by Lisa Jackson
Throat tight at his rebuff, Kylie held fast to the money. She thought about going back and making a scene and tossing the bills at Conrad’s feet. But she stopped herself. That would accomplish nothing.
She couldn’t be so obvious.
To get what she wanted, she decided, she’d have to be sneaky.
And she had been.
Now, memory after memory washed over her, painful insights of her life coming into clear, sharp, and horrid focus. As an adolescent she’d felt cheated. And bitter. Hatred for Marla Cahill, her father’s little darling, had burned bright in her chest. After the confrontation at the church, Kylie had seen Marla from afar and sensed that the girl who looked so much like her was as curious as she was about her half sibling. Marla traveled around the world, learned to sail in San Francisco Bay, attended cotillions, shopped in New York and Paris, spent Christmas vacations in Acapulco or the Bahamas or Aspen. She drove her own BMW and attended a prestigious private college her father had endowed with a library.
Kylie had been given cast-offs and icy stares. But once she’d gotten a little of her own back by managing, as she looked so much like her half sister, to dress up in one of Marla’s cast-offs and charge an outrageously expensive dress at a small boutique to Conrad Amhurst. When she’d said breezily to the clerk, “Charge it to Daddy,” the eager salesgirl, her head filled with the commission she would earn on the floor length, beaded black sheath, had nodded rapidly, telling her that the dress was made for her as she’d rung up the sale.
Somehow Marla had found out, though, to Kylie’s knowledge, she’d never ratted on her half sister and had only brought it up again when they were adults, when she’d come to Kylie with her plan.
Now, as she sat on the edge of the worn couch and looked up at Nick holding her son, she felt as if the world had dropped from under her feet. Yes, she’d been a scrappy girl, a stubborn woman, a person who had clawed and fought for everything she’d ever earned. But it had come with a price.
She flopped back on the cushions and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t think I was a very good person,” she confessed to Nick. “In fact I know I wasn’t.” She let out a long, deep breath as she thought of all the years she’d been envious of her half sister, of all the nights she’d lain awake thinking Why me? Why doesn’t my father love me? Or the nights when a harder and uglier emotion had burned in her blood, pure, hot hatred for a privileged half sister who had grown up knowing a father’s love. Kylie had fed on that hatred, becoming competitive with a sibling who acted as if she didn’t know Kylie was alive.
“The truth is that I hated Marla, wanted to get back at her,” Kylie admitted, and remembered seeing Marla again here, in this very apartment.
“So what happened?” Nick asked. “How did you end up living as Alex’s wife and pretending to be her?”
“That was a fluke, I think. It only happened because I didn’t die in the wreck.” Her mind spun backward. “Marla couldn’t have children and she found out that our father had changed his will, that he was cutting her out unless she came up with an heir—a boy. Cissy wasn’t good enough.”
“That’s unheard of today.”
“Conrad Amhurst lived by his own rules, liked playing games with people,” she said. “You said so yourself but he must not have known that Marla had the hysterectomy. Anyway, Marla approached me about having the baby—her son. All I had to do was get pregnant, have the baby and give him up, to pretend that he was hers.” As she said the horrid words she cringed inside, thought she might throw up. “I know, I know, it’s godawful. I was . . . very self-involved.” Standing, she walked to Nick and pried James from his arms. Gazing on her baby’s precious face, his fuzzy hair and his tiny fingers, Kylie couldn’t believe she’d been so heartlessly cold and calculating.
“That was all you had to do?” Nick said coldly.
“Yes. And keep my mouth shut.” Holding James she couldn’t believe it of herself, but remembered all too clearly the day Marla had suggested the plan. “Marla had worked it all out, knew that she and I had the same blood type, had even talked a physician into falsifying the records.”
“Robertson.”
“Yeah, a family friend who wanted money funneled into his clinic and Bayview Hospital, as he owns a lot of stock in it.” Kylie’s stomach turned sour as she settled into her favorite recliner, the chair Marla had occupied that fateful evening. She remembered the encounter as vividly as if it had been yesterday.
“I have a proposition for you,” she’d said as Kylie, surprised to find Marla in the hallway, had opened the door and Marla, in raincoat, umbrella, sunglasses and wide-brimmed hat, had breezed inside. If she found Kylie’s habitat unappealing, she’d kept her opinion to herself.
“A proposition?”
“Yes.” Marla had set her umbrella near the door and pulled off her hat. Hair, cut similarly to Kylie’s, had billowed around her face. Marla had stared at her, sizing up her half sister. “You’ve always gotten the shaft from Dad and I think I know a way to even the score.” Her green eyes had narrowed thoughtfully, her finely arched brows knitting.
“Why would you even care?” Kylie hadn’t bought Marla’s latent concern. Not for a minute.
“I really don’t. Not a lot. But I need your help.”
Now that was something. The powerful and pampered daughter of Conrad Amhurst had needed her. For the first time in all of Kylie’s pathetic life. Kylie had been wary, but hadn’t been strong enough to tell the rich bitch to go to hell and leave her alone.
“She outlined this bizarre plan,” Kylie admitted to Nick, shuddering inwardly as she remembered how easily she’d been seduced into going along with the scheme. “She wanted me to get pregnant—artificially inseminated—and, once I was certain I was carrying a son, hide out until she could take him off my hands.” Oh, Lord, it sounded so awful now, so horrid. “Marla planned to wear padding for six or seven months, the kind TV actresses wear, first a tiny one, then larger as the pregnancy went on, until I was in labor and it was time to make the switch.”
“What if you were carrying a girl?” Nick asked, clearly skeptical.
“That . . . it wasn’t an option. She wanted me to terminate, to get an abortion and start again but I refused. I told her if I ended up with a girl, I’d keep her.” Kylie turned tortured eyes to Nick. “But you have to understand I didn’t want a baby, not even . . . not even this one.” Her voice lowered. “And I was so anxious to get back at Marla for all those years she was the princess, I refused to go along with the artificial insemination and of course I upped the ante.” Her lips twisted when she remembered how she’d demanded more money from her sister.
“Of course.” Nick’s face had turned hard as granite. “So you slept with her husband and bargained away your child.”
“That’s about the size of it,” she admitted, her voice cracking. Tears flooded her eyes and throat. Guilt and recrimination tore at her soul. How could she have been so callous? So cold? So heartless? She brushed a kiss across James’s downy crown. “I felt that I’d really gotten one over on Marla.”
“By sleeping with her husband.”
“And doing something she couldn’t. I even . . . oh . . . I even think Alex looked forward to our time in bed together. There was something about him, an anger when he . . . well, when he kissed me. It was as if . . . as if he wanted to get back at her. We both had this vendetta against her, or at least that’s what it seemed like.” She shuddered when she thought of the nights she’d spent in Alex Cahill’s bed, the satisfaction she’d felt that she was having sex with her spoiled half sister’s husband, the pride Kylie had felt that she could give him and her father what Marla was incapable of. She’d finally bested her half sister.
“And you got pregnant,” Nick said without inflection.
“Yes. Within two months.” She blinked rapidly. “We were lucky. As soon as possible, we had tests checking the sex of the fetus and voilà, Conrad Amhurst was assured of a grandson.”
“Son of a bitch,” Nick muttered, his lips flat over his teeth. He walked to the window and peeked through the blinds. “So you went along with everything.”
“I’d planned to. But then . . . I felt the baby kick and . . . the further into the pregnancy I got, the more I knew I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t give up my child. I couldn’t abandon him the way my father abandoned me and . . .” She frowned at the irony of it all. “For the first time in my life, as soon as James was born I realized that there was something more valuable than money.”
“Come on Kylie, or Marla, or whoever the hell you are. Don’t play this cornball reformed sinner role with me, okay? I’m not buying it. How much were you supposed to get once the old man kicked off?”
She winced.
Nick crossed the apartment and stood over her, his expression dark and filled with contempt. “Tell me, darlin’ . Just how much is Conrad Amhurst’s baby worth?”
Closing her eyes as she held James, she said, “A million. I agreed to do it for a million.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“But then—”
“Don’t tell me, you wouldn’t take a nickel for him,” Nick sneered and Kylie wanted to die. The heater in the apartment clicked on, blowing hot air and she thought she heard the sound of a door opening in the hall.
“No,” she admitted, shaking her head. “I won’t lie. I upped the price.”
“Holy shit.”
“To three million.”
“You’re unbelievable,” he snarled and she knew she was destroying everything they’d shared, every tiny dream of happiness she’d ever had with him.
“What happened? Did they agree to pay you?”
“Eventually.” At the time, in Alex’s Jaguar, Marla had laughed at her. Alex had been stricken. He’d smoked and driven past Golden Gate Park where Kylie had seen a mother pushing a stroller, the baby sucking on a pacifier and trying to pat a floppy-eared dog tugging at his leash. The mother looked frazzled, trying to deal with baby and dog, but at that moment Kylie had realized she was lying to Marla and Alex. No amount of money would replace the love she felt for this baby growing inside her, the desire to love and be loved back.
“You’re worse than she is,” Nick accused. “Worse than Marla.”
Kylie felt as if he’d slapped her. “Probably,” she admitted. “But when I went into labor, I knew. I’d convinced myself before I had the baby that it would be best for him to grow up with two parents, in a lifestyle that few people can have, that Marla and Alex weren’t bad parents, lots of kids had worse . . . Oh, yeah, right.” She snorted at her own naiveté. “Alex had pointed out that the baby, raised as a Cahill, wouldn’t want for a thing, whereas if I were to keep James, he’d be raised in a single-parent household with a woman who was struggling to make ends meet and always working. I’d never see the baby anyway and he would suffer.”
“What was your response?”
“I told him to go to hell,” she said, remembering the horror on Alex’s face as Dr. Robertson had walked into the private room where the labor pains were becoming so intense she couldn’t think.
“Did you?”
“For all the good that it did. It was too late by then. I was already about to deliver. Alex told me that if I so much as breathed that I would fight him in court, he’d make my life torture. I wouldn’t have a chance to win with the team of lawyers Cahill Limited has at its disposal. They’d take everything from my past, all the mistakes I’d made, twist the facts around and make my life look worse than it was, throw it all in front of the court and prove that I was unfit to be a mother. By that time Conrad would be dead anyway and the money would be gone. The baby would be the biggest loser.” Kylie shook her head. “I can’t believe that I bought Alex’s bill of goods. You know, Alex even pointed out that this way, by giving my baby to Marla to raise, I would finally give my father something the old man had always wanted—a grandson. Is that convoluted thinking or what?” She felt the tears raining down her face. “I’d even convinced myself that I’d have other children, that I could give this baby up.”
“But you changed your mind.”
“Yes.” She looked up at him through the sheen of tears. “Oh yes. The minute I saw James in the hospital, the first time I heard him cry, I realized there was no amount of money that would keep me from him. I would take on the Cahill family and every lawyer they threw my way. I’d go into debt, do anything to keep James.” She saw the doubts in Nick’s eyes and knew all they had was lost. “Look, Nick, I don’t expect you to believe me.”
“I don’t.”
“Fine. You can damned well think anything you want, but that’s what happened.” Kylie couldn’t fight the tears of shame that washed down her face as she looked at her baby, her precious baby, sleeping, blissfully unaware of her pain as he cuddled in her arms. “I’m . . . I’m so . . . sorry,” she whispered to him now. Blinking rapidly, dashing away the hated tears with the back of hand, she said, “People have died . . . because of what I’ve done.” Her head ached as all the jagged little pieces of her life came together, reminding her of a time in her life she’d rather forget. She forced her chin upward and met the fury in Nick’s eyes with her own angry gaze. “I’m not the woman you thought I was. I’m not Marla.”
His smile curved cynically. “And that begs the question. Where the hell is she?”
“I don’t know,” she said, then rubbed her temple. “No . . . I heard Alex talking to her last night. I’m pretty sure it was her and he said something about her hiding out in the carriage house.”
Nick’s smile turned to ice. “At the ranch?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.” He pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go.”
She wanted to ask, And what about us, but didn’t. It was over. She could see it in his eyes. “Yes. Let’s.” She crossed the floor and yanked open the door.
A man was waiting for her, a tall man with brown hair, sunglasses, a goatee and a gun with a silencer pointed straight at her heart.
She froze. “Who are—?”
“Marla,” he said in that same horrid voice she recognized from the hospital and again in her room. Die, bitch! Those were his words. “What the hell are you doing slumming around these parts?” he asked with a cold, ruthless smile.
“Who are you?” Nick demanded, but in a second he recognized the face. It had altered from the time they were kids, but his heart nearly stopped as he realized he was facing Montgomery Cahill. In a heartbeat Nick knew this man was the killer.
“What’s the matter, Cuz? See a ghost?” Monty asked.
Nick sprang.
“No!” Kylie cried, clutching her baby.
Monty pulled the trigger.
Chapter Twenty
Kylie screamed.
The baby wailed.
Nick went down in a heap.
Blood oozed from his stomach.
“You bastard!” Kylie fell down beside Nick, felt for a pulse. “Nick, Nick, please—”
“He’s dead.”
“No . . . I can’t believe.”
“Want me to put another slug in him just to make sure?”
Still holding the baby, she sprang to her feet and lunged at Monty. He sidestepped and leveled his gun at her child.
She froze. “You wouldn’t.”
“Like hell.”
Oh, God, he’d kill the baby. Just as he killed Nick. “No, please, don’t hurt the baby, but Nick, we can’t just leave him.”
“Let’s go, Marla,” Monty insisted, irritation tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“No . . . I’m not who you think I am.”
“That’s all right, sweetheart, ’cuz, neither am I. Now you can come quietly with me or I’ll kill the kid.” His voice was flat. Toneless. He wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. She was sure of it.
Kylie had no choice. She looked back to see Nick lying in the hallway, his face white and drawn, his lifeblood spilling onto the shabby carpet. “But
we have to call an ambulance, do something, I can’t just leave him here . . . Nick . . . Oh, God, Nick . . . I love you.”
“Save it, Marla. You don’t know the meaning of the word.” Montgomery grabbed her arm and yanked her, dragging her toward the service elevator.
“Nick,” she cried, horror gripping her heart. She’d lost him just when she’d found him, when she’d discovered who she really was. Now he was dead. Killed. Gunned down. Because of her. “Why did you kill him?” she cried, dying inside. She couldn’t lose Nick. Not when she’d just found him, discovered who she really was.
“He was expendable.”
“Expendable?” she whispered, clutching her child, sick inside. “No one’s—”
“Shut up, cunt,” he growled in that same ghastly voice he’d used as he’d loomed over her bed at the house. “Lover boy bought it and now you and me, we’re gonna get it on. Just like before. And you’re gonna love it, baby.” He ran the barrel of his gun down the side of her cheek and she reached for it, but he aimed it straight at her son’s head. “Uh, uh, uh. Don’t want to see baby’s brains blown all over the elevator, do you?”
Kylie nearly threw up. She was shaking, her legs weak. Fear gripped her heart in icy talons. “You’re out of your mind,” she said as he pressed the button for the basement level and ripped the baby from her arms. She tried to grab James again, but Monty shoved her against the side of the car. The baby screamed.
“Either you come with me quietly, Marla, or I take this kid and I’ll either kill him before your eyes or, better yet, I’ll leave with him and you’ll never know what happened to him, got it? You won’t know if he’s alive, dead, or if I spend my days torturing him. You’ll spend the rest of your life in your own private hell.”
“I’ll kill you first!” she cried, eyeing the alarm on the panel of the car and knowing she’d never use it, never take the chance with her son’s life.
Monty’s grin was pure evil. “Try it, bitch.”
She let her arms fall to her sides. “What—what do you want?”
“Just what you do, Marla. Everything. Every fuckin’ thing.” His gaze raked down her body. “I want what I deserve.”
