Forbidden Dreams Read online

  “I want to escort you to your father’s Christmas party this year.”

  “What?” Her indignation didn’t quite hide the relief he saw wash over her. A hint of color returned to her face, forming a pair of bright flags high on her cheekbones.

  “If you know my dad,” she said, her voice tense and angry, “you must also know that I never take a date to his party.”

  “I don’t know your father. I’ve never met him.”

  “No?” She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “So what’s your angle, O’Keefe? If you’ve never met my father, why do you want to go to his Christmas party?”

  He met her gaze. “I want to meet your grandmother—or, more specifically, her new boyfriend.”

  She stared at him in confusion for several seconds before she let her arms relax onto the table. “Sterling Graves?” she asked. “You want to meet Sterling? But why? I mean, why at my dad’s party? Sterling’s from Palm Springs. You’re from Los Angeles. Surely, you don’t have to come all this way to get invited to the same party as Sterling Graves.”

  “I don’t simply want to meet him. I need to meet him, and not as a man from Los Angeles. If I go to that party as your friend, introduced as someone you’ve known for years, he won’t have cause to doubt me or my credentials or my reason for being there.”

  “And he would have otherwise?” Shell drew in a deep breath and fixed a hard stare on him. “What are you up to? Who are you, that he might not want to meet you ‘as a man from Los Angeles’? If Sterling prefers not to meet you, why do you imagine for one minute that I’d slip you in under false pretenses? As I’m sure you know, since you know that my dad has an annual Christmas party, its guest list is exclusive; and outsiders are never, ever included. And that goes for you, long-lost and sadly forgotten friend or not.”

  Important, influential guests attended her father, Elwin Landry’s, party. They were able to relax in the knowledge that security was tight, that no one, neither fellow guest nor member of the catering staff, could enter the house or grounds that one night of the year without his or her background having been long known to Elwin, or rigorously examined by people he trusted. No one who wanted to work there again or attend as a guest would dare betray that trust.

  And his daughter, who loved him, wouldn’t even consider it.

  “Yes,” Jase said. “I do know all that. That’s why I’m here with you now. And I’m not a stranger to you, remember. What I’m hoping is that through you, I’ll be admitted, not be looked upon as an outsider, exactly as that bastard Graves will attend with your grandmother as one of the select group.”

  Shell stiffened her spine. “Sterling Graves might well become my step-grandpa. That’s why he’s not being treated as an outsider. And why do you need to meet him?”

  “Number one,” Jase said evenly, “is to get his fingerprints so I can prove to myself that he really is the man I’m after. I’m ninety-nine percent convinced, but there is one small element of doubt. After your father’s party, I’ll know one way or the other, and be able to proceed with what I must do or back off and take my search elsewhere.”

  Shell gazed at him for a long moment, then got up, feeling unsteady and unsure on her feet. “Fingerprints?” She edged past him into the living room. As she added wood to the stove, she remembered Jase’s terrible scars, the questions she’d had about them, and about him, in the night. Now was the time to ask, to demand an answer, not some glib evasion.

  She spun and looked at him. “Search? For what? What are you, Jase? Some kind of a cop, or—”

  “Or a crook?” He shook his head. “No. What I am, Shell, is a man out to nab the crook who bilked my grandmother of her life’s savings and probably hastened her death. The man whom I believe intends to do something similar to your grandmother.”

  For a long moment she said nothing, could say nothing. When her breath came back, she whispered, “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head.

  “Why would you make that kind of accusation about a man you obviously don’t even know? I mean, you have to get his fingerprints to be sure. What kind of qualifications do you have for comparing fingerprints?”

  He struggled to his feet, hitching the blanket up and tighter around him, and walked toward her. She stifled a snicker. He looked like a debutante wary of tripping on the hem of her gown. Until he stood before her, that was, and gazed down at her with earnest solemnity, silent as if he searched for the right words. “I have … connections who can make a good enough comparison to assure me,” he said finally. “I can’t prove it yet, but I truly believe the man is a con-artist, Shell. I believe he’s about to take your grandmother for a bundle, the way he did mine just before she died.”

  Shell couldn’t breathe for a long, painful moment. She had to reject what he said. It was ludicrous to think it could be true. “You’re out of your mind!”

  “I am not.” He pounded one fist into the other, nearly losing his blanket. “Dammit, Shell, I believe my grandmother died of a broken heart after Sterling Graves took her money and left her more or less at the altar.”

  Shell slipped past him to the table, turning her head to keep her eyes on him. “But, Jase, that’s … well, that’s impossible! Sterling Graves is a perfectly honest man, a true gentleman, old-fashioned, courtly. I spent a week with my grandmother in Palm Springs in the fall, and I met him. She owns a condo there in a sumptuous seniors’ complex. He lives in the same facility, and apart from the fact that I liked him, that’s not a place that lets in deadbeats. If a person—even a guest—is not invited, the guards at the gate don’t admit him. Places like that also the research potential residents’ credentials before they are allowed to purchase a home. He’s the genuine article, and he’s also the best thing that’s happened to my grandmother in many, many years.

  “And he can’t be a con-man,” she added in triumph. “He comes from a good family back East, a family my grandmother has known since she was a girl. They went to the same high school. She attended college with one of his sisters.”

  He lifted a hand. “Shell—”

  She shook her head violently. “No. You’re completely wrong about him, and I won’t have my grandmother upset by you or anybody else making unfounded accusations about a man she’s very, very fond of. Dad and I both hope the two of them will get married soon.”

  Jase braced himself on the back of his chair. “They won’t be getting married, Shell. Sterling Graves, as he calls himself this year, never marries his marks. He simply charms the pants off them and takes their money and disappears.”

  “Ma-arks?” She made two angry syllables of the word. “You’re crazy, you know, if you think my grandmother is a ‘mark’ for anybody! She’s a bright, canny lady who’s been around the block more than a time or two, and she’s been protecting her money quite successfully since my grandfather passed away. Believe me, if she didn’t trust Sterling Graves implicitly, she wouldn’t have a thing to do with him, no matter how charming he might be.”

  With a haughty tilt to her chin, Shell grabbed their plates and cups off the table, swept the remains of her sandwich into the garbage, and all but dropped the dishes into the sink.

  Spinning around with a wet cloth in her hand, she glared at Jase. “And one more thing. ‘Lady’ is the operative word in that description of my grandmother, O’Keefe. Evelyn Briggs Landry is a lady of the old school, and no man would charm ‘the pants,’ as you so crudely put it, or anything else off her, unless she was his lawfully wedded wife.” She didn’t quite add so there, but it was implicit in her tone.

  Angrily, she scrubbed the tabletop, then paused in midswipe with the cloth, shooting him a frowning look. “What do you mean, ‘calling himself this year’?”

  Chapter Five

  JASE TOOK THE CLOTH from her and tossed it over her shoulder to the sink. “Sit down, Shell. Please?” She complied, still scowling, and he gratefully eased himself back onto his chair. “The man who calls himself Sterling Graves w
as not born with that name,” he said quietly. “Maybe your grandmother knew a boy by that name when she was a girl, but he’s long dead, and she obviously doesn’t know it. I do, because the minute I learned what name he was using, I checked it out. I have the written proof in my Jeep.”

  “Convenient,” Shell said, “since your Jeep is facedown in the middle of the creek, and all Ned was able to pull out was your bag and computer.”

  Jase’s look of consternation broke on a smile. “Computer, right. I’ve got all the stuff on that too. Just wait one minute, and I’ll show you.” He opened the lid and switched on the computer. After a moment he sighed disgustedly and flipped the switch back and forth several times. “Dead!” He slammed the lid shut. “Dammit, Shell, you have to believe me. He’s merely assumed that persona so he can earn her trust.”

  He seemed so sincere, Shell wanted to believe him. Only she knew Sterling, liked him. “Jase, honestly, your theory’s crazy. Nobody would take such a stupid risk. If my grandmother really did attend the same school as Sterling Graves and go to college with his sister, then anybody other than the real Sterling would be off his noodle to pretend to be him. I mean, what if she’d kept in touch with the sister and been told of Sterling’s death?”

  “I believe the man does his homework well before he ever approaches his mark.” When her mouth compressed and she sucked in an angry breath, he rushed on before she could object to the term again.

  “If, by some chance, she had heard that Sterling was dead, he’d have laughed and quoted Mark Twain. Your grandmother, unlike me, probably wouldn’t have bothered to check it out by calling the sister, or researching back copies of newspapers for obituaries, or requesting a death certificate from the state registry of births, deaths, and marriages. The innocent never do. But my bet is he knew before he went within ten miles of her that she hadn’t kept in touch with Sterling Graves’s family, that in fact she’d know nothing about the man, or even really remember him, except possibly his name.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Shell said definitively. “If she hadn’t remembered him, she’d have been coolly polite and extricated herself from him at the earliest possible moment. My grandmother is a very wealthy widow. She’s not stupid, Jase.”

  “Would she extricate herself politely? Can you be certain of that? As I said, the man is charming. He makes his living doing what he does. How do you know how your grandmother might respond to that kind of smooth operator? Have you ever seen her under those kinds of circumstances?”

  “You mean, such as on a date?” Shell laughed with little humor. “Of course not. Well, not until recently. My grandmother didn’t date after her husband died. She remained true to his memory for years.”

  She twisted her hands together. “That’s why we were all so pleased when she struck up a friendship with Sterling. He claims to have loved her from afar when they were kids. He’s a bit younger than she is, but Grandma says, at their age, what does that matter? They plan to go on a cruise together right after New Year’s. In separate cabins,” she added, “in case you’re thinking otherwise.”

  “Shell, I’m sure your grandmother’s morals are befitting a lady of her age and background. It’s the morals of the man calling himself Sterling Graves that concern me. Can’t you see? All these years she’s been careful, rebuffed men who tried to get close, and suddenly she’s fallen for someone and is planning on going away with him when she’s known him—what?—two months?”

  Shell worried the sleeve of her red sweater between her finger and thumb, staring down at it as if it had a stain she could rub away. “When you put it like that …” She looked up at him, clearly disturbed. “All right. Tell me more.”

  A trickle of relief ran through Jase. Maybe he was making some progress here. “I believe his name is—or was when he knew my grandmother—Martin Francis. Of course, it could be almost anything. Martin Francis is as unlikely to be the name he was born with as Sterling Graves.”

  “What makes you think the man who bilked your grandmother is Sterling Graves? How did you connect him and Martin Francis?”

  “I’ve been tracking him for nearly a year and a half now, and I think he’s rooked at least twelve other ladies in the past ten years and maybe a much longer time. His M.O. varies as to how he approaches his mark, but when he has, he checks her out in painstaking detail.”

  “How can he do that? As I said, my grandmother doesn’t give out information indiscriminately. She’s a very private person.”

  Jase nodded. He’d already learned that himself. “My suspect’s a computer whiz. One of the few geriatric hackers in the world. He’s broken into more data bases than you’d even suspect exist. He uses tax records, vital statistics, bank and credit card data, everything he can access—legally or illegally—from the all-too-massive amount of information that’s been compiled on each one of us, whether we try to keep our lives private or not.

  “He ascertains that his victim is a widow. He already knows she’s wealthy, or she wouldn’t be living in such a place. He discovers her maiden name, where she was raised, what schools she attended, and who her friends were. And,” he added after a significant pause, “who her friends were not.”

  Shell felt cold. Sterling Graves was, indeed, a “computer whiz.” In only a few hours he had reprogrammed her entire stock-control system for her by modem, making it incredibly easy to use. But did that make him a “geriatric hacker”? Weren’t hackers teenage nerds with fantastic IQs and no conscience?

  “So you see,” Jase went on, “if Sterling Graves and his sister were acquaintances of your grandmother’s, but not friends, then he’d be fairly safe in assuming the Graves persona.”

  Shell blinked slowly as she assimilated what he’d said. Unwillingly, she had to admit he was making sense. “Yes,” she said finally. “I see how it would be possible for him to wriggle into Grandma’s confidence using a trick—like that, and of course you’re right. She probably wouldn’t think to check him out. Why would she, since she already knew him, even if it was a long time ago?”

  She chewed on her lip for a moment. “And you think he’s been doing this for years? Why hasn’t he been caught?”

  “Mainly because he’s careful whom he chooses as his mar—his prey. A con-man’s victims seldom complain. They’re ashamed to let anyone, most of all their families, know how stupid they believe they’ve been and how much money they’ve lost. What they don’t understand is that stupidity was not their problem. Love was, and trust, and quite likely a deep need to assuage their loneliness.”

  Shell swallowed hard, thinking of how often her grandmother begged her to come and spend more time with her, either in her Vancouver apartment or her Palm Springs condo. “You’re my only granddaughter,” she would say. “You have competent help in your bookstore. Take more time off. I wish you wouldn’t spend so much time buried up there in the woods. After all, your mother has Kathleen.”

  Had her insistence on “burying” herself contributed to her grandmother’s loneliness? Had that helped set her up for a man like the one Jase described?

  “He’s also careful not to leave any pictures of himself behind,” Jase said. “He dislikes having his photograph taken, managing to turn away at the crucial moment. Before he leaves, he lifts any pictures that might have been taken despite his precautions.”

  Shell remembered how Sterling had sneezed when she’d taken a photograph of him and her grandmother beside the pool. He’d whipped out a large white handkerchief that hid most of his face, then accidentally knocked her camera into the water before she could try to take another. He’d apologized, of course, and bought her a new, and much better, digital camera despite her protests that he didn’t need to. But he’d ordered it from an online source and had it delivered to her home address so she wouldn’t have to pay duties, as he’d said with a conspiratorial wink. She’d returned home the next day without photographs of her week in Palm Springs.

  “How did you find all this out?” she asked Jase
.

  “I’d been away while my grandmother was seeing him,” he said, “so I never met him. But when I got back and up to Boston to surprise her with a visit, I was appalled at the way she was living. Patches on the walls where valuable pieces of artwork had hung, missing antiques but even more worrisome, the lack of household help. She’d let them all go, had closed off all but the kitchen and the maid’s room, where she was sleeping herself. She tried to make light of it, saying she had no need for fancy trappings and that the upkeep of a huge old barn of a place was a needless expense. I refused to buy it, and she finally admitted what had happened. She was so ashamed, so heartbroken, and felt so betrayed, she had to talk to someone.” He shrugged and watched his thumb nail track along the edge of the table. “And she knew I’d understand.”

  Shell felt a heaviness in her chest. Jase O’Keefe understood betrayal. And heartbreak? And shame? Why? When? Who? Sharba?

  Lifting his head he went on. “She’d always kept favorite photographs in a box in her bedroom closet, close by in case of fire, instead of in her albums in the living room. Since Martin never knew about the box, he missed a full-face shot of himself.”

  “And that photo led you to Sterling?”

  “Not directly and not immediately. She didn’t show me the picture so that I could find the man, but to help me understand why she’d fallen so hard. He is a good-looking fellow. Thick silver hair, always impeccably groomed, a charming smile, and a body many men forty years younger would envy.”

  Worry rose within Shell. That described Sterling to a T. Except he had a thick, bushy mustache that twitched beguilingly when he smiled. His blue eyes always twinkled merrily, as if he were about to burst into a rollicking, possibly bawdy song.

  “Gran refused to go to the local police even when I begged her to, to keep the man from harming other people. It wasn’t until after she died, less than six months after Martin Francis left her, that I decided to get the guy myself.”