Liar's Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

determined to get even! She hadn’t known where the idea had begun, or if it had ever really been a solid idea. She’d never seduced anyone in her life. She’d coldly set out to seduce Leif Johnston just to be able to tell her father that she was his best friend’s latest conquest.
    “I will not think about it!” Tracy whispered aloud.
    But it was as if a dam had broken, and she had no choice.
    She couldn’t hate Leif for what she had done herself; she’d lied about her age, and her first taste of martinis had certainly given her boldness.
    He’d been a wonderful lover and he’d been stunned by her lack of experience. Quiet, pensive—and then irritated. But even then she’d played it well. Perhaps it hadn’t been play—she’d been in awe, terrified of intimacy. Then she’d made her fatal mistake—she’d started to fall in love with him. Her game didn’t mean anything anymore.
    She’d spent a month with him. Secretly, they’d traveled to Connecticut, and in that time they’d shut out the world. There’d been no plan in Tracy’s mind anymore; she was simply in love. She didn’t want to get even with her father; she just wanted Leif. Someday she knew that she would have to tell him who she really was—she knew that. But she couldn’t break the spell. Not then. She let herself believe that the right time would come. And she lived in the enchantment. Waking up beside him, sipping morning coffee on the terrace that overlooked the rose garden and the pool, curling beside him and watching movies late at night, clad in velour robes th at could be so easily shed…
    Enchantment.
    Then her mother had finally reached her father, and, with Arthur Kingsley in tow, they had burst in upon a most intimate moment. Tracy had been furious and indignant, but not half so much so as those around her! Her father had accused Leif of horrible things—and Leif had been the most furious of all, glaring at Tracy with those smoke-and-fire eyes, aware that he had been duped in Tracy’s plot against her father. There was no way to tell him that it had only begun that way. She didn’t have a chance.
    Oh, God! It had been horrible! Tracy could still feel sick, recalling that night. Her father—Leif—
    They’d come to blows. Jesse had been wild, thundering against Leif. And Leif had taken it for a while, trying to tell Jesse that he hadn’t known, that he hadn’t had the faintest idea—that Tracy had gone by her pen name and told him that she was twenty-three.
    In frustration, Leif had finally decked Jesse. And her grandfather had come up from behind and decked Leif with his old baseball bat, and Leif had gone out like a light.
    Well, she’d meant to hurt her father. And she had.
    He and Leif didn’t speak for a year after the incident. And protesting all the way, she’d been hauled back to grandfather’s estate in Switzerland, her nightmare really just beginning. She’d expected to pay for the incident— never as seriously and painfully as she did in that cold retreat where she felt she had lost everything.
    Automatically, she sipped more champagne. Maybe it had all done something—though that price she had paid had been so high. She’d seen her father right after Zurich, and afterwards they had been close, seeing each other somewhere at least every six months.
    Until he had died.
    Tears welled hot behind her eyes; she swallowed and did not shed them. He’d been dead almost a year. It still hurt. Tracy knew all his faults so clearly! She had borne the brunt of many of them. But she’d still loved him and now she had to find the truth. At first she’d been stunned, then so terribly hurt—then furious because he had been such a young man—barely forty-two—and because he’d had so much more to give the world. He’d been so full of life …
    Her father’s murderer had been shot down before he’d ever left the park. For Tracy that hadn’t been enough. She’d dug into the man’s past with the help of a