Bewitching: His Secret Agenda

by Carla Neggers

  But she still had half an eye on the revolving doors. A flurry of activity, some shoving, people moving out of the way caught her eye. She turned.

  And there he was.

  “Oh, no!”

  She was off like a shot, adrenaline surging. She didn’t know who he was or what he thought she’d done, but she knew instinctively that he was after her, that she couldn’t let him catch up with her.

  It was her black-eyed rogue from lunch.

  He looked fit to be tied. Determined. Dangerous.

  Did he work with Jonathan Harling? Were they friends? Did he know she was running around town pretending she was a Harling?

  There was no time to think.

  She moved fast, pushing her way through a crowd and around the block, vaguely aware that Jonathan Winthrop Harling’s building occupied the corner. She came to a side entrance.

  She had no choice. None whatsoever. Looking back, she saw her pursuer pounding around the corner, straight for her. She had no idea if he had spotted her, was only aware that this wasn’t her city and she didn’t know where to hide, didn’t want to meet him in a dark, unpopulated alley.

  So, back into the building she went.

  * * *

  WIN SPOTTED HER going through the revolving doors at the side entrance and moved fast to intercept her.

  But when he got back to the lobby, she was gone.

  He searched the place with his eyes. The red-haired guard came up to him. “Lose her?”

  “She’s in here,” Win said.

  “One of my men must have seen her.”

  “It’s okay.” This was his place of business, his space. He couldn’t have a green-eyed blonde creating chaos here. “I’ll find her myself.”

  “She doesn’t know what floor you’re on,” the guard informed him. “I wouldn’t tell her.”

  “Thanks.”

  Where could she have gone? The guard would have seen her if she’d tried to circle back to the front entrance. Win would have seen her if she’d doubled back through the side entrance. The only other options were the ladies’ room and the elevators. Surely a guard would have questioned her if she’d tried to get onto an elevator. His was a financial building with moderately tight security.

  Hannah Harling of the Midwest Harlings.

  The blonde from lunch.

  The larcenous little wench, Uncle Jonathan had called her. Win could think of other names.

  He posted himself outside the ladies’ room just off the lobby and waited.

  * * *

  HANNAH FINISHED BOOKING a trip for two to Vancouver. Her plans, she told the agent, were tentative. The small travel agency off the main lobby was as good a hiding place as any and better than most.

  She hated lying, but felt she had little choice.

  “When I have everything finalized,” the agent, a pleasant woman in her mid-fifties, said, “I should send it up to Jonathan Winthrop Harling. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re Hannah Harling,” she went on.

  Hannah didn’t respond. She was going to get herself arrested if she wasn’t more careful, but avoiding the truth about her real name was certainly preferable to facing the black-eyed man who was after her. He didn’t look as if he would listen to any excuses she might have. Had he heard her say she was a Harling at the Beacon Street club? Was he protecting Jonathan Harling?

  What if the old man with him at lunch had been Jonathan Harling?

  She wished she had never listened to Cousin Thackeray. She wouldn’t have been predisposed to say she was a Harling if he hadn’t insisted so adamantly that a Marsh was doomed in Boston, “Harling country.” But she knew her elderly cousin wasn’t responsible. She was responsible for her own actions.

  “I hadn’t,” the agent resumed, “realized Mr. Harling was married.”

  Married?

  To some eighty-year-old man?

  Hannah smiled and left without correcting the woman on any of her misconceptions. Surely she would be able to explain Vancouver for two to Jonathan Winthrop Harling. Yeah, right. Given what you’ve demonstrated of your character so far, he’ll just be delighted to give you access to his family’s papers.

  She’d dug one very deep crater for herself.

  But what was done was done, and she couldn’t hang around in the travel agency forever. Venturing carefully into the corridor, Hannah peered toward the main part of the lobby where the security guard was posted behind his half-moon desk. She was out of view of the man on the mezzanine with the machine gun. Thank heaven for small favors. The other two she couldn’t see. They didn’t worry her nearly as much as her dark-eyed stranger.

  Spotting him, she inhaled sharply.

  He was posted at the women’s bathroom at the far end of the corridor, not fifty feet from her.

  Lordy, she thought, but he was a handsome devil.

  Did he think she was hiding in the bathroom? Was he waiting for her? Maybe she was just being paranoid. Either that or she’d outwitted him, she thought, with a welcome surge of victory.

  You’re not out of here yet, she reminded herself.

  She saw him glance at his watch and march toward the bank of elevators, his back to her. She held her breath at the sight of his clipped, angry walk. He did have broad shoulders. And his suit was so well cut it moved with him, made him seem very masculine indeed.... A modern pirate.

  Telling herself she was playing it safe, not behaving like a coward, she ducked back into the travel agency to give the elevators time to whisk him back where he belonged.

  The travel agent said happily, “I just emailed the information to Mr. Harling’s office.”

  Oh, good, Hannah thought.

  She decided to cut her losses for the day and darted out the side entrance before anyone so much as saw her, never mind pinned her to the nearest wall and called the police.

  * * *

  “I WARNED YOU,” Paula said, handing Win the printed email from the travel agency off the main lobby.

  “What is it?” he asked, still too angry to focus on anything other than his frustration at having lost the blonde.

  “Reservations for two to Vancouver next month.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to Vancouver for a week. The agency’s working out the details of your stay, but from what I can gather, it’s going to be very luxurious.”

  “Paula, I’m not going to Vancouver.”

  “I know that.” She jerked her head in the direction of the offending email. “But tell Hannah Harling.”

  Win’s eyes focused. He saw two names: Jonathan Winthrop and Hannah Harling. Then the little note from the travel agency downstairs, congratulating him.

  On what? For what?

  “She’s not satisfied with being a long-lost cousin from Cincinnati,” his assistant said scathingly. “She wants to be your wife.”

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, HANNAH opened up a can of soup for dinner, still too stuffed from lunch and too frazzled by her day to want a big meal.

  She ate standing up, pacing from one end to the other of her borrowed, Beacon Hill apartment. It wasn’t very far. At eye level, three shuttered windows looked onto the brick sidewalk and offered an uninspiring view, nothing like her view of the bay off Marsh Point. The friend who’d lent her the apartment kept a powerful squirt gun on the kitchen windowsill. Hannah had discovered the hard way that it was meant as a handy deterrent to particularly bold dogs, who occasionally did their business without benefit of leash, manners or master.

  But the apartment was a quiet, functional place to work, and that, she reminded herself, was her purpose in Boston. Work. Nothing more. She had nothing to hide. She had no bone to pick with the Harlings.

  Now she
realized she’d blundered badly; she’d let Cousin Thackeray’s hyperbole and paranoia get to her. She should never have posed as a Harling.

  There was nothing to do but make amends. She had to confess.

  First, however, she would lay everything out for her elderly cousin and see what he had to offer by way of advice. Her soup finished, she started for the wall phone in the kitchen.

  And stopped, not breathing.

  She was sure she recognized the charcoal-covered legs. The deliberate walk. The polished shoes. They were on her sidewalk, directly in front of her middle window.

  She moved silently across the linoleum floor and leaned over the sink, balancing herself with one hand on the faucet. She peered up as best she could, trying to get a better look at the passerby as he moved toward the kitchen window.

  It was him!

  Her hand slipped off the faucet and landed in the sink, wrenching her elbow. Her soup pan, soaking in cold water, went flying. The thud of stainless steel on linoleum was loud enough to be heard at Boston Public Garden. There was water everywhere.

  Hannah swore.

  She heard the fancy shoes crunch to a stop on the brick sidewalk. Saw the handsome suit blocking her window. All he had to do was bend down and he’d see her.

  She didn’t breathe, didn’t swear, didn’t yell in pain. Didn’t make a single, solitary sound.

  He moved on.

  I’m haunted, she thought, getting ice out of the freezer for her elbow. She threw towels on top of the spilled water and dumped the soup pan back into the sink. How many people in metropolitan Boston? Four million? What were the odds against seeing the same man at lunch, in the financial district, and now, on Beacon Hill at dinnertime?

  Hannah waited an hour before going out. She tied a scarf around her head, tucking in every blond hair in case her black-eyed rogue was still out and about and might recognize her. She had to risk it. She needed to walk, to think. She couldn’t even concentrate enough to call Cousin Thackeray. What on earth would she tell him? How could she explain her peculiar day, even to him?

  Beacon Hill was a neighborhood of subdued elegance, a lovely place to be at dusk, with its steep, narrow streets, brick sidewalks, black, wrought-iron lanterns and Federal Period town houses. Louisa May Alcott had lived here, the Cabots and the Lodges, Boston mayors and Massachusetts senators—and, of course, the Harlings.

  Hannah barely noticed the cars crammed into every available parking space, the fashionably dressed pedestrians, but imagined instead the picturesque streets a hundred, two hundred years ago. She knew her ability to give life to the past was the central quality that, critics said, made her biographies not just scholarly, but intensely readable.

  Less than a week in Boston, and already her reputation was in jeopardy.

  When she came to Louisburg Square, one of Boston’s most prestigious residential addresses, she turned onto its cobblestone circle. Elegant town houses faced a small private park enclosed within a high wrought-iron fence. Hannah made her way to the house the Harlings had built. It had a bow front and was black-shuttered, its front stoop ending right on the brick sidewalk. Any yard would be in back, one of Beacon Hill’s famous hidden gardens.

  According to her most recent information, now several years old, the house was owned by a real-estate developer. The Harlings had sold it during the Depression.

  Hannah sighed and stared at the softly illuminated interior that was visible through the draped windows. Would the current owner let her have a look at the place? Would she have better luck as Hannah Marsh, biographer, or Hannah Harling of the Midwest Harlings?

  She wasn’t quite sure why she cared. After all, what did a house built more than a hundred years after Judge Cotton Harling had sentenced Priscilla Marsh to death have to do with her work?

  The cream-colored, brass-trimmed front door opened, startling her. She jumped back.

  Then felt her heart jump right out of her chest.

  Her black-eyed rogue bounded out, wearing running shorts and a black-and-gold Boston Bruins T-shirt.

  Never mind getting to blazes out of there, as any sensible woman would have done, Hannah barely managed not to gape at the man’s thighs. The muscles were hard and tight, and a thick, sexy scar was carved above the left knee. He looked tough, solid, masculine.

  And he recognized her immediately, scarf or no scarf.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to have to chase you.”

  Given that she’d only slipped on a pair of flats and he was wearing expensive running shoes, she doubted she’d get far. And his legs were longer.

  She was at a profound disadvantage.

  His eyes bored into her. They were black, piercing, intelligent, alive, the kind of eyes that sparked the imagination of a woman more used to examining the lives of dead people. “I won’t have you arrested—”

  “Good of you,” Hannah retorted, just lightly sarcastic.

  He was unamused. “You will stop posing as a Harling.”

  She blinked. “Posing?”

  Still no sign of amusement. Whoever he was, he took her little ruse this past week seriously—too seriously for her taste. “Posing,” he repeated.

  His lean runner’s body was taut, and he seemed very sure of himself.

  Hannah couldn’t let him get the better of her.

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” she began, doing her best to sound indignant, “but I am a Harling. I’m from Cincinnati. I’m in Boston on a genealogical expedition and—”

  He leaned toward her. “Give it up.”

  “Give what up?”

  “You’re not a Harling, and if I were you, I’d cut my losses while I still could.”

  His words grated. “And just who are you to be telling me to do anything?”

  He raised his head slightly, looking at her through half-closed eyes.

  Something made her swallow and think, for a change.

  “You’re not...” she mumbled, half to herself, “you can’t be...”

  “I’m surprised,” he said cockily, “you don’t recognize your own husband.”

  For the first time in her life, Hannah was speechless. A hot river of awareness flowed down her back, burned into every fiber of her.

  The black eyes had thrown her off. Cousin Thackeray had said the Harlings were all blue-eyed devils.

  But this black-eyed devil said, “Name’s Harling.”

  She swallowed hard, preparing herself for the rest of it.

  “J. Winthrop Harling.”

  He wasn’t eighty. He wasn’t knobby-kneed. He didn’t wear smudged glasses. And he sure as blazes wasn’t harmless.

  What had she done?

  You’ll be in Harling country, Cousin Thackeray had warned her. Just never forget you’re a Marsh.

  She pulled off her scarf, letting her hair fall over her shoulders, feeling a small rush of pleasure at the sight of J. Winthrop Harling’s widening eyes. But the pleasure didn’t last when she realized what she saw in them. Lust. It was the only word for it.

  Right now, at that moment, he wanted her.

  Cousin Thackeray would croak.

  She tossed back her head. “You Harlings will never change. You’re the same arrogant bastards you were three hundred years ago. I’m surprised you haven’t threatened to have me hanged.”

  He frowned. “Hanged?”

  “It’s the Harling way,” she quipped, and about-faced. She headed for her street, daring J. Winthrop Harling to follow her.

  * * *

  WIN LET HER GO.

  He jogged down to the Charles River and did his three-mile run along the esplanade, his mind preoccupied with the fair-haired, green-eyed impostor. She had as much as admitted that she was no Harling.

  Then who was she
? A con woman? A nut? Had one of his friends put her up to this charade as part of some elaborate practical joke?

  What was that nonsense about hanging?

  Her eyes had seemed even more luminous in the soft lamplight, their irises as green and lively as the spring grass. Half of her had seemed humiliated by having met a real Harling, but the other half had seemed challenged, even angry. She hadn’t, he would guess, chosen the Harling name out of admiration.

  So, what was her game?

  Sweating and aching, Win returned to the drafty house he had bought a year ago. It needed work. He could hire the job out, but he wanted to do it himself, with his own hands.

  He grimaced, turning on the shower, trying to erase from his mind the image of his hands, not smoothing a piece of wallboard, but the impostor’s soft, pale skin...touching her lips...stroking her throat....

  He turned the faucet to cold and climbed in, welcoming the shock of the icy water on his overheated skin. But the heat of his arousal was not easily quenched, and the image remained. Fund-raising dinners, art lectures, his uncle’s club, Vancouver, even his own street. The woman had invaded every corner of his life. And now his mind, as well. His body was responding to the simple thought of her tongue intertwined with his.

  “She must be a witch,” he muttered.

  Then he had it.

  He no longer felt the cold of the shower. He shut off the water and reached for a towel. He barely noticed the continued swollen state of his arousal.

  A witch.

  Of course.

  The pale, silken hair...the green eyes...the anger...the accusation about threatening to have her hanged...

  His impostor was a Marsh.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HANNAH WAITED until morning, when she’d fully collected her wits, before calling Cousin Thackeray in Maine. “Jonathan Winthrop Harling,” she announced to him, “is not the only Harling in Boston.”

  Her elderly cousin didn’t comment right away, and Hannah used the moment of silence to quickly close the shutters, an easy process, since she was on a cordless phone. There was no point in inviting trouble, in case her black-eyed Harling decided to search Beacon Hill for her. She didn’t trust him to be above looking into people’s windows to find a woman posing as a Harling.