Hope opened her eyes on a wave of nausea and fear. She lay still, trying to quiet her rolling stomach. After a few moments, she sat up and glanced around. Terror washed over as she slowly took in her surroundings.
She was in the candlelit bell tower of a church. A three-foot wooden wall enclosed the tower, while an opening in the floor near where she sat led down to a steep set of stairs.
The bell loomed over her, gleaming in the candlelight. As she struggled to her feet, a voice from the other side of the enclosure said, “You’ve been out for a long time. I’d begun to wonder if you were ever coming to.”
He came out of the shadows then and walked slowly toward her. Reflected candlelight flickered in his eyes, giving them a strange, glowing quality that frightened Hope even more.
“Where are we?” she asked, trying to suppress her terror. If this man was really Andrew, surely she could reason with him. He’d once loved her, hadn’t he?
He stopped before her, smiling down at her. “You know where we are, Hope. I told you I was taking you to the place where it all began for us. Don’t you remember?”
Saint Mary’s, she thought. She pictured the structure in her mind, the magnificent stained-glass windows, the lighted spires, and the bell tower a good fifty feet above the ground. How had he gotten her up here? And what did he plan to do with her?
As if he’d read her mind, his smile deepened. “I thought we might renew our vows, Hope. I want to hear you say that you’ll love, honor and cherish me until death do us part.”
All hope of reasoning with him fled. She could see the madness in his eyes. “Don’t do this,” she begged.
He grabbed her arms and hauled her toward him. “Say it, damn you! Say it! Until death do us part!” He walked her backward, until she was bent over the wall that overlooked the street far below. “Say it!”
Hope grabbed for the wall. She could feel her feet lifting from the floor. Another few inches and she would fall backward over the wall, to the ground far below. Jake would be next. She wouldn’t be able to warn him, and Andrew would have his revenge.
“I’ll say it,” she said, glancing downward. Her head swam dizzily. She squeezed her eyes closed. “Let me up and I’ll say whatever you want me to.”
He hesitated, then pulled her up to face him. His smile grew triumphant. “Till death do us part, Hope.”
She opened her mouth to say the words, but before she could utter a sound, another voice spoke from the trap door. “You forgot to ask if anyone objects to this union,” Jake said.
He emerged from the opening and stood facing them. Hope’s heart pounded in terror, not just for herself, but for Jake. Andrew would kill him. She had no doubt about that.
Andrew grabbed Hope and jerked her up against him. “You shouldn’t have come here, Jake. You don’t belong here.”
Jake walked slowly toward them. “Let her go. This is between you and me.”
Andrew’s arm tightened around Hope’s throat. “Where’s your gun? I know you didn’t come here empty-handed.” When Jake didn’t respond, he shoved Hope toward the wall again. “Get rid of the gun, Jake, or she and I both go over the wall.”
Jake’s gaze flashed to Hope, then back to Andrew. He reached around and drew his gun from the back of his belt, then knelt and slid it across the floor. Andrew kicked the weapon aside, and drew his own gun, leveling it at Jake.
“You’re a fool, McClain. Pining after her all these years when all along, she was meant for me.”
As he spoke, his arm loosened around Hope’s throat. She saw his finger tighten on the trigger, and instinctively, she shoved her elbow into his stomach as hard as she could. The gun went off, and she saw Jake fall to the floor.
Since Andrew was caught by surprise, his arm slipped from Hope’s throat. She jerked away from him and lunged for the gun on the floor just as Jake came crashing into Andrew. The momentum flung them against the wooden wall, and in horror, Hope heard the crack of a board as it gave way.
Her breath in her throat, she watched helplessly as the two men struggled for a moment, and then Jake lost his footing and plunged through the opening in the wall.
Hope screamed, leaping forward to try and save him. To her relief, she saw that he’d managed to cling to the wooden floorboards, but he was dangling in midair fifty feet above the ground.
She started toward him, but Andrew whirled, the gun still in his hand. Hope had a weapon, too, and she leveled it at him. The two of them faced off, and then Andrew grinned. “You can’t kill me, Hope. You and I are meant to be together.”
“Move back,” she said. “Get away from him.”
Slowly, very deliberately, Andrew turned and pointed his gun downward at Jake.
Without hesitating, Hope squeezed the trigger on Jake’s gun, and the report inside the bell tower almost deafened her. Andrew gazed down at the red bloom on his shirt, then back up at her. He looked puzzled, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what had gone wrong. Then, almost in slow motion, he crashed through the splintered wood and fell with a horrified scream to the street below.
Hope went to help Jake, but he’d already hitched himself up to the floor of the bell tower. They sat quietly for a moment, Jake breathing deeply from the exertion and Hope in shock. She began to tremble all over.
“I killed him,” she finally said, rubbing the back of her hand across the moisture on her face. “I killed Andrew.”
“Hope, listen to me.” Jake took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him. “He wasn’t Andrew. Andrew died in that car crash. He was murdered.”
She glanced up at him. “Then who—?”
“I don’t know all the details,” Jake said. “I’m hoping once the police pick up Victor Northrup, we’ll have our answers, but for right now—” he brushed the hair from her face and gazed down at her “—I just want to hold you.”
“I want that, too,” she whispered. “More than you’ll ever know.”
* * *
BRANT COLTER STEPPED out of the interrogation room and walked over to where Jake and Hope sat waiting.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said.
Jake removed his arm from Hope’s shoulder and stood. “After tonight, I’ll believe anything.”
“Northrup’s willing to talk. He’s ready to finger the Grayson Commission in return for a deal.”
Jake’s jaw tightened. “There’s no way he can walk.”
“Hell, no,” Brant agreed. “The D.A. might consider a reduced sentence, though, depending on what he gives us. But you know what the real kicker is? He wants to talk to you. In fact, he won’t talk to anyone else.”
“You’re kidding. What do the brass have to say about that?”
Brant grinned. “They’re pissed, but Northrup’s adamant. It’s you or no one. I’d say this is a little payback, wouldn’t you?”
Jake shrugged. He no longer cared about getting back at the department. He just wanted the truth. And he wanted Hope.
He glanced down at her. She’d had a rough night, and it was likely to get worse. Once they finished here, they would have to go tell Iris.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he told her. “You want me to get someone to take you home?”
She shook her head. “No way. I’ll wait for you.”
He nodded. Their gazes clung for a moment, and then he turned and followed Brant down the hallway to the interrogation room.
* * *
NORTHRUP LOOKED UP as Jake entered. Impatience flickered across his arrogant features. “None of this would have been necessary if you’d taken the case from me, you know.”
“So it’s all my fault,” Jake said, sitting down across the table from him.
Northrup shrugged. “In a manner of speaking, yes. I would have steered you in the direction I wanted you to go, alleviating any suspicion from me in the process, but Hope came along, and you had to do her bidding, didn’t you? A pity for all of us.”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Jake suggested. “Who was Michael Eldridge?”
Not even a flicker of emotion crossed Northrup’s features at Jake’s use of the past tense. He smoothed back his hair with the palm of his hand, as if grooming himself for an important meeting. “He was exactly who he claimed to be—a stockbroker from Houston leading a life that was carefully orchestrated for him from the time he was fifteen years old, when I first met him.” Northrup paused, glancing at Jake. “You found out about his police record, and from that you’ve probably deduced I learned about him through his lawyer. I was in Houston twenty years ago trying to convince a young attorney named Charles McGee to join our firm here in Memphis when our meeting was interrupted by one of his clients, a juvenile delinquent named Michael Eldridge. When he burst into McGee’s office, I very nearly had a heart attack. Even then, he looked a great deal like Andrew, but of course, years of training and a dozen plastic surgeries have refined his appearance. Not to mention his manners.”
“How did you manage to convince a fifteen-year-old delinquent to join an underground political movement?” Jake asked.
Northrup smiled. “It wasn’t hard to convince Michael to help us out once he understood the stakes involved. And, of course, the rewards. The difficult part was keeping him on the straight and narrow all these years. He has…had a tendency to be impulsive, shall we say, and except for that one unfortunate incident that brought him into our organization, we couldn’t afford to have even a breath of scandal attached to his name. His background had to check out, his slate had to be clean in order for our plan to work.”
“Which was getting him elected to office, right?”
“Exactly. Eventually the highest office in the land. The Grayson Commission has been very successful on state and local levels, but less so nationally. Michael—or rather, Adam Kingsley—was going to change all that.”
“There’s one thing I haven’t been able to figure out,” Jake said.
Northrup’s arrogant smile flashed again. “Just one?”
“No one knew Adam Kingsley was still alive until last year, when DNA tests were performed on the remains in his grave. But you’re telling me this plan has been in the works for years. How were you going to pull that off? How were you going to arrange for Adam to return from the dead?”
Northrup traced a set of carved initials in the wooden table with his fingertips. “It can’t have escaped your notice how very much like Andrew our Michael was. Not just his looks, but his actions, his speech patterns, even his walk.”
“You’re saying he was originally meant to take Andrew’s place?”
“He studied tapes and recordings of Andrew for years, learning every nuance of Andrew’s appearance, speech and mannerisms. When Andrew married Hope, we knew our greatest challenge would lie in convincing her. However, if we’d continued on with our original plan, that problem wouldn’t have been as difficult to overcome as we’d thought. You see, in studying videos and photographs of Hope and Andrew together, Michael became very…enamored of her. He wanted her for himself, and so he rose to the challenge, as it were. Eventually, he became so adept at playing the role of Andrew that he sometimes forgot who he really was.”
“Finding out the real Adam Kingsley was still alive must have thrown a monkey wrench into your plans,” Jake said with grim amusement.
“You have no idea,” Northrup said. “We couldn’t take the chance that another Kingsley heir might someday turn up and want his share of the pie. So we changed our plans.”
“And Michael became Adam instead of Andrew. But Andrew still had to go, didn’t he?”
Northrup glanced up. “We could afford only one Kingsley heir. Divided power is no power at all.”
“So how did you pull off the DNA tests?” Jake asked. “Were all three of the samples from Andrew?”
“Tell me something, Jake.” Northrup sat back in his chair and eyed Jake coolly. “If you were in my position, how would you make certain the DNA tests yielded the results you wanted, namely, that Michael was Adam Kingsley?”
Jake shrugged. “I’d have to find a way to switch his blood sample with a sample of Andrew’s blood. Identical twins’ DNA would be a match.”
“Yes, but Andrew’s been dead for five months. Wouldn’t a forensics expert of Dr. Wu’s caliber be able to tell that the sample hadn’t been taken recently?”
Jake shrugged again. “You tell me.”
“The one sure way to get the results we wanted was to switch Michael’s blood with that of the real Adam Kingsley.”
Jake stared at Northrup’s smug countenance for a long, silent moment, digesting what he’d just told him. “Are you saying you know the whereabouts of the real Adam Kingsley? That you managed to somehow get him to cooperate with this…plan of yours?”
Northrup laughed softly. “You give me a little too much credit, I’m afraid. As it happens, I don’t know Adam Kingsley’s whereabouts. But Jonas Thorpe does.”
And Thorpe had yet to be found. “How did you and Thorpe hook up?”
“Jonas came to me after the Adam Kingsley story broke last year, because he’d learned our firm handled all claims against the Kingsley estate. He wanted to know how much money Iris Kingsley would be willing to pay to learn the whereabouts of her long-lost grandson, but I persuaded Jonas to join us instead. He knew nothing about the Grayson Commission or Michael Eldridge at that point, but when I explained, he quickly understood how much more profitable our plan would be in the long run than a one-time payoff from Iris.”
“That still doesn’t tell me how Thorpe knew about Adam.”
“As it turned out, Jonas’s sister was the woman who helped kidnapped Adam all those years ago. She raised him as her own son. To this day, he hasn’t a clue to his real identity. Can you imagine that?”
When Jake didn’t comment, Northrup continued. “Jonas didn’t know who the boy was either until the story about Adam still being alive made headlines all over the country last year. Then, fortunately for us, he started to remember things from his sister’s past—like how she’d disappeared from Memphis without a trace all those years ago, and how years later, when he finally saw her again, she had a son but no husband. A son who looked nothing like her or anyone else in the family. And she seemed extremely nervous, anxious to be rid of Jonas. So after the story about Adam broke, Jonas located his sister again, forced her to admit the truth to him, and then later, after he’d spoken with me, he convinced her to help us get a blood sample from Adam—unbeknownst to Adam, of course. Carol, substituting for the receptionist at the clinic, switched Adam’s blood with Michael’s. It was a brilliant scheme,” he said, his eyes gleaming with pride. “You have to admit that.”
Jake stood. “You get points for long-term planning. And where you’re going, you’ll have plenty of time to come up with another one.”
Northrup smiled up at him. “You don’t really think I’ll go to prison, do you? I have the best attorneys in the state at my beck and call. I won’t spend a night behind bars.”
“We’ll see about that.” Jake headed for the door.
“Jake?”
He turned. Northrup was studying his fingernails. “Give my regards to Hope.”
In your dreams, Jake thought and closed the door between them.
* * *
AT FIRST, IRIS HADN’T wanted to believe them, but when Hope and Jake finally convinced her, her blue eyes hardened with icy rage. “All these years, he pretended to be my friend, my confidant, while all along planning to destroy my family. He will never again see the light of day,” she vowed. “I promise you that. Andrew’s death will be avenged.”
They had also told her about Michael Eldridge and his ultimate demise, and though Hope knew Iris had to be grieving for the grandson she’d hoped to reclaim, she held herself together remarkably well, probably because of her fury. When that subsided, the shock would set in. To be on the safe side, Hope had put in a call to her doctor.
“Do you think what he said about Adam is true?” Iris asked Jake. Her eyes misted, but she visibly fought the emotion. “The real Adam, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “Unless and until we find Jonas Thorpe, we have only Northrup’s word.”
“But the woman who took Adam. Thorpe’s sister. Surely she wouldn’t be that hard to locate.”
Jake met Iris’s gaze evenly. “It’s been over thirty years since she left Memphis. I’m sure she’s changed her identity, probably several times since then, and there’s no telling where she is now. Without Thorpe’s help, it could be a little like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Then you’d better get started, hadn’t you?” Iris’s chin lifted and she glared at Jake.
He glared back. “Are you saying you want to hire me to find your grandson, Mrs. Kingsley?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Jake shrugged. “I don’t come cheap.”
“I didn’t expect you would.” She turned to Hope. “I suppose you’ll be leaving me now.”
Hope started to deny it, but then she realized Iris no longer needed her. She had something other than her grief to focus on. She had a mission.
“It’s time for me to move on,” Hope said softly, and realized that no truer words had ever been spoken.
Hope took Jake’s hand, and they left the Kingsley mansion together. As they drove east, into the beginning of a beautiful sunrise, Hope never once looked back.
* * *
A FEW HOURS LATER, Jake picked her up from her mother’s house where he had taken her earlier. Hope had had a shower, changed clothes, and even managed to sleep for a little while. She woke up feeling refreshed, as if the weight of the world had been removed from her shoulders.
Joanna, her eyes glistening with emotion, hugged them both before they left. Hope felt near tears herself. After all these years, after all they’d been through, she and Jake had finally managed to find their way back to each other.
“Where are we going?” she asked, when Jake had backed out of her mother’s driveway.
“You’ll see.”
Something in his voice made her curious. Hope turned to study his profile, but his expression gave nothing away.
Rather than leaving the neighborhood, he drove two blocks over, to Mrs. Forsythe’s house. The For Sale sign had been removed from the front yard, and Hope glanced at him in surprise.
“What are we doing here, Jake?”
He parked the truck and turned off the ignition. Dangling a set of keys in front of her, he said, “Let’s go in.”
“How did you get those keys?”
“I happen to know the real-estate agent,” he said. “She’s the same lady who sold my house for me.”
Jake let them into the house, and Hope looked around. All the furniture had been removed, but she could tell the place had been lovingly cared for. The hardwood floors gleamed, the windows sparkled, and the pastel walls glowed softly in the afternoon sunlight. She loved it immediately, just as she’d known she would the day she’d driven by here.
She turned to Jake, her tone suspicious. “How did you know about this house?”
“How do you think?”
“Let me take a wild guess. My mother the matchmaker, right?”
He grinned. “Let’s look around.”
He showed her the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen with a small, enclosed sunporch attached. When he started down the hall toward the bedrooms, Hope caught his arm.
“Jake, whose house is this?”
His eyes glowed with an inner light. He bent down and kissed her. “It could be ours.”
She caught her breath. “Are you asking me to marry you?” She saw something flash in his eyes, a vulnerability she’d never seen there. Before he could respond, she said, “Because if you are, the answer is yes.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Ten years is a long time to wait. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d married someone else. You had every right.”
“There was never anyone but you,” he said. “There never could be.”
He took her hand and led her into the bedroom. Sunlight spilled through the many windows, highlighting the sleeping bag Jake had fashioned into a makeshift bed. Some of the windows were open and a breeze drifted through. A crystal vase of spring flowers—from her mother’s garden, Hope would have sworn—was placed near the sleeping bag.
Jake sat and pulled her down beside him.
“I can’t give you a ring,” he said regretfully. “At least, not yet. It’ll take the last of my savings to make a down payment on this house.”
“I don’t have any money, either,” Hope said, but at the moment, she’d never felt so rich. Or so happy. She reached up and took his face between her hands. “I do love you, Jake. More than I ever thought possible.”
He kissed her, and Hope wound her arms around his neck. They tumbled backward onto the sleeping bag, desire building deliciously. The breeze stirred the sweet, delicate scent of the flowers, reminding Hope of the first time they’d been together.
As if reading her mind, Jake whispered, “You’re so perfect. Everywhere I touch. Here.” He kissed her neck. “Here.” His hand cupped her breast. “Here.” His fingers skimmed down her stomach. “And here…”
“You remember,” she breathed.
“Until the day I die,” he said.