Hidden Legacy

Betraying color came into her face. “I can’t make any promises.”

“I rely on your integrity, Alyssa.”

She nodded curtly. “Wait here. I’ll get the money I owe you.” She walked toward the staircase, desperate for him to leave, yet knowing if she never saw him again she’d always remember him.

“Do you feel safe here?” he asked abruptly.

In the act of mounting the staircase, she turned to look at him, one hand resting on the banister. He had taken up a position in the entrance hall beneath her, his aquamarine gaze keen as a laser. It seemed to go deep inside her; much deeper than she dared to go. “I’ve been coming here all my life,” she said in a deliberately offhand tone. “I’m rooted to the place. Besides, I’m not afraid of things that go bump in the night. No old house is without its resident ghost.”

He nodded, a vertical line between his brows. “Who, I haven’t the slightest doubt, is Richard Langford.”

Alyssa felt her throat dry up. She’d always accepted that, but now wondered if the original Captain Richard Langford who’d built the house was the only one who haunted it. Perhaps the more recent Richard Langford, the famous yachtsman, had joined his ancestor. “Did your uncle hate him?” she asked.

He continued to stare up at her. “Deep in his heart he did. He was madly in love with Elizabeth. Forget all the years in between. Talking to him now, the years were as nothing. He might have been talking about yesterday. She was the love of his life.” He shook his head. “I find it almost too much to grasp, but maybe there is such a thing as everlasting love. Julian blamed Langford for everything that went wrong in three lives. He even blamed Langford for his own death.”

She couldn’t have been more unnerved. “But…that makes no sense at all.”

“Langford was a married man with two small children,” he said tonelessly.

Something like shame burned in her cheeks. “Zizi would never have had an affair with a married man,” she protested, affronted by the very idea.

“Blame it on passion.”

Passion in the past. Passion in the present? Alyssa had a presentiment that life-changing emotion was waiting for her.

With a shiver she continued up the stairs. Richard Langford had been Zizi’s lover and possibly the father of her child? A married man, an adulterer? And Zizi had never told a soul? Had she been too ashamed? Zizi had supposedly let her child go, not knowing how that child grew up, if she was all right, no doubt praying she had love and security and all the things a child needed to be happy.