Overnight Heiress. Modean Moon
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.”