Shadow Lover (2 page)

An arm shot out, catching her before she could hurl herself across the room, and she was too startled to do more than strike out in sudden panic.

Aunt Sally's faded eyes opened, and she peered through the darkness. "Is that you, Carolyn?" she said in a sleepy, surprisingly strong voice.

Whoever held her seemed to have no intention of letting her go, but Carolyn's attention was centered on the woman who'd been a mother to her. "You're all right!" she said, not bothering to disguise the relief in her voice. "I thought something might have happened."

Aunt Sally's lined face looked oddly luminous. "Something's happened, all right, Carolyn. The best thing in the world."

Belatedly Carolyn realized that someone was still keeping her from Aunt Sally. She turned, and he dropped his arm, stepping back. She stared up at him in astonished silence, letting her distrusting eyes travel the length of him.

"He's back," Aunt Sally
said,
her soft voice unmistakably joyful. "He came back to me."

She sounded as if her lost lover had returned. The man had to be somewhere in his mid-thirties, ruling out that possibility, however. He was tall, though not as huge as some of her relatives, lean, dressed in faded jeans and a thick cotton sweater that had seen better days. His streaked blond hair needed to be cut; his handsome face needed a shave. There was nothing to be done about his astonishing eyes, except to wish that they weren't surveying her with quite such a cynical expression.

She'd never seen him before in her life; she was utterly certain of that fact.

"Who?" she said, staring up at him. "Who's come back?"

His smile wasn't particularly unpleasant. Just faintly mocking, as if he'd expected that reaction from her. "You don't remember me, Carolyn?" he murmured. His voice was low pitched, faintly husky, the voice of a smoker. "I'm wounded."

"I don't know you." She didn't want to know him. There was an aura of danger to him that was both illogical and unmistakable.

"It's Alex, Carolyn," Aunt Sally said joyfully. "My son has come home to me."

Carolyn froze in disbelief. She should have been shocked, but deep inside some part of her had guessed who he was. Who he was pretending to be.

Alexander
MacDowell
, Sally
MacDowell's
only child, heir to half the
MacDowell
fortune, had arrived back in the nick of time, almost twenty years after he'd disappeared. And she didn't believe it for one moment.

"Aren't you going to welcome me home, Carolyn?" he asked after a long, strained silence. "The prodigal son, returned to the bosom of his loving family?"

She could feel Sally's anxious gaze, and it was stronger than the sheen of mockery in the man's blue eyes. She wanted to scream at him, but her love for Sally stopped her. Sally had accepted him; Sally was fooled. Carolyn would have to be very careful indeed.

"Welcome back," she said, forcing the words.

Sally leaned back and smiled, closing her eyes. But the man calling himself Alexander
MacDowell
wasn't fooled for a moment. "I think my mother needs to sleep," he said softly. "I'm afraid I woke her up when I arrived last night, and she was too excited to do more than drift off."

"She's been very sick," Carolyn said, trying to keep the anger from her voice.

"She's dying," he said flatly. He glanced down at her. "Why don't you come have some coffee with me and tell me how she's been doing? I'm sure
Constanza
will find us something to eat."

"How did you know
Constanza
was still here?"

"I saw her last night. She and Ruben wept all over me," he said. "You don't seem very happy to see me, Carolyn. Have I ruined something by my unexpected reappearance?"

"Hardly."

He smiled then, a cool smile that was still surprisingly sexy. "Why don't we talk about it? Don't feel you have to get dressed on my account. You've grown up very nicely indeed."

He probably meant to fluster her, but even if Carolyn wasn't a
MacDowell
by blood, she'd spent her entire life surrounded by them. She lifted her head regally, ignoring the fact that she was wearing only a bright red t-shirt with
Tigger
emblazoned on the front, and it came halfway down her long, bare legs. "It'll take me five minutes to get dressed," she said coolly. "I'll meet you in the breakfast room." She waited for his response.

"I haven't been here in almost twenty years, Carolyn. There wasn't a breakfast room back then."

"Ask
Constanza
," she said, turning her back on him. Resisting the impulse to pull the t-shirt down closer to her knees.

She waited until she was back in her room before she let reaction set in. Closing the door behind her, she leaned against it, letting a shiver wash down over her body at the memory of the stranger's eyes, watching her, mocking her.

Because he
was
a stranger—she was absolutely sure of that. She had spent most of her early childhood in the proximity of Alexander
MacDowell
, and she still bore the scars to prove it, both psychic and physical. And that man in Aunt Sally's bedroom was nothing more than an imposter, and given the huge sums of money involved, that made him a criminal as well.

She pulled on her clothes hurriedly, slamming drawers and barely pausing to pull a brush through her hair before she left the room again. She didn't trust him alone in this house. She didn't trust him at all.

She'd been almost fourteen years old when she'd last seen Sally
MacDowell's
only real child. Alex had been a monster from infancy, or so she'd been told, and adolescence hadn't served him well. He was wild, dangerous, far too pretty for his own good, and absolutely no one could control him—not his stuffy Uncle Warren, who tended to view him and all children as distasteful aliens; not his strict mother, who ruled her world but melted when faced with her beloved son. He stole, he lied, he raised hell, and Ruben and
Constanza
kept finding both cigarettes and marijuana in his room.

Ruben kept covering for him, but Carolyn had heard the grownups talk. And she had prayed, every night, that they'd send him away, to military school, to reform school, to someplace where they'd beat the crap out of him and make sure he never came back to torment the young girl who wasn't really his sister, and would never truly belong with the grand
MacDowells
. The young girl who had a ridiculous, debilitating crush on him that nothing would destroy, no matter how horrible he was.

In the end, they didn't send him away. He simply took off, with every spare piece of cash in the house, including the kitchen money,
Constanza's
savings,
Carolyn's piggybank full of quarters that at last count had equaled eighty-three dollars, and sixty-seven hundred dollars in cash. He hadn't been able to get his hands on his mother's impressive jewelry collection, but thirteen-year-old Carolyn had already been given inappropriately valuable gold jewelry on birthdays and Christmas. He'd made off with that as well.

The best private investigators, the most determined police forces had been unable to find any trace of him over the ensuing years.
Warren
had sniffed and informed his sister she was well rid of him, and the fight that had erupted had kept Warren and Sally apart for almost a decade.

And now the black sheep had returned. Or someone pretending to be Alexander
MacDowell
was back. And Carolyn wasn't sure which would be more dangerous—the real Alex or a phony one.

She found him in the breakfast room, his long legs stretched out over an adjoining chair, a cup of coffee in one hand. The delicate
Limoges
cup that Aunt Sally loved looked ridiculous in his large, strong hand. It was tanned, and he wore no rings, she noticed. The Alex she had known would have worn rings. He was staring out at the wintry landscape, squinting against the bright white glare, and she stood in the doorway, allowing herself the dubious benefit of watching him.

There should have been no reason why he couldn't be Alexander
MacDowell
. The teenaged Alex had had pale blond hair, but it could have darkened into the shaggy, brown-streaked,
mass
on the stranger. His pretty, boyish features, his petulant mouth and hypnotic, slightly tilted eyes could have matured into the man who lounged there, entirely at ease. There were a million reasons why he could be Alex
MacDowell
, and only one reason why he couldn't.

"Are you going to hover there like a vulture?" he said lazily, not bothering to turn and look at her. Her reflection was clear in the bank of windows—he must have seen her the moment she appeared.

"That sounds more like you than me," she said calmly enough, moving into the room and pouring
herself
a cup of coffee. The
Limoges
cup fit perfectly in her hands. Her hands were delicate, long fingered, graceful. Aristocratic hands, in stark contrast to the stranger's hands.

He swiveled around to look at her. "You think I'm a vulture?"

"Don't they hover, at the side of the dying, waiting to scavenge?" He was sitting in her usual chair. The table was large enough for eight, and yet he'd somehow managed to hone in on the one thing she claimed for herself.

He smiled up at her, a slow, wicked smile. "You never did like me much,
did
you, Carolyn?"

He meant to be ingratiating, but Carolyn was immune. She sat across from him, taking a strengthening sip of her black coffee. "I never liked Alex much," she said carefully, though the real Alex would have known better. "I'm not sure what I think of you."

"Ah. You don't think I'm Alexander
MacDowell
? What am I doing here, then?" He didn't seem the slightest bit perturbed by her doubt.

"Sally
MacDowell
is dying. When she does she'll leave a substantial amount of money to her heirs. Alexander
MacDowell
has been missing for more than eighteen years, long enough to be declared dead.
Warren
's been itching to do just that for at least ten years now. If someone hadn't shown up, claiming to be Alex, then there'd be that much more money to go around."

"Greedy, are you?" he said, spooning sugar into his coffee with reckless abandon.

"Not particularly. I'm not one of the heirs. Whether Alex is alive or dead makes no difference to me. At least financially." She was proud of her cool, unemotional voice. She'd worked hard on perfecting it, on being the perfect
MacDowell
—she who never was a true
MacDowell
at all.

"You mean my mother isn't leaving you anything? I find that hard to believe—you've been a part of this family almost since you were born."

"Not legally," she said. "I was never adopted."

"Not even after I left?"

"Why would you think that?" she countered sharply. "You didn't have anything to do with my being kept as a foster child, did you?"

"You overestimate my influence," he said. "Besides, I liked having you as a little sister. I wouldn't have minded if they'd made it legal. You didn't answer my question, though. Are you trying to tell me that my mother hasn't left you anything in her will?"

"Why are you so interested in her will? How do you know you're even still in it?"

"You've as good as told me so, Carolyn," he said gently. "Besides, my mother was so happy to see me last night she told me all about it herself, and how grateful she was that she had never given in to pressure and changed it. So how much did she leave you?"

She stared at him in profound distaste. "Whatever Alex's other flaws," she said, "he was never crass."

He laughed, a light, mocking sound that grated on her nerves. "You've been around Sally too much. You've got that arctic edge down perfectly. Did you have to practice or did you just absorb it by osmosis?" He obviously didn't expect her to answer. He swung his feet down onto the floor and reached for the coffeepot, filling his delicate flowered cup and ladling in an indecent amount of sugar. The real Alex had always had a weakness for sweets. "I've lived a crass life for the last eighteen years. You'll have to forgive me if my social skills are a bit rusty."

"I'm sure you have," she said stonily. "But you aren't Alexander
MacDowell
."

"It must be nice to be so sure of yourself." He poured cream in as well, turning the coffee
a pale
beige. He glanced up at her, and she expected to see a flare of anger in his eyes. Instead he smiled at her. "Are you going to be the hardest one to convince? My mother,
Constanza
, and Ruben welcomed me with open arms. Of course, they wanted me back."

"Unlike me."

He glanced at her. "Why don't you want me back?"

"I don't want an imposter worming his way into the family and defrauding them of money."

"And if I'm the real Alex?"

"I don't want Sally's heart broken. She doesn't have much time left, and I want it to be peaceful. She'd learned to live without her son. She mourned him, and then got on with her life."

"Peace is a highly overrated commodity," he murmured. "I think Sally would prefer a few weeks of joy to a few months of fading away."