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Meg let out a deep breath and shook her head. “Turn left at the next light.”
“Who are you hiding from?”
Not a cop? This man was wasted on some hick town. “Turn left again and find a place about midblock to park.”
Lucas pulled the car to the curb and killed the engine, but when Meg reached for the door handle, he stopped her with a firm hand on her arm and an equally firm shake of his head.
“I know this is a shock to you,” he said. “I know there are going to be all sorts of changes in your life—changes that no one at this time can even imagine. But I also have to know if I’m taking trouble back to Avalon. If I’m taking more trouble back to Edward and Jennie. They don’t need it.
“You were scared spitless when they brought you into the interrogation room, you refused to go to Edward’s house until you learned about the publicity that’s sure to find you if you don’t, and you faked a faint so you wouldn’t have to give any details of your life beyond the past six months. That spells hiding to me. lady, and it’s time I had some answers.”
Meg sank back against the seat. Maybe Lambert wasn’t her friend, but at least he wasn’t her enemy. It wasn’t as though she could keep this secret forever, anyway.
“Wrong. I faked the faint to keep from talking and to get out of there. And I promise you all the answers you need, but first I have to go in that house.”
Lucas held her arm for perhaps a second longer. Then, with a nod, he released her. Meg scrambled from the car, had her key in her hand by the time she reached her door and went directly to the bedroom. The little stash of cash and credit cards on the top shelf of her closet was gone. She didn’t have to check for the rest; she knew it would have been taken, too.
Meg sagged against the door frame, allowing herself a moment’s weakness, and then went to find Lambert.
He had followed her into the house but had stopped at the open door to the bathroom. The medicine cabinet door stood at an angle, and the message she had scrawled on it was obvious even though she had only had cold cream to use.
“‘B’?” he asked.
“As in Plan B,” Meg told him. “Everyone talks about one. We actually had one. And an A and even a C. Today had all the earmarks of a B day.”
“Answers, Meg.”
She nodded, swallowed once and squared her shoulders. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to trust anyone, Lambert. It doesn’t come easily.” She took a towel from the hamper and began wiping the cold cream from the mirror.
Lucas stilled her motions, took the towel from her and rested both hands on her shoulders. “Answers,” he said in his whispery voice.
For a moment Meg accepted the comfort of tins man’s hands on her shoulders. He was strong enough for her to lean against if she but would, and for that moment she wanted very much to do just that, to let someone else fend off the fears and frustrations that had become her life. But she suspected that too many people had already done that to Lucas Lambert; she wouldn’t add unnecessarily to the burdens he carried. And besides, she remembered with a small start of surprise, he was a cop.
She stepped back, drawing her strength around her. “Your friend Edward isn’t just regaining his long-lost sister today,” she said. “He’s getting a little more family than that.”
“Meg—”
“Can I tell you the rest of it later?” she asked. “Right now we have to stop my son before he gets on a plane to Florida.”
Danny looked like her. Too thin, too intense, too competent in his escape plans to be a novice at Plan B or any other plan, and too world-weary to be the twelve Meg had told him.
Now the boy was asleep, curled up in a seat by a window of the Carlton executive jet—the aftereffects of too much adrenaline in too short a time. Lucas knew the symptoms well.
What he didn’t know was why these two were running, or how they had become so accomplished at it.
Megan had taken one quick, startled breath when she’d seen the interior of Edward’s private jet. Lucas thought that before that point the fact of Edward’s wealth hadn’t really penetrated through her shock at finding herself with family. She had sunk silently into one of the oversize chairs grouped for conversation at the front of the cabin. Now she looked up, catching Lucas in his study of the sleeping boy. He watched as the silent battle she waged with herself played through her expressive eyes, watched as she imperceptibly squared her shoulders and prepared herself physically for battle.
“How many times am I going to have to tell this story, Sheriff?” Meg finally said.
Lucas shook his head. “I don’t know. There is no statute of limitations on murder. And the Bureau is going to want to drag every possible bit of memory it can from you. Edward won’t push you, but he’s going to want to know what happened to you. And it seems to me that there are some things I will have to know, in order to protect you from whatever it is that has you running.”
Meg nodded. “Fair enough. But why don’t you make a note of the things you think are going to be important to the—to the past—and have them typed into a statement, or something, that I can sign and not have to go through this again?”
“We can try that,” Lucas told her. We can damn well try, he vowed. This woman looked like she had been through hell and was on the verge of being thrust back into it.
But this time he would make sure that nothing—nothing—got past him to harm her. It was a promise he now knew he had made the moment he had looked into her eyes and seen again the vivid reminder of the debt that was the only hope of redemption for his misbegotten life.
He could help this woman.
She was as fragile as his wife, Alicia, had been in those last few months after he’d come back to her, as fragile as Jennie had been when she first came to Avalon, although he suspected Meg would never admit to fragility—to weakness of any kind.
He could give her the security and protection she needed to discover who she was and who she could become. Her son would have the chance to be a child again, and in a few months, when she left, when she no longer needed him, he could deal with that, too.
Could he?
Giving was hard. Much harder than he’d ever dreamed when he’d promised that if he lived, he would learn to give. Give, rather than take. Give, rather than accept as somehow due.
Give, because if he never got anything else in return, he had already received more than he could ever give back.
But he suspected that Megan Elizabeth Carlton presented more of a challenge to his sanity and his soul than he had faced since he’d made that promise. Could he give to her and her son Danny without asking anything in return from them? Would he be able to let them leave—let her leave—without relinquishing a vital part of the soul he was trying so hard to redeem?
And even if he couldn’t, did he any longer have a choice?
Two
Meg leaned back in the luxuriously upholstered chair and closed her eyes, wondering where to start m telling the convoluted but not terribly interesting story of her life.
For a moment her senses became finely attuned to her surroundings—the hushed drone of the powerful engine, the fine fabric of the upholstery, the deep pile of the carpet, the unmistakable aroma of “new” and “clean.”
Everything about the jet’s passenger compartment was designed to cushion and protect its occupants, much as the Carlton wealth would cushion and protect.
Meg felt a wave of anger as uncontrollable and as unwanted as the one she had felt when she first saw a picture of the man they told her was her brother—laughing, carefree, with his arm around his wife in the security of their own home.
Secure, happy, protected—while she and Danny ran from city to city, from furnished apartment to hotel room, from one minimum-wage job to the next. She pushed those thoughts away, recognizing her rare flash of jealousy as both unreasonable and unwarranted. She had done nothing to earn this wealth. And she and Danny had always had each other.
Still, with the Carlton wealth behind her, she might not have had to hide so desperately from Blake...wouldn’t have been able to—
Enough!
Recognizing that her random thoughts were merely postponing the inevitable, Meg opened her eyes to find Lucas Lambert studying her from the adjacent chair.
“Are you all right now?” he asked.
Meg saw concern in Lambert’s gray eyes, concern and secrets she couldn’t begin to guess. But his secrets weren’t under examination now; hers were.
“Are you going to take notes?”
Lambert gestured toward the table between them, and Meg noticed controls and some sort of built-in equipment.
“I can take notes, or we can tape what you tell me. It’s your decision.”
Meg sighed. “Please take notes. I don’t think I’m going to say anything earthshaking, but I—I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of not knowing who is going to be listening.”
Lambert nodded and took a small notebook and what appeared to be a gold pen from an inside jacket pocket.
“Where do I start?”
“Meg, this isn’t an inquisition, but would it be easier if I asked you some questions?”
“No. No, I wasn’t thinking. Of course I know what you need me to tell you.
“I grew up in Simonville. That’s a small town about forty-five miles east of Sacramento. I was adopted—I think I always knew that—at least from the time I started school onward.
“My adoptive parents were—are—James and Audrey Stemple. They called me Margaret Ann—maybe I was able to cling to the name Meg—I don’t know. He was a judge. She is the daughter of a doctor. Other members of the family told me that they had wanted a child for years. The story was that I was the daughter of a distant niece, although I knew that wasn’t true, but I don’t know how I knew. They may have told me.”
Meg paused, collecting her memories.
“They—Audrey especially—told me a lot of things when they were angry,” she added, unable to keep her remembered pain from tingeing her words.
“I don’t remember much of my early childhood, very little before the first grade. I had a lot of trouble in the first grade. And the second.” Meg caught her hand to her mouth. “And the third.”
“Discipline?” Lucas asked.
Meg heard a barely tudden thread of humor in his voice. Well he might ask, she thought, considering the chase she had taken him on today. And she wished now that her problems had been discipline; Lucas Lambert could have understood that, perhaps even have appreciated it. And for some inexplicable reason, his good opinion had become important to her.
“No,” she said, plunging onward. Good opinion, bad opinion or no opinion, she had to get this story told and behind her. “Academic. I almost failed first grade, and all through the elementary grades I had to fight to barely keep up with the class.”
“Now that I find difficult to believe.”
“So did James and Audrey. Audrey especially. She explained to me time after time how I was going to have to do better, that as their daughter I had an image to uphold and that they had gone to great lengths to give me the advantages of their home, their name... ”
“You know there are a number of valid reasons why an obviously bright child doesn’t learn in school.”
She sighed and rewarded him with a smile that was genuine and free of any artifice.
“Thank you for that. And yes, now I do know. And now—today, in fact—I can at last begin to accept that I gave them no reason to be disappointed in me.” She had to ask. She had to hear again the words that freed her from a cruel and untrue childhood label—dumb, stupid, slow; Audrey had screamed all of those at her—but she was afraid that somehow she had heard Lucas wrong, had misunderstood, had wanted so badly to believe that she’d manufactured an excuse. “Tell me again the date of my birthday.”
“January 20?” Lucas said, but she heard the unspoken question in his voice.
“And Meg Carlton will be twenty-nine?”
“Yes.”
Meg felt moisture glittering in her eyes. She hadn’t misheard; she hadn’t misunderstood. “Write this down, Sheriff. Margaret Ann Stemple’s birth certificate swears that five months ago she passed her thirtieth birthday.”
Lambert was silent, so silent that Meg looked up at him. He was watching her, quietly, intently, while running his gold pen through his fingers. “It would seem to me,” he said finally, “that James and Audrey have a great deal to answer for—the ‘great lengths’ they went to to obtain someone else’s child, and why they so obviously failed to cherish that child once they had her.”
Cherish. Yes. That was precisely the right word for how Meg loved her own son. But how strange to hear that kind of comment come with such ease from someone who looked as though he had never been cherished, either. How strange it was that this stern and unsmiling man, this man who had known her only superficially and only for a few hours, should know instinctively what had been missing from her life.
“How are they with Danny?”
Caught in her thoughts, Meg almost didn’t hear the question, and then she wished she hada’t. “They aren’t,” she said abruptly, because now Lambert had come to the hard questions. “They’ve never seen Danny.”
She had met Blake Wilson when she was a senior in high school. She’d been tall even then, all arms and legs and knees and elbows and so hungry for affection that she had believed everything Blake told her, everything he promised.
“They didn’t approve of Blake, Danny’s father,” she told Lambert. “When we—decided to marry, they told me not to bother to come back to them when the marriage failed. When the marriage did fail, I—I believed what they had told me.”
“And the boy’s father?”
“Is the reason we’re running.”
Lambert had gone still, holding his pen between his fingers, not moving.
“He’s abusive,” Meg said, condensing years of pain into those two words. “The last time he found us, two years ago, he broke Danny’s arm.”
A pencil would have snapped under the pressure. “Did the bastard go to jail?” Lambert asked with deadly quiet.
And now for the moment of truth. Meg glanced around the luxuriously appointed Jet. She was only beginning to suspect the power and wealth of the Carlton family—enough power and wealth that Lucas Lambert, the sheriff, would continue to protect her and her son, but would Lucas Lambert, the man, believe her?
“No.”
Lambert placed his notebook on the table between them and aligned the gold pen beside it. “Why not?”
Meg fisted her hands to keep from reaching for his pen, for his hand—to touch him or any part of him in some—any—way. Where were all these unfamiliar urgings coming from?
“We were in Denver,” she told him, calmly, dispassionately. She was making a report as once before she had made a related report. “A nice young patrol officer came to the emergency room. I filed a complaint. By then Blake had come to the hospital, too. He can be...very convincing. He showed the nice young officer his own police commission—he’s a detective captain in Simonville—swapped a few stories about his father, the chief of police, and his grandfather in the ‘good old days’ of the department, threw in a blatant fabrication about a contested custody suit and convinced everyone there except one doctor that I was a vindictive, hysterical ex-wife.”
“This—this man is still a police officer?” Lambert asked, and Meg heard not one clue to his thoughts or his feelings.
“Yes. At least I think he still is. He left once a few years ago to do something he thought more exciting—DEA, I think—but he went back to Simonville.”
“You’re divorced?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“And you have custody of Danny?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That simplifies things. Not that it really matters. If you weren’t, or didn’t, a battery of lawyers would go to work tomorrow. Will anyway, if you want them to. Are you vindictive, Meg? Do you want his job? His hide? A pound or two of flesh?”
Did she? If she were truly honest, she’d have to admit that at one time she had wanted Blake to suffer for the pain he had caused Danny and for the unsettled and too-frequently disrupted life they were forced to lead. Then her fantasies had been just that—dark-of-the-night fantasies with no hope of ever being fulfilled. Now? Now she could no more ask than she could have when she was still Meg Wilson, struggling single mother.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. I just want him to leave us alone.”
“You don’t need the Carlton legal staff for that, Meg,” Lucas told her with promise in every softly spoken word. “Just me. And I swear to you, as long as I’m around, he’ll have to go through me before he ever lays a hand on either you or Danny again.”
Avalon, New Mexico, was as much a surprise to Meg as its soft-spoken sheriff had been. But in a day when her world had been literally turned around, she didn’t suppose she should be surprised by geography, no matter how unexpected it was.
