In His Wife's Name

“Thank you, Luke. You rescued me today in more ways than one.”

For several seconds Luke’s thoughts scattered at the sensation Mary’s hand created in his. Soft. Her hand felt so soft and delicately feminine. So…

Misleading.

That was the only term Luke would allow himself to describe his intense reaction to her touch.

As Mary climbed into her truck and drove off with a smile and a wave, Luke couldn’t help wondering what he was walking into and how it might be connected to his wife’s murder. Mary’s truck’s punctured tire had his gut shrieking warnings that something wasn’t right. Whether Mary was an impostor or not, Luke was afraid for her and her daughter.

This Mary Calder, whoever she was, had an enemy.

Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,

What’s bigger than Texas…? Montana! This month, Harlequin Intrigue takes you deep undercover to the offices of MONTANA CONFIDENTIAL. You loved the series when it first premiered in the Lone Star State, so we’ve created a brand-new set of sexy cowboy agents for you farther north in Big Sky country. Patricia Rosemoor gets things started in Someone To Protect Her. Three more installments follow—and I can assure you, you won’t want to miss one!

Amanda Stevens concludes her dramatic EDEN’S CHILDREN miniseries with The Forgiven. All comes full circle in this redemptive story that reunites mother and child.

What would you do if your “wife” came back from the dead? Look for In His Wife’s Name for the answer. In a very compelling scenario, Joyce Sullivan explores the consequences of a hidden identity and a desperate search for the truth.

Rounding out the month is the companion story to Harper Allen’s miniseries THE AVENGERS. Sullivan’s Last Stand, like its counterpart Guarding Jane Doe, is a deeply emotional story about a soldier of fortune and his dedication to duty. Be sure to pick up both titles by this exceptional new author.

Cowboys, cops—action, drama…it’s just another month of terrific romantic suspense from Harlequin Intrigue.

Happy reading!

Sincerely,

Denise O’Sullivan

Associate Senior Editor

Harlequin Intrigue

P.S. Be sure to watch for the next title in Rebecca York’s

43 LIGHT STREET trilogy, MINE TO KEEP, available in

October.

In His Wife’s Name

Joyce Sullivan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Joyce Sullivan credits her lawyer mother with instilling in her a love of reading and writing—and a fascination for solving mysteries. She has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and worked several years as a private investigator before turning her hand to writing romantic suspense. A transplanted American, Joyce makes her home in Aylmer, Quebec, with her handsome French-Canadian husband and two case-book-toting kid detectives.

Books by Joyce Sullivan

HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE

352—THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

436—THIS LITTLE BABY

516—TO LANEY, WITH LOVE

546—THE BABY SECRET

571—URGENT VOWS

631—IN HIS WIFE’S NAME

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Mary Calder—What really happened the night this beautiful public relations consultant was murdered? Luke Calder—He was determined to discover who had killed his wife.

Shannon Mulligan—Mary Calder’s name gave her a new identity and an escape from her past.

Rob Barrie—He wouldn’t rest until he and Shannon were man and wife…again.

Dylan White—What would this teen do to protect his mother’s income?

Glorie—The burglary in her gift shop was most puzzling.

Bill Oakes—What could the resort caretaker tell Luke about the woman who called herself Mary Calder?

To Mom and Dad,

My first heroine and hero, who taught me the meaning

of family and commitment and unfailing support.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to criminologist T. Lorraine Vassalo

and family lawyer Marci Lin Melvin, B.A., LL.B.,

for patiently answering my questions about the

Canadian legal system. And to fraud detective

Paul Heagle, Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police Services

(retired), for explaining how the men and women in blue

get the job done. Without you, this story would never

have been more than an idea on a piece of paper.

Thanks also to the following for helping me get the

details right: Jackie Oakley, Ottawa-Carleton Regional

Police Services; Dr. Stephen W. Maclean; Nina Fast, R.N.;

Deborah Sarty; Pat and Linda Poitevin;

and Kay Gregory. Any mistakes are my own.

Last but not least, a heartfelt hug to Judy McAnerin

for her exceptional plot analysis skills!

Contents

Prologue

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

Prologue

Mary was unmindful of the car tailing hers; its looming headlights in her rearview mirror were insignificant and blurred by the darkness of the night and the sleet lashing her windows. At least her meeting with her client at the country club had gone well, and he’d been open to her suggestions to smooth over his furniture company’s image in the media after a consumer’s report on the evening news had targeted it for its sales tactics. She didn’t know why public-relations crises were like fevers in sick children, which reached a flashpoint in the middle of the night.

Mary smiled, thinking about children. Babies in particular. And making a baby with Luke. Her toes had turned to ice cubes in her black leather pumps. What she needed was a hot bath, candlelight and Luke’s long lean body sharing the tub with her.

Mary stopped her sports car for a red light at a dark intersection, her mind drifting to fantasy. Too bad Luke was on duty tonight.

Without warning her door was jerked open. A hand brutally gripped her arm and attempted to pull her from the car.

Mary fought back instinctively. Honked the horn. Screamed at her attacker. In her peripheral vision, she saw a dark-clothed figure dart in front of the headlights—a woman?

Something struck Mary. Hard. Her left arm exploded with pain. Her attacker reached across her body and released her seat belt. As he dragged her free of the car, Mary saw her attacker’s face…looked straight into his eyes. Shock came in a frigid thrust she felt to the depths of her soul. In that brief all-knowing instant, Mary knew she wouldn’t survive the night.

Chapter One

Sixteen months later

The shrill of the phone literally caught Luke Calder with his pants down. After putting in a ten-hour night shift on the streets in a patrol car, all he wanted was some shut-eye. With a tired sigh, he kicked his jeans toward the laundry pile on the closet floor and reached for the phone beside his bed. “Calder here.”

“Constable Calder, this is Alex Hudson from the credit bureau. You asked us to flag your wife Mary’s file and notify you of any activity.”

Luke’s fingers stiffened on the telephone receiver, as his body tensed against the sudden eruption of emotion in the pit of his stomach. The barren sand-colored walls of his bedroom shifted around him as if on motorized tracks. More than a year had passed since Mary’s murder, and Ottawa-Carleton’s finest detectives and forensic experts—fellow officers Luke had faith in, would trust with his life—hadn’t been able to come up with a lead in her murder. The investigation was in limbo—just like Luke’s life—delegated to a stack of cold files on a major-crime detective’s desk. He closed his eyes to block out the spinning walls and dredged deep inside himself for the professional control that had been drilled into him at the police academy. A lead. Oh, God, please let this be a lead, he prayed. “Has there been some activity?” he bit out.

“Yes,” Hudson acknowledged, his husky voice tinged with compassion. “A business-loan application to a bank in British Columbia. A branch in Blossom Valley. It probably would have gone unnoticed if you hadn’t flagged your wife’s file.”

Luke sucked in his breath as his brain computed the significance of the information through an insulating layer of shock. When he’d made the request of the credit bureau after Mary’s purse was stolen during the assault and attempted carjacking, he’d been more worried about the perpetrator running up Mary’s credit cards to her limit, not fraudulent bank loans. But still, there could be a connection, however remote. “Did the applicant give a current address?”

“Only a box-office address in Blossom Valley. Have you got a pen?”

“Just a sec.” Luke reached for his black duty bag, which he’d tossed on the bed a few minutes ago. After a moment’s fumbling with the zipper, he produced a pen from a side pocket, then grabbed for a notepad, a woodworking magazine resting on the oak bedside table he’d made Mary as a first-anniversary gift. “What have you got?”

Hudson read off the address.

Luke jotted it down, forcing his hand to form each letter. His fingers had turned to rubber. “Thanks, I’ll take it from here.” His knees gave out as he hung up the phone. Luke sank onto the bed, his heartbeat spiking and his thighs shuddering as if he’d just chased down a perp. Nausea swirled in his stomach as he pressed his forehead to his bent knees, but there was no way to avoid the anguished images that twisted him inside out—images of Mary dying in fear…in pain…without a cop in sight to save her. Much less her own husband.

He’d been on duty that night. Mary had died before she’d reached the hospital. He hadn’t even had the chance to tell her that he loved her one last time. Why hadn’t she just let her assailant have the damn car?

A sob caught in his chest, building until the pain of it vibrated through his body and throbbed in his brain. His fingers clutched the magazine like a lifeline to sanity. Would this address lead him to Mary’s killer?

THERE WAS SAFETY living in a small town. Shannon Mulligan could look out the window of Glorie’s Gifts Galore—one of the many shops in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley where her handmade crafts were sold—and easily scan the six-block length of Blossom Valley. She knew the proprietor of every store in the Western-style business district by name and every face that belonged here. Strangers stuck out like palm trees in a desert and made her hackles rise until she assured herself that the stranger couldn’t possibly be her ex-husband.

Surely the fact that Rob hadn’t found her in sixteen months meant he likely never would. She and Samantha were safe.

As if knowing she was the object of her mother’s thoughts, nine-month-old Samantha gurgled and cooed with delight as her plump sweet fingers latched on to a bright red apple appliquéd to the green gingham skirt covering a nearby display table. A basket filled with vegetable-and fruit-shaped napkin rings nearly slid off the table as Samantha tugged on the tablecloth. Shannon expertly grabbed the basket to prevent it from crashing to the floor, then worked the gingham cloth from her daughter’s grasp.

“Oh, you silly girl!” she admonished gently. “The apple is so pretty and colorful, isn’t it?”

Samantha beamed up at Shannon from her stroller, her cap of silky dark hair mussed and her dark eyes glinting with smoky-gray and mottled-brown flecks of mischief. Eyes so like Rob’s, Shannon’s ex-husband, that they irrefutably confirmed the truth of Samantha’s sordid conception. Shannon prayed daily that her baby hadn’t also inherited her father’s tendency to fly into rages at the slightest provocation.

So far, Samantha’s temperament had been as meek as a lamb’s. Despite the terror and uncertainty that had hounded Shannon during the days and nights of her pregnancy, she loved her daughter more than life itself. Because of Samantha, Shannon had found a courage inside herself she hadn’t known she possessed. She’d taken risks, impossible risks, but they’d all been worth it. Rob would never be able to lay a hand on her again.

Her eyes stung with tears as she bent to kiss her daughter’s brow. Samantha deserved a safe and happy childhood. That was all that mattered.

“Not to worry, Mary,” Glorie assured Shannon, bustling up beside them and breaking Shannon’s train of thought. “I should have offered to get the door for you, but I just couldn’t take my eyes off that batch of birdhouses you just brought in. I promised to put one aside for a customer.”

Shannon could see by the genuine softening of Glorie’s careworn face that the gift-shop proprietor truly didn’t mind Samantha’s inquisitive fingers. Glorie’s heart was as generously proportioned as the body that housed it, and sometimes Shannon felt certain the residents of Blossom Valley would forgive her for assuming another woman’s identity. It wasn’t as if Shannon was doing Mary Calder any harm. She was just borrowing her name and her likeness.

Shannon eased Samantha’s stroller out of the aisle as Glorie pulled the door open. “Now don’t forget, Mary, you promised you’d drop off a dozen welcome signs and at least three letter boxes before the long weekend. I can’t keep them in stock. Your Garden Patch collection is just taking off.”

“And I couldn’t be happier,” Shannon replied with a sigh of contentment, feeling grateful that her new career fulfilled both her creative and her financial needs. She was making plans to buy additional tools and to hire someone with woodworking experience to cut the wooden pieces for her crafts so she could concentrate on the finishing and painting. Unfortunately the business loan she’d applied for at the bank to allow her to move her business out of the lakeside cottage she rented and into a larger place of her own had been denied, but Shannon was sure that had more to do with her short residency and lack of employment history. Her income was steadily improving. She just had to prove to the bank she was a good risk.

Promising Glorie she’d be back in a few days with her order, Shannon pushed Samantha’s stroller out onto the sidewalk. July sunshine bathed her face and bare arms with ovenlike warmth. The newspaper office was two doors down. She entered and made arrangements for her Help Wanted ad for a woodworker to be inserted in the upcoming Weekly Gazette. Now all she had to do was make a quick trip to the lumberyard for supplies, then head home to put Samantha down for her afternoon nap. Shannon did all her cutting while her daughter napped, looked after business details and sketched designs during the mornings, then painted at night after Samantha was in bed.

Her step quickened and she felt like singing with happiness as she pushed Samantha’s stroller toward the beat-up green pickup truck she’d embellished with decorative artwork advertising her Garden Patch collection. A billboard on wheels.

She’d fastened Samantha into her car seat and was climbing behind the steering wheel when she noticed the toy rattle tucked beneath the windshield wiper. What on earth?

Shannon climbed out of the truck and removed the pastel-pink bear-shaped rattle. She’d never seen it before in her life. It looked brand-new. Had someone found it on the sidewalk and assumed it belonged to her because they’d seen a car seat in the truck?

Shannon glanced up and down the street. There wasn’t a person in sight. So why, then, did she feel vaguely uneasy as she climbed back into the truck?

FROM A DISTANCE the woman leaving the newspaper office bore a striking resemblance to Mary—bare shoulders tanned a golden brown, the sun glinting off flaxen hair carelessly sweeping sculpted cheekbones. The exuberant bounce in her step as she pushed the stroller down the sidewalk seemed so bitingly familiar that Luke’s heart twisted with an impossible wish that the past sixteen months of his life had been some cruel hoax. But reason told him that Mary’s death was real. He’d identified her battered body.

Still, from the moment he’d spotted her double leaving the cottage at nine-fifteen this morning, the back of her truck loaded with boxes, this woman with the baby—whoever she was—affected him like a channel surfer punching the remote control of his emotions. Luke experienced flashes of white-hot rage, stomach-knotting confusion and sharp pangs of unsettled longing as he tracked her movements to three different gift shops in the area. Was it mere coincidence that she shared his wife’s name and likeness? Had the credit bureau made a bureaucratic error? Or was something else going on? How many Mary Tatiana Calders with the same birth date could there be in one country?

He was going to call Ottawa on his cell phone and have her license plate run when he got back to the motel. He dropped a tip on the coffee-shop table where he’d sat the past half hour conducting his surveillance and hustled outside to his rental car. The woman in faded jeans and a white sleeveless cotton blouse was just starting the engine of a brightly painted pickup that made following her child’s play.

Before he’d been granted emergency leave and hopped the first flight he could to Penticton, the Okanagan city nearest Blossom Valley with an airport, Luke had called Detective Sergeant Zach Vaughn, the lead investigator in Mary’s murder, to inform him what was up. Vaughn had tried to dissuade him from checking out the lead. Department policy discouraged officers from investigating cases involving family members. But since they both knew Luke had a right as a citizen to investigate his own case, Vaughn had agreed, with certain conditions. Luke was an informant traveling on his own time, with his own funds—though he still had a badge that could grant him certain privileges with the local police. Luke was to keep in constant touch with Vaughn. The minute Luke found any evidence linking this woman to Mary Calder’s murder Vaughn would call in the local police to take over the investigation.

After Luke had agreed to the conditions, Vaughn had checked the police computer and found out the woman had a British Columbia driver’s license, which gave Luke the street address the credit bureau hadn’t been able to provide.

Luke eased into the traffic behind a dusty black coupe with a dented right fender. This Mary Tatiana Calder didn’t go far, just to the hardware store on the west end of town. Luke pulled into the parking lot a good two minutes behind her, then sauntered into the store while she was wrestling the stroller out of the bed of the truck.

He planted himself near the book display just inside the entrance, fanned open the pages of a how-to book on wiring and waited. Suddenly the automatic doors swung inward and Luke heard the woman’s muted voice talking to the infant. But he lost track of the words as his gaze took in the baby girl propped up in the stroller and wearing a pink sundress that reminded Luke of cotton candy and all things feminine. Her full round cheeks, dark silken hair and wide gooey smile caught him like an arrow to the heart.

Once upon a time he and Mary had dreamed about having children. Planned for it. They’d even had names picked out. Nothing too fanciful like Tatiana, which Mary had hated as a child. Simple solid names like Ryan and Laura.

Pain Luke thought he’d banished clawed at his throat as his gaze trailed upward toward the baby’s mother. The shape of her oval face enhanced her startling resemblance to Mary, but only superficially. Even as his body registered the woman’s beauty, his brain logically picked out subtle differences—the nose that was longer and delicately pointed, the smattering of freckles across her cheeks, the smile that was wider. Eyes that were more hazel than blue. And from his vantage point he could see the telltale traces of natural-brown roots in her dyed blond hair.

He ducked his head behind the pages of the wiring book as the woman’s gaze swiveled past him. Instead of moving directly into the maze of plumbing and electrical-parts aisles, she turned toward the customer-service desk. Luke watched as she stopped in front of a bulletin board mounted on the wall near the desk and removed from her denim purse a piece of paper, which she posted on the board.

She seemed to be scanning the board with interest, then with a sigh, turned and headed right past him into the store, close enough for him to become acquainted with the exotic scent of her perfume, which made him think of hot summer nights and jasmine. Luke hid his face behind the book until he was certain she’d passed, then casually moved over to the bulletin board.

The Help Wanted notice she’d posted gave him all the excuse he needed to make the woman’s acquaintance.

AWARE OF THE TIME, Shannon hurriedly buckled her daughter into her car seat as the yard clerk loaded her lumber order into the back of her truck. It had taken longer than she’d anticipated to select and purchase the knot-free planks she needed; now she was worried Samantha might fall asleep before they got home. Taking a nap in the car, even a short nap, usually screwed up her daughter’s sleeping schedule, and Shannon needed to start cutting the pieces for the signs and the letter boxes today if she was going to fill Glorie’s order as promised.

Shannon climbed into the cab, slamming the door behind her. The engine ground for a second, then sputtered into life. She breathed a sigh of relief and popped a children’s cassette into the tape player, hoping a sing-along would keep her daughter awake and entertained for the next twenty minutes.

Cheerfully warbling a silly ditty about lost little ducks, Shannon turned onto the highway. Blossom Valley, located in close proximity to Canada’s arid desert region of Osoyoos, was framed by rugged hills covered with sagebrush and antelope-bush and the occasional stand of ponderosa pine and cottonwood. Orchards of ripening peach, apricot, apple and cherry trees lined the highway, and vineyards crept up the hills, irrigated by the many crystal-blue lakes that abounded in the Okanagan.

Shannon had picked this area because her aunt Jayne, who lived in Halifax and knew the bleak cold rain of the Maritimes, had toured the region with a friend several years ago and had come home raving about the dry climate.

A few minutes outside of town, the highway climbed, winding between a lake and a ridge of mountains. The curves were sharper. Shannon felt an insistent tug on the steering wheel as it seemed to resist her efforts to stay in her lane. What was going on? With fear mounting that they might plunge off the road, she reduced her speed and gripped the wheel tightly.

The truck continued to lean to the right, and it took Shannon a full minute before she realized she probably had a flat tire. There was no shoulder here where she could safely pull over, but she knew there was a lookout over the lake not far ahead. Knuckles white with fear, Shannon slowly negotiated the curves, feeling as if she was trying to coax a recalcitrant bull into submission. By the time she pulled safely into the lookout, her heart was pounding and her face was damp with perspiration.

Now what? She didn’t belong to an auto club that gave roadside service. And she’d never changed a tire in her life. Shannon slowly climbed out of the truck and examined the deflated right front tire. There were many things she’d never contemplated doing before Rob had assaulted her. Changing a tire should be a piece of cake.