Overnight Heiress. Modean Moon
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.
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