Heartwishes Read online

  He leaned heavily on his cane as he locked his car, then, stooped over, he made his way up the sidewalk. He supported himself against the jamb as he unlocked his front door. When it was open, he turned to again wave at his neighbor. As he knew she would be, she was watching to make sure he got inside safely.

  As soon as he was in the house, Dr. Burgess closed the door and leaned against it for a moment. He let out a sigh. “Nosy old bitch,” he muttered as he tossed his cane toward the tall urn by the door. It went in with a resounding thunk.

  Bending, he pulled up his pants leg and unbuckled the brace around his knee and tossed it at the cane. That done, he stood up, put his shoulders back, and flexed his neck. As he walked toward the cabinet against the wall, he unbuttoned his shirt, took off the belly pad that encircled his waist, and let it drop to the floor.

  He took a couple of refreshing breaths, rubbed the skin over his hard, flat stomach, and opened the cabinet to pour himself a drink. He wasn’t surprised to see that his ice bucket was full. He put a couple of cubes in a glass, poured it half full of thirty-year-old Scotch, then turned around and waited.

  The hideous lounge chair that was part of the rented house’s furniture was facing the wall—not the way he’d left it.

  “Are you hiding?” he asked after he’d taken a sip.

  The chair turned around, and his beautiful niece looked up at him. “What do you want so much that it’s made you come to little Edilean?”

  “Jean, darling,” he said, “is that any way to greet your uncle?”

  She tapped her upper lip. “Is that yours?”

  He pulled off the thick gray mustache and set it on a shelf in the cabinet. “Have you eaten? I could make us some—”

  “I know what you can cook. You taught me, remember? Why are you here?”

  “I came to see you,” he said. “How’s your mother?”

  “Doing as well as can be expected after all that you did to her.”

  “Jean, Jean, Jean,” he said. “Why are you so hostile to me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with how you hacked Mom’s bank codes and cleaned her out. Twice. Or maybe it was how my father went out with you one night and never returned. Take your pick.”

  He shrugged. “We’ve been over all this before and I thought it was in the past. As for your father, he had the reflexes of a tortoise. I never could figure out how he came to be my brother. I should have had a DNA test done.”

  Jean came out of the chair, angry. “I’m very good friends with the local sheriff. All I have to do is tell him about you and he’ll run you out of town.”

  “Friends, maybe, but that’s all there is,” he said as she stalked toward the front door. “I just heard that for days now he’s been inseparable from a pretty young woman who’s living with his parents. In fact, an hour ago someone showed me the two of them on that . . . What’s it called? YouTube. Disgusting invasion, that thing is. But I must say that I enjoyed the sight of her truly incredible body. And she appeared to be so very young.”

  Jean looked back at him, her jaw in a hard line. “Colin and I are in love.”

  “Really?” he asked, with a fake smile. Even with his dark hair dyed gray, he was a handsome man, and he’d kept his lean figure even as he neared fifty. He was her father’s younger brother, adored and spoiled by their mother as he grew up, and always bailed out of trouble when he was an adult and learning the art of thievery.

  Jean strode across the room to the door.

  “Is it that trust fund he lives off of that you care about?” He put his hand over hers on the doorknob and his face softened. “Can’t an uncle be jealous?” he asked. “I used to be the number one man in your life, but now I hear that my beloved niece is with a . . .” He smiled. “A sheriff. Of course I want to disparage him as much as I can.”

  Jean looked away for a moment. When he wanted to be, he was quite charming—and they had so much history together. She truly wanted to know what he was doing in Edilean. Was he again after her mother, or had he targeted someone else? She knew that anger wasn’t going to find out anything. Besides, he was the one who’d taught her how to mask her feelings. Turning, she gave him a hint of a smile.

  When he thought he saw her capitulate, he put his arm around her shoulders. They were both tall and thin, and he was only eleven years older than she was. Before she reached ten years old, she thought her uncle Adrian was the smartest, most clever man on earth. It had taken years for her to learn the truth about him. He was always after something, and every word he uttered was a lie.

  “Come on,” he said. “For old time’s sake, let’s share a meal. I always did love to be in a kitchen with you.”

  She agreed, but only because she needed to know what he wanted. Throughout their cooking—which they did easily and without getting in each other’s way—she talked to him. She tried to make it sound as though she was telling him about her life, but she was actually warning him. Just a few months before, when the search for the eighteenth-century paintings had been going on, Edilean had been full of FBI and Secret Service agents. “And a super-detective lives here now,” she said at the end. She wasn’t going to mention that Mike Newland spent most of the year in Fort Lauderdale.

  “I know,” he said, his deep blue eyes twinkling. “Jean, dearest, please relax. I came here only to see you.”

  “Why?” she asked as she put the risotto on the table.

  “Is love too old-fashioned for me to say?”

  Jean knew he was lying. When she was a child, he’d show up in her bedroom in the middle of the night. He never did anything as prosaic as ring a doorbell or knock. She’d be asleep, then wake up to see him standing there looking down at her. He’d put his finger to his lips for her to be quiet. She’d stand up and hug him and he’d shower her with gifts. There were pretty, smocked dresses from France, shoes of the softest Italian leather, dolls that were the envy of her friends. When she got older, there were earrings with real sapphires, and when she graduated from high school he’d given her a pearl necklace.

  Her mother had been horrified the first time she found out that her brother-in-law had entered their house during the night. She demanded that an alarm system be installed.

  “It won’t matter,” her husband, his older brother, said.

  But she didn’t believe him. She became a fanatic about keeping doors and windows locked and the alarm on. But one morning Jean came into the kitchen wearing a dress with a print of little bouquets of willow branches, their long, thin leaves in several shades of green, a pink ribbon tying them together. It had a Baby Dior label and Jean said Uncle Adrian had given it to her during the night. Her mother had been nearly hysterical, screaming that she wanted to put iron bars over every entrance.

  Her husband put his hands on her shoulders and tried to calm her down. “Whatever you do, he’ll see it as a challenge. You can put up cameras, bars, whatever you can think of, but if he wants to see his niece, he will.”

  “But she’s a child! He wakes her up in the night and I don’t like it.”

  “I hate it!” he said with passion. “I’ve hated it all my life. When I was a teenager and he was still in elementary school, he was always snooping in my room. I used to put my most private possessions inside a locked box, then put it in another box, then into a third one. Each one had its own lock. The next morning at breakfast, Adrian would spread the things out across the table for everyone to see.”

  She was calming down. “What if we asked him to please come to the front door during the day?”

  “You don’t think I have? He won’t do it. Just let him see Jean and don’t try to defeat him at his own game.”

  “But—” She couldn’t think of any way to thwart the man.

  It was after Jean’s father died while she was in her first year in college that the real problems began. Her father, an accountant, had set up a trust for his only child’s education, so her first three years at school were easy. Except for the grief of her