by Anne Stuart
Shadow Lover
by
Anne Stuart
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
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Memphis, TN 38130
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-423-5
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-377-1
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 1999 by Anne Kristine Stuart Ohlrogge writing as Anne Stuart
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Mass market paperback was originally published in 1999 by Onyx, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., in the United States and Canada
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo/Art credits:
Scene (manipulated) © Ievgenii Tryfonov | Dreamstime.com
:Elsa:01:
Dedication
For Jennifer Todd Taylor, who consistently saves my butt from egregious errors.
And thanks for letting me burn down the Edgartown house as a surrogate for the Big House.
I enjoyed it immensely.
Chapter One
THE BLINDING WHITE light of a late-spring snowstorm woke her. Carolyn rolled onto her back with a muffled groan, but the glare speared through a narrow crack in her heavy drapes and forced its way beneath her eyelids. There was no way she could ignore it.
She let out a deep, long-suffering sigh. She slept alone, always had, probably always would, and she could sigh to her heart’s content. “I hate Vermont,” she muttered, her voice low and bitter.
Snow in April was obscene. So was snow in September, and she’d had to suffer through that as well. Eight months ago she hadn’t minded. Some naive part of her had reveled in the flurries melting against the brightly colored leaves. Eight months ago she hadn’t known just how long and deadly a Vermont winter could really be.
The house was very quiet. Which was only to be expected—the MacDowell family compound was maintained by the best-trained servants money could buy, and nothing, not a speck of dust, not an untoward noise, ever disturbed the surface tranquility.
There were times, even now, when Carolyn wanted to race down the oak-floored hallways barefoot, singing at the top of her lungs. There were times when she wanted to laugh out loud, to scream in anger, to weep in loneliness. Those times came less often nowadays. She was a sensible woman, one who accepted the good and the bad in life. She muttered the serenity prayer under her breath at all hours, and most of the time she felt as calm and accepting as she appeared. Good, sweet Carolyn. Loyal, faithful Carolyn, always there when she was needed.
Heavy snow was one of those things she couldn’t change. She climbed out of bed and pulled the curtain, letting in the blinding glare. It was still and cold out there—the night had dropped more than a foot of snow on southern Vermont, but the maintenance people were already clearing it away with their usual silent efficiency. Carolyn leaned her forehead against the frosted glass, breathing deeply. Maybe she’d feel better if she got outside in the fresh, cold air. Even if she desperately needed the sun to warm her bones, not ice them.
She could always climb back into bed, pulling the duvet up around her ears, but for some reason that had never been an option, not since she’d moved into Alex’s old room last fall when she’d come back home to be with Sally. Sally had removed all of his belongings and put them in storage more than a decade ago, and Carolyn had bought new furniture, new curtains and rugs, and a big, old-fashioned bed in a vain effort to make it seem like home. It didn’t work.
Alex had been gone a long time—if she were a fool she’d think they’d forgotten about him. But no one forgot about lost children, not even the powerful, unsentimental MacDowells.
She sighed. Maybe she should just reclaim her small, utilitarian bedroom in the east wing where she’d usually slept during her visits. At least there she’d felt a sense of belonging, not the odd feeling that she was an imposter, that she’d usurped the best room in the place.
She was being ridiculous and she knew it. But she felt oddly unsettled; she’d felt that way for weeks. As if something monumental was about to happen.
She started to push away from the window, and then froze. Someone had parked at the head of the circular driveway, smack in front of the deceptively simple entrance to the main house. An ancient, rusty black Jeep stood up to its hubcaps in snow, and the inches on its roof told her it had to have been there for hours. It wasn’t there when she went to bed last night, sometime around eleven. She’d slept later than usual, but even so, it was still only a little past eight. Who in God’s name could have showed up in the middle of the night? Had something happened to Aunt Sally while Carolyn had been lying in bed bitching about the weather?
She had a closetful of silk nightgowns, presents from the various unimaginative members of the MacDowell family. Carolyn slept in oversized t-shirts, and she ran into the hallway, barefoot, not bothering with a bathrobe.
The main house in the MacDowell compound consisted of a huge center building and two wings off either side. Carolyn’s room was on the second floor; Aunt Sally’s sprawling apartment took up the first floor of the west wing. The house was silent as she raced down the stairs, arriving at the open door of Sally’s rooms breathless, panicky.
The old woman lay in the hospital bed in the inner room, still, silent, her eyes closed. The curtains were drawn, and only a dim light penetrated the artificial gloom. For more than a year Aunt Sally had been bedridden, hovering closer and closer to death, but there should have been more warning.
“Aunt Sally!” Carolyn’s voice was a broken whisper as she started forward into the shadows, ready to fling herself on the bed and weep.
An arm shot out, catching her before she could hurl herself across the room, and she was too startled to do more than strike out in sudden panic.
Aunt Sally’s faded eyes opened, and she peered through the darkness. “Is that you, Carolyn?” she said in a sleepy, surprisingly strong voice.
Whoever held her seemed to have no intention of letting her go, but Carolyn’s attention was centered on the woman who’d been a mother to her. “You’re all right!” she said, not bothering to disguise the relief in her voice. “I thought something might have happened.”
Aunt Sally’s lined face looked oddly luminous. “Something’s happened, all right, Carolyn. The best thing in the world.”
Belatedly Carolyn realized that someone was still keeping her from Aunt Sally. She turned, and he dropped his arm, stepping back. She stared up at him in astonished silence, letting her distrusting eyes travel the length of him.
“He’s back,” Aunt Sally said, her soft voice unmistakably joyful. “He came back to me.” She sounded as if her lost lover had returned.
The man had to be somewhere in his mid-thirties, ruling out that possibility, however. He was tall, though not as huge as some of her relatives, lean, and dr
essed in faded jeans and a thick cotton sweater that had seen better days. His streaked blond hair needed to be cut; his handsome face needed a shave. There was nothing to be done about his astonishing eyes, except to wish that they weren’t surveying her with quite such a cynical expression.
She’d never seen him before in her life; she was utterly certain of that fact.
“Who?” she said, staring up at him. “Who’s come back?”
His smile wasn’t particularly unpleasant. Just faintly mocking, as if he’d expected that reaction from her. “You don’t remember me, Carolyn?” he murmured. His voice was low-pitched, faintly husky, the voice of a smoker. “I’m wounded.”
“I don’t know you.” She didn’t want to know him. There was an aura of danger to him that was both illogical and unmistakable.
“It’s Alex, Carolyn,” Aunt Sally said joyfully. “My son has come home to me.”
Carolyn froze in disbelief. She should have been shocked, but deep inside, some part of her had guessed who he was. Who he was pretending to be.
Alexander MacDowell, Sally MacDowell’s only child, heir to half the MacDowell fortune, had arrived back in the nick of time, almost twenty years after he’d disappeared. And she didn’t believe it for one moment.
“Aren’t you going to welcome me home, Carolyn?” he asked after a long, strained silence. “The prodigal son, returned to the bosom of his loving family?”
She could feel Sally’s anxious gaze, and it was stronger than the sheen of mockery in the man’s blue eyes. She wanted to scream at him, but her love for Sally stopped her. Sally had accepted him; Sally was fooled. Carolyn would have to be very careful indeed.
“Welcome back,” she said, forcing the words.
Sally leaned back and smiled, closing her eyes. But the man calling himself Alexander MacDowell wasn’t fooled for a moment. “I think my mother needs to sleep,” he said softly. “I’m afraid I woke her up when I arrived last night, and she was too excited to do more than drift off.”
“She’s been very sick,” Carolyn said, trying to keep the anger from her voice.
“She’s dying,” he said flatly. He glanced down at her. “Why don’t you come have some coffee with me and tell me how she’s been doing? I’m sure Constanza will find us something to eat.”
“How did you know Constanza was still here?”
“I saw her last night. She and Ruben wept all over me,” he said. “You don’t seem very happy to see me, Carolyn. Have I ruined something by my unexpected reappearance?”
“Hardly.”
He smiled then, a cool smile that was still surprisingly sexy. “Why don’t we talk about it? Don’t feel you have to get dressed on my account. You’ve grown up very nicely indeed.”
He probably meant to fluster her, but even if Carolyn wasn’t a MacDowell by blood, she’d spent her entire life surrounded by them. She lifted her head regally, ignoring the fact that she was wearing only a bright red t-shirt with Tigger emblazoned on the front, and it came halfway down her long, bare legs. “It’ll take me five minutes to get dressed,” she said coolly. “I’ll meet you in the breakfast room.” She waited for his response.
“I haven’t been here in almost twenty years, Carolyn. There wasn’t a breakfast room back then.”
“Ask Constanza,” she said, turning her back on him, resisting the impulse to pull the t-shirt down closer to her knees.
She waited until she was back in her room before she let reaction set in. Closing the door behind her, she leaned against it, letting a shiver wash down over her body at the memory of the stranger’s eyes, watching her, mocking her.
Because he was a stranger—she was absolutely sure of that. She had spent most of her early childhood in the proximity of Alexander MacDowell, and she still bore the scares to prove it, both psychic and physical. And that man in Aunt Sally’s bedroom was nothing more than an imposter, and given the huge sums of money involved, that made him a criminal as well.
She pulled on her clothes hurriedly, slamming drawers and barely pausing to pull a brush through her hair before she left the room again. She didn’t trust him alone in this house. She didn’t trust him at all.
She’d been almost fourteen years old when she’d last seen Sally MacDowell’s only real child. Alex had been a monster from infancy, or so she’d been told, and adolescence hadn’t served him well. He was wild, dangerous, far too pretty for his own good, and absolutely no one could control him—not his stuffy Uncle Warren, who tended to view him and all children as distasteful aliens; not his strict mother, who ruled her world but melted when faced with her beloved son. He stole, he lied, he raised hell, and Ruben and Constanza kept finding both cigarettes and marijuana in his room.
Ruben kept covering for him, but Carolyn had heard the grown-ups talk. And she had prayed, every night, that they’d send him away, to military school, to reform school, to someplace where they’d beat the crap out of him and make sure he never came back to torment the young girl who wasn’t really his sister, and who would never truly belong with the grand MacDowells. The young girl who had a ridiculous, debilitating crush on him that nothing would destroy, no matter how horrible he was.
In the end, they didn’t send him away. He simply took off, with every spare piece of cash in the house, including the kitchen money, Constanza’s savings, Carolyn’s piggy bank full of quarters that at last count had equaled eighty-three dollars, and sixty-seven hundred dollars in cash. He hadn’t been able to get his hands on his mother’s impressive jewelry collection, but thirteen-year-old Carolyn had already been given inappropriately valuable gold jewelry on birthdays and Christmas. He’d made off with that as well.
The best private investigators, the most determined police forces had been unable to find any trace of him over the ensuing years. Warren had sniffed and informed his sister she was well rid of him, and the fight that had erupted had kept Warren and Sally apart for almost a decade.
And now the black sheep had returned. Or someone pretending to be Alexander MacDowell was back. And Carolyn wasn’t sure which would be more dangerous—the real Alex or a phony one.
She found him in the breakfast room, his long legs stretched out over an adjoining chair, a cup of coffee in one hand. The delicate Limoges cup that Aunt Sally loved looked ridiculous in his large, strong hand. It was tanned, and he wore no rings, she noticed. The Alex she had known would have worn rings. He was staring out at the wintry landscape, squinting against the bright white glare, and she stood in the doorway, allowing herself the dubious benefit of watching him.
There should have been no reason why he couldn’t be Alexander MacDowell. The teenaged Alex had had pale blond hair, but it could have darkened into the brown-streaked, shaggy mass on the stranger. His pretty, boyish features, his petulant mouth and hypnotic, slightly tilted eyes could have matured into the man who lounged there, entirely at ease. There were a million reasons why he could be Alex MacDowell, and only one reason why he couldn’t.
“Are you going to hover there like a vulture?” he said lazily, not bothering to turn and look at her. Her reflection was clear in the bank of windows—he must have seen her the moment she appeared.
“That sounds more like you than me,” she said calmly enough, moving into the room and pouring herself a cup of coffee. The Limoges cup fit perfectly in her hands. Her hands were delicate, long fingered, graceful. Aristocratic hands, in stark contrast to the stranger’s hands.
He swiveled around to look at her. “You think I’m a vulture?”
“Don’t they hover at the side of the dying, waiting to scavenge?” He was sitting in her usual chair. The table was large enough for eight, and yet he’d somehow managed to hone in on the one thing she claimed for herself.
He smiled up at her, a slow, wicked smile. “You never did like me much, did you, Carolyn?”
He meant to be in
gratiating, but Carolyn was immune. She sat across from him, taking a strengthening sip of her black coffee. “I never liked Alex much,” she said carefully, though the real Alex would have known better. “I’m not sure what I think of you.”
“Ah. You don’t think I’m Alexander MacDowell? What am I doing here, then?” He didn’t seem the slightest bit perturbed by her doubt.
“Sally MacDowell is dying. When she does she’ll leave a substantial amount of money to her heirs. Alexander MacDowell has been missing for more than eighteen years, long enough to be declared dead. Warren’s been itching to do just that for at least ten years now. If someone hadn’t shown up, claiming to be Alex, then there’d be that much more money to go around.”
“Greedy, are you?” he said, spooning sugar into his coffee with reckless abandon.
“Not particularly. I’m not one of the heirs. Whether Alex is alive or dead makes no difference to me. At least financially.” She was proud of her cool, unemotional voice. She’d worked hard on perfecting it, on being the perfect MacDowell—she who never was a true MacDowell at all.
“You mean my mother isn’t leaving you anything? I find that hard to believe—you’ve been a part of this family almost since you were born.”
“Not legally,” she said. “I was never adopted.”
“Not even after I left?”
“Why would you think that?” she countered sharply. “You didn’t have anything to do with my being kept as a foster child, did you?”
“You overestimate my influence,” he said. “Besides, I liked having you as a little sister. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d made it legal. You didn’t answer my question, though. Are you trying to tell me that my mother hasn’t left you anything in her will?”
“Why are you so interested in her will? How do you know you’re even still in it?”
“You’ve as good as told me so, Carolyn,” he said gently. “Besides, my mother was so happy to see me last night she told me all about it herself, and how grateful she was that she had never given in to pressure and changed it. So how much did she leave you?”