The Pretender (12 page)

I went in with my hat in my hand, and there she was with her beautiful face and her sea-green eyes all drenched in tears, and makeup running like watercolors in the rain. “Now, Barbara, honey,” I said, “what’s all this about?”

And, being the queen of drama she was, she collapsed in a heap on the floor at my feet, sobbing as if her life was
all but over. Which, I guess, to her way of thinking, maybe it was, considering how things were, back then.

I went down on one knee beside her and took her in my arms, but she fought me like a tiger. “I’m pregnant!” she screamed, and then she cussed me with language I’d never heard coming from such a lovely mouth. But it was what she told me next that made my blood run cold.

She couldn’t
bear it, she said, meaning the scandal, I guess, rather than the child she was carrying. It would mean the end of her career, she said, and how could she go back to her folks in Omaha in disgrace? Then she gave me an ultimatum: Either I would find a way to “fix it”—that was the way she put it—or she would, even if it killed her. Which again, in those days, it might well have done.

Well,
anyway, I had good reason to believe she meant what she said. And I thought of my son, who I hardly ever saw since his mother and I had become all but strangers to one another. And I knew what I had to do.

“Now, Barbara, honey, calm down, there’s no need to do that,” I told her, “because it’s gonna be okay. I’m gonna marry you.”

And that’s what I did.

There was a scandal, of
course. The movie gossip rags—that Louella Parsons woman, for one—heaped coals of fire on my head for leaving my wife and son to go and marry a starlet I’d been having an affair with. But then, when the baby was born they couldn’t get enough pictures of Barbara Chase, looking radiant and happy, like an angel, holding her beautiful little bald-headed pink-and-white baby girl.

But she still
had her dark times, Barbara did. And it was during one of those times, when I was off in Nevada shooting another movie, that she left the baby with her nanny and drove up Pacific Coast Highway to a lonely spot she’d always loved, and she left her clothes lying on the sand and walked naked into the ocean. Just kept on walking and never looked back.

Sam dropped the pages into the drawer
and slammed it shut, then leaned back in the chair and stared out the window at the meadow stretching off into the morning sunshine. Looked nice out there, but a mean gust of spring wind was blowing a spattering of pine needles across the porch.

“Well, hell,” he said to the wind, “what was I gonna do with a child? No more than a baby, and a girl-child, at that. Letting those Omaha folks
take her—sure seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

The right thing? You mean, the easy thing—for you, anyway.

The wind skirled away across the meadow grass, leaving its accusing whispers behind in the pines.

Being a habitual late-riser, Abby wasn’t used to having so many daylight hours to fill.

After returning to the hacienda to find her bed made and Pia curled
up asleep in the middle of it, she went off to find Josie, intending to offer to help with the rest of the house-cleaning. Or laundry. Or fixing lunch. Or…whatever. But Josie didn’t let her get the words out of her mouth before shooing her off with orders to “relax and enjoy” herself.

When had such a thing happened to her before in her whole entire life? Ever. Even that weekend in the Adirondacks
with Sunny hadn’t been what she could call relaxing; Sunny wasn’t relaxing company.

She did give it a try. She went into the big study, or library, or den—the room off the front foyer with the desks and books and computers in it—and tried to figure out how the sleek, latest-model computer worked, having some idea that she should check her email. But it appeared to need some sort of order
she didn’t know how to give it, and since she didn’t want to bother Josie, she figured she’d wait until Rachel and the sheriff got home and ask them to show her how to work it.

She browsed through the shelves of books and found one she’d been meaning to read, which she took back to her room. She stretched out with it on a comfortable lounge chair outside on the veranda with her head in the
shade and her feet in the sunshine and the breeze rustling the leaves on the climbing roses above her head. But she couldn’t seem to get into the book. Thoughts kept getting in her way.

Specifically, thoughts of Sage.

He kept sneaking into her mind, watching her with that little smile on his lips and his deep, dark somber eyes, leaning against a barn door frame in that graceful way
he had, smiling as if he knew she was aware of him and amused by that fact. It probably should have annoyed, or at least concerned her that he could distract her so easily when she had so much on her mind and her situation here was so precarious. But when his smiling face came into her thoughts, all it did was make her want to smile, too. And if she closed her eyes she could feel his touch, his hand
firm and sure on her elbow, his body solid and steady against her back, his arms wrapped around her, so warm and yet…she’d felt the prickle of goose bumps over every inch of her skin, and her hardened nipples almost hurt where they rubbed against his arm. Even now, remembering, she shivered as if a million tiny pinpoints of light were dancing over her skin.

Wow.
It had been a long time since
a man—or anything else, for that matter—had made her feel so alive.

Yes—alive.
And that was the problem. Not that she was bored. Far from it. With everything so new and strange, she wanted to be out exploring it, wanted to see everything there was to see. Reading a book…she felt like a kid trying to concentrate on schoolwork when spring had sprung and the sun was shining and birds were singing
outside the windows.

Only now, here, there was no teacher telling her she had to stay until the bell rang.

She closed the book and went to find Josie to let her know she was going out again. She could hear a vacuum cleaner humming somewhere far off down the hallway, but didn’t like to venture into parts of the house she hadn’t been shown, so she let herself out the front door and started
off down the winding drive.

She walked quickly, at first, with her head down, as if she had someplace important to go, some appointment to keep—before it occurred to her that there was no need to rush for anything. She was accustomed to power-walking through the streets of New York City, but here she could simply stroll, if she wanted to. On the way to nowhere in particular, she could pause
and look up at the sky to follow the flight of a huge black bird, or drop to her knees to examine a never-before-seen flower blooming in the grass beside the lane. Accustomed to always having appointments or work schedules to keep, here, if she wanted to, she could wander off on a quest to discover the source of that strange croaking sound and completely lose track of her original purpose—if there
had been one. Accustomed to constant worry about things that seemed to pose imminent disaster, here all her worries seemed far away.

Even the fact that she was pretending to be someone she wasn’t seemed not worth worrying about now. Until either Sam Malone or his lawyer contacted her, there wasn’t anything to be done about it anyway, so she could just…put it out of her mind.

And that
was easier to do than she could have imagined, in this place so far away and so very different from the world she and Sunny had shared. She was growing comfortable in the role she’d taken on. The role of Sunshine Wells.

Putting Sage out of her mind wasn’t so easily done.

His face hung in her mind like a moon in the sky, seeming to follow her wherever she went, and if she let herself,
she knew, she could pull the memories of that morning close again, until they touched even her senses. But what would that do but fill her with longing, that aching nostalgia for something she’d never had? What good would it do to daydream, when, like his home and his family, Sam Malone’s ranch manager wasn’t and could never be hers?

As much as she would have liked to go back to the barn
and visit the calves again—he’d told her she could, anytime—she didn’t feel strong enough to hold those longings at bay just now. So, to avoid encountering Sage she climbed through a barbed wire fence and struck out across the pasture where she’d seen the horses grazing. It seemed safe enough; she could see they were all far away down at the other end of the pasture and didn’t appear interested in
her in the slightest. And even if they were, she’d never heard of horses attacking anyone.

And unlike cows, they didn’t have those giant horns.

As she made her way across the pasture she came upon a large patch of charred ground, and remembering what Sage had told her about Carlos Delacorte coming for Rachel’s baby, his grandson, realized this must be where the helicopter had crashed
and burned. She shivered in the warm sunshine, thinking about the fact that three men had died here on this very spot, even if they were, according to Sage, very bad men. Now, looking at the black blot on the lovely green meadow, she felt certain there must be more to the story than she’d been told.

But of course, that, too, was something she had no real right to. Especially if it involved
Sam Malone. He and his family were actually none of her business. None whatsoever.

When she continued, making for the line of trees on the far side of the pasture, she discovered the horses were following her—at a distance. Evidently, they’d spotted her and come to check out the tall, yellow-haired trespasser. There were six of them, and although they were every bit as big as the ones she’d
petted in Central Park, and running loose besides, she didn’t really feel afraid. Her heart quickened, sure—whose wouldn’t, in the presence of such magnificent beasts? But the horses seemed merely curious and wary, content to follow along to see what she was up to.

The sun was high and hot, and by the time she reached the trees she was grateful for their shade. Grateful, too, for the water
in the little creek that ran chuckling softly through them, winding its way between banks that alternated between boulders and meadow grass and copses of willows. The water was icy cold, she discovered when she dipped her hands in it, but it felt good to bathe her face and neck even though it made her gasp.

She sat on a rock, remembering what Rachel had told her about going down to the creek
and meeting an old man on horseback, and later finding out he was none other than her grandfather, Sam Malone.

Maybe he’ll show up again,
she thought. But of course, he didn’t.

Refreshed and ready to move on, she thought about crossing the creek and climbing the rocky, shrubby hill beyond, but decided she didn’t really want to get her shoes wet. So instead, she turned right and followed
the creek upstream, and the horses stood in a tight little cluster and watched, almost, she thought, as if they were sorry to see her go.

After climbing through another barbed wire fence, she found herself directly behind the old farmhouse and barns, though screened from the buildings themselves by corral fences and an orchard of some sort. Beyond the ranch house, the meadow narrowed and
became a ribbon of emerald-green that snaked upward between slopes dotted with boulders and shrubby trees, toward mountains where sheer granite cliffs interrupted the deep blue-green of pines. Here and there on barren slopes were splashes of brilliant orange, like spilled paint. Abby thought she’d never seen anything more beautiful.

Then, for some reason the scene in
The Sound of Music
—the
movie, not the Broadway version—where Maria whirls around in the meadow on the mountain and bursts into song, popped into her mind.
Oh, if only I could sing!
But she couldn’t, and so she closed her eyes and held out her arms and turned in a slow, rapturous circle while the music swelled gloriously in her head.

Except, she realized, the music wasn’t only inside her head. Some of it was real.

She stopped whirling and stood motionless…poised…listening. Listening to a sound so soft and pure and sweet, it seemed almost to be part of the morning, the meadow, the mountains. It hovered in the air, balanced like a bird on the wind, a song without a tune, so haunting it made her throat ache.

She began to move again, led by the sound.

Chapter 7

S
he almost didn’t see him at first. As the meadow wound upward it had grown increasingly narrow, hemmed in by the creek on one side and the steep mountain slope on the other, the swath of wind-rippled grass surrounding outcroppings of granite boulders like flood waters swirling around islands in their path. On one of these islands of piled rocks, Sage sat cross-legged,
naked to the waist, his long straight hair loose down his back and blowing in the breeze. But for that slight telltale movement and the music he was making, he might have been part of the earth itself. She halted and stood rooted in the meadow grass, her breath stolen by the sheer beauty of him, and the sound of the wooden flute he played.

He had to have seen her; from where he sat his view
of the meadow, the ranch and the valley below must have been all-encompassing. But the music of the flute continued as though she were no more an intrusion than the sun on his shoulders or the wind in his hair. So, after a moment she hitched in a breath and went on climbing, making her way toward him and the rock pile he commanded like a prince his castle. Her heart pounded harder with every step
she took.

Sage watched her approach from beneath his lashes, eyes half-closed, a slow heat building in his belly and a sense of inevitability calming his mind. He’d taken his flute and time out in the middle of his working day to do just that—calm his mind and reconcile the burning attraction he’d been developing toward Sunshine Wells with the knowledge that she wasn’t for him, for so many
reasons. And it hadn’t worked. Normally, playing his flute relaxed his body and cleared his head, but today, images of a tall woman with golden hair danced across the blank screen of his mind in perfect harmony with his music, and it became as seductive as a siren’s song.

And then…the image in his mind became real. And the peace that had eluded him came and filled him like the warmth of
a rising sun.

He waited until she was standing below him, then stopped playing and laid his flute across his lap. He didn’t speak.

She said, “That was lovely. Please don’t stop.”

He shrugged, smiled a little. “The song was finished.”

“Oh.” Her face, her eyes were hard for him to read. There was something vulnerable about the way she gazed up at him, expectant…hopeful…but
defensive, too.

Fully aware of the danger in doing so, he leaned over and held out his hand. She hesitated, her eyes resting on the healing scar that ripped across his upper arm. But she didn’t remark on it, just gripped his hand and came up onto the rock beside him. She let go of his hand and for a moment balanced there, poised on the balls of her feet, eye-level with him, her face so close
to his he could feel the warm flow of her breath across his lips.

The urge to bring her closer still…to tip her into his lap, say, and if she didn’t object, kiss her senseless, was like an electric current running through his body. It took all his will to quell it, to keep himself still with his hands relaxed, cradling the flute that lay across his thighs.

The moment passed. She wiggled
around and settled herself beside him on the rock and lifted her hands to hold wind-blown strands of hair away from her face.

“That’s a Native American flute, isn’t it? Can I see it?”

Wordlessly, he passed the flute over to her and she took it and held it with what seemed like reverence.

“It’s beautiful.” She looked up at him. “Did you make it?”

He shook his head. “Not
this one. I have an uncle—great-uncle, actually, my mother’s uncle—who makes them. But I guess I lack either the patience or the skill. Or both. I bought this one.” He smiled. “Online, of course.”

She smiled back. “Of course.” Her gaze skipped across his scar and went back to the flute.

So did his, and he watched her fingers as they moved over the smooth length of carved wood, almost
caressing it. Juices flowed in the back of his throat, as if he were a starving man gazing at a laden banquet table.

“How do you—” she asked, at the same time he said, “Would you like to—” and her face lit up and she whispered, “May I?”

“If you don’t mind my germs,” he said with a smile and a shrug. The thought was in his mind:
No more germs than you’d get from kissing me.

Then
he watched her lift the flute slowly to her lips, her eyes shining brightly as they clung to his, and he knew as surely as if she’d spoken out loud the same thought was in her mind.

Abigail, what are you doing?
Voices of warning shrieked in her head. She ignored them all.

The instrument was warm, like a living thing. Warm from the sun, perhaps…or from
his
hands, his breath. Thinking
of the way she’d seen him hold it, the way his mouth had formed around it, she closed her eyes and placed the mouthpiece against her lips and blew, expecting to produce the same lovely sound she’d heard floating across the meadow.

Not quite.

“Oh,” she said, opening her eyes to regard him with dismay. “What am I doing wrong?”

His smile was gentle. “Nothing. It just takes practice,
is all. Here…like this.” He took the flute from her and raised it once more to his own lips, and in a moment the air was filled with that sweet haunting sound.

Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes; her throat ached. Her chest grew tight with so much longing, she feared there wouldn’t be room for her heart to beat. She thought she’d never wanted anything so much as she wanted now to lean over,
take the flute from his mouth and put her mouth where it had been. The desire to touch him was overwhelming, the desire to stroke that beautiful sun-warmed skin, trace the terrible scar that marred it with her fingers. To lay her face against his chest and breathe the scent of him deep into her lungs…into her very soul.

Appalled and desperate, she closed her eyes and turned her face away
from him. The music ceased abruptly.

“Here…” his voice was a soft rumble. “Try it again.”

She shook her head and smiled at him across her shoulder. Smiled through pain. “You go ahead. I’ll just listen.”

He shrugged and put the flute to his mouth, and again the music lifted into the afternoon sunshine, a melody without form or pattern, like the clouds floating across the sky,
or the wind stirring through the meadow grass.

To keep her mind from returning to dangerous, forbidden paths, she closed her eyes and tried to let the music fill her empty places, as her body moved to its rhythms. But sitting beside him, so close beside him the heat and scent of his clean, masculine body seemed all around her, so close the wind-lifted feathers of his hair brushed her skin…
It began to be agony. Unable to bear it any longer, needing to distance herself from it, she slid down off the rock and onto the grassy slope below.

The sharpness of the loss he felt when she left him both astounded and alarmed him. But he was strong, and forced himself to play on without faltering through the searing pain in his belly, the ache in his throat and the tumult in his mind.

Can’t do this. Can…not…do this. God help me…

Then…instead of walking away, heading back down the mountain as he’d thought she intended, she paused just below the rocks on which he sat and began to dance.

Dance…but like no kind of dancing he’d ever seen before. He didn’t think she meant to be seductive; she seemed completely unself-conscious, all but oblivious to his presence. It
was more, he thought, as if she couldn’t help herself, the music was inside her, part of her, and she simply had to move as it bade her.

Watching, he felt something swell inside him, something he’d never felt before and couldn’t have put a name to if he’d tried. Fully aware that he might be caught up in some sort of spell, and that it could prove to be nothing but disastrous for him, he
began to play again, reaching for her with his music, speaking to her in that language, touching her in a way he wanted to but couldn’t allow himself to, not physically.

And though she never once looked directly at him, he knew from the movement of her body that she understood his language, and that she was speaking back to him in a language all her own. Using only her body she created patterns
of incredible beauty, patterns that interpreted his music in ways that made him think she must see inside his mind. The vision of a blackbird filled his mind, or a sunflower, or a lion or a doe, his flute painted it in sound, and he watched, fascinated, as the woman in the meadow recreated his vision using only the movements of her body. It was sorcery…magic.

He ran out of breath, and feeling
as if he’d run a marathon, slowly lowered the flute to his lap. She turned once more and smiled at him, flushed and windblown.

“Nice,” he said, fully aware of the inadequacy of it.

She held out her hand and made a beckoning motion with her head, winsome as a child. “It’s fun. Come on, you try it.”

He shook his head, knowing his smile had gone awry. “Dancing’s not my thing,” he
said, but grabbed up his shirt as he slipped down from his rocky perch and went to join her anyway.

She waited until he was standing before her, then smiled into his eyes and murmured, “Chicken… I dare you.”

He had a fleeting vision of the two of them, as if watching a snippet of film—a movie, or a music video. Facing each other in the middle of a grassy meadow, he the taller, mainly
by virtue of being on the uphill side, he with his hair blowing free in the wind, hers pulled back in a chaste bun but with mischievous tendrils floating like feathers around her face. He could see himself lifting a hand to her cheek, bending his face to hers…could almost feel her hand touching his waist, feel its warmth on his naked skin. His belly writhed with wanting.

Hastily, he corralled
his hair, twisted and clubbed it at the nape of his neck and secured it with the rubber band he’d placed on his wrist for that purpose. She watched him with shimmering eyes, lips slightly parted.

“Not chicken,” he said in a husky growl. “Just wise.”

In spite of the breeze the heat in that meadow seemed oppressive. He could see a pulse beating in her throat. His imagination wanted to
take him there, wanted to see him pressing his mouth to that spot.

But if I take your hand…if I let myself touch you…can I make myself stop there? Can you…will you stop me there?

“Wise.” Her gaze brushed his scar, then shifted to his chest, and she nodded.

He watched a shutter come down across her eyes, and the fragile skin around them fluttered. Beneath her flawless skin, vivid
now with sun and exertion, he could see the muscles of her face tighten and draw up. She reminded him of a hurt child bravely determined not to cry, and his own throat ached with regret. He might have reached for her even then…was a heartbeat away from it. Then she looked away and laughed softly.

“Maybe so,” she said, and her eyes slid back to him, teasingly now, “but you’re still a chicken.”
She turned and started off down the hill, and the spell was broken.

“Maybe so,” he said, catching up with her and matching his strides to hers. After a moment he added, “But so are you.”

She threw him a quick, furtive look. And although he caught a glimpse of the old fear, now that he thought he knew its cause, it no longer troubled him. “Me? How?”

He shrugged. “You won’t sing,
you won’t ride a horse. I have my reasons for not dancing with you. Can you say the same?”

She made that snorting sound. “Well, for starters, I can’t sing. Seriously. I can’t.”

“Nonsense. Anybody can sing. What you mean, is, you don’t sing
well.
”

“Same difference.”

He didn’t argue the point with her. “What about horseback riding? Only reason I can think of why you wouldn’t
want to do that is fear.” They walked in silence for a few paces while she stared at her feet. “Chicken,” he prodded gently.

Her head came up and her eyes lashed at him, suddenly the deep slate-gray of storm clouds. Then just as suddenly she smiled, and he could see why she’d been given the name Sunshine. “Okay, if I let you teach me how to ride, how ’bout you let me teach you to dance?”

“Who said I
can’t
dance?”

“You said—”

“I said it’s not my
thing.
I never said I
couldn’t
dance.”

“Okay, now you’re just waffling. Come on—you teach me to ride, I teach you to dance—the way I do, not the Texas Two-Step, or whatever they do out here. Is it a deal, or not?”

He tried to think about it, tried to think of all the reasons it was a bad idea. His mind was a
blank. After a moment he nodded. “Okay. Deal.” He halted and looked over at her while he shrugged his shirt on. “Shall we start tomorrow?”

She paused, too, and her eyes followed his fingers as they worked their way up the row of buttons. He knew he didn’t imagine the hunger in them. “Why tomorrow? Why not now?”

Still buttoning, he jerked his head toward the barns, looming close below
them now. “Chore time. Got hungry animals to feed.”

There was a hiss of breath, and he saw her teeth dent the pillow of her lower lip. Couldn’t help but notice how soft it looked…how inviting. “Can I help?”

He was silent while he buttoned the last button. “It’s dirty work,” he said as he walked on, leaving his shirttail untucked and flapping in the breeze, because no way was he going
to unbuckle and unzip in order to tuck it in with her watching him. “Carrying hay, shoveling out calf stalls…”