Sara's Surprise Read Free Page B

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.
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Chapter Two

    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