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Loveknot
Marisa Carroll

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Marisa Carroll for her contribution to the TYLER series.

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Joanna Kosloff for her contribution to the concept for the TYLER series.

CONTENTS

Cover

Back Cover Text

Dear Reader

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

TIMBERLAKE.

Alyssa Ingalls Baron caught her breath at the sight of the imposing main lodge with its gabled dormer windows and twin fieldstone chimneys as the drive curved around to front the wide veranda.

Unconsciously her hands tightened on the steering wheel. “This is what it was like when my mother was alive.” She spoke the words aloud, the sound of her voice a talisman against the nervous beat of blood in her ears. “This is the way I remember it in my dreams.”

No one was sitting in the passenger seat of the car to hear her words. She was alone. She wanted it that way. No one knew she was coming to Timberlake to question Phil Wocheck face-to-face, for the first time, about Margaret Ingalls’s death. What she had to say to the old man was for his ears alone.

She parked the car in the graveled lot, hidden from the newly renovated lodge by an artful tangle of evergreens and barberry bushes, and started across the lawn. Adirondack chairs, painted a dark fir-green, were still grouped in inviting clusters under the massive maples and oaks, although many of the trees had already dropped their leaves and the late-fall weather was warm enough to sit outside comfortably for only a short time in the middle of the day.

But it was the windows Alyssa remembered best, dozens of them, it seemed, gleaming warmly in the sunlight, reflecting the blue of the sky and the lake, welcoming her—home.

Alyssa shivered. The feeling of comfort and momentary sense of belonging was so at odds with her mood. For forty years, most of her life, the lodge had been locked and shuttered and ignored, a grim testament to Margaret Ingalls’s desertion of her husband and daughter.

For all those years, no one but Phil had known what had happened to Margaret. Now they did. She hadn’t run away with a lover that long-ago night, but had died right here at Timberlake. It was public knowledge now, how she had died, when and where. The only question that still remained was who had killed her. Only two days before, Alyssa’s father, Judson Ingalls, had been acquitted of his wife’s murder. Acquitted of responsibility, but not proved innocent of the crime.

In the back of her mind Alyssa almost wished Judson had been found guilty. Then he would have continued to fight with all his considerable strength of will and formidable intellect to clear his name and lay to rest the rumors still swirling around Tyler. Instead, he had shut himself away in the big old house on Elm Street and refused to see anyone, friend or foe alike. Alyssa was worried for his health, and his mental well-being. That concern and her own nightmare memories of her mother’s death had driven her to seek Phil Wocheck’s company.

The double doors leading into the lobby opened smoothly and quietly. Inside, a fire blazed on the hearth. Light gleamed softly on the paneled walls from the impressive deer-antler chandelier hanging overhead. The Oriental rug that her younger daughter, Liza, had placed in the huge main room—now the lobby and reception area of the lodge—was gone; after it was discovered that it was stained with Margaret Ingalls’s blood, it had been replaced by another, even more magnificent in shades of green and copper and blue.

Alyssa knew she had Edward Wocheck to thank for that small courtesy. No matter how far apart they had grown in the last thirty years, he would never have put her, and her family, through the trauma of looking at the rug every time they entered this building. Before Liza set in motion the chain of events leading to the discovery of her mother’s body, Alyssa had simply avoided coming here. That was no longer possible. In the few months Timberlake had been open to the public, it had become a hub of activity in Tyler, Wisconsin.

There were about a dozen people sitting in comfortable, casual groupings of overstuffed furniture before the fire and the windows overlooking the lake, while they sipped drinks, exchanged hunting stories and big-city gossip or merely sat and stared at the fire. Even though it was the middle of the week, the lodge seemed to be well booked. Once more the prestige and drawing power of the Addison Hotel Corporation name was brought home to her. It could work magic, even on a small out-of-the-way resort like Timberlake.

A smiling young woman greeted Alyssa as she approached the front desk. “May I help you, Mrs. Baron?” she asked politely.

“Hello, Sheila. I’m here to see Phil Wocheck,” Alyssa responded with a smile of her own. Edward Wocheck, Phil’s son, and head of Addison Hotel Corporation, had promised when he bought Timberlake that he would hire and train as many local people as possible. He’d kept his promise. The young woman behind the counter was a Tyler resident, a high-school classmate of Liza’s. The bartender lived in Tyler, too, and so did most of the service staff. And Alyssa knew for a fact that Edward was paying for the education of two promising young Tyler High grads at a prestigious Chicago cooking school.

“Phil’s waiting for you in Mr. Wocheck’s suite. Second door on your left, in the west wing. Right through the French doors. Only I don’t have to tell you that, do I,” Sheila said with another smile. “You must know this building like the back of your hand.”

Alyssa kept her own smile in place with an effort of will. “It’s changed a great deal in the past year,” she said in a carefully neutral tone of voice. “A very great deal.”

“That’s right,” the young woman continued, seeming unaware of Alyssa’s reluctance to speak about Timberlake. “And Liza did a great job redecorating this part of the building. Have you taken a tour of the new additions?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Mr. Wocheck—Mr. Edward Wocheck, I mean—will have to show you around. Phil can’t manage the stairs as yet and there won’t be any elevators, you know. While the new facilities will be accessible to the handicapped, elevators are out of keeping with the unspoiled, turn-of-the-century rustic atmosphere of Timberlake Lodge.” She sounded as if she were reciting from a brochure lauding the resort’s amenities, or perhaps from a Timberlake Lodge employees’ pep talk.

“That would be nice,” Alyssa said politely, as she stepped away from the desk to allow a newly arrived couple to check in. “But I’m sure Edward Wocheck is far too busy to have time to give guided tours to everyone who wants one.”

“I’m sure he could find time for you, Mrs. Baron.” Sheila’s smile was still friendly but her eyes were speculative as she nodded a goodbye and returned to her duties.

Alyssa felt a faint heat touch her cheeks as she turned away. She ought to be used to the speculation about her past relationship with Edward Wocheck by now, but she wasn’t. In a town as small as Tyler, old love affairs were public property. Especially when one of the lovers was now the richest man in town, and the other was at the center of a forty-year-old murder investigation. Everyone watched every move they made when they were together. It was that lack of privacy, that feeling of living in a glass bowl, that made their public meetings so awkward and their private ones so charged with tension. Nothing more.

And today she didn’t want to see Edward at all.

Her thoughts had carried her down the west wing corridor to the door of Phil and Edward’s suite. The rooms they occupied held no special meaning for Alyssa. Her mother’s room was in the other wing, her old bedroom and her father’s on the floor above it.

She knocked firmly and waited for a response from Phil. The older man had moved to Timberlake from Worthington House, Tyler’s retirement center and nursing home, because he could no longer climb the stairs to his room at Kelsey Boardinghouse.

“Come in,” Phil called. “The door is not locked.”

Alyssa turned the knob and went inside. Phil was rising slowly from a floral upholstered couch in front of windows that looked out over the lake.

“Forgive me. I move too slowly these days to meet you at the door,” he said, coming toward her with only a cane and a limp to remind her that he’d broken his hip not many months before. “I can go pretty good once I’m up off the couch.” He shook his head in obvious frustration. “It is getting to my feet that doesn’t go so well. How are you, Alyssa?”

“I’m well, thank you, Phil,” she said, linking her arm through his as they walked back toward the couch.

“Let me take your coat and purse,” Phil insisted. “There is no one else here to do it now. I sent Edward’s butler away. Imagine, my son with a snooty English butler to do for him.”

“Edward has a butler?” Alyssa laid her coat and purse over the arm of a wing chair, upholstered in the same soft corals and greens as the couch. She knew he was a very different man from the boy she’d known and loved all those years ago, but somehow she couldn’t picture him with a butler, English or otherwise.

“Well,” Phil said, motioning her to take a seat as he lowered himself slowly onto the couch, “the butler is his wife’s. His ex-wife, Nikki Addison. She sent him here to make us comfortable,” he said with a sneer that twisted his lips. “If you ask me, she sent him here to spy on us. What need have three men for another man to take care of them? You mark my words. She will show up herself, soon enough. She will say it is because she misses her son. But I know better.”

Alyssa didn’t want to hear about Edward’s ex-wife, the millionaire daughter of hotel magnate Arthur Addison, a woman light-years removed in wealth and prestige from Tyler, Wisconsin. “Devon is here?” she asked politely, shifting the subject slightly, but enough to steer it away from Nicole Addison Wocheck Donatelli Holmes. She’d heard the string of names from Liza and knew, from Tyler gossip as well, that Devon’s father wasn’t one of his mother’s ex-husbands, but a French skier whom Nikki had never married at all.

Alyssa had never met Edward’s stepson. The boy had never visited Tyler when he was growing up, during the years when Edward had been making his fortune and his visits to his father had been few and far between. She wondered what the young man was like, born to such wealth and power, already Edward’s right-hand man and still only thirty years old. “How does he like Tyler?”

“He likes it well enough,” Phil said, his voice overriding her thoughts. “Devon is a good boy. Edward raised him right, kept his mother and the old one, his grandfather Addison, from spoiling him rotten. Edward is a good father.” His voice was gruff, as though the praise of his son didn’t come easily. The relationship between Edward and Phil had always been strained. Now, after thirty years of only occasional visits, they were living under the same roof. It couldn’t be easy for either of them.

“I’m looking forward to meeting him,” she replied automatically, politely.

“He is in Chicago today on business. But I expect him very soon. Next time you come, you’ll meet him.”

“I—I don’t want to come here any more than I have to, Phil,” Alyssa said softly. “It’s too often in my dreams.”

“I, too, never expected to live under this roof again. Does your father know you’re here?” Alyssa shook her head. “No.”

“You didn’t come to inquire about my health.”

“No.”

“You want to know what happened that night your mother died.” He didn’t look out across the lawns to the tree by the lakeshore where he’d buried Margaret’s body so many years before; he didn’t have to. Alyssa knew he was looking back in time in his thoughts, just as she was.

“Yes.”

“I told my story to the judge and the jury. And that fire-breathing lawyer, Ethan Trask. Even he couldn’t make me say any more.”

“But you know more than what you’ve told.” Alyssa smoothed the lightweight wool material of her slacks across her knee. “You can answer my questions, fill in the gaps in my memory.”

“What do you remember, malushka?” Phil asked using the Polish endearment of her childhood.

“Not enough,” Alyssa said with a quick catch of her breath. “And too much.”

“It might be best to let the past rest in peace, like Margaret now rests in hallowed ground.”

“I can’t let it rest, Phil.” Alyssa fought back tears. “For my father’s sake, if not my own peace of mind.”

“For Judson Ingalls’s sake,” he said softly, under his breath. “The whole town wonders if I acted at his bidding. What does your father think of me for keeping my secrets all these years?”

“I don’t know,” Alyssa said truthfully. “He won’t discuss the trial—or the night my mother died.”

“Do you blame me for what I did, malushka—hiding her body away, telling no one what I knew for all these years?”

“The past can’t be altered,” she said, too confused by her own unsettled emotions to give the old man the answer he wanted.

“That is true,” he said sadly. “What is done is done.”

“At least now I know why she never came back for me. If only I could remember exactly what happened that night.”

“Don’t force your memories.” He crossed his gnarled hands on the head of his cane and leaned forward heavily to stare at the floor, his shoulders bent with age and years of hard work.

Once more the shadowy nightmare images played themselves out in her mind’s eye—her mother struggling with a faceless stranger, her own small hands holding a gun, the sound of a shot and her mother falling to the floor, away, out of her sight.

“Did I kill my mother, Phil?” she asked, unable to bear not knowing a moment longer. All through the long days of her father’s trial the question had haunted her almost to the point of madness.

The old man’s head jerked up, his white hair backlit by the afternoon sun shining through the windows, gleaming like snow on the hillside. “Why do you think that?”

“I…remember.” Alyssa looked down at her trembling hands. She couldn’t stop herself. “I remember firing the gun that killed her.”

Phil shook his head so vehemently a lock of hair fell across his forehead. “No! It was not proved Margaret died of a gunshot wound. I saw her body. I still see it over and over again in my thoughts. I carried her to her grave. The table beside her bed was made of iron. So was her bed. Very heavy, with sharp edges. Did she fall and hit her head? Was she strangled? Or maybe it was her heart? There was arguing, maybe a struggle or a push and she fell.”

“But the bullet Joe Santori found in the woodwork?” Alyssa couldn’t allow herself to feel any comfort from the old man’s words.

Phil shrugged. “That proves only that the gun went off when you picked it up. I did not look at her body any more than I had to. I covered her with a shawl from her bed. I didn’t want to look at her dead face and I couldn’t put her in the ground without some covering from the cold. It would not have been proper. But I did not look at her again. It was enough to know that she was dead.”

“Then why did you bury her secretly? Did you do it to save my father? Or to protect me?” It was almost as important to her sanity to learn the identity of the man in her dreams as it was to know for certain whether she might have shot Margaret herself. Alyssa’s thoughts continued to circle around those two points like vultures above a dead deer.

“I did nothing to protect Judson Ingalls,” Phil repeated stubbornly. “I was not his lackey. I owed him loyalty, yes, as my employer, but nothing more. The lawyer, Ethan Trask, was wrong. I did what I did…”

“To protect me,” Alyssa whispered.

“But not for why you think. Not because of the gunshot. I did it because I could not let your father be sent to prison for murder, leaving you alone, malushka.”

“You still think the man you saw could have been my father?” Alyssa looked inward, remembering all the years Judson had raised and protected her on his own. He had a formidable temper, it was true—most of the Ingalls men did—but she could never recall his raising his hand to a living soul.

“Who else?”

“A lover? One of my mother’s lovers? She was running away that night, wasn’t she? Leaving my father… and me.”

Phil shrugged again, looking fierce. “I was only the gardener. I knew nothing of your mother’s love affairs. It is true she was going away. But you don’t know that she meant to leave you behind.” His tone held doubt, however. Phil did believe Margaret had meant to abandon her daughter that terrible night.

“No one knows the truth,” Alyssa said sadly. “In my dreams, in my memory, there is still only a faceless man who might be my father…and me.”

“I do not think you shot your mother,” he repeated obstinately. Silence settled between them.

“And I don’t believe my father killed her,” Alyssa said very quietly.

“Because I hid her body all those years ago, we will never know.”

“I guess we’ve come to a dead end. Thank you for telling me what you know about that night.”

“It is over and done with, Alyssa. You yourself said it. Let the past be the past.”

She rose from her chair, preventing Phil from doing the same with a gentle hand on his shoulder. She couldn’t believe her father had killed Margaret, run away and left her behind to deal with the horror alone. There had to be another man. A stranger who knew exactly what had happened that night. A man whose guilt would prove Judson’s innocence—as well as her own. “I can’t let it rest. For my father’s sake, and for my own. Goodbye, Phil.” She picked up her coat and purse and started for the door.

“Alyssa. Malushka, come back. We will find this other man together.”

She barely heard the old man’s words; their meaning didn’t register at all. She walked out of the building in a daze, only to come face-to-face with Edward Wocheck, the very real, flesh-and-blood man who also haunted her dreams.

* * *

“ALYSSA. I didn’t expect to find you here.” Edward Wocheck felt like kicking himself for the banality of his greeting. Alyssa looked as if she’d seen a ghost. The urge to take her in his arms and kiss away her fears and sorrows struck him like a blow between the shoulders. She’d always had the power to move him that way. It hadn’t been any different when he returned to Tyler a year ago than it had been thirty years before. He was just better at convincing himself he could live without her now, at nearly fifty years of age, than he had been at seventeen.

“Hello, Edward.” Others of their old friends and acquaintances still called him Eddie, but not Alyssa—another way she chose to keep her distance from him, perhaps. “I—I came to visit your father.” She looked nearly as flustered as he was, and sad.

“Why, Lyssa?”

“Just to see him,” she explained hurriedly, too hurriedly. “I miss visiting him at Worthington House.”

“You’re not telling the truth.” He wondered if she knew how easy it was for him to read the emotions flitting across her expressive features. She had been a very pretty girl. She was still a beautiful woman, her blond hair shining and nearly free of gray, her body soft and rounded in all the right places. Her figure was still slim and appealing, even though she was now a grandmother. “Are you angry with him for what he did that night forty years ago?”

“No,” Alyssa said, suddenly able to put her thoughts into words. “Maybe he saved my father’s life. Surely, then, so soon after it happened, a jury would have convicted him. He would have spent the rest of his life in prison…or—”

“My father did what he thought was best.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not saying he was right.”

“I don’t blame him. I don’t think my father does, either. Phil has suffered, too. Keeping such a terrible secret all these years.”

“We all have secrets.”

“Yes,” she said, almost to herself. “We all have secrets.”

“Tell me yours.”

“Edward, please. I have to go. We’ll talk about this later.” She seemed to realize she wasn’t wearing her coat and began to struggle into it.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he decided abruptly, holding the fawn-colored trench coat so that she could slip her arms into the sleeves. His father would tell him what their conversation had been about. But he could guess already. Judson Ingalls’s acquittal on murder charges had done nothing to lessen Alyssa’s fears of her own involvement in Margaret’s death. He wished she would confide in him, but she had not.

“Thank you,” she said politely, distantly. She seemed poised to run, like one of the deer that came out of the woods at dusk to drink at the edge of the lake, wary of humans, but drawn to the life-giving water.

He ignored her dismissal. They started walking. “Have you been busy at the plant since the trial ended?” He rested his hand lightly beneath her elbow and she didn’t protest the small intimacy.

“Swamped,” she said, managing a smile. He realized the subject of her family’s financially strapped business was nearly as distressing as his curiosity about her visit to his father. “It seems like everything was put on hold during the trial. And now Dad—” Abruptly she stopped talking, pretending instead that she had to watch her footing on the straight, well-paved path to the parking lot.

“Any new contacts on the horizon?” He shouldn’t have asked that question, and wished he hadn’t the moment it was out of his mouth.

“One or two. But small ones. Replacement parts for a couple of the big farm-machinery companies that we subcontract with. They’ll only keep us running till the first of the year. And then I’m afraid we’re looking at substantial layoffs.”

“And then?” he prompted, ignoring another jab of his conscience. Business was business. He shouldn’t feel as if he was betraying her.

“I’ll have to deal with the Japanese consortium that wants to buy the plant. Unless,” she said, looking up at him with a smile that was half teasing, half in earnest, “you could lend me a million dollars to get us through the winter.”

“I can’t do that, Lyssa.” Not because he couldn’t put his hands on that much money. He could float a loan that size from his own personal investments, without bringing Addison Corporation, or DEVCHECK, his own investment company, into the deal.

“Too small-potatoes for Addison Hotels, I suppose,” she said, a blush of red stealing over her cheeks.

“That’s not it.” He regretted yet again bringing up the matter. The words conflict of interest echoed through his brain. He wasn’t ready, or able, to discuss alternatives for management of Ingalls Farm and Machinery with Alyssa now or any time in the immediate future. He was also convinced she wasn’t going to thank him for it when he did.

“You must think I’m a fool,” she said, moving a little faster, just quickly enough to dislodge his hold on her elbow. “A small-town housewife, trying to run a million-dollar business that’s in trouble up to its neck, asking you for a huge loan she hasn’t even got the collateral to secure.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is, Edward. You’ve hidden your contempt for Tyler and the rest of us well these past months, but it’s still there, isn’t it?”

“I don’t have contempt or hatred for anyone in Tyler, Lyssa.”

“Not even my father?” she asked, her blue eyes looking past him, back into time.

“Especially not your father.”

“No,” she said, focusing on his face once again, searching for something in his carefully neutral expression. “I apologize for saying that. If you still hated my father, you wouldn’t have taken Timberlake off his hands. You paid cash. And far more than it’s worth.”

“You’re wrong. This place is a gold mine. It just needs the right management to take off.”

“It needs you,” Alyssa said softly. “You have changed a great deal. You don’t resent coming back here.” There was just enough doubt in her voice to prompt his answer.

“If I still hated everyone who ever put down Eddie Wocheck, the Polack from the wrong side of the tracks, I wouldn’t have done what I did with this place. Tyler is my hometown, just like it is yours.”

“I apologize again,” she said with a self-mocking smile. “You’re lucky you lost your Midwest naiveté years ago. It’s a lot harder to do when you spend your whole life in the same small town, you know. You can put your money to much better use than pumping it into a failing concern like Ingalls F and M.”

“Alyssa, stop putting yourself down. There are thousands of small companies all over the country in the same kind of financial bind. I can’t save them all.”

“Somehow that’s not very comforting to me, or the people who work for me. Goodbye, Edward. I won’t embarrass you or myself by asking for help again.” She got into the car. She hadn’t locked it, he noticed. No one in Tyler locked their cars.

He watched her drive away, wishing he could still trust his fellow man enough to leave his own car unlocked. Wishing he was still the boy Alyssa had loved and trusted with all her heart; knowing he was not and never could be again. And knowing, also, that sooner or later she would find that out.