Her Bodyguard. Peggy Nicholson

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      Dark against the brightness silhouetting him, he turned back to study her. “I suppose you’re a local girl, a Vod-islander.”

      That mockery of the upstate accent marked him as hailing from other parts, she thought absently. “No.” His expectant silence at her one-word response dragged more words from her. “I’ve been here since the spring.” She’d meant to stay only a day or two, a week at most. Still wounded by Lara’s letter of rejection, she’d intended only to catch a glimpse of her mother, see her in the flesh once, then go.

      Oh, she’d seen Lara Leigh a hundred times or more by then watching reruns of Searching for Sarah. But she’d felt no sense of reality, no connection. That beautiful, mobile, weeping or laughing face on the TV screen hardly seemed a real person, much less a person connected to her as no other.

      “Living here in Newport?” he prodded.

      “Yes.” Her first week, she’d stayed at a bed-and-breakfast a quarter mile down the Cliff Walk. Had haunted that stunning path morning and night, sure somehow that if Lara was any relation to her, then this was where they would meet. Her mother would love the cliffs, too. Living so near, she’d be bound to stroll there, drawn by the cry of the gulls, the cool breeze off the glittering ocean, the rumble of the waves grinding the rocks below.

      And her certainty had proved right—proof more clinching than any DNA test, to Gillian’s mind, that they were of one blood. Walking the cliffs on a misty dawn, her third in Newport, she’d looked eagerly toward Woodwind, its tall chimneys slowly taking shape through the fog. Looked—and had seen a slim figure step out through a wooden door hidden among the wild rugosa rosebushes that hedged the cliff side of the high estate walls.

      The figure set off at a long-legged, floating run and vanished around a bend in the path. Gillian caught her breath and jogged after. Wait, Lara! Wait for me!

      If the runner was her mother. Gillian rounded the bend and glimpsed silvery hair the same shade as Lara Leigh’s. Then more rosebushes intervened, black against the pearly mist.

      But no hurry, she told herself. She was fifteen years younger and a runner herself. She could overtake Lara whenever she chose. Cliff Walk edged the ragged peninsula jutting out into Rhode Island Sound for another two miles or so. She had plenty of time.

      Mist dewed her face, beaded in her lashes, as she ran. A loon called its weird laughing cry from the gray waters below. Gillian came to a set of mossy stone steps and bounded up them, then down another set, her ears straining for footsteps ahead, hearing in- stead the rip of a wave combing down the black pebbles of the shingle beach fringing the base of the cliffs, some seventy feet below. The path skirted the very rim of the drop-off, and here someone had built a waist-high chain-link fence to keep unwary sightseers from stepping out into echoing space. Wild white daisies softened the craggy soil, trailing downward from rock to rock. Elephant-high clumps of rugosas pressed in from both sides of the Walk now. Blossoms of magenta and white brushed her shoulders as she ran. Through gaps in the bushes Gillian snatched glimpses of the black silhouette of a lobster boat idling in toward a line of pots laid along the cliffs. On a clear day you could see twenty miles out to the islands, but not this morning, when visibility was measured in yards.

      And somewhere ahead...Gillian stepped up her pace. She passed a trail that led up between the mansions on her right toward the avenue, but somehow she knew Lara wouldn’t stray from this path. A woman who lived most of her life in the public eye would surely treasure this gorgeous solitude.

      And what do I do when I catch her? Glance sideways? Say something inanely pleasant, as runners often do when they pass each other—Nice day, huh? Or should she run a little farther, then wheel and confront her? Mother, it’s me, she could say, Sarah. But she never would dare. Not after that savaging letter. Gillian pulled up the hood of the orange sweatshirt she wore till it covered her hair. Tightened the string at her throat to keep the hood in place. There was no reason to think that Lara might recognize her, but still...

      Mind focused on the bow she was tying and on the coming encounter, she rounded another bend and shied violently sideways, grazing the bushes, thorns plucking at her sleeve. For all her fascination with vistas, she had a healthy fear of heights, and this was a spot she never liked. Just as the path passed a wide gap in the bushes, it dipped, then tilted subtly toward the cliff edge. Here, water ran off from the hillside above, carving a notch in the cliff. Someday the path would be entirely undermined; the hillside would cave in and fall. Cliff Walk, Gillian had learned, had been crumbling for time out of mind, the sea taking the land inch by inch, the soft slate cliffs eroding year by year. The path was perfectly safe, but still, you could feel the abyss calling. Three wincing steps and she was by the gap, looking ahead again.

      Lara? The path sloped downward; the highest cliffs were behind them now. The surf sounded louder and the fog was thicker, as if it had chosen this low spot to crawl onto the land. Gillian looked down, picking a route around a puddle in the path, looked up—and Lara burst out of the mist. Retracing her steps, homeward bound already.

      No time to think at all. As their strides carried them closer, their eyes met and locked. Hers were a gray so light as to seem silver, fringed by lashes as dark as Gillian’s own. Lara’s lips parted, Gillian opened her mouth to speak, but the only word that sprang to mind was Why? Oh, why?

      Gillian slowed, her steps faltering, her mind stumbling. That’s her! Near enough to touch! Near enough to question—if only she dared.

      She didn’t. Not this time, anyway. So instead she ran on, reliving the moment, trying to hold that startled, questioning face in her memory. Seeking from it some likeness to her own.

      Finding none—

      CHAPTER TWO

      A HAND WAVED BEFORE HER face, then dropped as she focused on it. “Do this often, do you?” inquired the man. His lopsided smile was whimsical; his eyes missed nothing.

      They were hazel, she noticed for the first time. “Do what?” She’d entirely forgotten he was in the room! For only a minute or so? It might as easily have been an hour.

      “Vanish down a rabbit hole. Not a very nice one, by the look of it.”

      “I...was trying to remember if I’d turned off the stove.”

      He didn’t buy it, but he cocked his head obediently, then one eyebrow. “Don’t hear fire engines.”

      Newport wasn’t large. Whenever the trucks turned out, the whole town heard the racket. “I believe I did turn it off after all.”

      “Ah.” He’d jammed his hands into the pockets of his chinos. Eyes fixed on her face, he strolled around her. She suppressed an urge to spin warily with him, and let him instead inspect her profile, then her backside. Clenching her teeth, she tipped back her head to study the chandelier above. She’d thought meeting her mother would be the ordeal of the day. Now she looked to Lara for rescue. Somebody deliver me from this... this... whatever he was.

      Bad news, that’s what he was. Elegantly packaged bad news, from his sexily too-long, razor-cut dark hair, to his runner’s shoes, which probably cost more than her monthly rent. With all stops in between just as scenic. Not handsome exactly, but something more potent, topped off with a whiff of... unpredictability. Not a trait she cared for in someone who was shaping up to be an opponent.

      “You know she’s been ill,” he said idly from somewhere behind her right ear.

      Ill? That was hardly the word Gillian would have used to describe a fall off the Cliff Walk.

      Shattered? her mind supplied, and she shivered suddenly. It had been two days after their encounter before she’d heard. She’d picked up a day-old Daily News in the Waves, the town’s favorite coffeehouse, and sucked in her breath at the headline: Woman Survives Fall From Cliff Walk! Somehow she’d known what had happened even before she’d read about it. “I heard she had...an accident,” she murmured, picturing for the hundredth time the stumble—a shoelace perhaps coming undone, or Lara catching the tip of a toe. Then the horrified nosedive,