by Alice Sharpe
She’d taken far too many liberties.
But the moment of ire was brief.
Katie and his little girl looked so right lying there together. A woman with a big heart and strong convictions and a child who had lost her mother.
Katie was worming her way into his house, his heart, his child’s life.
He had to put a stop to this. He couldn’t be the hero Katie wanted, the hero she needed. He couldn’t take a chance of leaving his child alone in the world, he couldn’t risk…
Risk. That’s what it amounted to. Terrible risk.
He left the room with a heavy heart. When Katie woke up he’d have to be firm, he’d have to make her understand. He’d get her to safety and that’s all.
For now, he’d be her protector. Beyond that, he could do no more.
ALICE SHARPE
DUPLICATE DAUGHTER
This book is dedicated to Katherine Jones, Hayden Jones
and Carmen Sharpe, with everlasting love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Sharpe met her husband-to-be on a cold, foggy beach in Northern California. One year later they were married. Their union has survived the rearing of two children, a handful of earthquakes registering over 6.5, numerous cats and a few special dogs, the latest of which is a yellow Lab named Annie Rose. Alice and her husband now live in a small rural town in Oregon, where she devotes the majority of her time to pursuing her second love, writing.
Alice loves to hear from readers. You can write her at P.O. Box 755, Brownsville, OR 97327. A SASE for reply is appreciated.
Books by Alice Sharpe
HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE
746—FOR THE SAKE OF THEIR BABY
823—UNDERCOVER BABIES
923—MY SISTER, MYSELF *
929—DUPLICATE DAUGHTER *
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Katie Fields—This Jill-of-all-trades newly discovered twin sister is injured, and their honeymooning mother is missing. Can Katie reclaim her family before it’s too late?
Nick Pierce—A widower whose three-year-old daughter is his sole priority. Can Katie convince him he’s her mother’s only hope?
Lily Pierce—A three-year-old enchantress whose mother died tragically. It doesn’t take Katie long to realize why Nick will go to the ends of the earth to protect Lily.
Caroline Mays-Swope—Katie’s missing mother. She’s made some difficult decisions in her life. Have they now come back to haunt her?
Bill Thurman (aka Bill Swope)—Nick’s father and Caroline’s new husband. Trouble follows this man.
Helen Delaney—Nick’s housekeeper and Lily’s babysitter. She’s sworn to do whatever it takes to keep Lily safe.
Frank Carson—This cop gone bad brags that he always gets his man. What else is he searching for?
Benito Mutzi—A mob boss who wants back what was once his. He isn’t finicky about how he goes about it.
Doc—An old army buddy of Nick’s. It helps to know a doctor who won’t ask tricky questions about gunshot wounds.
FBI agent Loni Boone—Is she as good as her word or does she have her own agenda?
Tess Mays—Katie’s twin sister, injured while helping Katie, depending now on Katie to help her.
Ryan Hill—The Oregon cop who loves Tess.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Prologue
She awoke in the dark, head throbbing, throat dry. For a second, she didn’t have the slightest idea where she was or what had happened to her.
First things first. Get to your feet. Find out where you are.
Struggling to her knees, she reached forward until her hands touched a rough, damp dirt wall. Leveraging her body, she attempted to stand. Her head hit the ceiling while she was still crouching and she cried out, her voice a muffled squeak. Wherever she was, there was no standing room and she sank back down to the dirt floor, a geyser of hopelessness welling up inside her chest.
Into the cold, dank air she whispered, “My name is Caroline. I have a daughter named Tess.”
This last thought made her wince. Thoughts of her beloved Tess always made her wince. Not because of Tess herself, but because of Katie, frozen forever in her mind as a six-month-old baby, born in the spring when the roses bloomed…
Flowers! White roses. Yellow freesias.
Of course…a wedding…her wedding…
Bill!
Visions of men with masks, men with guns. Bill crumpled on the motel floor…
Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks as the past few days came back in total clarity.
Bill.
Where was Bill?
Chapter One
Nick Pierce stood on the tarmac gazing upward, though he knew from experience the high mountain air of Frostbite, Alaska, meant he’d hear the single-engine plane before he actually saw it.
He was anxious to get this over with. He was anxious to get back home. There was nothing he could tell the woman flying out of her way to talk to him. He would have made that clear when she called, but like an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, he’d figured if he ignored her she’d go away, and he’d never actually taken one of her calls himself.
It hadn’t worked. Hell, that approach to problems never worked, but he always seemed compelled to give it a try anyway.
To top it off, the weather was changing. He could feel the cold bite of an approaching storm on his face, sweeping over the inlet, up the Panhandle, bringing snow and ice. Winter days were short this far north and at two-thirty in the afternoon, there was only about an hour of daylight left. Oh, face it—he was sorely tempted to drive away and forgo the meeting before he got stuck at the airport.
And then he heard a drone overhead and realized the time to leave had come and gone. A few minutes later, Toby Macleod’s aqua DeHavilland Otter came to a stop a few yards away from Nick’s four-wheel-drive truck, the wheel skis making slide marks in the accumulating snow. Nick stamped his feet to get his circulation moving, waiting for Toby to turn off the big turbo engine, then walked around to the far side of the plane, waving at Toby as he did so.
The sole passenger making the long climb out of the plane was bundled up to her ears in black boots, jeans and an olive-green parka, her head wrapped securely in a pale blue wool scarf. When she looked around to survey her surroundings, flaming red tendrils escaped the folds of wool, snapping like scarlet ribbons against the increasingly white environment. Reaching up and taking her ungloved hand, he helped her step down.
She stumbled as her right foot touched the ground, immediately straightening herself. Her head barely came level with his shoulder. She struck him as small, delicate, and out of place as she shoved her hands in her pockets and shivered.
“You’re Nicolas Pierce,” she said through clattering teeth, looking up at him with eyes as deep and blue as a fjord. She was extremely pretty and extremely young, at least to his world-weary eyes. He’d be thirty-eight in a few months and this woman looked about eighteen, though he guessed she was actually in her early twenties.
Taking her arm, he ushered her around the plane toward his truck.
“Call me Nick,” he said, the weather clock
ticking in his head. “And you’re Tess Mays,” he added.
He felt her flinch through her padded coat. “No, my name is Katie Fields.”
“I don’t understand,” he snapped, suddenly suspicious. Helen, his housekeeper, had said his father’s new stepdaughter had called a few times, the last to announce the fact she was on her way. The stepdaughter’s name was Tess. He turned to look down at the woman beside him. “Who?” he snapped.
“Katie Fields. I’m Tess’s sister.” She glanced up for a second, her breath a cloud of icy vapor, a few sparkling ice crystals sticking to her cheeks and brow.
“I don’t understand,” he repeated, but he resumed ushering her forward as she appeared about ready to freeze in place. The limp grew more pronounced as she hurried beside him.
“It’s a little complicated,” she told him as he opened the truck door for her, struggling for a second as the heavy metal met the resistance of the quickening wind.
Gripping her shoulders, he leaned down to talk close to her ear so she could hear him. “It’s too cold to stand around discussing things. Stay inside where it’s warm while I talk to Toby. I’ll be right back.”
With his help, she made the high step up into the cab of his truck, hunkering down in the leather seat with a sigh of relief, covering her lower face with her bare hands, breathing into them in an effort to defrost her nose and lips and fingers, too. He’d done the same thing a million times since relocating here from southern California.
“Turn up the heater,” he told her as the wind finally won the tug-of-war with the door and slammed it back into place. He nodded reassuringly through the window at her alarmed expression, then went back to the plane.
At his approach, Toby opened a little window by the pilot’s seat and poked his face cautiously through. Snowflakes immediately stuck to his beard and bushy red eyebrows.
“Hey, Nick,” Toby called. “How’s Lily?”
“Growing like a weed. How about Chris?”
“Two more weeks before the baby comes. She’s about ready to explode.” He grinned. Apparently, the thought of becoming a father for the fifth time pleased him. “Say, the weather is deteriorating quick,” Toby added. “I’ve got medicine aboard for the Lambert woman in Skie. I’ve got to get it to her, which means I have to be able to take off from here. You’ve got five minutes with the lady, tops.”
“It won’t take even that long,” Nick said.
He retraced his steps to the truck and climbed aboard, struggling with the door again.
Now he faced Katie Fields, who had warmed to the point that she’d unwrapped her hair and unzipped her parka. He could have saved her the trouble. Five minutes wasn’t long enough for anyone to get cozy.
As he pulled off his gloves, he took a good look at her face, trying to see something of her mother in her, but he’d never actually met the woman, just seen a wedding photograph sent north by Tess Mays. As he’d torn it in half the moment he figured out what it was, there was nothing left but a vague impression of a middle-aged woman with wispy, graying blond hair.
There was nothing, however, wispy about her daughter. Katie Fields might be small, but passion burned in her eyes like twin fireballs. Her red hair heightened this perception. Her golden eyebrows suggested she was actually a natural blonde, like Patricia, and with the thought of his late wife, his heart seized for an interminable moment.
“Like I said, I’m Tess’s sister,” Katie said, jerking him back to the present. “She didn’t know about me until recently—”
He shook his head as he pulled off his black wool cap. Straight strands of sandy hair fell into his eyes and he brushed them out of the way. “We don’t have time for details,” he told her. “You’ve made this trip for nothing and I’m sorry about that, but I don’t have anything to tell you. If I’d taken your call I could have saved you the expense of this trip.”
“But you were never around to take the call,” she said, and he got the distinct impression she knew perfectly well that he’d avoided this discussion like the plague. He shrugged.
“Your father—”
“As far as I’m concerned,” he interrupted, “my father was the perfectly ordinary man who married my mother when I was eight years old. His name was Jim Pierce. He adopted me and undertook the task of raising me. He owned a shoe store in San Diego. He played golf and told bad jokes. He died ten years ago. He was a great guy and I still miss him.”
She looked confused. Stuttering, she muttered, “But I thought…Tess said…your father…”
“Your mother’s new husband is my biological father. I’m sorry your family got mixed up with him. But again, I haven’t seen the man in over two years and if my luck holds, I’ll never see Bill Thurman again.”
“My mother married a man named Bill Swope.”
“Seems as though Dad got himself a brand-new name.”
“Why would he do that?”
More memories of Patricia invaded his head, but this time her own blood soaked her blond hair. Looking over Katie’s shoulder, Nick pulled on his gloves. “Toby is gesturing like crazy, the weather is about to close in, you have a plane to catch,” he said in a clipped voice.
Avoiding her gaze, he tugged on his hat and pushed open the door. The weather had further deteriorated in the few short minutes he’d been inside and the blast of cold air streaming into the truck had his visitor shivering again. He darted around and opened her door, anxious to get this woman into Toby’s plane before it was too late. She sat in the seat looking down at him, her scarf still in her lap, her pretty face puzzled.
“Come on,” he said, reaching up for her. Time was up.
She bit her bottom lip, then shook her head. “No.”
The wind was howling; he must have heard her wrong. He glanced at the plane. Toby had rubbed a clear space on the inside of the windshield and could be seen holding up one finger.
“I’m not leaving,” she yelled. “You have to help me.”
“I told you—”
“Listen,” she said, her voice still loud but her tone somber. “I get it. You don’t like your bio dad. I couldn’t care less what your problem with him is, all I know is he’s disappeared with my mother, a woman I haven’t seen since I was a few months old. My sister is lying in a hospital with a gunshot wound, worrying herself sick. My mother and your father never showed up in Seattle where they had reservations at a downtown hotel. I’m going to find our mother and take her to my sister, and if that means I have to stay in this frozen wasteland till the blasted daises pop through the snow, then so be it.”
He stared at her with disbelieving eyes. She couldn’t be serious. On the other hand, there was something about the stubborn tilt of her chin that suggested otherwise and it came to him with a jolt: Katie Fields wasn’t bluffing. Or budging.
He slammed her door and approached the DeHavilland, gesturing with his arm for Toby to take off. Toby disappeared for a moment and then opened the door and threw out a small brown suitcase that landed with a thud. After Nick retrieved the bag, he stood there in the freezing snow as Toby started the engine and taxied down the runway, gaining momentum, lifting to the sky and almost instantly disappearing. Being a pilot himself, he knew Toby would make it to Skie within an hour, and that Skie’s weather was never as bad as Frostbite’s.
Then he turned to look back at his truck and the woman sitting inside.
He’d have to take her home with him.
As he labored through the gathering snow, Katie Fields’s suitcase clenched under his arm, Nick swore at his father, wherever he was, and at the woman trusting enough to fall for his lies and marry him.
Bill Swope?
What was going on? Just exactly what had his father roped Katie Fields’s mother into?
Hopefully she wouldn’t pay for her naiveté with her life.
Chapter Two
Judging distances in the blizzard surrounding the truck was almost impossible for Katie, though there did seem to be some distant mountains lo
oming ahead. She’d spent her life on the Oregon coast, where it seldom snowed; this experience was like being immersed in one of those bleak Christmas cards that are supposed to look cheery.
No one could accuse Nick Pierce, however, of looking cheery.
She wrapped her cold hands in the folds of her scarf and wished she’d thought to swallow a couple of aspirin before debarking the plane. The coma she’d recently suffered still left her with headaches, and her injured leg throbbed despite the fact the doctor said it was mending well.
She sneaked a peek at Nick, who gripped the steering wheel with both hands, brow furrowed in concentration as he expertly handled the big truck. She could feel tension emanating from him like the warm blasts shooting out of the heater. She doubted his stress had anything to do with the driving and everything to do with her presence in his life.
Truth was, she was almost as perplexed by her behavior as he seemed to be. Sure, she was tenacious. Anyone who knew her knew that. But she was also driving in a snowstorm with a stranger. Once back in the truck, he’d announced she had no choice but to accompany him and he was headed home before he got snowed in at the airport. He didn’t equivocate or wait for her permission. It was as though she’d abandoned all free will the moment she let the plane leave the ground without her, and though she understood now that was exactly what she’d done, it didn’t make swallowing it less alarming.
Still, she’d do it again in a flash. This man knew things about his biological father that she needed to know, and one way or another, she was determined to worm them out of him.
She couldn’t explain why she was so sure something was wrong; like she’d told Nick, she hadn’t actually seen her mother in twenty-six-and-a-half years. Maybe it was her newly discovered twin sister’s certainty that their mother was in danger that had communicated itself to Katie, planted itself deep in her subconscious, making Tess’s distress as real as her own. After all, Tess had grown up with their mother and knew the woman as well as Katie had known their father.
