by Sylvie Kurtz
Gordon cackled in a rising gleeful madness. “It’s too late.”
Nick’s hands clamped tighter against Gordon’s neck. “Where is she?”
“How does it feel to know you’re helpless?” Gordon taunted.
“You sick bastard.”
“I want you to know what it feels like.”
“What’s Valerie ever done to you?”
“Not her.” Gordon spit a wad of blood. “That bitch Rita. She could never mind her own business. Ever since your mother started working for her, she’s been poisoning Holly’s mind.”
Personal responsibility wasn’t part of Gordon’s makeup. “Mom had to work because you couldn’t hold down a job.”
“Rita interfered with every damn thing. It was like being married to my mother. I had brains and skills. It was just a matter of time. But could she be patient? No, she had to go crying to Rita, and Rita pushed her into divorcing me.”
Nick banged his father’s head against the car. “Do you think I was deaf? I heard the way you talked to your wife. I heard her begging. I heard you hurt her, then tell her it was her own damn fault. What kind of man takes out his failure on a woman?”
Gordon’s green eyes gleamed with fevered bitterness. “You were mine. She had no right to take you away from me.”
“I wouldn’t have gone with you even if a judge had ordered me to.”
Gordon’s face twisted into a sneer. “It was supposed to be you.”
“What?”
“That night. I’d gone to the house for you. I was going to steal you from Holly the way she’d stolen you from me, but you were both sacked out on the floor. I grabbed the kid under the blue blanket.” He snorted. “Wrong kid.”
Gordon’s words were a slap, and a red haze of fury blurred Nick’s vision. “So you decided to ransom her.”
Ever the con man, Gordon shrugged. “Why waste a good opportunity? I thought it was fitting that Rita should feel my pain since she’s the one who caused it in the first place. She took my wife and my kid away from me.”
“And you took her husband and her daughter.”
Gordon shook his head. “Rushton took his own life. I had nothing to do with that.”
“What made you think you could raise me when you couldn’t make enough money to buy groceries for one?”
“I wasn’t.” Gordon’s eyes shone bright, enjoying the torture he was inflicting. “My cousin had just lost her kid, and I was going to give you to her.”
The whole puzzle fell into place.
Nick ground his teeth. “Marissa Zea is your cousin.”
THE AIR WAS GETTING WARMER. Her head was swimming. It would be so easy to drift away, to close her eyes and go to sleep.
No! Stay awake!
Valerie thought back to the survival segment she’d shot, when? Just last spring?
She pressed her hands against the coffin’s lid. It had some give and, according to the survival expert, that meant it would be relatively easy to break through.
What if all the earth on top of her crushed her? She should wait to be rescued. But what if rescue didn’t come?
Don’t think about it. Just keep moving. Step two. What was step two?
She crossed her arms over her chest and squirmed in the tight space as she pulled her long-sleeved wicking T-shirt off. Not the neat khaki safari shirt the guy had worn, but she was good at improvising. She did her best to knot the tail of her shirt to close off the opening, then slipped the shirt neck back over her head until the shirt fit like a sack.
She braced her feet against the lid. I can’t do this.
It’s do or die, Valerie, and I thought you still had things you wanted to do—like kick Nick’s butt and tell him what an idiot he is for sending you away. Like telling him he can stop looking for Valentina. Like telling him you love him.
Swallowing hard, she closed her eyes and kicked at the lid. The wood cracked, then broke apart. She screamed as loose dirt rushed in.
Stay calm. Breathe nice and slow. You can do this.
Using her hands, she pushed the dirt toward her feet. Oh, God, it was coming in too fast. She was going to drown in dirt.
In spite of the fear swimming through her muscles like spineless jellyfish, she worked at filling the space at her feet. When that space filled up, she pushed the dirt to her sides.
Her hands ached. Her fingernails tore and bled.
She kept digging.
NICK LOOKED AT HIS FATHER, the man who was supposed to have raised him, nurtured him and loved him. He looked straight into the ice-cold green eyes and swung. His fist connected with Gordon’s jaw, reeling him sideways onto the hood of the van. Fists flying, Nick punched him again and again. “How does it feel to be on this side of a fist?”
“You kill me, you never find her.”
Nick punched Gordon in the gut. He doubled over, staggering forward.
“Tell me where she is.”
Gordon cranked his head up and looked at Nick. “You think you’re so high and mighty. Just like them. But you’re not. Look at yourself, boy. You’re just like me.”
“I’m nothing like you. I don’t use the people I love. I would kill for them.”
The rawness of his outburst sobered Nick. He couldn’t let his temper rule. He couldn’t kill this man. Gordon needed the one thing he would hate most—a public tar-and-feathering, a trial that would expose his rotten core once and for all.
With one last well-placed punch, Nick flattened Gordon. He crumpled to the ground unconscious. Nick tied Gordon up with his own belt, then raced for the house and prayed to God he’d find Valerie before she ran out of air.
VALERIE CRANKED HERSELF to a seated position. Loose earth falling into the space she’d just vacated. How deep? Sure she was going to die before she reached the top, she kept digging. She tried to ignore the plinking of the soil that kept falling around her.
She kept digging and pushing until her hand cleared the edge of the grave. Breath exploded out of her mouth. I made it. I made it.
Voices muted to a flannel hum penetrated through the veil of T-shirt and dirt.
Her heart stuttered and the tears came faster. She was found. Nick had found her. “Nick! Help me! Nick!”
NICK COULD FEEL HER. Somewhere close by. “Valerie!”
Where? Please don’t let it be too late.
The sweat of terror coated his body so thickly, even the rain couldn’t wash it away. “Valerie!”
He spun around, searching for evidence of her grave. How many times had she looked into his eyes, seen something he’d thought he’d hidden well and not reacted in fear?
Too much rain. Too damn much rain.
His heart knocked in his chest. Of course. Gordon wouldn’t risk the rain ruining his plan.
Guided by some unknown force, Nick entered the house and scrambled down the steps leading to the basement. Gordon hadn’t bothered with a concrete foundation.
In the gray murkiness of the space, Nick spotted something moving. A hand. “Valerie!”
He flung himself to the ground. Using his hands, he dug until he cleared her shoulder, then he pulled her out. She staggered like a drunk into his arms, sobbing.
He pulled off the T-shirt stuck like a sack over her head. Then he brushed dirt away from her face and hair. Blood, bruises and dirt marked her face.
“Nick.” Breath tore out of her lungs. Her body shook with relief, and tears poured from her pale blue eyes. “You came.”
A tidal wave of feelings old and new crashed over him. His body was ice. His brain was fire. He peppered her face with kisses, then held on to her tight. “You’re alive. Thank God, you’re alive.”
She hiccuped a breath. “It’s over.”
“It’s over. And I’m never going to let you go, Valentina.”
She pushed away from him. “You know.”
Even though his father had provided half his DNA, Nick was not his father’s son. In this instant, with Valerie in his arms, Nick understood what his father never had. Success w
asn’t the dollars you added to your asset column, but how much love you had in your life. And Nick’s portfolio was stacked with love. “I know.”
Epilogue
One month later.
A stretch of fall perfection blanketed the grounds of Moongate Mansion—star-sprinkled sky, crisp moonlight and bracing wind. A dusting of the year’s first snow jeweled the wide lawn and a magical trail of lanterns illuminated the driveway for the combination welcome home–belated birthday–Thanksgiving party Rita had insisted on throwing.
Luna, ensconced for the duration of the party in Nick’s laundry room, yodeled at the moon, but the neighbors were too far away to care.
Valerie stopped on the drive leading from Nick’s carriage house to the mansion. Her mother and Rita stood at the front door.
Rita greeted each guest with a smile and a handshake, an aura of joy gleaming around her. Her laughter chimed through the foyer in a gleeful melody.
Watching this woman who’d missed her and searched for her for twenty-five years, Valerie found it odd to know nothing about her. How could Valerie have not even known that she was missing all these years?
The answer, of course, stood next to Rita.
Her mother looked so out of place in this world of glamour, but she was trying hard to accept all the changes Valerie had wreaked by melding her past as Valentina and her present as Valerie to create a new future—one she couldn’t have dreamed of when she’d written her life plan over a decade ago.
She looked at her mothers, thought of Nick and Holly, of herself, and marveled at the resiliency of the human psyche and its will to survive and thrive.
She’d grown up loved and cared for—even if smothered at times. Which made sense now that she knew her mother had lived with the terror that someone would knock on the door and claim her child.
Like it or not, Marissa Zea, even though she had not given birth to her, was her mother. She was the one who’d poured oatmeal baths when Valerie had come down with chicken pox in kindergarten. She was the one who’d fought the whole school board in middle school so her daughter would have a teacher who nurtured her spirit rather than cut it to pieces. She was the one who’d held Valerie as she’d cried her eyes out when Justin Strutton had broken her heart in ninth grade.
“Did you know?” Valerie had asked her mother when she’d gone home to explain to Higgins why the Valentina package couldn’t air. “Did you know I was stolen?”
Valerie had never seen her mother so small, so cowed—so afraid. She’d sat at Valerie’s kitchen table, wringing her hands until they were red and raw.
“Gordon told me your mother was a drug-addicted teenager who’d sold you to him for the price of a high. I believed him. I had no reason not to.” Tears streaked down her mother’s face. “He said your name was Val. I took it as a sign from heaven.”
“But didn’t you see the news?”
Her mother closed her eyes, pinched them tight. “I didn’t turn on a television for years. No radio. No newspapers. I didn’t want to accidentally read something that would make me have to give you up.” She gulped in air. “I’d already lost so much.”
“But something frightened you. After Dad died, you hung on to me even tighter.” Valerie had thought it was because of the loss.
“When your father died, I found clippings in a safe. That’s when I found out you were Valentina Callahan. Then I got scared. I didn’t want to lose you. And you were working at that station—for your own great-uncle. I was so scared, Valerie. You have to forgive me.”
Nick came up behind Valerie, bursting the bubble of memory. He wound his arms around her waist, and instantly her stress abated. She seemed to have grown a new skin of strength—as if her time underground had tempered her. Her hunger for information was no longer a desperate craving, but a healthy curiosity.
Though the Valentina segments hadn’t aired, the story had made national news.
Gordon was charged with kidnapping and attempted murder as well as at least a dozen counts of fraud. Nick had convinced all of the Valentine Pond project investors who’d lost money to swallow their pride and testify.
As for her job, Valerie had left it in limbo for now. The good thing about nepotism was that Edmund Meadows had promised her a place should she want to return once she decided what to do with her future.
Nick kissed her temple. “How are you holding up?”
Her gaze drifted to the two women in the doorway. “I’m not sure where I fit anymore.”
“Right here.” He turned her in his arms and kissed her until the edges of the world softened and all her doubts disappeared and melded the person she was born with the person she’d grown into, showing her a world of possibilities.
“Wow.” She pulled away from him, seeing her reflection in the dark mirror of his eyes, soft with love. She couldn’t help but smile. This one truth felt right. This one truth was enough. Nick, the companion her soul had never forgotten, filled her heart with pure happiness.
Her search was over. She was home.
VALERIE’S FAVORITE BIRTHDAY CAKE
¾ cup milk
2 teaspoons instant coffee powder
¾ cup unsweetened cocoa
½ cup plain yogurt
1 ¼ cups flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened (no substitutions)
1 ½ cups sugar
3 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
Preheat over to 350° F. Grease three 8-inch cake pans. Line bottoms with waxed paper. Grease and flour paper.
Heat milk and coffee in small saucepan until small bubbles form around the edge. Add to cocoa and whisk until smooth. Whisk in yogurt. Cool.
In medium bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Beat butter in mixer bowl until light. Gradually beat in sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time. Add vanilla. At low speed, gradually beat in dry ingredients alternating with chocolate mixture. Beat at medium speed two minutes. Pour into prepared pans.
Bake 25 minutes, until tops spring back when lightly touched. Cool in pan on wire rack 10 minutes. Invert cakes onto rack. Remove paper and cool completely, right side up.
CREAMY FUDGE FROSTING
4 ounces unsweetened dark chocolate, chopped
1 2/3 cups confectioners’ sugar
¾ cup whipping cream
2 teaspoons vanilla
6 tablespoons butter, softened (no substitutions)
Heat chocolate, sugar and cream, stirring constantly, in saucepan over medium heat until smooth. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Transfer to mixer bowl, and place in larger bowl of ice water. Let stand, stirring occasionally, until cold and thick. Remove from ice bath. Gradually beat in butter at high speed; beat until fluffy and stiff enough to hold its shape.
Place one layer on cake plate and spread with ¾ cup frosting. Top with second layer and another ¾ cup frosting. Spread top and sides with remaining frosting.
Makes 12 servings.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-2253-3
PULL OF THE MOON
Copyright © 2006 by Sylvie Kurtz
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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* Flesh and Blood
‡The Seekers
Table of Contents
Dedication
About the Author
Books by Sylvie Kurtz
Cast of Characters
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
Epilogue
Copyright
