Freefall

“Look, I can handle storytime so you can sleep,” he began.

She shook her head. “I don’t mind. I’m sure you have things to do.”

“Only one or two million.”

“Go on, then.”

“Are you sure? You look exhausted.”

She didn’t know whether to be warmed by his concern or offended by the implication that she looked like hell. “I’ll be fine. Once we’re done reading, I’m sure I’ll drop like a rock.”

They stood for a moment in awkward silence, two people who were all but strangers, linked only by a brief, sketchy past and by their shared love for the three children. Still, they had made it through the first evening together without coming to blows, she thought. Maybe they could somehow figure out a way to make this complicated arrangement work.

She gave him a tentative smile, then turned and followed Zach down the hall.

Chapter 3

Some odd, discordant sound wrenched her from sleep. She blinked back to consciousness, to that first shocky awareness of her surroundings. It never took her long, probably because she’d spent her whole life waking up in different beds.

Narrow, lumpy cots in a seedy Russian hotel, grand ornately carved beds in a haunted Irish castle, communal woven mats on the floor of a grass hut in Samoa. She’d slept in them all and many, many more.

This time she was in a big, comfortable four-poster, the bed Shelly had shared with her husband.

She listened to try to determine what had awakened her but heard only soft, childish breathing. She was surrounded by warm shapes snuggled against her like puppies in a cardboard box, she realized.

How had that happened? She and the children had been reading, she remembered, some sweet, silly book about a kindergartner and her wild adventures.

Ali had taken a turn reading slowly and carefully, her brow wrinkled in concentration like Shelly’s used to do.

Her sister would be so proud of her daughter. It was the last thought Sophie remembered.

Had she nodded off right in the middle of the story? She didn’t doubt it, she’d been so exhausted. They all must have fallen asleep, exhausted by the ordeal of the day.

There were worse things in life than snuggling with three sleeping children. She smiled in the darkness and wiggled her toes.

Someone had covered them with a quilt, she discovered. Ali? she wondered, with a pang of regret for a child who carried the weight of too many responsibilities on her narrow shoulders.

It must have been. Who else?

She suddenly knew the answer. Not Ali. Tom. Somehow she knew without a doubt he was the one who had covered them.

Heat thrummed through her at the thought of Tom coming to look for the children and discovering them all nestled together. Of him standing by the bed, kissed by moonlight as he watched her sleep when she was vulnerable and exposed.

She shouldn’t have this reaction to him, this trembling in her stomach, this slow surge of blood through her veins. He was just so damn beautiful, lean and dark and predatory like a panther she’d once been lucky enough to photograph in Punjab.

How were they ever going to make this work? In the darkness, all her doubts rushed back to pinch and poke at her. They both wanted custody of the children.

He would never let her take them away from here and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to stay here on the peninsula and deal with him day after day.

She sighed softly into the darkness and listened to the big house settle and creak around her. Shelly’s house. Her sister had adored this huge, elegant villa with its dozen bedrooms and immaculate gardens. It wasn’t the grandeur of the house that mattered. Shelly had never been like that—her twin would have been happy in a two-room trailer as long as she could stay in one place with the family she loved.

Their mother’s wanderlust had always been much harder on Shelly than Sophie. Shelly wanted nothing more than to live in one place long enough to make friends, to put her name on the mailbox, to plant tulip bulbs and be there to see them break through the earth in the spring.

While Sharon worked as a cocktail waitress at some sleazy bar or other, Sophie and her sister had talked long into the night, spinning dreams about their futures.

Hers had been about finding fame and fortune, about saving the rain forest and seeing more of the world than just about every armpit of a town between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

All Shelly had ever wanted out of life was a man to love her, children to nurture, a home with a garden. She wanted to think her sister had found far more than she’d ever dared dream, here in this elegant, graceful home by the sea.

Too bad she had to take Peter Canfield as part of the package.

Her sister had been happy, though. She comforted herself with that knowledge. She had pressed—and pressed hard—to make sure Shelly was being treated right. Either her sister was a far better actress than she gave her credit for, or Shelly had never been unlucky enough to see the darker side of the man she married.

The side Sophie had seen.

A low, mournful wail cut through the night, jerking her out of her thoughts. The sound scraped along her nerves, raised gooseflesh on her arms. That’s what had awakened her, she realized now. It was raw, unearthly, a supernatural kind of keening.

She rolled her eyes at herself. You, who have slept with villagers telling tales of the chupacabra of Puerto Rico and the giant bat of Cameroon ought to know better than to let a little wind bother you.

Still, her heart pounded an uneasy rhythm as she carefully picked her way through the maze of sleeping little bodies and padded to the sliding door that led to a small balcony overlooking the sea.

She unlocked it, disengaged the security system with the code Thomas had given her, and walked outside.

The night was cloudy and cool with a thick, ghostly mist curling up the cliffs through the coastal pine and cyprus. She leaned against the railing and peered into the darkness. All she could hear now was the crash and throb of the sea fifty feet below.

She heard nothing but the surf and her own breathing for several moments. Had she imagined it, then? She was about to chide herself for her overactive imagination and go inside to the children again when she heard it again, almost like a howl of pain.

Sophie peered into the darkness. Beyond the pool and back gardens, a long flight of wooden steps led down the steep slope to a small private beach. The sound seemed to have come from there. Clouds obscured the half moon but she thought she could just make out something huddled on the steps. A crouched silhouette.

The clouds shifted slightly and her gaze sharpened. It was a man out there wearing blue-striped pajamas, his shock of silver hair gleaming a pale, spectral white in the moonlight.

William! He must have wandered out of his apartment! Fear spurted through her. He could easily tumble down the steps, disoriented in the darkness. She paused for just an instant, then without another thought she hurried down the spiral ironwork stairs of the terrace and rushed across the wet grass, heedless of her bare feet.

When she reached him, William looked at her out of dazed eyes the same silver-blue as his son. The agonized grief on his face filled her with pity. The bitterness she had nurtured for so many years against this poor shell of a man seemed foolish now, so much wasted energy.

“I saw him,” he mumbled. “Peter came to my room. Where’s my son?”

He clutched at her T-shirt. “Shelly, where’s my boy? They said he was dead but I know he’s not.”

Despite the shiver down her spine, she managed to gently disengage his hands. The poor man was delusional. He had mistaken her for Shelly—not so unusual since they were identical twins. “It’s cold out here, Mr. Canfield. Let’s get you back to bed.”

After a moment he let her take his hand and lead him back to the house like a child. Just as they reached the door, Thomas burst through it, his hair messy and wild panic blazing in his eyes. He jerked to a stop when he saw them.

“What the hell are you doing out here with my father?”

Sophie bristled at his suspicious tone, his narrowed gaze, and slipped her hand from William’s grasp. “I saw him at the top of the steps leading to the beach. I was afraid he would tumble down. But I suppose if you don’t mind your father wandering around in the dark by himself, next time I see him I’ll mind my own business.”

“That’s impossible! There’s no way in hell he could unlock the doors without tripping the alarm.”