Praise for the novels of
JOAN JOHNSTON

“Johnston warms your heart and tickles your fancy.”

—New York Daily News

“Joan Johnston [creates] unforgettable subplots and characters who make every fine thread weave into a touching tapestry.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“[Johnston is] a top-notch craftsman.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Romance devotees will find Johnston lively and well-written, and her characters perfectly enchanting.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Ms. Johnston writes of intense emotions and tender passions that seem so real that readers will feel each one of them.”

—Rave Reviews

“Johnston’s characters struggle against seriously deranged foes and face seemingly insurmountable obstacles to true love.”

—Booklist

“A guaranteed good read.”

—New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Heather Graham

JOAN JOHNSTON

New York Times bestselling author of

The Hawk’s Way series,

The Benedict Brothers series,

which includes

OUTCAST

INVINCIBLE

and the Bitter Creek series,

which includes

THE COWBOY

THE TEXAN

THE LONER

THE PRICE

THE RIVALS

THE NEXT MRS. BLACKTHORNE

A STRANGER’S GAME

SHATTERED

Please visit her website at

www.joanjohnston.com

for a complete listing

of her titles and series.

JOAN JOHNSTON
INVINCIBLE

For Donna Hayes, Loriana Sacilotto,

Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Valerie Gray and Linda McFall.

A writer couldn’t ask for a better support team.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Epilogue

Letter to Reader

Acknowledgments

Prologue

How hard could it be to find spouses for her five grown children before she died? Bella supposed it depended on how long it took for her failing heart to give out. No one had ever accused the five Benedict children of being easy to handle. All of them over twenty-five, and not one of them ever engaged, let alone married.

That might have something to do with the lives they led as members of British royalty. Bella was actually Isabella Wharton Benedict, Duchess of Blackthorne. She certainly had her work cut out for her finding mates for four British-American lords and a lady. Bella corrected herself. Make that four gentlemen rogues and a spoiled rotten lady.

Could she do it? Did she dare try?

Bella stared out the window from her hospital bed at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, wondering where to start. She ran a brush through her shoulder-length black hair, which was threaded with more silver every day. She might be in the autumn of her life, but here in Virginia it was spring, when love blossomed.

Cardinals flirted in the flowering dogwood trees. Blue-and-black-and-yellow butterflies cavorted in the daffodils. Squirrels chattered at each other and played tag, tails flying. With any luck, her titled offspring would find themselves equally vulnerable to romance during this fertile season.

She threw the engraved silver brush onto the bedside table and turned her attention back to the doctor standing at the foot of her hospital bed. “What’s the verdict?”

“You’re still at about thirty percent heart function.”

That was actually good news. At least she hadn’t lost function since her last checkup. She could live—for a while, maybe years—with that little heart function. But the point was, her heart was dying, and she was dying along with it.

That’s what she got for insisting she could ski down an icy slope in the Alps. She’d survived the blunt force trauma to her heart when she’d lost control and gone over a cliff. But the injury had caused scarring that had resulted in reduced heart function and continuing heart failure.

“How long do I have?” she asked.

“The new meds I gave you should keep you up and running for a while.”

“Running?” Bella said with a quirk of her lips.

“Figuratively,” the doctor qualified. “You should certainly be exercising regularly to keep what’s left of your heart muscle healthy. And take your meds!”

Bella eyed the numerous bottles of pills she needed to keep her heart functioning. She hated depending on all those pills, but they allowed her an almost-normal life. ACE inhibitors. Beta blockers. Aldosterone antagonist drugs. She couldn’t begin to name the individual prescriptions. The problem was, at some point—in the not too distant future—her heart was still going to fail.

“How long do I have?” Bella asked again.

“Can’t say,” the doctor replied.

“Guess.”

The doctor shrugged. “A year for sure. Maybe two. Three if you take care of yourself—and you’re lucky. Or you could have a heart attack tomorrow. We just can’t predict these things.”

Bella shivered. That wasn’t much of a future.

“I do have some good news,” the doctor said.

“I’ll take what I can get.”

“We’ve been making enormous strides in stem cell therapy. Stay alive long enough and we may be able to rejuvenate that heart of yours with your own stem cells.”

“How long is long enough?” Bella asked.

The doctor focused on the medical chart in his hands. “Can’t say.”

“And if my heart continues to fail?”

“Heart transplant is a possibility down the line. Unfortunately, it won’t be easy finding a heart for you, Bella. B-negative donors aren’t thick on the ground.”

Bella smiled. Her doctor was young, a prodigy whose bedside manner left a lot to be desired. She appreciated his honesty. Knowing how much—or rather, how little—time she had left allowed her to plan how to use it wisely.

But a year? Two years? Three, if she was lucky? She had even less time than she’d hoped to get her children wed. With so little time, some of those marriages might have to be arranged without her offspring’s cooperation. It had to be marriage, she’d decided. Nothing less would do. Her marriage to Bull Benedict had been her salvation.

It had started badly, with blackmail on her side. Her aunt had threatened twenty-nine-year-old billionaire financier Jonathan “Bull” Benedict with charges of statutory rape if he didn’t marry destitute seventeen-year-old Isabella Wharton, Duchess of Blackthorne. Bull had sworn he’d hate her forever if she forced him into marriage.

She’d bit her lip and gone along with her aunt’s wishes in order to save her hereditary home, Blackthorne Abbey. And to give her unborn child a name. It was only later that Bull questioned whether he was the father of their first child. Only later that he learned Oliver was some other man’s son.

Because they were bound by law, they’d been forced to deal with one another’s lies. Because they were husband and wife, they’d scratched their bloody way through the tangled thorns of deceit to a love that healed all wounds.

Bella wanted her children bound to someone they could love by vows made before God. She was certain the moral commitment created by the spoken words, words pledging love and faith to one another, would give the young lovers the perseverance necessary to work through any differences that threatened their happiness.

She didn’t want her children wandering the world alone after she was gone, believing that love was a false thing. That love couldn’t be trusted. That was the lesson she feared they’d learned from the wickedness—the malicious trickery—that had finally torn her marriage apart.

“Of course, Bella, if you do end up with a new heart—or a rejuvenated one—you’ll be good to go for another fifty years,” the doctor said, interrupting her thoughts.

“Thanks a lot,” Bella said with a wry laugh. She was fifty-two. Reaching a hundred and two sounded pretty ambitious. And lonely, unless she could find a way to win her husband’s forgiveness. Bella felt hopeless about any sort of reconciliation with Bull. Especially when she considered how little she could tell him—certainly not the truth—about the event that had caused their bitter separation ten years ago, after twenty-five years of marriage.

They were still legally wed, but it was a marriage in name only. They lived separate lives. Every day for the past ten years, she’d feared Bull would come to her and ask for a divorce. It had never happened. She wondered if he was clinging to a fragile thread of hope, as she was, that someday they would find their way back to each other. Or whether he simply wanted to preserve his fortune. A fortune which, thanks to an ironclad prenuptial agreement, would only have to be shared with her if they stayed married for twenty-five years. They’d reached that mark a month before their separation.

Bella sighed inwardly. The chances of “love conquering all” seemed slim, considering how little time she had left. She needed to focus on her children’s happiness. When the end came would be soon enough to make peace with Bull.

“When can I get out of here?” she asked.

“Today, if you promise to follow my orders,” the doctor replied. “Make sure you exercise, Bella. Take your meds. And avoid stress. Otherwise…” He drew a finger across his neck, hung his head sideways and made a dying sound.

Bella grimaced at his antics. Maybe she could get Oliver, Riley, Payne, Max and Lydia to come to her, instead of having to go to the four corners of the earth to find them. Without revealing her precarious health, of course. Mother’s Day was coming up. That would make a good excuse to summon them to The Seasons, the Benedict family estate near Richmond, a former tobacco plantation her estranged husband’s family had owned since colonial days.

The doctor turned to Bella’s personal assistant, a quiet, intelligent, almost homely girl Bella had hired three years ago when she first began taking medication for her ailing heart, and ordered, “I don’t want her out partying till the wee hours, Emily. Bella needs rest if she’s going to stay alive until we can repair her heart—or find her a new one.”

“Of course, Doctor,” Emily replied. “I’ll take good care of Her Grace.”

Twenty-eight-year-old Emily Sheldon was nothing if not dutiful, Bella thought. The young Englishwoman refused to address Bella by name, instead referring to her in clipped British tones as “Your Grace,” an honor to which Bella was entitled by virtue of her aristocratic rank.

The refined, straitlaced young woman, who’d become as dear to her as another daughter, would follow the doctor’s orders to the letter. If Bella didn’t want to find herself being hounded by her assistant, she was going to have to involve Emily in her matchmaking plans.

When the doctor was gone, Emily began fussing with the sheets, pulling them up around Bella’s pale blue silk robe and smoothing them down. “I urge you to consider the consequences if you disobey the doctor’s orders, Your Grace. I’ll do my best to help you—”

Bella put a hand on her assistant’s delicate wrist and said, “Please sit down, Emily. I have something to discuss that’s going to require your entire attention—our entire attention—for the foreseeable future.”

1

“Hello, Princess.”

Kristin Lassiter’s heart skipped a beat. Without warning, she found herself facing a man she’d prayed never to see again. “Max?” Her voice broke because her throat had suddenly swollen closed. “What are you doing here?”

“Close the door, Agent Lassiter,” Max said.

Kristin had been ordered to report to the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Miami Field Office. She was just going back on duty in the field with a new partner, following the disastrous shooting incident she’d been involved in four months ago. So she wasn’t surprised her boss wanted to see her. But Rudy wasn’t in his office. This man was. With man being the operative word.

The last time she’d seen Max Benedict, he’d been a boy of eighteen. She’d been sixteen. They’d been best friends for three years. And lovers for one night. They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since.

The troubled boy she’d known had been lithe and fit and tanned. This tall, broad-shouldered man looked powerful. And dangerous.

Kristin felt a spurt of alarm that bordered on panic. Why was he here? Had he come to find out why she’d run from him all those years ago?

“Why are you here, Max?”

“I have a proposition for you.”

Before she could open her mouth to protest he said, “A business proposition.”

So, he wasn’t here for personal reasons. She slowly exhaled, careful not to sigh audibly with relief. He was acting like they were old friends. But they hadn’t been friends for a very long time. She’d been vulnerable to him once. Had adored him with all the luminous passion one devoted to a first love. Seeing him in the flesh, seeing the promise of the boy revealed in the virile man standing before her, stirred all those unwanted feelings to life.

Max couldn’t possibly believe she’d want anything to do with him now. Ten years had gone by since he’d used and discarded her. He must know her bitter feelings toward him hadn’t changed. Nor would they ever. So what was this boy from her past—turned dangerous man—doing here?

“Close the door, Agent Lassiter,” Max repeated.

This time, it wasn’t a request, it was a command, spoken in Max’s brisk British accent. She knew he could as easily have issued the order in French or Spanish or Italian or Russian, or even Portuguese, a result of his attendance at a series of elite British, American and European boarding schools. He’d honed his talent by conversing with the many foreign players on the junior tennis tour, where she’d first met Max all those years ago.

But the Max she’d known was long gone. The man standing before her was a stranger. His once Caribbean-warm blue eyes looked cold and remote. The playful dimple in his right cheek was gone, replaced by a nose and cheekbones and chin that looked carved from granite. There was no sign of the soft lips she’d kissed. His mouth was pressed into a flat, unrelenting line.

When she’d known Max in the past, he’d been dressed most often in tennis shorts and a sleeveless cutoff T-shirt that revealed an impressive set of biceps and six-pack abs. She felt certain the powerful, corded muscles were still there. But they were concealed by a perfectly tailored wool-and-silk suit that likely equaled the cost of a first-class ticket to London and a white Egyptian cotton shirt and Armani tie that probably matched her monthly food budget.

The fact Max had called her Agent Lassiter suggested he was here on official business. But his tailored suit was at odds with the rest of his appearance. A dark, two-day-old beard made his rugged features look disreputable. And the straight black hair he’d kept short on the tennis court had grown long enough that a shaggy lock of black hair had slipped onto his brow.

He looked like one of the bad guys.

But Kristin knew that Max Benedict, youngest son of the infamous billionaire banker Jonathan “Bull” Benedict and his estranged wife, Bella, the Duchess of Blackthorne, was nothing more than a wealthy, care-for-nothing playboy. His expensive clothing—and the fact he badly needed a haircut and a shave—convinced her of that.

Instead of closing the door as he’d ordered, she said, “Where’s Rudy?”

Max shoved papers out of the way and perched on the edge of Rudy’s cluttered mahogany desk before replying, “Your boss knows why I’m here. He let me use his office for this meeting.”

Kristin snorted. It was an inelegant, rude sound, revealing just how ridiculous she thought his statement was.

He made a disgusted sound in his throat, rose and crossed past her to shut the door. She’d expected him to slam it, but the quiet click told her even more certainly that she was now caged with a feral predator. She felt the urge to flee, but resisted it.

She turned to face him, stuck her balled fists on her hips and said, “What’s going on, Max?”

Irritation rolled off him in waves. She realized that he wasn’t any happier to be in the same room with her than she’d been to find him in her boss’s office.

He leaned back against the door, his arms crossed over his chest. It appeared her way out was blocked. But she’d been trained in self-defense. And she had a Glock 27 concealed beneath her suit jacket.

“I told them this wouldn’t work,” he muttered.

“Since I don’t know who you’re talking about, or why you’re here, I can’t respond to that,” she retorted.

“Foster Benedict sent me,” he said.

Kristin’s brows rose in surprise. “Isn’t Foster your uncle?”

Max nodded curtly.

“Your uncle sent you here?” she asked incredulously.

“My uncle, the advisor to the president on matters of terrorism, sent me here,” he clarified.

Kristin took three steps and dropped into one of the two brass-studded saddle-brown leather chairs in front of Rudy’s desk. “I really have fallen down the rabbit hole,” she murmured, shaking her head.

Max strode across the room to stare out the window. The FBI’s concrete-and-glass Miami Field Office was nowhere near the palm trees, white-sand beaches and marine-blue waters of Miami Beach. Instead, the view from Rudy’s fourth-floor window in North Miami Beach revealed a network of superhighways leading into, out of and around Miami.

Max turned back to her and asked, “How much tennis are you playing these days?”

The question, coming out of the blue, surprised her into replying, “I usually play on weekends with the kids who attend my dad’s tennis academy.”

“You look fit enough.” Max crossed and perched once again on the corner of the desk in front of her. He proceeded with a perusal of her body that left her feeling flushed. And indignant.

“Would you like me to undress so you can take a better look?”

He met her gaze, then slowly, seductively, looked her up and down again. “Since I’ve already seen what’s underneath that cheap blue suit, my imagination can fill in the blanks.”

She shoved herself out of the chair and stalked over to look out the window herself. Having just noted all the improvements in his physique over the years, it was humiliating to be told he still saw the underdeveloped body of a sixteen-year-old girl. It was true her bosom had never been anything to shout about. But he’d seemed more than pleased with her small breasts during the one night they’d spent together.

At sixteen, she’d been a world-class athlete. Her body had been toned and firm. It still was. The flyaway blond curls she’d worn in a ponytail on the tennis court were captured ruthlessly in a bun at her nape, although stray curls always seemed to escape. She reached up self-consciously to tuck one behind her ear.

Max seemed to have grown an inch or two taller, to perhaps 6'3", but she was the same 5'9" she’d been at sixteen. She wore no more makeup now to flatter her blue eyes or conceal her freckled complexion than she had then. And her bosom had stayed as small and trim as the rest of her.

“You look even more beautiful now than you did ten years ago, Princess,” he said softly.

Kristin realized he was standing right behind her, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her neck. She hated the fact that his compliment pleased her so much. At the same time, she wondered how he’d managed to cross the room without her hearing a sound.

He blew softly on a stray curl that lay against her throat.

She felt a frisson of desire run down her spine and jerked herself away from him. “Stop that!”

She saw the knowing smile on his face and felt her flush deepen. She deflected his attempt at seduction by saying, “Who is it you’re here to see, Max? Some once-upon-a-time princess? Or Agent Lassiter? Make up your mind.”

“Right,” he said. “Down to business.” He met her gaze and said, “I have a job for you.”

“I already have a job,” she snapped.

“Your boss has agreed to give you leave to perform a special mission.”

“A special mission?” she parroted back, adding a scalding dose of sarcasm.

“There’s been an assassination threat against President Taylor.”

That sounded real. That sounded ominous. Andrea Taylor wasn’t a particularly popular president because of actions she’d taken to end the ongoing war in the Middle East. “How could you possibly know something like that?”

“Interpol intercepted email traffic—source never identified—that suggested someone is planning to take advantage of the president’s seating proximity to the tennis courts to kill her during the U.S. Open tennis event over the Labor Day weekend in New York. The president is a huge fan of the game and always attends the tournament at Flushing Meadows.”

“Interpol? So how did you get this information? Don’t the Secret Service and Homeland Security have primary responsibility for protecting—”

“Interpol sent its information to the Central Intelligence Agency,” he interrupted. “Tennis is an international sport, with players and coaches from a lot of nations with grudges against the United States, and presumably someone who might want to kill the president. The CIA decided the threat deserved investigation, so they contacted me. I work for them on occasion.”

Kristin felt like laughing, but there was nothing amusing about Max’s stony expression. “On occasion? So you’re what? A private investigator or something?”

“A covert operative,” he said.

“A spy?” she asked incredulously.

He nodded curtly.

Then she did laugh. “That’s crazy, Max. I don’t believe you. Show me some credentials.”

“I work undercover. I don’t carry credentials. Or a gun,” he added, anticipating her next question.

“Why would the CIA hire you? I mean, you’re just a rich playboy.”

He raised a sardonic brow. “Who better to hobnob with wealthy drug czars playing polo in Argentina or attending the Carnival in Rio. Or munitions dealers gambling in Monte Carlo, or Arab terrorists playing tennis in Dubai?

“I have infamous parents. Outrageous siblings. I’m a peer of the realm, Lord Maxwell, youngest son of the Duchess of Blackthorne and her cruel—or is it crazy?—billionaire husband. Who would ever suspect me of spying? Which is why I’m so good at what I do.”

His explanation made surprising sense. She asked the next obvious question. “Why me?”

“Short answer? You’re a world-class tennis player who also happens to be a trained FBI agent.”

“I still don’t get it,” Kristin said.

“Foster drew the logical inference that if an attack was going to be made at a tennis locale in the States, the attacker might have some connection to tennis. He—or she—might be a coach, a player or someone working for a player or in a player’s family. He figured we might intercept the assassin if we send someone undercover to another tennis venue in advance of the U.S. Open. After some discussion, Wimbledon was selected over the French Open.”

That also made sense, Kristin conceded. The French Open was at the end of the month, which didn’t leave much time for planning.

“The CIA figured since I have a tennis background, and I live in London, I’m the logical person to infiltrate the professional tennis locker rooms at Wimbledon and listen for what I might hear about an assassination attempt on the president.”

Kristin made a face. “I haven’t played professional tennis for the past ten years.”

“Neither have I,” Max replied. “Which is why the CIA arranged with Scotland Yard—and the cooperation of the All England Lawn Tennis Club—for an exhibition mixed doubles match to be played prior to opening day at Wimbledon. Since Foster knew you and I were friends when we played junior tennis, he suggested you as my doubles partner.”

“I didn’t know your uncle knew we were friends.”

Max didn’t reply to her non sequitur. He rubbed a hand across his nape and said, “I told him this was a bad idea.”

“Because I haven’t played tennis for ten years?”

“That. And because of what happened between us.”

There it was. The elephant in the room. Kristin said nothing, because she had no idea what to say.

He eyed her and said into the silence, “I knew it would be hard—maybe impossible—for us to work together. But I couldn’t very well explain why to my CIA boss or my uncle. Especially since I’m not quite sure myself what happened.”

He’d contacted her in every way he could after their one night of love. One night of sex, she amended. But she’d refused to communicate with him. It was all water under the bridge. There was no going back. So why speak of it now? Especially since he was right. It would be impossible for them to work together. So why put them both through the agony of trying?

“I presume you’re hoping I’ll get you off the hook by refusing your offer,” she said at last.

He nodded. “I was pretty sure you’d refuse. But I was obliged to bring you the offer.”

“Who will you get if I say no?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll find someone.”

Kristin had a pretty good idea who that someone might be. A woman she disliked intensely. But she didn’t say the name, because she didn’t want to discuss what had happened ten years ago. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

“Well? What’s your answer, Princess?” Max said. “Want to play spy with me?”

Trust Max to make a joke of the whole thing. She wasn’t laughing. She met his gaze and said, “You’re off the hook, Max. My answer to your generous offer is no.”

“But—”

“Not just no,” she amended. “But hell no.”

2

Kristin was feeling frantic. Was her daughter a passenger on the flight from Switzerland that had landed at Miami International Airport an hour ago? Or had Felicity found some way to elude her chaperon before the plane took off? Would she be seeing Flick in a few minutes, when she cleared customs? Or had her precocious child managed to run away again?

Kristin paced impatiently at the waiting area for friends and family of arriving American Airlines passengers clearing customs. With any luck, her nine-year-old daughter had gotten on AA Flight 87 from London, which had connected with AA Flight 6485 from Zurich, Switzerland, where Flick had been enrolled in boarding school. The headmistress hadn’t wanted to wait until Kristin could come get her daughter. She’d insisted on putting Flick on the first available flight back to the States with a chaperon from the school.

Apparently, Flick had gotten into a fight with another girl. The headmistress’s decision had been final: Flick was no longer welcome at the school.

It was one more disaster to add to a growing list. How different—how much worse—her life was just seven days after she’d refused Max’s offer!

Over the past week since she’d met with Max Benedict, Kristin had lost weight from her already slender frame, so her cheeks looked gaunt. She had dark circles under her eyes from too many sleepless nights. A glimpse of herself reflected in the glass windows leading outside showed a heart-shaped face that looked haunted.

I should have gone to London, she thought. But making that choice wouldn’t have erased all the problems facing her now. She had to believe she’d made the right choice refusing Max, although his visit had left her feeling slightly anxious and surprisingly sad.

Several of those waiting for family to clear customs watched her warily, despite the fact she didn’t fit any sort of terrorist profile. As usual, her naturally curly blond hair was pinned up tight, although bothersome wisps had escaped. She wore a professional-looking collared white cotton blouse, crisp with extra starch from the dry cleaner, along with navy blue trousers. The matching navy blue jacket hid the Glock 27 she wore in a belt holster and had an inside pocket where she kept her FBI badge.

Although it was questionable whether either gun or badge would still be in her possession after her meeting with the FBI’s Shooting Incident Review Team (SIRT), an FBI version of Internal Affairs, later this afternoon.

Kristin’s glance darted from one individual to the next, automatically surveilling the waiting area. She focused intently on a suspicious-looking man who fit a profile the government wasn’t supposed to be using. His thick black eyebrows rose in alarm before he reached for a giggling two-year-old with black-button eyes and lifted her into his lap, holding her close to protect her from the crazy-looking lady.

So, probably not a terrorist, Kristin thought. Although he likely thinks you might be one. Get a grip. Be cool.

The last thing she wanted was for someone to point her out to airport authorities as a possible threat. That would be all she’d need to make her day perfect.

Why did Felicity have to pick now to get herself kicked out of that Swiss boarding school? Her daughter had refused to tell the headmistress what had provoked the fight. But there was no question of Flick staying after she’d blackened the left eye and broken the left front tooth of the Spanish ambassador’s daughter.

Kristin had faced not one, not two, but three serious traumas over the past week and managed to stay calm and collected. But Flick’s misbehavior, which had resulted in her ejection from school, had just handed Kristin the straw that might break the proverbial camel’s back.

On such short notice, she hadn’t been able to find a nanny or housekeeper she liked to take care of Felicity after school and on weekends while she was on the job. She was going to have to take time off work until she could get the help she needed. Which she didn’t want to do.

She didn’t want the Miami SAC to think she wasn’t able to handle the fallout from the shooting four days ago, which had come too closely on the heels of the shooting four months ago. And been equally disastrous.

You’re invincible, Kristin. Nothing can beat you.

How many times had her father spoken those words to her and her sister on the tennis court growing up? A hundred thousand maybe. She’d never quite believed him. Especially after her older sister, Stephanie, had died in a tragic auto accident at seventeen, leaving Kristin, four years younger, to bear the burden of her sister’s promise as a rising tennis star.

Their mother had long since left their father, because he ate, slept and lived tennis. Kristin had no choice but to try to please her father on the tennis court or be left out of his life altogether.

She hadn’t been as tall as Stephanie. Or as strong. And she didn’t have her sister’s fluid grace. Facts which caused her father endless frustration when he coached her. He was often disappointed in her performance and demanded that she practice to the point of exhaustion.

Which reminded her of the first time she’d met Max.

She’d been thirteen and had qualified to play at Wimbledon in the Girls’ Singles competition. She’d already won her first match, but her father wasn’t happy with her ground strokes. She had a day off between matches, so he’d insisted she spend time after her match practicing with a male hitting partner.

Her exercise clothes were sweat-soaked, despite the cool evening air. Her curly blond hair was bedraggled. She could barely swing her right arm to hit the ball. But until her father was satisfied, she couldn’t leave the court.

“Do it again, Kristin,” he ordered from the sideline. “This time, push through the ball with your whole body.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” she retorted as she slammed a ball down the line.

“That’s out!” he shouted. “By an inch. Keep the ball in the court, Kristin.”

She’d checked her grip and hit three more balls as hard as she could down the line. Every one landed just past the baseline.

“Damn it, Kristin. What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m tired, Daddy.”

“You stay here and work until you can get the ball in the court.” He stomped off and left her there.

Her hitting partner shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why don’t we call it quits?”

“You heard him,” she said. “I need to practice.”

“I didn’t plan to be here all night. You’ll have to find someone else to hit with you,” he said as he stuffed his racquet back into his bag.

Kristin stared at the teenage boy in disbelief. “My father is paying you—”

“Not enough,” the kid said. “See you tomorrow morning.”

Kristin stood on the court, her shoulders slumped, knowing she couldn’t head back to the locker room for at least another hour without getting grounded. That was her father’s favorite punishment, and it worked because she hated being confined indoors in some motel or hotel while on the road.

She heard someone behind her say, “Hey, kid. I’ll hit with you.”

She turned around and saw an older boy, with the most beautiful blue eyes she’d ever seen, standing on the opposite side of the court. It took her a moment to recognize him. “I know you. You’re—”

“In need of some hitting practice,” he said with a grin. He retrieved a racquet from his bag and dropped the bag on the sideline. “I was practicing my serve on the next court over. I couldn’t help overhearing your coach. Sounded like he was a little tough on you.”

“My dad just wants me to be the best I can be,” she said. “Aren’t you—”

A tennis ball was coming at her fast and with a lot of spin. She interrupted herself to hit it back. When the ball was on his side of the court she finished “—Max Benedict?”

“That’s me,” he said, whipping the ball back at her. “What’s your name?”

She could hardly believe she was hitting with one of the top five male players on the junior tour. A fifteen-year-old! She took a small backswing and slammed the ball back at him. Max Benedict was also a hunk.

“My name’s Kristin Lassiter,” she blurted. She felt a blush starting at her throat at just the thought of a boy as good-looking as Max being romantically interested in her. Which she knew was ridiculous. He dated older women. As opposed to barely teenage girls, like her.

“You’ve got great strokes, K,” he said as he tried to lob her.

She backed up to get the ball that had been hit high into the air and slammed it back down at him. “My name’s Kristin, not Kay,” she corrected.

“The letter K’s easier to say,” he replied as he ran for her overhead and snapped it back down at her.

Kristin struggled to get out of the way, so she could return the ball, but she was tired and her feet wouldn’t move. “Ah!” she cried as she swung and missed.

“Finally!” he said as he trotted to the net. “I was beginning to think you’d never miss.”

She crossed to the net, shoving flyaway curls off her face. “I miss plenty. Just ask my father.”

“You’re great, kid. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“Why would I lie?”

She eyed him askance. “I don’t know. Why are you playing with me? I mean, you’re really a great player. And you’re two years older than me.” She flushed at having revealed that she knew his age.

“You remind me of my younger sister, Lydia,” he said, tucking a curl behind her ear. “She’s thirteen, too. I couldn’t imagine Lydia putting up with a tenth of what your dad put you through tonight. I’ve had my own problems with well-intentioned parents. I guess I wanted to help.”

Kristin rose to her father’s defense. “He just wants me to win.”

“There are more important things than winning,” Max said.

“Name one thing,” she challenged.

“Having fun. Enjoying the game,” he replied.

“It wouldn’t be much fun if I didn’t win,” she pointed out.

“Wouldn’t it?”

She made a face. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it much. I’ve been too focused on winning.”

“Next time you play, think about having a good time. And winning,” he said with a grin. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine. Gotta go.” He winked at her and waved a hand at someone behind her.

When she turned to look, she saw a female player—someone on the women’s tour, rather than the junior tour—waiting for him on the sideline. He dumped his racquet in his bag, stalked over to the woman and kissed her on the lips.

He never looked back.

That was all it had taken for Max Benedict to capture her heart. A few minutes hitting tennis balls together. A considerate word of encouragement. A stray curl tucked behind her ear. A wink as he walked off the court. She’d loved him from that moment on.

Kristin grunted with disgust, then realized she was standing in an airport waiting area full of people who might wonder what she found so disgusting. She grimaced and crossed to stare out the windows at the traffic crawling by. What a fool she’d been all those years ago. She’d been well aware her feelings of love weren’t mutual. To Max, she’d been a substitute for the little sister he apparently missed while traveling on the tour.

He’d often come to hit with her on the practice court during that summer at Wimbledon, at times when her father wasn’t around.

Max made her believe in herself. He made her believe she could have fun on the tennis court. He made her believe she could win.

She became invincible.

She won the Girls’ Singles Championship that summer at Wimbledon and the next two years, as well. She won at Roland Garros in Paris. And she was the Girls’ Singles U.S. Open Champion at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. She was the bright future of American tennis. The public was fascinated by the tall, honey-blonde phenom, a killer without mercy on the tennis court—who looked like an angel off of it.

Her tennis career ended abruptly at age sixteen, when she lost in the Wimbledon Girls’ Singles Championship match to the rival she’d beaten the previous two years. When she’d discovered, with frightening, daunting clarity, that she wasn’t so invincible after all.

Kristin heard a commotion and turned around.

“Mom?” Felicity burst into tears as she bolted out of the doorway from customs.

Kristin barely had time to take two steps and open her arms before her daughter threw herself into them. She could feel Flick trembling and felt her insides clench at the sound of her daughter’s wrenching sobs. She tightened her grip to offer comfort. Why was Flick so distraught? What was going on?

“Mrs. Lassiter?” the chaperon who’d accompanied Flick through customs inquired. The elderly woman was small and compact and wore a tailored wool suit that might have been comfortable in Switzerland but looked out of place in Miami.

“I’m Special Agent Lassiter,” Kristin said, to avoid having to explain that it was Ms. not Mrs., since she’d never been married.

“There was an incident on the plane—”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Flick protested. “I told them I didn’t want anything to eat, but they wouldn’t believe me.” Flick was tall for her age, and because her vocabulary was so grandiloquent—Flick’s own description of her extravagantly colorful speech—she was often mistaken for a child far older than she was.

Kristin could imagine the rest. “I’ll be glad to pay for any damages.”

“The flight attendant had some difficulty calming the woman sitting next to Felicity,” the chaperon said. “She wants her silk blouse replaced.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Kristin said.

The chaperon handed her a card. “Here’s her personal information. You might want to be gone when she exits customs,” she said with a sympathetic smile.

“Thanks. And thanks for bringing my daughter home.”

Kristin put her arm around Flick’s narrow shoulders, looked around and said, “Where’s your luggage, Flick?”

“She didn’t check any bags,” the chaperon said. “I have a flight home to catch, so I’ll leave you two to sort this out.”

Kristin frowned as she watched the chaperon hurry away, then turned to her daughter and said, “Why didn’t you bring anything with you?”

“The headmistress is packing everything up. She’s going to ship it to me,” Flick explained. “She said she didn’t trust me in the dormitory.”

Good lord! She’d wondered why Flick was still wearing her school uniform. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a spot of blood on the collar of Flick’s white blouse, above the red V-neck wool sweater she wore with a blue red-and-green-plaid wool pleated skirt. “All right. Let’s go home.”

Flick stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at Kristin, her blue eyes brimming with tears. “I don’t want to go home, Mom. I want to go see Gramps in the hospital.”

Kristin stared at her daughter in shock. “How did you know—? How could you possibly—? Who told you Gramps is in the hospital?”

“I’m not stupid, Mom. Gramps emailed me every day—until last Wednesday. Nothing Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday. I knew something was wrong. So I tried calling him. Which got me in trouble with Mrs. Fortin. But he didn’t call me back. So I knew something was wrong.

“Then I called you and asked why Gramps didn’t call me back and you said—”

“I said he wasn’t feeling well. But that doesn’t mean he’s in the hospital, Flick.”

“But he is, isn’t he?” her daughter challenged. “Because if he wasn’t, Gramps would have called me back, no matter how sick he was. What’s wrong with him, Mom? How bad is he hurt? Was he in a car accident, or what?”

Kristin felt trapped. She’d hoped to shield Flick from the truth for long enough to let her father regain more of his faculties. But that obviously wasn’t possible now. “He’s had a stroke, Flick.”

“A stroke? What’s that?”

“A blood vessel broke in his brain.”

“Is he dying?” Flick cried.

“No, but the stroke caused some of his brain not to work right. That’s why Gramps hasn’t called you back. The stroke affected his speech, so he can’t talk very well yet.”

“Yet?” Flick said, looking, as she always did, for the loophole that allowed her to escape anything she found unpleasant.

“With therapy, he should get much better. But, Flick…”

Kristin cupped her hands gently on either side of her daughter’s anxious face and said, “His right side is paralyzed. He can’t walk or write—”

“Or type,” Flick interjected, pulling free. “So he couldn’t email me back.”

“That’s right.”

“Then it’s a good thing I got myself kicked out of that ludicrous school,” Flick said, her eyes narrowed in fierce determination. “Gramps is going to need my help to get better.”

Ludicrous: Worthy of scorn as absurdly inept, false or foolish.

It was the first time Kristin had heard Flick use the word. It seemed her daughter’s vocabulary had grown in the four months since she’d seen her at Christmas. It wasn’t always an advantage having a child who was so smart. Like now, when her daughter had manipulated her world to arrive home, instead of being at school where she belonged.

Kristin put an arm around Flick and walked toward the airport garage where she’d left her car, listening attentively as her daughter talked a mile a minute about everything that had happened since she’d last seen her mother.

Kristin heard a word—superfluous—that she didn’t know and realized she was going to have to look it up when she got home. She’d spent more time practicing on the tennis courts as a child than she had studying. She’d been homeschooled and had done the least work she could to get a high school diploma.

It was only after Flick was born that she’d realized she was going to need a college degree. She’d gone to the University of Miami and received a B.A. in Communications, figuring she could use the public relations and promotional writing courses to help Harry promote his tennis academy. After 9/11 everything changed, and she decided to join the FBI.

Flick, on the other hand, had started reading at four. By the time she was seven, Kristin had resorted to parenting books to try and figure out how to manage her brilliant daughter. One night, she’d caught Flick reading her most recent parenting book under the covers. It was a toss-up who was learning to manage whom.

But despite her intelligence, Flick was still a child. Kristin had kept her daughter in the dark about her grandfather’s stroke early last week, the day after Max’s visit, in fact, in an attempt to shield Flick from the worst of it. She’d hoped her father would be well on the road to physical recovery before Flick saw him again.

Her father’s face—eye, cheek and mouth—sagged on the right side, giving him a frightening appearance, which worsened when he tried to speak. Her nine-year-old daughter might be intellectually ready to help her grandfather. But Kristin wondered how she would react when she saw him in his hospital bed.

“Please, Mom,” Flick pleaded. “Let’s go see Gramps.”

Kristin was torn. “Flick, I’m not sure—”

“Please, Mom!”

Kristin realized that if she didn’t take Flick to see her grandfather, her creative daughter would find some way to get to the hospital on her own. “He’s very sick, honey. I’m afraid seeing you will upset him.” And you.

“I won’t upset him, Mom,” the girl promised. “I just want to talk to him.”

Talk to him? He can’t talk! Kristin knew her daughter didn’t comprehend the seriousness of her grandfather’s illness. But there was no keeping the two of them apart.

Harry Lassiter had been a part of Flick’s life from the day she was born, a surrogate father. No wonder her daughter was so desperate to see him. And Flick’s appearance might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Kristin’s father, a man who’d kept himself in excellent physical condition his entire life, was infuriated by his helplessness after the unexpected stroke. Harry had resisted the idea of physical therapy that could only promise improvement, rather than perfect health. Maybe Flick’s presence would encourage him to try harder to get back on his feet, even if he needed help walking from now on.

Kristin studied her daughter’s eager face. The bright blue eyes, strong chin and straight black hair from her father. The high cheekbones and uptilted nose from her mother. When she set her mind to something, the nine-year-old was a force to be reckoned with.

Harry Lassiter was as helpless to deny this extraordinary child whatever she wanted as Kristin was herself.

Hopefully, her father would be swept up by the whirl wind that was her daughter. By the time he came down again, he’d be standing on his own two feet.

For the first time in a very long time, Kristin smiled. Maybe things were finally going to turn around. “Come on, Flick. Let’s go see Gramps.”

3

Kristin perched on the edge of her father’s bed at Jackson Memorial Hospital and said, “Dad, I have a surprise for you. You have a visitor.”

“On ahn un,” her father replied.

Don’t want one.

Kristin knew what he’d said only because she knew how her proud father felt about anyone seeing him like he was now. “I know you don’t want to see anyone. You don’t have a choice.”

His gray eyes blazed with anger, and one cheek lifted as the side of his mouth turned down in a snarl. “No!”

That was clear enough. But Flick was waiting in the visitors’ lounge down the hall. God knew how long the inquisitive nine-year-old could last in a hospital waiting room without getting into trouble. Kristin had warned Flick to behave herself and hurried to her father’s room to prepare him for seeing his granddaughter. She didn’t have a lot of time to argue with him.

Her stomach knotted as she watched the once-invincible Harry Lassiter visibly struggle to say, “I ih e ere?”

Why is she here?

Kristin had debated whether to tell her father that Flick had gotten herself thrown out of school. It was one more thing he didn’t need to worry about. But she didn’t want to set a bad example by asking Flick to lie, and Flick would likely blurt it out anyway.

“Flick was worried when you stopped emailing. She got herself thrown out of school so she could come find out what happened to you.”

Kristin thought she saw the flicker of a smile cross half her father’s face. If so, it was the first since his stroke.

He sighed audibly. “Aw igh.”

“Well, all right,” Kristin said with a smile of her own, relieved that he’d given in so easily. “I’ll be right back. I left her—”

“Gramps!”

Kristin turned to find Flick poised in the doorway, a look of horror on her face.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” her father howled, creating a gar-goyle face that caused Flick to whimper, before he turned away with a sound of anguish, flailing with his one good hand under the sheet.

Out! Out! Out!

Kristin fought the urge to grab Flick and run—from her father, from her job, from her self-destructing life.

But she stood her ground. Because in her head she heard: Never run from a challenge. Remember, you’re invincible.

“You’re scaring Flick, Dad,” Kristin said in a firm voice. “Flick, come here,” she said in an equally firm voice.

Flick tore fearful eyes from her grandfather’s supine body and stared dazed at her mother.

“Come here,” Kristin repeated, holding out her hand to her daughter. “I know Gramps looks different. I would have prepared you, if you’d waited in the lounge. Because of his stroke, the right side of his face droops. That’s why he looks so…funny. So…weird. So…odd,” Kristin finished, after searching for the right word and never finding it.

“Dad, look at us,” she commanded her father. “I want Flick to see your face in repose.” His face would still look strange, but not so horrible as it had when he’d howled. Kristin kept a reassuring hand on Flick’s shoulder, to stop her in case she was tempted to run.

Kristin caught the stab of betrayal in her father’s eyes as he slowly turned back to face his granddaughter.

Grandfather and granddaughter stared at each other somberly for a full thirty seconds before her father said, “Iz oo, ik.”

“I missed you, too, Gramps,” Flick said.

“Air oo, uh?”

“Yeah,” Flick agreed. “You scared me pretty bad.”

Kristin barely managed to avoid rolling her eyes. Trust Flick to be totally honest.

“I’m okay now,” Flick continued. She left the security of Kristin’s side and crossed to her grandfather, bracing her hands on the bed to lift herself up and plop her rump down next to his hips. “But your face does look bizarre.”

Bizarre: Strikingly out of the ordinary. That was the word Kristin had been seeking. Trust Flick to root it out of her enormous vocabulary.

Kristin glanced at her watch, a twenty-five-dollar Timex with a brown leather band that Flick had given her for Christmas, which lit in the dark and kept perfect time. If she didn’t leave soon she was going to be late for her meeting with SIRT. “Dad, I’ve got a meeting. We have to leave, but—”

“Ik an ay ere.”

Flick can stay here.

“I don’t know, Dad,” Kristin said, staring worriedly at her daughter.

“I’ll be fine, Mom,” Flick said. “Visiting hours aren’t over till four. I checked.”

“You’re sure it won’t be too much for you, Dad?”

“Gramps, you need to comb your hair,” Flick said, eyeing his tousled blond hair with her head tilted. “It’s a mess. Where’s your comb?”

“No om. Us.”

No comb. Brush.

Flick hopped down and rummaged through the drawer in the small metal chest beside the bed. She found a boar-bristle hairbrush, set it on the bed, then climbed back up beside him. “Where do you want your part?”

He turned relieved eyes to Kristin and said, “O. I ine.”

Go. I’m fine.

Kristin hurried from the room before she could reconsider. She couldn’t miss her investigative meeting with SIRT. And maybe, if Flick had enough trouble communicating with her grandfather, he’d reconsider the speech therapy he’d been refusing.

Kristin headed east from Jackson Memorial on the Dolphin Expressway and kept her fingers crossed as she merged onto I-95 North toward the Miami Field Office. On paper, the MFO was only a seventeen-minute drive straight up the Interstate from the hospital. But all it took was one fender bender to turn I-95 into a parking lot in the middle of the day.

She exhaled when she found traffic moving freely. But she hadn’t driven more than a mile before she found herself slowing to a crawl. “Come on!” she muttered, pounding the steering wheel of her Camry. She checked her watch. She’d given herself an extra twenty minutes to get there, just in case, and it looked like she was going to need every second of it.

She turned the radio to a station that played upbeat Latin music and imagined herself sitting on a warm beach under a colorful umbrella with an ice-cold mojito in hand. She was doing a lot of imagining these days, because her life kept shifting out of her control.

During the past week, she had been asked to spy in London, called 911 to come get her father after his stroke, been involved in another shooting incident at work, in which her partner was seriously wounded, and picked up her errant daughter at the airport after she’d been thrown out of school.

Kristin felt like she’d hit her limit of bad news for one week. Except she now had to face the Shooting Incident Review Team, which held her fate in its hands. What if the board decided to suspend her? Or fire her? She felt a knot forming in the pit of her stomach.

Breathe, Kristin. This, too, shall pass.

But where would she be when it did?

It took fifteen minutes before she passed a two-car accident, which wasn’t even blocking the lane, but which motorists had slowed down to ogle. She made fast time the rest of the way to the exit for North Miami Beach, but she could almost feel the minutes ticking away.

The concrete-and-glass MFO building took up an entire city block and more. The FBI had set up shop in Miami as far back as 1924, and there were still enough criminals—and violations of the rights of American citizens in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America—to keep the MFO hopping.

Kristin heard a clap of thunder and eyed the dark clouds overhead. “Do not rain,” she muttered. “Do not rain.” It had been unseasonably hot the entire month of April and unseasonably rainy, as well. She drove as fast as she dared around the enormous MFO parking lot searching for a spot, anxious to get inside before the downpour started.

She started jogging when the first large raindrops hit her cheeks and eyelashes, but before she reached the door, the heavens let go. Kristin was breathing hard by the time she got inside and stood dripping—and swearing under her breath—at the security checkpoint.

“You look like a drowned rat, Lassiter.”

Kristin turned and saw her boss, Special Agent in Charge Rudy Rodriguez, ready to exit the building, umbrella in hand. In the four years since she’d come to Miami from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Kristin had never seen the Miami SAC caught unprepared.

Rudy was several inches under six feet, big-chested, with a thick waist and dark, sharp eyes. The SAC brushed his receding black hairline straight back from his brow with a palm and said, “I thought your meeting with SIRT was at 3:00.”

“It is.” Kristin had never gotten used to the SAC’s gravelly voice, the result of being nearly strangled to death in an undercover drug operation gone bad.

Rudy glanced at his watch, then reached into his suit coat pocket and came out with a neatly ironed white handkerchief, which he handed to her. “You might want to dry off a little before you head upstairs.”

She took the monogrammed cotton cloth, dabbed at her forehead, cheeks and chin, brushed off the shoulders and lapels of her suit jacket, and handed it back. “Thanks.”

She noticed Rudy didn’t offer advice about what she should say at the hearing. Or console her for having to go through the process of being questioned by SIRT again.

“Good luck,” he said. Then he was gone.

Kristin cleared security as quickly as she could, then took the elevator up to the office of Supervisory Special Agent Roberta Harrison, who was in charge of the MFO’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The OPR was charged with ensuring that agents conducted themselves with the highest level of integrity and professionalism. SSA Harrison did everything by the book, which made her good at her job.

But Harrison had never worked in the field, so she had very little idea how quickly decisions had to be made in moments of extreme duress. And therefore little—make that no—tolerance for honest mistakes.

Which was what the shooting incident Kristin had been involved in four months ago had been. Kristin was aware of how much it had irked SSA Harrison that no disciplinary action had been mandated by the Shooting Incident Review Team in that instance.

Unfortunately, there was no way to excuse what Kristin had done four days ago as an honest mistake. It was dereliction of duty, at the very least. Agent Harrison was finally going to get her pound of flesh. And maybe Kristin’s badge and gun.

Kristin’s crisply ironed shirt had been wilted by the rain, but she squared her shoulders anyway as she was ushered into the hearing room by a civil service secretary. Because she’d so recently been examined—interrogated—by SIRT, she knew what was coming.

Her heartbeat ratcheted up another notch and she took a calming breath to try to slow it down. Her stomach made a rumbling sound and she realized she hadn’t eaten lunch. Maybe that was the reason she felt so nauseous. Or maybe it was the result of a life rocketing out of her control.

“Sit down, please, Agent Lassiter,” SSA Harrison said. Technically, Agent Harrison wasn’t part of SIRT, but she’d apparently decided to attend the meeting.

Kristin seated herself and looked from one sober face on the SIRT panel to the next seated across from her. Three of the four FBI special agents on the Shooting Incident Review Team identified themselves as being from the Criminal Investigative Division, Training Division (Ballistics) and the Office of General Counsel.

“We’ve met,” the fourth special agent reminded her. “I’m Todd Akers, Inspector in Charge of this investigation.” Akers reminded her he was from the Inspection Division.

Kristin surreptitiously wiped her sweaty palms on the front of her trousers under the conference table as she eyed her inquisitors. No one on the Shooting Incident Review Team looked sympathetic.

She didn’t blame them. The charges against her were serious. She and her partner had been ambushed inside a home in Liberty City while they were questioning the occupants about an armed bank robbery. Because she’d hesitated before drawing her weapon—and then hesitated too long before firing it—her partner had been shot and seriously wounded. And because she’d fallen apart after her partner was wounded, the suspected bank robbers had escaped.

“I wondered whether SIRT was letting you off too lightly the last time, Agent Lassiter,” Roberta Harrison said. “I thought at the time you were acting with reckless disregard for human life when you shot that sixteen-year-old boy. You were lucky the local authorities decided not to prosecute.”

“I believed he had a gun.” Kristin felt her face flushing with the heat of anger. She’d been cleared of any wrongdoing in the previous shooting incident by SIRT, and here was Roberta Harrison, who wasn’t even part of the review team, trying her all over again.

“That poor boy didn’t even have a gun, did he?” Harrison said. “It was a cell phone. You shot an unarmed sixteen-year-old.”

“He matched the description of a suspect in an armed bank robbery. I identified myself as FBI. I told him to keep his hands where I could see them. Instead, he reached into his jacket pocket.”

“You didn’t wait to see whether he had a weapon. You just shot him.”

“If I’d waited, I might have been killed. Or seriously wounded, as my partner was when I failed to shoot quickly enough four days ago.”

“So, you admit you failed to back up your partner?” Harrison said triumphantly.

Kristin let out a shaky breath. How easily she’d fallen into the trap Harrison had laid for her. She looked toward the Agent in Charge of the review team, who wouldn’t meet her gaze.

The truth was, her failure to draw her weapon—and to shoot it—was almost predictable. She’d been warned by the psychiatrist she’d been required to see after the shooting four months ago that she might hesitate to shoot in the future.

She’d been on administrative duty for months. After she completed counseling, she’d been asked if she thought she could go back to work and fire her weapon without hesitation. She’d said yes.

She’d been wrong.

“I hesitated before drawing my weapon. And I hesitated before firing—to make sure the suspect had a weapon. By the time I realized he had a gun, he’d already shot George.” Her brand-new partner, who was busy manhandling another suspect, who was unarmed.

“In fact, the suspect shot Agent Parker twice before you fired your weapon, isn’t that true?” Harrison said.

Kristin nodded curtly. “I fired, but the suspect darted around the corner out of the kitchen, and I missed. Once George was down, the suspect he was cuffing took off. He was unarmed, so I didn’t shoot. He knocked me down and fled, along with the other suspect, through the back door. I could tell George was seriously wounded, so I stayed with him.”

“Rather than pursuing the suspects, even though one of them had shot your partner.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kristin said. “I thought we had enough information to find them again. And I wanted to render all the aid I could to my partner.”

She’d visited George in the hospital yesterday, where he was in serious but stable condition. He didn’t blame her, but he no longer wanted to be her partner.

“You’ve got a problem, Lassiter,” one of the SIRT panel members interjected. “Better get it fixed, or no one will want to work with you.”

Most FBI agents didn’t draw their weapons during their entire careers. She’d drawn hers twice, with disastrous results both times. She’d shot too fast. Then she’d shot too slow. She supposed the fear was, the next time she’d be afraid even to draw her weapon.

Kristin wasn’t sure herself what she would do if the situation arose again. Which explained why Harrison seemed so determined to pin her wings to the wall like a butterfly in a lab experiment. Harry Lassiter’s invincible little girl was looking pretty damned vulnerable right about now.

“Do you have anything you’d like to say on your own behalf?” the SIRT Agent in Charge asked.

It could have happened to anyone, Kristin thought. But that argument wasn’t going to do her much good. Or maybe, After what happened last time, you can understand why I had to be sure he had a gun before I fired.

She didn’t make either argument. Nothing could excuse her behavior. So she simply said, “No, sir. I have nothing to add.”

“SIRT will consider the evidence and inform you of what disciplinary action it deems necessary—if any—within the next few weeks,” Akers said. “Until then, Agent Lassiter, keep your nose clean.”

Kristin rose and realized her legs felt shaky. She steadied herself and headed for the door.

“Oh, one more thing,” SSA Harrison said, stopping Kristin at the door.

She turned and waited for whatever barb Harrison had saved for a parting shot.

“You need to see Rebecca in the information office downstairs. The MFO wants to issue a press release about your lawsuit.”

Kristin stared at the SSA blankly. “Lawsuit? I’m not involved in any lawsuit.”

“A reporter from the Miami Herald has already contacted the bureau. I assumed you’d received the paperwork. After this second shooting incident, the parents of the boy you killed are suing you in civil court for wrongful death. Better get yourself a lawyer, Lassiter.”

A lawyer? She couldn’t afford a lawyer, not on top of the expenses for her father’s hospital stay and his rehabilitation and the cost of a nanny for Flick. Her father would hate the publicity a lawsuit would bring, and it would make Flick’s life a nightmare. Not to mention her own. What if she ended up suspended without pay? Or lost her job. That was a distinct possibility, considering how badly the hearing had gone. Then what?

Kristin felt her knees threaten to buckle. She curled her hands into fists and stiffened her legs. A lawsuit was just one more straw. One tiny little straw.

You can do it. Remember, you’re invincible.

To hell with that. Kristin yanked the door to the hearing room open and headed for the stairwell. She realized she wasn’t going to make it. There were no private offices on this floor, just cubicles connected with a lot of other cubicles in a large room. There was nowhere to hide and lick her wounds.

She felt the choking knot building in her throat. Her nose burned with the threat of tears. She blinked to clear her blurring vision. She wasn’t going to break down. She refused to give SSA Roberta Harrison the satisfaction. She felt a tear hit her cheek and angrily brushed it away. But she was losing the battle against the sob growing in her chest.

There was only one place she could hope for any privacy. She hurried around the corner and shoved her way into the ladies’ room, searching for feet under the stalls. With a lack of trust she’d learned from the bureau, she smacked open each stall door, letting the metal slam against the opposite wall, as though she were clearing a house.

When Kristin was absolutely certain no one else was in the room, she let the sob break free.

4

The knock on the door came at a very inopportune moment.

Max had just eased the last button free on his date’s blouse and was sliding the black silk off her shoulders. After his meeting with Kristin in Miami, he’d been irritated to discover that he was having difficulty getting her out of his mind. This seduction—of another woman—was an attempt to remove her entirely.

He ignored the knock.

Despite orders from his uncle, he hadn’t yet found a replacement for Kristin on the tennis court. As ridiculous as it sounded, he kept hoping she’d change her mind. He hadn’t wanted her as his partner, but once she’d refused him, no one else would do.

He kept wondering what he’d done wrong all those years ago to make her hate him so much. Considering everything, it was no surprise she’d said no to playing spy. He was lucky she had. He didn’t need her complicating his life—or the risky assignment he’d been given.

But he couldn’t help comparing the porcelain skin he was kissing with Kristin’s freckled shoulder. K had been self-conscious about her freckles. He’d loved kidding her about them. And kissing each and every one of them. Which had taken the better part of the one night they’d spent together.

“Max?” The perturbed female voice saying his name woke him from his reverie.

He realized he’d stopped caressing his date and was staring out the tall, mullioned windows of the bedroom in the north wing of Blackthorne Abbey where he’d brought her. The room, supposedly slept in by Henry II, had once been the lair of the Beast of Blackthorne.

Not a real beast, of course, but the younger brother of the sixth Duke of Blackthorne, a soldier whose face had been badly scarred at the Battle of Waterloo.

K had loved that story, which also involved a fair maiden, a duke with amnesia and twin eight-year-old girls lost in the hidden passageways of the Abbey leading to the dungeon.

“Max?”

He realized he’d drifted off again. Damn and blast, K. What are you doing to me?

“Where was I?” he said with a rueful grin.

“Making me feel beautiful and desired.”

Max didn’t see the feline smile that accompanied the words, because he was lost again in the past.

“You make me feel so beautiful.”

Those were the words K had said when he’d looked at her naked for the first time. She’d been surprisingly bold—taking his dare when he’d shown up at her hotel room one afternoon unannounced, two years after they’d first met—dropping the hotel’s white terry cloth robe, which she’d donned after her shower, and standing before him in all her glory. Especially since he’d still been dressed in sweaty tennis clothes. He’d been so startled by what she’d done, he hadn’t said anything for a moment. She’d lowered her gaze, suddenly a shy fifteen-year-old again.

He’d quickly taken the few steps to bring him close, lifted her chin with a forefinger, looked into her eyes and said, “You are so beautiful.”

That was when she’d said the words that had thrilled and enthralled him. “You make me feel so beautiful.” He could see it was true. She blossomed like a flower before him, her eyes full of joy and her smile wide and happy. It was the most wonderful, most powerful feeling he’d ever had in seventeen years of living—the ability to bring another human being utter joy.

And he’d only looked at her.

That precious moment had been interrupted when her father knocked on the door and called out to her. Max had raced for the hotel closet and hidden there while K grabbed the robe she’d discarded and anxiously tied it tight at her waist. Her father had wanted to discuss tactics for the next day’s match, so Max had spent an uncomfortable hour fending off a bunch of empty hangers.

When Harry had finally gone, K’s playful mood had left along with him. She’d pleaded fatigue and apologized. Max had left without touching her, without even kissing her. But he’d been entranced with her from that moment on. To say he’d wanted her would be to understate the matter. He’d craved her.

Because of their separate tennis schedules, the opportunity to finish what she’d started didn’t come for almost a year. When he’d finally convinced her to sleep with him, he’d been so impatient to be inside her—and so ignorant of the true state of her innocence—that he’d hurt her. And disappointed her. Despite only wanting to love her, he’d somehow made her hate him.

K had kept him at arm’s length forever after. Or at least until he’d been forced by his uncle to approach her and ask her to work with him.

It had been an awful lesson to learn about human nature. You couldn’t make a person love you, no matter how much you loved them. What had happened with K was exactly what had happened with his mother. Once he’d let her in, she’d shut him out. The pain the second time was terrible enough to cure him of the disease.

Love was for fools and idiots.

“Max, would you rather we didn’t do this?”

Max was startled to discover he’d been neglecting his date again. He’d spent a great deal of time talking Veronica Granville, a reporter for the Times of London, into spending the weekend with him at Blackthorne Abbey, his family’s hereditary castle—complete with moat—in Kent. He’d arranged her seduction carefully, and it was proceeding according to plan. Or had been, until that knock had interrupted them.

And thoughts of that infuriating female from my past.

Max made himself focus on pressing kisses against the throat of the woman in his arms, but as he brushed aside Veronica’s long, straight blond hair, memories of Kristin intruded. He remembered ribbing K about her corkscrew curls, which she hated. And shoving K’s lush blond curls out of the way to kiss her nape as he lay beside her. He remembered how she’d shivered with pleasure in his arms. And how good it had felt to finally press his naked flesh against hers.

He supposed it was K’s lack of sexual experience that had made kissing her and caressing her so memorable. He couldn’t help smiling as he recalled how amazed she’d looked when he’d kissed the tip of her small breast.

“I’m glad to see you’re enjoying yourself,” Veronica said as she turned in his embrace.

The smile disappeared as he acknowledged how totally Kristin Lassiter had been dominating his thoughts.

The knock came again.

The statuesque blonde in his arms stared at the thick, wooden-planked door, with its enormous black wrought-iron hinges and said, “I thought you said we were the only guests at the Abbey.”

“We are.” He’d told the reporter he was a distant cousin of the Duchess of Blackthorne’s estranged husband, and that the duchess had offered to let him stay as a guest at the Abbey. He’d learned from bitter experience that he couldn’t trust a woman’s feelings when she knew from the outset that he was the youngest son of the infamous Bella and Bull.

Max blessed his mother for the diligence she’d used in keeping photos of her children out of the papers and off the internet. With some fancy footwork during his brief junior tennis career that included refusing to pose for photos or turning his head when the cameras flashed during the trophy presentation, he’d remained virtually invisible both in print and online. There were pictures, but not good ones.

“I heard you tell the butler we didn’t want to be disturbed,” Veronica said. “Who could it be?”

“Ignore it,” he murmured, brushing aside her silky blond hair and teasing her ear with his teeth, determined, this time, to banish K from his thoughts.

The knock came again, cracking like thunder.

And he bit Veronica’s ear.

“Ouch!” Veronica grabbed her ear as she pulled away and shrugged her blouse back onto her shoulders. “Answer the damned door, Max,” she snapped, turning her back as she rebuttoned her blouse.

Since she was dressed again, he sighed and headed for the door. When he opened it, he found the Blackthorne butler, whose forebears had worked at the Abbey since medieval times, wearing formal clothes and holding a silver platter containing a blue-tinged white envelope. The word TELEGRAM, framed by four red stripes, was written in blue on the upper left hand corner.

“I presume that’s for me, Smythe,” Max said quietly.

“Yes, your lordship,” the butler replied, just as quietly. “It was delivered by personal messenger.”

It was impossible to get Smythe to call him Max. He’d been trying since he was a boy of six. It was Lord Maxwell, or your lordship, as though they were living a century or two in the past. Considering the English laws of succession, there was no way he should be a lord.

It was Smythe who’d explained to him how, thanks to his courageous ancestors—and an act of Parliament—he remained fourth in line to inherit the Blackthorne dukedom.

It was a pretty good story, actually. One of K’s favorites, back in the days when they were speaking to each other.

When all the male Blackthorne heirs had died heroically during the Battle of Britain in the Second World War, Parliament had amended the Letters Patent creating the Dukedom of Blackthorne so the title would pass “to all and every other issue male and female, lineally descending of or from the said Duke of Blackthorne, to be held by them severally and successively, the elder and the descendants of every elder issue to be preferred before the younger of such issue.”

Which meant that either males or females could inherit the dukedom. This prevented the title from being extinguished by the death of the last male Blackthorne during the war. It was the first time such a thing had been done since the Dukedom of Marlborough was preserved in the same way for similar reasons in 1706.

As the elder of twin sisters, his mother was the current holder of the title. Max’s eldest brother, Oliver, would succeed her as the next Duke of Blackthorne. As the eldest son, Oliver currently held one of the Duke of Blackthorne’s lesser titles, Earl of Courtland, and was often referred to simply as Courtland.

Max stared at the note on the silver platter and said, “This couldn’t wait, Smythe?”

“It is a missive from Her Grace.”

Max knew that as far as anyone at the Abbey was concerned, communication from the duchess was like word from on high. He thought back to the last time his mother had gotten in touch with him. It was six months ago, when she’d emailed to ask if he was coming home to Blackthorne Abbey for Christmas. He wasn’t.

He was only here now because his mother was not. And because he’d hoped the exotic locale would help him seduce Veronica—and forget K.

He’d failed miserably on both counts.

“Thank you, Smythe,” he said, taking the note from the tray.

The butler bowed, then took an arthritic step back, before turning and limping away. As he retreated, his uneven cadence echoed off the high stone ceilings in the hall.

The instant the door was closed, Max crushed the missive, dropped it onto an ivory-inlaid chess table and said, “Where were we?”

But Veronica the Reporter was curious. She crossed the Aubusson carpet to the table, picked up the crushed paper and pressed it flat across the front of her skirt. “It’s a telegram. From America.” She turned to Max and asked, “Why would anyone send a telegram in this day and age? I mean, why not phone or fax, or text or email?”

It wasn’t until she pointed it out that Max realized just how odd his mother’s missive was. He took the telegram from Veronica and tore it open. He crossed to the windows edged with ivy on the outside and hung with gold brocade curtains on the inside and held the note up where it could catch the last rays of daylight.

Veronica followed him. “What is it, Max? Who’s it from?”

Max let out a sigh of relief, crushed the note once more and tossed it onto an ancient oak chest that ran below the mullioned windows. “It’s nothing.”

“Mind if I look?” She didn’t wait for permission, just picked up the discarded paper, straightened it out for a second time and began to read.

Max grimaced, knowing what was coming.

She gasped and turned to stare at him. “The Duchess of Blackthorne is your mother?”

He met her gaze and shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

“Don’t try using those innocent baby blues on me,” she said sharply. “Your mother’s not just famous, Max. She’s infamous.”

Which was why he never mentioned the connection. “So?”

“So? So?” she repeated incredulously.

Max knew exactly what was running through her mind. He’d lived through some of it and heard stories all his life about the rest. Seventeen-year-old Lady Isabella’s fairy-tale romance and rocky marriage to twenty-nine-year-old American banking heir Bull Benedict had been tabloid fodder for years.

First, Bella had stolen Bull away from her twenty-one-year-old second cousin, Lady Regina Delaford, daughter of the Marquess of Tenby, whom Bull had been courting. To add insult to injury, Bull and Bella had married barely a month after they’d met. The poverty-stricken duchess had even agreed to sign a prenuptial agreement to prove she wasn’t marrying the banking heir for his billions.

Eyebrows rose at the birth of their first child a mere eight months later. The public gasped each time Bella showed up at some charity function wearing the priceless jewels—each with a legend attached—that Bull had given to his wife during their marriage: rubies, pearls, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds.

Last, but not least, the public had devoured news of Bull and Bella’s antagonistic separation after twenty-five years of marriage. Gossip said Bull hadn’t divorced his wife because after twenty-five years of marriage, the prenup became null and void, and Bella could lay claim to as much as the English courts decided to give her of Bull’s tremendous fortune.

Even though they were separated, they continued to show up at the same charity, political and business functions in England, Europe and America, providing more delicious tidbits for the gossips.

As though to goad her husband, Bella never failed to wear one of the fabulous jewels Bull had given her during their marriage as a sign of his enduring love—when she walked in on the arm of another man.

“Are you going to America for Mother’s Day?” Veronica asked as she crossed to him.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

She pressed her abdomen against his as she slid her arms around his neck. She played with the straight black hair at his nape, sending a shiver down his spine.

It seemed his seduction of the reporter was back on track.

Max leaned forward to kiss the beautiful woman in his arms but hesitated when she whispered, “I can’t believe I’m kissing the Duchess of Blackthorne’s son.”

He lifted his head and stared down at her with the cynicism he always felt when someone seemed awed by who he was. Or rather, who his mother was. No one knew the real Max Benedict.

Except K. She’d known exactly who he was.

And rejected you.

The boy. She’d rejected the boy. He was a man now. Would K see that if she got to know him again? Would she be able to love him again? Did he want her to love him again? The thought was dizzying. Intriguing. And terrifying. He’d simply have to be sure this time, if it came to it, that he was the one doing the rejecting.

Even K—Agent Lassiter—had believed the carefully cultivated common belief that he was a care-for-nothing playboy, a reckless rogue who’d learned his hedonism from Bull and Bella in their heyday. Despite what K might think of his behavior, the deception made him a very good spy.

Not that he worked all the time. Or even every time the CIA—or some other American governmental organization identifying itself with capital letters—asked. But he was a valuable asset.

As he’d pointed out to K, by virtue of his pedigree, he had access to the very wealthy, which included drug czars and their sons and daughters, and munitions dealers and their sons and daughters, and of course, wealthy Arab potentates who might be funding terrorist activities and their sons, if not their daughters.

It was amazing how much information was dropped over a drink after a game of polo. Or during one of his seductions.

The sad thing was, Max hadn’t wanted information from Veronica Granville. He’d simply liked the way she looked. He’d liked how bright she was, how witty she’d been at the bar where they’d crossed paths. He’d hoped for some good sex, along with some intelligent company.

Now she had stars in her eyes, put there by his mother’s infamy. From now on, he would question whether her interest in him wasn’t really interest in getting closer to his mother.

But he wasn’t going to turn down the sex just because it might come with a few strings attached.

“Max,” she whispered in his ear. “If you go to America, will you take me with you?”

“We can talk about that later,” he said, used to negotiations where he promised nothing but the promise of something that might be offered in the future. “We have more important things to focus on right now.”

Max captured her mouth with his as he pulled her close. She rubbed herself against him like a cat drunk on catnip. He felt a little sad when he realized he didn’t trust her enthusiastic response.

He cleared his mind and focused on sensations. The softness of her breasts against his chest. The sweet taste of her mouth. The heat that surged through his veins, causing almost instant rock-hard arousal. The throbbing need he would soon slake inside her hot, wet, willing body.

Insidious thoughts crept back in. Of K lecturing him on how lucky he was to have a mother. And how if she still had a mother, she’d treasure every day she had with her. He’d argued that his situation was different. That the duchess hadn’t been a mother for many years. Just like K’s mother, when Bella had left his father, she’d left her children, as well.

So why, after all these years, had the duchess invited him to spend Mother’s Day at The Seasons? He had boy hood memories of holidays spent there with his brothers and his four male cousins, Nash, Ben, Carter and Rhett, Foster’s sons with his first wife, Abigail.

When Foster had divorced Abby, they’d divided their four sons between them. Foster got Ben and Carter. Abby got Nash and Rhett. Both parents had remarried and had more kids. Max and his brothers hadn’t been back to The Seasons since his parents had separated ten years ago. So what was his mother’s invitation all about?

“Max? Is something wrong?”

Max realized he’d stopped kissing Veronica and was once again staring out the window over her shoulder.

Damn you, Mother. You’re worse than K. Why can’t you stay the hell out of my life!

Max let go of the reporter and took a step back. “I’m sorry, Veronica. Maybe we can do this another time.”

“What?”

He could see she was annoyed. He didn’t blame her. He was more than a little annoyed himself at the distraction K—and his mother’s telegram—had created.

“I’ll drive you back to London.” He was glad now he’d decided to make the hour drive south on the M20 motorway from London, rather than taking the train with Veronica from Victoria Station.

Her hands shot to her hips. “I thought we were going to spend the weekend here, Max. Why the sudden change in plans?”

She would have done better kissing him again, Max reflected. He didn’t have much tolerance for female indignation. Although, he supposed she had a right to be upset.

She narrowed her eyes and said, “It’s that telegram, isn’t it? Is something going on with the duchess? I could use a scoop, Max. What do you know? Or think you know?”

“There’s nothing going on with my mother except a desire to keep all her lambs in the fold,” Max shot back.

“What mother wouldn’t want her children with her on Mother’s Day?” Veronica pointed out.

“Mine.”

Max didn’t elaborate. He wasn’t about to tell a reporter from the Times how seldom he’d seen his mother since his parents had split up. How visits with her, from the age of seven onward—when he’d been shipped off to boarding school—had been prized, because they’d been so few and far between. And how often those visits had been canceled.

He and his brothers had spent their lives in one English or European or American boarding school after another. There had been so many because whenever one or another of them had done something to get himself thrown out, the others had refused to stay where they weren’t all welcome. As the youngest, Max had created his own share of the carnage.

None of them had held a candle to Oliver. Oliver had a gift. He could destroy as easily with words as with a blow.

But, of course, Oliver had a greater burden to bear than any of the rest of them.

Max had heard the rumors about who’d really sired his eldest brother, who had dark brown eyes, rather than blue or gray, like both of their parents and the rest of his siblings. Max wasn’t sure what he believed. But he’d more than once defended both his mother’s—and his brother’s—honor.

Max had been lonely at the end, because he was five years younger than his next older brother, Payne. His brothers had all gone on to university—or not—and he’d been left behind. Sometimes he wondered how Lydia had managed. Being the only girl, and nearly two years younger than he was, she’d been all alone from the start.

“You’re not being fair, Max,” Veronica said with a petulant pout that made him realize how much he would have enjoyed having that mouth, with those full lips, taking full advantage of his body.

“I’ll make it up to you,” he said.

“Promise you’ll bring me back here?” she said, moving close again.

Rather than reply in words, he took her in his arms and kissed her, giving the effort his full attention. And comparing the kiss, inevitably, with kissing K. He and K definitely had unfinished business. Whether she came to work with him or not, he hadn’t seen her for the last time. He realized the woman he held in his arms wasn’t the one he wanted to be kissing and let her go.

“You won’t forget me, Max,” Veronica said in a breathy voice when he released her.

“Believe me, Veronica, you’re unforgettable,” Max said with a teasing wink. He would never forget how difficult it had been to concentrate on this woman when he was thinking about another.

Veronica smiled and he watched her shoulders relax.

“Excuse me while I visit the powder room,” she said. She turned and he realized she had no idea where it was.

He pointed her in the right direction. “In there.”

He almost groaned with regret as he watched the sexy sway of her hips as she walked away. He was sure she had the sexual sophistication to please him a great deal in bed. Veronica turned to glance at him over her shoulder, her long blond hair swinging free, and smiled. The invitation remained.

He should take advantage of it. He should cross the room and take her in his arms and finish what he had, by God, started.

But there was no way he could enjoy partaking of such delicious fruit until he’d settled things one way or the other with K. He was going to have to talk with her again. He was going to have to convince her to work with him. If for no other reason than to prove to himself that the woman wouldn’t—simply couldn’t—live up to his memories of her.

Maybe he ought to go to America for Mother’s Day. He could stop by The Seasons and find out what the hell his mother wanted.

More importantly, he’d be on the same continent as K. He could take a flight down to Miami and talk some sense into her. Because he wasn’t going to have any peace until he did.

5

“Another gift has arrived, Your Grace, along with a note declining your invitation.”

Bella growled with frustration, then put a hand to her heart, which was beating hard enough from anxiety to hurt. What if none of her children showed up? She couldn’t bear the thought. Did they despise her so much? Or were they truly as busy as they claimed to be?

Bella forced herself to take a deep, calming breath as she settled onto a rock-hard horsehair Victorian sofa. The sofa had survived fire and plague and pestilence over the centuries, which was why the uncomfortable thing still stood in the parlor at The Seasons.

She took several more deep breaths but didn’t feel the least bit calmed. Oliver, Riley and Payne had already rejected her invitation, citing business commitments. “Who sent the latest gift?” she asked her assistant. “Lydia or Max?”

“It’s from Lady Lydia,” Emily said.

“So Max might still come.”

“We can always hope, Your Grace.”

Bella eyed the young woman. “But you don’t believe he’ll show.”

“We can always hope,” Emily repeated. “You know how busy everyone is. According to the report from Warren & Warren Investigations, Courtland—I mean, the earl—Oliver—is purchasing ranch land in Argentina. Lord Riley is negotiating for oil tankers in Hong Kong. And Lord Payne…” A thoughtful frown wrinkled her forehead before she said, “Oh, yes. Mr. Warren reported that Lord Riley is on a ship somewhere in the Aegean, researching an underwater archeological find.”

“And Lydia’s excuse?” Bella asked.

“According to the note that came with your gift, she’s in Venice. She mentioned something about hunting down a stolen painting.”

Bella picked up a needlepointed pillow from the sofa and threw it across the room toward the elaborately carved white marble fireplace. It fell short. She hissed with fury.

“Are you all right, Your Grace?” Emily asked, rushing to her side.

“I’m fine, Emily,” Bella said with irritation. “There’s nothing wrong with my heart. Go back to your knitting.”

Emily reluctantly crossed the room, picked up a pair of knitting needles and a partially completed blue wool sweater from a silk-brocade-covered wing chair, and sat down.

“You know what I hate most about what’s happening here?” Bella said.

Over the clack of her knitting needles Emily asked, “What’s that, Your Grace?”

“The smug look I’m going to see on my brother-in-law’s face when only one of my children shows up here today.” Bella heard footsteps on the creaky, carpeted wooden Gone-With-the-Wind staircase in the central hallway of the nearly four-century-old home. She glanced over her shoulder and found Foster Benedict, Bull’s younger brother—and her nemesis—standing in the doorway to the parlor. “Speak of the devil,” she muttered.

“Good morning, Bella,” he said with surprising cordiality.

Bella watched as Foster crossed to a breakfront where a silver coffee service and a selection of pastries had been set out by the butler. Foster had been incensed when she’d told him she intended to have her children visit her for Mother’s Day at The Seasons. He’d already made plans to have his children meet their mother there. He’d ordered her to go somewhere else.

Bella had refused. Since she was still Bull’s wife, she was entitled to use of The Seasons. Instead, she’d suggested Foster have his family join hers, as they had during holidays in years gone by. Given no other choice, he’d agreed.

“It seems it won’t be as crowded here this weekend as I feared,” Foster said.

Bella saw the superior look on his face in the gilded mirror behind the breakfront. And heard the satisfaction in his voice. Foster expected five of his seven children—two of his four sons and his three teenage daughters—to be on hand today. He must be aware that at least four of her five children would not.

“I wouldn’t look so smug if I were you,” Bella said.

“Why not?” Foster said.

“Your children are making their way here from a few miles up the road. It’s understandable if mine aren’t able to come from halfway around the world. And I’m expecting Max to turn up at any moment.”

“One out of five,” Foster mused. “Frankly, one more than I expected.”

“You’ve always been a son of a bitch, Foster.”

“You’re the bitch incarnate,” Foster shot back.

“How dare you!” Emily said, rising from her chair to confront Foster. “Take that back.”

Foster laughed viciously. “Take it back?” He turned to Bella and said, “Tell your minion to back off, Bella. Or I’ll have her for breakfast.”

Emily looked flustered, but she stood her ground.

“Sit down, Emily,” Bella said in an even voice. Then she focused her narrowed eyes on Foster and said, “Don’t threaten Emily again, or I’ll have to retaliate in a way you won’t like.”

“What would that be?”

“Use your imagination,” Bella said. “You know I make good on my promises.”

The last time they’d locked horns Bella had arranged for Foster to lose an extraordinary amount of money on one of his investments. Foster understood the power of money.

His mouth turned down in a sour look. “Like I said. You’re a bitch.”

He turned back to the silver coffeepot and continued his recitation as though their altercation had never happened. “Just so you know, Ben brought his fiancée, Anna,” he said as he poured coffee into a china teacup. “Carter’s home on leave from duty in Iraq, so he invited his girl, Sloan, to come for the day.”

He added a spoonful of sugar, then turned to her with china cup in hand. “I’m surprising Patsy by having Amanda and Bethany and Camille flown in on the family jet from that French boarding school they attend. I pick them up in Richmond before lunch.”

“I’m sure Patsy will enjoy having her daughters here,” Bella said neutrally. She was willing to be just exactly as polite as Foster was. Besides, she’d never had any enmity for Patsy or her three daughters. The elder two girls were twins with curly blond hair who resembled their mother. The younger had dark hair like her father.

To be perfectly honest, Bella liked Patsy Benedict. Foster’s second wife would never be called thin or chic, but Patsy had warm hazel eyes and had always been extraordinarily kind to her.

But from the beginning, there had never been any love lost between her and her brother-in-law. The first time Foster had met her, he’d called her “a conniving bitch.” He was the one who’d insisted on the prenup. This was the first time they’d come in contact with one another in ten years. It seemed Foster’s animosity had survived her separation from Bull intact.

Which caused her to reply to his recitation with just a little satisfaction of her own, “I’m sure it will be nice to have most of your children here for Mother’s Day. But I can’t help wondering, where is their mother?”

Foster cleared his throat uncomfortably. “She’ll be here.”

“Why didn’t Patsy come with you from Washington?”

Bella knew that Foster, a retired four-star general, currently served as an advisor to the president on terrorism. He and Patsy had a brick home in the Fan District of Richmond, but Foster spent most of his time in another large home they owned in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.

“Patsy’s been staying at her father’s ranch in Texas the past few months,” Foster said. “Her father’s been ill.”

“Then it’s nice you’ll have a chance to get together today. When is she arriving? Are you picking her up at the airport, too?”

Foster cleared his throat again. “She said she’d make her own travel arrangements.”

Bella knew more about the situation between Foster and his second wife than she’d let on. She had enough social contacts in the Capitol to hear the rumors that Patsy and Foster had separated several months ago. Bella wasn’t sure of the exact problem, but it must have been something serious, since the couple had been together for nearly twenty years. She could understand why Foster didn’t want her around, if he was attempting a reconciliation with his wife.

Well, Bella wouldn’t get in his way. For Patsy’s sake, if not his. Besides, she had enough problems of her own. How was she going to get her sons married off before she died, if they were determined to avoid her company?

Bella had employed Warren & Warren Investigations, with its main offices in Dallas, Texas, often over the years to keep tabs on her children. Sam Warren’s information had always been reliable. She rarely interfered in her children’s lives, but once or twice, as they were growing up, she’d come to the rescue of one or another of her sons without his knowledge.

She’d helped anonymously, because she’d known none of them would want or appreciate her help. Lydia had remained loyal to her mother after the separation, but she knew the boys blamed her for breaking up their once-happy family.

It was your fault. You’re guilty as charged.

There were circumstances she’d never had a chance to explain that might have excused her behavior, if only Bull had been willing to listen. He’d been too angry to hear reason. And she’d felt too betrayed to explain.

She’d stood shocked and heartbroken as Foster tried to goad his brother into divorcing her. His diatribe was indelibly etched in her memory.

“She was a bitch when you met her, and she hasn’t changed one iota in the twenty-five years you’ve been married to her. I say cut your losses and get the hell out while you can.”

Bella wasn’t sure she would ever be able to forgive Bull for refusing to listen to her. Although, at this point, it didn’t really matter, did it? She was running out of time to tell Bull the truth. Running out of chances to make amends before her heart failed.

When Foster spoke, it was as though he’d been reading her mind. “I called Bull at his office in Paris and mentioned this little visit of yours to The Seasons. I wondered if he might have some idea why you decided to come here, considering the fact you haven’t been to The Seasons once since your separation.”

“Oh?” Bella said warily. “What did he say?”

“He was ready to get on a plane and come here himself. I didn’t think that was a good idea, considering everything.”

Of course you didn’t.

He arched a brow and said, “I told him that if you’d wanted him here, you would have invited him.”

And you heard me tell Bull when we ended up brangling at the Heart Association Ball in February, that I would rather die than lay eyes on him again.

“You know Bull,” Foster continued. “He does what he wants. If he comes, he’ll be on the jet from Paris with my girls. He thought it would be a good chance to see all the kids.”

Bella heard the rest of Foster’s thought without it being spoken: He’s not coming here to see you. Bull Benedict wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire. It wasn’t exaggerating to say that she and Bull had fought their own Revolutionary War during the ten years they’d been separated.

“The condition his European banks are in with this crazy global economy, I doubt he can get away.” Foster set down his coffee cup. “I’d better get going, or I’ll be late.”

Bella exhaled audibly when Foster left the room. She glanced at Emily, who was eyeing her worriedly, and shook her head to indicate she was fine. The young woman was acting like a mother hen with one chick. Bella didn’t bother repeating that she was fine. She simply rose and headed for the stairs. Climbing that enormous staircase was great exercise. And she needed time alone in her room to think.

If she and Bull were going to be in the same room again, she should take advantage of the opportunity to explain what she’d kept secret for so many years.

Maybe, at long last, she would.

6

“Hello, Bull.”

“Hello, Duchess.”

Bella felt her heart flutter when Bull called her Duchess. It had been his pet name for her during their marriage, spoken with tenderness and love. He’d rarely used it after they’d separated. Right now it sounded…so very good. She waited for the snide or snarly comment that usually followed, turning their post-separation encounters into a cat and dog fight.

It didn’t come.

She eased back into the Adirondack chair situated on the sunny bank of the James River, where both families had gathered for a Mother’s Day picnic, and gestured him into the chair beside her. “Would you like to join me?”

“How are you?” he asked as he stooped under a colorful umbrella and slid into the slatted wooden lawn chair beside her.

Such an innocent question. How should she answer it? She felt the tension gather in her shoulders just from sitting so close to Bull. Felt her heart begin the ridiculous pitty-pat that proximity to this masterful, passionate man always caused. She looked into his sky-blue eyes and opened her mouth to tell him the truth. What came out was, “I’m fine.”

His gaze roamed her face. “You look a little pale. I didn’t see you at Cote D’Azur or Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat over the winter. What have you been doing with yourself?”

I skipped a holiday on the French Riviera this year because I was getting a lot of medical tests. You see, my heart is failing. I’m slowly—but surely—dying.

Bella thought the words. They never made it out of her mouth. She’d heard the subtle insinuation in Bull’s voice. The mocking suggestion that she’d been hiding out with yet another lover. The truth stuck in her throat.

Lies came so much easier. At the beginning of their marriage, lies had been necessary. The truth would have destroyed everything.

Unfortunately, lying had become the easy way to keep peace between them. It was difficult to believe she could tell the truth now and not have it turned against her. But she’d already lost Bull. When the most important thing in her life was gone, what did she have to lose?

“To be honest, Bull, I’m—”

Before she could finish her sentence, she was interrupted by Foster’s three teenage girls. They rushed up to her Adirondack chair and grabbed her hands and arms, pulling her to her feet.

“Come and join us, Aunt Bella,” one of the twins urged. “We’re going canoeing.”

Bella was already standing by the time she said, “No, thank you, girls. I prefer to enjoy the James River from its banks, rather than by paddling through it. You go ahead.”

The twins turned their attention to Bull, who’d risen to his feet when the girls pulled her upright. “Come with us, Uncle Bull,” one twin pleaded. “We hardly ever see you anymore.”

“Please come,” the second twin urged. “There are three of us, so if we take two canoes we need another paddler.”

“What about your dad?” Bull asked. “Have you asked him?”

“Daddy said he needs to talk to Mom,” the youngest of the three girls said.

“We think that’s a good idea,” one of the twins said. Three worried glances slid to their parents, who were following an old wagon trail along the river bank. Foster and Patsy walked along separate tracks in the dirt road. The conversation seemed heated.

“What about one of your older brothers?” Bull asked.

“Ben and Carter already took their girlfriends out on the Chris-Craft,” one of the twins replied.

“C’mon, Uncle Bull. Pleeeeeze,” the youngest girl begged, latching onto his arm with both her hands. “Otherwise, I can’t go.”

Bull glanced in Bella’s direction. “I hoped to spend some time talking with your aunt.”

Bella wondered what he had in mind. They’d rarely spoken cordially during their separation. They hadn’t spoken at all since February. And yet, before it was too late, she hoped to explain things she’d left unexplained.

Time was running out.

She was seized with a sudden fear. Once she told Bull the truth, there would be no turning back. Whatever chance they might have had for some sort of reconciliation before she died might be gone. There was still a great deal of the day left. Maybe, if she had more time to think, she could find a better way to say what had to be said.

She glanced toward Camille’s crestfallen face and said, “Go ahead, Bull. We can talk when you get back.”

“All right,” he said, his gaze intent on her. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

Bella watched as Camille slid her arm through Bull’s and hauled him off toward the boathouse, talking his ear off as he strode away. The twins ran ahead. Their matching pink bikini bathing suits revealed just how grown-up they’d become in the years since she’d last seen them.

The sun was hot, and Bella settled back into the umbrella-shaded Adirondack. Foster’s second family was almost grown and would soon be leading lives apart from their parents. Meaning Patsy might feel more free to walk away from her husband. Which would be too bad. She didn’t like Foster, but she hated to see another family broken up.

Bella’s gaze naturally sought out the riverbank again, where Patsy and Foster were walking together. Or rather, walking in the same direction. Their body language made it clear they weren’t “together.” They stopped and faced each other.

Patsy’s chin jutted, and she perched balled fists on her hips. Foster locked his hands behind his head, then dropped them to his sides as he took a step toward Patsy. She took a step back, maintaining the distance between them.

The sharp sound of Patsy’s voice carried to Bella, but not the words she spoke. The wind caught Foster’s intense masculine tones and carried them in her direction, as well, without revealing what he’d said.

Bella wished she knew more about what had caused the rift between them in the first place. She’d always envied the fact that, after he divorced his first wife, Foster had found another woman to love. In the years since she and Bull had separated, Bella had never found another man who could inspire anything close to the feelings Bull had. Lord knew—and the gossip columns had reported endlessly—how hard she’d tried.

It was little comfort to know that Bull hadn’t found anyone either. He, at least, had gone through several long-term liaisons. In each case, she’d held her breath waiting to hear him ask her for a divorce. But the relationships had always ended.

With the days of her life numbered, Bella knew how foolish she’d been to walk away from the one man she’d ever truly loved. All those wasted years! Regret seemed futile, but she felt it all the same. She wanted Bull’s arms around her again before it was too late. She needed to tell him the truth. She just hoped he would be able to forgive her.

“Your Grace?”

Bella turned and felt her heart sink when she saw what Emily was holding. Her assistant had stayed at the main house to await news from the one child who hadn’t yet replied to her invitation.

“Lord Maxwell won’t be coming,” Emily said as she handed a floral card to Bella. “He sent flowers—your favorite, hyacinths—along with the note.”

“Thank you, Emily,” Bella said as she took the note. She opened it and read:

Dear Mother,

Sorry I can’t be with you to celebrate. I’m sure you’ll have plenty of company without me. I’ll see you when you return home.

Max

The note sounded cold to Bella. It was certainly missing any sort of affection. Not Love, Max or even Your loving son, Max. Just Max. No XXXs or OOOs—no kisses or hugs.

Bella felt her throat swell with emotion. She swallowed over the painful lump that formed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d hugged or kissed one of her children. They’d been gone at school so much. That had been her choice, of course. It had seemed safer to keep them out of the line of fire while she and Bull were lobbing verbal grenades in the years before they’d finally moved into separate homes.

But the war had gone on for far too long. When she’d finally brought her sons home to Blackthorne Abbey on holiday, she’d found them aloof. And nothing she’d said or done had been able to melt the wall of ice that had grown between them.

The younger boys had followed Oliver’s lead. Because of the rumors that had surrounded her eldest son’s birth, Oliver had learned early how to fight back. He won the battle against the gossips by not caring what others thought…or felt.

Consequently, her eldest son had a ruthless streak that ran deep. Oliver wasn’t entirely heartless. He clearly loved his younger brothers and sister. But he was unforgiving. And he could be cold-blooded, as he had been when he’d refused her invitation for Mother’s Day without a stitch of Riley’s politeness or Payne’s tact or Max’s apology or Lydia’s kindness.

Her eldest son was a bitter man. Perhaps it was time to tell him who his father was. And how he had been conceived. Then his rancor toward the world could be aimed where it truly belonged.

Was that really fair? Would the truth make her son’s life better? Or a hundred times worse? By unburdening herself, wouldn’t she be adding to the malignant weight her son had carried all his life?

“Your Grace? Are you feeling well?” Emily asked.

Bella realized her heart was pounding. “I’m fine,” she said. “Sit down, Emily. Get out of the sun.”

Emily smiled and said. “I like the sun, Your Grace. There’s too little of it in England.”

Bella waved her away. “You should be off canoeing with the girls.”

“My place is here with you.”

“Then sit down,” she said. “I don’t like to have you hovering.”

Emily looked guilty. And uncomfortable. She hesitated, then settled into the Adirondack Bull had vacated.

Bella felt awful for making her assistant feel self-conscious. Staying in one’s place out of respect was one thing, but the girl took it too far. Emily was another person she was determined to see well-settled before the end. The woman deserved to be happy. Although, it was hard to imagine Emily being attracted to—or, unfortunately, attractive to—a man.

“Do you have a boyfriend, Emily?” she asked.

Emily’s mouth dropped into an O of surprise. “Why, no, Your Grace.”

“Is there some man you fancy?”

Emily turned beet red. It wasn’t an attractive color on her.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” Bella said. “I was merely curious.”

“There is a man, Your Grace, but…”

“But you’re stuck traveling around the world with me.”

“It isn’t that, Your Grace. I love spending time with you.”

“Then what is it, Emily?”

The young woman twisted her hands in her lap. At long last, she met Bella’s gaze and said, “I’ve loved him from the moment I met him. But he doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

“Oh.” That was a sad state of affairs. One Bella would have to rectify. Just as soon as she managed to get her own large brood married off.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Your Grace?” Emily asked.

Bella realized she was twisting the large diamond she still wore on the third finger of her left hand in painful circles on her swollen finger. She laid her hands in her lap and said, “I’m disappointed about what’s happened this weekend, if you want to know the truth.”

“Very understandable, Your Grace. Your children are—”

“Ungrateful monsters? Spoiled brats? Renegades without a conscience?”

“Oh, no, Your Grace,” Emily protested. “I would never—”

“I’ve said it for you,” Bella soothed. And yet, she felt frustrated by the result of her first attempt at making amends with both husband and children.

Was it hope that made her feel so agitated? Or fear? Whatever she was going to do, whether it was trying to win back her husband, or finding spouses for her children, she’d better get started doing it.

She’d tell Bull the truth today, she decided. As for the other task she’d given herself… It wasn’t going to be easy arranging romantic liaisons for her sons and daughter if she couldn’t even get them to come see her for a special occasion like Mother’s Day. She was simply going to have to intrude on their lives, whether they liked it or not.

But where to begin?

Max was in London. He’d even agreed to see her when she got home. She knew the perfect woman for her youngest son. She should have done something long ago to get the two of them together. Now, at long last, she hoped to make things right. It made sense to start matchmaking with Max.

“Emily, I need you to make some travel arrangements for us.”

“Certainly, Your Grace. Where are we going?”

“Home. But first we’re going to—”

Foster descended on Bella like a blustery winter wind. “This is all your fault!”

Foster’s unexpected attack frightened Bella enough to make her heart jump. She put a hand against her chest and shot a warning look at Emily, to keep her from revealing the existence of her heart condition.

“I have many sins for which I will have to answer,” Bella answered as languidly as she could. “I doubt any of them have much to do with you.”

“My wife sees you flitting around the world without a thought in your head and—”

“Flitting?” Bella interrupted, arching a disdainful brow.

“Wandering, traipsing, gadding about,” Foster interjected, furiously. “And she starts thinking life in one place is too confining.”

“Are you sure it’s not life with one man she finds too confining?” Bella said in a silky voice.

Foster braced his hands on the arms of her Adirondack and leaned in so close she could feel his breath on her face. “You’re not the one to be talking. At least my children showed up here today. You’re reaping what you’ve sowed, Bella,” he said viciously.

“I hardly think—”

“You sent those poor kids of yours off to boarding schools their whole lives while you partied your way around the world.” He sneered down at her. “What did you expect? You treated them like dirt. They’re just paying you back.”

“That’s quite enough,” Bella said quietly.

Foster stood up, but he didn’t step back. “I’ve barely gotten started, lady. You had to come here when you knew I was trying to mend things with my wife. You’ve been a bad seed from the start. You insinuated yourself between Bull and the woman he was courting. You teased him and taunted him and stole him away from the caring person—the lady—he should have married. It’s a shame Bull couldn’t see what I did.”

“I loved your brother.” I still love him! Bella wanted to cry. But that would be setting fire to gasoline, considering Foster’s rage.

“You don’t know what love is!” Foster said with a sneer. “You tricked my brother into marrying you. Christ, you threatened him with jail if he didn’t.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” Bella protested. Her aunt, who’d stood in for her dead parents, had threatened to go to the police and have Bull charged with statutory rape if he didn’t marry her. “Bull wasn’t innocent,” Bella pointed out. “He did have sex with a seventeen-year-old.”

“But some other guy got there first, didn’t he, Bella?” Foster snarled. “Because Oliver isn’t Bull’s son. For God’s sake, his eyes are brown!”

Bella’s face blanched. Both Bella and Bull had blue eyes. Which made Oliver’s brown eyes a genetic impossibility. Some other man had to be his father. The truth had been there all along, but Foster had ever spoken it aloud. Until now.

“You love those detestable diamonds and rubies and pearls my brother lavished on you more than you ever loved him or any of those kids,” Foster ranted. “You’re a lying, cheating bitch, Bella. Just stay the hell away from me and my brother!”

Bella pressed a fist against her heart and leaned forward, struggling to breathe. “I won’t bother you…for much…”

“It’s her heart!” Emily cried, rising from her Adirondack.

Foster jerked his head around and searched the horizon. “Bull!” he yelled. “Get over here. Bella’s having a heart attack!”

7

“You had me worried, Duchess.”

Bella sat up straighter in her Richmond hospital bed. “I’m sorry, Bull.” The quiet apology should have been spoken years ago for the two great wrongs she’d done to the man standing beside her bed. Bella felt genuinely contrite, sorry enough to finally confess the lies she’d allowed to stand. If only she could find the courage to reveal the truth. About everything.

Yet, she put it off a moment longer. “You heard the doctor. It wasn’t anything serious.”

Bull snorted. “A panic attack? Horseshit. You’ve been an ice queen since the day I met you. What’s really going on, Duchess? Is there something wrong with your heart?”

The use of her nickname—and Bull’s pugnacious tone—suggested the gloves had come off. He was so close to the truth, Bella felt her weakened heart wrench with fear. She didn’t want Bull taking her back because she was dying. She didn’t want his pity. She’d sworn the doctor to secrecy and ordered him to give her husband a less serious reason for her fainting spell. He wasn’t buying it.

“Bull, I—”

“You’re awake,” Foster said as he shoved open the door without knocking and entered Bella’s hospital room. “Good.”

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