The Look-Alike Bride (Crimson Romance) (15 page)

“I’m going to buy a nanny cam,” Leonie grumbled. “Although they’ve probably got a lot of that high-tech surveillance stuff that detects hidden cameras. If I saw a blanked out portion, I’d at least know somebody had been there.”

“In a case like this, the best thing to do is assume somebody has either already been in, or will be in shortly.” He followed her inside the shop. “There are other ways to know whether or not anyone has been poking through your things.”

Leonie abruptly remembered she was supposed to be Zara, and Zara would know all about ways of detecting snoopers. She cleared her throat and said, “Yes, I know. I’ll take a few steps as soon as I get back. This is the one I want. Isn’t it beautiful?”

She stopped before a chunk of rock the size of a watermelon with large, perfectly formed quartz crystals standing out like icicles. The more she looked at it the better she liked it, and it would look fantastic in her apartment’s small living room. It would also look good in any new apartment she found, assuming she could get a job and pay her rent.

“Isn’t that a bit too big for a coffee table?” Adam shoved his hands in his pockets and regarded the piece with what she could only describe as a baleful look.

“Not at all.” She signaled the shopkeeper. “Besides, I may place it on a bookshelf or even in a special spot on the floor.”

“I’ll bet Butch will know what to do with it,” Adam said under his breath.

“Butch knows how to conduct himself in cabins and apartments.” Leonie waited while the shopkeeper, a middle-aged man with rugged features and the leathery skin of an outdoorsman, easily lifted the big chunk of rock and carried it to the front desk.

She followed him to the desk and produced Zara’s credit card. She had all Zara’s identification and credit cards, since Zara had claimed she wouldn’t need them where she was going, and Leonie might need them if she had to make purchases or if she got pulled over by the police.

She signed the credit slip with Zara’s signature, which she had diligently practiced for all of five minutes. It would serve Zara right if she sat around nights wondering what on earth Leonie had charged at the Crystal Shack that cost nearly two-hundred dollars. Leonie considered it a memento of her time at Lake Ouachita, but Zara would probably wonder if she had run mad, even when Leonie paid her back.

Maybe she had run mad, Leonie thought, smiling to herself as she presented Zara’s driver’s license as identification. She was conducting a red-hot affair with Adam Silverthorne in her sister’s name, and she was depleting her already skinny bank account—or, for the moment, Zara’s bank account—buying what amounted to a bunch of pretty rocks. There was a lot to be said for living in the moment. She had never enjoyed herself so much in her life.

The man at the counter surveyed her signature, frowning, and Leonie’s heart promptly stopped. She berated herself for not practicing the signature more diligently. What would she do if she got caught now, right in the middle of what would, no doubt, rank as the most exciting love affair of her life?

Just when she thought she couldn’t stand there another minute, the man glanced between the card and Zara’s driver’s license and handed her back the card. She glanced surreptitiously at the photograph of Zara on the license experienced a moment of profound thankfulness. For the moment, she really did look exactly like that photograph of Zara, thanks to makeup and hair color.

Adam drove them back to her cabin and carried her new purchase inside for her.

“Why don’t you just walk down to the lakeshore and pick up a few rocks there?” he asked. “You’re bound to find one just as big and heavy as this one.”

“Stop complaining. You can’t find a rock covered with big quartz crystals like this one on the lakeshore and you know it. But I am going to look for some nice-sized rocks to paint flowers on.” She waited while he set the rock carefully on an opened magazine in the center of Zara’s coffee table. “There. Now doesn’t that look beautiful?”

“More than beautiful,” Adam said.

She looked up and discovered his gaze fixed on her face. “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” she said, flushing. “But it definitely adds interest to the room. Tomorrow I’ll have to check out another shop for a few shelf pieces.”

Adam strolled over to a bookshelf where Zara kept several big coffee table books and a few bestselling novels, none of which Zara ever read, so far as Leonie could tell.

“As a matter of interest, if you fill up all your available space with quartz crystals, where are you going to put all the flower-painted rocks you’re intending to add?” He stood looking intently at the bookshelf.

“All over the place,” Leonie said happily. “Rocks with flowers painted on them look good almost anyplace, including outside on the patio.”

She could hardly wait to get to roses, the subject of the following day’s class. Her primroses, to her delighted eye, filled the place of a flower garden nicely and they didn’t have to be cultivated or watered or talked to.

“You’d better check your bedroom drawers.” Adam’s voice turned grim suddenly. “Someone has gone through these books, and you can bet whoever it was has also gone through everything in your bedroom.”

“They went through all the books?” Leonie couldn’t believe it. “What on earth do they think I’m hiding there? For their information, I don’t have anything of interest to them anywhere in this cabin.”

“People hide all kinds of things in books, angel.” Adam bent to pluck a coffee table book off the shelf and smiled at her. “Like money.” He opened the book and showed her a twenty-dollar bill lying between the pages. “I put this here yesterday. Whoever tossed the room left it alone, but he disturbed the other indicators I left in place.”

“You booby-trapped the bookshelves?” Leonie knew now she had entered an alternate universe. “This sounds like some kind of bad spy novel. Why would—? Never mind. I probably don’t want to know.” She reluctantly withdrew her mind from contemplating roses on rocks and directed it toward checking her belongings in her bedroom. “I wish I had thought to booby-trap my drawers. Maybe with a rat trap or two.”

“That would have been interesting.” Adam followed her into the bedroom. “We might have come home to find someone hanging off your dresser.”

It wasn’t funny, Leonie thought, as Adam watched her carefully go through everything in her bedroom drawers. This kind of thing definitely dampened a woman’s enthusiasm for vacations. It even made her jumpy and suspicious.

“I’m sorry, Adam,” she said at last. “I can’t tell if anyone has been through my things or not. Everything looks just the way I left it.”

“They’ve been here,” Adam said. His positive tone left no doubt about the matter. “They’re just trolling for any information they can find right now. The important thing is whether or not anything is missing.”

Leonie truthfully had no idea. “Not that I can tell. But if I think of something, I’ll tell you right away.”

“Good.”

Adam stretched out his hand to touch her hair. To her surprise, he plucked a long, silvery strand of her hair and held it before her eyes.

“Now I’m going to show you a simple way to discover whether or not someone has been going through your things,” he said and smiled into her eyes. “But first, I’ve spent far too long looking at rocks and crystals. It’s time I feasted my eyes on something a lot more interesting.”

“And what would that be?” Leonie asked innocently, even though she read the message in his eyes very clearly.

“Take off all your clothes and I’ll tell you,” he said.

“Is this a new form of show-and-tell?”

“It’s more like show-and-demonstrate.”

Leonie had no fault to find with that program.

“Okay,” she said. “So long as it’s educational.”

Adam ambled back to his cabin, where he intended to pack a change of clothing and a few of the food items he had stocked for his stay. Overhead, the stars twinkled down on him. Lights and fires from campsites around the lake glittered through the trees, and the moon was full and bright enough to light his path. He didn’t need to resort to the tiny but powerful flashlight he carried in his pocket.

He made his way along the wooded trail contemplating why the spooks were snooping through Leonie’s belongings, while he automatically noted every sound and movement along the path as he’d been trained to do. Though he’d left the agency five years ago, some of the old habits remained strong.

He wondered if Leonie knew he had once worked in a job similar to Zara’s. More to the point, would it make a difference if she did?

Even though Leonie firmly refused to discuss the future and seemed unlikely to ever tell him on her own that she wasn’t Zara, he thought he finally had a line on what was going on in that enchanting brain of hers. She thought he was some sort of summer fling. It would have angered him if he hadn’t realized she thought he was conducting the fling with Zara. The problem was that he had no idea how to tell her this fling had a long way to go without resorting to telling her he knew she wasn’t Zara.

He still wanted her to be the one to confess the truth first, even though he realized her loyalty to Zara would likely prevent that.

It was ridiculous. Why it was so important to him, he had no idea. When it came down to it, what difference did it make whether she thought he was making love to her or to her sister, so long as he was making love to her?

But it did matter on some deeper level Adam shied away from exploring. He accepted that it mattered and went back to his immediate problem, that of convincing her to trust him enough to let him into her life.

He stepped out of the woods and into the landscaped clearing that marked his brother’s cabin, only to discover all the lights blazing. He had left only one light glowing in the big family room.

All his senses went on alert. Adam remained in the shadow of the trees and stared toward the cabin. Then he caught the gleam of reflected lights off the polished finish of a silver SUV parked in the spot where he usually parked his old Jeep and relaxed. Seconds later, a man came out on the cabin-length deck and looked toward the darkness of the woods.

“Adam? Are you out there?” It was his brother, Jeremy.

Adam started forward, surprised. “I wasn’t expecting you. What brings you here in the middle of a merger?”

Jeremy’s computer engineering corporation had just bought a languishing computer showroom in Little Rock. He and his board of directors had been spending twelve and sixteen hour days thrashing out the details of the buyout. According to a newspaper article Adam had read the day before, the thrashing out process was nowhere near completed.

“Mom, of course.” Jeremy strolled forward as if unaware he’d just dropped a bombshell on Adam’s head. “I came to warn you. She’s on her way. Scent of a woman, or some such thing.”

“
What?
”

Adam applied a few choice epithets to himself. He should have known he was in for trouble. His mother had called that morning and left a voicemail to check on how his vacation was progressing, and he had yet to return the call.

He hopped up the wooden steps and joined his brother on the wooden deck.

“She seems to think,” Jeremy said, wrapping one arm around his brother's shoulders, “that you’ve finally met the woman you’re going to marry. Care to tell me what this is all about?”

“Sounds like you know more than I do,” Adam said, returning the hug with one of his own. “Are you telling me you left your negotiations to check out my marital intentions?”

“Maureen needed a break, and frankly, so did I. So we decided to pack it in and head for the lake when Mom called. The negotiations are temporarily stalled, but if your love life has finally gotten into high gear . . . ”

“Forget it.” Adam thought of graceful ways to skip off to Hot Springs and rent himself a hotel room. “No such luck.”

“No woman? Not even the scent of one?” Jeremy sounded amused.

Adam studied his older brother’s face in the half-light cast by the inside lamps and reminded himself that Jeremy had already been through this. Perhaps he had some advice to offer.

He drew in a deep breath of the pine-scented summer night air and let the loud singing of frogs and crickets soothe the unaccustomed nerves that assaulted him suddenly.

“The scent of a woman is about all there is at the moment,” Adam revealed. “How Mom got wind of her, I don’t want to know because I swear I didn’t say anything.”

“That’s why they call it feminine intuition.” Jeremy kept his arm across his brother’s shoulders. “She’s agonized over you ever since Deborah Mills dumped you for that lawyer ten years back. Thought it drove you into taking all those foreign assignments and kept you from finding yourself a promising young wife, now that you’re home for good.”

Adam stood at the deck rail and stared blindly toward the woods. Ten years ago, he’d thought his heart was broken and that all women were as mercenary and as false as Deborah Mills. He had accepted the job with the agency because it promised travel, and at that moment, he wanted badly to get out of the United States.

Somewhere along the way, he’d regained his faith and enjoyment in life.

Since meeting Leonie, he realized he had also regained his faith in women. Even if Leonie never told him the truth about her identity, he still intended to marry her.

The thought was so surprising, Adam couldn’t help grinning. “Mom is either seriously psychic, or she doesn’t have enough going on in her life since you and I left the fold.”

“Mom never has so much going on in her life that she can’t worry over us,” Jeremy said dryly. “Seriously, Adam, I thought you were out here writing the proposal that’ll put your firm in the black for years to come. Are you sure you’ve got time to court a woman?”

Adam started to say he wasn’t courting a woman, but had to shut his mouth on the words. Chances were that was exactly what he was doing.

“I finished drafting my proposal yesterday,” he said at last. “And I need a vacation. That’s why I’m here. But if you and Maureen want the cabin to yourselves—”

“Don’t be stupid,” Jeremy interrupted then laughed. “And don’t use us as an excuse to hide out in some hotel in Hot Springs. I’d be forced to tell Mom the name of the hotel.”