Royal Heir

Julia, digging in her shoulder bag for her keys, kept moving toward her car, aware he followed. She zeroed in on the blue elephant. “Fit what?” she said.

No answer.

Keys in her fist, arranged as a weapon with one poking out between each finger, she faced him. She said, “If you take one more step—”

He stopped, holding up his hands. He smiled then—the first smile she’d seen. If he thought she was one of those women who rolled over when a handsome man smiled at them he was in for a surprise. Julia had been smiled at many times by men she didn’t know and seldom had anything good come of it. But then she’d been weaker, smaller, more frightened—a victim. She reached inside herself, reclaiming the gutsy broad she’d had to become to survive. “Go away,” she said.

“Julia, listen to me.”

She couldn’t remember giving him her name. It jarred her into mumbling, “I’m listening.”

“I came here to see you. I came to get Leo back.”

“I knew you were in on this!” she said, tightening her grip on the keys.

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“How can I understand? You haven’t said anything.”

He looked down at his feet and then at her. Eyes smoldering with an intensity that unnerved her, he repeated, “I came to get Leo back.”

“Get him back? If you didn’t know he was going to be kidnapped then how—”

“I didn’t know about the kidnapping. I came to get him back…from you.”

“From me?”

Staring into her eyes, he added, “Of course I came for him. I’m his father.”

Chapter Two

Julia absorbed this latest shock for a moment before mumbling, “Are you saying that the late William Chastain wasn’t Leo’s father?”

“No. I’m telling you that I am William Chastain.”

“He’s dead,” Julia said.

“Well, no.”

“Nicole called me the week before she died and told me he was killed when his boat blew up.”

“And his body?”

“Between the explosion and the river currents, what body?”

“Exactly. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but I didn’t die on the river. I escaped.”

Julia shook her head. “Preposterous. Why would Nicole say you were dead if you weren’t?”

“Because she didn’t know I wasn’t.”

Julia shook her head again. “This is crazy—”

“I know it sounds nuts. But I can explain.”

“So do it.”

“Not here.”

She stared at him.

“Listen, Leo has big blue eyes and fuzzy reddish hair, like his mother. Like she had. He has a little mark on the back of his neck, a birthmark. You’re Julia Sheridan, Nicole’s cousin. You’ve just known Nicole a couple of years. I believe she took advantage of your generosity by calling on you to watch Leo when she flew down here to party with her pals. Am I close?”

“Close,” Julia said. “Trouble is, the people who took Leo knew all about me, too.”

“Then ask me something unique about Nicole.”

Julia rubbed her temples. Would this confusion never stop? She looked into his eyes and once again resisted the pull to trust him, to take him at face value. She said, “Why don’t you just show me some identification?”

He smiled again, but this time the thought crossed her mind that the gesture was fueled by frustration. “I don’t have any identification,” he said. “My wallet was in my suit jacket when my boat blew up. I wasn’t wearing it at the time.”

“Of course you weren’t,” she said.

He waved aside her sarcasm. “If I understood what was happening in there with the lawyer, the kidnappers produced all sorts of fake documents, right? If I was one of them, don’t you think I’d at least have made myself a nice official-looking Washington state driver’s license?”

He had a point.

“Look at me,” he added.

She did as he asked and for the first time, she noticed the details that she’d been too preoccupied to notice before.

“What happened to you?” she said. “Why are you wearing someone else’s clothes? What happened to your forehead and cheeks? When’s the last time you slept?”

“The clothes belong to some poor guy who left his car unlocked and his dry cleaning in the backseat.”

“You stole a suit?”

“I just wish he’d been a taller man,” he said and they both glanced down at the pant legs, which were too short. The sleeves were, too.

“What about those marks on your face? And your hair…?”

“The marks are leftover burns from the boat explosion. The hair got burned, too. Not too bad, but it frizzled off in spots.”

Julia suppressed a sigh. Things just kept getting more and more bizarre.

“After the crash, I managed to swim to shore. I had a friend with an old cabin cruiser in a small marina. He’s out of town. I jimmied the lock on his boat and hunkered down to figure things out.”

“Why? Why not just go home?”