Rainie to the house as fast as possible. She needed a double jigger of bourbon to calm her down. Maybe then she would start making sense.

  Once in the kitchen, Parker led her to a chair. The moment she sank onto the seat, she covered her face with trembling hands. “I’m married,” she said, her voice squeaky and thin. “No divorce. I need to get that said. I’m so sorry, Parker. I should have told you, but I just couldn’t.”

  He stepped to his kitchen liquor cabinet and jerked out a jug of Jameson. “I’m not stupid, Rainie. I figured as much.” After grabbing a tumbler, he poured her two fingers of whiskey, which, with his thick digits, was a hefty jot. Walking to the table, he added, “And excuse me for pointin’ it out, but that mess wasn’t a marriage. A sentence in hell, more like. Do you think God blesses a union like that? You let me put bars on your bedroom windows and reinforce the door. You’re terrified of the bastard. Do you think any promise you ever made to him could be sacred in any way? He ended the sanctity the first time he hit you. You’re contractually bound to him, yes, but that’s it.”

  He slapped the tumbler down in front of her, making her jump. He felt instantly sorry. Sometimes he forgot how timid she was—and all the many reasons she undoubtedly had for being timid. That was especially true when he was mad, and right now, he was flat pissed, not because of anything she’d done, but because she was so scared. Parker itched for the chance to knock What’s-his-name’s teeth down his throat.

  He sat down across from her. “Bottoms up, sweetheart.” He inclined his head at the whiskey. “Every sensible Irishman’s cure for rattled nerves. Works like a charm. I guarantee it’ll calm you down.”

  She looked at the glass as if it had magically appeared in front of her. Then she blinked and returned her gaze to his. “You knew? That I’m still married?”

  “I suspected.” He rocked back on the chair, studying the sweet contours of her face and wondering when, precisely, every precious line had become engraved on his heart. “Your bein’ married doesn’t matter. Not a whit. I love you, anyway.” He hadn’t meant to say that. He was definitely the old man’s progeny. His mouth always engaged before his brain did. “And just for the record, there’s absolutely no reason for that to alarm you. I meant what I said about us bein’ nothin’ more than friends, and I’ll be content with that for however long I have to be.” He paused to let that sink in. “I’ll also point out that there’s no reason for you to feel afraid of Peter. If he ever touches a hair on your head again, I’ll kill him.”

  Her already wet eyes welled with sparkling tears. “You don’t know it all. I’ve done a terrible thing.”

  “What?” Parker almost smiled, because he couldn’t picture Rainie ever doing anything truly horrible. She didn’t have it in her. “Let me guess. You tried to stab the son of a bitch with the scissors.”

  “No.” Her throat worked as she struggled to swallow. “I killed myself.”

  Parker mentally circled that one for a long moment. “Come again?”

  “I killed myself. A huge, elaborate hoax. He wanted to take me on a cruise, and I knew he meant to murder me during the trip and throw me overboard. I couldn’t just go along with that like a lamb being led to slaughter. So, instead, I pretended to be oblivious, went on the cruise, and beat him to the punch.” She reached for the tumbler and gulped down some of the whiskey, which brought even more tears to her eyes. “He’d figured out that I wanted to leave him. That was what started the whole cruise thing. That was my fault, I guess. Him finding out that I meant to leave him, I mean. Looking back on it, I don’t know what I was thinking. I was just so upset when I couldn’t liquidate the investments that I had to confront him.”

  “Whoa.” Parker held up a hand. “Back up, honey. You’re losin’ me. What investments?”

  “The ones he made for me with my inheritance money from my father’s estate. When things got really bad, and I realized I had no choice but to run, I needed to sell the stocks so I’d have some money to get away. Only I couldn’t touch the investments because he had them all under only his name. My own money, and I couldn’t get my hands on a single cent!”

  Her story still seemed a bit muddled to Parker, but he decided to sit back, hear her out, and hope that the picture finally came clear for him.

  “After I confronted him about the investments, he demanded to know why I had been looking at his portfolio. I couldn’t give him a reason without telling him that I needed my money to get away from him. He put two and two together, though, and figured it out. He flew into a horrible rage, dragged me out to the balcony, and almost threw me over the railing. To this day, I don’t know what stopped him. Maybe he realized at the last second that killing me that way wouldn’t look like an accident. After changing his mind, he wrapped his hands around my throat and swore that he’d see me dead before he would ever let me go. In order to convince me that he meant it, he informed me that his first two wives had made the mistake of trying to leave him, too, and he had killed them before they could file for divorce.”

  “Oh, honey.” Parker couldn’t think of anything else to say. She truly had served time in hell.

  She wiped her cheeks with quivering fingertips. “Later that same evening, it came on the news that this guy had vanished from a cruise ship during his honeymoon. Peter suddenly started talking about us taking a cruise.” She fixed him with bruised, aching eyes. “He was like that. It . . . it amused him to play cat and mouse with me. I knew if I went aboard a ship with him, I’d never live to see dry land again. I was so terrified, Parker. I had no money to get away from him, and I knew if I stayed, he was going to kill me.

  “Until then, I’d never told my friends, Maggie and Janet, the truth about my marriage. I was—” She broke off and lifted her hands in a gesture of helpless bewilderment. “Ashamed, I guess. My fairy-tale romance had turned into a nightmare. Whenever they e-mailed me and asked how things were going, I gave them vague responses. I felt like an idiot for getting myself into such a mess. But after the balcony incident, I no longer had a choice but to turn to them. I called Maggie the next morning. She and Janet came up with the idea of my faking my own death. Did you ever watch the movie Sleeping with the Enemy?”

  “The Julia Roberts film?” It hit Parker then. There’d always been something oddly familiar about Rainie, and now he saw it. Except for little differences in her features and eyes, she was almost an exact duplicate of the leading female character in that movie, right down to the flowing skirts, dainty tops, and quaint summer dresses. The wildly curly, sun-streaked hair. The funky white shoes she’d worn to that first interview. She’d mimicked that look. “I’ll be damned,” he whispered.

  “That’s where we got the idea, from that movie,” she went on, her voice wobbling like an out-of-balance tire. She gulped down more whiskey. “Janet thought of it. She’s my friend. Did I tell you that? I can’t keep my thoughts straight. She and Maggie, they’re both my friends. We met at university.”

  “Pepperdine?”

  “Yes. I didn’t lie about that. I actually went there, only under my real name, Lorraina Hall.”

  Parker rocked farther back on the chair to rest a boot on his knee. “I know I’ve been a little slow on the uptake here, but let me be sure I’ve got this straight. The three of you watched Sleepin’ with the Enemy and decided to fake your death so you could get away from Peter?”

  “Yes. It had been a long time since we’d watched the movie. But Janet remembered the plot, and we all watched it several more times.” Her chin started quivering again. “If I faked my own death, we hoped Peter wouldn’t look for me. Stan, this computer nerd we knew from school, got me a fake passport and other identification. I sent it to Janet, and sh
e used it to board the ship, wearing a disguise. She went to the cabin that she’d reserved for me, and left the luggage, the ID, and some money. Then she went shopping in the boutiques, posing as the new me, Anna Pritchard, so my existence would be established on the cameras.”

  “Cameras. On the ship?”

  “Yes. They’re all over the place. Janet’s a ship operations manager for the cruise line, so she knows the camera layout.” She swallowed more liquor. “In college, people often mistook us for sisters, so she looked enough like the passport picture of me to pull it off. She wore the same wig and a lot of makeup, just like I did when the photo was taken. She got through security, no problem.”

  It was all starting to come together for Parker now. “And you boarded with Peter as yourself?”

  “Yes.” She pushed at her hair, her hand still quivering with nerves. “He never suspected a thing. During dinner that night, I excused myself from the table to go to the ladies’ room, which wasn’t far from the dining room. Janet met me there, and we switched clothing. Once I looked like Anna Pritchard and she looked like Lorraina Danning, we left the ladies’ lounge with the outside camera documenting our departure. From there, I went to the cabin that Janet had booked for me, and she went to a camera-free area to change back into her own clothes. That’s how Lorraina Danning vanished.

  “Once in my cabin, I showered, layered on sunless tanning lotion and makeup, put on the wig again, and then waited for all hell to break loose, which it did as soon as Peter realized I was missing. For the remainder of the trip, I stayed in the cabin, pretending to be seasick. Everyone thought Lorraina Danning, the real me, had fallen overboard.”

  “So you hid out while everyone on the ship searched for you?” It wasn’t really a question. The picture was growing clearer in Parker’s mind with every word she said.