Sara's Surprise (3 page)

"Valdivia's dead, you know. You're letting his ghost haunt you. You're here all alone"

"Good-bye, Kyle." she said, her voice strained. "It was good to see you again." She began backing into the forest. "Maybe someday wetake care. Take good care of yourself. You deserve all the happiness in the world. Bye."

He moved forward, grimacing with frustration. "It's not that easy, Sara. I didn't come here simply because Dinah asked me to. I didn't come just to help you. I came to fight some of my own demons too."

She smiled nervously. "Dragons, not demons. That's what I have here. Didn't you see them on the main gate? Go home. Please, go home."

"No." She was still backing; he was still advancing. "Let me inside the keep right now or I'll pester you until you do."

"I won't. Not ever."

"Then you better tighten your security."

She halted, her fists clenched, her eyes wide with amazement. "Stay off the grounds, Kyle. I didn't want to tell you this, but I have dogs. Security dogs. Rottweilers. Trained to attack."

He froze, her words a betrayal, the worst kind. Some of his sympathy for her turned to disgust, and he uttered a few stunned curses that made her wince. "You know what dogs like those can do to a person," she said softly, her voice choked. "You know."

With one last, tearful look at his ravaged face, she turned and walked away.

He wasted no time. He went to the tiny mountain town nearby, bought a tent and other gear, and by late afternoon began setting up camp not two dozen yards from the keep's forbidding gate.

Sara watched every move he made via a network of cameras hidden in the trees outside the wall. She shut the lab down temporarily, then went into the greenhouse in the cavern underneath the castle and set all the feeding, lighting, and watering systems on automatic.

Finally she went into the nursery and bent over the pink and white playpen. "Come here, sweetheart. I'm going to move you to another room."

Sara always conversed with her daughter in an adult voice, as if her words were being understood. As a result of that and all the time they spent together, ten-month-old Noelle was advanced for her age. Seated among her toys, she held up both arms and gave a dimpled grin. "Roooom."

Sara laughed softly. "You sound like inspector Clouseau in a Pink Panther movie."

"Roooom. Roooom."

That was as far as the conversation went, but Noelle chuckled gleefully as Sara set her on the carpeted floor. She immediately poked her diapered fanny in the air, pushed herself onto all fours, then into a wobbly stance, and clasped the leg of Sara's jeans.

"I should have named you Vine. Clinging Vine," Sara teased. She folded the playpen, scooped one arm around Noelle, and started from the room carrying her on one side, the playpen on the other. "Come on, Daisy." The lanky, golden-coated dog got up from its spot in a streak of sunshine by the nursery's barred window. She followed closely, tongue lolling. Sara knew that the dog would have come without a command. Where Noelle went. Daisy went. Sara's mother had often said that there would never be a more devoted baby-sitter than Daisy.

Sara paused at the door and glanced back at a framed snapshot hanging on the wall over the crib. Her mother smiled at her from under disheveled gray hair, looking both scholarly and motherly. Dr. Anna Scarborough had had a difficult time gaining respectability as a scientist back when the world had said that the mystery of the womb was the only kind of biology a woman ought to study. Nonetheless, she had managed to blaze an impressive trail in the world's scientific community by compiling extraordinary research on plants in remote areas that few other scientists had visited. Then at the relatively late age of forty she had married a fellow biologist, happily given birth to two children, and concentrated her work in the laboratory and greenhouse she built at the castle.

She had seen and done a great deal, and last Christmas eve, as a fitting climax to a serendipitous life, she had calmly served as midwife for her first grandchild. Sara had never worried about giving birth at home because Anna Scarborough and Mother Nature were old friends.

Four months later, while attending a conference of environmentalists in New York, Anna had slumped over in her chair, her seventy-year-old heart too tired to contlnue beating.

Sara would always believe that her mother had died happyin the midst of her work, with her daughter and granddaughter waiting safely back in Kentucky. But Sara also believed that the strain of having a daugther kidnapped, the months of coerced research, and the worry that Valdivia's poisonous life would taint her granddaughter's future had contributed to Anna's early death.

Sara quickly looked away from the photo on the wall. Remorse made her even more determined not to involve anyone else in her or Noelle's lives.

When she reached the security room, Sara set up the playpen and placed Noelle in it. The baby's dark eyes widened with fascination at the bank of flickering television screens on one wall. She squealed, and Daisy perked her floppy ears in curiosity.

"We're going to stay here for a while and watch Mr. Surprise," Sara told them. "And I'm going to try to decide what to do about him."

Daisy yawned and snuffled the playpen's webbed sides so that Noelle could pat a small hand to her nose, Sara gazed at the dog and felt a deep stab of guilt. Trained attack dogs, indeed .

Daisy was the only dog in the keep. She had wandered up to the gate last year, a scraggly, starving puppy with loving eyes. One of her parents might have been a golden retriever; the other had undoubtedly been something with no brains and even less coordination. Bugs were the only creatures Daisy ever menaced. She was so clumsy that she stepped on them accidentally.

Sara turned toward the video screens and sat down in a high-backed swivel chair. Her heart thudded as she watched Kyle Surprise finish setting up his camp, arranging lanterns and building a fire with a skill that spoke of much experience. The semiautomatic pistol hanging in a holster on the front of his tent indicated experience of another kind.

A quilted jacket now covered his Hawaiian shirt. He moved with decisiveness. He wasn't more than six feet tall, but he looked taller. He had the lanky agility of a runner, and seemed to get wherever he was headed in no more than one or two easy strides.

His reddish-blond hair was longer than she remembered, and tended to wisp upward around his ears and the back of his neck. She wondered if he had let it grow out to soften the effect of the scars on his face.

Sara pressed trembling fingertips to her lips and studied that face as objectively as she could. He wouldn't believe her if she told him so, but he was still an incredibly sexy man. He had never had the matinee-idol perfection that made women gape at his brother Jeopard, but his features had beenand still were strong and sensual in a way that made perfection unnecessary.

The scars were terrible, especially the jagged one that ran under his eyes and across the bridge of his nose. But his eyes. Lord, his eyes made her forget everything else. The security camera didn't do them justice. Big and dark blue, sheltered by thick blond lashes, they were still the warmest, kindest eyes she'd ever seen. How they'd kept that look despite years of dangerous and often cynical work she had never fully understood.

But then, she really didn't know Kylenot the details of his background, his likes or dislikes, his dreams. She had been sitting with Dinah McClure the day he'd shot a paper airplane over the garden wall of Valdivia's estate in Surador. He had learned somehow that their guards let them venture into the garden alone for an hour every afternoon.

Hello, Dinah McClure,
the note in the airplane had said.
This is Kyle Surprise. Remember me? Would you and your friend like to split this banana farm?

Dinah had known Kyle and Jeopard Surprise through their sister, Millie, who had been her husband's secretary. Everyone, including Millie, thought that her brothers performed routine investigations for U.S. Navy Intelligence. Until the note came sailing out of the Suradoran jungle, Dinah had had no idea that Kyle and Jeopard were agents for a special hostage-retrieval group called Audubon.

Yes. Please help us
, Dinah had scribbled back, using one of the tooth-marked pens Sara always carried to jot down lists and ideas.

For the whole hour they'd traded airplanes with Kyle, telling him how Valdivia had kidnapped Sara in Florida and how Dinah had innocently gotten kidnapped by association; how Valdivia was making Sara work on a herbicide for military use; how Dinah had recently given birth to the baby she'd been carrying when Valdivia took her hostage.

For the first time in months they'd had hope of escaping. The next day they had exchanged more notes with Kyle, and a plan had been devised, but before he could put it into action he was captured by Valdivia's men.

Sara would never forget her first face-to-face meeting with Kyle Surprise. Like some kind of prize animal on display, he was chained by the ankle to a fountain in the courtyard of Valdlvla's hacienda.

"Dr. Scarborough, I presume," Kyle had said with a jaunty lilt to his voice, though his eyes had scanned her with serious, almost startled interestthe same way she looked at him. They flirted outrageously, both trying to distract the other from the tense situation at hand, but Sara felt a deeper bond, one unlike anything she'd ever known before. Dinah stood nearby, silent, as if she knew that a special and private communion was taking place.

Kyle waited for Valdivia's wrath with fearless aplomb. He stood calmly in the sunny courtyard that day, a prisoner anticipating an ugly fate yet capable of offering reassurance to Sara. He was a hero beyond anything she'd ever imagined. At the last moment he took her hand, kissed it, and made her promise to name a plant after hima perennial, he told her, with a big stem.

Her heart breaking, Sara hugged him and begged him to forgive her for beingeven innocentlythe cause of his predicament. He answered by drawing her into a fierce embrace, then kissing her. It was one of those moments that makes a small sanctuary in time, a mingling of heightened emotions and sensations that becomes an indelible memory, and she offered him everything in her soul.

Seconds later Valdivia walked into the courtyard. She told Valdivia that she'd do no more work on the herbicide if he harmed Kyle Surprise. Valdlvia had simply smiled and pointed toward Dinah, who held her new-born baby, Katie. "You can protect one or the other," Valdivia said. "Either Mr. Surprise or Dinah's child. You choose."

As Dinah stiffened with horror and Sara took an outraged swing at Valdivia's jaw, Kyle shoved them both into the arms of Valdivia's men. "Sara chooses to protect the baby," he told Valdivia.