Kitabı oku: «Invincible»

Praise for the novels of
JOAN JOHNSTON

“Johnston warms your heart and tickles your fancy.”

—New York Daily News

“Joan Johnston [creates] unforgettable subplots and characters who make every fine thread weave into a touching tapestry.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“[Johnston is] a top-notch craftsman.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Romance devotees will find Johnston lively and well-written, and her characters perfectly enchanting.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Ms. Johnston writes of intense emotions and tender passions that seem so real that readers will feel each one of them.”

—Rave Reviews

“Johnston’s characters struggle against seriously deranged foes and face seemingly insurmountable obstacles to true love.”

—Booklist

“A guaranteed good read.”

—New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Heather Graham

JOAN JOHNSTON

New York Times bestselling author of

The Hawk’s Way series,

The Benedict Brothers series,

which includes

OUTCAST

INVINCIBLE

and the Bitter Creek series,

which includes

THE COWBOY

THE TEXAN

THE LONER

THE PRICE

THE RIVALS

THE NEXT MRS. BLACKTHORNE

A STRANGER’S GAME

SHATTERED

Please visit her website at

www.joanjohnston.com

for a complete listing

of her titles and series.

JOAN JOHNSTON
INVINCIBLE

For Donna Hayes, Loriana Sacilotto,

Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Valerie Gray and Linda McFall.

A writer couldn’t ask for a better support team.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Epilogue

Letter to Reader

Acknowledgments

Prologue

How hard could it be to find spouses for her five grown children before she died? Bella supposed it depended on how long it took for her failing heart to give out. No one had ever accused the five Benedict children of being easy to handle. All of them over twenty-five, and not one of them ever engaged, let alone married.

That might have something to do with the lives they led as members of British royalty. Bella was actually Isabella Wharton Benedict, Duchess of Blackthorne. She certainly had her work cut out for her finding mates for four British-American lords and a lady. Bella corrected herself. Make that four gentlemen rogues and a spoiled rotten lady.

Could she do it? Did she dare try?

Bella stared out the window from her hospital bed at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, wondering where to start. She ran a brush through her shoulder-length black hair, which was threaded with more silver every day. She might be in the autumn of her life, but here in Virginia it was spring, when love blossomed.

Cardinals flirted in the flowering dogwood trees. Blue-and-black-and-yellow butterflies cavorted in the daffodils. Squirrels chattered at each other and played tag, tails flying. With any luck, her titled offspring would find themselves equally vulnerable to romance during this fertile season.

She threw the engraved silver brush onto the bedside table and turned her attention back to the doctor standing at the foot of her hospital bed. “What’s the verdict?”

“You’re still at about thirty percent heart function.”

That was actually good news. At least she hadn’t lost function since her last checkup. She could live—for a while, maybe years—with that little heart function. But the point was, her heart was dying, and she was dying along with it.

That’s what she got for insisting she could ski down an icy slope in the Alps. She’d survived the blunt force trauma to her heart when she’d lost control and gone over a cliff. But the injury had caused scarring that had resulted in reduced heart function and continuing heart failure.

“How long do I have?” she asked.

“The new meds I gave you should keep you up and running for a while.”

“Running?” Bella said with a quirk of her lips.

“Figuratively,” the doctor qualified. “You should certainly be exercising regularly to keep what’s left of your heart muscle healthy. And take your meds!”

Bella eyed the numerous bottles of pills she needed to keep her heart functioning. She hated depending on all those pills, but they allowed her an almost-normal life. ACE inhibitors. Beta blockers. Aldosterone antagonist drugs. She couldn’t begin to name the individual prescriptions. The problem was, at some point—in the not too distant future—her heart was still going to fail.

“How long do I have?” Bella asked again.

“Can’t say,” the doctor replied.

“Guess.”

The doctor shrugged. “A year for sure. Maybe two. Three if you take care of yourself—and you’re lucky. Or you could have a heart attack tomorrow. We just can’t predict these things.”

Bella shivered. That wasn’t much of a future.

“I do have some good news,” the doctor said.

“I’ll take what I can get.”

“We’ve been making enormous strides in stem cell therapy. Stay alive long enough and we may be able to rejuvenate that heart of yours with your own stem cells.”

“How long is long enough?” Bella asked.

The doctor focused on the medical chart in his hands. “Can’t say.”

“And if my heart continues to fail?”

“Heart transplant is a possibility down the line. Unfortunately, it won’t be easy finding a heart for you, Bella. B-negative donors aren’t thick on the ground.”

Bella smiled. Her doctor was young, a prodigy whose bedside manner left a lot to be desired. She appreciated his honesty. Knowing how much—or rather, how little—time she had left allowed her to plan how to use it wisely.

But a year? Two years? Three, if she was lucky? She had even less time than she’d hoped to get her children wed. With so little time, some of those marriages might have to be arranged without her offspring’s cooperation. It had to be marriage, she’d decided. Nothing less would do. Her marriage to Bull Benedict had been her salvation.

It had started badly, with blackmail on her side. Her aunt had threatened twenty-nine-year-old billionaire financier Jonathan “Bull” Benedict with charges of statutory rape if he didn’t marry destitute seventeen-year-old Isabella Wharton, Duchess of Blackthorne. Bull had sworn he’d hate her forever if she forced him into marriage.

She’d bit her lip and gone along with her aunt’s wishes in order to save her hereditary home, Blackthorne Abbey. And to give her unborn child a name. It was only later that Bull questioned whether he was the father of their first child. Only later that he learned Oliver was some other man’s son.

Because they were bound by law, they’d been forced to deal with one another’s lies. Because they were husband and wife, they’d scratched their bloody way through the tangled thorns of deceit to a love that healed all wounds.

Bella wanted her children bound to someone they could love by vows made before God. She was certain the moral commitment created by the spoken words, words pledging love and faith to one another, would give the young lovers the perseverance necessary to work through any differences that threatened their happiness.

She didn’t want her children wandering the world alone after she was gone, believing that love was a false thing. That love couldn’t be trusted. That was the lesson she feared they’d learned from the wickedness—the malicious trickery—that had finally torn her marriage apart.

“Of course, Bella, if you do end up with a new heart—or a rejuvenated one—you’ll be good to go for another fifty years,” the doctor said, interrupting her thoughts.

“Thanks a lot,” Bella said with a wry laugh. She was fifty-two. Reaching a hundred and two sounded pretty ambitious. And lonely, unless she could find a way to win her husband’s forgiveness. Bella felt hopeless about any sort of reconciliation with Bull. Especially when she considered how little she could tell him—certainly not the truth—about the event that had caused their bitter separation ten years ago, after twenty-five years of marriage.

They were still legally wed, but it was a marriage in name only. They lived separate lives. Every day for the past ten years, she’d feared Bull would come to her and ask for a divorce. It had never happened. She wondered if he was clinging to a fragile thread of hope, as she was, that someday they would find their way back to each other. Or whether he simply wanted to preserve his fortune. A fortune which, thanks to an ironclad prenuptial agreement, would only have to be shared with her if they stayed married for twenty-five years. They’d reached that mark a month before their separation.

Bella sighed inwardly. The chances of “love conquering all” seemed slim, considering how little time she had left. She needed to focus on her children’s happiness. When the end came would be soon enough to make peace with Bull.

“When can I get out of here?” she asked.

“Today, if you promise to follow my orders,” the doctor replied. “Make sure you exercise, Bella. Take your meds. And avoid stress. Otherwise…” He drew a finger across his neck, hung his head sideways and made a dying sound.

Bella grimaced at his antics. Maybe she could get Oliver, Riley, Payne, Max and Lydia to come to her, instead of having to go to the four corners of the earth to find them. Without revealing her precarious health, of course. Mother’s Day was coming up. That would make a good excuse to summon them to The Seasons, the Benedict family estate near Richmond, a former tobacco plantation her estranged husband’s family had owned since colonial days.

The doctor turned to Bella’s personal assistant, a quiet, intelligent, almost homely girl Bella had hired three years ago when she first began taking medication for her ailing heart, and ordered, “I don’t want her out partying till the wee hours, Emily. Bella needs rest if she’s going to stay alive until we can repair her heart—or find her a new one.”

“Of course, Doctor,” Emily replied. “I’ll take good care of Her Grace.”

Twenty-eight-year-old Emily Sheldon was nothing if not dutiful, Bella thought. The young Englishwoman refused to address Bella by name, instead referring to her in clipped British tones as “Your Grace,” an honor to which Bella was entitled by virtue of her aristocratic rank.

The refined, straitlaced young woman, who’d become as dear to her as another daughter, would follow the doctor’s orders to the letter. If Bella didn’t want to find herself being hounded by her assistant, she was going to have to involve Emily in her matchmaking plans.

When the doctor was gone, Emily began fussing with the sheets, pulling them up around Bella’s pale blue silk robe and smoothing them down. “I urge you to consider the consequences if you disobey the doctor’s orders, Your Grace. I’ll do my best to help you—”

Bella put a hand on her assistant’s delicate wrist and said, “Please sit down, Emily. I have something to discuss that’s going to require your entire attention—our entire attention—for the foreseeable future.”

1

“Hello, Princess.”

Kristin Lassiter’s heart skipped a beat. Without warning, she found herself facing a man she’d prayed never to see again. “Max?” Her voice broke because her throat had suddenly swollen closed. “What are you doing here?”

“Close the door, Agent Lassiter,” Max said.

Kristin had been ordered to report to the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Miami Field Office. She was just going back on duty in the field with a new partner, following the disastrous shooting incident she’d been involved in four months ago. So she wasn’t surprised her boss wanted to see her. But Rudy wasn’t in his office. This man was. With man being the operative word.

The last time she’d seen Max Benedict, he’d been a boy of eighteen. She’d been sixteen. They’d been best friends for three years. And lovers for one night. They hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since.

The troubled boy she’d known had been lithe and fit and tanned. This tall, broad-shouldered man looked powerful. And dangerous.

Kristin felt a spurt of alarm that bordered on panic. Why was he here? Had he come to find out why she’d run from him all those years ago?

“Why are you here, Max?”

“I have a proposition for you.”

Before she could open her mouth to protest he said, “A business proposition.”

So, he wasn’t here for personal reasons. She slowly exhaled, careful not to sigh audibly with relief. He was acting like they were old friends. But they hadn’t been friends for a very long time. She’d been vulnerable to him once. Had adored him with all the luminous passion one devoted to a first love. Seeing him in the flesh, seeing the promise of the boy revealed in the virile man standing before her, stirred all those unwanted feelings to life.

Max couldn’t possibly believe she’d want anything to do with him now. Ten years had gone by since he’d used and discarded her. He must know her bitter feelings toward him hadn’t changed. Nor would they ever. So what was this boy from her past—turned dangerous man—doing here?

“Close the door, Agent Lassiter,” Max repeated.

This time, it wasn’t a request, it was a command, spoken in Max’s brisk British accent. She knew he could as easily have issued the order in French or Spanish or Italian or Russian, or even Portuguese, a result of his attendance at a series of elite British, American and European boarding schools. He’d honed his talent by conversing with the many foreign players on the junior tennis tour, where she’d first met Max all those years ago.

But the Max she’d known was long gone. The man standing before her was a stranger. His once Caribbean-warm blue eyes looked cold and remote. The playful dimple in his right cheek was gone, replaced by a nose and cheekbones and chin that looked carved from granite. There was no sign of the soft lips she’d kissed. His mouth was pressed into a flat, unrelenting line.

When she’d known Max in the past, he’d been dressed most often in tennis shorts and a sleeveless cutoff T-shirt that revealed an impressive set of biceps and six-pack abs. She felt certain the powerful, corded muscles were still there. But they were concealed by a perfectly tailored wool-and-silk suit that likely equaled the cost of a first-class ticket to London and a white Egyptian cotton shirt and Armani tie that probably matched her monthly food budget.

The fact Max had called her Agent Lassiter suggested he was here on official business. But his tailored suit was at odds with the rest of his appearance. A dark, two-day-old beard made his rugged features look disreputable. And the straight black hair he’d kept short on the tennis court had grown long enough that a shaggy lock of black hair had slipped onto his brow.

He looked like one of the bad guys.

But Kristin knew that Max Benedict, youngest son of the infamous billionaire banker Jonathan “Bull” Benedict and his estranged wife, Bella, the Duchess of Blackthorne, was nothing more than a wealthy, care-for-nothing playboy. His expensive clothing—and the fact he badly needed a haircut and a shave—convinced her of that.

Instead of closing the door as he’d ordered, she said, “Where’s Rudy?”

Max shoved papers out of the way and perched on the edge of Rudy’s cluttered mahogany desk before replying, “Your boss knows why I’m here. He let me use his office for this meeting.”

Kristin snorted. It was an inelegant, rude sound, revealing just how ridiculous she thought his statement was.

He made a disgusted sound in his throat, rose and crossed past her to shut the door. She’d expected him to slam it, but the quiet click told her even more certainly that she was now caged with a feral predator. She felt the urge to flee, but resisted it.

She turned to face him, stuck her balled fists on her hips and said, “What’s going on, Max?”

Irritation rolled off him in waves. She realized that he wasn’t any happier to be in the same room with her than she’d been to find him in her boss’s office.

He leaned back against the door, his arms crossed over his chest. It appeared her way out was blocked. But she’d been trained in self-defense. And she had a Glock 27 concealed beneath her suit jacket.

“I told them this wouldn’t work,” he muttered.

“Since I don’t know who you’re talking about, or why you’re here, I can’t respond to that,” she retorted.

“Foster Benedict sent me,” he said.

Kristin’s brows rose in surprise. “Isn’t Foster your uncle?”

Max nodded curtly.

“Your uncle sent you here?” she asked incredulously.

“My uncle, the advisor to the president on matters of terrorism, sent me here,” he clarified.

Kristin took three steps and dropped into one of the two brass-studded saddle-brown leather chairs in front of Rudy’s desk. “I really have fallen down the rabbit hole,” she murmured, shaking her head.

Max strode across the room to stare out the window. The FBI’s concrete-and-glass Miami Field Office was nowhere near the palm trees, white-sand beaches and marine-blue waters of Miami Beach. Instead, the view from Rudy’s fourth-floor window in North Miami Beach revealed a network of superhighways leading into, out of and around Miami.

Max turned back to her and asked, “How much tennis are you playing these days?”

The question, coming out of the blue, surprised her into replying, “I usually play on weekends with the kids who attend my dad’s tennis academy.”

“You look fit enough.” Max crossed and perched once again on the corner of the desk in front of her. He proceeded with a perusal of her body that left her feeling flushed. And indignant.

“Would you like me to undress so you can take a better look?”

He met her gaze, then slowly, seductively, looked her up and down again. “Since I’ve already seen what’s underneath that cheap blue suit, my imagination can fill in the blanks.”

She shoved herself out of the chair and stalked over to look out the window herself. Having just noted all the improvements in his physique over the years, it was humiliating to be told he still saw the underdeveloped body of a sixteen-year-old girl. It was true her bosom had never been anything to shout about. But he’d seemed more than pleased with her small breasts during the one night they’d spent together.

At sixteen, she’d been a world-class athlete. Her body had been toned and firm. It still was. The flyaway blond curls she’d worn in a ponytail on the tennis court were captured ruthlessly in a bun at her nape, although stray curls always seemed to escape. She reached up self-consciously to tuck one behind her ear.

Max seemed to have grown an inch or two taller, to perhaps 6'3", but she was the same 5'9" she’d been at sixteen. She wore no more makeup now to flatter her blue eyes or conceal her freckled complexion than she had then. And her bosom had stayed as small and trim as the rest of her.

“You look even more beautiful now than you did ten years ago, Princess,” he said softly.

Kristin realized he was standing right behind her, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath on her neck. She hated the fact that his compliment pleased her so much. At the same time, she wondered how he’d managed to cross the room without her hearing a sound.

He blew softly on a stray curl that lay against her throat.

She felt a frisson of desire run down her spine and jerked herself away from him. “Stop that!”

She saw the knowing smile on his face and felt her flush deepen. She deflected his attempt at seduction by saying, “Who is it you’re here to see, Max? Some once-upon-a-time princess? Or Agent Lassiter? Make up your mind.”

“Right,” he said. “Down to business.” He met her gaze and said, “I have a job for you.”

“I already have a job,” she snapped.

“Your boss has agreed to give you leave to perform a special mission.”

“A special mission?” she parroted back, adding a scalding dose of sarcasm.

“There’s been an assassination threat against President Taylor.”

That sounded real. That sounded ominous. Andrea Taylor wasn’t a particularly popular president because of actions she’d taken to end the ongoing war in the Middle East. “How could you possibly know something like that?”

“Interpol intercepted email traffic—source never identified—that suggested someone is planning to take advantage of the president’s seating proximity to the tennis courts to kill her during the U.S. Open tennis event over the Labor Day weekend in New York. The president is a huge fan of the game and always attends the tournament at Flushing Meadows.”

“Interpol? So how did you get this information? Don’t the Secret Service and Homeland Security have primary responsibility for protecting—”

“Interpol sent its information to the Central Intelligence Agency,” he interrupted. “Tennis is an international sport, with players and coaches from a lot of nations with grudges against the United States, and presumably someone who might want to kill the president. The CIA decided the threat deserved investigation, so they contacted me. I work for them on occasion.”

Kristin felt like laughing, but there was nothing amusing about Max’s stony expression. “On occasion? So you’re what? A private investigator or something?”

“A covert operative,” he said.

“A spy?” she asked incredulously.

He nodded curtly.

Then she did laugh. “That’s crazy, Max. I don’t believe you. Show me some credentials.”

“I work undercover. I don’t carry credentials. Or a gun,” he added, anticipating her next question.

“Why would the CIA hire you? I mean, you’re just a rich playboy.”

He raised a sardonic brow. “Who better to hobnob with wealthy drug czars playing polo in Argentina or attending the Carnival in Rio. Or munitions dealers gambling in Monte Carlo, or Arab terrorists playing tennis in Dubai?

“I have infamous parents. Outrageous siblings. I’m a peer of the realm, Lord Maxwell, youngest son of the Duchess of Blackthorne and her cruel—or is it crazy?—billionaire husband. Who would ever suspect me of spying? Which is why I’m so good at what I do.”

His explanation made surprising sense. She asked the next obvious question. “Why me?”

“Short answer? You’re a world-class tennis player who also happens to be a trained FBI agent.”

“I still don’t get it,” Kristin said.

“Foster drew the logical inference that if an attack was going to be made at a tennis locale in the States, the attacker might have some connection to tennis. He—or she—might be a coach, a player or someone working for a player or in a player’s family. He figured we might intercept the assassin if we send someone undercover to another tennis venue in advance of the U.S. Open. After some discussion, Wimbledon was selected over the French Open.”

That also made sense, Kristin conceded. The French Open was at the end of the month, which didn’t leave much time for planning.

“The CIA figured since I have a tennis background, and I live in London, I’m the logical person to infiltrate the professional tennis locker rooms at Wimbledon and listen for what I might hear about an assassination attempt on the president.”

Kristin made a face. “I haven’t played professional tennis for the past ten years.”

“Neither have I,” Max replied. “Which is why the CIA arranged with Scotland Yard—and the cooperation of the All England Lawn Tennis Club—for an exhibition mixed doubles match to be played prior to opening day at Wimbledon. Since Foster knew you and I were friends when we played junior tennis, he suggested you as my doubles partner.”

“I didn’t know your uncle knew we were friends.”

Max didn’t reply to her non sequitur. He rubbed a hand across his nape and said, “I told him this was a bad idea.”

“Because I haven’t played tennis for ten years?”

“That. And because of what happened between us.”

There it was. The elephant in the room. Kristin said nothing, because she had no idea what to say.

He eyed her and said into the silence, “I knew it would be hard—maybe impossible—for us to work together. But I couldn’t very well explain why to my CIA boss or my uncle. Especially since I’m not quite sure myself what happened.”

He’d contacted her in every way he could after their one night of love. One night of sex, she amended. But she’d refused to communicate with him. It was all water under the bridge. There was no going back. So why speak of it now? Especially since he was right. It would be impossible for them to work together. So why put them both through the agony of trying?

“I presume you’re hoping I’ll get you off the hook by refusing your offer,” she said at last.

He nodded. “I was pretty sure you’d refuse. But I was obliged to bring you the offer.”

“Who will you get if I say no?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll find someone.”

Kristin had a pretty good idea who that someone might be. A woman she disliked intensely. But she didn’t say the name, because she didn’t want to discuss what had happened ten years ago. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

“Well? What’s your answer, Princess?” Max said. “Want to play spy with me?”

Trust Max to make a joke of the whole thing. She wasn’t laughing. She met his gaze and said, “You’re off the hook, Max. My answer to your generous offer is no.”

“But—”

“Not just no,” she amended. “But hell no.”

2

Kristin was feeling frantic. Was her daughter a passenger on the flight from Switzerland that had landed at Miami International Airport an hour ago? Or had Felicity found some way to elude her chaperon before the plane took off? Would she be seeing Flick in a few minutes, when she cleared customs? Or had her precocious child managed to run away again?

Kristin paced impatiently at the waiting area for friends and family of arriving American Airlines passengers clearing customs. With any luck, her nine-year-old daughter had gotten on AA Flight 87 from London, which had connected with AA Flight 6485 from Zurich, Switzerland, where Flick had been enrolled in boarding school. The headmistress hadn’t wanted to wait until Kristin could come get her daughter. She’d insisted on putting Flick on the first available flight back to the States with a chaperon from the school.

Apparently, Flick had gotten into a fight with another girl. The headmistress’s decision had been final: Flick was no longer welcome at the school.

It was one more disaster to add to a growing list. How different—how much worse—her life was just seven days after she’d refused Max’s offer!

Over the past week since she’d met with Max Benedict, Kristin had lost weight from her already slender frame, so her cheeks looked gaunt. She had dark circles under her eyes from too many sleepless nights. A glimpse of herself reflected in the glass windows leading outside showed a heart-shaped face that looked haunted.

I should have gone to London, she thought. But making that choice wouldn’t have erased all the problems facing her now. She had to believe she’d made the right choice refusing Max, although his visit had left her feeling slightly anxious and surprisingly sad.

Several of those waiting for family to clear customs watched her warily, despite the fact she didn’t fit any sort of terrorist profile. As usual, her naturally curly blond hair was pinned up tight, although bothersome wisps had escaped. She wore a professional-looking collared white cotton blouse, crisp with extra starch from the dry cleaner, along with navy blue trousers. The matching navy blue jacket hid the Glock 27 she wore in a belt holster and had an inside pocket where she kept her FBI badge.

Although it was questionable whether either gun or badge would still be in her possession after her meeting with the FBI’s Shooting Incident Review Team (SIRT), an FBI version of Internal Affairs, later this afternoon.

Kristin’s glance darted from one individual to the next, automatically surveilling the waiting area. She focused intently on a suspicious-looking man who fit a profile the government wasn’t supposed to be using. His thick black eyebrows rose in alarm before he reached for a giggling two-year-old with black-button eyes and lifted her into his lap, holding her close to protect her from the crazy-looking lady.

So, probably not a terrorist, Kristin thought. Although he likely thinks you might be one. Get a grip. Be cool.

The last thing she wanted was for someone to point her out to airport authorities as a possible threat. That would be all she’d need to make her day perfect.

Why did Felicity have to pick now to get herself kicked out of that Swiss boarding school? Her daughter had refused to tell the headmistress what had provoked the fight. But there was no question of Flick staying after she’d blackened the left eye and broken the left front tooth of the Spanish ambassador’s daughter.

Kristin had faced not one, not two, but three serious traumas over the past week and managed to stay calm and collected. But Flick’s misbehavior, which had resulted in her ejection from school, had just handed Kristin the straw that might break the proverbial camel’s back.

On such short notice, she hadn’t been able to find a nanny or housekeeper she liked to take care of Felicity after school and on weekends while she was on the job. She was going to have to take time off work until she could get the help she needed. Which she didn’t want to do.

She didn’t want the Miami SAC to think she wasn’t able to handle the fallout from the shooting four days ago, which had come too closely on the heels of the shooting four months ago. And been equally disastrous.

You’re invincible, Kristin. Nothing can beat you.

How many times had her father spoken those words to her and her sister on the tennis court growing up? A hundred thousand maybe. She’d never quite believed him. Especially after her older sister, Stephanie, had died in a tragic auto accident at seventeen, leaving Kristin, four years younger, to bear the burden of her sister’s promise as a rising tennis star.

Their mother had long since left their father, because he ate, slept and lived tennis. Kristin had no choice but to try to please her father on the tennis court or be left out of his life altogether.

She hadn’t been as tall as Stephanie. Or as strong. And she didn’t have her sister’s fluid grace. Facts which caused her father endless frustration when he coached her. He was often disappointed in her performance and demanded that she practice to the point of exhaustion.

Which reminded her of the first time she’d met Max.

She’d been thirteen and had qualified to play at Wimbledon in the Girls’ Singles competition. She’d already won her first match, but her father wasn’t happy with her ground strokes. She had a day off between matches, so he’d insisted she spend time after her match practicing with a male hitting partner.

Her exercise clothes were sweat-soaked, despite the cool evening air. Her curly blond hair was bedraggled. She could barely swing her right arm to hit the ball. But until her father was satisfied, she couldn’t leave the court.

“Do it again, Kristin,” he ordered from the sideline. “This time, push through the ball with your whole body.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” she retorted as she slammed a ball down the line.

“That’s out!” he shouted. “By an inch. Keep the ball in the court, Kristin.”

She’d checked her grip and hit three more balls as hard as she could down the line. Every one landed just past the baseline.

“Damn it, Kristin. What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m tired, Daddy.”

“You stay here and work until you can get the ball in the court.” He stomped off and left her there.

Her hitting partner shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why don’t we call it quits?”

“You heard him,” she said. “I need to practice.”

“I didn’t plan to be here all night. You’ll have to find someone else to hit with you,” he said as he stuffed his racquet back into his bag.

Kristin stared at the teenage boy in disbelief. “My father is paying you—”

“Not enough,” the kid said. “See you tomorrow morning.”

Kristin stood on the court, her shoulders slumped, knowing she couldn’t head back to the locker room for at least another hour without getting grounded. That was her father’s favorite punishment, and it worked because she hated being confined indoors in some motel or hotel while on the road.

She heard someone behind her say, “Hey, kid. I’ll hit with you.”

She turned around and saw an older boy, with the most beautiful blue eyes she’d ever seen, standing on the opposite side of the court. It took her a moment to recognize him. “I know you. You’re—”

“In need of some hitting practice,” he said with a grin. He retrieved a racquet from his bag and dropped the bag on the sideline. “I was practicing my serve on the next court over. I couldn’t help overhearing your coach. Sounded like he was a little tough on you.”

“My dad just wants me to be the best I can be,” she said. “Aren’t you—”

A tennis ball was coming at her fast and with a lot of spin. She interrupted herself to hit it back. When the ball was on his side of the court she finished “—Max Benedict?”

“That’s me,” he said, whipping the ball back at her. “What’s your name?”

She could hardly believe she was hitting with one of the top five male players on the junior tour. A fifteen-year-old! She took a small backswing and slammed the ball back at him. Max Benedict was also a hunk.

“My name’s Kristin Lassiter,” she blurted. She felt a blush starting at her throat at just the thought of a boy as good-looking as Max being romantically interested in her. Which she knew was ridiculous. He dated older women. As opposed to barely teenage girls, like her.

“You’ve got great strokes, K,” he said as he tried to lob her.

She backed up to get the ball that had been hit high into the air and slammed it back down at him. “My name’s Kristin, not Kay,” she corrected.

“The letter K’s easier to say,” he replied as he ran for her overhead and snapped it back down at her.

Kristin struggled to get out of the way, so she could return the ball, but she was tired and her feet wouldn’t move. “Ah!” she cried as she swung and missed.

“Finally!” he said as he trotted to the net. “I was beginning to think you’d never miss.”

She crossed to the net, shoving flyaway curls off her face. “I miss plenty. Just ask my father.”

“You’re great, kid. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“Why would I lie?”

She eyed him askance. “I don’t know. Why are you playing with me? I mean, you’re really a great player. And you’re two years older than me.” She flushed at having revealed that she knew his age.

“You remind me of my younger sister, Lydia,” he said, tucking a curl behind her ear. “She’s thirteen, too. I couldn’t imagine Lydia putting up with a tenth of what your dad put you through tonight. I’ve had my own problems with well-intentioned parents. I guess I wanted to help.”

Kristin rose to her father’s defense. “He just wants me to win.”

“There are more important things than winning,” Max said.

“Name one thing,” she challenged.

“Having fun. Enjoying the game,” he replied.

“It wouldn’t be much fun if I didn’t win,” she pointed out.

“Wouldn’t it?”

She made a face. “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it much. I’ve been too focused on winning.”

“Next time you play, think about having a good time. And winning,” he said with a grin. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine. Gotta go.” He winked at her and waved a hand at someone behind her.

When she turned to look, she saw a female player—someone on the women’s tour, rather than the junior tour—waiting for him on the sideline. He dumped his racquet in his bag, stalked over to the woman and kissed her on the lips.

He never looked back.

That was all it had taken for Max Benedict to capture her heart. A few minutes hitting tennis balls together. A considerate word of encouragement. A stray curl tucked behind her ear. A wink as he walked off the court. She’d loved him from that moment on.

Kristin grunted with disgust, then realized she was standing in an airport waiting area full of people who might wonder what she found so disgusting. She grimaced and crossed to stare out the windows at the traffic crawling by. What a fool she’d been all those years ago. She’d been well aware her feelings of love weren’t mutual. To Max, she’d been a substitute for the little sister he apparently missed while traveling on the tour.

He’d often come to hit with her on the practice court during that summer at Wimbledon, at times when her father wasn’t around.

Max made her believe in herself. He made her believe she could have fun on the tennis court. He made her believe she could win.

She became invincible.

She won the Girls’ Singles Championship that summer at Wimbledon and the next two years, as well. She won at Roland Garros in Paris. And she was the Girls’ Singles U.S. Open Champion at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. She was the bright future of American tennis. The public was fascinated by the tall, honey-blonde phenom, a killer without mercy on the tennis court—who looked like an angel off of it.

Her tennis career ended abruptly at age sixteen, when she lost in the Wimbledon Girls’ Singles Championship match to the rival she’d beaten the previous two years. When she’d discovered, with frightening, daunting clarity, that she wasn’t so invincible after all.

Kristin heard a commotion and turned around.

“Mom?” Felicity burst into tears as she bolted out of the doorway from customs.

Kristin barely had time to take two steps and open her arms before her daughter threw herself into them. She could feel Flick trembling and felt her insides clench at the sound of her daughter’s wrenching sobs. She tightened her grip to offer comfort. Why was Flick so distraught? What was going on?

“Mrs. Lassiter?” the chaperon who’d accompanied Flick through customs inquired. The elderly woman was small and compact and wore a tailored wool suit that might have been comfortable in Switzerland but looked out of place in Miami.

“I’m Special Agent Lassiter,” Kristin said, to avoid having to explain that it was Ms. not Mrs., since she’d never been married.

“There was an incident on the plane—”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Flick protested. “I told them I didn’t want anything to eat, but they wouldn’t believe me.” Flick was tall for her age, and because her vocabulary was so grandiloquent—Flick’s own description of her extravagantly colorful speech—she was often mistaken for a child far older than she was.

Kristin could imagine the rest. “I’ll be glad to pay for any damages.”

“The flight attendant had some difficulty calming the woman sitting next to Felicity,” the chaperon said. “She wants her silk blouse replaced.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Kristin said.

The chaperon handed her a card. “Here’s her personal information. You might want to be gone when she exits customs,” she said with a sympathetic smile.

“Thanks. And thanks for bringing my daughter home.”

Kristin put her arm around Flick’s narrow shoulders, looked around and said, “Where’s your luggage, Flick?”

“She didn’t check any bags,” the chaperon said. “I have a flight home to catch, so I’ll leave you two to sort this out.”

Kristin frowned as she watched the chaperon hurry away, then turned to her daughter and said, “Why didn’t you bring anything with you?”

“The headmistress is packing everything up. She’s going to ship it to me,” Flick explained. “She said she didn’t trust me in the dormitory.”

Good lord! She’d wondered why Flick was still wearing her school uniform. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a spot of blood on the collar of Flick’s white blouse, above the red V-neck wool sweater she wore with a blue red-and-green-plaid wool pleated skirt. “All right. Let’s go home.”

Flick stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at Kristin, her blue eyes brimming with tears. “I don’t want to go home, Mom. I want to go see Gramps in the hospital.”

Kristin stared at her daughter in shock. “How did you know—? How could you possibly—? Who told you Gramps is in the hospital?”

“I’m not stupid, Mom. Gramps emailed me every day—until last Wednesday. Nothing Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday. I knew something was wrong. So I tried calling him. Which got me in trouble with Mrs. Fortin. But he didn’t call me back. So I knew something was wrong.

“Then I called you and asked why Gramps didn’t call me back and you said—”

“I said he wasn’t feeling well. But that doesn’t mean he’s in the hospital, Flick.”

“But he is, isn’t he?” her daughter challenged. “Because if he wasn’t, Gramps would have called me back, no matter how sick he was. What’s wrong with him, Mom? How bad is he hurt? Was he in a car accident, or what?”

Kristin felt trapped. She’d hoped to shield Flick from the truth for long enough to let her father regain more of his faculties. But that obviously wasn’t possible now. “He’s had a stroke, Flick.”

“A stroke? What’s that?”

“A blood vessel broke in his brain.”

“Is he dying?” Flick cried.

“No, but the stroke caused some of his brain not to work right. That’s why Gramps hasn’t called you back. The stroke affected his speech, so he can’t talk very well yet.”

“Yet?” Flick said, looking, as she always did, for the loophole that allowed her to escape anything she found unpleasant.

“With therapy, he should get much better. But, Flick…”

Kristin cupped her hands gently on either side of her daughter’s anxious face and said, “His right side is paralyzed. He can’t walk or write—”

“Or type,” Flick interjected, pulling free. “So he couldn’t email me back.”

“That’s right.”

“Then it’s a good thing I got myself kicked out of that ludicrous school,” Flick said, her eyes narrowed in fierce determination. “Gramps is going to need my help to get better.”

Ludicrous: Worthy of scorn as absurdly inept, false or foolish.

It was the first time Kristin had heard Flick use the word. It seemed her daughter’s vocabulary had grown in the four months since she’d seen her at Christmas. It wasn’t always an advantage having a child who was so smart. Like now, when her daughter had manipulated her world to arrive home, instead of being at school where she belonged.

Kristin put an arm around Flick and walked toward the airport garage where she’d left her car, listening attentively as her daughter talked a mile a minute about everything that had happened since she’d last seen her mother.

Kristin heard a word—superfluous—that she didn’t know and realized she was going to have to look it up when she got home. She’d spent more time practicing on the tennis courts as a child than she had studying. She’d been homeschooled and had done the least work she could to get a high school diploma.

It was only after Flick was born that she’d realized she was going to need a college degree. She’d gone to the University of Miami and received a B.A. in Communications, figuring she could use the public relations and promotional writing courses to help Harry promote his tennis academy. After 9/11 everything changed, and she decided to join the FBI.

Flick, on the other hand, had started reading at four. By the time she was seven, Kristin had resorted to parenting books to try and figure out how to manage her brilliant daughter. One night, she’d caught Flick reading her most recent parenting book under the covers. It was a toss-up who was learning to manage whom.

But despite her intelligence, Flick was still a child. Kristin had kept her daughter in the dark about her grandfather’s stroke early last week, the day after Max’s visit, in fact, in an attempt to shield Flick from the worst of it. She’d hoped her father would be well on the road to physical recovery before Flick saw him again.

Her father’s face—eye, cheek and mouth—sagged on the right side, giving him a frightening appearance, which worsened when he tried to speak. Her nine-year-old daughter might be intellectually ready to help her grandfather. But Kristin wondered how she would react when she saw him in his hospital bed.

“Please, Mom,” Flick pleaded. “Let’s go see Gramps.”

Kristin was torn. “Flick, I’m not sure—”

“Please, Mom!”

Kristin realized that if she didn’t take Flick to see her grandfather, her creative daughter would find some way to get to the hospital on her own. “He’s very sick, honey. I’m afraid seeing you will upset him.” And you.

“I won’t upset him, Mom,” the girl promised. “I just want to talk to him.”

Talk to him? He can’t talk! Kristin knew her daughter didn’t comprehend the seriousness of her grandfather’s illness. But there was no keeping the two of them apart.

Harry Lassiter had been a part of Flick’s life from the day she was born, a surrogate father. No wonder her daughter was so desperate to see him. And Flick’s appearance might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Kristin’s father, a man who’d kept himself in excellent physical condition his entire life, was infuriated by his helplessness after the unexpected stroke. Harry had resisted the idea of physical therapy that could only promise improvement, rather than perfect health. Maybe Flick’s presence would encourage him to try harder to get back on his feet, even if he needed help walking from now on.

Kristin studied her daughter’s eager face. The bright blue eyes, strong chin and straight black hair from her father. The high cheekbones and uptilted nose from her mother. When she set her mind to something, the nine-year-old was a force to be reckoned with.

Harry Lassiter was as helpless to deny this extraordinary child whatever she wanted as Kristin was herself.

Hopefully, her father would be swept up by the whirl wind that was her daughter. By the time he came down again, he’d be standing on his own two feet.

For the first time in a very long time, Kristin smiled. Maybe things were finally going to turn around. “Come on, Flick. Let’s go see Gramps.”