Confessions of the Heart

“I can’t seem to stay away from you.”

The admission stunned her, although Anna wasn’t sure why. She felt the same way, had from the moment she’d first laid eyes on him.

But things had changed between them now. She could sense it. Ben had risked his life to save her, and Anna knew if the situation were reversed, she would have done the same for him. The bond between them was no longer merely a physical attraction, if it had ever been only that. The connection now was deeper, more spiritual and much more complex.

Love at first sight? Anna wasn’t convinced she believed in the concept still, but whatever she and Ben had, it wasn’t going away. Not in a day. Not in a year. Maybe not ever.

Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,

Happy Valentine’s Day! We are so pleased you’ve come back to Harlequin Intrigue for another exciting month of breathtaking romantic suspense.

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Julie Miller returns to her ongoing series THE TAYLOR CLAN with The Rookie. If you go for those younger guys, well, hold on to your hats, because Josh Taylor is one dynamite lawman.

Finally, Amanda Stevens takes up the holiday baton with Confessions of the Heart. In this unique story, a woman receives a heart transplant and is inexorably drawn to the original owner’s husband. Find out why in this exceptional story.

Enjoy all four!

Sincerely,

Denise O’Sullivan

Associate Senior Editor

Harlequin Intrigue

Confessions of the Heart

Amanda Stevens

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in a small Southern town, Amanda Stevens frequently draws on memories of her birthplace to create atmospheric settings and casts of eccentric characters. She is the author of over twenty-five novels, the recipient of a Career Achievement award for Romantic/Mystery, and a 1999 RITA® award finalist in the Gothic/Romantic Suspense category. She now resides in Texas with her husband, teenage twins and her cat, Jesse, who also makes frequent appearances in her books.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Anna Sebastian —Lured to San Miguel by someone from her heart donor’s past, Anna finds a new life, a new love…and an evil she could never have imagined.

Ben Porter —Can he protect the woman he loves from the evil that nearly destroyed him?

Katherine Sprague —Her heart gave Anna a new life. Will her memory destroy Anna’s happiness?

Gwen Draven —She had a love/hate relationship with her sister, Katherine.

Gabriella Sprague —She is the one who found her mother’s body. Is she also the one who lured Anna to San Miguel?

Acacia Cortina —An exotic beauty who claims to be descended from Mayan royalty.

Margarete Cortina —An eccentric woman whose strange beliefs have made her an outcast in San Miguel.

Hays Devereaux —Anna’s ex-husband and a man with a grudge.

Emily Winsome —Her determination to prove Katherine was murdered could be the death of her.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter One

“Someone knows about me.”

Dr. English glanced up from Anna Sebastian’s lab reports and gave her a wink. “Not my wife, I hope.”

“You aren’t married,” she reminded him. And despite what his teasing tone seemed to suggest, Anna was not now, nor would she ever be, involved in a torrid love affair with her doctor.

Not that he wasn’t torrid love affair material. He was a real heartthrob, in fact, with his dark hair, smoldering eyes and a slow, sexy smile that had sent Anna into a tailspin the first time she’d seen it.

But that was before he’d reached inside her chest and literally ripped out her heart.

Since then she’d become immune to that smile. Nowadays she valued Michael English’s expertise as a heart surgeon far more highly than his skills as a lover, although she suspected those skills were considerable.

“Aren’t you even the least bit curious about what I said?” she persisted.

“First things first.” He gathered up the lab reports and gave her a look that was now all business. “How’ve you been feeling?”

“At the moment, like I had a run-in with a vampire.” She put a hand to her neck where a bandage covered the small incision made several hours earlier for her heart biopsy.

Michael scribbled something in her file. “Have the mood swings improved since we eliminated the prednisone?”

“What mood swings?”

“Laurel said—”

“Laurel is a born worrier,” Anna scoffed. “She thinks if I feel the least bit tired or cranky or if I should—God forbid—cough, I’m experiencing rejection.”

He gave her a stern appraisal. “Have you experienced any of those symptoms?”

“No.” Anna shrugged. “I was just trying to make the point that my stepmother worries too much.”

“Any fever?”

“No.”

“Diarrhea?”

“No.” It seemed a shame to have to discuss something so unpleasant with a man like Michael, but Anna was used to it by now. He’d seen her at her worst and then some.

“Shortness of breath, dizziness, irregular heartbeat?”

“No, no and no.” She sighed. “You would think after nearly a year and no major complications, Laurel could relax a bit.” She slanted him a glance. “So could you, for that matter.”

“Anna.” His voice took on the note she didn’t like, the doctor to patient one that told her she was in for another lecture. “You can’t afford to get complacent just because you’ve only had one mild episode of rejection. It could still happen. You have to check your vitals on a daily basis. That doesn’t change. That’s forever. So is taking your medication. Non-compliance is the third-leading cause of rejection.”

“I am taking my meds,” she insisted.

“You never forget?”

“Not once.” The various medications had, thankfully, decreased to a more manageable number from the fifteen in the morning and another fifteen at night she’d been prescribed when she first left the hospital. She still sometimes felt as if she were running a pharmacy out of her medicine cabinet, but she took the pills and the liquids like clockwork every single day. No forgetting. No doubling up on the dosage. Even skipping one time could invite rejection.

Anna knew that only too well. Michael and the rest of her transplant team had hammered it into her head before and after her surgery. She’d had to memorize all her meds, know them by sight and what they were for, before she’d been allowed to leave the hospital.

“Lean forward.” Michael blew gently on the stethoscope before placing the warmed instrument against her back, and then he moved it around to her chest. Next he took her pulse, his brows drawing together in concentration as he counted.

He really was a handsome man. It would have been very easy to cross the line from professional to personal, Anna had to admit. He wasn’t just easy on the eyes, but was charming and funny and he loved to tease her. She couldn’t remember being teased that way since her mother had died of heart failure when Anna was thirteen.

She’d inherited her mother’s bad heart, but not her sense of humor. Always prone to a serious disposition, Anna had become even more intense and driven as a teenager, especially after her father remarried. She’d bitterly rebelled against her stepmother and had cut herself off from her family all through college and law school. Not until Anna learned her father was battling lung cancer had she finally taken the first step toward reconciliation.

She was grateful they’d made their peace before he died, but she knew she hadn’t given him the one thing he’d wanted most—her acceptance of Laurel. Even in their mutual grief, Anna hadn’t been able to warm up to her stepmother.

So it was ironic, she supposed, that Laurel was the one who’d talked her into seeing a doctor when she’d started having dizzy spells, Laurel who’d insisted Anna seek a second opinion when her first cardiologist had sent her home after treating her for an irregular heartbeat.

It was Laurel who moved in and took care of Anna when, several months later, the dizzy spells turned into exhaustion, Laurel who commiserated with her when she had to cut back her caseload at Matthews, Conley and Hart and later, when she had to take an extended leave of absence.

It was Laurel who’d been by Anna’s side when she got the news that in the year since her first diagnosis, her heart had taken a complete nosedive, and a transplant was her only hope.

It was Laurel who’d driven her to the hospital when the call had come that a heart had been found for her.

A new heart. A new life. A new Anna.

At least, she was trying for the latter. Facing her own mortality had made her take a long hard look at herself, and Anna had been a little shocked by what she’d found. Her whole adult life had been focused on her career to the exclusion of all else, including friendships, relationships and family.

The decisions she’d made had been brought painfully home to her when Laurel had kept a lonely vigil at the hospital, when only a smattering of cards and letters from well-wishers had been delivered to her apartment. She’d been forced to accept the unpleasant truth that, except for her stepmother—a woman Anna had treated badly for years—no one much cared whether she lived or died.

Of course, the senior partners at Matthews, Conley and Hart had a financial interest in her survival, but if she’d never made it off the operating table, they wouldn’t have shed any tears. They would have coldly and analytically gone about the business of minimizing the impact of her demise on the firm, perhaps even finding a way to capitalize on it, just as she would have done if she were in their place.

Her ex-husband had once accused her of being a cold, heartless bitch, and she supposed in a lot of ways she had been.

Michael was taking a blood pressure reading, and Anna knew better than to say anything until he was through.

“So,” he said, returning the pressure cuff to the wall over her bed. “What did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said someone knows about you. What did you do?”

“I think someone from the donor’s family knows who I am.”

He lifted his brows in surprise. “That’s impossible. Both the donor and the recipient’s identification are kept anonymous. The surgeons don’t even know who the donors are. The OPOs are designed that way.”

“I realize that, but I don’t know how else to explain the weird things that have been happening to me lately.”

He frowned. “What kind of weird things?”

Anna lay silent for a moment. “This is going to make me sound completely paranoid, but I’ve been getting these phone calls. They always come at night, after I’ve gone to bed, and they usually wake me up. No one seems to be on the line, but I can hear music playing in the background. You know that tune ‘Heart and soul, da-da, da-da, da-da…’ Okay, I’m way off key, but you know the one I mean?”

He gave her a strange look. “You say these phone calls always come at night and they wake you up? Are you sure you’re not dreaming? You’ve been through an ordeal, Anna. Both physically and mentally. Your whole life has changed in a matter of months—”

“I know,” she broke in. “But that’s not it. I’m not dreaming. I think the phone calls have something to do with my transplant.”

“But even if they do that doesn’t mean they’re coming from the donor’s family,” Michael argued. “It could be someone who knows you. Someone with a grudge who’s trying to get under your skin a little.”

She’d thought of that. Her aggressive style as a divorce attorney hadn’t exactly endeared her to the spouses of her clients, or to some of her own colleagues, for that matter. Still, there was something deeply disturbing and symbolic about the phone calls.

“Look,” Michael said. “I don’t want you worrying about this. The last thing you need is added stress.”

“I’m not stressed. God knows some days I feel as if I’m almost comatose.” Anna didn’t exactly miss the pressure cooker environment at the law firm, but a year post-op, she knew it was time to either go back to work on a limited basis or find something else to occupy her time. She couldn’t exist for the rest of her life in a world of little more than meds, naps and daily walks. She knew of other heart transplant recipients who were climbing mountains. She needed a mountain.

“You’re right. It’s probably nothing.” She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I thought I’d mention it, though, in case you want to report a possible security breach to Gift of Life.”

He made a final notation in her file. “A security breach is highly unlikely.”

“Right.” Anna knew of computer experts who could hack into the offshore accounts of major banks to search for hidden assets. In the right hands, she doubted the systems at most organ procurement organizations would present much of a challenge.

Michael slipped his pen into the pocket of his lab coat and closed her file. “You’re doing great, Anna. Your lab and blood work all look good. You keep this up, and I won’t need to see you again for another three months.”

He walked to the door, then turned and gave her a stern look. “But I’m serious about the stress. Don’t get all worked up about these calls. Unplug your phone at night if you have to. Give it a few days, and whoever this joker is, he’ll get tired of his little pranks and move on to something else.”

Move on to something else.

That was exactly what Anna was afraid of.

“SORRY YOU HAD TO WAIT so long,” she told Laurel a little while later as her stepmother carefully navigated her Lexus through the massive Texas Medical Center parking garage.

Laurel smiled. “Don’t be sorry. I know it sounds strange, but I always enjoy coming to the institute. The place is so amazing. Have you seen the Celebration of Hearts exhibit in the museum?”

The Denton A. Cooley Building, which housed the Texas Heart Institute, was indeed a marvel of twenty-first century technology, a state-of-the-art research, education and patient care facility named for one of the pioneers in heart transplant surgery. But Anna’s familiarity with the hospital was limited primarily to the eighth floor. “I never made it down to the museum.”

“Well, you should make a point to. They have a very impressive art collection, and a lot of Dr. Cooley’s personal mementos are on display, as well.” Laurel turned to Anna, her green eyes sparkling with exuberance. “I find something new and fascinating every time I go down there.”

“I’m glad you weren’t bored.” Her stepmother’s zest for life, for even the mundane, never failed to take Anna by surprise, but she supposed that was one of the things that had attracted her father to the petite blonde in the first place. After all this time, Anna could finally admit that Laurel was a lot like her mother. She wondered how different her life might have been if she’d come to that conclusion years ago.

She’d cut herself off so needlessly from the people who loved her, and it was only in looking back, only with the angel of death knocking at her door, that Anna had come to realize it was fear that drove her. Not ambition, not greed, not even her dislike and resentment of Laurel. Fear that if she cared too much, she might end up losing someone else.

Her mother’s death had affected Anna far more than she’d ever been willing to acknowledge, and her father—so much like Anna—had kept his own grief bottled inside. He’d refused to talk about her mother’s death, refused to allow Anna to talk about it. They’d both become very good at pretending and hiding their grief from one another. That was why when he’d brought Laurel home, without any warning, Anna had thought it the worst kind of betrayal.

She hadn’t been able to forgive him, hadn’t wanted any part of their happiness, because by then, she’d found something far more reliable and far less complicated than love. Success. Her professional life was something she had complete control over—or so she’d thought.

Deep in her reverie, Anna stared out the window as they pulled out of the parking garage and merged with traffic on the street. It was raining, and the rhythmic sound of the windshield wipers made her a little drowsy. It was a good thing Laurel was behind the wheel, she decided, resting her head against the back of the seat. Michael had given her the green light to resume driving six weeks after she left the hospital, but on biopsy days, she still had to rely on her stepmother.

Laurel had a few errands to run while they were out, including a stop at the pharmacy to replenish some of Anna’s meds, and by the time they finally left the medical center, it was after three and traffic was already congested. As they headed north on Main Street through downtown, Anna impulsively gestured to a parking garage on the left. “Pull in there.”

Laurel did as she was told, then flashed Anna a quick frown. “You’re not going into the office, I hope.”

Matthews, Conley and Hart occupied several floors of the J. P. Morgan Chase Tower, the tallest building in downtown Houston. Anna’s office was on the eighty-fifth floor, and on a clear day, she could glimpse the Gulf of Mexico. But Houston was a city at the mercy of a subtropical climate and the belching smokestacks from its dozens of oil refineries. A clear day in the downtown area was something of a rare occurrence.

“Anna,” Laurel admonished. “You really should go home and rest.”

“This won’t take long. Just drop me near the lobby, and then you go on home without me. You’ve waited enough for one day.”

“How will you get home?” Laurel worried.

“I’ll walk. I’m up to four miles a day,” she said when her stepmother tried to protest. “I think I can handle a few city blocks.”

“But it’s still raining.”

Anna held up her umbrella. “I’ve got my rain gear, and if it starts coming down harder, I’ll take a cab.”

Laurel found a place to park, then turned to Anna. “I’m worried about you, Anna. I’ve noticed how restless and preoccupied you’ve been lately, and I’m afraid you’re going to do something to jeopardize your health.”

Anna opened the door. “I have something I need to take care of, but it’s nothing for you to worry about. I promise.”

She got out of the car before Laurel could argue further and waved her on. Her stepmother hesitated for a moment, her brows drawn together in a deep frown, and then she reluctantly drove off.

From the lobby in the parking garage, Anna took the escalator down into the tunnels, a six-mile subterranean network that connected most of the major buildings in downtown Houston. The tunnels were air-conditioned and well lighted and contained everything from chiropractic clinics to offbeat boutiques, but somehow Anna could never quite conquer the oppressive feeling of being underground.

Hurrying underneath Travis Street, she rode another escalator up to the sleek glass-and-granite lobby of the Chase Tower, and then waited for an elevator to take her to the sixty-seventh floor where the offices of BMI Global Investigations were located.

The bell pinged and the doors slid open. As Anna stood back for the half dozen or so well-dressed professionals to disembark, she noticed a man at the rear of the elevator. He was taller than the other passengers, which might explain why her gaze was drawn to him. But Anna suspected it had more to do with the long, thin scar that ran from the top of his cheekbone to the curve of his chin. She’d finally gotten used to her own scar so the sight didn’t put her off, but she couldn’t help wondering what had happened to him.

He wasn’t dressed in a business suit as all the others were, but wore instead a dark-colored shirt and pants that seemed out of place in Houston on a muggy, rainy afternoon in July. The humidity outside was killer, but the man seemed oblivious to the weather, his fellow passengers and especially to Anna. He barely glanced at her even when they accidentally brushed shoulders as he got off the elevator.

“Excuse me,” he murmured.

A chill shot up Anna’s backbone. She could feel gooseflesh prickling along her bare arms as she was shuffled to the back of the car. Through the crowd, she caught a glimpse of the man moving quickly away.

But just before the doors slid closed, he stopped suddenly and glanced back, his gaze searching the elevator as he lifted a hand to the back of his neck.

BMI WAS A LARGE private investigation firm founded by two former H.P.D. homicide detectives and an ex-FBI special agent who’d worked out of the field office in Houston for over a decade. They now employed over a dozen certified investigators and a specialized support staff that included computer experts and forensic accountants who were masters at ferreting out hidden assets and undisclosed bank accounts, a service Anna had found invaluable over the years.

Matthews, Conley and Hart used the P.I. firm exclusively, and Anna had worked with all three of the principle investigators at one time or another. They each had their talents and areas of expertise, but she felt a little more comfortable with Tom Bellows. He was the oldest of the three, and he’d always secretly reminded her of her father.

The receptionist did a double take when she first saw Anna step through the doorway, and then she gave her a wary greeting. “Hello, Ms. Sebastian. We haven’t seen you in quite a while. Do you have an appointment?”

No inquiry as to her health, Anna noticed, but she could hardly blame the girl. Before Anna got sick, she would breeze into the office for a quick consultation with one of the investigators, barely giving whoever was behind the desk the time of day. She was ashamed now to admit that she’d never taken the time to learn the receptionist’s name. Nor had she ever noticed how pretty the girl was, with her long, silky hair and crystalline green eyes.

Anna glanced at the brass plate on the corner of the desk and committed the name to memory. “Hello, Juliette. I don’t have an appointment, but I really need to see Tom Bellows. Is he in?”

“Hold on and I’ll check.”

“Thanks.” Anna smiled her appreciation, and the receptionist was clearly stunned by her new, cordial demeanor.

When Juliette hung up the phone, she said in a careful voice, “You can go on back. Mr. Bellows has a few minutes before his next appointment.” She glanced at Anna, and then quickly looked away, as if she wasn’t quite sure how to respond to her.