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She began to shake inside, but she squared her shoulders. “You hate Mario because of Mom. Because she slept with Anthony—”
The slap sent her reeling backward and she fell against the wall of Witt’s den, her head bouncing off the corner of the mantel. “Don’t you ever speak of that woman again, do you hear me? She left me as well as every one of you kids so she could carry on her affair with Polidori. So don’t you be lecturing me about how you’re in love with that bastard’s son!”
“You don’t understand—”
“No, Trisha, you don’t understand! You’re never to see him again! Got it?”
Cowering against the wall, faced with her father’s horrid rage, she refused to agree. She loved Mario. She did. Her fists had curled into tight balls and tears rained from her eyes and it became blindingly clear that her father was an ogre, an ugly, ruthless monster who cared about only one thing: his precious daughter, London. Trisha rubbed the welt on the side of her cheek and bit her lip to keep from crying. At that moment she hated Witt Danvers and she’d do anything she could to hurt him!
Now, years later, she still felt the shame. Her father had been a bastard while alive and he was still controlling his children from the grave, putting reins on his money, making them jump through hoops. Angrily, she walked down the hall. Her father had never loved her, not at all. He’d only loved his youngest daughter and now she, or more probably some imposter, was back, trying to get her greedy little fingers into the old man’s fortune. Well, Trisha was bound and determined to fight the gold digger tooth and nail. London had escaped when the rest of them had been forced to suffer and face their father day after day, to cower and shudder and kiss the old man’s ass so he wouldn’t cut them out of his will.
Except for Zach. He’d managed to tell his father to go to hell and then slip back into Witt’s good graces. Much as she hated to admit it, Trisha admired her brother for his grit.
As for Adria Nash, even if she could prove that she was London, Trisha silently vowed she’d never get a penny of the Danvers fortune. She hadn’t paid her dues, hadn’t lived with the heartless tyrant who was Witt Danvers. London didn’t deserve half the old man’s estate and besides, this woman was probably just another fortune hunter.
“What’re you thinking about?” Nelson asked, his eyebrows pulled together anxiously as he glanced at his sister.
“Nothing.”
He didn’t believe her. “Just be on your best behavior, Trisha, and hear what she has to say. Brace yourself. She looks like our dear departed stepmother did twenty years ago.”
They entered the den and Trisha nearly missed a step as her gaze fastened on the woman—a beautiful woman. The resemblance was uncanny, and although this girl didn’t have the innate feline sensuality of the woman sh
e claimed was her mother, she was nearly a dead ringer for Kat.
Someone, Nelson probably, thrust a drink in Trisha’s hand and she took a sip. Zach made introductions, but Trisha didn’t pay much attention; she was too wrapped up in memories of her stepmother. Her throat tightened. God, could it be? Was this woman really her half-sister? She took another calming drink and stubbed out her cigarette. Jason was talking…
“…so we waited for you two before we looked it over. Adria assures us this is the proof we’ll need.” He slapped a black video into the VCR and turned on the power and Trisha pulled her attention away from the woman with the uncanny resemblance to Kat and watched the screen.
Zachary took his position at the window. The room was tense, but he found a grain of amusement in the tight smiles of his brothers and sister. Adria had gotten to them. All of them. They were worried. For the first time in nearly twenty years.
He heard a voice and turned his attention to the television screen where an emaciated, bald man was lying on a hospital bed and speaking with obvious difficulty.
“I suppose I should have told you this before, but for reasons I’ll get to later, selfish reasons, Adria, I kept the story of your birth a secret. When you asked me about it, I swear to God, I didn’t know the truth and later…well, I couldn’t bear to tell you.
“Your mother and I, rest her soul, always wanted children, but, as you know, Sharon couldn’t conceive. This was a constant torment to her and she somehow thought that God was punishing her, though why, I’ll never understand. So when we found you…when you were handed to us, it was the blessing she’d been praying for.
“We adopted you through my brother, Ezra. You probably don’t remember him much as he died in ’77. But he was the one who brought you to us. He was a lawyer, practicing out of Bozeman. He knew that your mother and I were desperate for children. Already in our fifties and with debts that were burying us and the farm, we were considered too old and too poor to adopt through the usual legal means.”
The man paused, took a sip of water from a glass on a nearby table, then cleared his throat and looked at the camera again.
“Ezra told me that one of our distant cousin’s daughters had herself in a fix. The girl, Virginia Watson, was divorced and penniless and had a five-year-old daughter whom she couldn’t care for decently. All she wanted was to see that Adria, her girl, was placed with a loving family. Ezra was a bachelor. He didn’t want a child but he knew that Sharon and I would do anything for a baby.
“And we did. The adoption was secret and the papers…well, there weren’t many, let me tell you. We didn’t want the state involved you see. So, anyway, Virginia came with you and dropped you off and from that day forward we thought of you as our own.”
He paused, the next words difficult. “I suspected everything wasn’t on the up and up, but I didn’t care. Your mom, she was happy for the first time in years, and I had no idea who you really were. I told myself someone didn’t want you and we did and that was that.
“Only years later, after Sharon had passed on, did I start to figure it out. I swear, until that time, I didn’t have a clue that you could be someone’s missing daughter. Hell, Adria, truth to tell, even if I had known, I’m not sure I could’ve given you up. But the long and the short of it is that I was cleaning some old newspapers out of the barn and I saw one with the story of the Danvers girl being kidnapped. The police were searching for her nursemaid, a woman by the name of Ginny Slade. That didn’t mean anything to me, either, but about two weeks later I sat down in my chair by the fire to read a little from the Bible and the page opened up to the family tree and right there I see the name, big as life: Virginia Watson Slade. According to the tree, at one time Ginny Watson was married to Bobby Slade from Memphis.”
He licked his lips nervously. “I’m not a stupid person and even I can put two and two together and come up with four. It looked like you could be the missing Danvers girl, but I wanted to be sure so I tried to contact Virginia, but no one had heard of her for years. From the time she dropped you off at the house, she seemed to have disappeared. No phone calls, no letters, no address. Her parents didn’t know if she was dead or alive and had no idea where Bobby Slade was. It was almost as if she’d fallen off the face of the earth and I hate to admit it, but I was relieved. I didn’t want to lose you.” Victor blinked rapidly and took another sip of water.
The man sounded and looked sincere, as if he were really a dying father, but Zach wasn’t going to let this dog-and-pony show get to him. In his mind Adria was a fake.
“I know this sounds callous,” Victor said in a hoarse whisper, “but I couldn’t stand the thought of losing you, Adria. You were all I had in the world. As for the Danvers family, I figured the damage was already done. I couldn’t undo the kidnapping. And I had to consider the adoption. At the time we’d taken you in, we knew that all the proper papers weren’t filed, that the adoption wasn’t by the book. Hell, it was probably illegal. I was afraid that somehow I’d be implicated in the crime, even though I had no idea where you’d come from. So, I’ve decided to die with this secret intact and leave this video in the safe by my bed. If anyone questions the tape’s authenticity, so be it. Saul Anders lent me his equipment, set up the tripod and saw to it that I had some privacy. He has no idea what’s on this tape and has sworn to me that he wouldn’t view it.”
The old eyes turned glassy for a second. “Okay, kiddo, that’s all I know. I hope it helps. I guess maybe I just loved you too much to tell you the truth. I’ll miss you, baby…” He forced a smile and the tape went blank.
Nelson whistled low under his breath.
