Bluish flashes ricocheted in the boys’ bedroom.
It had rained like this the night the blue van had rolled and burned.
What van? Where? Why?
The girl lay rigidly awake, longing for Lucas as she listened to the surf and to the sharp cracking sounds of thunder. Torrents of rain beat a savage tattoo against the bedroom window.
He was two doors down from her. Peacefully asleep in his huge bed, no doubt. Unafraid of the storm and blissfully unaware of the strange woman sleeping in his sons’ bedroom closet.
He might as well have been on the moon.
She stretched restlessly, almost wishing she was as happily unconscious of him as he was of her. But she needed him because he made her feel safe.
Why did her demons always come alive when she closed her eyes in the dark?
She hated feeling shut in and alone, and she felt she was—even though the closet door was louvered and her darling boys were just outside, snugly tucked beneath quilts in their bunk beds, oblivious to the storm and her fears. She lay stiffly on her hidden pallet in their huge closet and stared at the ceiling, watching the lightning that flashed through the louvers and caused irregular patterns of blue light to dance across the walls and hanging clothes.
Her strength had returned rapidly, but, so far, not her memory. Vague illusive images from her past seemed to flicker at the edges of her mind like the lightning, their brief flares so brilliant they blinded her before they vanished into pitch blackness.
Her entire world had become Lucas Broderick’s coldly modern mansion perched on its bluff above Corpus Christi Bay. But more than the mansion’s high white walls and polished marble floors; more than its winding corridors and spiral staircases intrigued her. With every day that passed, she had become more fascinated by Lucas Broderick himself.
From almost that first moment when she had awakened in his sons’ closet to their rush of adolescent chatter, they had made her aware of him.
“What if Dad finds her?”
An audible gasp and then terrified silence as if that prospect was too awful to contemplate.
“You’d better not let him—stupid.”
She had opened her eyes and found their fearful, curious faces peering eagerly at her. She’d had no memory of who they were or how she’d gotten here.
But she’d quickly learned that they were Lucas’s adorable sons, and that they looked endearingly like him.
“She’s awake.”
“Told you she’d live.”
“We’ve got to feed her something or she’ll starve like your gerbil.”
“What’s your name?”
Her name? Blue lights flickered, and she shook her head and made a low moan.
“Pete said she had amnesia, dummy.”
Pete? Who was Pete?
“You hungry?”
“Maybe…some broth,” she whispered.
Their heads swiveled and they stared at each other in round-eyed consternation as if they’d never heard the word. “Broth?”
“Then water,” she managed weakly.
That started a quarrel over who got to fetch it, each of them wanting to.
For ten long days and longer nights those two wonderful boys had fought many battles over the privilege of nursing her. They had checked medical books out of the library. They had cleaned her wounds and doctored them with medicine from Lucas’s huge marble bathroom. They had painstakingly picked the slivers of glass from the soles of her feet with tweezers, plunking the jagged bits into a metal bowl. They had soaked her feet in pails of hot water, and she could almost walk without limping.
They took turns pretending to be sick themselves so that one of them could stay home from school with her. They had given her the antibiotics they tricked their uncle into prescribing for them. For the first few nights they’d coaxed their father into buying and cooking the few foods she could keep down—chicken broth, Jell-O and boiled vegetables, which they’d smuggled up to her.
At first she’d been too weak and ill to worry about the way her presence in their home had forced them to deceive their father. But as she’d grown stronger and more attached to her lively, affectionate nurses, she blamed herself for their burgeoning talent at duplicity. Nursing her wasn’t the worst of it. They were hard at work on a covert project they called Operation Nanny.
The boys didn’t want Lucas to hire a new nanny. “Because,” as Peppin explained, “we couldn’t fool one of those nosy old bags so easy as Dad. A nanny’d be up here all the time—she’d probably find you the first day.”
Thus, every time Lucas informed the boys of a home interview for a prospective nanny, Peppin, who could mimic Lucas’s voice to a T, phoned the woman and told her the job had been filled.
At first the girl had been too ill and too grateful and too terrified of being thrown out of the house to care, but now she felt stricken that she had become a corrupting influence on their characters.
Although Peppin and Montague bickered incessantly, they could be an incredible team. During the day, when Lucas was at work, the boys gave her the run of his huge house, with its soaring ceilings and skylights and views of Corpus Christi Bay. One wall of his bedroom was made entirely of glass. Sometimes she would step out onto his balcony and let the tangy sea air ruffle her hair.
Sometimes she showered in his pink marble bathroom that had both an immense enclosed shower and a bathtub as big as a small swimming pool. Sometimes she spent a languid hour buried beneath mountains of foamy bubbles in his tub. Sometimes she would pick out old clothes from his abundant closets to wear. Always she would linger in his room, studying his things, running his slim black comb through her hair and brushing her teeth with his yellow toothbrush. She would open his drawers and run her fingertips over his undershirts and cuff links, marveling that one man could have so much of everything. But what she loved best was lying in his bed and hugging his pillow to her stomach and imagining him there beside her, holding her. She gathered flowers from his gardens and arranged them in crystal vases everywhere, taking special pains with those that she left on the white table beside his bed. It pleased her when he picked a pale yellow rose from that vase and pinned it to the black lapel of his three-piece suit one morning before he rushed to his office.
She tried to think of ways to repay him for all that his boys had done for her. The endless stark hallways of his beautiful house had been strewn with everything from rumpled clothes, baseball bats, soccer gear and Rollerblades to newspapers when she’d arrived. Dirty dishes had overflowed from the white-tiled kitchen counters onto the ebony dining room table.
When she’d gotten better, she’d convinced the boys that maybe their father wouldn’t be so anxious to hire a nanny or a housekeeper if he didn’t feel the need for one so strongly. She had made a game of cleaning the house.
While they picked up, she would lie on a couch or a chair, perusing the tattered album that contained black-and-white pictures of Lucas’s childhood in India, wondering why he’d looked so unhappy as a boy. Wondering why the pictures of India especially fascinated her even as she prodded the boys to pick up.
Every time Peppin or Monty touched something, the rule was that they had to put it where it belonged. She began talking them through the preparation of simple meals, using the cans in the pantry and the frozen dinners in the refrigerator, so that Lucas always came home to a hot meal. At first they complained bitterly, but she just laughed and tried to motivate them by telling them they were learning basic survival skills.
Mostly they went along with her projects because she lavished attention on them. She walked with them on the beach, threw horseshoes with them and played games. The only thing