The Inheritance Read online

  She could definitely get used to this.

  The man was watching her in the rearview mirror. Holly became aware of his gaze, and she peered through the dividing glass at the deep green eyes reflected above the windshield. There was in them an unmistakable hint of humor. She stared, holding her gaze to his somewhat longer than absolutely necessary. Then she grinned, winked, raised her glass toward him in a silent toast, and turned to look through the tinted glass beside her at the rainy Long Island landscape. This held no appeal, she soon realized. She looked through the small selection of compact discs: classical music and jazz, neither of which interested her. She glanced briefly at the telephone, wondering which of her few friends or relations would be most impressed by her calling them from a limousine. Mom and Dad? Rhonda and Mrs. Newman at the travel agency?

  Oh, please! she admonished herself. She was just being silly. Smiling at her gaucherie, she took another sip of the delicious wine, settled back in the seat, and reflected on the amazing series of events that had brought her here today, all the way from warm, sunny southern California to rainy, gray New York.

  He drove through the rain along the Long Island Expressway toward the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, glancing up occasionally to observe his passenger in the mirror. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

  She was aware of his gaze, he noted. At one point she actually raised her wineglass in a silent toast and winked at him before looking away again. It was that wink, accompanied by the irresistible, insouciant grin, that sealed his fate. Here was a woman unlike any he had ever known. Tall, graceful, obviously intelligent—and very, very rich. Oh, he’d been with rich women—several, in fact—but nothing on her scale.

  Off limits, he could hear the voice of reason saying as he flipped the control for the windshield wipers from low to high and switched on the headlights in the gathering twilight. Do not touch. Don’t even think about it. She is your employer now, your entire family’s employer.…

  But, of course, he was already thinking about it. He was doing more than thinking. He was here.

  His father, who would be this young woman’s usual chauffeur, was in bed with the flu, under Dr. Bell’s strict instructions not to get out until the fever subsided. That’s why he was here now, in the first place. Under ordinary circumstances, he would not have had his first glimpse of her until Thursday, when she arrived at the house in Connecticut. Until then she was staying at the apartment in the city.

  He glanced again in the rearview mirror and wondered if, perhaps, he could talk Da into letting him come for her on Thursday. Da’s uniform fit him well enough. And it wasn’t as if he had other things to do. Between jobs again, as he’d informed his mother and Da when he’d arrived on the family doorstep last week. Fired again, his mother had corrected him, frowning briefly before taking the prodigal into her arms and ushering him into the gatehouse where his parents lived with his sister, Dora. The gatehouse in which he and Dora had grown up. Hell, he’d been born in the gatehouse at Randall one winter night twenty-eight years ago. He’d never expected to be back there now. He’d expected to leave Randall House behind him a long time ago.

  But now all that had changed. Now she had arrived.

  So now, of course, he had come back.

  He glanced at her reflection again, forcing himself to smile, just in case she noticed. No sense in giving away the game now, before it had officially begun. Pressing his lips together in grim determination, he eased the big car expertly over to the left, into the fast lane.

  The fast lane.…

  He nodded to himself as the car increased in speed through the early evening traffic into New York City. He couldn’t wait to get there. He couldn’t wait for the game to begin.

  It was the letter that had begun it, in June, five months ago. Holly remembered the day clearly: hot, dry, the air visibly shimmering above the highway and stretches of parched desert that surrounded the Coachella Valley, where she had lived her entire life.

  She’d grown up in Indio, the largest town in that remote section of the country, known primarily for the raceway that was the site of a rather famous annual event. Three miles west of the town of Coachella, “America’s Date Capital,” and twenty miles east of Palm Springs. Her mom, Mary, owned an interior decorating shop in downtown Indio, and her dad, Ben, was an executive at the California Date Company in Coachella.

  Holly had gone to Palm View Elementary and Valley View High before leaving home for four years to attend the University of California in San Diego. She’d come home to Indio after graduation, but she didn’t stay with her parents for long. She found a job at Explorers Travel Agency in Palm Springs, and she’d taken an apartment there with Rhonda Metz, one of her fellow agents. She’d been there for three years now; working a little, playing a lot, dating a rather dull succession of men—and wondering what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. She’d majored in English at the university, but she didn’t particularly want to write or work in publishing. If she were honest with herself, she knew, she would admit that she was lazy. She didn’t like work, period, including Explorers Travel Agency.

  Ironically, her biggest desire in life was to be rich enough to become one of her own clients. She wanted to travel, to see the world. London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Sydney: she sent others to those places all the time, but she had never seen them. There was a big poster, a gorgeous photo of a beach resort in Crete, on the wall beside her desk at the agency. She constantly found herself staring at it, dreaming of the beautiful Mediterranean so far from southern California, wanting to be there as she had never wanted anything else.…

  Then, as if by magic, the letter had arrived.

  She had just returned home from the travel agency that afternoon five months ago. Rhonda was having dinner with her new boyfriend, so the little, two-bedroom “bachelorette pad,” as they called it, was empty and quiet. She’d collected the mail from the box in the lobby before going inside.

  She’d noticed the letter immediately. Shuffling through the usual assortment of bills and brochures, she stopped when she came to the white, business-sized envelope with her name and her Indio address neatly typed on the front. Her mom had crossed out the typed address, written Holly’s present one, and sent it on. The words “personal and confidential” were typed in a lower corner, and there was no return address of any kind. The postmark was from New York City.

  Inside it was another envelope; small, pale blue, with only her name, Holly Smith, written in a small, elegant hand across the front. The engraved return address was on the back flap:

  Alicia Randall Wainwright

  Randall House

  Randall, Connecticut 06429

  She’d held the envelope up to her face and sniffed: lavender. Alicia Randall Wainwright. She’d never heard the name before, and she wondered who the woman might be. Obviously rich, she decided. How else could you explain the woman, the house, and the town itself all bearing the same name?

  It was a rather long letter, several pages in the same beautiful hand that had written her name on the blue envelope. As she began to read, she experienced a series of small shocks that added up, as she continued, to the biggest shock of her life.

  Randall House

  June 22

  Dear Ms. Smith,

  My name is Alicia Wainwright. We don’t know each other, but I am writing to you with certain information of a very personal nature. It will definitely come as a surprise to you, and I cannot think of any delicate way to go about it. But I assure you that, as they said many years ago when I was a young woman, the information is “to your advantage.”

  Let me begin with the biggest surprise. Your name is not Holly Smith. It is Holly Randall. There, I’ve stated it, plain and simple. There really was no other way. Allow me to explain:

  Your parents, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, adopted you when you were an infant. Before you were born, actually. I will not go into the particulars of it now, nor will I explain the circumstances surrounding your adop
tion. I will only say that your parents—I mean Mr. and Mrs. Smith—are unaware of those circumstances. Part of the deal your real mother made with the person who arranged the adoption was that you and your new parents would never be bothered, would never be approached by our family. Now I must break that promise—a promise I, personally, never gave—and I trust that you will soon understand why I do so.

  I am your great-aunt. My brother—your grandfather, James Randall—died fifteen years ago, leaving the Randall family fortune to me. But he made certain stipulations in his will regarding the settlement of the estate in the event of my death, and I wish to honor them. Those stipulations involve you.

  It has now become necessary for me to approach you. I am not in good health: I don’t know how long I have, but last February it became imperative that I find you. For reasons I don’t wish to explain at this time, I could not approach your natural mother to learn your present whereabouts. It took two private detectives in my employ the better part of four months to find the person who had arranged for your adoption. That person has agreed to forward this letter to you, wherever you are. I have been told only that your name is now Holly Smith.

  Well, Holly Smith, allow me to tell you that you are the principal heir to a great fortune. I know nothing of your life, or of your present circumstances, but I can only assume that this will be good news. I can’t imagine it being anything else!

  I must make a request of you now, and, as we have never met, you may regard it as an imposition. But I must request it, anyway. Please do not reveal any of what I’m telling you to anyone, even Mr. and Mrs. Smith (I am assuming that’s their name), until you and I have spoken further. I promise to tell you everything: who your real parents were, the necessity of your adoption, and the particulars of your inheritance. But I must do that in person. I cannot tell you these things in a letter.

  My address is on the envelope. You may write if you wish, or you may call me at 203-555-4300. I will arrange to have you brought to me, or, if you prefer, I shall come to you. If, for any reason, you do not wish to contact me or hear more of this, please call my attorney, Gilbert Henderson, in New York City, as other arrangements will have to be made concerning the Randall estate. Mr. Henderson’s telephone number is 212-555-1000.

  Holly, it was your grandfather’s dying wish that you inherit the Randall fortune, and now it is my wish, as well. Please, please get in touch with me, and soon. I live for the day when I will hear from you. Until then I remain

  Yours sincerely,

  Alicia Randall Wainwright

  Holly sat back against the cool leather backseat in the limousine, shaking her head at the irony as she remembered the phone call she’d finally made, last August. She’d waited until then, but she hadn’t called Mrs. Wainwright.

  She’d ultimately called the lawyer, Mr. Henderson. He had been surprised to receive the call, of course, but he had quickly recovered, and he had given Holly the inevitable news in a low, clear voice that conveyed his professional and personal sadness. He had just that morning attended her great-aunt Alicia’s funeral at Randall House. She had died of a heart attack, while swimming, three days before.

  Then he had told her the rest.

  And now, three months and several phone calls later, here she was in a limousine, on her way to New York City and, from there, to Randall, Connecticut. Holly Randall, new owner of fabulous Randall House; a twenty-room house in Palm Beach, Florida; apartments in New York City, Los Angeles, and London; stocks, bonds, real estate, and substantial shares in the National Food Corporation; several “important pieces” of art and jewelry; several cars, three horses, an eighty-five-foot yacht, a sailboat, and round-the-clock access to a National Food Corporation private jet. And—oh, yes, the lawyer had quickly added—a custom-built Steinway grand piano in the music room at Randall House that had originally belonged to, and been composed on by, Rachmaninoff. Total value: well, Mr. Henderson wasn’t sure, exactly, but it was somewhere in the vicinity of six hundred million.

  She sipped the last of the wine as the car made its silent, smooth way across the bridge into the city. Hell, she thought, the piano alone would be worth more than most human beings will ever see.…

  No. She wouldn’t think about all that. Not now. Now, she would just get through the next step, meeting the lawyer at his office tomorrow morning. There was going to be some sort of test, he’d told her, to assure everyone that she was really Holly Randall. But he hadn’t told her the nature of the test.

  She hadn’t brought up the subject with her parents in Indio, in accordance with Mrs. Wainwright’s wish. In fact, they had no idea where she was now, or what she was doing. A vacation, she’d told them. A trip to New York City, transportation courtesy of the travel agency. They had accepted that. They always accepted whatever she told them. Ben and Mary Smith were good and trusting people.

  But they were not her parents.

  She’d known that, at least, for quite a long time, ever since Ben’s accident in the date fields six years ago, when she was eighteen. He’d been cut on the wrist by a date thorn, a sharp, clawlike edge of the palm bark that surrounds and protects the fruit at the top of the tree, and it had severed a vein. He’d been rushed to the emergency room, where Mary and Holly had soon joined him. He’d lost a lot of blood, and he needed an immediate transfusion. Both women had offered to donate blood. A quick check of the family’s medical records showed that neither Mary nor Holly was eligible to do so, and the blood was taken from the hospital’s stored supply.

  That’s when she’d found out. Her blood type was O positive, which didn’t come close to matching that of either parent. While the doctors stitched up her father in the emergency room, Mary sat her down on a hard, cold chair in the cold waiting room and told her. They didn’t know who her real parents were. They’d gotten her through an adoption agency in Los Angeles, which had represented an anonymous party in New York. That was all Mary knew. Ben was sterile, she explained, had been all his life, and they’d always wanted a child.

  She’d assured her mother that it was all right, that it really didn’t make any difference to her. And that had been the truth.

  Until now.…

  The car came to a sudden stop. Holly blinked and looked around. The rain had ceased, and the limousine had pulled up in front of a big building on Central Park South. A liveried doorman was opening the door for her. She put the empty wineglass in the bar compartment and got out of the car.

  The doorman grinned at her. “Welcome to New York, Ms. Randall.”

  She stared at him, then at the handsome chauffeur who was now removing her suitcase from the trunk, then back.

  Ms. Randall.

  She produced a warm, dazzling smile, hoping it concealed her surprise. “Why, thank you.”

  Then the chauffeur was leading her inside, across a beautiful lobby to an elevator. Before any of the opulence could fully register in her mind, they were rising swiftly, silently up to what had to be the top floor, or close to it.

  Holly smiled at the chauffeur as they ascended. “Thank you, Mr.—umm.…” She trailed off feebly, feeling the color burning her cheeks.

  His grin transformed the rugged handsomeness of his features, and his bright green eyes flashed. “It’s Kevin. Kevin Jessel, at your service.” He doffed his chauffeur’s cap and executed a small, formal bow. “My father is your chauffeur and resident mechanic at Randall House, but he’s in bed with the flu, so he sent me. My mother is the housekeeper there. My parents and grandparents have done for the Randalls since before you and I were born.”

  Holly continued to stare. “Then that car, that limousine, isn’t—rented?”

  “No, ma’am, it’s yours. And it’ll be back for you on Thursday, to take you to Randall.”

  She was beginning to feel numb inside. “I see. And—will you be driving it?”

  He grinned some more, fingering the gray cap in his hands. “It would be a pleasure.”

  She smiled back at him. He was watching
her, she noticed, and she wondered if any of her racing thoughts had shown on her face.

  They emerged from the elevator into a little foyer where the single door stood open. An attractive, middle-aged African-American woman in a black uniform and white apron stood there, smiling at her.

  “Ms. Randall, this is Mrs. Wells, your New York housekeeper,” Kevin said as he stepped into the apartment and set the suitcase down.

  “Welcome, Ms. Randall,” the woman said.

  Ms. Randall. Again.

  “Thank you.” Holly smiled as Mrs. Wells helped her remove her coat. Then the housekeeper bustled off, murmuring something about dinner being ready soon, and Holly stepped forward into the huge penthouse apartment with a terrace overlooking Central Park. She tried mightily not to stare around at everything, acutely aware that Kevin Jessel was still hovering in the doorway, watching her. She turned to face him again, smiling to mask her sense of wonderment.

  “Anything else, Ms. Randall?” he asked.

  “Yes, one more thing—Kevin. I want you to call me Holly.”

  He looked confused. “You mean, now?”

  “I mean always. It’s my name. Holly Smith.”

  He grinned once more as he twirled the cap in his hands. “Okay, I’ll call you Holly if you insist—”

  “I insist.”

  “But you’re not Holly Smith. Not anymore. You’re Holly Randall now. I’ll be back for you at two o’clock Thursday afternoon. Good night—Holly.”

  With that, he was gone. After a moment, Holly took a deep breath, walked slowly into the beautiful living room, and sank down onto a couch.

  It’s all too much, she thought as she stared around at the apartment and the terrace and Central Park in the background. I’ll never be able to get used to this. I won’t be able to sleep in this place. I won’t even be able to eat!