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The jet landed at a small, but obviously modern, airport in what seemed to her to be little more than a wide clearing in the forested mountains. From the plane she’d seen a white-spired, picture-postcard village a little further up the mountain.
Meg awakened Danny, who scrambled upright in his window seat and strapped himself in for the landing. He was no more surprised than she by the terrain below them—the former-ocean-bed desert stretching in one direction and the awesome pine-covered mountains in the other—he just didn’t hide his surprise as well as she.
And he didn’t manage to hide his involuntary shrinking away when Lucas reached to help him into the top-of-the-line Land Rover that waited for them at a terminal straight out of an art deco design book.
Meg saw Lucas’s mouth flatten into a narrow, unsmiling line, but he unobtrusively stepped back, giving Danny the space he needed without calling attention to that need. He gave Meg the same space, not touching her, as he held the door for the passenger-side front seat.
Almost in the center of town, he turned into the graveled driveway of a walled estate that wound its way through an arborist’s sampler of trees and shrubs to a large, stone and timbered house. The house should have been imposing because of its size, but instead Meg found it surprisingly welcoming.
Meg sat still while Lucas rounded the Land Rover and opened the door for her; she’d lost the duel of the doors twice in Tulsa and knew that he would insist on this courtly gesture no matter whether she was seventeen or seventy. Danny remained in his seat, and she suspected it was because he was temporarily intimidated by his surroundings. She’d explained to him what Lambert had told her as best she could when they had retrieved him from the Tulsa airport, but she knew he was having as much trouble as she was—maybe more—understanding the changes in their lives.
She smelled the pleasant aroma of wood smoke from a fireplace chimney and felt the promise of a light chill in the air of approaching night, a chill that the wealth and comfort of the house they faced would cushion.
Lucas Lambert held his hand out to her to help her from the vehicle. She glanced at it, at the strength evident in its wide palm and long, blunt fingers, and hesitated. She never asked for help—never—but this man insisted on giving it to her. Why? What was there about her, or him, that made him do so? And what was there about her, or him, that made her want to take that help? Not just in alighting from a car, but in facing what waited for her inside that huge stone house, in facing what waited for her when Blake found out who and where she was?
She lifted her chin and placed her hand in his, taking his help as she stepped from the vehicle and onto the winter green grass bordering the drive.
For a moment his hand closed over hers, wrapping it in a promise of safety and caring and concern that she had no memory of ever knowing, wrapping it in a promise of more, much more. Stunned, she looked up, surprising for no more than a second a look in his eyes that spoke of hunger and longing and a loneliness as great as she had known for most of her life. And then it was gone, replaced by a professional, or perhaps a distant-relation, friendliness.
She drew in a not-quite-steady breath and gave him a shaky smile before turning toward her son. “Come on, Danny,” she said softly. “Let’s go meet this new family of ours.”
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “It’s for sure they’ve got to be better than the old one.”
Meg let the uncharacteristic bitterness pass without comment. She had felt something similar when faced with the apparent ease of Edward Carlton’s life when contrasted with hers. His studio portrait had proved her mistaken about just how sheltered and comfortable he had been. Something would prove it to Danny, too, but until it did, nothing she said would change his mind.
Double oak doors, framed by a heavily leaded, stained-glass fanlight and matching panels, guarded the entrance to the house. Before their little entourage reached the fiat, protected landing, one of those doors flew open, spilling light out into the darkening night and revealing the tall, stern man of the photograph and a small, delicate young woman as light and effervescent as a butterfly.
“You brought them?” the young woman said. “Sheriff Lambert? You really brought them.”
“Yes, Miss Jennie,” Lucas answered, stepping to Meg’s side to grasp the young woman’s hands. “Now what are you doing running around like this? Aren’t you supposed to be resting?”
The tall, stern man—it had to be Edward, her brother—dropped his hand onto the woman‘s—onto Jennie’s—shoulder. “Yes, she is,” he said. “But you know Jennie.”
He looked out onto the steps, and his eyes—eyes that were achingly familiar to her from all the times she had looked into a mirror—locked with Meg’s.
“Meggie?” he said. “Oh, God.” His voice broke, and Meg saw a glint of moisture in his eyes. “It really is you. Meggie.”
Jennie lifted a hand to grasp Edward’s where it lay on her shoulder. “Of course it is,” she said. But even her voice seemed strangely thick. Then, smiling, she stepped away from Edward’s touch and out onto the porch. “He really wants to do this,” she said to Meg, “but he’s still learning that it’s all right to show his emotions. Give him a little more time, though, and you’ll be able to see the love that’s in him, too.” Then she wrapped her arms around Meg and hugged her tightly. “We’re so glad we found you. Edward’s missed you forever.”
With one last welcoming hug, Jennie stepped back and looked toward the young boy standing slightly behind Meg, a boy who, in spite of his youth, was almost as tall as she. “And you’re Danny. Lucas told us about you when he called from Tulsa, but no one would ever have had to tell me who you are. You’re going to look just like your Uncle Edward.”
Danny shrugged and nodded, clearly unsure of his welcome or how he should act toward this strange woman, in spite of her words. Meg took a comforting step closer to him.
“I suppose you’re too big to admit wanting a hug,” Jennie said to the boy. When Danny shrugged and nodded again, Jennie smiled. “Too bad,” she said as she stepped up to him and wrapped him in an embrace. “Everybody needs hugs.”
Danny didn’t immediately surrender to the embrace, but he didn’t struggle, either. Meg caught him looking at her in questioning wonder and gave him a shrug of her own.
“And everybody needs to come into the house and get out of the night air,” Edward said, stepping back but holding out his hand toward Jennie.
“Yes, Miss Jennie,” Lambert added, looking pointedly at her. “They do.”
Jennie laughed and turned, wrapping one arm over Danny’s shoulder and the other around Meg’s waist. “Then by all means, let’s everybody go inside.”
Only then did Meg notice the lines of pain on the young woman’s face. Only then did she hear the strain in her voice. Curious, she thought, as she let herself and her son be led into the house, down a long, wide hall with hardwood floors and Oriental rugs. Fine English side tables and crystal wall sconces lined the walls on the way to what must have been considered a small room in that house, but which was welcoming and comfortably furnished, with a cheery wood fire burning in the cozy fireplace.
There, Edward firmly but gently led Jennie to a wing chair and stood in front of her until she grinned at him and settled herself in the chair. Then, as though not really sure of the etiquette—and who could be, Meg wondered—he gestured toward the other chairs in the grouping. “Please,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable. I—” He broke off with a short laugh. “I really don’t know what to say next. And I suppose you are as much in the dark as I am.”
He turned fully toward her. He was tall. As tall as Lucas Lambert who stood beside him, although he was leaner and didn’t have the look of being battle scarred that Lambert wore so unconsciously. And it was more than just his eyes that were familiar to her from her time at the mirror.
“Meggie,” he said again, and his voice made her name a prayer. “I knew—I knew it had to be you when your prints matched,” he told her. “And Lucas told us how much—how much you bore the family resemblance. But, God!...”
Jennie reached for his hand and grasped it.
Edward straightened and glanced toward Lambert. “You’ll stay for dinner?” he asked.
Lucas shook his head, and Meg felt an unreasonable sense of betrayal at being abandoned by him. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got work stacked up at the office and more coming as a result of today.” He turned toward Jennie. “You take care of yourself, now,” he said softly.
He looked again at Edward. “The news shouldn’t break for a few days, but if you need me, you know to call.”
He turned toward Danny. “You’re a fine young man,” he said, and Megan heard in his words a goodbye, to Danny and to her. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”
And then he turned toward her. “And—and it’s been a pleasure meeting you, too, Meg. If you need anything...”
Meg shook her head, stopping his polite offer. “Thank you, Sheriff Lambert,” she said. So, it was to be Lucas Lambert, the sheriff, with whom she dealt in the future, and not Lucas Lambert, the man. For a while she had wondered. For a while she had almost let herself hope. “You’ve been more than kind. I appreciate all you’ve done for us.”
Tully Wilbanks, his first deputy, was still on duty when Lucas arrived at headquarters. He summoned Tully back to his office and waited until the deputy shut the door. Then he shrugged out of his suit jacket and draped it across his chair. Stretching once, he sighed and leaned against the desk.
“Tough trip?” Tully asked.
Lucas shook his head. “Surprising, but not strenuous.”
“Was she?”
Was she Megan Carlton and not an impostor? It was amazing how many normally intelligent people thought someone who didn’t claim to be anyone other than a single mother and daytime bartender could be scheming to be Megan Carlton. Even he had, he remembered. At first. “She is.”
“Wow. I guess now we’re going to have reporters and feds crawling all over the place.”
“Reporters, maybe,” Lucas admitted. “But not too many feds. At least not for a while.”
“Okay,” Tully said. “We can handle the press. We’ve still got the plans we worked out when that British rock star came to visit his cousin.”
Plan B. Everyone talks about one. We actually had one. And an A and even a C.
“Tully?”
“Yeah, Lucas?”
“We may be getting a call from a Blake Wilson. He’s a detective with the Simonville, California, PD, although he may claim some previous DEA connection. He’ll be asking for professional consideration, and he may claim he has visitation rights with his son. He doesn’t get either.”
Tully’s left eyebrow went up a quarter of an inch, but he made no comment, only nodded his understanding.
“If he shows up,” Lucas went on, “I’m to be notified the moment he sets foot in this jurisdiction, and he’s not to be allowed anywhere near Meg Carlton or her son without an escort. Will you make that clear to the department?”
Again Tully nodded.
“And will you see if you can find a picture of him, probably from the DEA, without letting him know?”
“Is he dangerous?”
Lucas considered that for a moment. “He’s a cop,” he said finally, “so he will be armed. He’s a cop,” he said, letting his distaste show, “who broke his ten-year-old son’s arm.”
After Tully left, Lucas leaned back in his leather chair, toed open a bottom desk drawer and propped his feet on the rim. Meg Wilson—Meg Carlton—had been quite a surprise for him. And he was pretty sure he had been a surprise for her—over and above the obvious stunning news of the day.
He’d felt the moment she became aware of him and of the attraction he’d felt for her. He let a rueful smile twist his face at the memory of that one brief moment, standing in front of her brother’s home with her son watching as he helped her from the car: one brief moment that had no time to go anywhere before he surrendered her to her new brother and to her new life.
What on earth had made him think this woman needed him? Meg Wilson might have. But Meg Carlton? Not too likely. At least, not after the ordeal of the next few weeks had passed.
But until then, she did.
Oh, yes. Until then, she definitely did.
And did he need her? He suspected that he did. He suspected—hell, he knew, damn it!—that sometime between watching her being led into the interrogation room and helping her from the car in her brother’s driveway, he had grown to need the surprising, gentle, stubborn, competent and insecure woman that Meg Carlton had become.
His chair was too well constructed and maintained to squeak when he pushed out of it, but his desk drawer closed with a satisfying slam.
He couldn’t need her. He couldn’t take from another person. Not again. Not ever. And he was afraid that if he ever admitted to needing Meg Carlton he’d want to take, have to take, and it wouldn’t matter then how much he had to give, because it would never be enough.
He ran an impatient hand through his hair and then grasped the back of his neck, working his head back and forth in an attempt to release some of his tension.
Enough! he told himself. He had more to do than wallow in what he couldn’t or wouldn’t take.
He had responsibilities.
Shaking his head, he reached for his telephone and punched out the numbers.
“Lambert residence,” answered the sweet, young-girl’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Hi, kiddo.”
“Pops! Are you home? Did you bring Avalon’s Anastasia with you?”
Lucas surrendered to a grin. At fourteen, Jamie was only two years older than Danny, but a world apart in openness from the quiet, solemn boy, and a world apart in spontaneity from the daughter he had finally tracked down seven years ago. Russian history was her latest love. How like her to compare Meg Carlton’s return with the tragic life of the youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas.
“I did,” he said.
“And is she?” Jamie asked. “Really?”
“Really,” he told her. “Wait till you see her. There’s no way she’s not Edward’s sister.”
“Hot da—oops!”
Lucas chuckled. “Oops is right, kiddo. You won’t like the taste of soap messing up your pizza.”
“You mean I don’t have to force feed us broccoli tonight after all?”
Lucas shook his head. Jamie loved broccoli. But she loved pizza more. “Not tonight,” he told her. “Tonight I have a craving to take my best girl out for a special meal and a night on the town.”
After he hung up, he shrugged into his suit jacket and looked around the office.
It was a good office. A stable, dependable workplace after a lifetime of strife. And if Jamie was his best girl, that was his choice, too. A choice he had willingly made. A choice he could live with, as he could live with the peace of Avalon, as he could live with doing what he had to do to ease the way of others, as he could live without...without the temptation that for a moment Meg Carlton so unconsciously had offered.
He couldn’t need her, he told himself again. He wouldn’t need her. But somehow his vows seemed pathetically lacking in force.
Three
Meg stretched and twisted, trying to get comfortable in the wide bed. She suspected she wouldn’t, no matter how many times she pounded the down-filled pillows. No matter how many times she told herself that Danny was sleeping peacefully in the equally luxurious room adjoining hers. No matter how many times she realized she was living her little-girl fantasy: the king and queen had come for her—had told her, “You belong with us, my dear. We’re taking you home to live in the castle,” and had whisked her away from the unhappiness of life with James and Audrey, of life with Blake.
And they’d whisked her away from the insecurity of knowing that if anything happened to her, her son would be alone, unprotected and unloved. Now Danny would never be left alone. Edward would love him, and Jennie; she knew that from the few hours she had spent with them. And Lucas would protect him.
Meg slid her hand over the smooth sheet she lay on. It wasn’t actually linen—she was fairly sure of that—but a cotton so luxurious that the sheets on this bed alone had to have cost as much as the entire contents of her bedroom in Tulsa. And across the room, in the alcove of a sitting room, the glow from a fire in the tiny marble fireplace danced over the pattern of an Oriental rug. Sheer luxury. Opulence in excellent taste.
So why was her mind spinning, refusing to let her sleep? Wasn’t her life going to be wonderful from here on out? After all, the glass slipper had fit.
No. That was the wrong fairy tale.
And in spite of all the times she’d wished as a child for the king and queen to come and get her, in spite of the pictures and videotapes of converted home movies Edward had shown her that evening, in spite of the memories her brother—her brother—had shared with her, she didn’t feel like the princess. She was just Meg Wilson, Danny’s mother and Patrick’s bartender. Tomorrow she would miss an entire shift at Patnck’s. Tonight Danny had missed his woodcarvers’ club meeting, and she had missed a class in contract law. That was going to be important when everyone here discovered she was really an impostor.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. She wasn’t an impostor. This was her life now, and no matter how strange, how alien it seemed to her, she had better get used to it.
A brother. Oh, Lord, she had a brother. A family. A decent family—she would have been drawn to Edward and Jennie even if they hadn’t been—been hers. And friends. She could have friends now. Friends she wouldn’t have to leave without a word, if—when—Blake found them.
And when Blake found them this time, Lucas would be there with her, standing between her and whatever he threatened.
Lucas.
Meg turned again, and this time her shoulder found the spot in the feather bed that had eluded her all night, her cheek nestled against the pillow and the tension that had clenched her shoulders eased from her as she felt, at last, the peace of sleep wrapping itself around her.
“Gee, Ma, you goin’ to sleep all day?”
Ma? Meg raised one eyelid and glanced across the oversize pillow she had hugged to her as she slept. A dream floated back into her subconscious as she focused on Danny standing at the side of the bed. Since when did her son call her Ma? She squinted at him through sleepy eyes. Since when did her son look like an escapee from a Dumpster?
“Didn’t I throw that T-shirt in the rag bin this fall?”
Danny looked down at his shirt and grinned. “Yeah, but I figured, what the heck? They’re probably expecting the Beverly Hillbillies. Why not give them what they want?”
Meg closed her eyes, but all thought of sleep had fled with Danny’s words. Sighing, she unwound her arms from the pillow and scooted up against the headboard, taking the sheet with her. “He’s my brother, Danny. Do you have any idea what this means to me?”
“Yeah,” her son told her. “It means that after today you get to sleep in silk instead of that reject from the thrift store.”
