Jude Deveraux
Stranger in the Moonlight
The big office sprawled across a corner of the sixty-first floor. Full-length windows went along two sides, offering breathtaking views of the skyline of New York. The other two walls had tasteful paintings chosen by a designer, but they gave no hint of the occupant. In the middle was a desk of rosewood, and sitting in a steel and leather chair was Travis Maxwell. Tall, broad shouldered, and darkly handsome, he was bent over papers and frowning.
Another damned merger, Travis thought. Another company his father was buying. Did his desire to own, to control, never end? When Travis heard the door to his office open, he didn’t look up.
“Yeah? What is it?”
Barbara Pendergast—Penny to him, Mrs. Pender-gast to everyone else—looked at him and waited. She didn’t put up with bad moods from anyone.
Travis looked up at the silence and saw her. She was twice his age and half his size, but she intimidated the hell out of everyone but him. “Sorry, Penny, what is it?” She had worked for his father until just a few years ago. Together the two of them had gone from owning nothing until Randall Maxwell was one of the richest men in the world. When Travis joined the business, Penny decided to help him out. It was said that Randall Maxwell’s protests could be heard six blocks away.
Penny waited a moment to give the full weight to her announcement. “Your mother called me.”
“She what?!” Travis forgot about the merger as he leaned back in his chair and took a couple of deep breaths. “Is she all right?”
“I’d say she’s better than all right. She wants to divorce your father because there’s a man she wants to marry.”
Travis could do nothing but stare. Penny wore her usual boring, but expensive, suit. Her hair was pulled back, and she was looking at him over her reading glasses. “My mother is supposed to be in hiding, keeping a low profile. How can I protect her if she’s out in public? And she’s been dating?”
“I think you should see this,” Penny said and handed him a photocopied newspaper article.
It was from a Richmond newspaper and told of a fashion show for kids that had taken place in Edilean, Virginia, where his mother was staying, or more accurately, hiding. He scanned the article. Some rich woman had thrown a lavish birthday party for her daughter and there were some clothes designed by a Jecca Layton and—He looked up at Penny. “Sewn by Ms. Lucy Cooper.” He put the paper down. “That’s not so bad. Cooper is an assumed name, and there’s no photo.”
“It’s not bad unless your father decides to go looking again,” Penny said. “Her love of sewing is a dead giveaway.”
“What else did Mom say?”
“Nothing,” Penny said. “Just that.” She looked at her notepad. “To quote her directly: ‘Tell Travis I need a divorce because I want to get married,’ then she hung up. You know she thinks you, her precious son, makes the world spin on its axis.”
“My one unconditional love,” Travis said with a half grin. “Did she say who she wanted to marry?”
Penny gave him a look. Travis knew there had always been great animosity from his mother to Mrs. Pendergast. For many years, Randall left his wife and child home, but he never went anywhere without Penny. “Of course she didn’t tell me,” Penny said. “But to answer before you ask, I don’t think she would have been stu—uh, unwise enough to let this unknown man in on who she is currently married to. So no, I don’t think the man is after her money.”
Copyright © 2012 by Deveraux, Inc.
Moonlight in the Morning
Chapter 1
One
Edilean, Virginia
2011
Jecca Layton was coming to Edilean for the entire summer!
Dr. Tristan Aldredge put down the phone with his cousin Kim. At last something good was happening in his life! In the last weeks he’d begun to think that he was on a downward spiral that was never going to end.
His arm itched, and he did his best to use the coat hanger wire to scratch it under the cast. So much for medical school, he thought. All those years of training and what did he use for the incessant itching but a coat hanger?
As always, he tried not to think of what had happened to him a few weeks before. He’d been on his way to the airport when he realized he’d left his cell phone at home. Since he was the only doctor in a small town, he couldn’t risk being out of touch. He drove back home and came upon a robbery in progress. Before he knew what was happening, he’d been hit in the back of the head with a golf club and kicked down a hillside. So now his arm was in a cast, his father had come out of retirement to take over Tris’s practice, and Tristan had been told to “rest.” To do nothing. Let his arm heal.
This pronouncement had made him waver between suicide and murder. How was he supposed to do nothing? He couldn’t help but think how many times he’d told his patients just what his doctor had said to him. Over the years, Tris had put on his most sober face and told patient after patient to find something he/she could do with one arm or leg. To Tris, it had seemed like a temporary thing, so why so much complaining? But when he was told the same thing, he’d said that was impossible.
“I have patients. An entire town depends on me,” he’d said to his doctor.
“And you’re the only one who can handle it?” the man replied with one eyebrow raised. He had no understanding of Tris’s predicament and certainly no sympathy. Tris thought about running his chair over the man’s stethoscope—while it was in his ears.
His father had been worse. He’d come up from Sarasota where he’d been living in retirement and started complaining the second he entered Tris’s office—the office that used to belong to him. His father saw everything that Tris had changed and told his son that it should have been left the way it was. When Tris protested, his father told him to go home and rest.
“Doing what?!” Tris had muttered as he left.
He’d thought about getting out of Edilean for a while, but that hadn’t appealed to him. He liked being home, and besides, he had plants to take care of. And patients to see on the side, ones that his father wouldn’t know about.
Still, the prospect of the summer was bleak, and he dreaded it.
But then, Kim called to ask how he was doing. He’d refrained from telling her the truth, but he did manage to give a few sighs and she rewarded him with some sympathy. She’d then told him the wonderful news that her friend Jecca Layton was coming to Edilean to spend the entire summer painting.
© 2012 Deveraux, Inc.
