“You aren’t my lawyer,” she pointed out.
“Your lawyer? Jesus, Amanda, you spent most of yesterday in my bed.”
She felt another pang, this one bittersweet. It was the first time he’d called her Amanda since she had arrived at his office. Not, of course, that it meant anything.
“So I did.” She turned her head to offer him a small, ironic smile. “But today we’re here. Today, you called me into your office, put an acre of desk and an arctic cold front between us, and offered me proof that I deliberately hid my past. Proof you went looking for after we became lovers. Today you are the attorney of Jesse Daulton and Daulton Industries.”
They stared at each other in silence, and then Amanda nodded slightly.
“You can’t have it both ways, Walker. Don’t expect me to tell you things just because we’re lovers—especially when I know only too well that you’re just waiting for me to say or do something you can use against me.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“Oh, no? What about this little meeting?”
“I called you, Amanda—not Jesse,” he reminded her tautly. “You. And, goddammit, don’t try to put me on the defensive. I’m trying to give you a chance to explain yourself so I won’t have to call Jesse.”
She heard a faint sound escape her, maybe a laugh. Or maybe not. “You sound so … betrayed, Walker. But maybe I’m the one who should be feeling that way. Because, you see—you fooled me completely. The past couple of days, I never guessed that your smiles and your passion were just … Walker biding his time. Until he could attack.”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“Do I? How do I know that? Because you tell me so? You called Boston on Friday, Walker. Why?”
After a moment, he said flatly, “Because you told me you majored in business in college—and I knew Amanda Grant majored in design.”
She uttered another of those faint sounds that mimicked amusement. “Like a cat at a mousehole, just waiting to pounce. Well, congratulations—you caught me in a lie.”
Amanda turned away from the window and walked quickly across the office. She had to leave, now. Had to get away from him. She had to try to think, to decide what to do next.
But before she could reach the door, he was there, blocking the way out. He caught her, hard hands on her shoulders, and made her look at him.
“Amanda, tell me what this is all about!”
“I thought you knew.” She gave him a bitter smile. “Didn’t you tell me that greed motivated most people? Obviously, I’m a lying, scheming bitch just out for what I can get.”
He shook her. “Stop it. I know damned well that isn’t true. You could have had Glory, all of it, and you fought Jesse to make sure that didn’t happen.” He didn’t shake her again, but his long fingers kneaded restlessly.
“Then what does it matter why I came here? You’ve done your job, Walker, You’ve protected the property and interests of the Daultons. And now You’ve exposed me for the liar I obviously am, so maybe you’ll get a bonus—”
“Goddamn you.” His hands lifted to her face, and he bent his head to cover her mouth with his in an almost bruising kiss. It was brief, but incredibly intense, and when he lifted his head, his breathing was uneven. “This isn’t for Jesse or any of them, don’t you understand that? This is for we.” His voice was low, hoarse, angry. “Why won’t you trust me?”
“Why should I?” Her voice was unsteady despite her best efforts, and she knew only too well that she had no hope of hiding from him how swiftly and easily he could affect her. “You’ve done nothing but doubt me from the first moment I walked into your office, so why should I trust you now?”
“Because I’m not hiding anything.” His hands dropped to her shoulders again and tightened. “Look around you, Amanda. Most of the people in this town can tell you who I am. Want to meet the doctor who delivered me? I’ll introduce you. Want to see my pictures in high-school and college annuals? I’ll dig them out for you. My mother kept scrapbooks just crammed with pictures of my life, and the basement of King High still has shelves holding the rock collection I assembled as a boy.”
“Walker—”
“Everything I am is right out in the open, in front of you. No lies. No deceptions or mysteries. Nothing hidden.” He drew a rough breath. “So tell me, Amanda. Which of us has the right to ask for trust?”
She couldn’t think of a word to say to that.
Walker let go of her shoulders and leaned back against the door. His face was set, his eyes burning. “I haven’t been pretending for the past few days, not while we were together. I’m not that good an actor. When I touch you … when we make love … nothing else matters. Nothing. Don’t try to tell me you don’t know that.”
Amanda shook her head a little, but in bewilderment rather than negation. “I don’t understand you, Walker. What do you want from me?”
“The truth. Just the truth. Finally … the truth.” He waited a moment, then added huskily, “Trust me, Amanda, please.”
She turned and moved away from him, back into the office. Almost aimless, she went to stand in front of the leather couch that was along one wall, gazing up at the painting of Duncan McLellan, Walker’s father.
Hawklike good looks apparently ran in the family, she mused, studying the handsome face and shrewd greenish eyes of the man who, along with his wife, had died on a rain-slick, foggy mountain road nearly ten years before.
Walker’s roots were here, sure enough. His life was here. And it was true that there was nothing of his life hidden from her, nothing deceptive. It was true that he had a better right than she to ask for trust.
She turned to find that Walker had remained at the door. He was still leaning back against it, watching her. Waiting. She really didn’t know if she could trust him, didn’t know if she would be making the biggest mistake of her life by confiding in him, but she did know that if she walked out of this office now, it would be over between them.
And that was it, of course. That was why anything would be better than walking out. She didn’t want it to be over between them. Not now. Not yet.
Amanda sat down on the couch and, her choice made, felt the most wonderful sense of relief. “All right. The truth.” She drew a breath. “The truth is, I am Amanda Daulton. And the truth is, I still can’t prove it. But if you can’t accept that—there’s no point in my going on with the rest.”
For a moment, Walker didn’t say anything at all. But then, finally, he pushed himself away from the door and came across the room to her. He sat down on the couch, turned a little toward her, and reached for her hand. “All right.”
The words were so simple, his tone so unquestioning, that Amanda was caught off guard. “You believe me?”
“Like you said—if I don’t believe that much, there’s no point in hearing the rest, is there?”
Amanda had a feeling she had just heard a lawyer’s sly evasion, but she accepted it just the same. She had burned her bridges; there was no going back now.
“All right then. After my mother was killed last year in a car accident—”
“Where?” he interrupted.
So he wanted it all. Amanda shrugged again. “Outside Seattle. I grew up all over the country, but that’s where We’d lived since I finished college.”
“Long way from Boston,” he noted.
She decided not to comment, and went on. “After the car accident, I had to go through my mother’s papers. Including some she had in a safe-deposit box. I found her marriage license, newspaper clippings about Brian Daulton’s death, three journals she’d kept during her marriage—and my birth certificate.”
“The birth certificate you brought here,” Walker noted, “was a photocopy dated just before your mother was killed.”
Amanda nodded. “I think she had decided to tell me the truth. I even found the beginning of a letter to me in with some of her stationery—but she’d only gotten as far as saying there was a lot I had to forgive her for, and that she didn’t
know how to explain it all to me.”
“What about the journals?”
“All they told me was that her marriage was troubled, and that although she loved Glory, she hated being isolated there. They were journals, Walker, not a diary. She described the things around her and … mused. Pondered her emotions in an abstract way. Like daydreaming written down. Anyone could have read the journals, and probably did; whether consciously or unconsciously, she didn’t record anything too specific. There were entries in a kind of stream-of-consciousness style that was almost—maybe—like a private code. Anyway, they weren’t much help.”
“What did you do then?”
“You mean after I sat down and cried?”
Walker looked at her for a moment, then lifted the hand he held and rubbed it briefly against his cheek. “I’m sorry. It isn’t just a recitation of events, is it? Not to you. The shock must have been overwhelming.”
Amanda shook her head wonderingly. “My whole life had been a lie. She had told me our name was Reed, that my father had died in an accident when I was just a baby. I’d even had a birth certificate naming me Amanda Reed—but when I checked, I found out it was a fake.
“At first, I was too stunned to do anything. I didn’t remember being anyone else. I tried to think back— and that was when I realized I didn’t remember much of anything before my tenth birthday.”
“You hadn’t noticed that before?”
“No. And when I tried to remember then, to force myself, I got this sick feeling of fear. It was like … standing outside the closed door of a room, and knowing that what was inside was something terrible. I didn’t want to open the door.”
Amanda drew a breath. “For a few weeks after she was killed, I didn’t do anything about the situation. I had a job—working for a publisher of specialty magazines—and that kept me busy. But when the numbness wore off, I knew I couldn’t just pretend I didn’t know and go on as if nothing had happened. Aside from everything else, I needed to know who I really was, for my own sake. But that fear … and realizing that my mother had been afraid, that the nervousness I’d gotten used to had actually been fear—”
“How could you know that?”
“I knew. It was as if her death and the shock of finding out my real name had—had ripped a veil away from me. I knew she’d been afraid. And I knew she had left Glory in fear.” Before he could ask how she knew that, Amanda explained the final entry in Christine Daulton’s journals, the one that mentioned Amanda being in shock and Christine’s relief that they were “safely away” from Glory.
“But she didn’t offer the reasons?”
“No. All I knew was that she had been afraid, and that I was afraid when I tried to remember.” Amanda paused for a moment, then went on slowly. “I knew from the newspaper clippings and her journals that the Daultons were a powerful and wealthy family. I was … wary of just turning up here without warning, especially when I had no idea of what I’d find. So I found a private investigator I thought I could trust, and explained the situation. We put our heads together, and decided the best thing to do first would be to gather all the information we could find on the family.”
“Sensible,” Walker said. “And when you’d done that?”
“The first thing that struck me,” Amanda said, “was that there was no public reference to anything having happened that night. Until the newspapers wrote up Brian Daulton’s death, there wasn’t even a mention of his wife having left him and taken their child with her.”
“Jesse would have kept it quiet—probably, if I know him, thinking Christine would come back sooner or later.”
“About her running away, that’s what I thought. But I was convinced something else had happened, something that made her run away in fear—and if it happened, it happened without any public notice.”
“Something you didn’t remember—but feared.”
Amanda didn’t let the doubt in his voice discourage her. She kept her voice steady. “I knew something had happened. But I also knew, by then, that at least two other women had claimed to be Amanda Daulton, and it seemed likely I would be viewed with open distrust if I couldn’t prove myself.”
“Which you couldn’t.”
“No. But I didn’t really have a choice; I needed to come here, to find out who I was, and to understand the family I’d come from. Even if … even if I never found out why my mother had run away from Glory, I thought I’d at least have a better understanding of who I was. But whenever I thought about coming here, I was always conscious of that locked room and the terrible thing inside it, the thing I was afraid of.
“My mother had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide us under a different name—and it seemed to me that it would be smart if I did the same thing. So, my investigator helped me to create a background for myself, just in case I had to … make a quick exit. I knew there were holes in it, but I didn’t think it would have to hold up more than a couple of months. After that, either I’d know the truth about what had happened that last night, or it probably wouldn’t matter.”
“you’d be gone?”
Amanda leaned her head back against the couch and looked at him gravely. “I thought I probably would. From the moment I stood on that hill in the pasture and looked at Glory the day you took me out there, I knew I could never live in that house.”
“Why? Because you were afraid?”
She managed a small smile. “Because I knew I didn’t belong there. Oh—it was familiar. It’s when I saw the house that I started remembering bits and pieces of my childhood.”
He was silent for a moment, then asked, “What about that night? Have you remembered anything about what happened?”
“There have been a couple of flashes, very vivid but brief. I remember … going downstairs, past the clock. Out the front door and across the field. Jumping a ditch filled with muddy water, and getting near the stables. Seeing a light. Hearing … something. Something terrible.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. That’s where the memories … and the nightmares … always stop.”
After a silent moment, Walker said, “Does that night have anything to do with your fear of horses?”
“I think so. I loved horses before that night—but not after. So something must have happened, and whatever it was made me afraid of horses. I think … that night, I was sneaking out to see a mare who’d foaled a couple of weeks before. But I don’t remember seeing her. It’s … just a blank after that.”
Walker shook his head. “Christine never told you anything about what might have happened that night?”
“Nothing. As far as I can remember, she never said a word to me about it. But I know she was afraid.”
Amanda gazed steadily at Walker, willing him to believe her. “She was always afraid after we left here. And I don’t know why.”
Frowning, Walker said, “Have you asked any of the others what they remember?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It was just another night to them. Maggie and Kate both said my mother had been unhappy, but neither noticed anything unusual about her. Neither did Jesse. But …”
“Someone did?”
“Victor.”
“What?” Walker’s eyes narrowed swiftly.
Amanda nodded. “Just before he went off on that stock-buying trip, we had a brief conversation by the pool. He said … my mother had been having an affair with a trainer named Matt Darnell that summer.”
“Did you believe him?”
She hesitated, then nodded again. “He said he had proof. Before I could ask about that, he was called away, and we never spoke again. But I went back and checked her journals, and there are some passages that seem to hint at something … passionate happening that summer. And Victor said this Matt Darnell left with my mother and me. He seemed very sure of it.”
“Then maybe that’s your answer,” Walker told her. “Maybe this frightening room you’re afraid to look into was created when you
were torn away from a place you loved in the middle of the night and taken from your father.”
“What about the fear of horses?”
“It could have been a separate incident, something that happened before or after that night. You said yourself your memories have been flashes, too elusive to get hold of. Maybe it’s all jumbled together in your mind.”
“And my mother’s fear?”
“She was a runaway wife, and the Daultons were powerful. She could have lost custody of you. She must have known Jesse wouldn’t stop looking after Brian died, and if he’d found the two of you, you can bet he would have taken her to court.”
“Maybe.” The possible explanations he offered were plausible, certainly. But they didn’t explain why Christine Daulton had continued to be afraid long after Amanda had come of age. They didn’t explain why Amanda had absolutely no memory of Matt Darnell. And they didn’t explain Amanda’s growing certainty that her fear of horses did stem from something that had happened that night.
But for now, she was tired of thinking about it, tired of having all the questions and worries chasing their tails inside her head. Helen had said she would remember when the time was right, and Amanda had to believe that was true.
She was on the point of telling Walker that she might have been deliberately poisoned at the party, and that Victor might have been killed because of whatever he hadn’t gotten the chance to tell her, and that maybe the dogs had been taken away so that someone could get to her—God, it was all so nebulous! Mights and maybes, whatevers and what-ifs. Walker would think she was paranoid, and she was beginning to think the same thing.
“So,” she said instead, meeting his intent gaze, “now you know the truth. My story, with all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, just the way a lawyer likes them.”
He smiled slightly. “Thank you.”
She was a little surprised. “For what?”
“For trusting me.”
Amanda looked down at his hand still holding hers, watched his thumb move gently to rub her skin. “Are you going to tell Jesse?” she asked almost idly.
“Not if you don’t want me to.”