Children of Destiny Books 4-6 (Texas: Children of Destiny Book 10)

by Ann Major

  Tad's face darkened. "Who knows? The bush coppers, acting officious as hell, poked around the wreckage for a while, came by the station in their new Jeeps and wrote up a report. Then we never heard from them again. I didn't think it was sabotage then, but all I know now is that that was the beginning of it all. Holt was a harmless sort, poor bloke. A geologist. Always out poking around where he didn't belong, exploring for minerals. Never found much. I guess he never knew what hit him."

  "You don't have any ideas who's behind this mess?"

  "I have a few, but I can't prove anything. I don't trust any of the Martins. Not even their American cousin, Noelle."

  "You've been down on women ever since I've known you."

  "Ever since I stuck my head in the noose and married one of them. But I can't forget that we didn't have any trouble till Noelle turned up. Now it's brother against brother, property owner against property owner. We used to trust each other out there. With every property under attack, nobody trusts anybody anymore. Hell! Who knows? Anyway, I didn't come here to rehash my problems!"

  "Well, I called you because I've got good news." Ian's grin broadened. "One of my men found Deirdre."

  Tad sprang out of his seat and leaned across the desk. Forgotten were the killers that stalked him night and day. Forgotten were the Martins and the drought.

  His fear was an icy, suffocating mist that seemed to mingle with the noxious curl of acrid cigar smoke, gagging him.

  "What?" he rasped. "You mean her body? Where? It must have been badly decomposed. Lizzie?" His chest tightened. He hardly dared breathe his daughter's name.

  Ian leaned forward, too, his grin intact. His dark face was placid. Only his sharp black eyes belied his outward calm. "Not her body, you bloody bastard. Her." He seized Tad by the forearm and held it in a death grip. "She's alive. So's your kid."

  "Alive..."

  Ten thousand pins seemed to pierce him just beneath the surface of his skin. He couldn't believe it. Tad didn't want Deirdre dead, but he didn't want her back in his life, either. He just wanted Lizzie.

  Her being alive didn’t make sense. Deirdre had to be dead. She would never have left Australia without the money. And he had found the money in the cottage.

  Images of that nightmarish time nearly a year ago came back to him. The bush coppers had seized him and flown him to the island, to her cottage. He could still remember the way her suitcase had lain half open on the rumpled bed with her lacy garments dripping out of it. The rest of her things had been scattered untidily about on the rose-patterned carpet and couches. Meticulous about her person, Deirdre had always been messy when she traveled. They had told him she'd probably drowned.

  He could almost hear the rush of the sea sounding through the windows of the cottage, almost smell the salty dampness of it seeping inside. He had picked up her lavender silk blouse, which had fallen carelessly beneath the white wooden rocker. He had caught the faint, lingering fragrance of her scent. She had been wearing that blouse the last time he'd seen her alive, the afternoon three days before when she'd come back to the station on the pretext of discussing their problems and telling him where Lizzie was. Only what Deirdre had really been after was the operating cash he kept in his safe. She'd stolen the money—all $75,000 of it, and his plane—and run out on him again. She'd emptied their joint checking account in Brisbane. He hadn't had the vaguest idea where she'd gone until the coppers had come for him.

  He remembered standing in that cottage. He had felt her presence everywhere. It was as if she had only gone out for a minute and would be back in a little while. Only there was an eeriness about her absence that had told him she would never come back. And she hadn't. Nor had his child been found.

  He had told the police to look in the lining of Deirdre's suitcase because he'd known her to hide things there before. When they found the money, they'd considered that incriminating evidence against him.

  Apparently she had gone diving alone, the police had said. Or someone had made it look like she had. Did he know why she'd come to the island without him, with the money? Where had he been at the time of her disappearance? What was his alibi? They had found bits of what might have been her diving gear washed up on the beach. A battered yellow tank. A piece of black hose. They weren't sure. Like Lizzie, she had disappeared without a trace.

  Then they had begun to torture him with questions about Lizzie. Where was she? All he could tell them was that he didn't know. Deirdre had taken her.

  "It is no secret you and your wife didn't get along, Mr. Jackson. No secret that you hated her."

  Hate. The single word was inadequate to describe the complex snarl of emotions he had felt toward his wife. Surely he hadn’t hated her.

  "You say she took your child. She took your money. Did you follow her here? You have a temper. Did you kill her?"

  They'd crucified him on that last question.

  Tad had hired professionals to look for Lizzie. When they'd failed to find her, he'd retreated to his homestead, into his own pain and silence for nearly a year. There'd been times he'd been grateful for attacks against his station because at least they'd distracted him from wondering about Lizzie.

  "There's no way Deirdre's alive," Tad whispered to Ian.

  No way was he taking her back if she was. He was through. Through with all women, for that matter.

  Ian's expression was intense, odd. "So you don't think she could come back?"

  "No. It's a trick of some sort. A lie."

  "It's no lie. You're lucky as hell she turned up, mate. You can quit hiding out on your property, and you can shave off that damn beard." Ian thrust a series of photographs in front of Tad. "My man took these yesterday."

  Tad stared wordlessly at the pictures. A beautiful woman—if it wasn't Deirdre, it was an exact duplicate of her—was standing on a beach in front of a towering rain forest. Except for her dark eyes, she was tall and golden like a Valkyrie; sleek, slim and yet amply endowed where a man most wanted a woman to be. Her long, blond hair was glued to her shapely neck and head. Sparkling rivulets of water slid down the curves of satin-gold legs. She was wearing a one-piece black bathing suit that fit her body like a second skin. She was comforting a wet and frightened Lizzie in her arms.

  Usually Deirdre had found other things in life infinitely more diverting than her child.

  "Oh, Lizzie..." Tad breathed. She looked older…and yet the same, still his Lizzie.

  She was alive.

  His hand began to tremble. For the first time he allowed himself to believe she was really alive.

  "Lizzie." He ached to hold his daughter as the woman was holding her. To touch her soft red curls. To hear her quick, lilting bursts of laughter. To watch her dart about in her dinosaur suits. He would relish even the sound of her tears, even the hot outbursts of her temper, so like his own.

  In the picture Lizzie's hair was the same brilliant copper red, but she was older, six now. Her hair was longer, tied back with purple ribbons. Of course, purple, only purple. She'd always had a fixation about anything purple. And dinosaurs. He realized with a pang how long a year was to a little girl. Would she even remember him?

  Of course she would remember him!

  He devoured the pictures of her. In one she was holding a starfish and studying it. In another the woman was bending over her and lovingly examining a hurt baby toe. The look of trust and devotion between the woman and his child touched something deep and longed for in his own soul.

  Jess...

  The forbidden name sprang from some place deep within him.

  Jess, Deirdre's identical twin.

  Dear God. Quickly he closed the door on the treacherous emotion Jess alone could arouse in him.

  The woman, whichever twin she was, had his child. She had deliberately kept his child from him for nearly a year. Of course, he’d contacted Jess when Deirdre had run off with Lizzie, and although Jess had acted concerned, she’d sworn she hadn’t seen either of them.

  The last shot was o
f Lizzie alone.

  Tad stared at it until the familiar upturned nose and red curls blurred. The excitement, the relief of knowing she was alive was unbearable. He felt a vague reeling sensation. He tried to focus, but the image of his daughter swam before his eyes. He could no longer ignore the woman who held his child in her arms. Lizzie looked happier than she'd ever looked with Deirdre. He forced himself to concentrate.

  He picked up the picture of the woman and stared at it hard. With avid dislike, his eyes ran down the slim yet deliriously curved body. Jess... He knew it was she.

  Just as he knew how the long, blond hair would blow in the wind, just how silky it would feel if he were to run his fingers through it. Just how hot her skin would be to his touch, or how cool. Just how warmly those dark, gold-flecked eyes could sparkle when she laughed. Just how treacherously she could use such beauty to twist and manipulate a man. Once he'd been bewitched by this woman. Her touch alone had enflamed him.

  His heart filled with a savage, dark anger. Never again.

  He studied the beautiful face, the magnificent bust, the cinched-in waist, and his mouth twisted with pain as he remembered.

  Deirdre's face.

  The face that had launched his life on a collision course with disaster.

  Only it wasn't Deirdre.

  It was her twin. His sister-in-law. Dr. Jessica Bancroft Kent.

  A muscle in his stomach pulled.

  Even more than Deirdre, he detested her.

  Because once he’d loved her.

  Had she had his child a year and not told him? Had she betrayed him a second time?

  Years ago when he'd been hardly more than a kid himself—when he'd been in school at the university back in Austin, Texas and before he'd married Deirdre, he'd been thoroughly tricked by Jessica Bancroft. Though Bancroft had posed as a do-gooding intellectual bent on becoming a doctor and saving the world, he'd discovered that she was every bit as much a liar as her sister.

  For it was Bancroft who'd played the starring role in the trick that had induced him to make the worst mistake of his life. Her excuse had been that she had been helping her sister. The knowledge of her long-ago betrayal lay as heavy as stone in his stomach.

  Help... That was the catchword that gave people like Jess the excuse they needed to meddle in others' lives. Tad had always believed that if people would just mind their own business, the world would run a lot more smoothly.

  Although Jess and Deirdre had kept up through the years, Tad had avoided Jess. He had never given a damn how Bancroft might feel about him. All he knew was that she had helped Deirdre trap him into his hellish marriage. Then Jess had gotten married herself. Not that she'd ever acted like a wife should. She'd run all over the world doctoring the poor, leaving her husband and son to fend for themselves.

  Three years ago Jess's husband and their only son had been killed in a car accident in Austin. Deirdre had gone and stayed with Jess for a couple of months, not that Jess had played the grieving widow for more than a month or two. No, she’d taken off almost immediately after Deirdre’s departure on back-to-back, medical-missionary sprees. She wasn't a woman, with a real woman's heart.

  Sure, Bancroft had a meddlesome, do-good facade. The truth was, she was bossy and conceited as hell. She liked inserting herself in poverty-ridden villages where no one knew nearly as much as she. There she could strut about, filled with self-importance, as she taught ignorant people to boil water and wash their hands, as she delivered their babies, as she bullied them to her heart's content until they recovered from cholera or whatever blight had made it necessary for them to endure Jess's ministrating presence in the first place.

  Deirdre had come home after the funerals, and after that two-month absence, the sense of isolation she'd always felt about living in Australia on a remote cattle station with him had worsened.

  Tad hadn't minded Deirdre being away. He’d been relieved to have the station and Lizzie to himself. That absence had been a turning point, and after it their marriage had gone steadily downhill. It was as if they had both known it was over and they had given up.

  Holt Martin had crashed into Mount Woolibarra. Deirdre had flown to Brisbane and begged Ian to convince Tad to leave Australia or consider a divorce. Then the war against himself and his property had begun, and the tensions in his marriage had increased.

  Tad stared at the picture in his hand. If Deirdre was dead, this could only be Jess.

  If it was Jess, she’d lied when she’d claimed Deirdre hadn’t contacted her.

  After a long time, he set the picture down beside the others.

  A chill ran down his spine. Whichever twin it was, she’d be trouble. Not that he cared. All that mattered was that she had his daughter, that his Lizzie was still alive.

  "It's amazing," Tad whispered. "Truly amazing... Lizzie... Deirdre..."

  "So you think it's Deirdre?"

  Tad didn't look up. "Who else could it be?"

  There must have been something odd in his face because Ian was watching him, examining every nuance of his expression.

  "It was so strange. I got this call. A woman talked to my secretary and told her that a client of ours, Tad Jackson, would be very interested in what she had to say. The woman was an American; the take-charge sort. Bossy as hell. You know the type—the kind who makes her presence felt wherever she is. She wouldn't hang up till she got me."

  So it was Bancroft. Cut loose from her do-gooding mission and thereby free to meddle in his life.

  Dear Lord! Oh, yes. He knew the type.

  His jaw clenched. Just the memory of her still cut him to the quick.

  But she had Lizzie! And it was obvious from the pictures they were getting along famously. He studied the redheaded six-year-old in the purple swimsuit wistfully. He ached to see Lizzie.

  Then his gaze returned to the blonde [JO1]who had his child, and that was a mistake, because he couldn't stop himself from staring at the snug swimsuit where it clung to the soft swell of her breasts.

  Damn her! He had a weakness for the exquisite proportions of well-endowed women. He told himself it was a general thing. Still, her photograph triggered memories, and a hot tingle of something he didn't want to feel tightened every muscle in his body as he remembered a night he'd vowed to forget.

  A magical night when orange blossoms had bloomed on a verdant lawn that swept down to Town Lake in Austin. A night when moonlight was blue dazzle on rippling waters. An unforgettable night of unusual and tantalizing pleasure.

  Jess Bancroft had been too damned good to forget.

  Who would have thought a Puritanical do-gooder like Jess would be a wanton in the sack? Her primitive, abandoned passion had stunned him, and the connection he’d felt to her had stunned him as well.

  She had made him think it was Deirdre he was making love to. For that, he could never forgive her.

  Tad frowned uneasily.

  Ian said, "She said I ought to come to a certain place. That I'd find something of interest. I thought it was some sort of hoax, but I sent a man down there just in case. He took those snapshots."

  Tad sank slowly back into his chair. He was numb with shock. He could feel the violent thudding of his heart, the perspiration beading on his forehead. Was it his cold that was suddenly making him feel so ill or the murderous all-consuming emotion he experienced when anything reminded him of his missing wife and daughter?

  "Where were these pictures taken?"

  "I really don't think you should see her," Ian replied coolly. "At least, not for a while. Not... not till you calm down. Your face is purple."

  "Achoo!" A raspy curse vibrated behind Tad's sneeze.

  "She's my...er...wife, damn it. She's put me through hell when she took Lizzie and disappeared. Where is she?"

  Ian hesitated. "Maybe she doesn't want to see you."

  Fat chance. Jess Bancroft hadn't come to Australia to count legs on starfish or coo over Lizzie's injured baby toes. "She called you!"

  Ian was regardin
g him coolly. "That's the odd thing I can't figure. Why did she call me...and not you?"

  "Ian, for God's sake! She's got Lizzie! Have you never felt a single overpowering emotion in your well-ordered life?" Tad's hard gaze was riveted to the map with the colored pins on the wall. "Besides greed?"

  Ian smiled grimly, "Not since I was young. Not since my home was sold out from under me, and my parents and I were out on the streets starving. Not since my sister died on those streets. I learned to channel my emotions, not to act on them. I married a woman who likes to stay home. A woman, who understands that this is a man's world. She knows her place—and mine. While you... You married the most beautiful creature on earth. A goddess meant to dazzle and be admired. Then you buried her alive on Jackson Downs with nothing but cows and termite mounds and goanna lizards scuttling about for company. And then people started shooting at her. So she got a bit jumpy."

  "If I had it to do over, I would run like hell from anyone who even remotely reminded me of Deirdre."

  For a moment two pairs of male eyes were drawn to the voluptuous image of golden female beauty in the photograph. Then both men looked away—too quickly.

  "I wonder..." Ian folded his hands beneath his blunt chin in that curious attitude of prayer that meant he was thinking.

  "You've got to tell me where they are, Ian, before she takes Lizzie away again."

  The world was full of wretched niches where a doctor of Bancroft's curious bent could hide indefinitely.

  "They're on the island," Ian said.

  "What?"

  "They're staying at the cottage—alone."

  "She's crazy to go there."

  "It's almost like she's tempting fate, isn't it?" Ian mused.

  Tempting fate was exactly the sort of sport Jess Bancroft liked best. Aloud, Tad said, "It's the last place I would have thought to look."

  "You're as crazy as she is if you go there. What's going to happen to Jackson Downs with you gone?"

  "My brother-in-law, Kirk Mackay, is there, and there's no man alive I'd trust more to see after things, even if Jeb sent him to check up on me."