The Seductive Impostor Read Online Free PDF

they’d unwittingly inherited a small fortune in stolen art. Willow would tear Sub Rosa apart stone by stone, trying to root out all of Thaddeus Lakeman’s secrets. And in doing so, she would ultimately ruin her own political career.
    Rachel shone the beam of her flashlight farther into the passageway. She was almost to the secret door that opened into the second-floor hall. Rachel’s vision blurred with tears as she remembered the horrific images of her last moments at Sub Rosa three years earlier.
    The bedroom.
    The blood.
    The realization, and disbelief, of what she was seeing.
    She had seen her mother first, lying across the foot of the bed, fully clothed, blood seeping from her body and running down the rumpled blankets, pooling in a dark puddle so thick the pattern on the carpet was unrecognizable.
    And then Thadd, on the floor beside the bed, face down, barefoot but still fully clothed, his body unnaturally still, his left hand outstretched as if reaching for Marian. He had looked untouched but for the dark stain pooling beneath him.
    Rachel had run to her mother first and covered the gaping wound in her chest with her hands. She had actually attempted to gather the blood, trying to push it back into her mother’s lifeless body. Her screams had filled the room.
    She had seen her father across the room then, propped in a half-sitting position against the far wall. His eyes were open. Blood was trickling from his mouth and seeping from the corner of one eye. And higher, oozing crimson from the tiny hole just above his right ear. In the relaxed grip of his right hand was the gun.
    Frank Foster’s chest had risen on a gasp as she had stared at him, and it had taken Rachel a shocked moment to realize that her father was still alive. Panic had frozen her in place. Blind to her mother’s blood on her hands, she’d had enough wits to go to the phone and dial 911. She told the woman on the other end of the line that there had been a shooting at Sub Rosa and she needed an ambulance, and then dropped the receiver.
    She’d gone to her father then, approaching him slowly, fearfully, afraid to disturb the fragile spark of life he still held. She’d gently taken the gun from his hand and tossed it away, then looked up and found his eyes focused on her face.
    Not just alive. But conscious. Aware.
    Huddled on the floor of the silent tunnel, her arms wrapped around her bent leg, Rachel tried to remember what she had said to him. She’d called him Daddy and repeated the word why several times, almost as a litany. And while she had cradled him in her arms, wind moaned through the open panel in the wall beside them, sending warm, salt-tainted air swirling into the room to mix with the metallic smell of so much blood. More from habit than thought, Rachel had used her foot to push the panel closed, keeping the secret of the passageways safe.
    All these years later she remembered the only words her father had been able to utter in a soft, ragged whisper.
    â€œRa-Rach…don’t go Vegas…see dancer…Norway night…fi-find her…killed…Marian…find her—”
    They had been the last words Frank Foster had spoken. Rachel had thought for the last three years that he’d meant not to go to Las Vegas—which hadn’t made any sense to her at all—and something about seeing a dancer, possibly a dancer in Vegas?
    But in the letter her father had left her in the strongbox, she’d learned that Vegas was actually a man named Raoul Vegas, a dealer in stolen art her father had told her to look up if she wanted to get rid of her inheritance discreetly.
    Now, though, she realized her father had changed his mind since writing the letter, and had been telling her not to go to Raoul Vegas. She still didn’t know what Norway night or seeing a dancer meant, or who it was she should find.
    The bullet lodged in his head had stayed there, unreachable by the doctors, and