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“Oh, no you don’t, Anna.” The man’s arms tightened around her as his harsh voice rose above the rattle of the rain. “I’m not going to put you down and give you the chance to pull God-knows-what new stunt. Not till we’re inside where it’s dry and I get a damned good explanation for what you’ve been up to.”
Rose was fully prepared to explain her actions, but she wasn’t about to take the heat for what someone named Anna might have done. Aware that they were moving past the French doors she’d noticed earlier, she opened her mouth to tell him that he was making a mistake.
“Look,” she started, but before she could say another word, one of the doors opened.
The man stopped, and Rose turned. Framed in the doorway was a blond woman dressed in a champagne-colored jacket over a matching skirt. She was maybe a shade over five feet tall, and from the lines marking her delicate, perfectly made-up features Rose guessed she was somewhere in her late forties or early fifties.
The woman’s fingers tightened around a small ivory purse as she frowned and spoke sharply. “Logan, what are you—”
She broke off as her dark-brown eyes met Rose’s. Lifting a slender hand to cover her mouth, the woman blinked and breathed a stunned-sounding, “Anna?”
Again the Anna business. Rose shook her head, but the man named Logan was already replying.
“Yes, Elise. She slipped on the tiles and took a fall. I need to get her inside and see if she’s broken anything.”
As the man carried Rose through the doorway, the woman backed into the cream-and-beige room, her wide brown eyes gazing in surprise before narrowing slightly.
“Anna,” she said. “You know how dangerous those tiles are. I must have told you a hundred times that—” The woman broke off. Her eyes narrowed further as she went on, “Where have you been, young lady? What have you done to your hair? And where did you get those clothes? Not to mention those vulgar earrings?”
Rose frowned. Young lady? No one had addressed her in such a patronizing, belittling tone since her junior year in high school. And as to the comment about her earrings, she touched the long tangle of beads strung in hues of blue and purple that her mother had given her this past Christmas, then opened her mouth to protest the term vulgar. But before she could say a thing, again she heard, “Anna?”
This time the word was barely a whisper, filled with unmistakable relief. Rose turned. A tall man with gray hair that nearly matched his light-charcoal suit stood on the threshold between the bedroom and the hallway behind him. He appeared to have paused in the act of tugging loose his red silk tie to stare across the room at Rose.
The man holding Rose was quick to reply. “Yes, Robert. Anna took a fall, and I want to lay her down on the bed and see if anything is broken.”
He’d barely taken one step forward before Rose gave a protesting wiggle and managed to blurt out, “That’s not necessary. I’m fine, just let me—”
“Logan,” the blond woman interjected, stepping toward them. “I really think it would be better if you took your sister up to her bed.”
Rose followed the woman’s gaze to the water dripping from her thoroughly soaked purple skirt and turquoise sweater, then over to the large bed draped in a pristine ivory coverlet.
The arms holding her tightened convulsively. A second later she was being whisked past the bed, then the man named Robert. The action took place so quickly that Rose found herself halfway down a cream carpeted hallway before it occurred to her to twist violently in an attempt to escape this Logan person’s hold.
“Put me down,” she demanded.
When he ignored her, instead turning and mounting a set of stairs, Rose tried again. “Look, I’m sorry about sneaking up to the balcony. That was wrong of me, but—”
Rose stopped speaking as she realized that Logan had reached the top of the stairs and turned down another hall without even looking at her. When he came to a stop in front of a closed door, Rose demanded, “Have you heard one word I’ve said?”
The man ignored her as he stretched out the arm supporting her legs, grasped the doorknob and twisted it several times. When the door didn’t open, he finally looked at her, his eyes narrowed with undisguised fury.
“All right, Anna. Dig your key out of that dammed suitcase you call a purse.”
Rose shook her head helplessly. This was her fault, she supposed. The first time he’d called her Anna, she should have pointed out his mistake. And she shouldn’t have run, shouldn’t have acted so irrationally.
“Please listen to me,” she said in a low, level tone. “I’ve been trying to explain that you are mistaking me for someone else. I don’t have a key to this room, because I don’t belong here. So just…put me down and allow me to leave.”
“What do you mean, you don’t…” he began.
“Hey, kiddo,” another voice broke in. Rose turned to see the gray-haired man approach, followed by the blond woman. “Give me your purse,” the man went on, “and I’ll fish that key out.”
When he reached toward the bag’s shoulder strap, Rose twisted away. “No!” she yelled. “What’s wrong with you people? Why won’t you listen to me? I’ve been trying to tell you that I don’t know you. I don’t know…”
She paused, frowning as she realized that both these people’s faces were vaguely familiar. She gave her head an impatient shake and finished, “I don’t know any of you.”
The gray-haired man frowned, the woman gasped, and the stranger named Logan sighed. “Anna, give your father that damned key.”
Before Rose could tell him she didn’t have a father, the woman stepped forward and snapped open her ivory purse. “When Anna insisted on getting a key made for her room, I suspected she’d eventually lose it, so I had the locksmith make one up for my key ring. Here, I’ll get us in.”
As Logan backed off to allow access to the lock, Rose once more demanded to be put down and began kicking for emphasis. Aware that her actions had broken his grip, Rose tried to twist out of his arms, but as the door clicked open those arms tightened again and he carried her into the room. She opened her mouth once again to attempt to make these people, especially the one holding her so firmly, understand that some mistake was being made. But once she caught sight of her new surroundings, all she could do was stare.
The carpet was the color of amethyst, the walls a pale shade of lilac. The bed she found herself being carried toward was covered in pale aqua—the exact color scheme of her room back in Seattle. Well, perhaps not exact. The tones she’d used were several shades darker, but, still, Rose found the similarity startlingly uncanny.
Even more uncanny was the neatly folded quilt at the foot of the bed, composed of yellow and pink flowers appliquéd onto alternating squares of turquoise and purple. It matched perfectly the one lying across the foot of her own bed—the exact same colors, faded slightly from repeated washings.
She knew her quilt was one of a kind, made by her mother the year she was born. Yet this one was…
“Just like mine,” she whispered.
“It is your room, Anna,” Rose heard Logan say, as he placed her on the bed.
Rose looked up. The man remained bent over her, frowning deeply, but the concern in his hazel eyes lent a certain softness to his scowl.
“I’m going to get Dr. Alcott,” the blond woman said abruptly. She glanced at Logan. “Aunt Grace somehow learned that Anna was missing and became so upset that we had to call the doctor in.”
She dropped a disapproving frown on Rose, then turned to leave the room. A second later the woman’s voice echoed from the hall.
“Robert, Martina says that Chas is on the telephone. He needs to speak to you about tonight’s speech.”
The man glanced at the door, down at Rose and finally to Logan. “I should only be gone a moment. Keep an eye on your sister, won’t you?”
Rose saw one corner of Logan’s mouth lift in a ghost of a smile as he watched the older man leave. Taking advantage of her captor’s momentary distraction, she rolled off the opposite side of the bed and onto her feet, then made a mad dash for the still-open door. But before she even made it around the edge of the bed, Logan was blocking her escape with his body. When she raised her hands to push him out of the way, he grabbed her wrists and demanded, “Blast it, Anna, what the hell is wrong with you?”
Rose looked up as she tried to pull her wrists free. She winced as the large hands tightened around them, then shook her head.
“Haven’t you been listening to me at all?” she asked. “I do…not…know…you. I’m not someone named Anna. My name is Rose. I know I shouldn’t have come onto your grounds. I certainly shouldn’t have been up on your balcony, but—”
Rose stopped speaking. She had to. The man in front of her had begun to laugh.
Chapter 2
The laughter had started as a soft chuckle, but it quickly built in strength and volume until it was nearly deafening. As he continued to chortle, his grip on Rose’s wrists relaxed slightly, though not enough for her to break free.
Rose knew this because she jerked her hands down, hard, in an attempt to escape. At this point he stopped laughing, and although he tightened his grip, a slight smile tilted one corner of his mouth as his eyes once more locked on to hers.
“Good grief,” he said with a shake of his head. “Not that again.”
Rose stared at the crooked smile she’d seen so often in her dreams, then looked up to the amused eyes. Behind the gently teasing glint she saw a mix of anger and concern. Her response was a mutinous frown. Who was this man to stand there laughing at her, judging her? For that matter, who were any of these people? What was this place? Just what sort of nightmare had she stumbled into?
She gave an uneasy glance to the room. It was nearly three times larger than the one she occupied in Seattle. The bed was a queen, where hers was only a twin. These walls were nearly blank, while hers were filled with pictures and memorabilia. But the color scheme and placement of the furniture was eerily similar, even without the inexplicable presence of the turquoise-and-purple quilt that matched hers so precisely.
Then there was the matter of the blond woman and gray-haired man. They’d looked familiar, also, in a misty, half-remembered way. Was it possible that they had appeared in her dreams, as well?
A shiver raised gooseflesh on Rose’s arms. It was as if she’d fallen through Alice’s rabbit hole into a world filled with oddly familiar sights, like this room and the view of the bridge outside. And the man holding her wrists.
Rose looked at him and found that the remains of his smile had been replaced by another frown. “What do you mean by ‘not that again’?” she asked.
His green-brown eyes seemed to assess her before they narrowed. “Come on, Anna,” he replied. “You know. Rose— the imaginary friend you made up when you were little? And that business about missing a part of yourself.”
The floor beneath her feet began to roll from side to side like the bridge of a ship in a wind-tossed sea. All her life Rose had felt an odd sense of loneliness, as if she were somehow incomplete. Somewhere around the age of six, when she’d asked her mother about this, the woman had reminded Rose that she’d been born prematurely. Perhaps, her mother suggested, in Rose’s hurry to arrive on earth she had somehow inadvertently left some part of herself back in heaven.
At the time, Rose had accepted this explanation. After all, she’d rarely been alone. Early on she and her mother had lived in an artist commune in Oregon, where she’d been surrounded by other caring adults and their children. After she and her mother moved to Seattle, there had been classrooms full of children to interact with, along with after-school music teachers and the customers who visited her mother’s shop. During her brief marriage, she’d been surrounded by people. And for the past two years she’d been in the constant company of her mother, always conscious of the inoperable tumor, dictating that Rose’s time with Kathleen Delancey would all too soon come to an end. So, she could hardly claim to have been lonely in the conventional sense. Yet whenever she looked inside herself, she’d felt as if a part of herself was missing, some odd hole in the fabric of her existence.
And now this man was suggesting that someone else felt this way. Someone, moreover, who apparently looked enough like Rose to make everyone she came in contact with think that she was this person. Someone who’d once had an imaginary friend named Rose.
This was all nuts. It was no wonder that her head was spinning, her ears ringing and her legs suddenly wobbly. If it weren’t for the tight grip this Logan maintained on her wrists, she was certain her legs would give way, leaving her to collapse on the floor at his feet.
She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t give in to the whirling eddy that threatened to drag her into unconsciousness. She had to stay alert, on her feet, and somehow find her way out of this nightmarish place. Drawing a deep breath, Rose forced herself to meet the man’s dark eyes and speak as calmly as possible.
“I know this must sound crazy, but I am who I say I am. Let me go, and I’ll prove it to you.”
The man—Logan, she reminded herself—seemed to search her face for a moment before releasing her wrists. Rose continued to stare into his eyes a moment longer, oddly reluctant to look away. Finally she took two steps back, pulled her gaze from his as she slipped her large purse from her shoulder. She reached in and fished out her turquoise leather wallet. Drawing her driver’s license from its plastic sleeve, she handed it to the man. Shivering within her damp sweater, she watched as he studied it.
“Well, I know you use false IDs to avoid the attention that comes with the Benedict name,” he said at last. One corner of his mouth lifted in that half smile of his as his eyes met hers. “But why choose Seattle? Was there a sale on fake Washington State licenses?”
His smile became a mocking grin as he handed the document back, hardening Rose’s frustration into anger.
“For your information, that license is real. And it says I’m legal to drive in the State of Washington because that is where I live.”
“Right. And what about the wallet? This was my Christmas present to you a little over a month ago.”
Again Rose felt the floor begin to shift beneath her feet. The turquoise wallet had been a day-after-Christmas-sale purchase at Nordstrom’s. It was something she hadn’t really needed, but upon seeing it, she’d felt she had to have it—as if it was somehow meant to be hers.
The fact that this Anna possessed the exact same wallet sent another wave of shivers dancing down her spine. Rose straightened that part of her anatomy. This was no time to get giddy over coincidences, she told herself. Such a reaction would only make it more difficult to convince this stranger of her identity.
Not that it mattered if he believed her or not. She knew who she was. What was more, in spite of all the unanswered questions tumbling through her mind regarding this look-alike of hers, she now only wanted to get out of this house, to escape from these people and the vague unsettling sense that she’d seen them before.
“Look, Logan whoever-you-are.” Rose spoke softly as she shoved her driver’s license back in place and dropped her wallet into her purse. Pushing her damp bangs out of her eyes, she glared up at him as she went on, “I’m through trying to reason with you. I am Rose Delancey, just as my license states, and I refuse to be kept in this madhouse one moment longer.”
She pivoted toward the door, but before she could take one step, strong fingers gripped her elbow and spun her back around. The man’s lips twisted scornfully as he asked, “If you aren’t Anna, then how do you know my name is Logan?”
“It’s what that woman called you.”
His eyes narrowed. “That woman is your mother.”
“No. My mother is…dead.”
Immediately Rose clamped her jaw shut, trapping the sob that wanted to follow. She wasn’t going to cry. Not now. Not after she’d promised her mother.
It was just that this was the first time she’d actually said the word dead out loud, with all its echoes of finality. The small group that had gathered for her mother’s funeral had all known what had happened, so there had been no reason for Rose to explain a thing. The end had been expected, after all, and Rose had heard several people murmur that the suddenness of it had been something of a blessing. Rose knew, of course, that they’d meant that her mother was now beyond pain, not that it was a blessing that Kathleen Delancey was gone, leaving her daughter truly alone.
And feeling, suddenly, crazy.
Swallowing hard, Rose stared at the lapel of the man’s leather jacket. She should have stayed in the apartment above her mother’s gift shop, should have gone through all her mother’s papers as the lawyer had suggested, then gradually come to terms with her loss. She never should have followed her crazy visions without first putting her life in order and getting her emotions in hand.
“Rose?”
The soft inquiry brought Rose’s head up and hope into her heart. “You called me Rose,” she said as another damp chill shuddered through her. “Does that mean you believe what I’ve been—?”
The shake of Logan’s head left the rest of Rose’s question unasked.
“I tried Anna,” he replied. “When you didn’t look up, I decided to give Rose a try.” He paused a moment, frowning into her eyes as if weighing a decision before he went on. “Look, Anna. You’re wet, cold and probably tired. We can talk after you take a warm shower and get into some dry—”
Now it was Rose’s turn to shake her head, interrupting him to insist, “For the last time, I am not Anna. I don’t live in this house, have never even been in this house, or in this…room.”
Rose shuddered as her gaze slid from his to the hauntingly familiar decor.
“Then why are you here?”
Rose closed her eyes as a sense of hopelessness engulfed her at the thought of telling this obviously cynical man about her recurring dreams of the view from the balcony outside this particular room.
When she felt Logan’s hand gently grasp her upper arms, she realized he must have seen her shoulders slump. Her knees seemed to bend of their own accord. Once she was sitting on the edge of the bed, she opened her eyes. Aware of the man seated next to her, she stared at the bridge through the sliding glass door, realizing that her explanation would sound insane.
“Dreams,” she said anyway. “I have repeatedly dreamed of this particular view of that bridge. I came here to find if this view existed in reality. I needed…”
As her voice trailed off, Logan couldn’t miss the despair shimmering in her dark eyes. The expression on her face was so damned sincere that he was half tempted to believe that this truly might not be Anna Benedict. But he knew Anna’s vivid imagination all too well for that. Like Alice In Wonderland, she was fully capable of imagining “six impossible things before breakfast” and believing each of them completely.
Logan had always suspected that this characteristic was a reaction to her family’s expectations. Keeping an eye on Anna had been a duty he had gladly fulfilled ever since the day that Robert and Elise Benedict brought their new daughter home. The tiny infant’s cry had elicited a fierce sense of protectiveness in his ten-year-old soul that had never waned no matter how she’d tried his patience over the years.
Not, he reminded himself with a twitch of his lips, that he was a paragon of patience, but he understood the introverted young woman’s battle to find her place in a family of over-achievers. In the past six months, though, he’d been so busy overseeing Benedict family legal concerns that he hadn’t spent much time with Anna.
It occurred to him now, as he studied the combination of confusion and fear on Anna’s too-pale face, that her brief disappearance might have been in response to the numerous social and political functions she’d been required to attend. But whatever the cause, it was obvious that something had made Anna snap. Something serious enough, it seemed, to cause her to fantasize that her mother was no longer alive.
Logan recoiled from the thought. Fifty-three-year-old Elise was a dynamo of organization, capable of simultaneously setting up a charity bazaar, overseeing the arts foundation her husband had established for local schools, and designing the interior of a homeless shelter. The fact that Elise managed all this without losing an ounce of composure, getting a spot of dirt on her tasteful haute couture outfit or allowing one lock of hair to escape her meticulously arranged hairstyle might intimidate any daughter.
But to imagine her mother dead?
“Look. You have to believe me.”
Anna’s words pulled Logan’s attention to her pleading eyes. “I don’t belong here,” she went on. “I want to leave this house, now.”
The desperation in her voice made Logan look at her long and hard. Anna’s face seemed thinner and very pale, considering her fondness for the California sun. Her indigo eyes appeared more deep set, yet larger and more luminous.
Luminous? Logan blinked. Where the hell had that word come from. Never, in all the years he’d known Anna, had he paid much attention to her eyes. Well once, when she was twelve and insisted that her blue eyes, combined with the fact that both her parents had brown, proved that she’d been adopted. The explanation had been simple enough, of course. Elise and Robert each had one blue-eyed parent, supplying the recessive gene that Anna, but not her brother, Chas, had inherited.
Logan’s sudden poetic attention to the young woman’s features was far less easy to explain. Even more confusing was his sudden awareness of the gentle curves that formed the body so close to his. As his flesh began to warm, his muscles tensed. He’d known Anna all her life, and never before had he reacted to her with this…this—
He shook away the half-formed thought. Anna was his sister, dammit. Okay—she was Chas’s sister, but as an unofficial Benedict that was how he’d always viewed her. Yet, insane as it was, he found himself mesmerized by the hopeless expression in those dark eyes of hers, fascinated by the curve of her lips, felt his head bending inexorably toward hers.
