Royal Heir. Alice Sharpe
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can’t follow anyone right now,” he said. “I hitchhiked down here when I read that Leo was being sent to you. I was lucky to make it to the airport on time. Come on, Julia, think. There must be something about Nicole that wouldn’t make its way onto a fact sheet and would convince you I was married to her. Some habit, some gesture. Like the way she flipped that mane of hair. The way her eyes could turn you to stone when she was unhappy with you. The obsession with red underwear, the mole on her left thigh, the way she flossed three times a day. Something.”
His description of Nicole was right on the mark. But anyone meticulous enough to dig up George Abbot’s name could dig up all these things as well. On the other hand, she realized she was beginning to give up. If he wasn’t William Chastain, who was he and what did he want with her?
“Okay, I’ll play along,” she said, searching her memory for some obscure detail of Nicole’s life. “I know. Tell me what kind of diet she started after Christmas.”
He looked startled by her question. “I was living on my boat by then. I saw her when I came to see Leo and she did as much to make that next to impossible as she could.
“Besides, she was always on a diet. Wait, we met for lunch in January. She complained she’d gained half a pound over the holidays. Half a pound. I didn’t even know they made home scales that measured down to half a pound. Let’s see. She settled on some kind of seaweed algae smoothie. It looked like bilgewater. Smelled like it, too.”
“It did smell like bilgewater,” Julia said.
“Well?”
“You’re William Chastain?”
“Call me Will. Only Nicole insisted on calling me William.”
“Nicole told me a lot…well, about you.”
“None of it good, right?”
“No, not much.”
His voice softened. “Things were good at the beginning, but you didn’t know her then. By the time you discovered she existed, things had gone sour. My fault as much as hers.”
It was decision time. Julia, trusting her gut instinct, said, “Okay.”
“Does that mean you’ll take me along?”
“Yes. But I’m warning you, I know how to defend myself.”
This time his smile reached his eyes. “I don’t doubt it for a minute,” he said.
WILL CLOSED his eyes. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept without visions of exploding boats tearing him from sleep. Days, maybe. His eyes felt gritty, as though he’d been caught in a sandstorm. His arm throbbed where the car had thumped him. His hip no doubt sported a black-and-blue mark the size of a salad plate.
And he was hungry. For the first time in days, he was hungry.
“When’s the last time you saw Nicole?” he asked. They were just exiting the freeway, Julia driving fast. He found her impatience reassuring.
She didn’t answer.
He’d been thinking about Julia ever since he’d learned his child was to be given to her, handed over by Nicole’s directive. He’d tried to recall what Nicole had said about her cousin. “Mousy and shy” were the terms Nicole had most often used when describing Julia.
He sneaked a look at Julia’s profile. No, she wasn’t flashy like Nicole. It didn’t look as though she spent a lot of time pouting or posturing, either. She came across as a loner. From the first moment he’d spied her in the airport, he’d recognized in her the same aura of isolation he carried inside himself.
Mousy? No. Her brown hair was windblown but luxuriant, her dark eyes intelligent, her tall frame athletic but curvy. She wore her blue jeans like a second skin, and the suppleness of the sable leather jacket set off her hair and eyes while mimicking the smooth texture of her skin.
His hand drifted to the bandage on his arm—her white scarf—ruined now by his blood. Well, no wonder Nicole wrote her cousin off as little more than a babysitter for those times when Leo became an inconvenience. His wife had been a tad egotistical. She seldom picked up on nuances, either, and wouldn’t have differentiated shyness from restraint.
“Two weeks before you were reported dead,” Julia said.
It took him a second to realize she was answering his question.
“Nicole called to ask me if she could leave Leo with me for a weekend. But I was working and I said no.”
Her voice choked up on the last word. He was beginning to understand that Leo’s plight was personal to her. He hadn’t understood how close she’d become to his son.
Okay. Nicole had wanted a weekend free. Out of town, out of state, for that matter. A lover’s tryst with a man whose face and position were too well known to stay close to home while romancing a woman other than his wife? Would Nicole’s chief of police boyfriend come along or would they have met somewhere? He said, “Did she ever bring any friends to your house when she brought Leo over?”
“Friends?”
“Men,” he said.
She darted him a glance and then turned her concentration back to the road. “No,” she said.
“Does it surprise you to hear she had a boyfriend?”
“No,” she said, not looking at him this time. “Tell me why you pretended you were dead and why you let Leo leave Washington.”
He had known this was coming. He’d prepared a few lies. But now, sitting in the dark car, too tired to dissimilate, he chose the truth. “I’m pretty sure Nicole set up my supposed accident. I got a call from a woman claiming to have compromising pictures of my wife and her husband. She said she’d hired a private eye to get them. Told me they were mine for the taking.”
“Why didn’t the woman use them herself?”
“She said she was afraid of her husband. Claimed he was the chief of police. She told me to meet her at a restaurant across the river. The fastest way there was on my boat so I took it. Only someone who knew me well would know that’s what I would do.”
“Nicole, for instance.”
“Of the people interested in our small world of problems, only Nicole. Anyway, I was living on the boat by then so all my papers, everything I valued besides my son, were aboard.”
“And it exploded?”
“It was hit by another boat going like a bat out of hell. I got off in the nick of time. The newspaper the next day said that human remains were found were are being tested for DNA to see which boater they belong to, me or the nameless other guy. Contrary to what television leads us to believe, the testing can take a while. A small speedboat was reported stolen from a nearby marina. Recovered wreckage confirmed that it was the boat that hit mine.”
“But you don’t think it was an accident?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He thought for a moment. “It came right at me. I turned on every light and still it came. The next day I called the chief of police’s house. A servant informed me that the chief’s wife was in the hospital following childbirth complications. Had been for several days. Hard to picture her calling me from a hospital bed, then sneaking out to rendezvous at a restaurant across the river. I don’t doubt the affair. I just doubt the pictures and the setup.”
“So you determined Nicole must have been behind it?”
“Who else? I didn’t want her or the boyfriend to know they weren’t successful. A man in that position has serious clout. I’m just an architect, a relative unknown. I thought if I was declared dead, I could uncover some kind of evidence that would prove Nicole and her lover guilty of attempted