Double Play: Ambushed! / High-Caliber Cowboy

Molly read every article she could find, becoming more excited as she did. This could definitely be the answer to her problems.

The sheriff was the drawback though. That and the fact that Molly hadn’t pulled any kind of “magic trick” since her father had died fifteen years before. She’d given up that way of life and had promised herself that she would never go back to it.

For years she’d never stayed in one place long, knowing that Vince and Angel could get out on parole at any time. At least that’s what she told herself. In truth, the one thing she hadn’t been able to cast off was the transient lifestyle of her childhood or the fear that Max had been right—that fraud was in her blood.

No matter how hard she tried, she found she got restless within weeks and would quit her job, move somewhere else and get another mediocre job. Fortunately she had an assortment of skills that lent themselves to quick employment and she’d never been looking for a “good” job since she’d be moving on soon anyway.

But Vince and Angel were out of prison now and after her. She hadn’t seen anything in the papers about Lanny Giliano. She could only assume he was dead and she was next. She had to do a disappearing act, and maybe Max was right. Maybe fraud was in her blood and just waiting to come out.

On a hunch, she found an online video of Jasmine giving a speech at some charity benefit. The father had put the video online at the time of Jasmine’s disappearance, saying he thought his daughter might be suffering from amnesia and hoped someone would recognize her and call.

Molly watched the video a half dozen times online until she could mimic Jasmine’s gestures, her way of speaking, her facial expressions. Mimicking was something Molly had learned at an early age, a gimmick she and her father used during his act when he pretended to read minds in the audience.

Molly would secretly pick someone from the audience while her father had his back turned. Then he would read her mind and point to the person she’d picked. It amazed the audience. But the trick had been quite simple. She would just mimic the expression and body language of the person and her father would spot it and match it with the right person. Magic!

It amazed her how quickly all that training came back. Her mind was already working out the details. Not that she wasn’t aware of the danger. Identity fraud. Fortunately, there was little record of her life the past fifteen years since her father’s death or, for that matter, the fourteen years before that.

All of her “jobs” with her father hadn’t involved paperwork, and few of her jobs had since. She preferred work where she was paid “off the books” in cash. Jobs where she didn’t have to provide a social security number or an address. Much safer.

And there were enough employers who wanted to avoid paying taxes that it hadn’t been hard to find menial work. She had pretty much remained invisible over those years, but she knew that wouldn’t protect her from Vince and Angel. They would turn over every rock to find her. And they wouldn’t stop until they did.

The way Molly saw it, only one person—the person who put Jasmine’s car in that barn—would know that she really wasn’t Jasmine. And that person was in prison serving time for his other crimes.

Which was good, since Molly already had two killers looking for her. That was sufficient.

CHAPTER FOUR

Atlanta, Georgia

KERRINGTON LANDOW never thought he’d be relieved to have the phone ring in the middle of a meal. But if he had to listen to one more of Sandra’s lies…

“Let the maid get it,” Sandra said with impatience.

He ignored her as he shoved back his chair and gave her one of his this-isn’t-over-by-a-long-shot glares. Throwing down his napkin, he turned and stalked out of the dining room to take the call on the hall phone.

“Hello,” he snapped, surprised how furious he was. In truth, he didn’t care if Sandra was cheating on him or not. No, what made him angry was that she seemed to think he was so stupid he didn’t know what she was up to.

“Jasmine’s car’s been found.”

He went rigid.

“Did you hear me?” Bernard Wolfe demanded.

“Yes. I heard you.” But still he couldn’t believe… “What about—?” He looked up. Sandra had followed him. She was watching him from the dining room doorway, frowning, definitely interested in whom he was talking to.

“They haven’t found Jasmine’s body. Not yet anyway,” Bernard was saying. He sounded upset.

The same way Sandra would be when she heard. He had purposely not said Jasmine’s name in front of her for that very reason. Sandra had thrown Jasmine up to him for years.

“I know I was your second choice,” she said whenever they had a fight. “Do you have any idea what it’s like living in that woman’s shadow? It was bad enough when Jasmine was alive. But now I have to contend with her ghost?”

He had tried to reassure Sandra but the truth was, he’d never gotten over Jasmine and doubted he ever would. And now her car had been found.

“What is it?” Sandra asked coming down the hall. She was looking at him as if she’d seen him pale, had noticed the tremor in his hand clutching the phone. Sweat broke out under his arms. He worried she could smell the fear on him.

“They found her car in an old barn near Antelope Flats,” Bernard was saying on the other end of the line.

Kerrington said nothing. He’d checked out the town when Jasmine had told him her plans to marry the sheriff. He’d laughed in her face. He’d known she would never go through with it.

“What?” Sandra demanded. She was standing directly in front of him now, her eyes locked on his face as if she could see through him, always had been able to.

Sometimes he forgot that Sandra had known Jasmine probably as well as anyone. She and mousy little Patty Franklin had been Jasmine’s roommates at Montana State University in Bozeman. Jasmine had gone there on a whim after she’d already worked her way through all the men at several other universities, he thought bitterly.

Sandra had been the opposite of Jasmine, tall and slender, her hair dark like her eyes. She’d been available and he’d needed someone to use to make Jasmine jealous. Jasmine would never have believed it if he’d dated Patty the Pathetic, as Bernard called her.

“What?” Sandra demanded again, practically spitting in his face.

“They’ve found Jasmine’s car,” he said, knowing it would be impossible to keep something like this from her.

He’d expected the green-eyed monster to rear her ugly head. Instead, Sandra seemed stunned. She leaned against the wall, her face stony and remote.

“Sandra is there?” Bernard said with obvious disgust.

Where else had Bernard expected her to be? She was his wife, although Kerrington couldn’t even guess where she’d been spending a lot of her time lately. He was hit with the most ridiculous thought. That the man Sandra had been seeing behind his back was Bernard. The two deserved each other, no doubt about that. But they couldn’t stand to be in the same room together.

He rubbed a hand over his face and turned his back to Sandra to look in the hall mirror. He felt a need to assure himself and he’d always been reassured by what he saw in the mirror, as long as he didn’t look too deeply.

Jasmine used to say he was classically tall, dark and handsome. Only she’d made it sound as if he were a cliché. He’d even overheard her and her brother Bernard refer to him as her “mindless pretty boy.”

He shook off the memory, replacing it with a more pleasant one. Jasmine naked and in his arms begging for more.

“I’m flying out tonight,” Bernard was saying. “I think you and I should talk before I go, don’t you? The cops are going to be asking a lot more questions. I think we need to get our stories straight so we tell them the same thing we did seven years ago.”

Kerrington swore softly under his breath. It had been so long, he’d thought all of this was behind them. He should have known Jasmine’s car would eventually turn up. Wasn’t that what he’d hoped? Just not now, not after all this time.

“I’m going, too,” he whispered into the phone as he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Sandra had gone into the living room and sat down, her sour hatred of Jasmine almost palpable.

“You should just stay home and take care of your wife,” Bernard said.

“Never mind what I should do,” Kerrington growled. Had Bernard heard something about Sandra? Is that why he was suggesting Kerrington take care of his wife? Or was that earlier thought of Bernard and Sandra closer to the truth than he’d wanted to admit? It would be just like Bernard.

“I’m flying to Montana as soon as I can get a flight,” Kerrington said, keeping his voice down, his back to Sandra and the living room. “We can talk there.”

“That’s not a smart thing to do.”

“She was my girlfriend,” Kerrington argued.

“The one who dumped you.”