Critics have fallen under the spell of Jude Deveraux’s New York Times bestseller—her most magical novel
Forever…
“Irresistibly eerie, yet decidedly a love story, Deveraux’s offering bursts with high-spirited repartee and bizarre but bewitching characters.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] modern fairy tale…. This is Deveraux at her most pleasurable.”
—Booklist
“Exciting…filled with humor, romance, and the paranormal. Settle in for some exhilarating reading!”
—Romantic Times
…and her other sparkling bestsellers
Wild Orchids
“Incredible, wonderful, fantastic, superb are just a few adjectives I can use to describe Ms. Deveraux’s ingenuity in the penning of Wild Orchids…. It’s an unforgettable read.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“This is a spooky, scary story that will keep you on the edge of your chair. A not-to-be-missed novel.”
—Rendezvous
“Forget garden-variety ghosts and poltergeist—the devil himself makes an appearance in bestseller Deveraux’s latest romantic suspense novel…. [Deveraux] does a superb job of building up to her chilling conclusion.”
—Publishers Weekly
The Mulberry Tree
“Deveraux’s touch is gold, and her protagonist combines innocent appeal with wry experience in a way that readers will surely find irresistible.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A twisted, unpredictable story…indicative of Deveraux’s penchant for telling fresh, new stories each time out.”
—Romantic Times
“Mystery, romance, and good cooking converge in [The Mulberry Tree] by perennial bestseller Deveraux.”
—People
The Summerhouse
“Deveraux is at the top of her game…. [She] uses the time-travel motif that was so popular in A Knight in Shining Armor, successfully updating it with a female buddy twist that will make fans smile.”
—Booklist
“Entertaining summer reading.”
—The Port St. Lucie News (FL)
“Jude Deveraux’s writing is enchanting and exquisite in The Summerhouse.”
—BookPage
“Once again, Deveraux gives us a book we can’t put down.”
—Rendezvous
“Jude Deveraux takes a fascinating theory and runs with it…a very compelling and intriguing story.”
—Romantic Times
Temptation
“An exciting historical romance that centers on the early– twentieth century women’s rights movement…. Filled with excitement, action, and insight…. A nonstop thriller.”
—Harriet Klausner
“[A] satisfying story.”
—Booklist
“Deveraux[’s] lively pace and happy endings…will keep readers turning pages.”
—Publishers Weekly
High Tide
A Romantic Times Top Pick
“High Tide is packed full of warmth, humor, sensual tension, and exciting adventure. What more could you ask of a book?”
—Romantic Times
“Fast-paced, suspenseful…. [A] sassy love story.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Exciting…. Fans of romantic suspense will gain much pleasure.”
—Midwest Book Review
“[A] fantastic read.”
—Rendezvous
Books by Jude Deveraux
The Velvet Promise
Highland Velvet
Velvet Song
Velvet Angel
Sweetbriar
Counterfeit Lady
Lost Lady
River Lady
Twin of Fire
Twin of Ice
The Temptress
The Raider
The Princess
The Awakening
The Maiden
The Taming
The Conquest
A Knight in Shining Armor
Wishes
Mountain Laurel
The Duchess
Eternity
Sweet Liar
The Invitation
Remembrance
The Heiress
Legend
An Angel for Emily
The Blessing
High Tide
Temptation
The Summerhouse
The Mulberry Tree
Forever…
Wild Orchids
Forever and Always
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Deveraux, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-9163-1
ISBN-10: 0-7434-9163-7
First Pocket Books paperback edition September 2003
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Darci
Chapter One
HE WAS LYING. I DIDN’T KNOW HOW MUCH OR ABOUT what, but I was sure he was lying.
Also, he was acting. More than that, he was playing the character he portrayed on TV, the shy, likable, brilliant detective, Paul Travis. The gorgeous-but-doesn’t-know-it Paul Travis. He was dipping his head down and glancing up at me as though he expected me to swoon over the sheer beauty of him, but I wasn’t even close. When you’re married to a man like Adam Montgomery, other men don’t compare.
I sat down across from him and began concentrating to try to force him to stop acting and tell me the truth.
This wasn’t what I wanted to be doing but my mother had sent me a letter. It was the first letter I’d ever received from her so of course it had an impact on me. It said, “You owe me.” Stuck in the letter was a photo of the actor, Lincoln Aimes.
The letter puzzled me for days. Of course I knew what she meant: You owe me for saving your life, so pay me back. But what did she want me to do with the beautiful black actor?
Was my mother asking me to do what I could to get the man to be her next lover? That didn’t make sense because my mother certainly didn’t need anyone’s help in getting a man, even a man much younger than she was.
After I received the letter and photo, I got on the Internet and ordered the DVDs of the first four seasons of Lincoln Aimes’s TV show, Missing. The character Paul Travis didn’t appear until the sixth show of the first season and then only in a small role, but he was such a hit that they asked him to become a leading character. At least that’s what the brochure that came with the DVDs said. When I searched the Internet I read that the actor had had problems finding roles that cast him as anything other than a body and a face.
Poor guy, I thought. We should all have such problems.
It seemed that Lincoln Aimes wanted to play meaty parts. You know, something like a society outcast, the guy who was given bad parents and poverty, but manages to rise above that and become the first American president with no scandal attached to him.
Instead, casting agents took one look at Lincoln Aimes’s perfect face, his perfect body, and cast him…well, as a sort of dumb blond. With honey-colored skin.
I read that Lincoln Aimes too
k a few roles, none of which he liked, then was out of work for a couple of years. I guess he got hungry because he finally accepted a small part on the hit detective series Missing, which each week looked for a missing person. After just one appearance, he became one of the three main characters.
What made the role work was that, in a way, it made fun of Lincoln Aimes’s exceptional beauty. When the cast was working on a case, the character of Paul Travis was all business. He unraveled clues, was great at sizing people up, and had a real knack for putting himself into the mind of a missing person.
What he didn’t know was that behind his back, everyone was talking about how gorgeous he was. It was a running joke throughout the show. The other characters constantly used him for such things as getting the angry woman in records to put their requests on the top of the pile. Paul Travis, or just Travis, as everyone called him, would hand the woman the request, speak to her in a businesslike way, then walk away. The camera would show her sighing and saying, “Yes, Travis,” then immediately feeding the info into the computer. The next second she’d take the head off some ugly guy who complained that he’d been waiting for the same information for three days.
The whole premise was hokey and bordered on the ridiculous, but it enlivened a show that was like too many others already on TV. It was fun to see witnesses do double takes when they saw Travis. And it was fun to tune in each week to see what the writers came up with to show off Lincoln Aimes’s beauty.
Yes, it was a good show, and I, like most of America, watched it regularly. Of course no one believed a person could be so good-looking and not know it, but it was a nice thought. It made the viewer smile when Travis said in wonder,“That man offered me a job as a male stripper. Weird, huh?” We viewers chuckled with the characters in the show. And each week we tuned in to see if maybe they were going to tell us something about Travis’s personal life—but they never did. We saw other characters’ wives, husbands, apartments, kids. But never anything at all about Travis’s personal life. If it didn’t happen to him at work, it was never shown.
So now the actor who played Paul Travis was sitting in my living room, looking at me shyly, as though he thought I’d believe he was who he played. But he was lying to me.
I stared at him hard and concentrated, and was soon rewarded with seeing him raise his head and look at me straight-on, with no head-ducking.
“Your mother said you could help me find my son.” He had to take a deep breath to get the words to come out, and I could feel that he was very nervous. About what? I wondered.
As for the child, I wondered about that. From what I knew of the actor, he wasn’t married, never had been, and had no kids.
Of course he had a girlfriend: Alanna Talbert, the darling of the screen, “the woman most men wanted to have an affair with,” as some poll said. She was tall, thin, had cheekbones that could cut glass, and was as perfect physically as Lincoln Aimes was. She, too, was African-American.
“I didn’t know you had a son,” I said as I stalled for time. I wanted to know how much my mother had told him about me.
“Neither did I,” he said, then gave me another look in the character of Paul Travis.
“You want to cut that out and tell me what it is you want?” I snapped at him.
He blinked at me a few times and I could feel his consternation. Obviously, he wasn’t used to being spoken to like that by a heterosexual woman. The truth was, I have certain, well, abilities that make me able to see…I hate to say that I can see “inside” a person, but I guess that’s what happens. I can’t read minds but I do have very, very strong intuition. And right now my intuition said that this man thought he could talk me into doing anything he wanted.
Maybe if I gave him an itty-bitty bit of a headache he’d stop posing, I thought. Maybe he’d tell me what he wanted, I could say no, then he’d go away. I wanted to get back to doing what I did every day, which was lie on the couch in my bedroom and concentrate on my missing husband.
“I—” he began, then stopped as he got up to walk around the living room. It was a pretty room, done in peaches, yellows, and blues. Until a year ago, it was the happiest room on earth. He looked back at me and I could feel that he’d released some of the hostility I’d sensed when I first met him, but I could still tell he thought I was someone not quite trustworthy. I couldn’t very well hold that against him, could I? Not after what that…that man had written about me. The whole world called me the Hillbilly Honey. I was the laughingstock of America. Until my husband and his sister disappeared, that is. Then I became the most hated person in America. People believed I’d murdered my husband to collect his inherited money. I told everyone, the police, the reporters, all of them, that I knew in my heart that my husband and sister-in-law were still alive, but no one listened to me.
So now here I was, alone, hiding from the world, and this man was asking me to help him find his son.
And I knew that he was either lying or hiding something big.
Linc
Chapter Two
SHE DIDN’T LOOK THE WAY I THOUGHT SHE WOULD. I expected her to be larger, more menacing. I expected to see something in her eyes that would show me the woman all of America was talking about.
I’d first heard of Darci Montgomery from Alanna. She’d tossed a thin paperback book down on the floor and said, “That poor kid.” This surprised me, as Alanna didn’t usually feel sympathy for people. Any sympathy Alanna had went to herself.
I picked up the book and looked at it. How to Snare a Billionaire was the title. I’d been so busy arguing with the producers of Missing that I was probably the only person on earth who hadn’t read the book. I’d spent weeks talking, yelling, and even begging the producers to stop with the Travis-is-beautiful crap. I said the whole thing lowered the tone of the show. CSI didn’t need such a gimmick and neither did Law and Order, so why did we have to have it? Their answer was that if you take away the jokes about Travis’s beauty all you have left is a second rate Law and Order. I came up with some different jokes they could use. How about a really stupid rookie cop? They couldn’t get rid of him because he was the commissioner’s nephew. How about a female cop who’s a stripper at night? How about a genius kid who helps solve the crimes?
One by one they shot my ideas down. Stupid brings in a stupid audience who’d not like the highly technical investigation we do on the show. Showing a woman stripper would get us taken off the network. They could show naked men, but women had to keep their clothes on. As for kids, go talk to Disney.
So, anyway, I was late reading the book that had all of America talking. It seems that some kid, a journalism major, had conned his way inside the elusive, wealthy Montgomery family enough that he was invited to join the family for a couple of weeks during the summer. He admitted in the introduction of his resulting book that his plan had been to write a tell-all about them. He wanted to sneak around and listen to fights, get the servants talking and find out about scandals. He wanted to report on extravagances that middle-class Americans could only dream about.
But after three days with the Montgomerys in their big marble mansion in Colorado, he was ready to go home. All he had to report was that they were a nice bunch of people. Yeah, they were wealthy and they had servants, but their servants were treated well and paid very well. Try as he might, he couldn’t get one of them to say anything bad about their employers.
The Montgomery kids were polite and considerate—and they didn’t own cell phones or receive Jaguars for their sixteenth birthdays.
It wasn’t until the fourth day that the writer began to see the possibility of a story. He’d already read about the great tragedy of the Montgomery family, when a child had been kidnapped and later his parents had disappeared. The child, Adam Montgomery, had been found wandering in the woods in Connecticut, so ill he nearly died, and later he remembered nothing of his ordeal. His parents were never found.
The writer stayed because this Adam Montgomery was arriving and he wanted to s
ee if the man had been affected by his childhood trauma.
The minute Adam Montgomery and his family stepped out of the car that had picked them up at the airport, the writer knew he had a story. His nose began to itch and his ears started tingling.
Adam Montgomery was a tall, distinguished-looking man, a young Charlton Heston. Beside him was his petite wife. She was very pretty, with wide-set eyes and short strawberry-blonde hair, but she had a way of staring at people that was decidedly odd.
With her were two little girls who he thought were hers, but one was her niece. Two more people got out of the car. One was a tall, elegant woman who looked downright fierce. When one of the Montgomery women reached out to touch her, the tall woman jumped back, not allowing anyone to get too near her. She backed against a man who was inches shorter than she was, but from the way he put his arm around her waist, he seemed ready to fight for her.
Days of lethargy left the writer and he decided to forget about going back to his girlfriend and to stay to see what he could find out about this odd-looking group.
What he found out was not what he expected. Yes, the story of the tall woman, Boadicea, having been held captive all her life was interesting, but all the Montgomerys were so protective they would tell him nothing. And they were just as protective of Adam’s young wife. Try as he might, the writer could get nothing out of any of them, but he knew there was a story there.
It took days of work, but he finally found a man who’d once worked for the Montgomerys and had been fired for pilfering who was willing to talk—for a price. It seems that, besides stealing, the man had been good at listening at doors. He said that all the Montgomerys teased Darci about money and the writer had wanted to know why.
What the writer heard so dumbfounded him that he could hardly speak. It seemed that Adam had been told by a psychic that he had a sister who was being held by a witch in a coven in Connecticut. The witch had a magic mirror but it could only be read by a virgin.