Duplicate Daughter

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

Prologue

She awoke in the dark, head throbbing, throat dry. For a second, she didn’t have the slightest idea where she was or what had happened to her.

First things first. Get to your feet. Find out where you are.

Struggling to her knees, she reached forward until her hands touched a rough, damp dirt wall. Leveraging her body, she attempted to stand. Her head hit the ceiling while she was still crouching and she cried out, her voice a muffled squeak. Wherever she was, there was no standing room and she sank back down to the dirt floor, a geyser of hopelessness welling up inside her chest.

Into the cold, dank air she whispered, “My name is Caroline. I have a daughter named Tess.”

This last thought made her wince. Thoughts of her beloved Tess always made her wince. Not because of Tess herself, but because of Katie, frozen forever in her mind as a six-month-old baby, born in the spring when the roses bloomed…

Flowers! White roses. Yellow freesias.

Of course…a wedding…her wedding…

Bill!

Visions of men with masks, men with guns. Bill crumpled on the motel floor…

Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks as the past few days came back in total clarity.

Bill.

Where was Bill?

Chapter One

Nick Pierce stood on the tarmac gazing upward, though he knew from experience the high mountain air of Frostbite, Alaska, meant he’d hear the single-engine plane before he actually saw it.

He was anxious to get this over with. He was anxious to get back home. There was nothing he could tell the woman flying out of her way to talk to him. He would have made that clear when she called, but like an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, he’d figured if he ignored her she’d go away, and he’d never actually taken one of her calls himself.

It hadn’t worked. Hell, that approach to problems never worked, but he always seemed compelled to give it a try anyway.

To top it off, the weather was changing. He could feel the cold bite of an approaching storm on his face, sweeping over the inlet, up the Panhandle, bringing snow and ice. Winter days were short this far north and at two-thirty in the afternoon, there was only about an hour of daylight left. Oh, face it—he was sorely tempted to drive away and forgo the meeting before he got stuck at the airport.

And then he heard a drone overhead and realized the time to leave had come and gone. A few minutes later, Toby Macleod’s aqua DeHavilland Otter came to a stop a few yards away from Nick’s four-wheel-drive truck, the wheel skis making slide marks in the accumulating snow. Nick stamped his feet to get his circulation moving, waiting for Toby to turn off the big turbo engine, then walked around to the far side of the plane, waving at Toby as he did so.

The sole passenger making the long climb out of the plane was bundled up to her ears in black boots, jeans and an olive-green parka, her head wrapped securely in a pale blue wool scarf. When she looked around to survey her surroundings, flaming red tendrils escaped the folds of wool, snapping like scarlet ribbons against the increasingly white environment. Reaching up and taking her ungloved hand, he helped her step down.

She stumbled as her right foot touched the ground, immediately straightening herself. Her head barely came level with his shoulder. She struck him as small, delicate, and out of place as she shoved her hands in her pockets and shivered.

“You’re Nicolas Pierce,” she said through clattering teeth, looking up at him with eyes as deep and blue as a fjord. She was extremely pretty and extremely young, at least to his world-weary eyes. He’d be thirty-eight in a few months and this woman looked about eighteen, though he guessed she was actually in her early twenties.

Taking her arm, he ushered her around the plane toward his truck.

“Call me Nick,” he said, the weather clock ticking in his head. “And you’re Tess Mays,” he added.

He felt her flinch through her padded coat. “No, my name is Katie Fields.”

“I don’t understand,” he snapped, suddenly suspicious. Helen, his housekeeper, had said his father’s new stepdaughter had called a few times, the last to announce the fact she was on her way. The stepdaughter’s name was Tess. He turned to look down at the woman beside him. “Who?” he snapped.

“Katie Fields. I’m Tess’s sister.” She glanced up for a second, her breath a cloud of icy vapor, a few sparkling ice crystals sticking to her cheeks and brow.

“I don’t understand,” he repeated, but he resumed ushering her forward as she appeared about ready to freeze in place. The limp grew more pronounced as she hurried beside him.

“It’s a little complicated,” she told him as he opened the truck door for her, struggling for a second as the heavy metal met the resistance of the quickening wind.

Gripping her shoulders, he leaned down to talk close to her ear so she could hear him. “It’s too cold to stand around discussing things. Stay inside where it’s warm while I talk to Toby. I’ll be right back.”

With his help, she made the high step up into the cab of his truck, hunkering down in the leather seat with a sigh of relief, covering her lower face with her bare hands, breathing into them in an effort to defrost her nose and lips and fingers, too. He’d done the same thing a million times since relocating here from southern California.

“Turn up the heater,” he told her as the wind finally won the tug-of-war with the door and slammed it back into place. He nodded reassuringly through the window at her alarmed expression, then went back to the plane.

At his approach, Toby opened a little window by the pilot’s seat and poked his face cautiously through. Snowflakes immediately stuck to his beard and bushy red eyebrows.

“Hey, Nick,” Toby called. “How’s Lily?”

“Growing like a weed. How about Chris?”

“Two more weeks before the baby comes. She’s about ready to explode.” He grinned. Apparently, the thought of becoming a father for the fifth time pleased him. “Say, the weather is deteriorating quick,” Toby added. “I’ve got medicine aboard for the Lambert woman in Skie. I’ve got to get it to her, which means I have to be able to take off from here. You’ve got five minutes with the lady, tops.”

“It won’t take even that long,” Nick said.

He retraced his steps to the truck and climbed aboard, struggling with the door again.

Now he faced Katie Fields, who had warmed to the point that she’d unwrapped her hair and unzipped her parka. He could have saved her the trouble. Five minutes wasn’t long enough for anyone to get cozy.

As he pulled off his gloves, he took a good look at her face, trying to see something of her mother in her, but he’d never actually met the woman, just seen a wedding photograph sent north by Tess Mays. As he’d torn it in half the moment he figured out what it was, there was nothing left but a vague impression of a middle-aged woman with wispy, graying blond hair.

There was nothing, however, wispy about her daughter. Katie Fields might be small, but passion burned in her eyes like twin fireballs. Her red hair heightened this perception. Her golden eyebrows suggested she was actually a natural blonde, like Patricia, and with the thought of his late wife, his heart seized for an interminable moment.

“Like I said, I’m Tess’s sister,” Katie said, jerking him back to the present. “She didn’t know about me until recently—”

He shook his head as he pulled off his black wool cap. Straight strands of sandy hair fell into his eyes and he brushed them out of the way. “We don’t have time for details,” he told her. “You’ve made this trip for nothing and I’m sorry about that, but I don’t have anything to tell you. If I’d taken your call I could have saved you the expense of this trip.”

“But you were never around to take the call,” she said, and he got the distinct impression she knew perfectly well that he’d avoided this discussion like the plague. He shrugged.

“Your father—”

“As far as I’m concerned,” he interrupted, “my father was the perfectly ordinary man who married my mother when I was eight years old. His name was Jim Pierce. He adopted me and undertook the task of raising me. He owned a shoe store in San Diego. He played golf and told bad jokes. He died ten years ago. He was a great guy and I still miss him.”

She looked confused. Stuttering, she muttered, “But I thought…Tess said…your father…”