2

Metal screeching, tearing. Blood. Pain. Mind-shattering terror.

Mommy! Daddy!

She woke with a scream.

Leigh Howard fought panic. It was only a nightmare. This time. Only a nightmare.

But so real. Nothing was missing. Not the terrible argument. Not the screams. The excruciating pain. Her mother’s blood mixing with hers.

Sweat drenched the bed. Leigh wearily sat up on the side of the bed, trying to shake the images that lingered in her mind.

It was still dark outside, but a night-light made the room visible. It was ridiculous, she knew. A thirty-two-year-old woman shouldn’t need a night-light, but she couldn’t sleep without one.

She stood, went to the window, and looked outside at the pasture. Maude, the rescue donkey and companion to her show horse, grazed in the pasture. She always grazed, a never-ending eating machine.

Leigh looked down at her hands. They still trembled. Deep breath, she told herself. Take a deep breath. The fear will fade. But she knew it would never entirely go away.

She glanced at the clock. Only four in the morning.

Yet she knew she couldn’t go back to sleep. The bed would be wet. Not damp. Soaking wet with sweat.

She closed her eyes. If only …

If only there were someone to call, to talk to. But there wasn’t. Only Mrs. Baker, who lived a mile away. She certainly wasn’t going to run crying to the family’s housekeeper, even one who was almost a family member.

She went into the bathroom. Peered at herself. God, she looked a horror. Her eyes were red and tired. Her damp hair fell lifelessly around her face.

She padded down the stairs to the kitchen and turned on the light. A cup of hot chocolate might help. She heated some milk, poured chocolate syrup into it, and sat down at the large table in the sunroom. Think about the day. The horse show benefit that she chaired. She knew it was only an honorary position, but she wanted to show she could do more than “honorary.” Maybe a cocktail party/silent auction to raise awareness of their cause.

She wanted this year’s event to surpass every other one.

Maybe then she could convince Max that she could actually accomplish something important. Maybe he would loosen the strings on her inheritance.

It galled her no end that she was heiress to a fifty-million-dollar trust fund, but lived on an allowance supervised by a tight-assed lawyer. She blamed him for chasing off James Hallaway III as easily as he’d dispensed with her ex-husband. Maybe, just maybe, she and James could have made a marriage work had there not been so much interference. Dollars offered, and, she admitted painfully to herself, dollars taken.

God, could she ever pick them!

But even a gold-digging husband might be better than being so entirely alone.

She yawned. She’d had three hours’ sleep at most.

She needed more. She needed to be alert and confident when she faced the lion in his den later today.

She would take a hot shower and use a bed in one of the guest rooms. Maybe the nightmare had gone away for the night.

Maybe.

Anger came in waves. It swelled to tsunami strength, then retreated, only to return.

Kira tried to tamp it down as she walked inside her mother’s cubicle. She had rerun the doctor’s words all day, even as she’d struggled through a city budget committee meeting. She’d returned to the hospital last night, but her mother had been exhausted from tests.

The words made no more sense today than they had yesterday. Either the hospital had made a terrible mistake and somehow mixed her blood up with someone else’s, or her mother had lied to her for more than thirty years.

She pasted a smile on her face as she approached the bed in the critical care unit. Her mother was sleeping. Kira sat down in the uncomfortable chair next to the bed.

Katy Douglas had always been a small, slender woman who was constantly on the move. Now Kira studied her mother’s features as she never had before.

Kira’s build was larger. She was taller and had more curves. She’d always attributed her mother’s slender size to the fact she worked so hard, right up to the moment she was diagnosed with renal failure. Even then, she hadn’t stopped until she’d collapsed while cleaning a house when one of her employees didn’t show.

Their eyes were both blue, although her mother’s were a bright blue and Kira’s were more of a smoky blue gray. Her mother’s hair was a honey color, and curly, while hers was a dark mahogany shade and both straight and fine.

But they thought alike. Was that genes or environment?

Had her mother lied to her all these years?

How many times had her mother told her she was a miracle baby? That when she was born, everyone—everyone but Katy—said she would die within days. But she hadn’t. She’d been named Kira, Latin for light, her mother said. She’d found the name in a baby book. She’d known Kira would live, that her light would glow.

Her mother’s eyes flickered open. Even though her face was wan, she smiled. The open, delighted smile that always came to her face when she saw Kira. “How long have you been here?”

“Not long.”

“You should have wakened me.”

“You looked too peaceful,” Kira said.

It wasn’t true. Katy Douglas looked ravished by a disease that was draining her lifeblood. The doctor said she didn’t have much more than a month to live unless she received a new kidney.

“You look tired,” Katy Douglas said. “You aren’t taking care of yourself. Go home and get some rest.”

“I’d rather spend some time with you,” Kira said.

Another smile. “A little while, then. What did you cover today?”

Kira made a face. “A budget committee meeting. Deadly dull. Give me a good political scandal any day.”

A knock came at the door, and a tall, thin man entered then with a tray full of test tubes. The technician glanced at Katy Douglas, then Kira.

“My daughter, the newspaper reporter,” her mother said with pride. “She works for the Atlanta Observer,” she explained to the technician, who placed the tray on a table, then searched for a vein in arms that were mostly purple from numerous needles. He finally found one and drew blood.

The technician nodded at Kira and left the room.

“Tell me again about the day I was born,” Kira said, asking the question she’d wanted to ask since the moment she entered the room. “It was this hospital, wasn’t it?”

“The best day of my life,” Katy said, her gaze fixing on Kira’s face. “Your father was playing drums that night. We thought … I thought you wouldn’t come for another month. But then, you were always impatient. So impatient.” Her voice started to fade.

“Was it a caesarean?” Kira asked gently.

“No. You were coming just as we reached the hospital,” Katy said. “As I said, impatient. I just made the emergency room. The doctor … he said he didn’t have to work … that I had already done everything. But then the pediatrician came in and looked at the baby. I … knew something was wrong.”

“But you wouldn’t give up on me.” Kira knew the story by heart, but she had to hear it again. Now.

“No,” her mother said softly. “Not my Kira.” Her voice had weakened in those few moments and her eyelids fluttered.

“Time for me to go,” Kira said, even as she clung to her mother’s hand, trying to force her own life force into her mother. “I love you,” she whispered.

“I love … you, darlin’,” her mother replied in a voice already weakening from those few words.

Kira waited until she knew her mother was asleep, then stood. For a moment she couldn’t move.

She knew one thing now. Her mother certainly believed that she had given birth to Kira. No one could relate the story with such loving remembrance unless she’d lived it.

Her mother believed Kira was her daughter, the daughter of her blood.

The hospital must have made a mistake. Then or now.

She hoped to God it was now.

Damn it. Damn the doctor. Damn the hospital. She knew her mother was slipping away, and Kira was being cheated of her chance to help. Perhaps her mother’s only chance.

She’d been assured the doctor would call her the moment the new test results returned. She resisted the urge to pick up the phone and call him again. Persistence was a good quality for a reporter, but she couldn’t risk alienating him at the moment.

She looked down at her hand. It was shaking. This time, the lab had to get it right.

Maybe if they were wrong about the genetic match, they were wrong about the compatibility as well.

Maybe there was still hope.