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“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.
