The Unknown Daughter

At his shout, the figure scrambled to the ground, rolling and preparing to run.

Eric stepped closer and pinned the suspect with the flashlight beam.

Then the summer night, the achingly familiar sights and sounds pressing in around him and a vision from his past seized him in a moment of déjà vu that rooted him to the spot. Carrinne Wilmington, seventeen years older but somehow exactly the same, dressed from head to toe in burglar black, stared at him, her face a mask of fear and shock.

Eric instinctively adjusted the flashlight’s glare out of her eyes.

“Eric?” Carrinne squinted. “What are you doing here?”

Dear Reader,

I’ve been asked repeatedly where I find the ideas for my stories. And as many writers have said before me, it’s not so much that I find my stories and characters, as they find me.

My young family has changed a great deal over the past decade, as my husband and I established our careers and my son raced through preschool and kindergarten. Looking back, it’s important to remember the heartache and struggles we’ve endured. The mistakes and the false starts that showed us what was truly important, and what was best left behind. The decisions that helped us grow into the happy family we are today.

Decisions are powerful things. That’s the theme woven into The Unknown Daughter. It’s through our most difficult choices that we discover who we are and what we believe. I find the process of making life-changing decisions fascinating. Sometimes you succeed. Sometimes you fail. But facing the next challenge, when everything within is screaming at you to run the other way, is the very essence of living.

I wish for you the courage and the determination you need to grow into all that you dream you’ll be. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on Carrinne and Eric’s story. Visit me at my author Web site, www.annawrites.com, and register for one of my contests.

Sincerely,

Anna DeStefano

The Unknown Daughter

Anna DeStefano

To my father, Walton, whose passing taught me to cherish all of life, both the ups and the downs.

To my mother, Jane, and her love for the written word, who never doubted that my name would one day share space with the countless others on her bookshelves.

To my son, Jimmy, who is a daily reminder of the perfection of God’s miracles.

To my husband, Andrew, who has always wanted for me every dream I could possibly dream.

And to my critique partners, Tanya, Rachelle, Dorene, Anna A. and Missy and the countless friends I’ve made along my writing journey.

All that’s true in this story, all that comes from my heart wouldn’t have been possible without the blessing of your love.

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 SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CARRINNE WILMINGTON glared through the windshield of her rented Dodge at the stately south Georgia mansion that had been her family’s home for as long as they’d kept records in these parts. Ancient oak trees flanked the house, their tops dancing in the balmy July breeze. The moon skimmed a cloud-churned sky, creating midnight shadows that shifted in the changing light.

She fought the urge to peel away from the curb, to keep driving until she reached the airstrip just outside of Oakwood and caught the next flight back to New York. Turning off the ignition, she glanced down at herself, then dropped her head to the steering wheel.

She was a B-movie cliché.

Her city clothes, black on black on black, had seemed a logical choice when she’d left the roadside motel on the outskirts of town. She was sneaking back in the dead of night, for heaven’s sake. She needed invisibility, anonymity.

With a groan, she sat back. What she needed was to have her head examined. Who cared what she was wearing, when she was about to walk back into the world that had nearly destroyed her?

Her eyes traveled to the dormer windows her grandfather slept behind. Controlling yet distant, Oliver Wilmington had been the only family she’d ever known after her mother had died giving her life, and he’d let her down when she’d needed him the most. Now, seventeen years later, he couldn’t know she was back. No one could. If she was lucky and found what she’d come for, she’d be out of here and back in New York by tomorrow afternoon.

Get on with it, Carrinne.

She pushed open the door and slid out, gritting her teeth against the sick taste of fear.

“Get in, find Mom’s diary, then get out,” she whispered, creeping through the dimness toward the gray brick house. The diary had to be in the attic, inside the trunk that held her mother’s things. “Forget about everything else.”

But the past shimmered in every shadow as she skirted landscaped shrubs and flowerbeds that were exactly where they had always been. She turned the corner toward the back terrace and stumbled to a halt at the base of an enormous cypress tree, her childhood refuge where she’d read fairy tales and dreamed girlish dreams.

Her old friend welcomed her home, its phantomlike branches rustling in the night. She turned her back on the memories, on the dreams she’d finally wised up and stopped dreaming years ago.

The solarium’s angles came into view. The sight of its glass-and-wooden frame kicked the butterflies in her stomach into a frenzied tap dance. Nostalgia she hadn’t expected tugged her lips into a smile even as she panted for breath, winded by the short walk from the car. She struggled against the light-headed, ear-ringing haze, bending at the waist, hands on her knees.

Not now. She straightened and waited for her vision to clear, her lungs to work. This isn’t happening, not now that I’m this close.

Her equilibrium returning, she took in the sight of the one place in her grandfather’s ordered world that had truly belonged to her. Inside the solarium’s sanctuary, she’d nurtured tiny buds and seedlings, watching them burst to life year after year. Oliver had called her obsession folly, but the plants had needed her when no one else had. And the solarium had meant freedom in ways her grandfather had never imagined.

She approached the corner windows, willing strength into her legs. Ivy cascaded like a waterfall from a nearby oak, obscuring all but a few inches of the long, opaque panes of glass. She reached for the screwdriver in her back pocket, but a whisper from the past stopped her. The stone was still there, directly beneath the last window, mostly buried now. She knelt and pulled until the rock shifted and she could feel beneath. When her fingers closed around cold steel, her heart nearly beat its way out of her chest.

Pulling the encrusted screwdriver free, she wiped until streaks of metal gleamed in the pale moonlight. How many nights had she done this, popping the loose latch she’d discovered on the last window and sneaking into a cold, silent house long after curfew? Only, back then she hadn’t been alone. Back then there’d been one last kiss to keep her warm until she could escape and once more find heaven in the arms of the boy she’d thought she’d love forever. Her hand clenched around the tool. An overpowering urge to hurl it into the window brought her to her senses.

Standing, she shoved aside the ivy, using the screwdriver to jimmy the latch free. She pushed against the vertical window, strained when it refused to swing inward. The frame stubbornly resisted, then wrenched open with a wood-splitting moan. Staring at the shattered hinge, Carrinne held her breath and waited. Night sounds continued their hypnotic refrain, unperturbed by the commotion.

No alarm sounded, though she hadn’t really expected one. Her grandfather abhorred newfangled conveniences, no matter how practical. Changing with the times was a sign of weakness. For once, Oliver’s uncompromising certainty that his way was always best would work in her favor.

She pocketed the old screwdriver and slipped through the narrow opening. Back into the one place on earth she’d sworn never to set foot in again.

“WHAT AM I doing here?” Sheriff Eric Rivers cut the headlights and turned into Governor’s Square.

“My question exactly,” his younger brother, Tony, muttered from the passenger’s seat of the squad car. “You could have let me take this one on my own.”

“No way are you going solo on a burglary, kid.” Eric parked in front of the Wilmington mansion and scanned the grounds for signs of trouble. All he saw was the house he’d managed to avoid for the last seventeen years.

“Unit Fifteen, at 2201 Governor’s Square,” Tony barked their location through the hands-free radio attached to his uniform near the shoulder—standard equipment Eric had insisted everyone on patrol start carrying. “Give us five to have a look around.”

“Roger, Fifteen,” Marge replied from dispatch.

Eric walked around the car and waited at the curb for Tony, shaking his head at his brother’s scowl. Tony shoved his nightstick into his belt and adjusted his sidearm with a jerk.

“You’ve been steaming since we left the station. Let it go.” Eric rolled the tension from his shoulders and headed up the driveway. It was almost comical, watching his usually easygoing brother chafe at carving out his own place in Oakwood’s small-town sheriff’s department.

“You treated me like your kid brother in front of the entire station.”

“I was the only one in the station when this call came in, remember? That’s why you’re stuck with me.”

“But this is the third call out here from that security company.” Tony fell in step beside him. “You know as well as I do it’s old man Wilmington’s new silent alarm acting up. You coulda let me take it alone.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Eric paused at the top of the drive, motioning Tony to a stop. Something wasn’t right.

He scanned the front of the house, trying to pin down what had his instincts on edge. Nothing out of the ordinary. Everything looked fine. Oliver Wilmington, Oakwood’s richest and most influential citizen, had been in the hospital for weeks. None of his staff lived in residence anymore. The house was silent and still, just as it should be. But there was something…

Maybe it was the past tripping all over the present making him nervous as hell. Maybe it was the steamy, night-kissed air rustling the leaves overhead. Maybe he was just stir-crazy and it had been too long since he’d been out on a call.

He rolled his shoulders again and switched on his flashlight.

“Besides—” Tony followed him up the marble steps, shining his own flashlight into the enormous windows fronting the porch. “You’re the sheriff now. You never go out on calls anymore.”

“I do if backup is needed.”

“I don’t need backup.”

Eric turned from peering through the front door’s rectangular glass insets. “Any rookie straight out of the academy needs backup.”

“And this has nothing to do with the fact that ten years ago you were the one paddling my ass for skipping school?”

“No.” Eric chuckled and headed back down the steps. Tony had been six when their father died. It had been Eric’s job to keep him in line ever since. “This has nothing to do with your ass.”

At the same time, they both glimpsed the midsize sedan parked halfway down the block. Not that parking at the curb was so out of the ordinary on downtown streets. But the Wilmington place took up an entire block of the square, and the nondescript car was a little too conveniently out of the home’s sight line.

“Run the plates,” Eric said. “When you’re done, meet me around back.”

He didn’t wait to see if Tony followed orders. He didn’t have to. His brother was a good cop, even if he was too green for his own good.

Heading around the right side of the house, he shined the flashlight on the ground, the shrubs, the shadows on either side of the path. Damn if everything didn’t look exactly as it had years ago.

The flashlight’s beam picked up a set of footprints in the soft earth beneath the ancient cypress tree. He stopped. It was Carrinne’s tree. Their tree. A rattle from behind the house shook the memories from his head.

Moving again, only this time keeping to the shadows, he shined the flashlight at each window, looking for signs of forced entry. He unsnapped the clip that held his gun in its holster and reached for the radio at his shoulder.

“Get over here, Tony,” he whispered. “We’ve got company.”

Rounding the back corner of the house, Eric advanced slowly, soundlessly, listening through the darkness. From the direction of the solarium came a crash, followed by another. Sprinting, his hand hovering above his holster, he reached the structure in time to see a blurred figure squeezing out of an all-too-familiar window.

“Freeze!” he barked. “Sheriff’s department.”

The figure scrambled to the ground, rolling and preparing to run.

“Freeze!” He stepped closer and pinned the suspect with the flashlight beam.

Then the summer night, the achingly familiar sights and sounds pressing in around him, and a vision from his past seized him in a moment of déjà vu that rooted him to the spot. Carrinne Wilmington, seventeen years older, but somehow exactly the same, dressed from head to toe in burglar black, stared back at him, her face a mask of fear and shock.

He instinctively adjusted the flashlight’s glare out of her eyes.

“Eric?” She squinted. “What are you doing here?”

Her soft voice had lost some of its southern accent. Still, it swept over his skin like his favorite T-shirt fresh from the dryer. Warm and smooth.

A blink and a deep breath later, she was off. By the time he recovered enough to sprint after her, she’d raced around the side of the house.

He cleared the corner to see Tony grab Carrinne as she flew by. His brother held her arms to her side, subduing her struggles with textbook ease. Carrinne thanked him for his efforts by squealing and fighting even harder to get away.

“Take it easy.” Eric raced up to the pair. “She’s—”

Before he could finish his sentence, Carrinne went limp and slid to the ground.

“CARRINNE?” came the voice again. “Carrinne. Wake up, darlin’.”

A hand patted Carrinne’s cheek. Pushed the cap from her head. Moaning, she fought to open her eyes. Where was she? Where was Maggie?

“Who’s Maggie?” asked the masculine voice that had called her darlin’.

A voice from her past.

Reality crashed over her in a dizzying wave. After searching the attic as long as she’d dared and finding no sign of her mother’s trunk, afraid of waking Oliver if she kept digging, she’d been struggling back out of the solarium window when…

Jerking to full consciousness, she blinked until her vision cleared. She was lying on a carpet of soggy Bermuda grass, and leaning over her was the one man she wanted to see less than her grandfather.

“What…what are you doing here, Eric?” She struggled to sit, flinching when his hand moved to steady her.

With a raised eyebrow, he stepped away. “I could ask you the same question.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She stood on rubbery legs.

“What are you doing here after all these years?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She inched another few feet away, a nervous cough slipping out before she could stop it. “I’m visiting my grandfather.”

“Through the solarium window?”

“It’s late,” she mumbled, then winced at the feeble excuse. There were so many reasons why this conversation shouldn’t be happening. Her gaze fixed on his badge. “You’re in uniform.”

“It comes with the job.”

“You’re a cop?”

“He’s the new sheriff,” a third voice said.

Her attention jumped to the officer who’d stopped her. Something about the younger man made her take a closer look.

T. Rivers, his badge read.

“Tony?” She wrapped her arms around herself, stifling the reflex to give him a hug. Eric’s kid brother had been six the last time she’d seen him. “Heavens, you’ve grown.”

Then Tony’s words registered. She swung back to Eric. The rebellious teenage boy she’d known was now a severe, responsible-looking man.

“You’re the sheriff?”

His level stare made her squirm. “Why were you breaking into the solarium, Carrinne?”

To find what I need to protect our daughter.

She bit her lip, bit back the truth she’d never planned to be close enough to tell him or anyone else in this town. Not after he’d dumped her, telling her she’d been nothing more than a mindless distraction. Not after her grandfather had ordered her to have an abortion or get the hell out of his house. A wave of curls fell into her eyes. She pushed them back and reached deep for the nerve she needed to pull this off.

“I wasn’t supposed to arrive until the morning,” she lied. “And I didn’t want to wake Oliver in the middle of the night. All the doors were locked, so I figured I’d give the solarium a try.”

“But, Ms. Wilmington—” Tony started to say.

“If your grandfather’s expecting you, why was the silent alarm on?” Eric’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure he knows you’re coming?”

“Of course.” She brushed the dirt from her arms and gave bravado her best shot. “Why don’t I just find a motel for the night and come back in the morning?”

“Better yet—” Eric turned toward the front of the house “—why don’t we ring the bell and straighten this all out now?”

“No!” She grabbed his arm, then instantly let go. Her fingers tingled from the strong, solid feel of him. “I mean… Can’t we wait until morning? Oliver’s getting older. He needs his rest.”

Eric let out a harsh breath, biting back a curse. He had no idea what Carrinne was up to, but he knew “guilty as hell” when he heard it.

“Your grandfather’s in the hospital,” he said, watching her closely. “He had a stroke six weeks ago.”

“Oh…I…I haven’t spoken with him in over a month.” Her face grew paler, even as she squared her shoulders. “We made tentative plans for my visit, and I’ve been too busy to call him since.”

“It’s odd that his lawyer didn’t contact you about the stroke.”

“I’ve been away on business.”

“You don’t have an answering machine?”

“I told you, I’ve been busy. I haven’t had time to check my—”

“Lying’s only making this worse.” They’d be out here all night at this rate. “Are you going to tell me what’s really going on, or do I have to take you in?”

“Take me in?” The alarmed expression on her face was the real deal. Not like the casual innocence she’d done such a lousy job of faking a few minutes before.

“Give me one good reason why you were breaking in, and maybe we can end this here.”

“I wasn’t breaking in. I grew up in this house.”

“A technicality that might keep you out of jail. But if you want to avoid coming with me to the station, you’ll have to do better than that. Just trust me, okay?”

A battle raged in her green eyes. Then they hardened with a determination that was a chilly reflection of the man who’d raised her.

“The only person I’m talking to is Oliver,” she said.

Running a hand through his hair, Eric sighed and turned to Tony. “Radio in. Have Wilmington’s lawyer meet us at the station.”

When he glanced back, Carrinne was staring at the cypress tree he hadn’t realized they’d stopped beneath. Blond and petite, a heart-shaped face he could cup in the palms of his hands. Painfully familiar in so many ways, she was a complete stranger to him.

And why shouldn’t she be? He’d cut her out of his life after his father’s death. Then she’d left town without saying another word to him. Seventeen years of nothing lay between them.

He’d tried and failed over the years to forget their time together. How he’d thrown away what he never should have let himself want in the first place. But the look of betrayal on her face that last night had made a regular appearance in his dreams, never letting him completely forget.

She clearly didn’t want him anywhere near her now. Unfortunately, for both of them, she didn’t have a choice. His instincts told him Carrinne Wilmington had more trouble on her hands than she knew what to do with.

NO PROBLEM, Carrinne told herself as she rode to the sheriff’s department in the back of Eric’s squad car. No sweat. She’d tackle the lawyer first, then her grandfather. She was a pro at talking her way out of tough situations. She’d built her small New York accounting firm from the ground up. Whatever it took to get the job done, that’s what she did.

Getting what she needed without Oliver’s help was no longer an option. She’d come up empty-handed at the house, and she needed more time in the attic to look for her mother’s things. But would her grandfather be willing to help? That was a question she hadn’t let herself worry about until now, because she was afraid she already knew the answer.

At the age of ten, she’d found the stash of diaries in her mother’s closet and had read cover-to-cover each precious link to the woman she’d never known. There’d been a diary for every year after her mother turned seven, except the last. Angelica Wilmington’s sixteenth year. The year she’d become pregnant with Carrinne.

Finding the missing book had become Carrinne’s obsession. But each time she’d hunted for it, Oliver had demanded she stop digging up the past. She’d told him about her nanny Matilda’s stories. About how her mother had kept her diary with her always, up until the day she died delivering Carrinne. But he’d refused to listen. Discussing his daughter or anything about their lives before Carrinne’s birth was an unpardonable sin in the Wilmington house.

Finally, he’d ordered all her mother’s things packed into an enormous trunk and sent to the attic. He’d decreed her mother’s memory off-limits, and by God that’s the way things were going to be. And, because she’d longed for her grandfather’s approval back then, even more than she’d wanted to read her mother’s final hopes and dreams for her unborn baby, Carrinne had forced herself to stop looking. Eventually, she’d forgotten about that last diary all together.

Until now, when finding it had become a matter of life and death.

She cleared her throat against a cough, not quite succeeding in stopping it.

“You okay?” Eric asked from behind the wheel as he parked.

Her gaze collided with concerned brown eyes reflecting back from the rearview mirror, eyes the exact same shade of chocolate as their daughter’s. When he glanced over his shoulder, she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from staring. Seventeen years hadn’t made the least bit of difference. Seventy years wouldn’t.

His thick brown hair, now sprinkled with slivers of distinguished gray, made a woman want to tame it with her fingers. The angles and planes of his face were just as strong as she remembered, arranged as if by a force of nature into cheekbones and lips that looked as though they were carved from granite. At least until he smiled. Eric’s smile had melted straight through her heart the first time she’d coaxed it out of him. He didn’t appear to smile any more now than he had when they were kids.

“Carrinne?” he prompted.

She cleared her throat and her mind at the same time. “I’m fine.”