The Virgin Mistress. Linda Turner
it. So she’d taken her to the cove to show her her secret hideaway.
There’d been no other footprints but theirs that day, and Rebecca had loved it. The pounding of the surf against the shore and the cry of the gulls had given her a serenity she’d found nowhere else on earth, and to this day, whenever she was feeling low, she only had to close her eyes to feel the spray of the Pacific on her face and the damp sand under her feet.
Nothing, however, beat being there in person. Unable to resist the call of the pristine sand that had been washed clean by the waves, she dismounted and looked up with a smile when Austin joined her. “Isn’t it beautiful here? When I first came to live here, Meredith and I used to have picnics on the beach here all the time.”
Her tone was wistful—she could hear it in her voice—and she wasn’t surprised when Austin heard it, too. Frowning, he said, “Don’t you go on picnics now? You two seem so close.”
“We used to be,” she said. “I admired her so much. She was wonderful with the foster children, and I loved helping her with them. But after the accident, she didn’t have time for picnics. Her priorities changed.”
“How?”
She shrugged. “There were little changes at first. She became totally devoted to Joe Junior—then she had Teddy and was the same way with him. Later, she got wrapped up in her social schedule, and she just didn’t have time to do the things we used to do.”
She didn’t have time for me anymore, Rebecca added silently. And she didn’t know why. She just knew Meredith was different, and they weren’t as close as they’d once been. And the only explanation she had for it was the accident.
The thought saddened her, and the mood was somber as they returned to the house, where they found themselves guests at a small dinner party. Feeling underdressed in riding clothes, Rebecca felt her heart sink at the sight of a former congressman and a famous Hollywood producer who had joined the family in the courtyard for before-dinner drinks. Why, she wondered in frustration, did Meredith insist on inviting the entire world to dinner? When she’d first come to the ranch, one of the things she’d loved the most about living there had been the family suppers in the eat-in kitchen. They’d been homey and fun and intimate and given everyone a chance to catch up on each other’s day.
But those times were, unfortunately, long gone, and now it seemed like there were always outsiders around. Meals were much more formal and in the dining room. And Rebecca hated it. Given the chance, she would have used the excuse that she had homework to grade and left. But she’d had so much fun with Austin that she hated to see the evening end. And one look at his resigned expression and she knew he wasn’t any more thrilled than she at the idea of attending a dinner party. The least she could do was stick around and help him through it.
Fortunately, it didn’t turn out to be as bad as Rebecca had anticipated. The conversation shifted back and forth between politics and the movie industry, and the discussions on the future of both were lively and sometimes more than a little intense. But Joe was in his element, his blue eyes sparkling with interest, and for the first time since the shooting, he seemed like his old self. Rebecca could have sat there for hours, just listening to him talk.
Meredith, however, changed the entire mood with just a few carelessly chosen words. The meal was almost over—Inez was serving her fabulous praline cheesecake—when Meredith took advantage of a sudden lull in the conversation to turn her attention on Austin. “So, Austin,” she said brightly, “how is the investigation going now that you’ve had time to check out the guest list? You must have narrowed down some suspects.”
Just that easily, silence fell like a rock. For a moment, Austin didn’t say a word. A muscle clenched in his jaw, and he just looked at her. But everyone at the table was waiting for his answer, and he finally said quietly, “I can’t discuss that at this point. The investigation is ongoing, and I still have a lot of leads to follow up.”
“But what about suspects?” she pressed. “You must have some idea of who the shooter is by now. You’ve been talking to people all week.”
“This kind of case takes time to solve,” he retorted. “You don’t do it overnight.”
“But—”
“That’s enough, Meredith,” Joe growled. Glaring at her from the opposite end of the dining room table, he gave her a hard look that anyone who knew him well was familiar with. Without saying a word, he told her to shut up. Glancing at his guests, he smiled wryly. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t want to talk about violence at the dinner table. It doesn’t do a lot for the digestive system.”
Far from intimidated by his warning look, Patsy just barely resisted the urge to scream at him. How dare he correct her in front of guests! She could talk about anything she wanted to, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it!
“I would have thought you’d want to know who your enemies are,” she said coldly. “But if you want to live in a fairy tale and pretend everything is hunky-dory, go ahead. I know where you want to be buried.”
Urged on by that voice in her head that always seemed to get her in trouble, Patsy knew she may have gone too far, but she didn’t care. He could be such a jackass sometimes. She didn’t know what Meredith had ever seen in him. If he hadn’t been so damn rich, she, herself, would have walked away from him years ago. But she’d been alone and poor before, and rich was better—even if that meant she did have to put up with Joe Colton.
Not, she silently amended with a secret smile, that she might have to do that for much longer. Somebody else out there wanted him dead. They’d tried to kill him once. They were bound to try to do it again. And next time they just might succeed. Then she’d have all that lovely money to herself, and she’d never have to deal with Joe Colton again.
Three
The nightmare came out of the darkness like a thief in the night, grabbing her before she even thought to note the danger. Coming awake with a startled cry of horror, Louise Smith bolted up in bed, her brown eyes wide and unfocused, her heart slamming against her ribs. In her subconscious, vague, shadowy images rose up before her, terrifying her, and for a moment, she couldn’t even have said where she was. Then she blinked, and the neat feminine decor of her bedroom came into focus and she realized she was safe and sound in her modest little home in Jackson, Mississippi.
It was then that the tears started.
Suddenly cold all the way to the bone in spite of the fact that it was a warm summer night, Louise wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth in her bed. The nightmares had become more frequent over the course of the last few months—and more terrifying. She’d had them for years, ever since she’d woken up one morning at the St. James Clinic with no memory of who she was, but they’d never been so bad before. Every night for the past week, she’d hardly closed her eyes when she went to bed before the nightmares began. And they were always the same—a little girl crying out for her mommy in the dark. And she was the mommy the little girl cried out for.
A sob welled up from deep inside her, and she could no more hold it back than she could change the fact that she was Patsy Portman, a woman with a prison record and a history of mental disability, a woman who’d had a baby girl taken from her soon after her birth that was still, to this day, lost to her. Just thinking about that still made her cringe. What kind of monster was she?
When the hospital staff at the St. James Clinic had told her about her past, she was sure that there had to be some mistake. She wasn’t that kind of person. She couldn’t be! She might not remember who she was, but surely she would know if she’d killed a man! But then her doctor had shown her her prison record, and there was no denying that she was as amoral as she’d been told she was. Horrified, she’d vowed to change her life right then and there.
The first thing she’d done was return to Mississippi and her last known address, where she’d changed her name to Louise Smith so she could start her new life with a clean slate. But putting the past behind her hadn’t been that