LITMIR.BIZ

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face tensed. “Can I get the money?” He leafed through the will. “It’s a crapshoot. It’s not too difficult to break a will that involves leaving one family member an entire fortune at the expense of the others. But charitable foundations with iron-clad, carefully thought out legal documents such as these are tricky, especially when the foundation will contribute substantially to several powerhouse charities who have teams of lawyers on their payroll.”

      “But Beth bamboozled Gram into giving her everything—”

      “Not quite everything. Your grandmother did adequately provide for you. At least most judges would see it that way. Technically your cousin won’t actually be inheriting the fortune, Ms. Moran. She would merely be managing the foundation.”

      “For a huge salary?”

      “A six-figure annual salary for overseeing such a vast enterprise would hardly be out of line.”

      “Beth is a thief and a criminal.”

      Lucas felt an insane urge to defend the absent heiress.

      “Those are serious charges that might not be so easily proven. From the picture you’ve drawn of Beth—a goody-two-shoes Samaritan building houses for the poor in Mexico—it might be difficult and unpleasant to convince twelve disinterested people she wouldn’t sincerely honor your grandmother’s last wishes. If she’s a fake, we’ve got a chance. But if she’s not—” He paused. “Unfortunately juries and judges have a tendency to favor do-gooders. I suggest that you talk to your cousin. Try to persuade her it would be in her best interests to divide the money between all of you.”

      “You have no idea how stubborn she is.”

      “Maybe one of you will come up with a better idea.”

      A pair of black-lashed, olive-bright eyes set in a gorgeous face met his, and Lucas was chilled when he sensed a terrible hatred and an implacable will.

      The black clouds were rolling in from the west. The mood in the library had darkened, as well. Other faces turned toward him, and they were equally hard.

      Lucas almost shuddered. No wonder the saint had run.

      Strangely, his feelings of empathy for the girl intensified. He tried to fight the softening inside him, but it was almost as though he was on her side instead of the Morans’.

      Ridiculous. He couldn’t afford such misplaced sympathies.

      “If you take the case, how much will you charge?” Holly demanded.

      “If I lose-nothing.”

      “And—if you win?”

      “I would be working on a contingency basis, of course—”

      “How much?”

      “Forty percent. Plus expenses.”

      “Of nearly a billion dollars! What? Are you mad? Why, that’s highway robbery.”

      “No, Ms. Moran, it’s my fee. I play for keeps—all or nothing. If you want me, and if I agree to take the case, I swear to you that if there is any way to destroy your cousin’s name and her claim to your fortune, I’ll find it. I am very thorough and utterly merciless when it comes to matters of this nature. I’ll study these documents and send my P.I. to Mexico to investigate Casas de Cristo and see what dirt I can dig up on her down there. She’s bound to have enemies. All we have to do is find people who’ll talk about her and get them talking. Fan the flames, so to speak.”

      Lucas began gathering documents and stuffing them into his briefcase. “Just so you can reach me anytime—” He scribbled his unlisted home phone number and handed it to Stinky. “I’ll let myself out.”

      Lightning streaked to the ground. Almost immediately a sharp cracking sound shook the house. Wind and torrents of rain began to batter the windows.

      The drought was over.

      But none of the ranchers who had prayed for rain rejoiced. They were watching Lucas’s large brown hands violently snap the locks on his briefcase as he prepared to go.

      The mood in the library had grown as ugly and dangerous as the storm outside. The Morans were in that no-win situation so many people involved in litigation find themselves. They were wondering whom they disliked the most—their adversary, the family saint, or their own utterly ruthless but highly reputed attorney.

      

      One minute Lucas was bursting out of the library doors into the foyer, intent on nothing except driving to San Antonio as fast as possible. In the next minute, Lucas felt as if he’d been sucked blindly into a cyclone and hurled into an entirely new reality in which an incredibly powerful force gripped him, body and soul. In which all his dark bitternesses miraculously dissolved. Even his fierce ambition to work solely for money was gone.

      Unsuperstitious by nature, Lucas did not believe in psychic powers or ghosts. But this otherworldly experience was a very pleasurable feeling.

      Dangerously pleasurable. Almost sexual, and dangerously familiar somehow.

      All his life he’d been driven by anger and greed or by the quest for power.

      And suddenly those drives were gone. What he really wanted was in this room.

      He stopped in mid-stride. His huge body whirled; his searing gray eyes searched every niche and darkened corner of the hall.

      The mysterious presence was very near. As he stood there, he continued to feel the weird, overpowering connection.

       She was as afraid of this thing as he was.

       She?

      For no reason at all Lucas was reminded of the times he and his brother, Pete, had hidden together as children from the Indian slum bullies, not speaking to one another but each profoundly aware of the other.

      “Hello?” Lucas’s deep querying drawl held a baffled note.

      He held his breath. For the first time he noted how eerily quiet the foyer was. How the presence of death seemed to linger like an unwanted guest.

      How the hall with its pale green wallpaper was heavy with the odor of roses past their prime. How these swollen blossoms, no doubt leftovers from Gertrude Moran’s memorial service, were massed everywhere—in vases, in Meissen.bowls. How several white petals had fallen onto the polished tabletops and floors. Holly had shown him the old lady’s rose garden and had told him she had loved roses.

      Lucas’s senses were strangely heightened as he stood frozen outside the library doors, struggling to figure out what was happening to him. He inhaled the sicklysweet, funereal scent of the dying roses. He listened to each insistent tick of the vermeil clock.

      The summer sunlight was fading. Much of the white and gilt furniture was cast in shadow. The threadbare Aubusson rug at his feet had a forest green border.

      When he saw the closet with its door standing partially ajar, he felt strangely drawn to it. Oddly enough, when he stepped toward it, the connection was instantly broken. He was free.

      All his old bitterness and cynicism immediately regained him.

      He bolted out of the Moran mansion faster than before.

       One

      “Kill!”

      Sweet P.’s earsplitting voice blasted inside Lucas’s black Lincoln as he raced toward the hospital. The shrieks seemed to slice open his skull and shred the tender tissues of his inner ear as handily as a meat cleaver.

      There should be a law against a three-year-old screaming in an automobile speeding sixty miles per hour on a freeway.

      Just as there should be a law against a kid being up at five in the morning experimenting with her older cousin’s handcuffs.

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