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“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.”
