The Night In Question
Harper Allen
A MOTHER'S HEARTBeing convicted for a crime she hadn't committed shattered Julia Tennant's world. Losing her daughter broke her heart. Free at last, she faced the special agent who'd sealed her fate, and asked for his help. Max Ross spoke coldly, but the flash of heat that seared through his eyes told her he heard her plea.This man had the strength of will needed to reclaim her child–once she convinced him that someone else had gotten away with murder.A MAN'S STRENGTHHe'd hated himself for wanting her. Now Max would move heaven and earth to right the wrong done to Julia. He'd use all his considerable skills to prove her innocence and get her daughter back–though the cost might be his heart and soul….
It seemed Julia Tennant was always slipping away from him
Max watched her slim figure walk swiftly down the sidewalk to the bus stop, her shoulders hunched. He felt a chill spread through him.
She loved her child. The anguish he’d heard in her voice had been wrenchingly real. Yet her daughter was supposed to have been on the flight with Julia’s husband the night he was killed. For Julia to be guilty, she’d have to have been willing to kill not just her husband, but her child, as well.
The floor beneath his feet seemed to buckle. “She didn’t do it,” he breathed.
And suddenly he was sprinting toward her, calling her name, knowing he had to stop her from walking out of his life again.
Dear Reader,
We have a fabulous fall lineup for you this month and throughout the season, starting with a new Navajo miniseries by Aimée Thurlo called SIGN OF THE GRAY WOLF. Two loners are called to action in the Four Corners area of New Mexico to take care of two women in jeopardy. Look for Daniel “Lightning” Eagle’s story in When Lightning Strikes and Burke Silentman’s next month in Navajo Justice.
The explosive CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL continuity series concludes with Adrianne Lee’s Prince Under Cover. We just know you are going to love this international story of intrigue and the drama of a royal marriage—to a familiar stranger…. Don’t forget: a new Confidential branch will be added to the network next year!
Also this month—another compelling book from newcomer Delores Fossen. In A Man Worth Remembering, she reunites an estranged couple after amnesia strikes. Together, can they find the strength to face their enduring love—and find their kidnapped secret child? And can a woman on the edge recover the life and child she lost when she was framed for murder, in Harper Allen’s The Night in Quesiton? She can if she has the help of the man who put her away.
Pulse pounding, mind-blowing and always breathtaking—that’s Harlequin Intrigue.
Enjoy,
Denise O’Sullivan
Associate Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
The Night in Question
Harper Allen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harper Allen lives in the country in the middle of a hundred acres of maple trees with her husband, Wayne, six cats, four dogs—and a very nervous cockatiel at the bottom of the food chain. For excitement she and Wayne drive to the nearest village and buy jumbo bags of pet food. She believes in love at first sight, because it happened to her.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Julia Tennant—She’s spent the past two years in prison. Now she’s out and determined to find her child—with the help of the man who once tore her world apart.
Max Ross—The FBI agent had Julia convicted of a crime she didn’t commit. Falling in love with her was an even bigger mistake.
Willa—Four years old when she was taken from her mother, Willa now seems to be the target of a killer—and her mother is in a race against time to find her and save her.
Noel Tennant—He lost a corporate battle against his brother Kenneth. Did he seek his revenge in a murder plot?
Barbara Van Hale—Kenneth’s sister, Barbara lost her own husband when the bomb went off. After fearfully testifying against Julia, Babs was put into a witness protection program along with the little girl she now has custody of—Julia’s daughter, Willa.
Olivia Tennant—The Tennant family matriarch, she’s destroyed each of her children’s lives one by one. But did she arrange to have her own son eliminated?
Peter Symington—Blind since birth, Noel’s friend may be the only one who sees the truth.
To Ann Leslie, with thanks and appreciation.
Contents
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
Epilogue
Chapter One
She looked nothing like he remembered.
Max Ross studied the unnaturally still figure of the woman sitting across from him while their waitress carelessly slapped down a couple of cups of coffee on the stained tabletop.
“Anything else?” The waitress’s nametag said, Hi! I’m Cherie—Have a Great Day! There was a smear of ketchup on the collar of her uniform, and her mouth was bracketed with two dissatisfied lines. Max doubted if she could make anyone’s day great. Certainly she wasn’t having an uplifting effect on the silent woman across from him. Except for pulling the thick cup and saucer closer toward her with one finger, Julia hadn’t given the slightest indication that she was taking any notice of either him or the incongruously named Cherie. It was as if there was an invisible shell around her, a shell that nothing was allowed to penetrate.
So what? He didn’t give a damn if Julia Tennant never had a good day the rest of her life, he thought coldly. Just walking around Boston as a free woman was way more than she deserved.
“That’s all, thanks.” Without raising his eyes he held out a twenty. “Keep the table next to us empty for half an hour.”
The twenty was plucked out of his hand, but the waitress didn’t move. “No guarantees, mister. If one of my tables is free then I lose out on tips. Making a living is tough these days, right, girlfriend?”
This last was addressed to Julia in an attempt at female solidarity. When Max saw the chipped red nails rest lightly on Julia’s shoulder he started to say something.
He was too late.
“Get the hand off. Now!”
She was still staring down at her coffee cup and he could swear those pale lips hadn’t moved, but the words had hissed out in a shockingly threatening undertone and the spoon she’d been using to stir her coffee was clenched in her fist. Before he could intervene, Julia lifted her eyes to the frozen waitress.
“I’m not your girlfriend, honey. And I don’t like being touched.” A lank strand of hair fell into her eyes but she ignored it. “If you want to sweeten the deal you can probably get ten bucks more out of him, but don’t push your luck.”
No one else in the place seemed to have noticed the incident, and Max wanted to keep it that way. He handed the shaken Cherie another bill. “Half an hour. This is private, okay?”
“Okay.” The white-faced woman flicked a frightened glance at Julia, now hunched over her coffee again as if nothing at all had occurred. “Private. Sure, mister.”
She turned and made a beeline for the swinging doors to the kitchen, ignoring the disgruntled looks of other customers who were trying to get her attention.
“Lousy coffee.” Julia patted the breast pocket of the cheap windbreaker she was wearing and pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes. Sticking one in her mouth, she lit a match with the economical movements he was beginning to associate with her, squinting against the smoke. She didn’t leave the pack on the table, Max noticed, instead tucking it securely back into the pocket it had come from.
“You didn’t smoke before, did you?” he asked. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he felt stupid. She glanced up as if sensing his discomfiture.
“No, Mr. Ross, I didn’t smoke before,” she said flatly. “I’ve picked up a few bad habits in the last two years. And I’ve lost a few too—like pretending I give a damn about small talk.” The corners of her lips lifted humorlessly, but her eyes were opaque, giving no clue to her real feelings. “What do you want from me?”
The Boston papers had called her The Porcelain Doll, and the name had been apt, Max recalled. Her skin had had the pearlescent glow of delicate china, her fair hair had brushed like a swath of spun silk against the shoulders of the discreetly expensive black suits she’d worn and her eyes had been the bluest he’d ever seen, fringed with thick dark lashes. Much of the time they’d been spilling over with tears, and that had reminded him of a doll too.
God, she’d been able to turn on the waterworks at a second’s notice, he remembered with sudden anger—trembling, crystalline drops that hadn’t been real enough to smudge her mascara. At the time of her trial he’d been thirty-one, and no gullible FBI probationer but a ten-year veteran of the Agency. But even he had found himself wondering once or twice if there was any way he’d made a mistake about her. Julia Tennant had been on the stand for three gruelling days, and at the end of the third she’d looked as breathtakingly beautiful as if she’d just choked up watching a particularly emotional rendition of La Boheme, rather than being mercilessly cross-examined on multiple murder charges.
Actually, her nickname had been The Porcelain Doll Bomber. Those slim and still-delicate fingers had handed over a gift-wrapped package to her husband, Kenneth Tennant, just minutes before he’d boarded his executive jet. Those blue eyes had probably widened in well-rehearsed horror as, only seconds after takeoff, the resulting explosion had rained flaming debris through the night sky.
But in the end, despite her tears and the protestations of innocence that even days of grilling couldn’t shake, the twenty-three-year-old widow had been found guilty of the murders of her husband and the three other unfortunate souls who’d been on the aircraft with him that night. Justice had been done, Max thought with grim satisfaction. His only regret at her sentencing had been that she didn’t have four lifetimes to spend in prison—one for each victim she’d callously snuffed out.
A few days ago he’d been told she was about to be released. Considering the date, he’d thought it was a bad April fool’s joke at first.
“If we’re just going to sit here gazing into each other’s eyes I’ve got better things to do, Mr. Ross.” Julia ground the butt of her cigarette out in an ashtray and pushed her coffee cup away from her as she started to rise from her chair. “It’s my first night of freedom. You’re not how I planned to spend it.”
“Sit down.” His voice revealed nothing of the outrage simmering inside him, but for a moment he saw a flicker of apprehension behind that blank gaze. Tucking a stray strand of lusterless hair behind her ear in the first extraneous gesture he’d seen her make, she sank back into her seat.
From the tables around them came a buzz of noisy conversation. Cherie hadn’t reappeared, but the two other waitresses working the floor called out their orders to the short-order cook at the counter and exchanged sarcastic banter with the customers. Max hardly noticed. Under the harsh lighting Julia’s skin was unhealthily pale and the smudges beneath her eyes looked like bruises. Her fingers were laced tightly together on the table.
She still looked like a doll. The unwanted thought darted through his mind. Except now she looked like a doll that someone had discarded a long time ago—the expensive paint chipped away, the pretty dresses lost over the years, the glamor gone. The sapphire eyes that had once sparkled with diamond tears stared at him expressionlessly. Julia Tennant didn’t cry anymore, he realized with sudden certainty.
There was no reason why that should bother him. When he spoke his voice was harsher than he’d intended.
“You’re never going to see her again. You understand that?”
“Don’t worry.” She looked away. “They told me.”
He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “If you think that anything’s changed just because you manipulated the system, forget it. If there was any real justice in this world, you’d still be upstate making mailbags with the rest of the twenty-five-to-life sewing circle instead of being handed a get-out-of-jail-free card. You got away with murder, Julia.” He kept his voice even with an effort. “But if I even suspect that you’re trying to find her—”
“Back off. I said I understood the situation.” She lifted her chin slightly, her shoulders tense under the thin nylon of the windbreaker, and for a moment the ghost of the former Julia flitted across her features. He’d seen a newspaper photo of her at an arts gala once; her hair swept up and held back with jewelled combs, those delicate eyebrows arched in polite detachment, that same slight tilt to her chin.
Kenneth Tennant, his thick dark hair a distinguished silver at his temples, had been in the photo too. A proprietary arm had been around his beautiful trophy wife, and he’d been smiling at another couple in the picture—his sister Barbara and her new husband, Robert Van Hale.
Tennant and Van Hale had been doomed even then, he thought. Both of them had been on the jet when Julia Tennant’s exquisitely wrapped package had been opened.
“You couldn’t stop staring at me throughout the trial. I see you haven’t been able to break the habit.” Her voice held a thread of anger. “You must be attracted to dangerous women, Mr. Ross—or is it that girls-behind-bars fantasy that some men have?”
“Get one thing very clear, Julia,” he said, leaning forward slightly. When she automatically moved away he reached over and grabbed both of her clasped hands in one of his, holding her there. “You’re not my fantasy. You’re a black widow spider, as far as I’m concerned—a cold-blooded murderer who killed the father of your child, the husband of your best friend and two other people you didn’t even know.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Julia said tightly. “I walked into prison that first day with quite a reputation to defend. You know how it is when you’re the new kid on the cell block.”
“I’m sure you held your own.” He didn’t loosen his grip on her. “You’re the type who always lands on her feet. Your overturned conviction proved that.”
“Too bad the court takes pesky little details like constitutional rights so seriously. Now let go of my hands. You’re hurting me.”
Despite the lack of expression on her face, her voice had risen enough to attract attention, and Max released her fingers in reluctant frustration. What the hell had he expected? he asked himself. Some show of remorse? Some acknowledgement, however belated, of guilt?
A part of him had never been able to believe that she was exactly what she appeared—devoid of any real emotion, unmoved by the lives she’d destroyed. He wasn’t naive enough to think that her all-too-brief incarceration would have worked any miracle of rehabilitation, but he’d held to the faint hope that her time in prison might have made her face up to what she’d done. He’d been a fool. Nothing touched Julia Tennant.
Not even the loss of her child.
He’d done what he’d come here to do, he thought heavily. He’d delivered the message, although from her reaction it hadn’t been necessary. Like a phoenix, Julia had risen from the funeral pyre of her old life and was ready to start a new one—unburdened by any inconvenient baggage from her past. He pushed his chair back, unwilling to spend even a moment longer with her, and then he stopped.
“What’s that?” His gaze was on the back of her hand, and when she followed his glance her own wavered. Then she gave him a cold smile.
“You don’t want to know, Ross. It might upset your preconceptions about me landing on my feet.” She held her hand up and studied the odd marks on the back of it, slowly turning it so that her palm faced outward at him.
The same four red scars showed, a mirror image of the other side, but Max wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were steady and there was a tiny mocking hitch at the corner of her mouth, and all of a sudden he saw her coolness for what it was.
Behind the mask was a woman just barely holding herself together. Julia Tennant had been through hell.
Wrong tense. She was still there.
He felt as if he’d just been kicked in the solar plexus. The stale air of the restaurant pressed in on him, making it hard to breathe, but he knew it wasn’t the haze of smoke drifting from a nearby table or the unpleasant odor of frying grease that was creating the suffocating miasma. The air around Julia was thick with despair. It was an almost palpable thing.
“What was it—some kind of homemade weapon?” he asked, his throat dry and his voice a harsh rasp.
“It was a fork, Max.” Her outspread fingers trembled, and she instantly stilled them. “They got the new girl in a corner one day, and they nailed my hand to a table with a fork. I guess it was an initiation rite or something.”
She held her hand out a moment longer, in much the same pose as she might once have held it to admire the green fire of an emerald on her finger. Then she wrapped it around the coffee cup so that the wound wasn’t visible to him, drained the last of her coffee and set the cup back down on the table with an audible click.
“I’m leaving now,” she said offhandedly. “I have to find a place to stay for tonight, and since I don’t have reservations at the Ritz I’d better start looking for a room. If you ever approach me again, Ross, I’m putting you in a world of pain that you’ll never crawl out of. Do you understand that?”
The woman was threatening him. Compassion fled, and Max narrowed his gaze. “What are you planning, Julia—another gift-wrapped bomb?”
“No. A gift-wrapped attempted rape charge,” she said, her tone as cold as his. “You come near me and I’ll have my blouse ripped so fast you won’t have time to pull your damn ID from your wallet before the cops come. The charge won’t stick, but that’s the kind of thing that stays on your personnel file. Think about it.”
“And you think about this.” He’d passed the point where he could hide his anger and he knew it. “I’m never going to stop watching you. I’m making it my personal mission in life to ensure you don’t ever find her, Tennant, so keep that in mind if you get the urge to play mommy someday in the future and decide to go looking for her. She’s doing fine without you. She’s starting to get back to normal, and I won’t let you rip her world apart a second time.”
“You—you’ve seen her?” Julia had already started to turn away. Now she froze. Slowly she turned back to face him, her shoulders rigidly set and what little color there’d been in her face ebbing away. “When did you see her? Is she all right? Has anything happened to her?”
The questions tumbled from her bloodless lips too rapidly for him to answer, and the previously dull eyes blazed with sudden urgency. She looked down at him, and for a moment she seemed to be holding her breath.
Then she let it out. One corner of her mouth lifted in a mocking grin, and she shrugged carelessly. Reaching into her windbreaker, she pulled out the pack of cigarettes, shook one free and tossed the pack on the table. From the front pocket of her worn jeans she extracted a box of wooden matches, and one-handedly she snapped a thumbnail against the head of a match and peered at him through the flaring flame.
“Isn’t that what you wanted from me, Max?” There was a jeering note in the husky voice. She put the cigarette between her lips, raked back a limp strand of blond hair and brought the flame closer. “Isn’t that why you mentioned her—because you wanted to see if I would crack, just a little?”
“You didn’t crack when you watched your husband’s plane go down. You didn’t crack on the stand.” Max ignored the tendril of smoke that curled down at him and kept his tone even. “I hear you didn’t crack in prison, Julia. No, I didn’t expect the mention of her would upset you. But tell me one thing—why can’t you bring yourself to say her name?”
The shadow he thought he saw pass behind her eyes was gone so quickly that he realized it had to have been a distortion from the cigarette’s smoke. She was still holding the burning match in her right hand. With a deliberate movement she brought the fingers of her left to the flame, her gaze locked on his. Slowly she let her thumb and her index finger get closer, until he knew it had to be burning her. Then she pinched the flame out, her eyes still not leaving his face.
“Willa,” she said flatly. “Her name’s Willa, and she used to be my daughter, before you people took her away from me. I can say it, Max. There’s just no reason to, since I’m never going to see her again.”
She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then her lashes dipped briefly to her cheekbones, as if she was suddenly weary of the conversation. He didn’t know what prompted him to utter his next words.
“I saw her the day before yesterday. She’s fine. Nothing’s happened to her.”
Julia’s eyes were still closed, and he saw her lips tighten. The burning end of the cigarette trembled slightly. When the dark lashes lifted, the fabulous sapphire gaze that had disturbed his dreams for the last two years rested on him.
“Thank you,” she said in an undertone so low that he barely caught it. A wisp of smoke drifted between them, and she looked down at the cigarette in her hand as if she’d forgotten it was there.
“Cherie’s on her break. Did you folks want anything else?”
An older waitress had approached their table, and, disconcerted, Max wrenched his gaze from Julia. “No.” He shook his head. “We’re just about to leave.”
As he turned back to the slender figure in the wind-breaker and jeans, Julia bent swiftly forward and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. Once again she was under control, he realized. Any vulnerability she might have inadvertently revealed a moment ago was gone, and her eyes were no longer sapphire-like, but a hard, opaque blue.
“Don’t ever try to push my buttons like that again, Ross,” she said quietly. “You of all people should know what a cheap shot that was.”
He stared at her, taken off-guard. Then he frowned. “Look, lady, I wasn’t trying to push—” he began, but she cut him off.
“I know more about you than you think I do. I made it my business to find out all I could about the man who ripped my life away from me.” Her gaze darkened. “You lost a child yourself, didn’t you?”
The door to the coffee shop opened and a blast of chilled air blew in. There was a chorus of half-joking shouts from the table of construction workers nearest the door, but Max heard nothing except for the crashing roar that was suddenly filling his ears.
How had she known? He felt violated. She’d dug into his background—how in hell she’d managed it, he didn’t know, but somehow she’d learned more about him during her two years in prison than his closest acquaintances at work knew. She’d had no right to—
“You don’t like having your personal life pored over by a stranger, do you?” Julia said thinly. “Mine was on the front pages, Max—courtesy of you and your associates. Like I said, I don’t ever want to see you around me again.”
This time when she turned away he let her take a few steps before he called out her name. She looked over her shoulder at him, a flicker of anger crossing her features.
“What the hell is it now, Ross?” she asked, not disguising the impatience in her tone.
He shoved the cardboard package to the edge of the table. “You forgot your cigarettes, Julia,” he said, his own voice barbed. “I don’t want them. I don’t smoke.”
She took a half step toward him. Then she checked herself. “Neither do I, Max. I just quit.” Her grin was tight. “I’m going to be a model citizen from now on.”
The next moment she was gone. Across from him her coffee cup and the battered pack of cigarettes were the only proof that she had been there at all.
She’d been taunting him, he thought with sudden anger. Even her last remark had held a hidden message she’d known he would understand. She’d been telling him that she had the strength and the willpower to do whatever she had to do.
She’d been taunting him and she’d been lying to him.
Julia Tennant fully intended to go looking for her child.
Chapter Two
“You smell like a party, Mommy…”
Julia felt Willa’s hair brushing against her neck as her small daughter gustily breathed in the scent of Dior. She tightened her hold on her, praying that the tears she could feel prickling behind her eyelids would remain unshed for these final few moments. But Willa’s attention was on something else, she noted thankfully. She felt tiny fingers touch the luminous pearl studs she’d defiantly fastened to her ears earlier that morning.
“You look like a princess, Mommy.”
“Do I, kitten-paws?” Even as she used the endearment her throat closed in pain. She couldn’t do this, she thought desperately—she couldn’t go through with it. If she packed a bag for Willa right now they could be at the airport before anyone started looking for her. She could get them on the first flight leaving the country—she could find a job, change their names, make a new life for the two of them—
Except that she didn’t have a passport. And within minutes of her non-appearance at court, all airport and border crossing personnel would be on the lookout for a woman and a little girl.
She couldn’t do this. But she had no choice.
She opened her eyes as Maria stifled a sob a few feet away, and the housekeeper’s tearful gaze met hers. Thomas, the chauffeur who’d driven her on countless shopping trips and frivolous outings, stood by the door awkwardly twisting his cap between his hands.
It was time to go. And even though it felt as if her heart was being ripped from her body, she had to make this final parting as normal as possible for her child’s sake.
Julia pressed a desperate kiss to the flaxen head, gave Willa one last too-tight hug and set her back on her feet. Round blue eyes looked up at her in slight alarm as Maria came forward and placed her work-worn palms on the small, OshKosh-clad shoulders.
“Why are you crying, Mommy?”
Because when I walk into court today I’m pretty sure I’m not going to walk out, honey. Because twelve people who don’t even know me are probably going to find me guilty of doing a terrible thing. Because you’re my life—my sun and my moon and my stars—and I’m so very, very afraid I’m never going to see you again.
She forced a smile and saw the worry in her daughter’s eyes disappear. “Because pearls are for tears, silly. It’s the rule. Now, go back into the kitchen with Maria and finish your toast, okay? See you then, red hen.”
“See you later, alligator,” Willa giggled. “Love you trillions.”
Before the rest of their ritual could be completed, the sturdy little legs were skipping down the hall to the breakfast room with Willa’s usual exuberance.
Julia said it anyway.
“Love you trillions,” she whispered, the tears finally spilling over completely as her hungry gaze imprinted this last precious image of her daughter on her memory. Willa reached the end of the hall and turned the corner.
“Trillions and jillions,” Julia breathed hoarsely to the empty hallway. “And forever and ever, kitten-paws.”
Slowly she turned to where Thomas was waiting for her, and the endless pain began….
JULIA HUGGED the damp pillow tightly, willing herself not to awaken. Sometimes the dream would repeat itself. And despite the wrenching anguish she relived night after night at the end of it, it was worth it to hold, even in her imagination, that small wriggling body, press her face against that silky topknot of blond hair, breathe in the sweet, milky, little-girl scent of Willa’s skin. But this time it was no good. Tiredly, she opened her eyes to the unfamiliar room around her.
The next moment she was sitting up abruptly, her heart crashing against her ribs as full consciousness returned.
She wasn’t in prison anymore. She was free. She was free!
Swiftly flipping back the thin blanket that had been covering her, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, her bare feet impervious to the chill of the linoleum floor. Joy so pure it felt like a physical element tore through her. No matter that she was in the cheapest room of the cheapest flophouse she’d been able to find last night—she was free, she thought, trembling with excitement. There had been times that she’d thought this moment would never come.
Free meant she could start looking for Willa. She could hardly believe it was true, she thought faintly. No wonder she was shaking like a leaf. She let her breath out in a ragged exhalation.
“You got out,” she whispered. Across the room her reflection wavered at her from a smeared dresser mirror, and she met her own gaze.
“There were times in there you weren’t sure you were going to make it, but you did,” she told the woman staring back at her. “They said you were too pampered, that you’d never survive. They were wrong. They didn’t know how much you had to live for.”
Slowly she got to her feet. Drawing closer to the mirror, she stared at her reflection in it, her palms flat on the dresser’s surface, her arms braced.
She’d slept in the cotton bra and the utilitarian briefs that were all the underwear she owned. Against the pallor of her skin the bra straps looked dingy from too many washings, and she felt a brief flicker of humiliation.
She’d gone into that place wearing a teal-blue designer suit, handmade Italian heels, satin and lace lingerie. She’d come out almost two years later in a shapeless polyester smock, her own clothes somehow having been mislaid, she’d been told. In the smock she’d felt as conspicuous as if she’d had her inmate number stencilled across her back, and the first thing she’d done when she’d gotten out yesterday was to spend a few of her precious dollars in a secondhand clothing store.
She’d left the hated smock balled up on the floor of a change room, and for an hour or so she’d just walked aimlessly down one street after another, not noticing the April chill but finding herself trembling instead with nervous exhilaration. Around her streetlamps and neon signs and car headlights had begun to come on, piercing the blue Boston dusk, and gradually she’d started to feel at ease among the stream of humanity flowing around her on the sidewalks.
Then a tall figure had detached himself from the passers-by and had stepped in front of her, blocking her path.
As easily as that, Max Ross had ripped away any delusions she might have had of putting her past behind her. At the sight of him she’d felt immediately exposed, as if everyone around them knew what she was and where she’d spent the last twenty-three months.
He’d meant her to feel that way.
But he’d made one vital miscalculation, she thought with a spark of cold anger. He’d thought he’d been dealing with Julia Tennant—the Julia Tennant he’d seen two years ago, the Julia Tennant he’d helped put behind bars. That woman might have accepted his warning.
That woman didn’t exist any longer.
She raked her hair straight back from her forehead, and narrowed her gaze at her reflection in the mirror. “You tipped your hand, Ross. That wasn’t smart,” she said softly. “You shouldn’t have let me know how much you hated me, because now I’ll be watching out for you.”
Despite her words, a sudden tremor ran through her as she recalled their briefly antagonistic meeting the night before and saw again the hostile implacability in his expression.
He would do anything he could to stop her. Sick fear washed through her. In the mirror, her reflection swayed slightly, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
Sometimes the dream went on, the rest of the memories, less vivid but still unforgettable, tumbling through her mind like a collection of spilled photographs. The faces of the jury members as they’d filed back that final time into the courtroom, the electric excitement from the press section as the verdict had been delivered, the blank expressions of the court officers as they’d moved toward her after she’d been found guilty. Her own confused hesitation as to what was expected of her until she’d seen the handcuffs one of them was unfastening from his belt.
And just as she was escorted out, the flash of pity, instantly erased, that had crossed Max Ross’s features while he’d watched from a few feet away.
Abruptly she straightened, blocking out the images in her mind. She’d imagined that, she told herself. Pity wasn’t in Ross’s repertoire. If the man had any humanity at all, he certainly didn’t intend to waste it on the woman he thought of as a black widow spider.
As she’d learned over the past few weeks, he wasn’t alone in that attitude.
“Your sister-in-law only testified against you after the authorities guaranteed her safety,” Lynn Erikson had told her in prison. “Do I think you’ve got a good chance of having your conviction overturned with what we’ve found out about the search of your summer home? Absolutely.”
Lynn had shrugged, and in the small gesture it had been possible to see a ghost of the arrogant and high-powered attorney she’d once been before a cocaine addiction had raged out of control, destroying her life and robbing her of her freedom.
“They didn’t need a search warrant for the house that had been your husband’s, but the summer place on Cape Ann had always been in your name only. The wiring and the chemicals they found there should never have been allowed into evidence, and without them, all the state has is Barbara’s testimony of seeing you hand the package over to Kenneth just before his flight. That’s not enough to prove you knew what was in it.”
She’d shaken her head wearily, as if to forestall Julia’s hopes. “But it doesn’t change the deal Barbara got, or the fact that permanent custody of Willa was given to her when you got sent here. Oh, maybe after a lengthy court battle you might win your daughter back, but I doubt it. Even if your sister-in-law didn’t have the Tennant fortune backing her, she’d still have the sympathy of any judge. Her own husband was on that private jet—who’s going to take a child from the arms of a victimized widow and find in favor of the woman who got away with killing both her husband and her brother-in-law?” Lynn’s husky voice had softened. “You say Barbara always adored Willa. At least you know your little girl’s being raised by someone who loves her, Julia. A lot of the women in here don’t even have that to hold on to.”
She owed her freedom to Lynn, Julia thought, turning from the dresser mirror and staring unseeingly out of the grimy window. Maybe the sensible course of action would be to take the disbarred but still brilliant attorney’s advice and accept that Willa was lost to her forever.
But she didn’t accept that. Because if she ever did, there would be no reason to go on living.
The teal-blue suit she’d worn that last morning when she’d said goodbye to Willa hadn’t been found when she’d signed for her belongings upon leaving prison. Her heart had been in her mouth as she’d waited for the rest of her possessions. When the clerk had brusquely told her that her leather handbag had also gone missing, and would be forwarded on to her if and when it was found, she’d feared the worst.
“There was a pair of costume earrings,” she’d told the woman, forcing a meek note into her voice. “They weren’t worth much, but they had sentimental value. Are they still here?”
The clerk had exchanged a dry look with the guard behind her. “Sentimental value?” She’d snorted disbelievingly. “Were they a present from your late husband, honey? Here they are.”
Carelessly she’d rolled the huge pearls across the counter, her hostility barely veiled. But Julia was used to it. Most of the prison personnel had made it clear they disagreed with her release. She’d said nothing as the woman went on.
“Honestly, I’ve seen less tacky fakes in a gumball machine. I’ve heard you rich bitches never wear the real thing, but couldn’t you at least have bought decent copies?”
Through the grime of the hotel room’s window Julia could see a knot of pedestrians waiting for the light to change on the street below. For a moment she thought she recognized Max Ross standing a few feet away from the group, and she froze. Tall. Broad shoulders. Dark hair. Then the man glanced impatiently up at the red traffic light and she relaxed as she saw his face. It wasn’t him. She was safe for the time being.
Her jeans were slung across the back of a chair, and she went to them. Feeling inside the front pocket, she withdrew two tissue-wrapped objects. Carefully she nudged aside the nest of tissue and stared at the pair of earrings in her palm.
Willa had called them her princess earrings. Kenneth had bought them for her as a wedding present, and had insisted she wear them whenever they were out in public together. He’d told her once that he enjoyed displaying his impeccable taste—in jewelry as in women.
Appearances had been vitally important to him. She hadn’t known until too late that his gifts and attentions to her were as empty as their marriage had soon become, and it was even later that she’d realized his daughter meant just as little to Kenneth Tennant. She and Willa both had existed only as accoutrements to him—part of the background that he’d felt necessary for a man of his station in life.
He’d been the coldest human being she’d ever known—as emotionless in his personal life as he was in his business dealings. She’d always been privately convinced that the latter had led to his death. Some rival he’d destroyed, some executive he’d ruined—it had to have been someone like that who’d found a way to kill him and make it look as though she’d been responsible. But even though that unknown enemy had robbed her of two years of her life, she had no intention of trying to discover his identity. She was only interested in one thing, and it wasn’t revenge.
If Kenneth had still been alive, the wife he’d thought of as a possession would no longer have attracted him, Julia thought without self-pity. But the baubles she’d once been adorned with had kept their value. They were South Sea pearls, exquisitely matched and rimmed with diamonds. They were going to get her back her child.
“I’m going to find her, Ross,” she said softly to the empty room. “I want what your people took from me—my daughter, my life, my freedom—and I’m going to get it. And when I do, we’re going to disappear so completely that you’ll never see us again.”
“YOU WHAT?”
Julia stared at the overweight young man sitting in front of her. He hit a key and spoke over his shoulder at her.
“I said it only took me a couple of hours to do the job after you left on Tuesday. You should have given me a number where I could reach you.” He tucked a greasy strand of hair behind his ear. “So you’ve been in the joint, huh? What for—dealing?”
There was absent curiosity in his tone, but most of his attention was focused on the computer screen in front of him. He typed in another command without waiting for her reply. She wasn’t about to tell him the truth anyway, Julia thought wryly.
She’d gotten his name from one of the women in prison.
Since the morning she’d sold her pearls to yet another shady connection she’d learned of in prison she’d been on tenterhooks, wondering desperately if Melvin Dobbs would be able to find Barbara’s and Willa’s whereabouts with the medical data she’d given him.
It had been three days of knowing that Max would be on her trail, three days of looking over her shoulder and half expecting to see him there, even though she’d stayed in a different place every night.
“You said the kid and the woman both had a rare allergy to wasp stings, so I ran a cross-check on prescriptions for the antidote that had been ordered in adult and child strength from the same pharmacist.” Dobbs hit the Enter key and sat back as the glowing blue screen in front of him rapidly filled up with lines of type. “There were several matches, but only one where both the adult and the child were females. By the way, they’re still in the state.”
For a moment Julia wondered if she’d heard him correctly. “They’re still in this state?” she repeated stupidly.
At his casual nod her hand flew to her mouth, stifling a choked-off sob. She felt the hot prickle of tears in her eyes, but thankfully Dobbs’s attention wasn’t on her.
Dear God—they were still in Massachusetts! For two years she’d imagined Willa as being thousands of miles away from her, had ached with the certainty that between her and her daughter were rivers, mountains, countless cities as barriers—and all the time only a few hours at most had kept them apart.
She could see her today, Julia thought, her mind racing. She wouldn’t do anything rash or foolish—she wouldn’t do anything that might jeopardize her goal—but if she was careful she might be able to catch a glimpse of Willa in a park or a playground. Just one quick look. Surely that would be safe enough.
And then I’ll figure out a way to have you with me forever, sweetheart, she thought tremulously. I still don’t know how I’m going to do it, but we’ll be a family again, you and me.
She fixed her burning gaze on Dobbs’s computer screen as the lines of type scrolled downward and then stopped.
“That’s the one.” He grunted and reached over to a nearby printer. “I’ll run off a copy for you to—”
“She was in prison for killing the girl’s father and the woman’s husband, Dobbs. And unless you shut down that computer right now, you’re looking at hard time yourself.”
Shocked, Julia spun around at the sound of the harsh voice coming from the doorway. Her appalled gaze met the coldly assessing glance of the man standing there.
“Hullo, Tennant,” Max said with a tight smile. “Looking for something?”
“This is harassment, Ross.” She dragged in a constricted breath, and willed her voice to remain steady. “I warned you to leave me alone, and I meant it. You’re interrupting a private business transaction here, so get the hell—”
“I said shut down the computer, Dobbs. Do it,” Max ordered, not taking his eyes from Julia. “Right off the top of my head I can come up with at least two charges that can be laid against you unless you cooperate. Endangering the life of a child is the first one. Being an accessory to kidnapping is the second. Shut it down.”
But Melvin’s fingers were already flying over the keys, and even as Max delivered his ultimatum and Julia turned back to the computer, she saw the lines of type flicker and disappear from the screen. Her eyes opened wide in denial.
“Bring it back up, Dobbs,” she commanded unsteadily. “I paid you for that information. He’s got no authority to—”
“He’s a fed.” Flicking a switch at the side of his computer, the hacker jerked his head at the open ID wallet that Max was negligently displaying. “That’s authority enough for me.” Dismissively he turned away from Julia to the man behind her. “I didn’t know why she wanted it. Just get her out of here and let’s pretend this whole thing never happened, okay?”
“No! No, it’s not okay, dammit!” Her hands balled into fists at her sides, Julia looked wildly first at Dobbs, and then Max. “Damn both of you—that’s my daughter’s address you’re keeping from me. I have the right to know where she is!”
“No, Julia, you don’t.” Max had been standing a few feet away, but now he took two swift strides toward her. Behind the coolness of his gaze heat flared, and was immediately extinguished. “And if I even suspect that you’ve persuaded our venal friend here to change his mind and tell you where she is, I’ll have her relocated so fast you won’t get within a hundred miles of her. For a while after she was moved she was a sad and lonely little girl, but now she’s started to adjust. She’s in kindergarten now. Do you really want to be responsible for uprooting her all over again?”
“She was sad and lonely because her mother was taken away from her, for God’s sake!” Julia hissed at the implacable face only inches from hers. “You were responsible for that, Ross!”
“And I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.” His voice was ice. “She’s got a shot at a normal life. She wouldn’t have that, growing up with the woman who killed her father, her uncle and two innocent bystanders.”
“You keep forgetting something.” He was so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her parted lips, and she realized with a small shock that it had been years since there had been this little distance between her and a man. Julia thrust the thought aside and continued. “They had to let me go, Max. They couldn’t prove their case. I’m an innocent woman.”
“You got off on a technicality, Tennant!” As if she’d goaded him into action, he grasped her arms just above her elbows, and pulled her closer, obliterating the last few inches of space between them. His jaw was set and his grip on her felt like steel. “You got off, but that doesn’t mean you’re not guilty. The only innocent one in this whole damn mess is that little girl, and I intend to keep her safe—from you. Do we understand each other?”
She was vaguely aware of Melvin Dobbs, sitting frozenly a few feet away from them. But on a deeper, more visceral level, she suddenly felt as if nothing and no one had any solid reality except the man in front of her.
His grasp on her arms was tight enough that it should have been uncomfortable. Instead she felt ridiculously as if it was all that was keeping her from falling into a terrible void and plummeting to her own destruction. He was strong, she thought disjointedly, but his strength wasn’t merely a matter of muscle and sinew. It was a strength made up of conviction and a bedrock foundation of personal honor. He meant what he said. He cared enough about a child he hardly knew that he would go the limit to keep her safe.
Under different circumstances, she and Max Ross might have found themselves on the same side, she realized with a small shock. She would have liked that. He was a man a woman could count on.
And if she were honest with herself, in those alternate circumstances there might well have been more than just cooperation between them. Even now, facing each other as enemies, there was a suppressed undercurrent flowing beneath the surface of their anger and antagonism.
She distinctly remembered the first time she’d noticed him, although, as she’d learned during her trial, he’d been involved in the investigation from the first and had actually spoken with her an hour or so after the explosion on the night it had happened. She didn’t recall the encounter, but that was understandable. She’d been in shock those first few days, and then had come the nightmarish realization that the authorities saw her as their prime suspect. From then on her world had unravelled so swiftly she hadn’t taken in much of anything.
Besides, Max was the original invisible man. Obviously that was an asset in his line of work, and she supposed he’d cultivated that ability he had of unobtrusively melting into the background, but she still didn’t know how he did it. Granted, there was nothing about him that was jarringly noticeable, unless the casual observer happened to look directly into his eyes. They were a dark, clear green, and in the tan of his face they looked like chips of arctic ice. But his hair, dark brown and cut fairly short, was ordinary enough, and his features, although harder than the average, were regular.
Still, it seemed impossible that a big man with such a—she searched for the word—such a solid presence could go unnoticed in a crowd whenever he wanted to. Which meant that at her first remembered meeting with him, he’d wanted her to know he was there.
It had been on the first day of her trial, and she’d been walking into the courtroom when she’d become aware of him standing a few feet away. His gaze had been steady and assessing, his expression carefully blank, and she’d suddenly known that the privileged shield of wealth and beauty and social status that had protected her for so long had been ripped away from her. She hadn’t realized who he was at that point, but she knew that the man watching her didn’t see her as Julia Tennant, the attractive young widow of a wealthy and powerful man. Those green eyes had seemed to be looking straight through her, as if they were trying to read her very soul.
And even as he’d continued to stare at her, his attitude impersonally professional, she’d seen a hard edge of color rise up under the tan of his cheekbones. He’d turned away immediately, and during the rest of the trial he’d been careful not to meet her eyes again.
But as she’d told him in the coffee shop, she’d known he’d been watching her. And, if she were honest with herself, the undercurrent she was feeling right now had been there from the start, on her side as well as his.
Except that wouldn’t make any difference to him, she thought with renewed despair. Max Ross might have his alternate realities just as she did, and his might even be more urgent than hers, but even if they included sweat-soaked sheets, total satiation, and every dark desire he’d ever had, he would never let them interfere with real life.
He was the law. She was an ex-convict. They weren’t on the same side and never would be, as far as he was concerned.
She gave it one last try, knowing it was futile.
“She’s my daughter, Max.” Her voice was husky. Her gaze on his, she tried desperately to make him see it her way. “I love her—surely you believe that? Even if everything else you thought about me was true, you must know that I love her too much to ever put her in danger. I’m her mother. She needs me.”
Just for a second she thought she saw him waver, and her heart leapt. Then he shook his head and the irrational hope died.
“If you love her you’ll give her up, Julia.” His voice was as low as hers had been, and it had lost its edge. “What kind of a life could you give her, even if you did find her? Her aunt has legal custody of her now, and that would make you a fugitive. You and Willa would be on the run, never putting down roots, never being able to give her a secure home. Is that what you want for her?”
He stared at her for a long moment. Then he let go of her arms, and his own dropped to his sides. His eyes darkened with something that could have been compassion. “I think you’ll do the right thing, Julia. I think you’ll let her go.”
And looking at him, she knew with sudden despair that he was right.
Chapter Three
She was soaked to the skin, but that didn’t matter. Hunching her shoulders against the downpour, Julia dimly realized that she was shivering, but that too was unimportant. She kept walking. Despite having no real destination in mind, somehow it seemed to her that she was heading in the right direction.
Damn Max Ross. The unspoken epithet was automatic, with no heat behind it. Damn him for showing up, damn him for making sure she hadn’t gotten the information she’d wanted and damn him for what he’d said.
But most of all, damn him for knowing her better than she’d known herself.
“…on the run, never putting down roots, never being able to give her a secure home…is that what you want for her?”
She’d wanted to scream at him that he was wrong, that it wouldn’t be that way. She’d wanted to tell him that no matter what difficulties faced her, she could give her daughter a stable life, a happy childhood. She’d wanted to tell him all the lies she’d been telling herself. She’d looked into his eyes and she hadn’t been able to say any of it, because she knew she didn’t believe it.
She’d been holding on to a dream that had died the day she’d been convicted, and Max was right—no one would ever believe she hadn’t done what she’d been accused of. Although no reporters had tracked her down, in the last few days a newspaper or two had covered her surprising release. The gist of the stories was that she’d made a mockery of the legal system.
No, there had never been any chance of getting Willa back again—not really. Max had known that from the start. Now she did too.
There was no reason to go on anymore.
The thought slipped into her mind as if it had been lurking there and waiting for the right opportunity to reveal itself. She was dead already, Julia thought distantly. Her body might go on for years, but it was only a shell. Everything that had been good, everything that had been real, everything that had been life to her had been held in a tiny pair of hands that had once clutched hers, had shone out of a pair of eyes that had gazed at her with absolute trust, had been encompassed by a love so perfect she could give nothing less in return.
Max was right. If she persisted in trying to get Willa back, ultimately she would tear her daughter apart. Did he understand, even a little, what he was forcing her to face?
He had to. He’d lost a child himself. And although the few details she’d garnered about that loss had been scant, the impact it had had on him was visible. Oh, he’d managed to continue functioning. He’d kept his job, and even performed it with a kind of automatic zealousness—her own case was proof of that. But there was an almost two-dimensional quality to him, as if when his workday was over, and he was finally alone with only himself for company, he simply…shut down. Maybe his ability to fade into the background wasn’t simply a tool of his trade, she thought with sudden insight. Was it possible for a man to turn into a ghost one day at a time?
Dead man walking. How much sheer strength of will did he have, that he could force himself to get up every morning and face an empty world, day after day?
More than she had. More than she cared to have, she thought numbly.
She stepped off the curb onto the street with barely a glance at the traffic lights. Her face was wet with rain, her hair plastered to her skull as if she’d just surfaced from a dive and suddenly she didn’t feel as if she could take another step. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, wanting to blot out the present, wanting to bring back the past…and just for a moment, it worked.
She was holding Willa again, and feeling those tiny fingers delicately touching her ears.
“Why are you crying, Mommy?”
“Because pearls are for tears,” Julia said out loud, forcing a shaky smile to her lips and stopping stock-still in the middle of the road as the rain came down and the scars on her heart finally gave way and tore asunder. Her vision of Willa faded slowly away, and her voice sank to a raw whisper. “Everyone knows that, kitten-paws. Even I know that now.”
Her head bowed, her shoulders shaking with soundless sobs, she didn’t hear the hoarse voice calling out her name until it was too late. Blindly she looked up and saw the bus bearing down on her.
HE’D ALMOST BEEN too late. Max rubbed his jaw wearily and looked down at the still figure tucked under two comforters and a wool blanket in his bed. Her hair was still damp, and just below the hairline and above her closed eyes was a raw-looking graze. He’d given her that when he’d managed a fair imitation of the high-school football player he’d once been and had knocked her out of harm’s way with a flying tackle in the intersection. He realized he was gingerly rotating his shoulder, and he winced just as the doctor he’d called in looked up.
“There’s nothing physically wrong with her except for exhaustion and a bad chill. Now that she’s fallen asleep, I’d prefer not to wake her.” The older man lifted an eyebrow. “Even if I could get her admitted, hospital beds are in short supply. She’d be released tomorrow.”
“She refused to let me take her to one, anyway.” Max met his quizzical gaze and shook his head firmly. “And no, Doctor—there’s nothing here you have to worry about. I’ll let her get a decent night’s rest and then send her on her way in the morning. My interest in her is professional, not personal.”
One-handedly he fumbled his ID wallet out of his jacket pocket—his torn jacket pocket, he realized with little surprise—and displayed it briefly. The doctor grunted.
“I didn’t peg you as the type. But doesn’t she have anywhere else to stay?”
“She’s a transient.” Max’s reply was more curt than he’d meant it to be. “And I’m not sure she didn’t deliberately step out in front of that bus, Doctor. I’d given her some bad news earlier, and…” He paused uncomfortably. “Hell, who knows. Maybe I should have handled it differently.”
“I see. Well, if you’re still worried about her emotional state tomorrow, give me a call and I’ll arrange to have her put under observation for a few days, although I’m sure she won’t thank me for that.” There was shrewd assessment in the physician’s faded gaze as he got to his feet and walked to the door with Max. “She’s recently been a guest of the state, am I right?”
At Max’s quick glance he gave a wintry smile. “Please, Mr. Ross—she’s got a prison pallor, a wound from some kind of homemade weapon on her hand, and she’s obviously been living on sheer nerve for far too long. And you’re FBI, which raises a whole passel of awkward questions I don’t think I’ll ask.”
“Like I said, the relationship between us isn’t personal,” Max said evenly. “I was the one who put her behind bars. If I had my way, she’d still be there.”
They’d reached the front door, and the older man took the lightweight topcoat that Max was holding out to him and shrugged into it. He pursed his lips thoughtfully, patted his pockets for his keys and picked up his medical bag.
“Then it’s all the more interesting that you unhesitatingly risked your own life tonight to save hers, wouldn’t you say?” He tucked an umbrella under the arm that held his bag, and grasped Ross’s hand with the other. “Call me if you need to. But Mr. Ross, don’t forget that old Chinese saying—if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them forever.”
“My forebears were hardheaded Scots Presbyterians, Doctor.” Max didn’t smile as he opened the door and stepped aside. “That philosophy would have struck them as annoyingly fanciful.”
He waited until he saw the other man get into his car. Then he closed the door against the still-wet night and snapped off the porch light. A few steps along the short hall, he stopped to unlatch and slide open the pocket doors that led to the living room.
“Sorry, buddy. You can come in now.”
At his words, the big black dog that had been lying on the living room floor got heavily to his feet, his tail beating in acknowledgement. Stiffly the animal walked over to him and stopped, looking up inquiringly.
“Yeah, we’ve got a guest, Boomer.” Max dropped a hand to the dog’s head and idly scratched the folded ear, frowning. “I’m damned if I know what I was thinking, bringing her here, but we’ve got a guest. I’d better go check on her.”
The house was quiet as he passed through the kitchen, the only sounds the ticking of the clock on the wall and the irregular dripping of the faucet. He’d been meaning to fix that, he thought, pausing to tighten the loose tap. Maybe tomorrow he’d stop by the hardware store and get some washers after he sent Julia Tennant on her way.
Julia Tennant. Julia Tennant in his house—no, in his bed. What exactly had he been thinking, for God’s sake?
He’d told the good doctor his interest in her wasn’t personal. That might have been true at some point, but even two years ago he’d been in danger of crossing over the line between professional and personal. Now there was no doubt about it. His involvement with her in the last few days hadn’t been any part of his official duties.
In fact, if anyone found out just how involved he’d let himself become with Julia Tennant, Max told himself with calm certainty, he could end up losing his job.
He’d had a whack of vacation time due him. Other agents might plan a trip to Disneyland with the wife and kids, a wild and crazy jaunt to Vegas, a fishing trip with a few good buddies. He’d taken a week off three years ago, mainly because his director had insisted on it, and for the whole seven days he and Boomer had sat on the couch in front of the television, watching old movies and the afternoon soaps.
But when the word had gotten out that Julia Tennant’s conviction had been overturned and she was due to be released, he’d immediately asked for time off. He just hadn’t told anyone that he intended to spend his vacation making sure that she didn’t get within a hundred miles of her daughter and the woman who had once been her friend and sister-in-law.
So, yeah—this whole thing was emotional, Max admitted, staring out of his kitchen window into the night. But despite what Julia probably thought, the emotion driving him wasn’t hatred of her. She was a murderer, and he’d put plenty of them behind bars without giving them a second thought. On the Tennant case, however, he’d had to watch a little girl’s world be torn apart by the cold-blooded actions of her mother, and Willa Tennant’s innocence had broken through the wall of detachment he tried to keep between him and his work.
She hadn’t deserved to have her father killed, her life turned upside down, and everything familiar taken from her. He’d vowed her mother wasn’t going to do it to her a second time.
But this afternoon when he’d seen Julia standing in that intersection as if she had no desire to go on living, his blood had turned to ice. And a few seconds later, when he’d been cradling her suddenly fragile-seeming body beneath him on the pavement, he hadn’t been thinking of Julia Tennant as the enemy at all. Oblivious to the shaky anger of the bus driver who’d stopped a few feet past them and the surge of bystanders who’d gathered around, his attention had been fixed on her hair, dark with rain under his hand, on the vulnerable line of her throat, on the delicate fanning of her lashes against her cheeks. Then her eyes had opened.
They really were sapphire. For a moment they’d simply gazed at him as if waking up and finding him close to her wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. For that same crazy moment, he’d felt exactly the same way.
He was losing his goddamn mind, Max thought flatly, turning away from the sink and just barely concealing his disconcertion as he met those sapphire eyes once again. This time they were staring expressionlessly at him from a few feet away.
“If you’ll tell me how much I owe you for the doctor, I’ll be on my way.”
Her posture was ramrod straight and the shoulder-length blond hair was pulled tightly back from her face in a low ponytail. The graze on her temple had been cleaned by the doctor, but pinpricks of blood had welled up on it again.
She looked about as vulnerable as an electric fence. She was looking at him the way she always had—as if breathing the same damned air as he did was an ordeal. Max felt a muscle in his jaw twitch.
“Don’t worry about it.” His tone was deliberately dismissive, and with a flicker of satisfaction he saw her stiffen. “It was my decision to call him in. He gave you a fairly clean bill of health, by the way.”
“So barring any more encounters with the Boston transit system, I should live to a ripe old age. That’s good to hear.”
If he hadn’t been watching her closely he would have missed the total despair that flashed over her features. She bent her head, holding out her hand to Boomer as the dog sniffed her leg with canine formality. After a moment the heavy black tail gave a slow wag of acceptance.
“You stepped out in front of that bus deliberately, didn’t you?” He hadn’t intended to ask her the question, but as soon as the words were out he knew he needed to hear her answer. Julia’s head remained bowed.
“I don’t know, Max,” she said finally. “I honestly don’t know. Anyway, what happens with me isn’t your problem now, so don’t worry about it.” She gave Boomer one last pat and straightened, meeting his gaze directly. “I want to thank you for opening my eyes. You were right—Willa’s better off without me. I won’t be looking for her anymore.”
The smile that lifted her lips was brittle, as if she was one small muscle movement away from cracking. The least impulsive of men, with difficulty Max curbed the impulse to reach out to her. There was nothing he could say, he told himself harshly. He’d accomplished what he’d set out to do.
All that was left was to let her walk away. In silence he preceded her down the short hallway. He unlatched the front door and opened it, seeing with obscure relief that at least the rain had stopped.
The woman before him was a stone-cold killer, he reminded himself sharply. Forty days and forty nights of rain wouldn’t wash away the enormity of her crime.
“There’s a bus stop at the corner.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “There should be one coming by in a few minutes.”
“I’ll wait for it on the curb this time.” There was a touch of wryness in her tone. “Goodbye, Max.”
He saw the slight movement as she began to extend her hand to him. Before she could complete the action, he bent down to grasp Boomer’s collar. Her expression went very still.
“I’ll hold him while you leave,” he said shortly. “Sometimes the old boy forgets he’s not a pup anymore, and tries to make a dash for freedom.”
“Tell him it’s not worth it.” Julia’s words were clipped. She put her hand on the aluminum handle of the outer door and then paused, looking down at the two of them. “The answer to your question is yes, Max. Some part of me couldn’t bear the thought of going on without her. But even while I was lying there on the pavement a second later, I thanked God that I’d been prevented from doing it—because one day, maybe years from now or decades from now, my daughter might want to meet the mother she can’t remember. And even if that meeting only lasts long enough for her to satisfy her curiosity, it’ll be something to hold on to for the rest of my life.”
She turned back to the door, averting her face from him, but not before he saw the terrible bleakness that shadowed her features, the raw glaze of desolation in her eyes. Before he could speak she went on, her voice a whisper and her words no longer directed at him.
“In kindergarten already. Oh, precious—I wish I’d been there to hear about your first day.”
For a heartbeat she rested her forehead against the glass of the door, her eyes tightly closed and her teeth catching at her bottom lip. Then she raised her head and took a deep breath.
The next moment she’d pushed open the door and was gone, so quietly and quickly that by the time Max released his hold on Boomer’s collar he could just make out her slim figure swiftly walking down the sidewalk, her shoulders hunched against the night air, her hands jammed into the front pockets of her jeans.
It seemed that Julia Tennant was always slipping away from him, he thought with illogical frustration. She’d walked out on him at the coffee shop, she’d walked out on him this afternoon at Dobbs’s place and now she was gone for good—from his life, and her daughter’s.
And something about that just didn’t make sense.
Still standing at the door, he felt a chill spread through him. Julia had reached the corner, and the harsh street lighting gave her face and her hair an even paler hue. A block or two past her he could see the bus approaching.
She loved her child. The anguish he’d just heard in her voice had been wrenchingly real. She loved her daughter more than life itself, and that love was so total she was willing to give Willa up rather than bring any harm to her.
When he sat in on a trial, Max had a habit of focusing on one jury member out of the twelve, using his or her reactions as a gauge for the others. At Julia’s trial, he’d chosen a middle-aged woman as his barometer, and he’d been able to pinpoint the exact moment when Julia’s fate had been sealed. The prosecutor had brought out the fact that Willa had been supposed to be on the flight with her father the night he was killed. The little girl had actually boarded the private jet with him and the others, and only the fact that she had promptly gotten sick as soon as she’d been buckled into her seat had saved her life. Kenneth had apparently insisted on having her taken off the plane, rather than cope with her nausea.
Max had seen the middle-aged juror, probably a mother herself, turn appalled eyes on Julia as the implication had set in—that the woman they called The Porcelain Doll had been willing to kill not only her husband, but her child as well. The rest of the trial had been merely a formality.
The worn parquet flooring beneath his feet seemed suddenly insubstantial, as if it was about to buckle and splinter. Max clutched at the door frame as everything he’d thought was real was swept away.
“She didn’t do it,” he breathed, his frozen gaze fixed on the lonely figure standing under the streetlight. He saw the bus slow as it approached her, saw her waiting for it to stop so she could get on. “If she’d known there was a bomb in that package she would have gotten on that plane herself before she’d ever put Willa in danger. She didn’t do it, dammit!”
He pushed open the door, sprinting toward her and calling out her name in a hoarse shout as he saw her step up onto the platform of the waiting bus. He had to stop her, he thought desperately.
Because if Julia Tennant was an innocent woman, then someone else had gotten away with murder.
Chapter Four
“When did you last eat?” Before Julia could reply, Max pulled two flat packages from the freezer compartment of his refrigerator. “It looks like you’ve got a choice of He-Man Beef or He-Man Chicken. Both have some kind of apple crisp dessert and mashed potatoes.”
“I’m not hungry.” Julia saw that her hands were trembling slightly on the tabletop. She slipped them onto her lap out of sight. “How are you going to persuade the Agency to reopen the case? Would they do that on your say-so alone?”
“No.” Carefully he folded back a square of foil from the corner of each aluminum rectangle before sliding the dinners into the oven. He set a timer on the counter and took his place at the table across from her. “The Agency doesn’t operate on gut feelings and instinct. As far as they’re concerned, they got the right person, whether you were released from prison or not. Your file’s officially closed.”
“So you’d be looking into this on your own time?” She shook her head. “You don’t strike me as the type to operate on gut feelings either. What’s in this for you?”
The woman she’d once been would have approached the question more obliquely, would have softened its bluntness with a social padding of courtesy. As she’d told him in the coffee shop, Julia reflected, she seemed to have lost that knack. She flushed slightly as his gaze met hers.
“Does there have to be something in it for me?”
The black Labrador on the braided rug in front of the sink heaved himself to his feet with difficulty and padded over to his master’s side. Max let his hand drop absently to the dog’s head before he continued.
“I guess I can’t blame you for thinking that way.” He shrugged. “Let’s say I’m looking to clear my conscience, Julia. I screwed up and you paid for my mistake with two years of your life. I want to put things right again—not only for you, but for Willa.”
His tone was steady, but she thought she could hear a trace of self-recrimination in his words. She searched his face.
“You think she’s in danger, don’t you?” Under the table her fingers laced together tightly. “Dear God—you don’t think Barbara planted that bomb?”
He frowned. “It’s a possibility. But it doesn’t really make sense when you look at the lifestyle your sister-in-law’s adopted since the tragedy.”
“Her lifestyle?” Julia’s brows drew together in confusion. “Maybe she doesn’t take off to Europe at the drop of a hat or go to parties every night of the week, but she’s never thought anything of snapping up a Picasso lithograph without even asking the cost, because it happens to catch her eye. She keeps a floral designer on staff, for heaven’s sake, and the flower arrangements in her house are changed twice a week.”
“That’s my point. These days she’s more likely to cram a handful of cornflowers and daisies into a jelly jar, and instead of Picassos, she’s got Willa’s drawings stuck up on the refrigerator. She’s handed control of Tenn-Chem over to her mother, and, as far as I know, she refuses to have anything to do with any of the other Tennant businesses.”
He shook his head. “Like I said, it doesn’t fit. And she’d never let any harm come to Willa, Julia. She’s been a good mother to her.”
He hadn’t meant his words as an accusation, she knew. But at them she felt as if a ball of ice had settled in her stomach. “My daughter has a mother, Max,” she said sharply. “Or she did, before you put me behind bars.”
“I just meant—” he began, but she cut him off, her voice rising.
“I’m the one who should be picking wildflowers with my little girl. I’m the one who should be admiring her artwork, taking her to kindergarten, tucking her in at night. I don’t want to hear how well another woman is fulfilling my role, Max—I want my daughter back.” She held his gaze stonily. “How are you going to do that for me, when you don’t even have the backing of the Agency?”
She pushed her chair back from the table. “So you finally believe I didn’t do it. Big deal. Am I supposed to be grateful that you don’t think I’m a black widow spider anymore?”
She kept her tone deliberately flat. It wasn’t hard, she thought tightly. Prison had taught her how to hide her real thoughts behind a mask of indifference, but even without that training she doubted whether there would have been any inflection in her voice. She didn’t care what Max Ross thought of her, she told herself. In fact, she didn’t even know why she’d come back here to his house when he’d caught up to her at the bus stop.
“No, Julia, you’re not supposed to be grateful.” A muscle moved in his jaw. “But maybe you could set aside that chip on your shoulder long enough to see that I want to help you.”
“The only way you can help me is to make the last two years go away. That’s not about to happen.” She smiled thinly at him. “Nothing’s changed from this afternoon just because the agent who ripped my life apart now wishes he could paste it back together again. It’s too bad you didn’t have this change of heart before you built your airtight case against me, but you didn’t. Now it’s too late.”
She started to get up from the table, but a heavy warmth at her knee stopped her. Looking down, she saw Boomer had planted himself solidly beside her, and was looking up at his master expectantly.
“Sorry.” Max took in the situation at a glance. “It’s time for his heart medicine and his biscuit, and he’s capable of sitting there all night until he gets them. I’ll shut him in the living room in a minute.”
Frustration tightened her lips, but as Max turned to the cupboard and took down a bottle of pills and a bag of dog treats she let her hand drop to the old Lab’s glossy head. His ears felt like worn velvet under her fingers, and unexpectedly she felt the edginess inside her ease a little. She shrugged, speaking before she thought.
“He’s not really bothering me. I used to have a golden retriever when I was a little girl.”
Immediately she regretted revealing even that much of herself to the big man in front of her. This isn’t show-and-tell, Tennant, she told herself harshly. Ross isn’t interested in your childhood, and even if he were, you’re not interested in sharing it with him. Why don’t you just step over his damn dog and get out of here?
But somehow she couldn’t. The Labrador’s tail beat once, slowly, against the floor, and when she began to take her hand away from his head he laid his muzzle on her knee and looked soulfully up at her. She gave in and resumed stroking the silky ears.
“Lady.” Max looked over his shoulder at her as he tipped a capsule into his palm. “Isn’t that what her name was? You got her for Christmas when you were six?”
Her hand stilled. She narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s right. How did you know?”
His face was expressionless, but as he bent to Boomer and deftly slipped the capsule down the dog’s throat she thought she saw a flash of apology behind the green gaze. He palmed the biscuit in front of the salt-and-pepper muzzle and Boomer took it with more enthusiasm than he had the pill.
“I read the psychological profile on you.” Straightening to his full height, he turned to the sink and washed his hands before drying them on a nearby dishtowel. He faced her, and if there had been any apology in his gaze before, it was no longer visible. “It was comprehensive.”
Boomer had settled down on the floor with difficulty to crunch his biscuit. This time when Julia stood she was able to step over him without disturbing him, and she did, her legs feeling suddenly shaky.
She should have been used to it by now, she thought, tamping down the spark of dull outrage that threatened to flare inside her. She should have been used to having her whole life and personality laid out for any stranger to comb over, looking for some clue as to why Julia Tennant, née Weston, with her cosseted, albeit somewhat unconventional upbringing, should have strayed so far from the norm of human behavior as she had. She’d read op-ed pieces in the papers that had laid the blame for her actions on everything from her mother’s peripatetic lifestyle to what one writer had called the “Grace Kelly syndrome”—society’s adulation of the kind of cool blond beauty she’d once been told she possessed.
She’d reminded herself that the authors of those articles hadn’t known her. But this was different.
She was in the man’s home, for God’s sake. She was only inches away from him. She felt suddenly as if she was standing there without any clothes on, powerless to prevent him from looking his fill of her.
Prison had taught her to keep her mouth shut. But she wasn’t in prison anymore. The spark inside her ignited into a cold flame.
“It must have made for some interesting bedtime reading.” She allowed a note of husky amusement to creep into her voice and widened her eyes at him. “Is it still tucked away in a drawer somewhere to pull out on those restless nights when you can’t fall asleep? Did it feed a fantasy or two?”
His mouth tightened. He shook his head. “I told you, Julia—you weren’t my fantasy. Learning everything I could about you was part of the job.”
Leaning back against the counter, he crossed his forearms over his chest and met her eyes. “Maybe we should get this straight right now. Even if we hadn’t met under these circumstances, you’re not my type. I don’t go for high-maintenance blondes who were born clutching a charge card. Sure, when I first saw you I realized you were probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but you’re a little too rich for my blood, honey. I live in the real world.”
“I didn’t think you were considering taking me home to meet Mom and Pop, Ross.” Julia returned his gaze steadily. “That’s why I used the term fantasy. And no matter how hard you try to deny it, I know you indulged once in a while.” Her smile was cynical. “What exactly are you hoping this will lead to?”
She saw the flash of anger, quickly veiled, in his eyes and knew her arrow had found its mark. But the next moment he proved that his aim was at least as good as hers.
“The same thing you want it to lead to, Julia.” Casually he pushed himself from the counter he’d been leaning against and took a step toward her. In the less-than-spacious room that one step brought him close enough to touch her, but he merely unfolded his arms and let them hang by his sides, his manner relaxed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe all this hostility between us is a front for something else. Why don’t we test your theory?”
The suit jacket he’d been wearing earlier had been thrown over the back of a nearby chair, and he’d rolled back the cuffs of the plain white shirt he was wearing. Against the skin of his wrist glinted the steel of a utilitarian watch. Everything about him was unobtrusive, as she’d noted before, Julia thought. Everything about him was almost boringly ordinary. She should have been able to let her gaze sweep over and by him without feeling the slightest twinge of interest, and for one moment, she almost made it.
Then her eyes met his, and suddenly it seemed as if the air around them had thickened, making it hard for her to breathe.
Ordinary? she thought faintly. How had she gotten that impression? Maybe feature by feature there was nothing about him that grabbed attention. The dark brown hair was a little too long to conform to current style, a little too short to be sexily shaggy. The even features were bluntly masculine, but not memorable. He was tall, but not more than an inch or two over six feet, and although his shoulders were broad enough to strain the seams of the white shirt, they didn’t have the obsessive muscularity of a bodybuilder.
And none of that was important, because emanating from him like an almost physical force was an aura of pure maleness.
An insane vision of tangled sheets, sweat-sheened skin, intertwined limbs fogged her mind for a second, and for that second it was so real that she could almost feel his hands spread wide on her hips, feel him thrusting into her. It wasn’t her fault, she thought disjointedly. Any woman would sense what she was sensing. Line Max Ross up with three other men, men with movie-star good looks, men who knew and used all the tricks to make a female heart turn over, and without even exerting himself he would be the one that a woman would pick out, maybe without even knowing why she’d done so.
She felt a spreading heat radiate through her, and let herself sway infinitesimally toward him.
Trillions and jillions, Mommy. And forever and ever…
Julia jerked back, sanity flooding through her. The man in front of her had taken her child away from her. The man in front of her had destroyed her whole life. How could she have seen him, even for a moment, as anything but her enemy?
The heat she’d thought she’d felt was anger, she told herself unsteadily. Rage. She just hadn’t recognized it, because for too long now that emotion had been forbidden her.
“Forget it, Ross.” Her tone was ice. “Maybe if I thought you really could help me get my daughter back I might go for your deal, but you can’t and we both know it. So I guess it’s just you and your fantasies again tonight.”
She took a step away from him, expecting him to react in some way and not knowing what she would do if he did. She didn’t want to get into it with him, she thought in sudden weariness. She didn’t have the energy to indulge in any more skirmishes with the man, especially since there was absolutely nothing to be gained from them. What she really wanted to do was to find some anonymous place to lay her head for the night, blot out the last few hours from her mind and wait for sleep to claim her. Maybe she would dream of Willa, she thought without much hope. Tomorrow she would have to start planning how she was going to spend the rest of her life, but maybe just for tonight she could linger in the past a while longer.
“It wasn’t a quid pro quo.” Behind her he spoke, his voice harsh in the silence. “But okay, there’s been a fantasy or two, Julia. I don’t know why, but I can’t deny it. If that makes me a bastard, then go ahead and pin the label on me. Just don’t insinuate that I’d put conditions on helping you. No matter what you think of me, I’m going to do my damnedest to bring your daughter home to you.”
She paused at the doorway of the kitchen. “The woman I used to be might have believed you, Max,” she said tonelessly. “I used to be able to fool myself about nearly everything. But you told me yourself how it would be for Willa if I managed to find her. I won’t do that to her.”
A few minutes ago she’d told herself she didn’t know why she’d come back here with him, she thought. But like so much in her life, that had been a lie too. She’d come here hoping he would save her, hoping she could dump all her problems in his lap and let him solve them for her.
Like Sylvia used to. The comparison brought the usual conflicting mixture of love and regret that thinking of her mother unfailingly stirred in her. You always told yourself you’d never grow up to be like her, but in the end you turned out exactly the same. Admit it—some part of you really did think he could wipe out the past for you.
But life, no matter what the impulsive and beautiful Sylvia Weston had believed right up until the end, wasn’t a fairy tale. There were no knights in shining armor, there were no magic solutions, there weren’t any guaranteed happy endings. And sometimes the only choice left was the hardest one of all.
Whether or not Max managed to pull off the impossible and clear her name wasn’t the point. Willa didn’t need her. Barbara was a born mother—the kind of mother that Willa should have had from the start.
Babs always wanted children. You forfeited your right to Willa before she was even born, and you know it.
The truth was so ugly. No wonder it had taken her this long to gather up the courage to face it. Now all she had to do was to speak it out loud, so that never again would she be tempted into thinking it had been any other way than how it had really been.
She turned. He’d come up behind her and was standing only a foot or so away, as if he knew she had one last thing to say. Her eyes met his.
“I married him for the money, you know,” she said unevenly. “He married me for my looks. I knew I was a trophy wife, and I didn’t see anything wrong with the bargain we’d struck. It wasn’t until the maternity nurse put Willa into my arms for the very first time that I realized what I’d done.”
Her gaze went past him to the kitchen window. Frilled Priscilla curtains were held back on each side of it, and beyond the fussy eyelet lace the night outside seemed empty and black. She closed her eyes for a second, and opened them again to find him still watching her.
“It was a bad marriage.” Her teeth caught at her bottom lip, and she shook her head. “No—it was a hellish marriage. There’d never been any love there, on Kenneth’s part or mine, and a month or so after the wedding I realized that I didn’t even like him. He was the coldest, most ruthless person I’d ever known.”
She smiled bleakly at the silent man in front of her. “But like you said, I’d been born with a charge card in my hand. I’d been raised to believe that marrying for love was unthinkably naive, and as long as I made myself available to him when he needed me—whether it was to accompany him to some social function, to host a dinner party or to provide him with an heir to take over the Tennant empire one day—Kenneth paid for anything I wanted without question.”
“You were his wife, for God’s sake.” Max broke his silence as if he couldn’t help himself. His jaw tightened. “Maybe you married for all the wrong reasons, but you wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”
“It wasn’t a mistake. I put a price on myself, and Kenneth met that price.” Her voice didn’t waver. “But when Willa was born, I took one look at her and fell completely and totally in love—and I knew I’d already done the most terrible thing to her I could do. I’d had no business making a child with a man I didn’t love, Max. I’d had no right to bring a life into the world to fulfill my end of a bargain. And to Kenneth, all that was important was that she was the wrong sex. He wanted a boy to carry on in his footsteps, not a daughter.”
“That was his problem, not yours.” Max’s voice was edged. He took a step closer to her. “Why didn’t you leave?”
“Because I wouldn’t have been allowed to take Willa with me,” she said, looking away. “Kenneth saw both of us as possessions, and even if he couldn’t stop me from walking out of the marriage he would have made sure I never saw her again. I’d wanted a rich man. I got one. He had enough money to buy anything, even sole custody of his daughter. I think if I’d given him the son he’d wanted he might have made some kind of deal, but after Willa was born I vowed to myself I wouldn’t bring another child into that marriage.”
Her smile was crooked. “You know what’s funny, Max? Once or twice I really did daydream about how life would be if he wasn’t there anymore. I never actually considered murder, but when I saw his plane explode I couldn’t find it in my heart to mourn for him. I felt more grief over the deaths of Buddy Simpson and Ian Carstairs than I did over my own husband’s.”
“The Tenn-Chem pilot and Kenneth’s personal secretary.” He nodded. “Yeah, they left families too. And then there was Van Hale.”
“I hadn’t really known Robert long. He and Babs had only been married for a short time when he died, but losing him like that devastated her. Until I was arrested and charged with planting the bomb, I stayed with her as much as I could. I was afraid of what she might do to herself.”
“She was your best friend, wasn’t she?” He took in a tense breath. “And now she’s the woman keeping your daughter from you. That’s my fault too, Julia. But whatever it takes, I’m—”
“It’s not your fault. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
It was ironic, she thought. For over two years now the man in front of her had been convinced she was guilty of the one crime she hadn’t committed. Now he seemed just as determined to find her innocent on all counts—and some part of her was more than willing to let him keep his good opinion of her.
But that was why she’d needed to confess to him in the first place, she told herself coldly. Because she had to make him see that she didn’t deserve absolution.
He could get Willa back for you. He said it himself—if your name was completely cleared, no court would keep her from you. That’s what you’ve wanted, isn’t it?
The small voice inside her head didn’t belong to her anymore. It was the voice of the woman she’d once been, Julia thought dully—Sylvia’s daughter, who, if she’d learned nothing else from her beautiful mother, had been taught that her golden looks and an ability to tell the number of carats in a diamond at a glance entitled her to glide through life without taking any responsibility. And there was still enough of Sylvia left in her that she’d shirked from telling him the whole truth, even yet.
She raised her gaze to his, schooling her features into a frozen impassivity.
“I thought you would have come across it during your investigation, but I guess Kenneth’s lawyers must have figured it made him look almost as bad as it did me.” Despite herself, her voice shook. “But it exists, Max. I wish to heaven it didn’t but it does, and my signature’s on it.”
“What exists, dammit?” Obliterating the last few inches between them, he took her by the shoulders, his grip firm. He shook his head in confusion. “Did Tennant get you to sign some kind of prenuptial agreement or something? Whatever it was, it won’t have any bearing on whether you’re given custody of Willa. You’re her mother, for God’s sake—no one can take that away from you.”
“That’s just it—it wasn’t taken away from me!”
Wrenching out of his grasp, Julia felt the tremors start to spread. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, as if to hold them in, but it was no use. She stared back at him, her vision glazing in pain.
“It wasn’t taken away from me, Max—I gave it up.” Her voice cracked hoarsely. “I gave Willa up.”
She saw the incomprehension in his eyes and suddenly the guilt and shame that had been dammed up in her for so long spilled over in a corrosive wave.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” she said, her tone rising thinly. “I signed all rights to my daughter away two days before I got married, Max! She’s the most precious thing in my life—and nothing can wipe out the fact that I traded her away before she was even born.”
Chapter Five
He’d been wrong, Max thought grimly.
When he’d met with her in the coffee shop, he’d told himself that Julia had been through hell. He’d assumed that the internal demons that drove her had appeared the day she’d been put behind bars, never to see her child again.
But some part of Julia’s soul had been in torment even when she’d been living as Kenneth’s wife.
And her tough facade had been just that—a facade. She’d reached her breaking point. Even as the thought went through his mind, he saw what little color there had been in her cheeks drain away. With one swift movement he caught her just as her limbs began to crumple.
“I know you don’t like being touched, Julia,” he said shortly as her eyes widened in instant consternation and her body stiffened. “But I don’t like letting women fall face-first onto my kitchen floor.”
“For God’s sake, put me down.” Her lips were still bloodlessly white, but her eyes lasered blue fire at him as he carried her into the living room. “I’m perfectly all right, Max. Put me down.” Her tone was tight with tension.
“You’re not perfectly all right.”
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