Читать книгу Capturing The Millionaire - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 6

Chapter One

It wasn’t supposed to rain in October. Not in Southern California, anyway.

Alain Dulac was pretty sure it was a law written down somewhere, like the requirements for Camelot. As he tried to steer his sports car, a vehicle definitely not meant for this kind of weather, he found that his visibility was next to zero. Because, as the old song from the sixties went, it never rained in California—but it poured.

And that’s what it was doing now. Pouring. Pouring as if the entire Pacific Ocean had gotten absorbed into the black clouds that were hovering overhead and were now dumping their contents all over him. He would have been alert to the possibility of a flash flood—if he could see more than an inch or so in front of him. He wasn’t even sure where he was anymore. For all he knew, he could have gotten turned around and was headed back to Santa Barbara.

By the clock, it was a little after 4:00 p.m. But to all appearances, it looked like the beginning of the Apocalypse. There was even the rumble of thunder, another unheard of event this time of year.

His windshield wipers were fighting the good fight, but it was obvious they were losing. A few seconds of visibility were all their efforts awarded him.

Alain swallowed a curse as the car hit a pocket of some sort and wobbled before continuing on its road to nowhere.

It would have been nice if the weatherman had hinted at this storm yesterday, or even early this morning, he thought darkly. He gripped the steering wheel harder, as if that could afford him better control over his car. If there had been the slightest indication that today was going to turn into something that would have made Noah shudder, Alain would have postponed going up to Santa Barbara to get that deposition until the beginning of next week.

Archie Wallace certainly looked healthy enough to hang around until Monday. At age eighty-four, the former valet—or gentleman’s gentleman, Alain believed the old term was—looked healthier than a good many men half his age. Alain could have waited to get the man’s testimony instead of risking life, limb and BMW the way he was right now.

That’s what he got for going into family law instead of criminal law. Not that, he’d discovered, there weren’t a host of criminal activities going on behind the so-called innocent smiles of the people who came into his firm’s office.

For the first time since he’d left Archie’s quaint cottagelike home, a hint of a smile curved Alain’s lips. Nothing wrong with camera time, he thought. As he turned the notion over in his head, he found that he liked the idea of getting his own spotlight instead of being in one by proxy. Heretofore his main claim to fame was being the youngest of Lily Moreau’s sons. His mother, God bless her, was as famous for her lifestyle as she was for her exotically colorful paintings. At times her lifestyle overshadowed her work.

Alain had no doubt that the reporters who’d come to cover her last show were as interested in the dark, handsome, quarter-of-a-century-younger man at her side as they were in the latest paintings that were on display. Kyle Autumn was Alain’s mother’s protégé and, to hear her talk about him, the love of her life.

At least for this month.

The fact that Alain and his two older brothers each had a different father bore testimony to the fact that Lily loved her men with a passion. But that passion was anything but steadfast.

She was a better mother than she was spouse, and, luckily for the art world, a better artist than she was either of the two.

Alain had no real complaints on that score, though. Long ago he’d realized that Lily was as good a mother as she could be, and he and Georges had always had Philippe. As the oldest, Philippe was more like a father than a brother, and it was from him that Alain had gotten most of his values.

In a way, he supposed that Philippe was responsible for his having gone into family law. Philippe had always maintained that family was everything.

Too bad the Hallidays didn’t feel that way. The latest case he was handling was already on its way to becoming this year’s family drama. All sorts of accusations were being hurtled back and forth with wild abandon. And the tabloids were having a field day.

To be honest, it wasn’t the sort of case Dunstan, Jewison and McGuire ordinarily handled. The venerable hundred-and-two-year-old firm took pride in conducting all matters with decorum and class. This case, however, had all the class of a cable reality program.

But there was an obscenely huge amount of money involved. The firm’s share for winning the case for the bereaved and voluptuous widow was something only a saint would have been able to turn away from. The company had had little to keep it going but its reputation these last few years. Which was why Alain had been brought in. He was the youngest at the firm. The next in line was Morris Greenwood, and he was fifty-two. Clearly an infusion of young blood—and money—was needed.

Alain had been the one to bring the Halliday case to the older partners’ attention. When they won the case—when, not if—it would also lure a great deal of business their way. Nothing wrong with that.

Like his mother, Alain was a wheeler-dealer when he had to be. He felt fairly confident that winning wouldn’t present a problem. Ethan Halliday had become so smitten with his young bride that two months into the marriage, he’d had the prenup agreement torn up, and rewritten his will. The young and nubile lingerie model was to inherit more than ninety-eight percent of Halliday’s considerable fortune. The will literally snatched away what the four Halliday children considered their birthright. Two men and two women, all older than their father’s widow, found themselves in agreement for the first time in years, and had banded together against a common enemy: their wicked stepmother.

It had all the makings of a low-grade movie of the week. Or, in another era, a sad Grimms’ fairy tale. And it looked as if the happy ending was going to be awarded to his client, if he had anything to say about it.

If he lived to deliver the deposition he’d gotten.

Another sharp skid had Alain jerking to awareness again, his mind on the immediate situation rather than the courtroom. He could all but feel the tires going out from under him.

The winds weren’t helping, either. Strong gusts sporadically rose out of nowhere, fighting for possession of his vehicle. Fighting and very nearly winning. Once again he gripped the steering wheel as hard as he could just to keep the car from being shoved off the road.

It felt as if the wind had split in half, and each side was taking a turn at pushing him first in one direction, then the other, like a battered hockey puck.

Alain thought about the way the day was supposed to have gone before this sudden, spur-of-the-moment disaster had unfolded. He’d made arrangements to go antique browsing with Rachel, then grab an early, intimate dinner, after which whatever came up, came up.

Alain grinned despite the immediate trying situation. Rachel Reed was a wildcat in bed and pleasantly straightforward and uncomplicated when she was upright and dealing with life. Just the way he liked them. All fun, no seriousness, no strings. In that respect, he was very much like his mother.

He found himself struggling with the wheel again, trying to keep his car on course. Whatever that was at this point.

Where the hell was he, anyway?

Though he knew it was futile, Alain looked expectantly at the GPS system mounted on his dashboard. It continued doing what it had been doing for the last fifteen minutes: winking like a flirtatious teenager with something in her eye. One of the arrival-time readings that had flashed at him earlier had him back at his house already.

He only wished.

“What good are you if you don’t work?” he demanded irritably. As if in response, the GPS system suddenly went dark. “Hey, don’t be that way. I’m sorry, okay? Turn back on.”

But it remained dark, as did the rest of his dashboard. He no longer had lights to guide him, and all that was coming from his high-definition radio was an endless supply of static.

Alain blew out a breath. He felt like the last man on earth, fighting the elements.

And lost, really lost.

Even his cell phone wasn’t working. He’d already tried it more than once. The signal simply wasn’t getting through. Mother Nature had declared war on him and all his electronic gadgets. It was as if she knew that without them, he had no sense of direction and was pretty much adrift, like a leaf in a gale.

There was a map tucked into a pocket of the front passenger door, but it was completely useless since it only encompassed Los Angeles and Orange County, and he was somewhere below Santa Barbara, on his way to Oz—or hell, whichever was closer.

He was crawling now, searching desperately for some sign of civilization. He’d left the city behind some time ago, and he knew there were homes out here somewhere because he’d passed them on his way up. But they were sparse and far apart and he’d be damned if he could see so much as a glimmer of a light coming from any building or business establishment.

He couldn’t even make out the outline of any structure.

Squinting, Alain leaned forward, hunching over his steering wheel and trying to make out something—anything—in front of him.

Just as he gave up hope, he saw something dart into his path.

An animal?

His heart leaping into his throat, his instincts taking over, Alain swerved to the left in order not to hit whatever it was he’d seen. Tires squealed, brakes screamed, mud flew and he could have sworn the car took on a life of its own.

Where that tree on his left came from he had absolutely no idea. All Alain knew was that he couldn’t slam into it, not if he wanted to walk away alive.

But the car that he had babied as if it were a living, breathing thing had a different plan. And right now, it wanted to become one with the tree.

A moment after it started, Alain realized that he was spinning out.

From somewhere in the back of his head, he remembered that you were supposed to steer into a spin. But everything else within him screamed that he not make contact with the tree if he could avoid it. So he yanked hard on the wheel, turning it as far as he could to the right.

Horrible noises assaulted his ears as the screech of the car’s tires, the whine of metal and the howl of the wind became one. His usual composure melted as genuine panic gripped him. Alain heard something go pop.

And then there was nothing.

It seemed as if Winchester had been giving her problems since the day she’d found him and brought him home from the animal shelter. But she had a soft spot in her heart for the dog and cut him more than his share of slack. Of all the canines Kayla McKenna had taken in, his was one of the saddest stories.

Before she’d rescued the small German shepherd, someone had used him for target practice. When the dog had come to her attention, Winchester had a bullet in his front right leg and was running a low-grade fever because an infection had set in. Rather than go through the expense of removing the object, the local animal shelter, where she’d found the wounded dog on her bimonthly rounds, had only placed a splint on the leg.

The dog she’d whimsically named Winchester, after a rifle made popular during the winning of the West, was down to only a few hours before termination when she’d come across him. The instant she’d insisted that the attendant open up his cage, Winchester had come hobbling out and laid his head on her lap. Kayla was a goner from that moment on.

It was her habit to frequent the shelters every few weeks or so, looking for German shepherds that had, for one reason or another, been abandoned or turned out. If she could she would have taken all the dogs home with her, to treat, nurse and groom for adoption into good, loving homes. But even she, with her huge heart, knew she had to draw the line somewhere.

So she made her choice based on her childhood. Hailey had been her very first dog when she was a little girl—a big, lovable, atypical shepherd. As a guard dog, she was a complete failure, but she was so affectionate she’d stolen Kayla’s heart from the start. Her parents had had the dog spayed, so she never had any puppies. But in a way, Kayla thought of Hailey as the mother of all the dogs she’d rescued since moving back here after getting her degree.

Kayla had all but lost count of the number of dogs she’d taken into her home, acting as foster guardian until such time as someone came along to adopt them. It didn’t hurt matters that she was also a vet, so that the cost of caring for the neglected, often battered animals was nominal.

“You’ll never get rich this way,” Brett had sneered condescendingly. “And if you want me to marry you, you’re going to have to get rid of these dogs. You know that, don’t you?”

Yes, she thought now, lifting the lantern she’d brought out with her, to afford some sort of visibility in the driving rain. She’d known that, and hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. She’d met Brett in school. He was gorgeous, and she had fallen wildly in love. But it turned out she had completely misjudged him. He was not the man she could spend the rest of her life with.

So she’d kept the dogs and gotten rid of her fiancé and in her heart, she knew that she had made the better deal.

The wind shifted, lashing at her from the front now instead of the back. She tried to pull her hood down with her other hand, but the gusts had other ideas, ripping it from her fingers. Her hair was soaked in a matter of seconds.

“Winchester!”

The wind stole her breath before Kayla could finish calling for the German shepherd.

Damn it, dog, why did you have to run off today of all days? This wasn’t the first time he’d disappeared on her. Winchester was exceedingly nervous—the result of mistreatment, no doubt—and any loud noise could send him into hiding.

“Winchester, please, come back!” The futility of her plea seemed to mock her as the wind brought her words back to her. “Taylor, we need to find him,” she said to the dog on her left.

Taylor was one of the dogs she’d decided to keep for herself. He was at least seven, and no one wanted an old dog. They represented mounting bills because of health problems, and heartache because their time was short. But Kayla felt that every one of God’s creatures deserved love—with the possible exception of Brett.

Suddenly, both Taylor and Ariel, the dog at her other side, began to bark.

“What? You see something?” she asked the animals.

Shading her eyes with her free hand, she raised the lantern higher with the other. As she squinted against the all but blinding rain, Kayla thought she saw what it was that Taylor and Ariel were barking at.

What all three of her dogs were barking at, because she could suddenly make out Winchester’s shape. He was there, too, not more than five feet away from the cherry-red vehicle that, from this vantage point, seemed to be doing the impossible: it looked as if it were climbing up the oak tree. Its nose and front tires were more than a foot off the ground, urgently pressed up against the hundred-year-old trunk.

Despite the rain, Kayla could swear that she smelled the odor of smoke even from where she was standing.

One second her legs were frozen, the next she was pumping them, running toward the car as fast as she could. The rain lashed against her skin like a thousand tiny needles.

She almost slid into a rear wheel as she reached the vehicle. Rain had somehow gotten into the lantern and almost put the flame out. There was just enough light for her to see into the interior of the disabled sports car.

Dimly, Kayla could make out the back of a man’s head. His face appeared to be all but swallowed up by the air bag that had deployed.

She heard a groan and realized it was coming from her, not him.

Her runaway, Winchester, was hopping on his hind legs, as if to tell her that he had discovered the man first. This had to be the canine variation on “He followed me home, can I keep him?”

The man wasn’t moving.

Kayla held her breath. Was the driver just unconscious, or—?

“This is the part where I tell you to go for help,” she murmured to the dogs, trying to think. “If there was someone to go get.”

Which there wasn’t. She lived alone and the closest neighbor was more than three miles away. Even if she could send the dogs there, no one would understand why they were barking. More than likely they’d call the sheriff, or just ignore the animals.

In either case, it did her no good. She was on her own here.

Setting the lantern down, Kayla tried the driver’s door. At first it didn’t budge, but she put her whole weight into pulling it. After several mighty tugs, miraculously, the door gave way. Kayla stumbled backward and would have fallen into the mud had the tree not been at her back. She slammed into it, felt the vibration up and down her spine, jarring her teeth.

She hung on to the door handle for a moment, trying to get her breath. As she drew in moist air, she stared into the car. The driver’s face was still buried in the air bag, and the seat belt had a tight grip on the rest of him, holding him in place. Admitted to the party, the rain was now leaving its mark, hungrily anointing every exposed part of the stranger and soaking him to the skin.

And he still wasn’t moving.