Overnight Heiress. Modean Moon
report stated she worked as a day bartender in a popular downtown restaurant and lived in a neighborhood that was still safe but was well past its prime. She was wearing what had to be her uniform. Everything about her was squeaky clean but functional; there were no frills in Meg Wilson‘s—Carlton’s—life. That would change. That would definitely change.
Lucas considered the other photographs he had brought with him and handed her one of Edward and his new wife Jennie taken in the back garden of their home in Avalon.
Meg studied the photo, and for a moment Lucas saw what he could only describe as wistfulness play across her expression. Then her chin jutted and a cocky smile lifted her lips. “He seems to have survived his ordeal fairly well.”
What the hell was she so mad about? Because Lucas was sure that anger was what he saw in her—maybe unacknowledged, maybe even unwanted, but anger just the same.
“Perhaps you’d like this one better,” he said, fighting his own anger at her response. He handed her a studio portrait of Edward taken a year before, showing him as an ambitious, successful, driven—empty—man before Jennie had healed him.
Meg studied the portrait. For a moment her features, a feminine version of Edward’s—a stunningly beautiful feminine version of Edward’s, Lucas suddenly realized—became as bleak as those of the man he had first met only months before.
“So,” she said. “What’s my name?” She dropped the photo onto the table in front of her. “Who am I?”
Her name was Megan Elizabeth Carlton, and she would be twenty-nine years old in three months. Twenty-nine. It wasn’t often a woman got to celebrate her twenty-ninth and her thirtieth birthdays twice. Meg’s lips twisted against bitter anger. That explained so much. What was slow or backward or just plain stupid for a six-year-old—and she had been called all of those—or immature for a twelve- or an eighteen-year-old, was pretty remarkable for someone more than a year and a half younger.
No wonder she hadn’t been able to cope with Blake. She hadn’t been old enough to marry him when she’d divorced him.
Her parents—her adoptive parents—had some serious questions to answer. To her, and to the FBI. Had they known how young she truly was? Or had the lie about her age started before she was brought to them? It mattered; yes, knowing the answer to that question mattered. But letting them know who she was and where she was meant the possibility of Blake finding out, too. And she wasn’t ready for that yet.
Not yet.
Meg schooled her features to reveal none of her thoughts. Lambert’s attention seemed to be focused on the traffic as he guided his rental car back to her apartment, but more than once she had caught him studying her with more perception than normal suspicion. She ought to be terrified of him, being locked in the confines of this less-than-spacious rental car. He was dark, vaguely Native American, vaguely Arabic in appearance, and massive, but for some reason he wasn’t threatening in the way she had come to expect from her past history with cops. He didn’t look like a cop—maybe that was the difference.
And then Meg realized that he did. But he looked like a cop who had spent his life deflecting assaults and abuses away from those who couldn’t defend themselves and taking them on himself if necessary. Or a gladiator, maybe. With battle scars that not even the civilized veneer of expensive tailoring could hide.
“Have you about got it figured out?”
Lambert’s voice was still a surprise. His gravelly accent bore traces of the South—aristocracy, not Appalachia—and he spoke softly as though he had spent years allowing nothing more obvious than a whisper. And once again, his perception intimidated her.
“What?”
“Whatever it was that threw you into that poor, pitiful female, ‘I’m going to faint’ routine. Have you ever fainted in your life?”
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