The Seductive Impostor Read Free Page A

from a giant control room in the basement.
    Sub Rosa was practically its own living, breathing entity. The loving creation of Foster & Daughter Architects.
    She missed it.
    And she never wanted to set foot inside it again.
    â€œI can’t help Keenan Oakes,” she said softly. “Sub Rosa belongs to him now. He’ll eventually learn its ways.”
    â€œI know, Rachel. I’m only asking that you promise not to do anything to…well, to hinder his adjustment.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t begrudge the man his inheritance. I’ve long since passed the point of caring one way or another.” She looked beyond the stunted pine trees growing along the cliffs beside her home, up toward the towering gables of Sub Rosa’s roofline. “We’ve made peace, that great house and I. We’re content now to live side by side, neither of us intruding on the other.”
    Wendell nodded. “Good, then. I’m glad for you.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, then turned and finally walked off the porch to his car. He opened the driver’s door, but stopped yet again and looked back at her. “Now make peace with your new neighbor as well, Rachel, because he’ll likely come calling once he gets a good look at his inheritance.”
    â€œAnd why would that be?” she asked, glaring at her old friend.
    He grinned at her. “Probably because when we spoke on the phone last week, I told him to direct his questions concerning Sub Rosa to the second architect on record.”
    â€œWendell!” she shouted, as Wendell disappeared into his car and started the engine.
    He rolled down the window and popped his head out, his grin wicked. “It’s time you rejoined the living, Rachel, my love. And I’ve been thinking, Keenan Oakes just might be the man to make that happen,” he shouted back, just before he drove away in a cloud of gravel and dust.
    Â 
    Four hours had passed since Wendell’s disturbing visit, and Rachel was now sitting on the living room sofa, surrounded by the mess she’d made of her home searching for the key to the strongbox. The open box sat on the coffee table in front of her, the contents spilling out of it, the nine-page letter lying half-folded on top of everything. Stunned insensate, Rachel stared at the painting hanging over the fireplace not ten feet away.
    It was a beautiful painting, obviously old, technically perfect, of a Scottish castle that loomed out of the mist, standing tall and strong against the battering sea. The small painting had been placed there the day they’d moved in. Her father’s prized possession. Her favorite inheritance from Frank Foster. And according to the letter she’d found in the strongbox, worth a small fortune.
    The letter also said it had been stolen from a museum in Scotland more than twenty years ago.
    The delicate emerald earrings and necklace in Willow’s jewelry box upstairs, which had been worn by their mother on special occasions, were worth a staggering $1 million dollars. The letter said they had been stolen from a private home in France more than sixteen years ago.
    The bronze Asian statue on the bookcase next to the hearth was sixteen hundred years old, worth $200,000, and had been stolen from an Oregon home almost a decade ago.
    The silver tankard, wine-tasting cup, and snuffbox sitting on the piano had all come from a single collection in Germany, eight years ago.
    All stolen.
    And all of them now in her possession.
    The ruby and gold ring Rachel wore on her right middle finger, which had been a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday, had been taken from London not two months before Frank Foster had presented it to her. At the time of its disappearance, the ring had been valued at $93,000.
    Rachel very carefully worked the ring off her finger and gently placed it in the strongbox.
    She picked up the letter again and unfolded it, forcing her