by Ann Major
Been there. Long legs and a cute butt had cost him big time. Joan had started by taking half of his estate. She’d won child support, lots of it. Then she’d dumped the boys back on him.
His housekeeper had quit the first day, shaking both fists and screaming, “Your sons are savages, Mr. Broderick. If you don’t pack them off to a military school, and soon, you’ll be sorry.”
No housekeeper he’d hired since had lasted more than a week, and his once elegant house was a shambles.
Forget Joan and the housekeeper problem.
The intriguing fortune hunter with the intriguing backside was living in an impoverished barrio and running a huge, privately endowed, highly successful, nonprofit organization called Casas de Cristo, which built houses for the poor all over northern Mexico. She had tribes of wealthy philanthropists who trusted her enough to donate their millions. She had church groups and college kids from all over the United States providing money and free labor.
Missionaries were a tiresome, impractical breed. He should know. His father had played at saving the world. What the hell? The more starving Indians he’d fed, the more babies they’d produced with more mouths to be fed. One thing was sure. The old man had damn sure failed to provide for his own sons. Lucas had had to work his tail off to get a start at the good life.
Thus, Lucas was mildly surprised that he felt such distaste at the thought of defaming this girl when such an immense fortune and therefore his own lucrative fee were at stake. All he had to do was drum up a few witnesses to say that Bethany was cheating her benefactors by building her houses for less than she said or that she was taking bribes from the poor families selected to have houses built for them.
He loathed do-gooders. Why should it bother him that there wasn’t a shred of evidence that she was anything other than what she appeared to be—that rare and highly bizarre individual like his father who actually wanted to help other people?
Odd that he didn’t particularly relish having to prove that Gertrude Moran had been senile when she’d drawn up her new will, either.
But that last part would be easier.
A flash of movement flickered across the golden urn that sat in the center of a library table. The urn, conspicuously located but now forgotten, was surrounded by stacks of legal documents, coffee cups, wineglasses, beer bottles and half-eaten sandwiches. Lucas glanced from it out the window, where he got a double surprise.
The sky was now an eerie green. A dark man in a black Stetson sat in a blue van parked beside his Lincoln. After studying the storm clouds and the newcomer for a tense moment, Lucas relaxed, dismissing them both as of no immediate importance.
Not that the Morans had noticed either the clouds or the van. And they had quit all pretense of interest in the urn that contained Gertrude Moran’s ashes immediately after the reading of her will, at which point they’d started hunting their lawyer.
Fortunately Lucas had been close by in San Antonio visiting Pete, his older brother, who was a doctor.
Lucas leaned forward in his chair and lifted the urn with his left hand. Whatever he had seen there had vanished. All he saw now was his own brooding dark face and his thick tumble of unruly black hair. Turning the urn carelessly with his other hand, he glanced at the portrait of the woman whose ashes he held.
Gertrude Moran’s sharp, painted eyes glinted at him with an expression of don’t-you-dare-try-to-mess-with-me-you-young-upstart. In old age with her soft snowy hair, she had remained a handsome woman. Holly had told Lucas that the portrait had been finished less than a month ago. Lucas found it hard to imagine someone who looked so forceful and intelligent not knowing exactly what she was doing when she’d drawn up her will.
Gertrude Moran had been shrewd all her life. The original Moran fortune had been in land and oil. She’d diversified, doubling her fortune while other oil people went broke. In an age when most rich people were stuffy and dull, she had been a hoot. The newspapers had been full of her stunts.
Lucas lowered his gaze. Well, she’d damn sure stirred the family brew by secretly changing all the ingredients in her will and leaving only a few million to these spoiled bastards.
“Well, Mr. Broderick, can you get us our money back or not?” Holly leaned forward and issued another invitation with her dark, glowing eyes and a display of cleavage.
Been there, he reminded himself, but he dropped the urn with a clang.
Stinky jumped as if he was afraid Gertrude’s spirit would spring out of the urn like a bad genie. A hush fell over the room, and for a long moment it did seem, even to Lucas, that those keen, painted eyes brightened with mischief and that some bold, alien presence had invaded the room.
He almost felt like clanging the urn again to break the spell.
His hard face tensed. “Can I get the money?” He leafed through the will. “It’s a crapshoot. It’s not too difficult to break a will that involves leaving one family member an entire fortune at the expense of the others. But charitable foundations with iron-clad, carefully thought out legal documents such as these are tricky, especially when the foundation will contribute substantially to several powerhouse charities who have teams of lawyers on their payroll.”
“But Beth bamboozled Gram into giving her everything—”
“Not quite everything. Your grandmother did adequately provide for you. At least most judges would see it that way. Technically your cousin won’t actually be inheriting the fortune, Ms. Moran. She would merely be managing the foundation.”
“For a huge salary?”
“A six-figure annual salary for overseeing such a vast enterprise would hardly be out of line.”
“Beth is a thief and a criminal.”
Lucas felt an insane urge to defend the absent heiress.
“Those are serious charges that might not be so easily proven. From the picture you’ve drawn of Beth—a goody-two-shoes Samaritan building houses for the poor in Mexico—it might be difficult and unpleasant to convince twelve disinterested people she wouldn’t sincerely honor your grandmother’s last wishes. If she’s a fake, we’ve got a chance. But if she’s not—” He paused. “Unfortunately juries and judges have a tendency to favor do-gooders. I suggest that you talk to your cousin. Try to persuade her it would be in her best interests to divide the money between all of you.”
“You have no idea how stubborn she is.”
“Maybe one of you will come up with a better idea.”
A pair of black-lashed, olive-bright eyes set in a gorgeous face met his, and Lucas was chilled when he sensed a terrible hatred and an implacable will.
The black clouds were rolling in from the west. The mood in the library had darkened, as well. Other faces turned toward him, and they were equally hard.
Lucas almost shuddered. No wonder the saint had run.
Strangely, his feelings of empathy for the girl intensified. He tried to fight the softening inside him, but it was almost as though he was on her side instead of the Morans’.
Ridiculous. He couldn’t afford such misplaced sympathies.
“If you take the case, how much will you charge?” Holly demanded.
“If I lose-nothing.”
“And—if you win?”
“I would be working on a contingency basis, of course—”
“How much?”
“Forty percent. Plus expenses.”
“Of nearly a billion dollars! What? Are you mad? Why, that’s highway robbery.”
“No, Ms. Moran, it’s my fee. I play for keeps—all or nothing. If you want me, and if I agree to take the case, I swear to you that if there is any way to destroy your cousin’s name and her claim to your fortune, I’ll find it. I am very thorough and utterly merciless when it comes to matters of this nature. I’ll study these documents and send my P.I. to Mexico to investigate Casas de Cristo and see what dirt I can dig up on her down there. She’s bound to have enemies. All we have to do is find people who’ll talk about her and get them talking. Fan the flames, so to speak.�
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Lucas began gathering documents and stuffing them into his briefcase. “Just so you can reach me anytime—” He scribbled his unlisted home phone number and handed it to Stinky. “I’ll let myself out.”
Lightning streaked to the ground. Almost immediately a sharp cracking sound shook the house. Wind and torrents of rain began to batter the windows.
The drought was over.
But none of the ranchers who had prayed for rain rejoiced. They were watching Lucas’s large brown hands violently snap the locks on his briefcase as he prepared to go.
The mood in the library had grown as ugly and dangerous as the storm outside. The Morans were in that no-win situation so many people involved in litigation find themselves. They were wondering whom they disliked the most—their adversary, the family saint, or their own utterly ruthless but highly reputed attorney.
One minute Lucas was bursting out of the library doors into the foyer, intent on nothing except driving to San Antonio as fast as possible. In the next minute, Lucas felt as if he’d been sucked blindly into a cyclone and hurled into an entirely new reality in which an incredibly powerful force gripped him, body and soul. In which all his dark bitternesses miraculously dissolved. Even his fierce ambition to work solely for money was gone.
Unsuperstitious by nature, Lucas did not believe in psychic powers or ghosts. But this otherworldly experience was a very pleasurable feeling.
Dangerously pleasurable. Almost sexual, and dangerously familiar somehow.
All his life he’d been driven by anger and greed or by the quest for power.
And suddenly those drives were gone. What he really wanted was in this room.
He stopped in mid-stride. His huge body whirled; his searing gray eyes searched every niche and darkened corner of the hall.
The mysterious presence was very near. As he stood there, he continued to feel the weird, overpowering connection.
She was as afraid of this thing as he was.
She?
For no reason at all Lucas was reminded of the times he and his brother, Pete, had hidden together as children from the Indian slum bullies, not speaking to one another but each profoundly aware of the other.
“Hello?” Lucas’s deep querying drawl held a baffled note.
He held his breath. For the first time he noted how eerily quiet the foyer was. How the presence of death seemed to linger like an unwanted guest.
How the hall with its pale green wallpaper was heavy with the odor of roses past their prime. How these swollen blossoms, no doubt leftovers from Gertrude Moran’s memorial service, were massed everywhere—in vases, in Meissen.bowls. How several white petals had fallen onto the polished tabletops and floors. Holly had shown him the old lady’s rose garden and had told him she had loved roses.
Lucas’s senses were strangely heightened as he stood frozen outside the library doors, struggling to figure out what was happening to him. He inhaled the sicklysweet, funereal scent of the dying roses. He listened to each insistent tick of the vermeil clock.
The summer sunlight was fading. Much of the white and gilt furniture was cast in shadow. The threadbare Aubusson rug at his feet had a forest green border.
When he saw the closet with its door standing partially ajar, he felt strangely drawn to it. Oddly enough, when he stepped toward it, the connection was instantly broken. He was free.
All his old bitterness and cynicism immediately regained him.
He bolted out of the Moran mansion faster than before.
One
“Kill!”
Sweet P.’s earsplitting voice blasted inside Lucas’s black Lincoln as he raced toward the hospital. The shrieks seemed to slice open his skull and shred the tender tissues of his inner ear as handily as a meat cleaver.
There should be a law against a three-year-old screaming in an automobile speeding sixty miles per hour on a freeway.
Just as there should be a law against a kid being up at five in the morning experimenting with her older cousin’s handcuffs.
Just as there should be a law against Peppin owning a pair of the damn things in the first place.
“You get off here,” Pete suddenly said as they were about to pass the exit ramp.
Tires screamed as Lucas swerved across two lanes onto the down ramp.
“Mommy! Carol!” Patti.yelled between sobs.
Too bad Mommy was out of town and Carol, her sitter, had called in sick.
Patti shook her hands violently, rattling the handcuffs.
Lucas’s temples thudded with equal violence.
It was Monday morning. Six o’clock to be exact. Lucas felt like hell. Usually he never dreamed, but last night a weird nightmare about a girl in trouble had kept him up most of the night. In the dream, he had loved the girl, and they’d been happy for a while. Then she’d been abducted, and he’d found himself alone in a misty landscape of death and stillness and ruin. At first he’d been terrified she was dead. Then she’d made a low moan, and he had known that if he didn’t save her, he would lose everything that mattered to him in the world. He’d tracked her through a maze of ruined slums only to find her and have her utter a final lowthroated cry and die as he lifted her into his arms. He’d bolted out of his bed, his body drenched in sweat, his heart racing, his sense of tragic loss so overwhelmingly profound he couldn’t sleep again.
The girl’s ethereally lovely face and voluptuous body had seemed branded into his soul. He’d gotten up and tried to sketch her on his legal notepad. Sleek and slim, she had that classy, rich-girl look magazine editors pay so dearly for. She had high cheekbones, a careless smile, yellow hair and sparkling blue eyes. He’d torn the sheet from the pad and thrown it away, only to sketch another.
Due in court at ten, Lucas had intended to be halfway to Corpus Christi by now. Instead Pete, Sweet P., the boys and he were rushing to the emergency room, where Pete was on call. Some girl had overdosed, and a doctor was needed STAT, medical jargon for fast. Gus, an emergency-room security guard, had volunteered to remove the handcuffs if Pete brought Sweet P. when he came.
Disaster had struck right after Lucas had loaded the luggage and boys into the Lincoln and Pete and Sweet P. had gotten into Pete’s Porsche. The Porsche wouldn’t start because someone had left an interior light on all night.
Someone had also removed Lucas’s jumper cables from his trunk. And that same mysterious someone had also lost the key to Peppin’s handcuffs. Thus, Lucas and the boys had to drive Pete and Sweet P. to the ER before they could head for home.
Why was Lucas even surprised? His personal life had been chaos ever since the boys had moved in. For starters, they must have dialed every nine-hundred number in America, because his phone bill had run into the thousands of dollars the first month they’d lived with him.
Lucas put on his right turn signal when he saw the blue neon sign for San Antonio City Memorial and swerved into the covered parking lot for the hospital’s emergency room. With a swoosh of tires and a squeal of brakes, Lucas stopped the big car too suddenly, startling Sweet P. into silence. Her watery blue eyes looked addled as she took in the blazing lights of the three ambulances and the squad car.
Lucas’s expression was grim as he lowered the automobile windows, cut the motor and gently gathered Sweet P. into his arms so Pete would be free to check his patient.
As he got out of the Lincoln with the squirming toddler, Lucas gave Peppin and Montague a steely glance. “You two be good.”
“No problem.” Peppin’s sassy grin was all braces. Huge mirrored sunglasses hid his mischievous eyes.
As always Montague, who resented authority, pretended to ignore him and kept his nose in a book entitled Psychic Vampires.
The emergency room was such a madhouse, Lucas forgot the boys. Apparently there’d been a fight at the jail. Three prisoners lay on stretchers. A man with hairy armpits and a potbelly wearing only gray Jockey shorts with worn-out elastic was standing outside a treatment room screaming drunkenly that doctors made
too much money and he was going to get his lawyer if he didn’t get treated at once. In another room an obese woman was pointing to her right side, saying she hurt and that her doctor had spent a fortune on tests and that she was deathly allergic to some kind of pink medicine and that her medical records were in Tyler on microfilm if anybody cared about them. Six telephones buzzed constantly. Doctors were dictating orders to exhausted nurses.
In the confusion it took Lucas a while to find Gus. Meanwhile Sweet P. was so fascinated by the drunk and the fat lady, she stopped crying. Enthroned on the counter of the nurses’ station, she was having the time of her life. A plump redheaded nurse was feeding her pizza and candy and cola, which she gobbled greedily while Gus rummaged in a toolbox for the correct pair of bolt cutters.
“Now you hold still, little princess,” Gus said.
Suddenly Pete’s frantic voice erupted from an examining room down the hall.
“She’s gone!”
Lucas left Sweet P. with Gus and raced to the examining room, where an IV dangled over an empty gurney with blood-streaked sheets. Bloody footprints drunkenly crisscrossed the white-tiled floor.
“She has little feet,” Lucas whispered inanely, lifting a foot when he realized he was standing squarely on top of two toe prints.
Pete yelled, “Nurse!”
A plump nurse in a blue scrub suit, wearing a plastic ID, ambled inside.
“Oh, my God!”
Pete thumbed hurriedly through the missing patient’s chart, reading aloud.
“No name. A Jane Doe. Brought in by a truck driver who found her hitchhiking on the highway. Tested positive for a multitude of legal and illegal drugs. Head injury. Stitches put in by plastic surgeon. Contusions on wrists and ankles. Disruptive. Belligerent. Very confused. Amnesia. Possible subdural hematoma. Refused CAT scan because she went insane when we put her face inside the machine. Claustrophobic.”
“What does all that mean?” Lucas demanded.
“Not good. She’s high as a kite, badly confused.”
“Doctor—” The nurse’s whisper was anxious. “A while ago someone called about her. Said he was family. Sounded very concerned. Described a girl who could have been this girl. Sammy’s new, and I’m afraid she told him we’d admitted a girl matching her description. The caller said he was coming right over. But when Sammy told the patient that a family member was on his way, she became very agitated.”
