Patricia Potter (46 page)

No one here knew anything about that night. No one had ever connected Meara Evans with the twenty-one-year-old kidnapping and death of the supposed kidnapper. Lisa knew nothing about it. Neither did Kelly. Kelly’s family had come to the island years after the club closed, and none of the old members of the Jekyll Island Club returned after the state took ownership. And while Meara had personally maintained loose ties with the Connors, she had always managed to arrange roadblocks to keep them from meeting Lisa. She did not want an unintentional word to rip her fabric of lies.

Lisa emerged from her room, wearing a blouse and slacks, her long blond hair pulled back carelessly in a ponytail.

So young. I want you to be young forever.
But Meara held her tongue and merely smiled. “Ready?”

“You’re sure you want to go?” Lisa said, worry etched on her face as she saw her mother’s tense expression.

No. I don’t
. “Of course,” Meara said instead. “It’ll be good for both of us.”

Lisa smiled, some of the old brightness in it.

“We’ll wow them,” she said.

“You already wow Kelly.”

Lisa tipped her head. “You think so?”

“I know so, young lady. Let’s go. We’re already late.”

Chris arrived at the Tabor home exactly on time, and immediately knew he had dressed too formally. Kelly Tabor was dressed in slacks and a polo shirt, his mouth stretched in a wide welcoming grin. “I should have told you we do things rather informally down here.”

Chris was, if anything, resilient. With an easy grin of his own, he slipped off his jacket and tie, and rolled up his sleeves.

“Much better,” Kelly said. “Come meet my mother. Meara and Lisa haven’t arrived yet.”

Chris hesitated. “Before they do, I would like to make an appointment with you. Tomorrow morning, if possible. I have to convey a temporary power of attorney.”

“No problem,” Kelly said. “I have a court date in the morning, but my legal secretary can handle the power of attorney easily. I’ll talk to her first thing, and you can come in any time after nine.”

“Thanks.”

“For business? Hell, I have to thank Meara. How long do you plan to be here?”

“Two to three weeks, possibly longer.”

Kelly nodded. “If you need anything else—” Just then a woman, tall, slender and of an age comparable to Chris’s, entered the room. Her auburn hair was tinged with gray, and she had the warm brown eyes of her son. “Mr. Chandler?”

Kelly’s mouth twitched. “If you wait a moment, Mother, I’ll introduce you properly. Chris Chandler, my mother, Evelyn Tabor. Mother, this is Chris Chandler.”

Evelyn smiled at him warmly and held out her hand. “I understand you’re a friend of Sanders’s and Meara’s.”

Feeling the fraud he was, Chris nodded. “I was sorry to hear of Sanders’s death. He was a good man.”

“That he was,” Evelyn said. “We miss him, too.”

“Can I get you a drink?” Kelly interjected.

“Scotch and water if you have it.”

Kelly nodded.

“Light on the Scotch,” Chris added.

Kelly disappeared into the other room.

Chris turned all his attention to Evelyn. “It was kind of you and Kelly to invite me. I travel a lot, and it’s very nice to get a home-cooked meal.”

“I don’t know how home-cooked it is. Kelly’s cooking some steaks outside. He thought you might enjoy that more.”

“Sounds perfect,” Chris said, glancing casually around the house, trying to stifle the desire to look at the door, toward the windows. “You have a lovely home here.”

“Thank you. My husband built it, along with several other homes on the island.”

“A builder?”

“No, a lawyer, but he was interested in many things. Too many. He died two years ago of a heart attack. He could never slow down.”

“I’m sorry,” Chris said.

“Don’t be,” Evelyn said with a smile. “He lived exactly the way he wanted to.”

“And is your son like that?” Don’t pry, Chris told himself. But, damn it, he wanted to know everything about Kellen Tabor. He wanted to know if he was an ally. And if he kept talking, perhaps he wouldn’t be quite as nervous as he was. Christ, he was a bundle of nerves.

“No. Kelly’s a good attorney, and he often works long hours but he also can enjoy a sunset. My husband never could.”

The doorbell rang just as Kelly returned to the room, holding two glasses. Chris took one, and Kelly held the other while Evelyn answered the door.

They were both beautiful. His daughter. And…Meara. He allowed himself only a moment to study them both: Meara’s stiff expression, Lisa’s curious one as she looked his way.

Kelly quickly made the introductions to Lisa, who looked up at Chris with two of the widest blue eyes he had ever seen. Chris took her hand for the briefest of seconds, just long enough for politeness, before he did the same with Meara, but it was Meara who snatched her hand away, and Chris wondered if she’d felt the same impact as he had. His hand felt like fire.

“It’s good to see you again, Meara,” he said, and his smile broadened at the almost wistful look she gave him. But her mouth smiled. A little. Mechanically. And he knew that whatever he was feeling, she was probably even more uncertain, more apprehensive.

It was Lisa who broke the sudden silence. “Kelly said you knew my father.”

My father.

“Only slightly,” Michael said. “But I liked him.” True enough. Liked. Admired. Envied.

She gave him a smile, slow and sad and incredibly sweet, that slid straight into his heart, and he knew he had already started storing memories. Just as he had with Meara. Memories that would have to be like snapshots, indelibly etched in his mind, for he would have nothing else. In a few weeks he would be gone, out of her life once more, and it was better that way. For her. For Meara.

But hell for him. Just this brief taste of what could have been.

“I want to know all about how you knew him,” Lisa said, her face serious and intense.

“Later,” Kelly said. “Right now, I require an assistant cook.”

Lisa grinned suddenly, making her face startlingly beautiful. “To keep you from burning everything.”

“An infamy,” Kelly decried with twinkling eyes that admitted the accuracy of her charge.

“But true,” Lisa said with the insistence of a long time friend. But she gave Chris an apologetic smile and left the room with Kelly.

“Gin and tonic, Meara?” Evelyn asked.

“Yes, thank you.”

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

Don’t go.
Meara nodded.

After she left, Meara turned to face Chris. She had to remember. His name was Chris, not Michael. His smile had come so easily with Lisa, but then it always had. He could turn charm on and off as abruptly as a water faucet. There was no sign of the same tension, the same heartbreaking apprehension as there was in her. It seemed as if he had met a complete stranger. The dark side of her felt resentment. Then reason took hold. What, for Heaven’s sake, had she wanted him to do? Grab Lisa and declare everything? She bit her lip, trying to make sense of something that had no sense.

“Meara?”

His voice was low, pleading, as if he understood.

She turned slowly.

His face was as it had been, seemingly relaxed, but the side of his mouth twitched with something like anxiety, and his hand raked his hair in a way she recognized. He only did so in times of great stress. That she did know.

But while she admired his control, she hated it too. Had always hated it. It had covered so much duplicity.

“Yes?” she managed coolly.

“She’s…lovely.”

“And young…too young for all this—” Meara’s voice broke. “Too young to know…terror.”

“So were you, Meara.” For a second the control was gone, his voice reaching out to her, his eyes beseeching in a pleading way she had never seen before.

“I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to her.”

“Nothing will.” There was so much pained emotion in his assurance, yet confidence too. It gave her confidence. She looked at him and wondered how seconds ago she could have believed he was taking the meeting lightly. He was hurting. As much as she ever had.

She knew that. And she knew something else in that instant.
She still loved him.
No thought she’d ever had was more frightening, more cataclysmic. But now as she saw the raw pain and defeat and loneliness in his eyes and felt its impact, she knew she had never stopped loving him. And never would.

He must never know. For her daughter’s sake. For her own sake. For no matter how much she loved him, she would never entirely trust him again. He was a chameleon, able to blend in anywhere with an ease that astounded her.

How easily he had mingled with members of the Jekyll Island Club, with the Connor family, even with Sanders, who had been trained to ferret out such impostors. And now president of a successful company. A spy. A German spy now a respectable and obviously wealthy American businessman. All through subterfuge, through lies. How could she ever believe him?

But she did. She had believed his warning about Kurt Weimer. Part of that, she justified, had been her own instinct, her immediate aversion to the German, and it was not wholly because of her own experience with a German years ago. Despite what the man now with her had done, she had never sensed evil around him, had never felt the chill of cold ruthlessness as she had with Weimer.

Now Chris Chandler seemed very alone and exposed, standing awkwardly with hand partially outstretched as if in entreaty, unable to claim his daughter, unable to say what he so obviously seemed compelled to say. She swallowed against sympathy, against the welling warmth within her.

She heard Evelyn’s footsteps before seeing her, just in time to turn away, to compose her face, for Michael to compose his face.

“Mr. Chandler, can I get you anything else?” Evelyn said.

“Chris,” Meara heard him say in that damnably seductive voice of his. Chris. Of course, Chris. Not Michael. Michael was gone. The chameleon.

“All right, Chris then,” she heard Evelyn say, and Meara’s eyes went to the other woman, seeing the light in her eyes as she looked at her guest. Meara felt jealousy, wild and fierce, jolt through her. Evelyn was an attractive woman, intelligent and active, and she had obviously already succumbed to her guest’s easy charm.

This dinner was going to be a nightmare.

But it wasn’t, and one reason was Chris. He was the perfect guest, keeping the conversation going, asking impersonal questions which somehow turned personal until he knew the particular interests of everyone at the table. He even made Lisa laugh, something much too rare since Sanders’s death, when he described his feelings the first time he topped a tree as a lumberjack, how scared he had been as the earth got farther and farther away.

Except no one at the table believed he’d been scared. There was a self-assurance about Christopher Chandler that proclaimed he could, and did, handle anything that might confront him.

Despite the banter, though, Meara detected a certain tension. She suspected she was the only one to see it, and then only because she knew his expressions so well, remembered the way his mouth had firmed when his injured leg had hurt. She wondered now how he had climbed those trees with it—probably only through that enormous willpower and determination she had come to know so well years ago when he’d continued to walk even though she knew he was in agony. It was the one thing she had never stopped admiring about him.

Lisa, however, was obviously fascinated with the man who had been a lumberjack and was now president of a business. She was “into” the environment now, and she wanted to know whether the lumber industry wasn’t destroying the forests.

“Some do,” he admitted. “Our company tries to do as little damage as possible, replanting trees when we’re finished. We know it takes hundreds of years to replace these trees. But you live in houses made of wood, and you read books whose pages come from forests. It’s a trade-off.”

“But I’ve seen pictures of whole forests laid bare,” she said.

Chris’s eyes warmed. He liked her concern, the passion which reminded him of Meara. “It happens,” he said slowly. “I’ve backed legislation that would require lumber companies to reseed and replant, but many of the industry leaders don’t agree, and they have powerful influence.”

“It seems we’re destroying everything,” she said sadly.

“Sometimes you have to destroy to build,” Chris said.

Lisa looked at him quizzically. “That’s a cryptic remark.”

Chris grinned. “I guess it is. You’re a very bright young lady.”

Lisa was obviously delighted with the conversation, with the challenge of dueling with someone like Chandler, who treated her as an equal.

“That was a cop-out,” she observed dryly.

They all laughed at that, even Meara, who felt a peculiar sense of rightness about how well Chris and her daughter appeared to get along. There was even a brightness in his eyes she’d never seen before.

“You would make a good lawyer,” he remarked.