The Accidental Bodyguard

Lucas almost shuddered. No wonder the saint had run.

Strangely, his feelings of empathy for the girl intensified. He tried to fight the softening inside him, but it was almost as though he was on her side instead of the Morans’.

Ridiculous. He couldn’t afford such misplaced sympathies.

“If you take the case, how much will you charge?” Holly demanded.

“If I lose-nothing.”

“And—if you win?”

“I would be working on a contingency basis, of course—”

“How much?”

“Forty percent. Plus expenses.”

“Of nearly a billion dollars! What? Are you mad? Why, that’s highway robbery.”

“No, Ms. Moran, it’s my fee. I play for keeps—all or nothing. If you want me, and if I agree to take the case, I swear to you that if there is any way to destroy your cousin’s name and her claim to your fortune, I’ll find it. I am very thorough and utterly merciless when it comes to matters of this nature. I’ll study these documents and send my P.I. to Mexico to investigate Casas de Cristo and see what dirt I can dig up on her down there. She’s bound to have enemies. All we have to do is find people who’ll talk about her and get them talking. Fan the flames, so to speak.”

Lucas began gathering documents and stuffing them into his briefcase. “Just so you can reach me anytime—” He scribbled his unlisted home phone number and handed it to Stinky. “I’ll let myself out.”

Lightning streaked to the ground. Almost immediately a sharp cracking sound shook the house. Wind and torrents of rain began to batter the windows.

The drought was over.

But none of the ranchers who had prayed for rain rejoiced. They were watching Lucas’s large brown hands violently snap the locks on his briefcase as he prepared to go.

The mood in the library had grown as ugly and dangerous as the storm outside. The Morans were in that no-win situation so many people involved in litigation find themselves. They were wondering whom they disliked the most—their adversary, the family saint, or their own utterly ruthless but highly reputed attorney.

One minute Lucas was bursting out of the library doors into the foyer, intent on nothing except driving to San Antonio as fast as possible. In the next minute, Lucas felt as if he’d been sucked blindly into a cyclone and hurled into an entirely new reality in which an incredibly powerful force gripped him, body and soul. In which all his dark bitternesses miraculously dissolved. Even his fierce ambition to work solely for money was gone.

Unsuperstitious by nature, Lucas did not believe in psychic powers or ghosts. But this otherworldly experience was a very pleasurable feeling.

Dangerously pleasurable. Almost sexual, and dangerously familiar somehow.

All his life he’d been driven by anger and greed or by the quest for power.

And suddenly those drives were gone. What he really wanted was in this room.

He stopped in mid-stride. His huge body whirled; his searing gray eyes searched every niche and darkened corner of the hall.

The mysterious presence was very near. As he stood there, he continued to feel the weird, overpowering connection.

She was as afraid of this thing as he was.

She?

For no reason at all Lucas was reminded of the times he and his brother, Pete, had hidden together as children from the Indian slum bullies, not speaking to one another but each profoundly aware of the other.

“Hello?” Lucas’s deep querying drawl held a baffled note.

He held his breath. For the first time he noted how eerily quiet the foyer was. How the presence of death seemed to linger like an unwanted guest.

How the hall with its pale green wallpaper was heavy with the odor of roses past their prime. How these swollen blossoms, no doubt leftovers from Gertrude Moran’s memorial service, were massed everywhere—in vases, in Meissen.bowls. How several white petals had fallen onto the polished tabletops and floors. Holly had shown him the old lady’s rose garden and had told him she had loved roses.

Lucas’s senses were strangely heightened as he stood frozen outside the library doors, struggling to figure out what was happening to him. He inhaled the sicklysweet, funereal scent of the dying roses. He listened to each insistent tick of the vermeil clock.

The summer sunlight was fading. Much of the white and gilt furniture was cast in shadow. The threadbare Aubusson rug at his feet had a forest green border.

When he saw the closet with its door standing partially ajar, he felt strangely drawn to it. Oddly enough, when he stepped toward it, the connection was instantly broken. He was free.

All his old bitterness and cynicism immediately regained him.

He bolted out of the Moran mansion faster than before.

One

“Kill!”

Sweet P.’s earsplitting voice blasted inside Lucas’s black Lincoln as he raced toward the hospital. The shrieks seemed to slice open his skull and shred the tender tissues of his inner ear as handily as a meat cleaver.

There should be a law against a three-year-old screaming in an automobile speeding sixty miles per hour on a freeway.

Just as there should be a law against a kid being up at five in the morning experimenting with her older cousin’s handcuffs.

Just as there should be a law against Peppin owning a pair of the damn things in the first place.

“You get off here,” Pete suddenly said as they were about to pass the exit ramp.

Tires screamed as Lucas swerved across two lanes onto the down ramp.

“Mommy! Carol!” Patti.yelled between sobs.

Too bad Mommy was out of town and Carol, her sitter, had called in sick.

Patti shook her hands violently, rattling the handcuffs.

Lucas’s temples thudded with equal violence.

It was Monday morning. Six o’clock to be exact. Lucas felt like hell. Usually he never dreamed, but last night a weird nightmare about a girl in trouble had kept him up most of the night. In the dream, he had loved the girl, and they’d been happy for a while. Then she’d been abducted, and he’d found himself alone in a misty landscape of death and stillness and ruin. At first he’d been terrified she was dead. Then she’d made a low moan, and he had known that if he didn’t save her, he would lose everything that mattered to him in the world. He’d tracked her through a maze of ruined slums only to find her and have her utter a final lowthroated cry and die as he lifted her into his arms. He’d bolted out of his bed, his body drenched in sweat, his heart racing, his sense of tragic loss so overwhelmingly profound he couldn’t sleep again.

The girl’s ethereally lovely face and voluptuous body had seemed branded into his soul. He’d gotten up and tried to sketch her on his legal notepad. Sleek and slim, she had that classy, rich-girl look magazine editors pay so dearly for. She had high cheekbones, a careless smile, yellow hair and sparkling blue eyes. He’d torn the sheet from the pad and thrown it away, only to sketch another.

Due in court at ten, Lucas had intended to be halfway to Corpus Christi by now. Instead Pete, Sweet P., the boys and he were rushing to the emergency room, where Pete was on call. Some girl had overdosed, and a doctor was needed STAT, medical jargon for fast. Gus, an emergency-room security guard, had volunteered to remove the handcuffs if Pete brought Sweet P. when he came.

Disaster had struck right after Lucas had loaded the luggage and boys into the Lincoln and Pete and Sweet P. had gotten into Pete’s Porsche. The Porsche wouldn’t start because someone had left an interior light on all night.

Someone had also removed Lucas’s jumper cables from his trunk. And that same mysterious someone had also lost the key to Peppin’s handcuffs. Thus, Lucas and the boys had to drive Pete and Sweet P. to the ER before they could head for home.

Why was Lucas even surprised? His personal life had been chaos ever since the boys had moved in. For starters, they must have dialed every nine-hundred number in America, because his phone bill had run into the thousands of dollars the first month they’d lived with him.

Lucas put on his right turn signal when he saw the blue neon sign for San Antonio City Memorial and swerved into the covered parking lot for the hospital’s emergency room. With a swoosh of tires and a squeal of brakes, Lucas stopped the big car too suddenly, startling Sweet P. into silence. Her watery blue eyes looked addled as she took in the blazing lights of the three ambulances and the squad car.

Lucas’s expression was grim as he lowered the automobile windows, cut the motor and gently gathered Sweet P. into his arms so Pete would be free to check his patient.

As he got out of the Lincoln with the squirming toddler, Lucas gave Peppin and Montague a steely glance. “You two be good.”

“No problem.” Peppin’s sassy grin was all braces. Huge mirrored sunglasses hid his mischievous eyes.

As always Montague, who resented authority, pretended to ignore him and kept his nose in a book entitled Psychic Vampires.

The emergency room was such a madhouse, Lucas forgot the boys. Apparently there’d been a fight at the jail. Three prisoners lay on stretchers. A man with hairy armpits and a potbelly wearing only gray Jockey shorts with worn-out elastic was standing outside a treatment room screaming drunkenly that doctors made too much money and he was going to get his lawyer if he didn’t get treated at once. In another room an obese woman was pointing to her right side, saying she hurt and that her doctor had spent a fortune on tests and that she was deathly allergic to some kind of pink medicine and that her medical records were in Tyler on microfilm if anybody cared about them. Six telephones buzzed constantly. Doctors were dictating orders to exhausted nurses.

In the confusion it took Lucas a while to find Gus. Meanwhile Sweet P. was so fascinated by the drunk and the fat lady, she stopped crying. Enthroned on the counter of the nurses’ station, she was having the time of her life. A plump redheaded nurse was feeding her pizza and candy and cola, which she gobbled greedily while Gus rummaged in a toolbox for the correct pair of bolt cutters.

“Now you hold still, little princess,” Gus said.

Suddenly Pete’s frantic voice erupted from an examining room down the hall.

“She’s gone!”

Lucas left Sweet P. with Gus and raced to the examining room, where an IV dangled over an empty gurney with blood-streaked sheets. Bloody footprints drunkenly crisscrossed the white-tiled floor.

“She has little feet,” Lucas whispered inanely, lifting a foot when he realized he was standing squarely on top of two toe prints.

Pete yelled, “Nurse!”

A plump nurse in a blue scrub suit, wearing a plastic ID, ambled inside.

“Oh, my God!”

Pete thumbed hurriedly through the missing patient’s chart, reading aloud.

“No name. A Jane Doe. Brought in by a truck driver who found her hitchhiking on the highway. Tested positive for a multitude of legal and illegal drugs. Head injury. Stitches put in by plastic surgeon. Contusions on wrists and ankles. Disruptive. Belligerent. Very confused. Amnesia. Possible subdural hematoma. Refused CAT scan because she went insane when we put her face inside the machine. Claustrophobic.”

“What does all that mean?” Lucas demanded.

“Not good. She’s high as a kite, badly confused.”

“Doctor—” The nurse’s whisper was anxious. “A while ago someone called about her. Said he was family. Sounded very concerned. Described a girl who could have been this girl. Sammy’s new, and I’m afraid she told him we’d admitted a girl matching her description. The caller said he was coming right over. But when Sammy told the patient that a family member was on his way, she became very agitated.”

“Get security on this immediately,” Pete ordered. “This young woman is in no condition to be out of bed. Check the entrances. The parking lots. In her condition she couldn’t have gone far.”

Fire and ice.

Chilled to the bone, burning up at the same time, the barefoot girl shivered convulsively in the parking lot. Her thoughts kept slipping and losing direction like a sailboat in rough waves.

She didn’t know who she was.

Or where she was.

Or who wanted to kill her.

When that freckled nurse had asked her her name, terrible images had rolled through her tired brain.

A name? Something as specific as a name?

“Oh, dear God,” had been all she could whisper brokenly.

She could remember the van rolling, catching fire. She kept seeing a gray face, its hideous vacant eyes peering at her through plastic.

Pain and terror shuddered through the injured girl.

They knew who she was, and they were coming after her.

Her head throbbed. When she tried to walk, her gait was wide. Her feet felt like they didn’t quite touch the ground, and she had the sensation she was about to topple backward.

Crouching low outside the entrance, the girl had tracked blood down the concrete steps because slivers of glass were still embedded in her heels. Her torn, blood-encrusted jeans and hospital gown clung to her perspiring body like a wet shroud.

Vaguely she remembered someone cutting her red T-shirt and her bra off. Patches of yellow hair were glued to her skull. Dark shadows ringed her blue eyes. She kept swallowing against a dry metallic taste in her mouth. She kept pushing at the loose bandage that hid the row of stitches that were yellow with antiseptic. What was left of a heparin lock oozed blood down her arm.

She had to get out of here.

But how? When ambulances and cops were everywhere?

When those two curious boys in the black Lincoln kept jumping up and down and staring restlessly out of the car.

Feeling muddled, she shut her eyes. Her entire life consisted of a few hours and less than half a dozen foggy memories that made no sense. It was as if she was a child again, and there were monsters in the dark.

Only the monsters were real.

She remembered huge headlights blinding her as she’d thrown herself in front of them. She remembered the frightened trucker, lifting her and demanding angrily, “Girlie, what were you trying to do?” Next she remembered the hospital.

The two boys in the Lincoln must’ve grown bored with leaning out the windows because all of a sudden they slithered into the front seat like a pair of eels. They leaned over the dashboard, fighting for control of the radio, holding the seek button down through several stations until they came to rap music. Gleefully they slapped their right hands together, turned the volume up and settled back to listen.

“Boys! That’s way too loud!”

A stout security officer edged between the girl and the Lincoln. The boy with the slicked-back ponytail and the shark-tooth necklace quirked his head out the window again. When his huge mirrored glasses glinted her way, she was afraid he’d spot her.

“Sure, Officer,” he said, clumsily faking a respectful attitude as he thumped the dash with his hand in time to the beat.

The officer lingered a minute or two till the volume was low enough. Only then did he stride away. When he had gone the boy leaned out of the car again, hand still thumping the side of the car as he stared fiercely in the direction of her shadowy hiding place. Twelve, thirteen maybe, he had the surly good looks of a wannabe bad-boy.

The fingers stopped thumping. He yanked off his mirrored glasses and wiggled so far out of the car, he nearly fell.

She heard more sirens in the distance as his gray eyes zeroed in on her.

Dear God.

His sulkily smirking lips mouthed, “Hi.” He started to wave.

She put a finger to her lips in warning as two more squad cars, sirens blaring, rushed into the lot. A dozen officers with hand-held radios jumped out.

She shrank more deeply into the shadows, her pleading eyes clutching the smiling boy’s as a fat cop shuffled over to the Lincoln.

“You been here awhile, kid?”

The sassy smile faded. He gave the cop a sullen nod.

“You seen anything suspicious?”

Sulky silence. Then slowly the black ponytail bobbed. “Yeah.” He pointed toward the alley at the opposite end of the parking lot. “I saw…a girl with a—a bandage on her head. Way over there.”

The cops shouted to the others and they took off in a dead gallop. When they had disappeared, the boys slapped their right hands together.

Then, ever so cautiously, they eased a door open and scuttled toward her. Hovering over her, their dark narrow faces seemed to waver in and out of focus.

They were so alike they could have passed for twins. Not that they were trying to pass. The taller and skinnier of the two had shorter hair, wire-rimmed glasses and pressed jeans. The huskier kid with the ponytail and the gold earring wore rumpled black clothes. A vicious shark tooth dangled from his necklace.

When they leaned down, their hands, shaking, a whirring sound beat inside her ears and made her feel so dizzy and sick, she almost passed out.

She barely felt their hands as they gently circled her. Or heard their frightened whispers.

“We have to help her.”

“But she’s hurt. Look at all those bruises, and her eyes—”

“And her feet! We should take her into the hospital so Uncle Pete—”

“No!” She grabbed their arms, her broken nails digging into their skin, her huge eyes pleading.

“Can’t you see how scared she is?” a young voice croaked hoarsely. “Somebody bad might be after her. We gotta save her.”

“What’ll Dad do?”

The whirring inside her head got louder. Halfcarrying, half-dragging her, they crawled with her to the car and made a bed of lumpy pillows and blankets for her on the floorboard of the back seat. The boys unfolded a blanket and covered her, whispering that if she was quiet they could smuggle her home and hide her in their room until she got well.

The girl lay there, trembling uncontrollably, terrified of the claustrophobic feeling she had because the blanket was over her face.

Only vaguely was she aware of footsteps hurrying, of car doors slamming, of men’s voices talking low in the front seat, of a little girl’s excited shouting. “See there! Got ’em off!”

“Oh-big deal.”

But the girl in the back seat instantly registered a man’s beautiful, gravelly drawl. “Peppin, the officer told me you helped them.”

There was something so familiar about the sound of his voice. Something so warm. It seemed to resonate in her soul.

She knew him. She had loved him. Somewhere. Some time.

“Yeah, Dad. Peppin really helped ’em,” the older boy said.

“Shut up, Monty!” Peppin slugged his brother.

“Hey!”

“Who are all the cops looking for anyway, Dad?”

“Some young girl got high on drugs and had a wreck. It’s a very serious situation. She could die without proper medical attention.”

The girl felt hot all over. Tears pooled in her eyes.

“Die?” Peppin croaked as a key turned in the ignition. His young face bleached a sickly white, he stared at his tearful hideaway.

She shook her head at him, tears escaping under her eyelids.

Peppin sucked in a long, nervous breath. “So— Uncle Pete, what sort of treatment would she need?”

“Hmm?”

“Your patient?”

Peppin bombarded his uncle with questions, demanding specific details.

Once again Peppin’s father praised his son in that deep melodious drawl of his—this time for his intellectual curiosity.

The man’s low voice was husky and somehow devastatingly familiar, and yet at the same time it lulled her. She wanted to go on listening to it, for nothing seemed left in the whole world but that voice wrapping around her.

Who was he? Why did she feel she knew him?

She was too tired for thought, and her eyelids grew heavy again, fluttering down and then rising as she fought to stay awake.

She slept soundly for the first time since the van had rolled and the driver had chased her into those blinding headlights.

She slept, knowing she was safe, because the man with the beautiful voice was near.

Two

Bluish flashes ricocheted in the boys’ bedroom.

It had rained like this the night the blue van had rolled and burned.

What van? Where? Why?

The girl lay rigidly awake, longing for Lucas as she listened to the surf and to the sharp cracking sounds of thunder. Torrents of rain beat a savage tattoo against the bedroom window.

He was two doors down from her. Peacefully asleep in his huge bed, no doubt. Unafraid of the storm and blissfully unaware of the strange woman sleeping in his sons’ bedroom closet.

He might as well have been on the moon.

She stretched restlessly, almost wishing she was as happily unconscious of him as he was of her. But she needed him because he made her feel safe.

Why did her demons always come alive when she closed her eyes in the dark?

She hated feeling shut in and alone, and she felt she was—even though the closet door was louvered and her darling boys were just outside, snugly tucked beneath quilts in their bunk beds, oblivious to the storm and her fears. She lay stiffly on her hidden pallet in their huge closet and stared at the ceiling, watching the lightning that flashed through the louvers and caused irregular patterns of blue light to dance across the walls and hanging clothes.

Her strength had returned rapidly, but, so far, not her memory. Vague illusive images from her past seemed to flicker at the edges of her mind like the lightning, their brief flares so brilliant they blinded her before they vanished into pitch blackness.

Her entire world had become Lucas Broderick’s coldly modern mansion perched on its bluff above Corpus Christi Bay. But more than the mansion’s high white walls and polished marble floors; more than its winding corridors and spiral staircases intrigued her. With every day that passed, she had become more fascinated by Lucas Broderick himself.

From almost that first moment when she had awakened in his sons’ closet to their rush of adolescent chatter, they had made her aware of him.

“What if Dad finds her?”

An audible gasp and then terrified silence as if that prospect was too awful to contemplate.

“You’d better not let him—stupid.”

She had opened her eyes and found their fearful, curious faces peering eagerly at her. She’d had no memory of who they were or how she’d gotten here.

But she’d quickly learned that they were Lucas’s adorable sons, and that they looked endearingly like him.

“She’s awake.”

“Told you she’d live.”

“We’ve got to feed her something or she’ll starve like your gerbil.”

“What’s your name?”

Her name? Blue lights flickered, and she shook her head and made a low moan.

“Pete said she had amnesia, dummy.”

Pete? Who was Pete?

“You hungry?”

“Maybe…some broth,” she whispered.

Their heads swiveled and they stared at each other in round-eyed consternation as if they’d never heard the word. “Broth?”

“Then water,” she managed weakly.

That started a quarrel over who got to fetch it, each of them wanting to.

For ten long days and longer nights those two wonderful boys had fought many battles over the privilege of nursing her. They had checked medical books out of the library. They had cleaned her wounds and doctored them with medicine from Lucas’s huge marble bathroom. They had painstakingly picked the slivers of glass from the soles of her feet with tweezers, plunking the jagged bits into a metal bowl. They had soaked her feet in pails of hot water, and she could almost walk without limping.