Royal Heir

The gunshot had taken off a corner of a plaster wall and shattered a mirror. But not before it had torn through the elephant, almost severing its neck, ripping its blue fur, blasting out an eyeball. Stuffing, piled like snow drifts, littered the floor along with shards of glass from the mirror. Julia dropped the elephant—it was beyond saving. She swept the glass and stuffing against the floorboards where it wouldn’t be a hazard.

She would have to get Leo a new stuffed animal. The thought brought more tears to her eyes.

Moving from room to room, she found a pillow case missing from one of the pillows on her bed. Besides that, only a couple of open drawers drew her attention until it dawned on her that the few nice things she owned were gone.

A locket belonging to her mother. A silver frame around a picture of her sister. Her father’s modest coin collection. Her whole family, gone, and now the precious few mementoes she’d managed to hold on to after years of turmoil gone as well.

As were a few pieces of costume jewelry and the silver-plated ladle she’d received as a Christmas gift. From Nicole.

Julia picked up the cordless phone to call 911. She paused on the last digit, clicking the phone off, re-settling it on the charger base, glancing toward the door through which Will had disappeared.

What in the hell was going on?

What kind of burglar robs a house in a neighborhood like this one, settling on a few ornaments when the computer and stereo were worth far more?

“Tweakers,” her boss, George Abbot, called them. His brother was a cop and George enjoyed throwing out the lingo. He was referring to meth addicts, people who stole just to finance their next high. Petty crime, as a rule of thumb, nonviolent. That kind of break-in was common around here.

But the gun—

Julia plopped down on the inexpensive over-stuffed red chair she’d bought on deferred payments just hours before news of Nicole’s death had reached her. Stilling her trembling hands by sitting on them, she looked at the few other pieces of furniture, each chosen to complement the sunny-yellow paint of the walls.

This house was her castle. In daylight, sun streamed through the windows and pooled on the floors. After dark, it became a sanctuary, a place in which to retreat from the world. It was the reason she’d marched through the front door without thinking and almost gotten herself shot dead.

She’d left that morning intending to share her home with a tiny boy who needed her. She’d come home empty-handed, the child’s whereabouts unknown, his future in jeopardy, her haven violated.

And now his father was here, a dead man, only not dead. Where was Will?

When the phone rang, Julia popped to her feet. Her heart rate doubled. The kidnappers! It had to be.

“Hello?” she said, listening for some sound, a clicking, a whir, that would indicate the police had activated the tracing device. Of course, advanced technology no doubt precluded telltale sounds—

“Miss Sheridan? This is Detective Morris.”

Taking a deep breath, she said, “Detective Morris.”

“Sorry to alarm you,” he said. “Just calling to see if you made it home okay.”

“Well—”

“I want you to know we’ll have a police car patrolling your neighborhood tonight, starting at midnight. There are no new developments at the airport. Any word from the kidnappers? Any new developments we should know about?”

She should tell him about her intruder…

Her gaze strayed to the glass door as Will Chastain made his way across her well-lit patio, a bag of some kind dangling from his right hand. Relieved to see him still in one piece, she took a deep breath. He looked up and their eyes met.

She said, “Nothing to report, Detective.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Did Monsieur Pepin return to Washington?”

“We let him go a couple of hours ago. We know where to find him. He was very upset. He feels responsible.”

Don’t we all? Julia thought.

“You call if you need anything. We’ll monitor all your incoming calls.”

“I understand,” she said, replacing the receiver as Will let himself in the sliding glass door.

“He got away,” he said, crossing the floor in his socks. He pointed at the phone and added, “You called the cops?”

“No. They called me.” As a flicker of hope ignited his eyes, she added, “It was a routine call, nothing more.”

“I see. Did you tell them about…this?”

Her knees wobbled. Julia sat down again. Some of it was the culmination of the day’s events, some of it was the profound relief that Will had returned unharmed.

If he was Will Chastain. But even that automatic mental disqualifier felt feeble now. She’d started accepting him as who he said he was some time before. For better or worse, she’d bought into his story.

And now she coveted his presence. Disheveled and weathered though he was, he exuded confidence and something more.

Determination. That was it. Nothing was going to stop him. No one was going to keep him from Leo. What must it be like to be loved like that, wanted like that? It struck her that if Leo was ever going to return to her—to them—Will was going to have to be a part of it. And she wanted to be a part of it, too.

She said, “I didn’t mention any of…this.”

“Because?”

“I guess I thought we should talk about it first,” she said.

“Then let’s talk.”

“First tell me what happened out there,” she said, gesturing at the only other chair in the room. It was orange and armless, not really comfortable, chosen for its color and price tag rather than its function. That had seemed the way to decorate to Julia who, before decorating this house, had never even chosen a bedspread for herself.

He brought her the sack which she’d more or less forgotten about until he placed it in her hands. It was the pillowcase off her bed, a fact she’d registered when he’d come through the door with it dangling from his hand. In it, she found all her missing items.

Trinkets. Mementoes of a scratchy past, of people whose faces had faded in her mind.

Studying the bullet-sheared wall and the mess of stuffing and plaster and glass swept against the baseboard, Will whistled. “Thank the Lord our thief is a lousy shot or you’d be dead,” he said as he perched on the edge of the orange chair. There were bright smears of blood on the scarf still wrapped around his arm. There were also new streaks of mud on his pants and caked on his shoes. He looked absolutely exhausted.

At first Nicole had often commented on her husband’s good looks and his success as an architect. The comments had morphed, though, into how cruel he was. No specifics, just words like selfish and callous which Julia had always understood to mean he wasn’t giving Nicole everything she wanted.

He said, “I chased him through at least five backyards. Woke up every dog in the neighborhood. The guy had a limp, but he ran like hell. I think I would have caught him except that I slipped in some mud and he scampered over another fence. I heard a car door, but by the time I got to the fence and looked over, he was peeling away from the curb.”

Julia, proud that her kick had connected with the intruder’s leg, said, “Was the car the same—”

“As the one from the parking garage? I don’t know. It could have been. Same low profile, same general color but other than that…I just don’t know.”

“It has to be connected,” Julia said.