Sunshine and the Shadowmaster (13 page)

“This isn't a wonder, Dad,” Jared muttered. “It's a baby on the way with no husband in the house.”

But Oggie's rheumy eyes were misty. “No. It's another of life's wonders. More than forty years ago, I stole my beloved Bathsheba—God rest her sainted soul—from that dirty weasel, Rory. And now we've come full circle. Rory's son will marry our Sunshine. The ugliness of the past will be put forever to rest.”

Jared let out one of his disbelieving grunts. “You haven't got the picture, here, Dad. He hasn't said he'll marry her yet.”

“He doesn't even
know
yet,” Eden said. “Be fair.”

“Fine.” Jared shot back the word. “So we'll see to it that he
does
know. And if he doesn't make things right, then whatever happened forty years ago is nothin' to the ugliness I'll be showing you tonight.”

Oggie shook his grizzled head. “Always with the negative. We'll see, we'll see.”

“Fine. We're outta here.” Jared turned to Heather, who'd been standing there slightly stupefied, telling herself that this couldn't really be happening to her. “Sunshine, give me the address.”

Heather bestirred herself. “I don't have it with me.” She turned for her own car. “Follow me to my house and I'll give it to you there.”

At Heather's, Jared and Oggie waited outside. Heather ran up the steps, let herself in the house and rushed to the phone to call Eden.

“Eden, listen. I'm going with them. If Dad won't take me, then I'll follow in my own car. Will you do me a mammoth favor?”

“Anything. Ask.”

“Call Lucas for me. I know I ought to do it myself, but I don't have the heart to. Besides, Dad's got the engine running outside, so I don't have the time, either.”

“Certainly I'll call him.”

“Tell him—oh, I don't know. Tell him that Jared Jones is coming to his house to bust his face in. Maybe he'll get smart and clear out of there. But I doubt it. He's as bullheaded as Dad.”

“Don't worry. I'll handle it. Somehow.”

“Oh, thank you.” She gave Eden the Monterey number. “Tell him we're on the way and say that... Oh, I suppose you'd better tell him about the baby. The mood Dad's in, it won't be a secret for long anyway. Okay?”

“Count on me.”

“I do, you know I do.”

Heather thanked Eden again, then hung up, stuck her address book into her back pocket and headed out the door.

A
t two in the morning, Jared pulled up to the wrought-iron gate that barred the entrance to Lucas's estate.

“What the hell's this?” Jared growled under his breath.

“It's a gate, Dad,” Heather told him.

Jared shot her a surly look. “I don't need any smart-mouth remarks from you.”

“Now, now, you two.” Oggie chuckled. “Let's not get testy.”

Just then, a speaker in the brick wall not far away from the truck crackled to life. “Yes. What is it?” The voice was a woman's voice, very clipped and impatient sounding.

“It's trouble, is what it is,” Jared announced. “Open the gate.”

“Give me your name, please.”

“Jones. Jared Jones. Here to have a little talk with Lucas Drury.”

There was a pause, then the voice said, “Yes. All right. Follow the driveway. Go left when it forks, or you'll end up at the stables.”

Before them the gate slowly swung back.

Oggie chuckled some more. “Yessiree. Rory's boy did all right by himself, and that's a fact.”

“Rory's boy is a dead man,” Jared muttered, and drove through the gate, which closed slowly and smoothly behind them. Ahead, the driveway twisted away into darkness.

Heather glanced back and watched the gate disappear as they rounded the first bend in the road. They climbed a gentle incline, winding gradually upward through a forest of high, tangled eucalyptus trees, turning left, as they'd been instructed, when the road forked. After that, the forest of eucalyptus faded away on either side. Now the only trees were twisted Monterey cypress, reaching out their gnarled limbs to the night. Close-growing brush clung to the rocky hillside and Heather could smell the salty wetness of the ocean through Jared's open window. Overhead, the stars seemed few and far between in the black, moonless sky.

They saw the house well before they reached it. It was a sprawling Spanish-style villa, so well lit, even in the middle of the night, that they could make out the fanned designs of the panes beneath the window arches, the diamondlike pattern that embellished the iron railings, and the splashes of vermillion made by climbing roses in bloom. The tires of the pickup crunched on a bed of white pebbles as Jared swung around a huge stone fountain and pulled up twenty feet from the pillars and arches that framed the gargantuan front door.

In the bleak silence after Jared turned off the engine, Heather stared up at the mansion where Lucas lived, dread like a cold block of ice in her stomach. Two powerful urges warred within her. She longed to lay her head down on the dashboard and sob out her shame and frustration—and to shove her father out of the way, jump from the truck and run back down the twisting driveway in the dark.

Anything,
anything
to escape the mortifying, potentially violent scene that lay ahead.

“Er, maybe you oughtta wait in the truck for a few minutes, Sunshine,” Jared suggested. “This could be ugly, I'm afraid.”

Heather sent him a grim look. “Thanks for thinking of my feelings, Dad. But it's a little late, you know.”

“What's gotta be has gotta be,” her father said sagely.

“You're enjoying this,” Heather accused.

Her father didn't even bother to argue. “A man does what he has to do.”

“You don't
have
to do this.”

On the other side of Heather, Oggie started chortling again. “Face the facts, girl.” He patted her hand with his gnarled old claw. “Your dad's a hooligan at heart, family man or not.”

Heather turned on her grandfather. “Thanks, Grandpa,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could muster. “I made Dad bring you along to keep trouble from happening, not to stand by and philosophize about it.”

“There'll be no trouble,” Oggie said. “Wait and see.”

“Enough talk,” Jared growled. “You coming or not?”

“I'm coming,” Heather replied through clenched teeth.

A pained looked crossed her father's craggy face. It was obvious to Heather that, while Jared had no qualms about humiliating her, he wished she wouldn't insist on watching him do it. “You sure?”

“I'm positive.”

“Fine. Then don't dawdle.” Jared jerked the keys from the ignition, pushed open his door and stepped down, where he suddenly grew chivalrous and held the door open for her.

She didn't move.

He commanded, “Stop foolin' around.”

On the other side of Heather, her grandfather had already hauled his old bones to the ground and was waiting by the truck patiently, leaning on his cane.

“You comin', Heather Jane?” her father asked again.

In a totally meaningless gesture of defiance, Heather turned her back on him and slid out on Oggie's side. When her tennis shoes touched the ground, she realized that what she'd thought were pebbles were actually thousands upon thousands of tiny, translucent white shells. She thought it strange and decadent that anyone would choose to pave their driveway with shells.

They went up the tiled tiers of steps and under the wide, triple-arched portico. They rang the bell and the door was drawn back instantly by a thin, aloof-looking woman in her fifties who reminded Heather of upright, unimpeachable Nellie Anderson.

“We're here to see Lucas Drury,” Jared announced.

The woman granted them a single, sweeping, thoroughly disapproving glance. “Of course. He's waiting in the atrium. This way.”

They left the huge entry hall from which a curving staircase spiraled upward and went down another hall, then turned left and went down another after that. Heather's palms were clammy and it hurt to draw breath. Behind her, her grandfather's cane tapped hollowly on the antique tiles of the floor.

At last, the hall opened up to a two-story, skylit room.

“Holy guacamole,” Oggie muttered as he and his son and granddaughter halted in a tight little knot on the edge of the room.

Heather agreed with him. The room was spectacular. It could have graced the palace of some Moorish conqueror. The tiles underfoot shone with a rich patina of age. And there were more tiles, painted with elaborate, flowing designs, that continued halfway up the pure white walls. An arch on the wall opposite them was framed in an intricate plaster relief. Through the arch and an iron gate so splendidly worked that it resembled black lace, a swimming pool could be seen, gleaming and shimmering in the play of strategically placed artificial light, looking both eerie and magical at once.

Overhead, below the five diamond-shaped skylights, an iron chandelier sent out twining arms on which black candle sconces perched, each one tipped in golden light. The rug was off-white, woven in squares. The couches were upholstered in a sky blue fabric. Thick, textured brocades covered most of the chairs.

The majority of the tables and the wood-backed chairs on the edges of the room were fashioned of rich, reddish mahogany. But two chairs stood out from the rest. They were of ebony, with sweeping curved arms, their backrests carved in an intricate pattern of twining leaves and vines. The pair of black chairs faced each other, one toward the arch with the swimming pool glimmering behind it, one toward the entrance to the hall where Heather, Jared and Oggie stood.

Lucas sat in the chair that faced the hall. He wore black, as he had that first morning, when he came to Heather's house to claim his son. Soft black, Heather thought rather dazedly. Loose black slacks and a shirt that looked like brushed silk. Black shoes that could as well have been slippers. No socks. He sat slouched in the chair, with his feet crossed at the ankles in front of him, his hands folded over his belt. His eyes, as usual, gave nothing away. He regarded Heather, her father and grandfather with a thoroughly infuriating half smile on his chiseled face.

He waved a long-fingered hand. “Thank you, Hilda. Sorry to interrupt your sleep.”

The thin, aloof woman nodded and left them. For a moment after that, they all just stared at each other. Heather thought about nightmares. Surely this was one. To be standing here in this Moorish prince's palace at two in the morning, wearing old jeans and a frayed shirt, flanked by her hell-raiser of a father and her wily old grandpa, facing down the dark-haired stranger with whom she'd spent one unforgettable night.

“Drury.” Jared broke the silence at last, growling the single word like a pit bull about to pounce.

“Welcome,” Lucas said, and rose lazily to his feet.

“This isn't a social call.” Jared sneered, stepping forward, putting Heather behind him.

“But we wouldn't mind a little toot, if you got one handy,” Oggie said, feinting forward on Heather's other side, leaving her in the rear. “It was a damn long drive out here, and I'm so dry my eyeballs have calcified.”

Jared turned on his father. “Knock it off, Dad. You don't need a drink.”

“Take it where you can get it, I always say.” He grinned at Lucas. “Black Jack, if you're pourin', son.”

Still wearing that infuriating half smile, Lucas strode to the wet bar between a pair of stone columns and quickly poured out three fingers of amber liquid from a crystal decanter. Oggie stumped over and took the glass. He raised it high. “Here's to...the next generation.”

Heather wished she could sink through the floor. She hated her father, she loathed her dear old grandpa and she wanted to murder Lucas Drury.

He knows,
she thought.
He has to know. Eden promised to call him, and Eden always keeps her word.

Which meant he was stringing all of them along, playing out this absurd farce for everything it was worth.

Her father said, “You want to know why we're here, Lucas Drury?”

Lucas just looked at him, one eyebrow raised in a parody of interest.

Heather jumped forward and grabbed her father's arm. “Let me handle this, Dad.”

Jared frowned down at her. “Sunshine, you're out of line.”

“What? It's
my
problem. You're the one who's out of line.”

Oggie knocked back the rest of his drink and poured another. “She's right, Jared. It
is
her problem. If she's up to it, we should let her handle it.”

“I don't need any advice from you, old man.”

“Sure, you do,” Oggie argued good-naturedly. He lifted his glass. “Always have, always will.” He took a big swallow, groaned, sighed and then pulled a cigar from his pocket, which he lovingly began to unwrap.

“How about if you tell me exactly what the problem is,” Lucas suggested quietly.

Heather shot him a furious glance.
You know very well what the problem is,
she thought darkly.
And if I had a gun, you'd have a hole in your heart.

“Heather's knocked up,” Jared said.

Heather let go of his arm. “I hate you, Dad,” she told him softly.

“Well, it's the truth, isn't it?”

Heather turned away. She looked back down the hall through which they'd come, wishing she were out in the pickup. Or drowned in the ocean. Or lost in the eucalyptus forest on the outskirts of Lucas's estate. Anywhere,
anywhere
but here.

Jared spoke to Lucas. “And we know you're the father.”

“I see,” Lucas said.

Heather couldn't see his face. She refused to turn and look at him. But his voice had been calm. Now she
knew
that he'd known all along.

“So, you got anything to say for yourself,” Jared asked, “before I rearrange your face for you?”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “I think Heather and I should be married right away.”