He managed a smile, nodding. “You know her well, don’t you?”

David lifted his shoulders in an awkward, painful shrug. “Hell, we’re twins. She’s all I’ve got.”

“Then you have to understand I’m not being patronizing or paternalistic or overprotective—or anything else Ashley might think to call me.”

“An asshole,” David suggested cheerfully.

“Where can I find her?”

David gave it up: Carruthers hadn’t had his head bashed in by the man who’d raised him. Maybe he could help. With a cast practically up to his ass, David sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to. “Try Belle Meade,” he said. “Woman by the name of Nelle Milligan.”

Jeremy looked relieved. “Got it.”

“And if you’re lying to me, Carruthers, and anything happens to my sister, there’s no place you can hide. No place. Understood?”

Jeremy snatched a scrap of paper off the bedside table and jotted something down. He handed the paper to David. “Those are my father’s home and office numbers in San Diego. He has access to Mac. I’m the one in danger of making a mistake in judgment, David, not you.”

Then Jeremy left.

David glanced at the phone numbers. Frustration seized him, and he swung his arm and in one swipe heaved his water pitcher, glass and little box of tissues across the room. A nurse flew in. “Mr. Wakefield!”

“Fetch me some crutches and get this needle out of me. I’m getting out of here.”

“That’s out of the question. Please, just be patient.”

But that wasn’t his style, and never had been.

With her hair tucked under the floppy yellow rain hat and wearing the shocking pink raincoat she hadn’t worn in years, Sarah Balaton didn’t look like herself at all. She dragged out old cosmetics and did up her face in blue-toned colors she no longer used, and she tried not to notice how her hands shook.

The moment she stepped outside her apartment, although no one seemed to be about, she called on the techniques learned in drama classes she’d taken through college: You are not Sarah Balaton; you are someone else.

She made up a secret identity for herself. She would be Mavin Hawthorne. Mavin didn’t walk with Sarah’s natural brisk gait. Mavin was more sultry, more seductive, and she carried her shoulders at a slight angle, hips thrust forward.

Andrew Balaton’s man in the lobby glanced up and with only his eyes followed her out the door.

Mavin, you’re terrific, Sarah thought, forcing herself not to leap up in jubilation. She climbed slowly into the cab she had waiting. Her coat rode up well above the knee. Sarah would have jerked it down, but Mavin let her leg linger in full view of whoever happened to be on the street. Then she pulled it into the cab and shut the door.

“Intercontinental Airport,” she told the driver. She glanced back at her building: her bodyguard was running toward her. “Hurry!”

The cab pulled away from the curb. Her father’s man—or whatever he was supposed to be—jumped into a white Cadillac.