“We don’t have much time,” Frank reminded her. “If I were that young man or his mother, I’d want to find a good place to hide out for a while. The press will eat them alive.”
Elly shook her head. “Something tells me this guy isn’t the type to run away from anything.”
“Elizabeth,” her father whispered hoarsely, sounding increasingly worried, “if this explodes in our faces, our professional reputation will be destroyed. We might as well give up the business. Do you understand?”
She swallowed. It was that bad then. “I’ll bring them to you,” she promised. “Somehow.”
Dan was thirty minutes late for his appointment with the contractor, mostly because he had other things on his mind. His thoughts boomeranged back and forth between memories of manhandling an attractive redhead out his mother’s door, his hand placed strategically on her pretty rump, and the less enjoyable knowledge that he’d probably never see Elly Anderson again.
Luckily, the contractor was still in his office. They negotiated a few terms, signed the contract. Within a week the storm damage to the bungalows closest to the shoreline would be repaired. One less thing to worry about.
Dan drove back toward the Haven along Ocean Avenue and turned into the parking lot. A flash of crimson hair in the sunlight caught his eye. Setting the parking brake on his SUV, he squinted through the windshield into the wintry glare. A man and a woman stood where the lot met the sandy boardwalk.
Elly’s elegant legs appeared even longer whenever the wind flipped up the hem of her skirt. Her hair, lifting free of confining pins, swirled in russet waves around her face as she talked to Kevin and occasionally lifted a hand to hold flaming wisps out of her eyes.
“What’s that woman up to now?” he muttered, heaving himself up out of the car.
Dear old Kev wore that deer-staring-into-headlights expression common to men confronted by a pretty woman. Dan only hoped his friend hadn’t said anything to encourage Elly’s snooping. He jogged across the parking lot toward them.
“I thought we agreed you were through with this nonsense!” Dan shouted into the wind.
Elly turned to observe him, her eyes far too enticing to cool his simmering blood. Simmering because he was furious with her but also because she looked so deliciously disheveled with the wind tugging at her skirt and hair, and teasing open the collar of her jacket to reveal a sliver of flesh at the top of her breast.
She planted her feet firmly and straightened her spine to meet him. “We need to talk, Mr. Eastwood.”
“Isn’t that where we started this morning?”
Kevin looked from one to the other of them with a puzzled expression then backed off two steps. “I don’t know what this is about, but I’ll let you two hash things out. Got work to do.”
To Dan’s surprise, Elly didn’t so much as blink or make any move that might be construed as retreat. “I need you and Mrs. Eastwood on a plane for Europe,” she stated. “Tonight at the latest.”
He laughed. “You’re not only wrong about my mother, you’re insane!”
“No,” she said solemnly, “I’m not. Not on either account. I have evidence. Please listen to me. If you don’t, both of you are going to be hurt far more than you can imagine.”
There was something fervent and beyond argument in her tone. This was a woman who believed in what she said. For the first time Dan felt deep in his gut that Elizabeth Anderson wasn’t flinging idle fairy tales at him or working some kind of confidence game. He remembered the look on his mother’s face earlier that day. Madge had been afraid—not of lies, but of the truth. And that terrified him.
He looked at his watch. “It’s getting close to lunch time. Are you hungry?”
Elly gave him a guarded look. “Famished,” she admitted. “No time for breakfast this morning. Why?”
“Let’s get a table at Kirby’s. We can talk this out over crab cakes.”
Kirby’s, one of the most popular seafood restaurants on Ocean Avenue, was nearly deserted during off season. They sat in a fifties-style red vinyl booth and Dan ordered two steaming crab cake platters piled high with salty French fries, little paper cups of sweet coleslaw on the side.
Elly poured a stream of rich ketchup over her fries and dug in hungrily. Dan ate more slowly than usual, watching her. He was aware of her thin ankles crossed beneath the table, visible through the space between his bench and the table top. When he lifted his eyes they fixed with fascination on her animated lips as she relished the crunchy potatoes and fat crab cake with its savory Old Bay seasonings perfuming the room around them.
He found it impossible to hold onto his irritation with her. But he was curious and more than a little suspicious of her motives for wanting to whisk him off to another continent. “So tell me about this proof. And why the urgency to get me out of the country?”
“I know you feel I’m intruding,” she began, spearing another fry with her fork and shaking it at him in schoolmarm fashion, “and I don’t like being put in the position of having to accuse anyone of lying about their past but—”
“But that’s precisely what you are doing, isn’t it?” he asked in a low voice.
Elly pursed her lips and studied him for a long moment, as if searching for diplomatic words. “People can be very creative about their past, if they are afraid. A woman has to be particularly careful. And a single mom always has to explain herself to others. No doubt your mother felt that a dead husband was easier for people to accept than the truth.”
“And that truth is?” He might be willing to believe her. Might. But not without one hell of an explanation.
Elly continued with obvious caution as she pulled a manila envelope from the briefcase on the bench beside her. “I have photocopies of letters found on the von Austerand family’s property. There now is little doubt that the ones signed Margaret were written by your mother, but we can verify that as soon as she is in Elbia.”
She put up a hand to stop him from interrupting. “We believe your mother fell deeply in love with Karl von Austerand the year she studied in Paris. She probably believed they would marry, but he wasn’t completely honest with her. He was engaged to another woman of royal blood. And he was the crown prince, soon to become King of Elbia.
“Karl was attending the college under an assumed name to avoid publicity. When Madge discovered they could never wed, she ran home to America—probably just after learning she was pregnant. Instead of returning to her parents’ home in Massachusetts, she found a place to live in Baltimore and hid her shame by inventing a husband. The move probably was intended to elude Karl, too. Perhaps she feared what he might do if he discovered their child. You.”
Dan could feel the heat rising from his chest to his throat. He glared at the folder resting on the table beneath her hand. “This is very difficult to believe,” he said tightly.
Elly slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry. See for yourself.”
He couldn’t move, was barely capable of breathing. Still furious with Elly, he was nevertheless increasingly fearful that what she claimed might be true. She didn’t have to tell him how drastically his life would change if it was.
And what about Madge’s quiet existence? She hated confrontation. She had always favored a life without complications. Any shattered love affair and unwanted baby were as complicated as life got. Unless the father of your baby was a man whose family’s status rivaled that of the royals of England or Monaco—people with unlimited wealth and power, who could never escape their celebrity or stay off the front page of grocery-store gossip rags for long.
Elly rested her warm hand over