by Anne Stuart
It pissed him off to come back, eighteen years later, and find she was still doing it.
She deserved better than that. Better than the tepid kind of love Sally dispensed. Love on her terms. He had no doubt at all that Sally really did love her, as much as she was capable. But Carolyn Smith deserved to be loved with reckless passion. She needed to get away from this damned group of selfish bastards who had bled her dry in the name of family.
And he was one of the worst.
At least he’d been able to escape.
The damnable thing was, he couldn’t remember much of what happened eighteen years ago. He’d stolen a car, and this time his mother was going to have a hard time buying him out of trouble. He could remember the row that night, Sally screaming at him, him screaming back. The house in Edgartown had been full—Patsy had just left her second husband, and she and her three children had taken up most of the second floor. Warren was there for the weekend, though he spent most of his time at the Yacht Club, away from the inconvenience of noisy children. He’d heard about Alex’s latest fall from grace—it wasn’t just any car he’d stolen, but the classic MGB belonging to a retired sportscaster. He could vaguely remember Warren’s face, pale but splotched with rage, delivering ultimatums in a high-pitched voice.
This time he was going to jail, they told him. This time it was serious, and he was close enough to adulthood that he wouldn’t be able to get off with a slap on the wrist. It was past time he learned his lesson.
So he’d left. Stalked from the house, he remembered that much. He’d walked for hours, until all the lights in the old house had dimmed, and then he’d gone back in looking for money.
His memory got vaguer at that point. He knew he’d ripped off Constanza, and he’d also known that Sally would immediately replace anything he took. He must have emptied Patsy’s purse, then gone to Carolyn’s room to see what she’d left lying around.
He could still see her face, watching him as he pocketed all of her treasures. She’d grown in the past year, and he’d been uncomfortably aware of her as female, rather than victim, for months now.
So he’d kissed her. He remembered that as well, the sweet shock of her young mouth, the incredible temptation of her body still warm from bed. It had haunted him over the years, and he never could figure out why. Maybe because that was the last thing he could remember.
He’d gone down to Lighthouse Beach—he’d figured out that much—even though he couldn’t remember doing it. The Valmers’ boat was moored there, and he’d have no trouble hot-wiring it and taking it to the mainland, disappearing from the only family he’d ever known.
Someone had been waiting for him down at the beach, and he hadn’t the faintest idea who the hell it had been. In eighteen years that wide, gaping space in his memory hadn’t filled in. Nothing had come back to him, and whether he pushed it or let it be made no difference. A big section was simply gone from his life, including his attempted murder.
One moment he was kissing Carolyn Smith and thinking he was a pervert and that she was jailbait.
The next, he was lying on a narrow bed in a house outside of Boston, looking at the man who’d once been married to Sally MacDowell. He’d had a hole in his back from a bullet, one that had been roughly extracted and bandaged, and no memory of how he’d gotten there. According to John Kinkaid, he’d just showed up at his doorstep the night before, looking half-dead, and Kinkaid had let him in.
Later, he’d been able to piece some of it together. The trawler filled with fishermen who weren’t really interested in fish had hauled him out of the dark ocean and patched him up before dropping him off on the Massachusetts coast. He’d found a scribbled piece of water-soaked paper in his pocket with Kinkaid’s address on it, and he could only assume he’d come across it when he’d been rifling his mother’s purse. Either way, he was there.
He hadn’t been expecting a touching, heartfelt reunion—he’d never been a sentimental kid—but the reality of it fell far short, anyway. He’d never seen pictures of his father, but it came as no surprise that Kinkaid was a good-looking man, even in his mid-fifties. No MacDowell would have settled for less than physical perfection.
He was tall, lanky, with a long face and brown eyes. Alex couldn’t blame himself for not recognizing the significance of those brown eyes—at some point he’d hit his head and had a minor concussion to complicate matters. With a bullet hole in his back, he had no intention of going to a hospital emergency room or a doctor and have to answer questions. They’d just send him back to Edgartown.
Kinkaid fed him soup and ginger ale, even woke him hourly to make sure he was okay.
By the second day, he was giving Alex sweet black coffee, which he’d always had to sneak from Constanza’s kitchen.
“Sally’s worried about you,” he’d said, sitting down opposite the bed.
Alex had proceeded to slop hot coffee on his jeans. “You told her where I was?”
“Relax, kid. She hasn’t got the faintest idea. I’m not about to snitch on you.”
“But she’ll probably try to get in touch with you. She’s smart—she’ll figure out I might try to find my father.”
An odd expression crossed Kinkaid’s face. “We haven’t been in touch in over seventeen years,” he said. “I doubt she’ll even think of me as a possibility. It’s been too damned long.”
“Since I was born,” Alex said.
“Yes.” The single word left no room for questions.
“She could find you. If she wanted to, she could find anyone,” Alex said bitterly.
“If you think that, then why did you bother to run away? Or do you want her to bring you back?”
“I’ll go back,” he said. “When I’m good and ready. When I find the answers to a few questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
Alex had snorted with adolescent contempt. “I wanted to meet my father, is that so crazy? That side of my life is a blank. Sally never talks about you; I’ve never even seen a picture of you. All I know is you walked out on us when I was born.”
“And you want to know why?” Kinkaid lit a couple of cigarettes, passing one to Alex. He’d died of lung cancer ten years later, and Alex had given up smoking.
“I think I have a right to know,” Alex said. “I have a right to know my father.”
Kinkaid sighed. “Sorry, kid, but I can’t help you with that one. I’m not your father.” It should have come as a shock, but it didn’t.
“Is that why you left her? Because she had an affair and got pregnant by another man?”
“Nope. The only time Sally got pregnant, I was the father. I have no doubt of that.”
His head had been pounding for days—at Kinkaid’s words the pain suddenly went into overdrive. “What are you saying?”
“That you aren’t Sally’s kid, either. Our baby was stillborn, and Sally never was a woman who took no for an answer. I don’t even know where the hell she found you, though she must have paid through the nose for you. She brought you home and presented you as her newborn son, and if anyone had any doubts they were smart enough to keep their mouths shut.”
“But not you?”
“Oh, I kept my mouth shut, all right. I just left. Our marriage had been a shambles for a long time, but I stuck around because of the kid. Once the baby died there was no need for me to get caught in Sally’s lies.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Kinkaid said with rough kindness. “It’s nothing personal. I’m sure Sally loved you just as much as she would have loved a kid she gave birth to.”
“I don’t know if that’s saying much.”
Kinkaid shrugged. “As for me, it wasn’t like I’d lost a puppy and could be happy with a new one. Once Sally lost our kid there was no reason for me to stay. You were her new toy
, and she didn’t need me around anyway.” He sighed. “It was hard turning my back on all that money, though. Still, I don’t regret it. I married someone else, we had a couple of kids, then went our separate ways. I see my daughters on weekends, and that’s enough fathering for me.”
Alex had stubbed out his cigarette. “I better get going,” he said.
“Naaah, stay put,” Kinkaid said, pushing him back on the bed. “In a way I feel like you’re some kind of kin to me. Like a stepson or something. After all, you’re my ex-wife’s kid.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Listen, I’m sure Sally loved you like crazy. Just because she bent a few laws to get you doesn’t make it any different.”
“Am I even legally her son?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you, kid. She was willing to do anything to get you—she’s not about to come out with the truth at this late date. She never liked admitting when she did something wrong.”
“Do you think she did something wrong?”
“It’s none of my business. She always used her money to get what she wanted. It just wasn’t what I wanted.”
“Yeah,” said Alex, reaching for another cigarette from the pack lying on the table. “So that makes two of us.”
“Two?”
“Me and Carolyn. She brought another kid home a few years later, a little girl. She just didn’t try to pass her off as her own. She didn’t bother to adopt her, either. She always said single women couldn’t adopt, but I didn’t believe her. Sally could do anything she set her mind to.”
“If she spent enough money,” Kinkaid said. “By the way, kid, what’s your name?”
“Alex. Alexander MacDowell.”
Kinkaid made a rueful face. “We were going to call our kid Samuel. Samuel Kinkaid.”
“It’s a good name,” Alex said.
“Yeah.”
And five weeks later, when Alex finally left, his name was Sam Kinkaid.
It had been surprisingly easy to disappear. John Kinkaid had drifted a long ways from the insulated propriety of the MacDowells, and he helped him get all the paperwork he’d need to start his new life. He passed no judgments, simply gave Sam a carton of cigarettes and a hundred bucks when he left, and the promise to be there if he needed him.
He hadn’t. He’d never seen him again, but it hadn’t mattered. He had his new life now. For the first time he was free.
He’d had a dose of reality quickly enough, with no one to bail him out of trouble, no money cushioning his every move. And he’d reveled in it, bumming around Europe, drifting, trying his hand at a variety of things. In the last eighteen years he’d been a car thief, a college student, a stockbroker, a ski bum, a gigolo, and a carpenter. He was strong and resilient, with his own admittedly twisted sense of honor, and he needed nothing and nobody.
Until he heard that Sally MacDowell was dying.
It was funny how the news came to him. He wasn’t a fanciful man, but he couldn’t keep from feeling that it was fate.
The MacDowell family, for all their money, kept a low profile. And Alex had deliberately kept himself from checking on them. That was his past life, over and done. He didn’t care anymore.
Whenever he had spare money, free time, or any excuse at all, he found himself in Italy. Tuscany, to be exact. At one point in his life he wondered if he felt some kind of hereditary sense of belonging, but given his blond hair and blue eyes he doubted it. Whatever the reason, it felt like home as no place had during his years of wandering. It was only in Tuscany where he felt at peace.
He even owned a small, tumbled-down house up in the hills there. Not quite a villa, grander than a farmhouse, it was little more than a ruin, barely livable, surrounded by overgrown gardens where the air always smelled of roses, no matter what was currently blooming.
His friend Paolo had been helping him repair the roof, and when he’d gone home after lunch he’d left the wrappings from his sandwich behind. An elderly edition of the international Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper was old and faded, discolored from the sun. Why he should have chosen to read American financial news that was two months out of date still amazed him. But then, he was someone who always needed to be reading in his spare time—in the bathroom, while watching TV, when he was eating. He came across the news about the reorganization of MacDowell Industries when he was in the midst of a dish of cold pasta.
The article didn’t say she was dying. It didn’t need to—Alex could read through the journalistic lines easily enough. And he knew it was time to go home and find the answers to all the questions that had haunted him.
He couldn’t exactly remember when the plan had hit him. At first he’d simply intended to go home and present himself to his loving family. Warren was the logical one to approach first—he didn’t want to kill Sally from the shock of her prodigal almost-son returning.
But it hadn’t been that easy. Warren was insulated from the hoi polloi, and several layers of secretaries and receptionists protected him from phone calls. His apartment in New York had an unlisted number, and if Alex had ever known it, he’d forgotten it long ago.
Finally, in annoyance, he’d left a terse message that Alex MacDowell wanted to speak to his uncle. He should have expected the swift response he got.
The MacDowells retained a large firm of lawyers. The return phone call from one of the junior partners was brief and to the point. Sally MacDowell’s son was dead, and con men would be dealt with severely.
And that’s when the idea had hit him. A little insurance, a little fail-safe. Years ago, someone had tried to kill him. One of the mighty MacDowells, probably. If they wanted him dead back then, they certainly wouldn’t welcome him back now, when they’d gotten used to thinking all that lovely money was theirs. He had no idea what Sally’s will contained, but he had little doubt that once he returned a large portion of her substantial wealth would devolve onto him. And Warren and Patsy MacDowell wouldn’t like that.
It hadn’t taken him long to find out the lay of the land, once he decided how he was going to deal with it. Alex had never been declared dead—his grieving mother had refused to allow it. Once she died the estate would be in disarray until they managed to come up with some proof. Anyone amoral enough and devious enough would welcome an effective imposter with open arms.
And if his memory served him, dear Uncle Warren was the perfect patsy.
It had been amazingly easy. He’d tracked Warren down to his men’s club and simply sat near him in a quiet corner of the bar and waited. Warren’s gaze had drifted past him with patrician lack of interest, then he’d frozen.
“Who are you?” he’d demanded in a hoarse voice.
Alex had smiled. “Your long-lost nephew?”
“He’s dead.”
“Maybe. It would be convenient if you could prove it. But you haven’t been able to, have you?”
Warren reached for his dark amber drink, his perfectly manicured hand shaking. “What would you know about it?”
“I know a lot of things. I happen to look like a missing member of your family. I even looked like him back when he disappeared—the cops picked me up and questioned me when they were looking for him. With the right sort of help I could convince anyone I’m Alexander MacDowell.”
“And why would you want to do that?”
“For money,” he said lightly. “Oh, I’m not greedy. I wouldn’t expect everything that MacDowell was going to inherit. After all, I’d need help if I wanted to pull this off. But think of the convenience. No delay in proving whether he’s dead or not. No question about inheritance. We work out something nice and cozy, just the two of us, and once the old lady dies and there’s a generous amount of disposable income, I’ll take off and never be heard from again.”
Warren had stared a
t him in disbelief. “And you think I’d trust you? You must be the con artist who’s been trying to get in touch with my sister. I thought I had the lawyers take care of you.”
“Don’t be too hasty, ‘Uncle Warren,’” he’d murmured. “You strike me as a smart man. You wouldn’t want to dismiss an opportunity like this without careful consideration.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“My name’s Sam Kinkaid.” He’d used the name deliberately, but Warren hadn’t even blinked. Obviously, Sally’s former husband had been erased from his memory banks.
Warren leaned back, looking at him for a long, thoughtful moment. “I could call the police.”
“But you won’t. You’ll go back to your Park Avenue apartment and you’ll think about this. You’ll mull it over, thoughtfully, over a couple of scotches. You won’t talk about it with anyone, because you’re smart enough to know that a secret stretched three ways always breaks. And then, in a few days, maybe less, you’ll call me.”
Warren wrinkled his nose in fastidious disapproval. “You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
“It takes balls to carry off something like this. The question is, do you have any?” Warren simply stared at him, and Alex figured he’d set the trap well enough. He rose, towering over the older man. “It’s up to you. Here’s my phone number. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
“You can expect to hear from my lawyers,” Warren said coldly.
Alex had only grinned at him. “Thanks for the drink, Uncle Warren.”
His instincts told him when Warren would call, and his instincts were right. In less than a week he was being drilled privately in MacDowell family history, some of which was familiar, some of which was entirely new to him. He heard about Patsy’s new marriages, her adult children; about Sally’s illness and her devoted servants, Constanza and Ruben. And he heard all about Carolyn Smith, the foster child who was brought into the family and had never left.
