voice trailed off and she shrugged anxiously, pushing her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose with her index finger. Innocently, and not a little awkwardly, she lifted her hand to cup his jaw, rubbing her thumb gently across his cheekbone where his skin was still tender beneath the bruise.
“I know,” she repeated quietly. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
One
Jack McCormick sat behind his big, executive, mahogany desk, staring blindly at his big, executive mahogany-paneled office. A crisp white sheet of stationery and a torn envelope marked Confidential sat neglected on the blotter before him, the tidy black letterhead on both stating, among other things, Roxanne Matheny Investigations, Inc. He had read the letter four times already. But he could still hardly believe what it said.
Scarcely thinking about what he was doing, he tugged open the top right-hand drawer of his desk and extracted a battered baseball that was more innards than out. He curled his fingers comfortably over the worn leather and rubber, palming the sphere with affection the way he would a lover’s breast. It was the only thing he owned that had been with him forever. All else had been lost at some point along the way. Until now.
He gazed at the letter again, his eyes feasting on the message it bore. They’d found him. Finally. Before he’d even had a chance to look for them.
A soft rap of knuckles on his office door brought Jack out of his deep ruminations, and he lifted his head toward it. “Come in,” he called ouL
Adrian Chavez, his highest-ranking associate, nudged the door open and strode confidently through. But when he observed his employer’s expression, he hesitated.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
Jack shook his head slowly and gripped the baseball more firmly, but he didn’t elaborate. “What’s the word?” he asked instead.
Adrian extended a hefty accordion folder toward him. “The Lavender acquisition. As it currently stands, anyway.”
Jack clamped his jaw shut rigidly and set the baseball aside, then reached for the record his associate offered, his attention suddenly focused tighter than it had been for some time. “And what did Gregory Lavender have to say today?”
Adrian paused, eyeing his boss thoughtfully, then linked his fingers together behind his back. “Not much that he hasn’t already said over the last few months.” Clearly restless, he then brought his arms forward, crossing them negligently over his chest, as if giving another matter much thought.
“What?” Jack asked, grinning with satisfaction. “Did he have something else to add this time?”
“Yeah,” Adrian told him. “As a matter of fact, he did have something else to say about you.”
“I can only imagine what.”
Adrian studied his employer with something akin to admiration. “Gregory Lavender said he’d see you dead before he turned his company over to you. Especially after what you did to his daughter.”
Jack expelled an errant breath of air that almost—almost—sounded like a chuckle. “Yeah, I’ll just bet he would.”
Adrian rocked back on his heels. “So...just what did you do to his daughter?”
Jack glanced up and narrowed his eyes at his associate. “I freed her.”
Adrian nodded. “Sounds like fun.”
Jack emitted another rough sound. “Actually, it was more like...”
He inhaled a deep breath, and left his thought unfinished. More than twenty years had passed since he’d seen Gregory Lavender’s daughter. But scarcely a day had passed that he hadn’t thought about her. He’d freed her? he asked himself. Hell, more like she had been the one to free Jack.
Adrian simply continued to gaze at his employer, not pressing the issue of Georgia Lavender. “So what do we do now?” he asked instead.
This time, when Jack chuckled, it was heartfelt. He’d been waiting a long, long time for this. What was that old saying about revenge being a dish best served cold? That was a good way to describe the feeling nestled deep in Jack’s belly. Cold. Raw. Bitter. He was about to make up for much of what had been dumped on him in his past—and Georgia Lavender’s too. He was about to repay a debt to her that had gone far too long unsettled. Oh, yes. He’d been waiting a long time for this.
He gazed down at the letter on his blotter from Roxanne Matheny, P.L, lifting it to scan the message there once again. He’d been waiting a long time for that, too. Everything was coming together, but it was coming too soon. He wasn’t sure he could tackle both at once. Still, a man had to take his opportunities where he found them and play them for all they were worth. It was the only way Jack knew how to survive. It was what had saved his life.
Well, that and Georgia Lavender.
It was time, he thought. Time to go back to Carlisle. Time to make good on his debt to Georgia. Time to make Gregory Lavender pay for what he did to his only child.
Time for Jack to reclaim what was rightfully his.
The quickly curling waves were huge, thick and slate gray, crashing into sprays of white foam as they slammed against the beach below Georgia Lavender’s house. As she stood on her deck, her long, fiery hair buffeted wildly by the cold winter wind, she could barely distinguish the thin line of a horizon smudged a little darker gray than the shades of ocean and sky. It had been days since she had seen the sun. And that was just fine with her.
If she hadn’t already painted this scene a dozen times over the past few months, she would run into the house for her paint tubes, and would return with only black, white and perhaps a bit of green and blue. Carlisle’s coastline in the winter was awash with grays of every variety, and she had captured them all on canvas at some point. Her gallery was full of such paintings. But the tourists never seemed to tire of buying them.
The temperature hovered around forty degrees—probably below thirty with the windchill—and she felt like taking a walk. Evan wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours, and she was feeling restless for some reason. She went inside to find her golden retriever, Molly, sound asleep on the couch, but at her quick whistle, the big dog awoke and leapt down, wagging her tail furiously.
“Wanna go for a walk, girl?” Georgia asked unnecessarily.
Molly barked loudly three times, clearly ready for some exercise.
She tugged a thick, oatmeal-colored sweater on over her jeans, then wove her unruly russet tresses into a fat braid that fell down between her shoulder blades. Shrugging into her oversize, flannel-lined denim jacket, she decided not to bother with Molly’s leash, because she knew the beach would be deserted. Living year-round in what was predominantly a rental community meant that at this time of year, she and Evan were virtually the only inhabitants for miles.
The solitude didn’t bother either one of them, though. They both liked being far from society’s constraints. They had Molly to keep them company, after all, and Molly never had a mean thing to say about anybody.
As Georgia and the golden retriever clattered down the wooden stairs
