Mistaken Identity Read online

  Despite the heat, the man who met them outside the terminal wore a dark suit. Lauren didn’t figure out why until he reached courteously for her carryall and flashed a leather shoulder strap under his coat. Like Marsh, he was armed.

  The unease that had gripped her at the Flagstaff airport returned with a vengeance.

  She sat silently in the backseat of the sedan their escort had waiting at the curb. He filled the short drive with a casual commentary, pointing out the streets named after the town’s most prominent denizens. With Marsh taut and silent beside her, Lauren couldn’t summon the least interest in Hope, Autry, Sinatra or Shore Street.

  Her prickling unease vaulted into distinct nervousness when they turned into a sprawling resort and walked into the casita where David Jannisek had been living for the past few weeks under an assumed name. What looked like a small army of law enforcement officials had descended on the place.

  Marsh seemed to know most of them. He was performing introductions when a glad cry rang through the room.

  “Lauren!”

  Becky tumbled out of the adjoining bedroom, her face alight with relief and joy. The sisters met in a fierce hug. They were both near tears when they pulled apart.

  “Oh, Beck, I was so worried about you!”

  “You gave me a few hairy moments, too.” Sniffling, she tucked a stray strand behind Lauren’s ear. “You practically disappeared off the face of the earth. Where were you?”

  “In a shack in the mountains.”

  Becky’s irrepressible spirits returned with a hiccup of laughter. “Well, I guess if we both had to go into hiding, I’m glad you got the shack and I got Palm Springs.”

  “Thanks!”

  The laughter faded almost as quickly as it had come. “Can you stay for a few days, Laur? Please. Just until we get this mess sorted out and I know what’s going to happen next?”

  Lauren didn’t hesitate. Josh and her business would just have to wait another few days. She couldn’t go off and leave Becky in this crisis.

  Or Marsh.

  She buried that thought quickly with a smiling assent. “Sure, I can stay. Are you all right?” she asked quietly, noting the bluish shadows under Becky’s eyes.

  “I will be, when this is over. Come on, I want to hear every detail.”

  There were a few details Lauren wanted to hear, too, but first things first. She tugged her sister around to face the man watching them from a few feet away.

  “This is Special Agent Marsh Henderson.”

  “Well, well,” Becky murmured, her voice dropping into the teasing lilt that came as natural to her as breathing. “I might not have skipped town if I’d known you were waiting to whisk me off to a mountain hideaway.”

  Lauren couldn’t be jealous. She absolutely refused to dig her nails into Becky’s arm. But that didn’t stop her from feeling a spurt of satisfaction when Marsh appeared unaffected by her sister’s thorough and very appreciative appraisal. His face registered only a thoughtful interest as he studied first one sister, and then the other.

  “I know,” Becky said, with a wicked grin. “Most people can’t tell us apart.”

  His eyes shifted to Lauren. A half smile tugged at his mouth. “That’s a mistake I’ll only make once.”

  The effervescent Becky blinked, not quite sure how to take that. She recovered quickly, however.

  “Henderson?” she mused. “Henderson? Where have I heard that name?”

  “It was in all the Phoenix papers six weeks ago,” a thin, handsome Hispanic put in from the other side of the room. Al Ramos, Lauren guessed. The Scottsdale homicide detective in charge of the murder investigation, according to Marsh.

  “Ellen Henderson was the woman who took the bullets intended for David Jannisek,” he told Becky.

  The color drained from her cheeks. Her stricken gaze flew from the detective to Marsh. “Oh, no! Was she a relation?”

  “My sister-in-law.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He nodded, obviously unwilling to display his private grief in public. Then he got right to the business that had consumed him for all these weeks. “Where’s Jannisek?”

  “Out on the patio, talking to some FBI agents.”

  He turned without another word and made for the glass doors.

  “Wait! They said they didn’t want to be interrupted.”

  “Tough.”

  Becky blinked again, and turned to Lauren with a wry smile. “A man of few words, I see. Was he that uptight the whole time you were together at that shack?”

  “He had his moments.”

  She should have known her sister’s inner antennae were too finely tuned to any and all things male to accept that response at face value.

  “No kidding? Did he try to come on to you or something?”

  “Becky!”

  “Laur, you’re blushing!” Ignoring the other occupants in the room, none of whom made the least pretense of minding his own business, she gave a little hoot. “He did! Well, I’ll be darned. He put the make on you!”

  Her face flaming, Lauren dragged at her sister’s arm. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk. In private.”

  Before abandoning the room, Becky shot another glance over her shoulder at Marsh. Her appraising glance started with his wide shoulders and swiftly traveled south. Her eyes danced by the time she closed the bedroom door behind them.

  “To each her own, sister of mine. But I speak from vastly superior experience when I tell you you’re going to have your hands full with that one.”

  “Never mind my hands. What about yours?”

  Lauren pushed a jumble of glossy magazines, frothy underwear and discarded clothing off one corner of the bed. Becky certainly hadn’t wasted any time making herself comfortable in the luxurious suite. Dragging her sister down beside her, Lauren demanded the explanations that were so late in coming.

  “How did you get tangled up with someone like David Jannisek?”

  Her sister’s laughter died, and in its place came an expression Lauren never remembered seeing on her face before. She looked completely unsure of herself.

  “It started off as a fling. One of my usual love ’em and ditch ’em relationships. But he’s so charming and extravagant and darned sexy.”

  “He almost charmed you right into the middle of a shoot-out.”

  “I know,” Becky said miserably. “I couldn’t believe it when the police knocked on the door and told me what happened. They asked me all kinds of questions. And then Dave disappeared. I told myself I was well rid of him, but…”

  “But what?”

  She pleated the colorful bedspread with restless fingers. “But it hurt, Laur. More than I expected it to. Sometime between the silly jokes and the extravagant gifts, I fell for the jerk. Big time.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “I didn’t want to. I tried like the dickens to put him out of my mind. I was going to camp out with you in Denver for a few weeks while I got my head straight again. Then you called and told me hunky Henderson out there intended to use me as bait to lure Dave out of hiding. I couldn’t let him walk blindly into a trap. I had to talk to him first.” She gave her sister a wobbly, un-Beckyish smile. “I knew as soon as I saw him again that I…I love him.”

  Lauren’s heart sank. Her laughing, frivolous sister had never come close to loving before. How like her to finally fall for exactly the wrong man.

  “How did you find him?”

  “I had a hunch he’d come here.” Her glance drifted around the lavish suite. “He said he’d spent the happiest days of his life in Palm Springs…with me.”

  “Oh, that’s original.”

  The sardonic retort brought a smile, less wobbly this time. Becky’s response cut right through the disdain Lauren felt toward the hotelier, sight unseen.

  “He’s had a rough time, Laur. His wife died in a car crash just a year after they were married. They were in their last year of college, and Dave could never afford to buy her anything,
even a wedding ring. I think that’s how he lost all sense of value where money’s concerned—and why he spent so much on me.”

  “Not just on you.” Lauren unclasped the unicorn pin. “This has to go back.”

  “He wanted you to have it. I wanted you to have it.”

  “I can’t keep it.” She folded her sister’s fingers over the pin. “It’s too expensive. You shouldn’t have let him buy it.”

  “I know,” Becky agreed glumly. “It’s just that Dave has this need to give. He won’t admit it, but his generosity comes straight from the heart. He flashes this sexy smile and charms the pants off you, but underneath he’s…he’s…”

  Her hand lifted, dropped.

  “…he’s one of a kind.” She slid a glance at Lauren. “Kinda like your special agent.”

  “He’s not my special agent.”

  Like sunshine piercing through a cloud, Becky’s laughter returned. “Ha! I saw the look he gave you when he made that crack about not confusing the two of us again. Come on, girl, spill it. Tell me you put all that raw male and hard muscle to good use.”

  Lauren couldn’t dodge the pointed question. Her sister knew her too well.

  “It was a mistake. A moment of sheer insanity. We were alone and things got tense…”

  “I’ll bet!”

  “…and it just sort of…happened.”

  “Oh, that’s original,” Becky teased, throwing the words back at her. “So what’s the story? Are you going to let things just sort of happen again?”

  It was Lauren’s turn to pleat the colorful bedspread. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yes. Maybe.” She heaved an exasperated sigh. “I don’t know. Up to a point, he was only interested in how I fit into his plan to hunt down the man behind the attack on David. Now…I just don’t know.”

  “Trust me,” her sister said with all the confidence of a woman who knew whereof she spoke, “he’s interested in you for reasons that have nothing to do with any plan.”

  Lauren wanted to believe her, almost as much as she wanted to believe that she and Marsh would pick up where they’d left off after this was all over. But she wasn’t sure she liked being slotted into one part of his life, and shut out from others.

  Right now, he considered her a distraction, a dangerous one at that. Intellectually, Lauren could accept that. She even harbored a grudging respect for his single-minded determination to bring the man behind his sister-in-law’s death to justice. What she was having difficulty accepting was the emotional wall he seemed to put between the hunt and everything else in his life—now including her.

  That feeling of separation increased over the long hours that followed. Marsh and the rest of the team grilled David Jannisek relentlessly. By late afternoon, Becky had been drawn into the process, as well. Although she’d never been formally introduced to many of David’s so-called associates, she’d seen him talking to them on several occasions. Having her sister’s eye for detail, she provided descriptions to a crime analyst to feed into a laptop computer.

  Lauren hung around the casita for most of the day, feeling useless. Later that evening, the team finally let Jannisek and Becky take a break while they remained huddled on the patio together to discuss what they’d gathered so far.

  Over an ordered-in dinner of pizza and soft drinks, Lauren finally met her sister’s David face-to-face. He was every bit as charming as Lauren had expected, and devastatingly handsome. With his tanned skin, tawny hair and Clark Gable-style mustache, he needed only the ascot and jodhpurs to complete his aristocratic image. Even in loafers, tan slacks and a black knit shirt, he looked as though he’d walked right out of the pages of GQ.

  But it was his bone-deep regret for having drawn Becky into the pit he’d dug for himself that won Lauren’s grudging approval. That, and his determination to make what restitution he could.

  “I’m going to pay back everything I owe,” he said quietly, tapping his ring finger on the table in a steady, unconscious rhythm. “I piled up too many debts as a result of my gambling.”

  Becky reached across the table to squeeze his hand.

  “Marsh says the information Dave’s providing is payment enough to society,” she told her sister, “but he won’t listen.”

  Surprised, Lauren sifted through the figures on the patio for the man who’d hunted Jannisek so ruthlessly. Concentration etched a deep groove in Marsh’s forehead. His black hair gleamed in the light of the ceramic lanterns decorating the walled-in patio. In jeans and rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looked tough and uncompromising and not at all the kind of predator who would show this sympathy toward his prey.

  “Hopefully, the information I’m giving him will lead to the man he wants.”

  She dragged her attention back to Dave, whose own attention was focused exclusively on her sister.

  “If it does,” he told a subdued Becky, “it’ll be months, maybe years, before the case comes to trial.”

  Dismay put a squeak in her voice. “Years?”

  “They want to put me in the witness protection program. It means a new name, a new life.” His hand tightened around hers. “I can’t take you with me. I won’t expose you to that kind of danger again. After the trial, when the man who wants me dead is put away, I’ll come looking for you.”

  Her mouth curved in an attempt at a smile. “I suppose you think I’ll be waiting.”

  “No! I don’t have any right to ask you to put your life on hold. I’ll come for you. If you haven’t found someone else, maybe we can start again.”

  She swallowed. “Maybe.”

  He hooked a finger under her chin. Lauren could only guess at what it cost him to keep his voice even and his eyes gentle on Becky’s face.

  “Someday you’ll bump into this stranger and he’ll flash a smile at you that will turn your world upside down.” His thumb stroked a pattern on Becky’s chin. “It’ll be like the first time, baby, only in reverse. Remember how your saucy grin blew me away when I walked into the lounge to check out the new cocktail waitress?”

  “I remember.”

  “A few years from now, I’ll walk up to you on the street or in some restaurant or shopping mall and you won’t know what hit you.”

  Becky’s throat worked. “Maybe.”

  Neither of them noticed when Lauren took her soft drink and slipped away. She ached for her sister, but knew in her heart this was one problem she couldn’t jump in and fix for her.

  Feeling more extraneous than ever, she retired to her own casita next to Becky and Dave’s. It was furnished in the same luxurious mix of Impressionistic colors and Southern California chic, with Monet prints on the walls and a bedroom dominated by a Sonoma-style, wrought iron four-poster bed draped in twisted grapevines and romantic, billowing sheers. As she surveyed the sybaritic creation, she couldn’t help comparing it to the narrow bunk she and Marsh had tumbled into last night.

  At the thought, desire whipped like prairie fire through her veins. With an intensity that shook her, she longed to share that football-field-sized bed with Marsh.

  Watching Becky and Dave tonight had brought home again how fragile this absurd condition called love was. One minute, your heart sang and you were talking about forevers. The next, you might find yourself riddled with regrets.

  No! Not this time!

  Whatever happened between her and Marsh, she decided fiercely, there wouldn’t be any regrets.

  She slid between cloud-soft cotton sheets with renewed resolve to hit some of Palm Springs’ exclusive boutiques first thing in the morning. She might not have a clue if or when they’d pick up where they’d left off at the cabin, but she wanted to be prepared in either case.

  Chapter 13

  To Lauren’s disappointment, Marsh nixed her proposed shopping expedition the next morning. Until the team finished with Dave, he thought it best for everyone concerned to keep a low profile.

  As a result, she was forced to raid Becky’s wardrobe yet again. She
found a soft, cottony V-necked tank in shell pink to wear with her jeans.

  Her sister insisted that she also take the flesh-colored Wonderbra that transformed the plain little top into a seductive showcase of feminine charms.

  Lauren felt self-conscious about her dramatically altered curves all day, not that anyone saw them but her. Marsh remained huddled with Dave and the rest of the team all morning and well into the afternoon. Lauren didn’t see him until later that evening, when he knocked on her door.

  He looked both tired and elated at the same time, she thought, like a man nearing the end of a long quest. But evidently he wasn’t too tired to notice the way she filled the V-necked sweater. His gaze slid south and snagged there for a moment or two, but he nobly refrained from comment. Instead, he smiled at her with a warmth that made her heart thump erratically under her borrowed clothing.

  “It’s been a helluva two days. I’ve missed you.”

  Her brow lifted. He’d been so intent and focused on his mission, she didn’t think he’d remembered she was still in Palm Springs, much less missed her.

  “That’s good. I think.”

  His gaze drifted to her mouth. “It’s good.”

  Ridiculously flustered by that sort-of declaration, she invited him in.

  “Have you finished with Dave?”

  “Just about.” He strolled into the spacious living room and sank down beside her on the elegant, tapestry-covered sofa. “Jannisek’s given us enough information to mount a five-state raid within the next few weeks. Even more important, he put a face and a name to the man who sicced those hired guns on him. Henry Mullvane.”

  The steely satisfaction in his voice told Lauren it wouldn’t be long before Mr. Mullvane was breathing in recirculated prison air.

  “Henry Mullvane doesn’t sound like a very mobsterish name.”

  “You were expecting maybe Luciano or Corleone?”

  “Well…”