Tell Me Your Secrets...

His eyes widened. “I don’t know.”

“You were there. You and Beatrice came out of the stable with Austin and the Lintons.”

Now Carter was frowning. “Beatrice, Austin and the Lintons were in the stables when I arrived. A call had come in for Austin and Elena asked me to deliver the message. The horses were already saddled when I got there.”

“I’ll have Gus check into it,” Sloan said.

“Well.” Doc Carter closed his bag. “I want you to take it easy for the next day or so. Don’t go to sleep for a while.”

I made the mistake of nodding and pain sliced into my head again. “Aspirin?”

He took a bottle out of his case and shook two pills into my palm. I swallowed both of them dry before he handed me a glass of water.

Doc turned toward James. “Shall I tell Beatrice to hold dinner for you?”

“No,” James directed. “Tell her to go ahead and serve dinner without us. Elena will bring something up when we’re ready.”

None of us spoke again until Doc Carter left the room. Then Sloan looked at me. “We’re going to tell James everything.”

I opened my mouth, but Sloan held up a hand. “First someone shoots at you, then your saddle girth is cut. I’m putting a stop to your masquerade right now.”

“No need to argue about it,” James said. “I already know who she is. She’s Brooke Ashby, and she’s here because I sent her that letter telling her that she was adopted.”

MINUTES LATER, I was still trying to absorb what James had revealed. He’d forestalled questions, insisting that Sloan pour us each some of the brandy he kept in his desk.

I waited for Sloan to sit down beside me before I asked the question that was foremost in my mind. “Do you know what happened to Cameron?”

“Yes, I know.” His face and his tone were grim. “But what I say stays in this room. Agreed?”

“All right.” I nodded.

Sloan looked angry. “I’m not promising anything.”

James studied him for a minute. “Her life and Cameron’s life might depend on your silence.”

“She’s alive then?” I linked my fingers with Sloan’s. “Where?”

James took a sip of his brandy. “She’s safe in L.A. I’ve hired security for her.”

“So she did run away,” Sloan said. “And you knew all the while where she was.”

“I knew where she was. But she didn’t run away. The morning after you quarreled, she went to that spot she loves so much by the ocean. She told me that morning that she was having second thoughts about going through with the wedding.” Frowning, he waved an impatient hand. “Not because she was falling for that Linton character. She wasn’t. The gal was too smart for that. She was keeping tabs on him like I asked her to.”

He paused to take another sip of his brandy. The light was beginning to fade outside, and Sloan reached to turn on a lamp.

“She was upset that morning,” James continued. “She told me that she believed Linton was really falling for her, and that was causing her to have second thoughts about settling for a marriage of convenience. Said maybe the both of you deserved better. I’ve no doubt she would have come around and done the sensible thing. She always does. But while she was out there on the cliff, someone came up behind her and pushed her over.”

I tightened my grip on Sloan’s hand.

“Brooke figured that much out this morning,” Sloan said. “She climbed down and found Cameron’s locket on the ledge.”

“Smart gal.” He shot me an approving glance. “The ledge saved Cameron’s life. But it knocked her out for a while. When she came to, it was dark. She had her cell phone in her pocket and she called me, told me what happened and drove herself back here. We sat right in this very spot and decided what to do next.”

“So she drove her car back here and not the would-be killer?” I asked.

“Yes.” There was a ruthless light in James’s eyes now. “I wanted the bastard to worry and wonder how that car had gotten back here. And whether or not Cameron could still be alive.”

“So you let us all believe that she’d gone away to think about the wedding,” Sloan said.

James nodded. “Then I waited for someone to show their hand.”

“And you didn’t think I had a right to know where she was?” Sloan asked. His voice was soft and tight with anger.

When he answered, James’s voice was tired. “Cameron didn’t see who pushed her. The noise of the sea and the wind blocked any sound. I wasn’t about to trust anyone.” He met Sloan’s eyes steadily. “You’ll have to forgive the overprotectiveness of a father.”

A tense silence followed.

I took a sip of my brandy to ease the tightness in my throat. “Why L.A.?”

James met my eyes, and I saw regret and something else, something that I’d seen before when he looked at me. Hunger? “She wanted to see you, to be close to you.”

“She knew about me?”

“I told her that night when we were deciding what to do. I’d been thinking of getting in touch with you, but it was her idea that I send you that letter. We figured that you’d make an appearance here and that would stir things up.”

“The return of the long-lost twin?” I asked around the tight ball that had formed in my throat. “How could you have been so sure I’d take the bait?”

James gave me a steady look. “You have McKenzie genes in you. I knew that curiosity would bring you here. But I wasn’t expecting the memory loss story—that was a stroke of genius. I had to move up the wedding to really force the attacker’s hand.”

There was a knock on the door, and Sloan rose to answer it. The interruption gave me a chance to play James’s words over in my mind. “You have McKenzie blood.” What I’d suspected but never quite believed had turned out to be true. I was James and Elizabeth’s daughter. And my sister was alive.

Elena came in pushing a cart, and for a while the only sound in the room was the clink of china and silver as she set out dinner on James’s desk. When she’d lit the candles and pushed the cart out of the room, James said, “Shall we eat?”

I put my brandy snifter down. “I can’t. Not until you tell me why you gave me up for adoption.”

Sloan returned to his place beside me and took my hand in his. “You’re going to have to explain that to me, too.”

James kept his eyes steady on mine. “I gave you up for adoption because I loved your mother, and I thought it would save her life. I thought I was in love with my first wife, Sarah, too. But we met in our teens, and during the ten years we were married, we changed, grew up I guess. She wanted something besides ranch life. I wasn’t surprised when she ran away. The surprise was that she chose my best friend.” He nodded to Sloan. “Your father.”

“That must have been hard,” I said.

“I told myself that it happens. Lancelot was Arthur’s best friend, and Guinevere fell for him. I hoped that they would be happy together.”

“They were in love, then?” I asked.

“Why else would they have run off together?”

“You didn’t try to find them?”

“Sure.” James frowned. “But the P.I. I hired never found a trace.”

I gripped Sloan’s hand harder. Because we were talking about his father, and it didn’t sound as if James had really wanted to find them.

“I was fifty-five when I met Elizabeth Cameron, and it was love at first sight for both of us. I took one look at her and thought this was the woman I was meant to be with. It was the same for her. She’d never wanted to marry, never considered it until she met me. What we shared was a rare and special kind of love—the kind that you experience when you meet the mate that you were created for. If you haven’t experienced it, you won’t understand what I’m saying.”

I thought I knew what he was talking about, but I didn’t dare look at Sloan, didn’t dare think about it.

“Elizabeth was thirty-five when we married, twenty years my junior. The one bone of contention between us was that I wanted children and she didn’t. She didn’t want anything else to interfere with her art. In her mind, marriage had interfered enough. But I persisted. I’m not sorry about that. In the end she gave in and agreed to give me one child.”

James took another sip of brandy, then set the glass down. “From the beginning of the pregnancy, she was plagued with depression. I took her to the best doctors, and finally we ended up in a clinic in Switzerland where they supposedly had some expertise. But they could do nothing for her. When the doctor told me we were having twins, I didn’t dare tell her. I know it sounds unbelievable now, but when the person you love is sick, you become desperate. Your mother’s psychological condition was too delicate, too precarious. I was afraid that another baby might push her over the edge.”

He drew in a breath and let it out. “That’s when I made the hardest decision I’ve ever made. I brought you back here on a separate plane and arranged for your adoption through a private agency. I selected your parents because I recognized in your mother the same kind of dedication to work that I’d seen in Elizabeth. And I suppose that giving you to them helped me to live with the guilt I felt for pressuring Elizabeth into having you and Cameron.”