Haunting Rachel (23 page)

That surprised Adam. “Outright? No repayment?”

“No. He told Sherman that when he was a success in years to come, to pass on the favor.” Rachel looked at Adam with a slight frown. “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d done that more than once with some of the smaller amounts. I’ll have to check on that later. In the meantime …”

She found the next entry that interested them. “LM, lent one and a half million, is Lori Mitchell. She lives in a small town in Oregon, where the loan helped her start her own newspaper. Seems her father had known Dad, and
that’s why she turned to him for help when the local banks refused her loan application. The loan from Dad isn’t due to be repaid for another three years. That may be why she hasn’t contacted me—if she even knows Dad was killed. He notes here that he told her to concentrate on getting her paper going and not waste time keeping in touch with him.”

“Oregon,” Adam said. “We can check, just to make sure she’s where she’s supposed to be. But I think we can probably cross her off the list.”

Rachel made a note, then turned a couple of pages of the notebook and began translating again. “JW, lent five million dollars, is—Jordan Walsh. It says he lives in D.C.” She glanced up at Adam. “Close enough.”

“I’d say so. What does it say in Duncan’s notes?”

“Let’s see…. The money was lent to start a business, though what kind isn’t mentioned. Dad was hesitant, but he was asked as a personal favor to lend the money.”

“Asked by whom?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“What does it say
exactly,
Rachel?”

She glanced at him again, then slowly translated aloud, “Walsh is very persuasive, and the company he means to start could help countless people. Still, I’m not entirely convinced this is the best way to finance his efforts. But as a personal favor to an old friend, I am willing to take the risk.’” She looked at Adam. “That’s it.”

“Nothing more?”

“Not here.” She thumbed through the remaining pages slowly. “I don’t see his name come up again.”

“When is the loan to be repaid?”

“Doesn’t say. But …”

“What?”

“Dad transferred the money to Walsh just a couple of
months before he and Mom were killed. It was the last loan he made.”

“And one of the largest.”

“Yes.”

Adam frowned. “Then I’d say we need to find out a bit more about Jordan Walsh.”

“How?”

“Nick can probably help us.”

“And what do we tell him?”

“Rachel, he knows about the explosion. He knows about yesterday. It won’t surprise him to hear we’re going through Duncan’s papers looking for an answer.” He paused. “You said you didn’t suspect Nick. If he isn’t a suspect, then maybe he can help us.”

“All right.”

“Why don’t I go and talk to him? After what happened yesterday, you could probably use a quiet day. Stay in, maybe work on the floor plan of your new boutique. Forget the rest of this for a while.”

While you do what, Adam? Talk to Nick? Or something else?

Rachel looked down at the notebook, hating her own suspicions.

Adam got up and came around the desk. He took her uninjured hand and pulled her gently to her feet, then reached for her other hand as well. Looking at the elastic bandage wrapping her wrist and hand, he said, “Until we know absolutely that you’re safe, you shouldn’t be out alone. You’ve already been hurt enough. If something else happened to you, I don’t think I could stand it.”

She wanted to believe that. He was looking at her, that intensity unshuttered, explicit hunger in his eyes, and Rachel found it hard to breathe suddenly. “Adam—”

“Oh, I know. You don’t quite trust me, do you, Rachel,
in spite of saying you do. So much is happening right now, and I’m still a stranger. A stranger who looks like a dead man.” There was a tinge of bitterness in his voice. “Jesus, Rachel.”

“What do you want me to say? That it doesn’t matter? I wish I could, Adam. I really wish I could. But I can’t. Not yet. I’m sorry.”

“Do you think that helps?”

“I think I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Not now.”

Adam stared down at her for a moment, then swore beneath his breath. “I’m not Thomas Sheridan, Rachel.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? Maybe what you need is proof.”

Rachel opened her mouth to ask him what he was talking about, but before she could make a sound, she had her answer.

His head bent, and his mouth touched hers. Softly, gently, as if he feared to damage something unspeakably fragile. His mouth was warm and hard, and disturbingly unfamiliar.

She let her eyes drift closed, mesmerized by the butterfly sensations of his lips caressing hers. The heat came slowly, welling up from some core she hardly recognized, rising inside her, swelling until it filled all the places in her that had been cold and dark and empty. She felt a tremor ripple through her body.

He felt it too.

In a moment, she was gathered against him, surrounded by powerful arms, held in an inescapable embrace. Yet still his kiss remained feather light and tentative, his mouth toying gently with hers. Until finally Rachel heard a wordless plea escape her, and her arms slid up around his neck.

His arms tightened around her, and his mouth slanted across hers, finally taking what she offered him.

It shook Rachel as she’d never been shaken before. When she had last felt real desire, it had been the tremulous, yearning passion of a girl for the man she trusted implicitly, the man she had known virtually all her life. Safe in Tom’s arms, she had felt no uncertainty, no fear, no anticipation of pain or loss.

In Tom’s arms, she had been totally, completely innocent.

Ten years later, grief and loss and pain had taught Rachel there was no safety in loving or being loved. And maybe that sharper awareness of how fleeting and uncertain life could be opened the floodgates containing a passion she had not known herself capable of feeling.

Maybe it was that.

Or maybe it was Adam.

The only thing she knew for certain was that it had nothing to do with Thomas Sheridan.

Adam kissed her in a way she understood not from experience but only because comprehension sprang from primitive instinct. And she responded with the same all-consuming hunger, the same need to possess, to mark as her own the man who belonged to her.

And it was she who cried out in disappointment when he wrenched his mouth from hers.

“Rachel …” His forehead pressed against hers, and his ragged breathing was warm on her face. “Christ, Rachel—”

“Don’t stop,” she murmured, touching his face with shaking fingers when he drew back just a little and stared down at her.

“I have to.” His voice harshened. “I won’t win like
this, Rachel. I won’t take you away from Thomas simply because I can carry you off to my bed—and he can’t.”

Her hands fell away from him. “You think—”

“I think this is a decision you have to make, and not in the heat of desire. I want you. But I have to be sure it’s me you want. You have to be sure. Or it’ll destroy both of us.”

Adam released her and stepped back. His face was still, his eyes once more shuttered. “I’ll go and talk to Nick.”

He left her there, staring after him.

fter Adam left, it was a long time before Rachel could get her thoughts organized. And, even then, they didn’t make much sense. She felt shaky, and wasn’t sure if it was aftereffects of yesterday’s brush with death or what had just happened.

A brush with … something else.

Too restless to just sit, needing desperately to be busy, Rachel locked up her father’s desk and left the study. Lunchtime was still more than an hour away, and she wasn’t sure what she intended to do, but when she reached the foyer, she encountered Darby.

“Hi. I was just looking for you.”

“What’s up?”

“Well, I was going through that lovely little mahogany secretary—the one that you said used to be in one of the upstairs bedrooms? And I found something I thought you should see.”

“I thought you were going to just box up whatever you found when you cleaned out drawers.”

“Oh, I am. That’s what I’ve been doing, in fact. But since this has your name on it—literally—I thought I’d better give it to you.”

“What?”

Darby pulled a small blue envelope from her clipboard and handed it to Rachel. “I suppose there’s no telling how long it was in that drawer—”

“At least … ten years.”

“Ten years? How do you know that?”

“Because this is Tom’s handwriting.” She stared at the envelope, at her name scrawled in Tom’s sprawling hand, hardly surprised that she remembered his writing so vividly.

“Tom? Tom Sheridan?” Darby looked concerned. “Jeez, maybe I should have just dropped it in the box with the rest of the stuff. I had no idea it’d bring back bad memories, Rachel, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right.” Rachel smiled at her friend. “Good memories, not bad ones. Tom used to leave me little notes and presents hidden in the house. I always suspected I’d never found them all, but he’d never confirm that when I teased him to tell me.”

Darby hesitated, then asked, “Are you going to read it? Should I go away and leave you alone?”

Alone with my dead lover.
Rachel wasn’t surprised that Darby would expect her to be upset; what surprised her was that all she felt was a slightly wistful sadness that hardly hurt at all.

“Of course I’m going to read it. And, no, there’s no reason why you should go away and leave me alone.” Rachel opened the envelope and withdrew a folded sheet
of blue notepaper, which contained only a few words sprawling over the page.

She showed it to Darby, smiling. “He must have left me a present there. I seem to remember finding one or two over the years.”

“Romantic.” Darby was smiling as well.

“Yes, he was. Or maybe just playful. I never was quite sure.”

Darby chuckled. “Well, I’ll keep an eye out for more of his notes to you. And whatever else he may have left for you.”

Rachel put the note back into the envelope and slid both into her pocket. “That would be a good idea. In the meantime—could you use some help? I’m not in the mood to do nothing today.”

“Sure, if you feel up to it. Do you? With all the bruises you collected yesterday—”

“Moving around a little will do me good. Besides, if I go ahead and start cleaning out drawers, you can get finished faster.”

“In that case, you’re on. We have more stuff from the basement parked out in the hallway near the kitchen, if you’re interested. I had just started to go through the drawers, when I found the note.”

Rachel was interested, and a few minutes later was sitting on a borrowed dining room chair while she emptied the drawers of a tallboy. Darby left her to it, retreating once more to the basement to continue her tagging.

Rachel didn’t really know what had prompted her to help Darby, when she had resisted doing so before. Maybe
it had been Tom’s letter, with the implicit promise of more hidden in the house. More from him—and perhaps from others. Not that Rachel believed the answer to why someone apparently wanted her dead was hidden in some drawer last closed years ago. But given her father’s secrecy about the private loans, it was possible that useful information could be found.

Then again, maybe she just wanted her hands and thoughts occupied.

By the time Fiona announced lunch, Rachel had filled one cardboard box with a variety of trash from drawer liners to old church bulletins, used greeting cards and crumpled stationery, and had another half-filled with yellowed linens and yards of unused material. And that was only from the tallboy.

She went upstairs to wash her dusty hands before the meal, pausing to run a brush through her hair and then pausing again as she came back through her bedroom. The rose on her nightstand looked as fresh as it had that morning. As it did every morning.

She wondered what Adam would make of that. She didn’t know what to make of it, and every time she considered it, her mind shied away.
It’s as if someone places a fresh rose in the vase while I sleep, so fresh there’s still dew on the petals….

“I’m losing my mind,” Rachel murmured, and it seemed as good an explanation as any.

She sighed and pulled Tom’s note from her pocket. A note from a long-dead lover. A rose that wouldn’t wilt. Definitely the stuff of madness.

She carried the note to the little desk near the window and opened the top drawer to place it inside. Then she stopped, aware of a niggling unease. There was something
not quite right here, she thought. Something that was … something that shouldn’t be …

She opened the drawer farther and looked at the neat stack of stationery and envelopes, the small notecards. Small blue notecards. Slowly, she compared Tom’s note to what lay in the drawer. The stationery was the same. There was nothing wrong with that. Except for one thing. This was stationery she had brought with her from New York.

Ten years ago, there had been none like it in the house.