Overnight Heiress

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.” She had to ask. She had to hear again the words that freed her from a cruel and untrue childhood label—dumb, stupid, slow; Audrey had screamed all of those at her—but she was afraid that somehow she had heard Lucas wrong, had misunderstood, 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 to take that help? Not just in alighting from a car, but in facing what waited for her inside that huge stone house, in facing what waited for her when Blake found out who and where she was?

She lifted her chin and placed her hand in his, taking his help as she stepped from the vehicle and onto the winter green grass bordering the drive.

For a moment his hand closed over hers, wrapping it in a promise of safety and caring and concern that she had no memory of ever knowing, wrapping it in a promise of more, much more. Stunned, she looked up, surprising for no more than a second a look in his eyes that spoke of hunger and longing and a loneliness as great as she had known for most of her life. And then it was gone, replaced by a professional, or perhaps a distant-relation, friendliness.

She drew in a not-quite-steady breath and gave him a shaky smile before turning toward her son. “Come on, Danny,” she said softly. “Let’s go meet this new family of ours.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “It’s for sure they’ve got to be better than the old one.”

Meg let the uncharacteristic bitterness pass without comment. She had felt something similar when faced with the apparent ease of Edward Carlton’s life when contrasted with hers. His studio portrait had proved her mistaken about just how sheltered and comfortable he had been. Something would prove it to Danny, too, but until it did, nothing she said would change his mind.

Double oak doors, framed by a heavily leaded, stained-glass fanlight and matching panels, guarded the entrance to the house. Before their little entourage reached the fiat, protected landing, one of those doors flew open, spilling light out into the darkening night and revealing the tall, stern man of the photograph and a small, delicate young woman as light and effervescent as a butterfly.

“You brought them?” the young woman said. “Sheriff Lambert? You really brought them.”

“Yes, Miss Jennie,” Lucas answered, stepping to Meg’s side to grasp the young woman’s hands. “Now what are you doing running around like this? Aren’t you supposed to be resting?”

The tall, stern man—it had to be Edward, her brother—dropped his hand onto the woman‘s—onto Jennie’s—shoulder. “Yes, she is,” he said. “But you know Jennie.”

He looked out onto the steps, and his eyes—eyes that were achingly familiar to her from all the times she had looked into a mirror—locked with Meg’s.

“Meggie?” he said. “Oh, God.” His voice broke, and Meg saw a glint of moisture in his eyes. “It really is you. Meggie.”

Jennie lifted a hand to grasp Edward’s where it lay on her shoulder. “Of course it is,” she said. But even her voice seemed strangely thick. Then, smiling, she stepped away from Edward’s touch and out onto the porch. “He really wants to do this,” she said to Meg, “but he’s still learning that it’s all right to show his emotions. Give him a little more time, though, and you’ll be able to see the love that’s in him, too.” Then she wrapped her arms around Meg and hugged her tightly. “We’re so glad we found you. Edward’s missed you forever.”

With one last welcoming hug, Jennie stepped back and looked toward the young boy standing slightly behind Meg, a boy who, in spite of his youth, was almost as tall as she. “And you’re Danny. Lucas told us about you when he called from Tulsa, but no one would ever have had to tell me who you are. You’re going to look just like your Uncle Edward.”

Danny shrugged and nodded, clearly unsure of his welcome or how he should act toward this strange woman, in spite of her words. Meg took a comforting step closer to him.

“I suppose you’re too big to admit wanting a hug,” Jennie said to the boy. When Danny shrugged and nodded again, Jennie smiled. “Too bad,” she said as she stepped up to him and wrapped him in an embrace. “Everybody needs hugs.”

Danny didn’t immediately surrender to the embrace, but he didn’t struggle, either. Meg caught him looking at her in questioning wonder and gave him a shrug of her own.

“And everybody needs to come into the house and get out of the night air,” Edward said, stepping back but holding out his hand toward Jennie.

“Yes, Miss Jennie,” Lambert added, looking pointedly at her. “They do.”

Jennie laughed and turned, wrapping one arm over Danny’s shoulder and the other around Meg’s waist. “Then by all means, let’s everybody go inside.”

Only then did Meg notice the lines of pain on the young woman’s face. Only then did she hear the strain in her voice. Curious, she thought, as she let herself and her son be led into the house, down a long, wide hall with hardwood floors and Oriental rugs. Fine English side tables and crystal wall sconces lined the walls on the way to what must have been considered a small room in that house, but which was welcoming and comfortably furnished, with a cheery wood fire burning in the cozy fireplace.

There, Edward firmly but gently led Jennie to a wing chair and stood in front of her until she grinned at him and settled herself in the chair. Then, as though not really sure of the etiquette—and who could be, Meg wondered—he gestured toward the other chairs in the grouping. “Please,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable. I—” He broke off with a short laugh. “I really don’t know what to say next. And I suppose you are as much in the dark as I am.”

He turned fully toward her. He was tall. As tall as Lucas Lambert who stood beside him, although he was leaner and didn’t have the look of being battle scarred that Lambert wore so unconsciously. And it was more than just his eyes that were familiar to her from her time at the mirror.

“Meggie,” he said again, and his voice made her name a prayer. “I knew—I knew it had to be you when your prints matched,” he told her. “And Lucas told us how much—how much you bore the family resemblance. But, God!...”

Jennie reached for his hand and grasped it.

Edward straightened and glanced toward Lambert. “You’ll stay for dinner?” he asked.

Lucas shook his head, and Meg felt an unreasonable sense of betrayal at being abandoned by him. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got work stacked up at the office and more coming as a result of today.” He turned toward Jennie. “You take care of yourself, now,” he said softly.

He looked again at Edward. “The news shouldn’t break for a few days, but if you need me, you know to call.”

He turned toward Danny. “You’re a fine young man,” he said, and Megan heard in his words a goodbye, to Danny and to her. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

And then he turned toward her. “And—and it’s been a pleasure meeting you, too, Meg. If you need anything...”

Meg shook her head, stopping his polite offer. “Thank you, Sheriff Lambert,” she said. So, it was to be Lucas Lambert, the sheriff, with whom she dealt in the future, and not Lucas Lambert, the man. For a while she had wondered. For a while she had almost let herself hope. “You’ve been more than kind. I appreciate all you’ve done for us.”

Tully Wilbanks, his first deputy, was still on duty when Lucas arrived at headquarters. He summoned Tully back to his office and waited until the deputy shut the door. Then he shrugged out of his suit jacket and draped it across his chair. Stretching once, he sighed and leaned against the desk.

“Tough trip?” Tully asked.

Lucas shook his head. “Surprising, but not strenuous.”

“Was she?”

Was she Megan Carlton and not an impostor? It was amazing how many normally intelligent people thought someone who didn’t claim to be anyone other than a single mother and daytime bartender could be scheming to be Megan Carlton. Even he had, he remembered. At first. “She is.”

“Wow. I guess now we’re going to have reporters and feds crawling all over the place.”

“Reporters, maybe,” Lucas admitted. “But not too many feds. At least not for a while.”

“Okay,” Tully said. “We can handle the press. We’ve still got the plans we worked out when that British rock star came to visit his cousin.”

Plan B. Everyone talks about one. We actually had one. And an A and even a C.

“Tully?”

“Yeah, Lucas?”

“We may be getting a call from a Blake Wilson. He’s a detective with the Simonville, California, PD, although he may claim some previous DEA connection. He’ll be asking for professional consideration, and he may claim he has visitation rights with his son. He doesn’t get either.”

Tully’s left eyebrow went up a quarter of an inch, but he made no comment, only nodded his understanding.

“If he shows up,” Lucas went on, “I’m to be notified the moment he sets foot in this jurisdiction, and he’s not to be allowed anywhere near Meg Carlton or her son without an escort. Will you make that clear to the department?”

Again Tully nodded.

“And will you see if you can find a picture of him, probably from the DEA, without letting him know?”

“Is he dangerous?”

Lucas considered that for a moment. “He’s a cop,” he said finally, “so he will be armed. He’s a cop,” he said, letting his distaste show, “who broke his ten-year-old son’s arm.”

After Tully left, Lucas leaned back in his leather chair, toed open a bottom desk drawer and propped his feet on the rim. Meg Wilson—Meg Carlton—had been quite a surprise for him. And he was pretty sure he had been a surprise for her—over and above the obvious stunning news of the day.

He’d felt the moment she became aware of him and of the attraction he’d felt for her. He let a rueful smile twist his face at the memory of that one brief moment, standing in front of her brother’s home with her son watching as he helped her from the car: one brief moment that had no time to go anywhere before he surrendered her to her new brother and to her new life.

What on earth had made him think this woman needed him? Meg Wilson might have. But Meg Carlton? Not too likely. At least, not after the ordeal of the next few weeks had passed.

But until then, she did.

Oh, yes. Until then, she definitely did.

And did he need her? He suspected that he did. He suspected—hell, he knew, damn it!—that sometime between watching her being led into the interrogation room and helping her from the car in her brother’s driveway, he had grown to need the surprising, gentle, stubborn, competent and insecure woman that Meg Carlton had become.

His chair was too well constructed and maintained to squeak when he pushed out of it, but his desk drawer closed with a satisfying slam.

He couldn’t need her. He couldn’t take from another person. Not again. Not ever. And he was afraid that if he ever admitted to needing Meg Carlton he’d want to take, have to take, and it wouldn’t matter then how much he had to give, because it would never be enough.