Before now, she’d never had any way of confirming her suspicions about Ronan and Emily, but she’d begun to seriously question them when she’d seen the reunion between Rufus Wynter and his daughter in the newspapers two years ago. She’d realized from the timing of when Emily was supposed to have died, plus her age then and now, that it could all be connected to her own past.

  Because Emily/Mia Wynter, née Kingston, was a beautiful red-haired woman, with the most beautiful eyes, green with a surrounding ring of turquoise.

  Exactly the same hair and eye color as the baby Molly’s mother had brought home twenty years previously, whom Molly had doted on and believed to be her sister, before that baby was just as suddenly taken away from her.

  As a young child, Molly hadn’t been able to gauge how many weeks Mia had been with them. It was only as an adult that she had learned it must have been the three months unaccounted for in Mia’s life.

  “You should have stayed away from Mia and her family, Molly,” Serena Jenkins had chided her. “If you had, I wouldn’t need to be paying you a visit now.”

  It hadn’t initially been Molly’s intention to seek out Mia or Rufus. At least, she didn’t think it had…

  For almost two years after the reunion of father and daughter, and despite the aching in her chest to do so, Molly had resisted going anywhere near the newly reunited father and daughter. But it seemed that each step she took, each job offer she accepted, brought her ever closer to London. To where she knew Mia now owned and ran an animal shelter.

  Seeing the vacancy in a job agency window had been too much of a temptation for Molly to be able to resist. Nor could she bring herself to say no when Mia had offered her the job and use of the apartment above the main building.

  Because she had known with absolute certainty, just from that one meeting, that Mia Kingston was the same person Molly had once believed to be her baby sister. The reason she was so sure of that was because the moment she had met Mia again, she had been filled with the same wave of sibling love as she had felt for that baby twenty-two years previously.

  The woman who now called herself Serena Jenkins had today confirmed every horrific suspicion, and more, that Molly had ever had regarding those events in her childhood.

  The more being that the other woman had now revealed she’d used Molly’s looks and innocence as a distraction to enable her to carry out those despicable crimes.

  “Such a pity you had to grow up and lose some of that doll-like cuteness,” Serena then said in a bored voice. “You didn’t eat very much, and you were a quiet little thing, but there was simply no point in keeping you with me any longer when you could be of no further use to me.”

  Looking at the other woman, her makeup perfect, her clothes expensively tailored, and wearing those damned red-soled high-heeled shoes, had only confirmed for Molly that Sarah had simply walked away seventeen years ago to take on this other persona. That she had done so without so much as a second thought for the daughter she had left behind. The daughter who was no longer cute enough to assist her in her illegal endeavors.

  How much of this did Rufus already know?

  Because it was obvious from his guarded behavior since his arrival earlier that he knew something.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rufus could sense Molly’s reluctance as she ascended the stairs ahead of him to her apartment. The heavy way she was walking made it appear almost as if she was suffering the despair of a prisoner on her way to the gallows. Although why Molly should feel that way, he had no idea.

  Rufus still hadn’t been able to fathom what her mother was involved in. He only knew, from the way her money was hidden and that long-term bolt hole she’d had waiting for her on the Cayman Islands, that it must be something illegal.

  But Molly couldn’t possibly be implicated in those crimes. She’d been a child. Worse, she’d been a child who was eventually abandoned by that same mother.

  Until today, it seemed.

  Why Serena Jenkins had decided to come back into Molly’s life now was anyone’s guess. But the fact she had made it obvious the older woman had known exactly where her daughter was currently working and living. That she might possibly have always known where Molly was and just hadn’t given a damn.

  That was certainly no reason for Molly to ever think anyone would blame her for something her mother had or hadn’t done. In the past or now.

  Molly looked on the verge of crying by the time she turned to face him after they had both entered her apartment and Rufus had closed the door behind him.

  “You—” Rufus frowned his irritation as his cell phone vibrated in his pocket to alert him to an incoming call.

  “Don’t answer that,” Molly begged. “Let’s talk first. Please!”

  Rufus looked up from seeing his cousin’s name on the screen. “I’m sorry, but I really do need to take this,” he apologized before pressing the cell phone against his ear.

  “I now believe the payment into Serena Jenkins’s bank account seventeen years ago coincided with the disappearance of a very young baby from Northern Ireland named Ronan.” As usual, Linus lost no time in stating the facts rather than wasting any time on pleasantries.

  “What the hell…!” Rufus gasped.

  “The payment was made only a day after Sarah Harper disappeared with the baby Molly told you was her brother, also named Ronan. It’s going to take me a little longer to find where and with whom he was placed, but I will find it,” Linus assured grimly.

  Fucking hell!

  “What else did you discover?” he prompted slowly, knowing there had to be more when Linus didn’t immediately speak again or end the call.

  His cousin released a noisy breath. “A payment went into that same account the day after Emily was supposed to have died in the car crash with Beth. The amount was withdrawn again the day before we now know Emily was found abandoned in a church in Cornwall. At the moment, this is all circumstantial. But I’m also guessing that the amount of publicity after the accident, along with the photos of Beth and Emily in the newspapers, would have made it difficult to…rehome a small baby whose photo was on the front page of the nation’s newspapers.”

  “She wasn’t one of Mia’s fucking strays!” Rufus rasped furiously.

  “Sorry, Rufus, I didn’t know how else to put it,” Linus said softly. “I had my suspicions when we talked earlier, but no concrete evidence to back it up. I still haven’t put it all together yet, but those two sets of dates, at least, don’t lie. And if those two payments were made in exchange for stolen babies, then there’s a good chance the others were too.”

  Rufus’s head was spinning. His vision blurred as his eyes filled with tears. The pain gripping his chest was so severe, he really felt as if he were having a heart attack this time.

  What Linus was saying couldn’t be right. Could it? Because if it was, then that meant Sarah Harper/Serena Jenkins was responsible for the abduction of dozens of babies.

  “Since the disappearance of the babies would have been random and never in the same country or place, I’m also going out on a limb here and guessing that no sort of pattern was detected by the different authorities in those countries,” Linus added.

  If that was what Linus had deduced from the information he’d gathered so far, then Rufus didn’t doubt that was exactly what had happened. Rufus easily guessed that his cousin was only sugarcoating those facts for his benefit.

  Linus knew, Rufus’s whole family knew, that he had been looking for answers for the past two years as to how Emily could possibly have survived the car crash that killed her mother.

  It now seemed that his daughter had survived because, in all probability, someone had removed her from the car before the crash occurred.

  No, not someone, he realized.

  Molly’s mother.

  The same woman who had now suddenly decided to appear back in London and visit her daughter after an absence of seventeen years.

  Rufus desperately needed to know the reason why she had.

  Molly watched Rufus intently as he listened to whatever his caller was saying to him.

  Which was why she saw the expression of complete shock on his face, followed seconds later by all the color draining from his suddenly hollow cheeks.

  He’d also staggered back a couple of steps before putting his hand on the back of the couch to maintain his balance as he continued listening.

  Molly’s breath got stuck in her throat as she watched the increasing horror in Rufus’s expression.

  She couldn’t know for certain, but she suspected, by the fact Rufus somehow already knew her mother was in London and that she had also visited Molly at the shelter earlier today, that whoever was talking to him now was telling him some, if not all, of what her mother had today admitted concerning the events of twenty-two years ago.

  Information that would reveal how the behavior of Molly’s mother had impacted so personally on both Rufus and his wife and their daughter, Emily.

  How it was still doing so all these years later.

  It was everything Molly would have told Rufus and Mia in the letter she had intended to leave for them to read after she was gone.

  She immediately tensed, like a deer caught in headlights, when Rufus suddenly glanced sharply across the room to where she stood.

  She flinched when she saw his now-gray cheeks were wet with tears and his eyes were dark and bottomless pits of pain.

  And accusation?

  Yes, because it was exactly as she had feared it would be.

  Even if Rufus didn’t blame her for her mother’s actions once he knew the whole truth of what had happened, he would most certainly never be able to look at Molly again without seeing her connection to the woman who had stolen his daughter from him twenty-two years ago. Along with all the pain and despair that had followed as a result of that abduction.

  “Where is your mother now?” Rufus demanded the moment he ended the call. “Do not even attempt to say you don’t know,” he warned her harshly.

  “But I don’t.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  There. This was what Molly had known would happen if Rufus were to learn even some of the events of the past. Which he now seemed to have done, judging by the suspicion and distrust she could clearly see in those haunted dark eyes.

  Molly swallowed before speaking. “Who just called you?”

  “My cousin, Linus.”

  She nodded. “And told you what?”

  “That your mother is the person responsible for stealing my daughter from me,” he bit out fiercely.

  Molly drew in a gasping breath at the blunt delivery of that statement.

  “That because of her actions,” Rufus continued in a hard voice, “she’s also responsible for my wife dying in a car crash, probably when Beth tried to follow her in an effort to retrieve Emily after your mother took her.”

  Molly gave a low groan of pain at the stark truth of both these accusations.

  Rufus’s eyes glittered without a hint of pity for her obvious distress. “And I sure as hell don’t believe it’s a coincidence that out of all the places you could have chosen to find work in London, you ended up seeking employment at the animal shelter owned by Mia. Who, it now seems, was one of your mother’s victims!”

  No, of course it wasn’t a coincidence. But how to explain her actions without also seeming guilty was Molly’s problem.

  “One of them?” she prompted cagily, still not sure how much Rufus knew.

  “Linus is convinced that your mother has abducted other babies over the last thirty years. He believes they could have been sold to couples wealthy enough to pay her price. Let’s hope it’s nothing more nefarious than that, because from the increasing deposits made into her offshore bank account, it could possibly be as many as two babies a year,” Rufus bit out.

  Molly was horrified. She had suspected something like this after her conversation with Serena Jenkins earlier today. But she couldn’t even begin to absorb the number of babies Rufus was now saying her mother had taken.

  “Is that what happened with Ronan?” Her mother had implied as much earlier, but Molly had refused to give her the satisfaction of asking for details.

  “We believe so,” Rufus answered her. “Linus used the dates and times you gave me to trace Ronan’s origins and disappearance back to Northern Ireland. I have every confidence that by the end of the day, Linus will have also discovered exactly who adopted Ronan.”

  “His real parents need that information. I only need to know he’s safe and happy.” It was all she had ever wanted to know in regard to Mia too.

  But once she’d met the other woman, it had been impossible not to stay and enjoy her friendship for a few weeks or months.

  “I had only begun to guess at some of this before today,” she told Rufus awkwardly.

  “But your mother confirmed it when the two of you spoke earlier?”

  “Some of it, yes,” she admitted.

  His eyes glittered. “And you didn’t think all this should have been the first thing you told me when I walked in the door earlier?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Molly avoided looking at the accusation she knew would be in Rufus’s eyes. “I didn’t expect to see you before I left. But I did have every intention of telling you all that I know in the letter I was going to leave.”

  “That’s something I suppose!”

  “Rufus, please⁠—”

  “Unfortunately for you, I decided to come here to see you after Linus told me your mother was currently in England.”

  “Don’t ever call her that again!” Molly shuddered. “She was never a good mother to me, but what I now know about her makes me want to scrub every bit of her DNA from my body.”

  Rufus’s narrowed gaze lingered on her packed bag leaning against one of the chairs before he turned to look at her accusingly. “You really were just going to write that letter and leave?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave a weary shake of his head. “Which tells me you didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth.”

  “We’ve had one night together, Rufus, and you haven’t exactly been eager to bare your soul to me either!”

  He winced. “That isn’t true, on my part, at least. I’ve told you more, shared more of myself with you, than I have with anyone else during the last twenty-two years.”

  He had, Molly realized when she thought of some of their conversations. “And I’m so grateful for your trust in me. I really am. It’s the reason I decided I couldn’t bear to see your face when you learned the truth about me.”

  “I still don’t know all of it,” he scorned. “For instance, I have no idea what possible reason you could have had for coming to work at the animal shelter in the first place.”

  She released a shuddering breath. “I wanted to see Mia for myself, to know if she truly was who I thought she was.”

  “And who was that?”

  “The baby sister I cared for so lovingly for three months.” Molly choked out her words.

  “You cared for her?”

  She nodded. “My mother was never very…maternal. She couldn’t stand it when the baby cried, so I did all that I could to ensure Emily was too contented to become a bother.”

  “You were the one who fed and looked after Mia?” he prompted incredulously.

  “My mother obviously made up the bottles of food and such, but otherwise, yes.”

  “That fucking bitch!”

  Molly couldn’t argue with the description, knowing he could have used much worse ones and still have been accurate.

  “I was devastated when baby Emily disappeared as suddenly as she had appeared,” she revealed shakily. “Then, twenty years later, I saw the articles in the newspapers about how you and your daughter Emily, a young woman who was now known as Mia, had been reunited after being separated for the same twenty years. I accepted employment at the animal shelter because once I’d met Mia, I realized immediately she really was that baby sister I had loved so much as a child, and I wanted to spend a little time with her before I had to move on. I had—have no ulterior motive other than that,” she insisted. “I just wanted to be with Mia again for a short time.”

  “And your relationship with me?”

  Her cheeks blazed with heat. “That was unexpected.”

  A nerve pulsed in his jaw. “You seriously expect me to believe you became such good friends with Mia, went to bed with me, because you couldn’t help but like both of us?” he bit out coldly.

  “I do like both of you,” Molly protested. “Very much. Admittedly, it came as a surprise how attracted I am to you. But I assure you, my friendship and affection for Mia isn’t faked either,” she added softly. “My intention was always only to work here for a couple of months and then move on, nothing more sinister than that, I promise you. Serena Jenkins suddenly appeared here today before I was able to do that. She threatened that if her crimes should ever become known, she would implicate me in them if I didn’t leave here immediately.”

  Rufus made a strangled sound in his throat that could have been caused by any emotion from despair to rage. “How could you possibly be implicated when you were only a child yourself?”

  Because Sarah/Serena had ruthlessly used Molly’s “cuteness” when stealing those babies! “She has a way of twisting things and facts to suit her purpose.”

  He frowned. “I’m starting to wonder if your mother might not be a psychopath.”

  “It’s certainly one explanation for her coldness and lack of any empathy for the pain she must have caused so many couples over the years.” Yet another reason for Molly to wish she didn’t share any of the woman’s DNA.

  “Did you never ask her, twenty-two years ago, where the baby you loved so much had gone?”

  “I’m sure I would have done,” Molly’s answer sounded defensive. “But I was only five years old, and she was my mother, so whatever answer she gave me, I would have had no choice but to accept it.” She released a shaky breath. “I honestly never suspected she was guilty of anything other than neglect and disinterest in me until two years ago, when news of your reunion with Mia appeared in the newspapers, and I began to suspect the truth.”

 

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