All That Glitters
All That Glitters
Mary Brady
The rarest treasure of all Discredited journalist Adriana Bonacorda has a lead on the hottest story of the year–billionaire business titan Zachary Hale is accused of cheating investors! She's so determined to talk to him that she follows him to the charming town of Bailey's Cove, Maine.When a hurricane traps Addy and Zach together, it's her one chance to revive her career. But she's shocked by the passion that springs up between them. Is Zach really a criminal? Or is there a reason for his silence? In a place founded by pirates, where a legendary treasure is supposedly hidden, Addy just might find something truly precious….
The rarest treasure of all
Discredited journalist Adriana Bonacorda has a lead on the hottest story of the year—billionaire business titan Zachary Hale is accused of cheating investors! She’s so determined to talk to him that she follows him to the charming town of Bailey’s Cove, Maine.
When a hurricane traps Addy and Zach together, it’s her one chance to revive her career. But she’s shocked by the passion that springs up between them. Is Zach really a criminal? Or is there a reason for his silence? In a place founded by pirates, where a legendary treasure is supposedly hidden, Addy just might find something truly precious….
“Who are you?”
Zach heard her question, but raised his hammer and bent one of the nails anchoring the rope closer to the beam.
Addy was a reporter.
Anything he said could end up on the internet, in print and on television.
He looked into her face. The angle of her head, the lines of her mouth, even the slant of her eyebrows said she was asking because she wanted to know, not that she wanted to broadcast the information to the world.
No one had ever asked him that question, not his classmates, his coworkers, the women he dated. No one wanted the answer to that question.
She stepped in close, too close to ignore her.
The wind flapped the tarp and the rain smashed into it like the sound of distant gunfire.
He leaned in toward her and her lips parted as if she were about to ask a question, but she did not. He pressed his lips to hers and captured her gasp.
Dear Reader (#ulink_4f84a4d9-e41e-592e-86fd-e2019788e178),
Readers, thank you so much! I hope you like Addy and Zach’s story.
Practically the only people who will talk to reporter Adriana Bonacorda are her blood relatives. Everyone else thinks she’s a liar, a con artist or both. Disgraced, broke and on the scent of a big story, Addy races from Boston to Maine—in a hurricane. Her quarry? Big-time swindler Zachary Hale. Exposing the deepest secrets of this billionaire schemer will put her right back on top of the journalist heap. But when she ends up at his mercy, she finds there is so much more to this man…and she finds her heart and her livelihood are in so much jeopardy.
And wait! Will they find All That Glitters—inside a pirate’s treasure chest?
I’d love to hear from you. Visit my website at www.marybrady.net (http://www.marybrady.net) or write to me at mary@marybrady.net.
Enjoy the Mills & Boon Superromance authors’ blog at www.superauthors.com (http://www.superauthors.com).
Warmest regards and bright blessings to all,
Mary Brady
All That Glitters
Mary Brady
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#ulink_2519d16e-3d79-58c4-b52f-ff7598282b70)
MARY BRADY lives in the Midwest and considers road trips into the rest of the continent to be a necessary part of life. When she’s not out exploring, she helps run a manufacturing company and has a great time living with her handsome husband, her super son and one cheeky little bird.
A large thank-you to my clever and intellectual friends Pamela Ford, Victoria Hinshaw, Olivia Rae, Laura Scott and Donna Smith.
Contents
Cover (#u007fb95a-ce80-5f98-a009-770a10a044ec)
Back Cover Text (#u57f659cf-4d71-5c69-a76d-ab947ba0a784)
Introduction (#u77f6c5f4-ebb2-59f5-a6e5-f8e913cc38b4)
Dear Reader (#ulink_168d900c-5ec5-51a1-88a7-a3152d884923)
Title Page (#u2a1040e6-9525-5196-b380-521f2a4392f9)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#ulink_ff6fc1f5-02c0-5727-8ba8-985c68ef4e2f)
Dedication (#u46ab7ae1-021a-5a85-9dd0-ace4dc068ac3)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_61573d96-0c76-5a48-b6f5-55fe978d95e7)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_bb5bd0d5-f29c-5490-954e-3c703a1a614d)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_38216c02-df21-51c9-902b-13c76972ffa9)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_412f5cf3-67a0-533b-8e98-ba2078ea0d35)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_ddc86e86-80e2-5f33-abc6-5e4e064c5150)
ADRIANA BONACORDA gripped the steering wheel of her rental car until her aching knuckles blanched white. Rain made it nearly impossible to see more than a few car lengths in front of her and the wind rocked the tiny compact. Addy prayed she could stave off the dark threats coming at her from all angles long enough to get to Bailey’s Cove, Maine, in one piece.
“Stay away from the coast, folks” had been the last bit of coherence she had gotten from the car’s radio. All she heard now was squawks and dead air.
Her phone still worked because it started ringing the raucous tones she’d assigned to her younger sister, Savanna.
“Hello, Savanna, sorry, warning, the signal may break up.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Maine after Zachary Hale.” Addy peered through the wind-driven rain searching for her turnoff.
“That’s what I called about. Hey, what’s he doing in Maine?”
“He’s headed to ground and I hope to get to him before he’s in hiding.”
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
Addy harrumphed. “It doesn’t work that way in the world of high finance.”
“I end up with nothing and some fat cats get rich. And he gets off without any punishment?” Savanna almost squealed the last few words in indignation.
“Calm down. During the huge Ponzi scandal, it was early December when the FBI got involved and early March, fifteen months later, before any jail time began to be served, and that scandal involved over fifty billion dollars.”
“Not fair. Just not fair.”
“Savanna you must have called for something besides a rant about Hale and Blankenstock.”
“I guess you just answered my question. I wanted to know how you were doing at getting Hale to fess up.” Savanna sounded sad. Her life was a wreck and she was newly unemployed.
“And you need more money.”
“I do. I hate to ask but can you lend me another hundred? I want to—”
A sign, big and green, loomed off to the side of the road heralding her exit and then vanished into the downpour.
She could barely see the road she was driving on and her sister was a distraction on a good day. “Savanna, I gotta go. I’ll have some funds transferred as soon as I can.”
As soon as I see if I have enough, she thought.
“I need to take the girls shopping. They didn’t get any new clothes for school and now they’re on sale cheap and they really need them.”
“I get it. Yes, I’ll do it when I can. Bye.”
Addy thumbed off the phone and tossed it onto the seat beside her. She squeezed her already hunched shoulders tighter and concentrated hard on seeing through the rain.
The exit ramp popped into view and she braked hard, rocked in the wind and dove off the nearly deserted interstate onto a narrow two-lane road. She had known this drive wasn’t going to be easy in the remnants of a hurricane, but some things had to be done.
Moving closer to the coast, deeper into the fringes of a storm whipping up the Atlantic Ocean, made for bad driving, but maybe not a bad day. There was a pot of gold at the end of this rainstorm, maybe even a Pulitzer Prize. At the very least she’d get a stab at retrieving her pride.
A sudden blast of wind sliced down hard across the road trying to take her small car with it. Addy answered with a fierce jerk of the wheel.
“Please, let me get there.” The sound of her voice eerily muted in the din coming from the outside. “That guy needs to pay.”
As she moved slowly down the road, the windshield wipers beat wildly at the sheets of rain, giving her occasional glimpses of the wreck and ruin going on outside. A branch skittered across the road and a river ran where the shoulder of the road should have been.
This storm, a has-been hurricane, was to brush the coast as it headed north toward the good folk of Nova Scotia.
Well, it was “brushing” hard, Addy thought.
There had been a point when the weather forecasters wondered if Hurricane Harold would break records and head directly for the central coast of Maine. Luckily for the citizens of the rugged state, that was not going to happen.
Braving the storm, Addy felt a touch of the old Adriana Bonacorda. She had been tough and smart. She had needed to be in order to survive. Not every reporter would be daring enough to chase a story into the middle of Afghanistan, a rebel monk to his hideout in Nepal or a billionaire criminal into the fringes of a storm.
She jerked hard again on the wheel to avoid hitting a piece of siding or a door or whatever it was and then hissed out a breath as she brought the car back into her lane.
In addition to the radio warnings, a State Trooper had sternly advised her to stay away from the coast. She had the distinct feeling they would have arrested her for reckless something or other if she’d tried to drive in this weather in Massachusetts, but not here in Maine.
Desperation could make one nuts.
After her big disgrace, she had tried to get worthy stories under more sane circumstances. Instead of a scoop or a better angle, she had gotten scorn, and worse, derisive snickers from the other reporters at every news scene. When she had tried to defend herself online, the whole world was then alerted that she had put her heart and soul into one giant piece of fiction she had unwittingly called news.
She had been duped, an apt word for eager and stupid. Today she battled to recover eager, but stupid she’d left buried in the humiliation.
When the sign marking the turn off toward Bailey’s Cove flashed at her through a break in the rain she popped the wheel with the palm of her hand. “Yes.” She was going to make it. Maybe there were still lucky cards in her pile.
Just then a piece of debris plastered itself to her windshield and, for a terrifying moment of blindness, stuck to the wipers and refused to move away. When it finally flew off, she hunkered down with passion, renewed by luck, and after fifteen more minutes of concentration reached the town.
Bailey’s Cove, Maine, population fourteen-something-thousand, the wildly undulating sign read as she slowed the car to a crawl.
The low-slung buildings of small-town urban sprawl blinked in and out of view as she crept into the small fishing village in the late afternoon storm-filtered light. Some of the buildings had boarded-up windows. A few had sandbags. There were no lights anywhere.
A service station called O’Reilly’s had its large glass windows boarded up, but huge letters scrawled on the boards, OPEN and CALL. She supposed there was a phone number somewhere to be found, but she couldn’t see it for the rain.
These people had been preparing for a direct hit by the hurricane called Harold. Even though the storm was passing them by, they had not known until two days ago they were to be spared the brunt of it.
Addy peered out at the sealed-up buildings, wondering which ones had people inside. There had to be someone here who would refuse to leave and who could tell her where Zachary Hale would hide out. Nothing on the internet had narrowed it down to anything less than “somewhere near Bailey’s Cove, Maine.” In fact, Bailey’s Cove got no direct hits on the internet.
With this storm raging, Hale would think he was safe, sheltered from prying eyes.
Ha!
When a puddle nearly swallowed the compact car, Addy pulled onto the higher ground straddling the lanes. She stretched her beleaguered fingers and retrieved her mobile phone that had flown off the seat during one of her dodges.
She had a signal, but with the exception of her sister who needed money for school clothes, or makeup for herself if she found nothing she wanted to buy for the girls, she had no one to call.
Sad.
Silly.
Stupid.
Shut up, she thought. None of those things mattered. They were the past. Intrepid. Hard-hitting. Totally inquisitive, she said back to the nagging voice inside her head.
After today, Adriana Bonacorda would be headed for the top again. And the frosting...her sister and all the others Hale had robbed would get a chance at recovering some of their losses.
The road continued to descend into town. Buildings appeared and disappeared through the windswept downpour. On the ocean side of the road, she spotted a small wooden church. Soaked and dark, the siding seemed to shudder, but that might have just been the strobe effects of the rain.
After a moment, Addy realized a woman stood in the arched doorway of the church. Her mop of hair swung wildly as she waved. A crazy woman, a comrade, a sister against the storm.
Addy checked for traffic. Nothing but rain. She intended to make a U-turn to question the woman, but when she looked across the street again, the doorway was empty.
Okay. Now she was imagining people. Maybe she was seeing herself in forty years. They both might be crazy and the woman had the same out-of-control mop, but the woman’s had been gray.
Keep driving, she told herself, and she did. She had little alternative.
Scuffling with the wind, she eventually reached what seemed, by the age of the buildings, to be the center of the old town. More boarded-up and shuttered windows greeted her, their darkness almost a grimace.
At the corner, in front of a restaurant called Pirate’s Roost, a sign pointed to the harbor. A sliver of hope gleamed. Maybe that’s where the people were, trying to save their boats or piers or whatever seamen did in a storm.
As she crept several blocks down toward the harbor on what had become a torrent instead of a street, Addy could see she was right. Luck again or savvy? She hoped the latter. Two crews in rain slickers wrestled with boats as one crew tried to secure a boat they had already rescued from the water, the other struggled to pull one out onto the dock. Each small craft dithered dangerously in the wind as they worked.
All one of these people had to do was point her in the right direction and then she’d leave them to their task.
She let the car roll slowly toward the pier.
Once she found him in his hideaway, she’d get a reaction from the scum, swindler Zachary Hale, and if her luck still held, an interview. The whole interaction would likely be a series of bald-faced lies on his part, but it would give her starting points from which to tear this guy to the ground, kick him into the hole he’d dug with the pension funds and life savings of old ladies, blue-collar workers—and her widowed sister. Then Addy would cover him with the truth until he begged to return every dime he had left of his ill-gotten booty.
The trickle down from this story was the gravy. People were going to recoup some of their hard earned money. Retirees, pensioners, kids trying to pay off college loans might actually get a break. Nuns. And Savanna, her sister, who had thought she was on her way to a secure future.
This story would turn the tide for Addy and all the cheated.
Darn, but she was good, and people were going to realize the lies about her for what they were.
As if tired of her fanciful boasting, the bitsy car rolled to a stop on its own as it faced off against the wind.
The closest four-man crew of yellow rain-suited workers had managed to raise the pleasure craft from the ferocious water and pull it onto a boat rack with ropes. But they struggled to rescue it from the wild wind and secure it on the stand.
Addy left her fashionable fedora on the passenger seat, flipped up the hood of her lime-green Ilse Jacobsen rain jacket and snugged the zipper up under her chin. The car undulated in a scary shimmy as she leaped out and hurried toward a man holding a rope for all he was worth.
Halfway there, the wind whipped off the hood of her jacket, slapped her long, hyper-curly blond hair against her cheek and stole away her breath. Her steps faltered and she stopped.
Wet and chilled, she hauled her hood back on, but not before cold rain poured down the back of her neck and, as she leaned into the wind and managed to take another step—into her shoes.
These people were crazier than she was to be out here. These were just boats, pleasure boats, and not someone’s livelihood. And since the remains of Hurricane Harold were passing right by this little-known corner of the world, their efforts were probably unnecessary.
Forcing one foot and then the other, she struggled closer to the workers.
Several boats had already been hauled out and sat tethered in place with taught ropes. Still out in the harbor, hardy lobster boats strained and rocked at anchor, and one particularly large yacht looked as if it were ready to break free and crash everything into flotsam on its way inland. Some poor rich guy was about to be short one boat.
Zachary Hale, she hoped.
As she got within a few feet of the boat, the closest man clinging to the rope hollered above the rushing wind, “Lady, get out of here.”
“I need to ask you a question,” she shouted, and wasn’t sure her voice even got past the end of her nose until he wrapped the rope around one arm and pointed at the flapping overhead. Two identical red flags with black centers curled and snapped above them.
Hurricane! Even a landlubber like her knew the meaning of those flags. Marine warning flags for a hurricane.
Harold had beaten the odds and headed inland. The wind hammered at her as she stood immobile, wavering between the insanity of the storm and the lunacy her life had turned into.
She suddenly saw herself once again standing on a stage facing a jeering crowd at the university. When the booing started, she had thought it was a joke, and then as it continued, she expected rotten eggs, but it had been a more intellectual crowd, and all she got were death threats and promises of a lifelong ban from journalism.
The wind took another shot at her and she tensed her whole body. When she didn’t leave, the man waved her away with a jerk of his head, but it was another shout from him to “go away” that revved up her reporter mode.
She swiped at the rain running down her face and, when he turned in her direction, stepped forward.
“I just need to find Zachary Hale.” She screamed into the wind and it screamed right back at her.
“’Et.... ’Ell. ’Way.” The rising wind carried much of his shout off, but she got the gist.
She inched closer to him. “Tell me where to find Zachary Hale.”
Just then the wind ripped at the boat and one man on the other side lost his grip. With horror, Addy realized the craft, lifted by the wind, now tipped. Then, in slow motion, the boat began to fall in her direction.
She stumbled back, but not quickly enough. The man grabbed her by the shoulder of her jacket and hauled her aside like a net full of cod as the boat crashed into the spot where she had stood a second before.
The white-and-red boat rocked and settled half on one side.
When the wind couldn’t blow her over, she realized the man had not released her. She looked up into his dark, angry eyes. How sweet. A savior. A tough guy with a heart of gold.
A cliché.
Oh, God, she was not always this cynical. Once upon a time, she had actually been nice, she thought, as her feet nearly left the ground. Her savior propelled her toward her car, where he opened the door and pitched her in.
“Go,” he shouted against the wind and then slammed the door turning away as if he had fixed that problem.
“Ah-yuh” and “ahm tellin’ you” she was in Maine.
Addy stayed in the rental car, watched the men and dripped all over the seat and floor mats. Rental car—it was okay. These boat rescuers were going to have to leave sooner or later. They might even need a ride. A grateful man, out of the wind and rain, might be willing to chat about Zachary Hale.
After several more minutes of struggling, the workers finished their task and then raced toward a nearby shed. A short moment later, a black SUV burst out and defied the wind as it made a quick arc and sped near where she parked.
The SUV stopped suddenly and the driver side window lowered. Glowering out at her was her rescuer, his face covered with soft golden whiskers, his hair both plastered to his head and sticking out at endearing angles. Hero type. Handsome and good-hearted. Maybe he’d tell her where the manicured billionaire was hiding.
“Unless you have a death wish, get out of here,” he said as the wind buffeted both vehicles.
“I just—”
The window closed and the SUV took off up the hill leaving her with no answers, a scant few feet above sea level, in a rising storm.
She looked to the second crew who were securing their boat and decided her best chance for an answer was fleeing up the hill. “You are not getting away so easily, buddy.”
Addy slammed the car in gear and hurried after the SUV’s taillights. A year ago, she would have felt the gut clench of paralyzing fear. Today, she almost savored the chase. There was a kind of freedom when one’s tail was dragging along the bottom of the barrel as hers was.
She had nothing to lose.
Water rushed down the street, high enough to make her add a prayer to her bravado as she rode a gusty tail wind steadily up the hill. At the top, the SUV turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
Addy gave the car more gas than was probably prudent, but a hot scoop waited for no one.
When she reached the stop sign at the intersection, the SUV sat parked at the curb around the corner in front of a place called Braven’s Tavern. Addy realized they must be waiting to see if she could climb the hill. Good. She might yet get a chance to speak with someone.
Just then, three of the SUV’s doors popped open and all but the driver leaped out, splashing in their rubber boots. The yellow-suited passengers hurried toward the boarded-up tavern. As Addy inched her car around the corner, the SUV made a U-turn and headed back down toward the harbor. Maybe the driver was crazier than she was.
The yellow suits hurried into the tavern, the big, solid oak door slamming shut behind them.
She let the madman driver go and parked the worthy compact rental in a high spot just past the tavern in front of Pardee Jordan’s Best Ever Donuts where water swirled but didn’t collect.
The donut shop gave her some shelter from the wind, but there was no shelter from the rain. By the time she got to the tavern’s old-fashioned oak door, rain poured down her shoulders, wicked up the pant legs of her jeans and threatened to dampen her underwear.
She grabbed the long brass door handle, tugged hard, and when the door swung open, dashed inside. These Mainers might be rough around the edges, but they would not toss her back out into the storm.
She hoped.
The short, dark hallway of the entry led to an open area where, on the right, hooks lined the wall and the SUV’s three passengers were shedding their rain gear and hanging it up to drip.
To the left, the bar stools stood empty at the square-cornered, U-shaped bar and no bartender leaned over the bar in greeting. Shelves of liquor and a couple unlit beer signs decorated the back wall of the bar lit by flickering candles.
The three workers stopped and turned as a unit to gape at her. One man was tall and lean with a lot of red hair plastered to his head and around his face. One was stocky and white-whiskered and the third man who was somewhere in the middle of height and girth had graying dark brown, unruly curls around his thin face.
Not one of them said a word.
Addy pushed her hood back from her wet hair and gave each of them an even look. Well, what she hoped was an even look because when one’s underwear was starting to take on water it was hard.
They stared back for a moment and then turned away to continue removing their rain suits. She had the feeling they would have stripped down to their underwear if she hadn’t been there—maybe they still would.
“Eh, Michael, sorry about Francine,” the stocky, white-whiskered member of the trio said to the red headed man.
Addy remembered the word FRANCINE as it had headed directly for her upturned face. Francine was the boat’s name.
The shoulders of the tall thin man with what now seemed like a bushel of wet red hair slumped. “Ah-yuh. Wish we’d’a known sooner.”
“...that the storm wasn’t going to pass us by.” In her head Addy filled in the missing words.
She stepped up behind the group. “Excuse me. I’m looking for Zachary Hale.”
A choking kind of cough made her she realize the four of them were not the only people in the bar. She looked over her shoulder to see scattered tables in a room off to the left of where she stood. People, men and women, sat in clumps of two, three or four at timeworn tables with mismatched chairs. All of them stared at her.
She peered first into the faces of the people at the tables to make sure the billionaire hadn’t shed his fancy business suit to hide amid this crowd.
When she didn’t see anyone resembling the slick, manicured tycoon in disguise she turned halfway back to the three men so she could address everyone. “Can anyone tell me where to find Zachary Hale?”
A few of the people continued to stare at her, but most turned back to their beers and bowls of snacks.
“Pardon me, miss.” The red-haired man spoke to her in a friendly voice as he pointed toward the door. “You don’t want to be going anywhere in that, so come sit at the bar and I’ll pour you a beer.”
Before she could even respond, he walked around the bar, and pulled a glass from under the counter.
Addy held her ground and pulled her hood back on. “That’s very nice of you, but I really need to get going. If someone could just tell me where Mr. Hale lives or where he might be right now.”
“You’ll get blown off the road trying to get up Sea Crest Hill in this weather.” A woman’s voice came from the crowd at the tables.
A few heads turned in the middle-aged woman’s direction and she hushed quickly. Her ruddy face got redder and she turned her chair away.
At least these people knew the man. In this small town the hill called Sea Crest couldn’t be too hard to find.
She decided to try a less direct question. She might get another nibble. “Does anyone know if he’s here in town?”
Silence.
Hale was a thief, but she doubted he’d physically harm anyone. He wasn’t that kind of bad guy, so these folks were mum because Hale grew up in this town and not because they were afraid of him. He was one of them and they weren’t going to give her much information.
She rubbed her back where a bead of water trickled down her spine between her shoulder blades. She could lie to them. Make up something about being Hale’s worried fiancé or secretary with important business.
She looked around the room. Every one of them except the woman who had given away Sea Crest Hill was staring at her with varying degrees of resolute.
And she was such a bad liar. Even the slowest of this crowd would call her on it.
Until a year ago, anyone in the news field would have said if there was one thing Adriana Bonacorda could be relied on for, it was the truth.
“Listen, miss.” The red-haired man, evidently the bartender as he had tied an apron around his thin waist. “You can stay here if you want. There isn’t much in the way of amenities, but we’re far enough up hill from the harbor to be safe and dry in this sturdy old building.”
“Thank you. I’ll be all right, but I need to find Mr. Hale.”
“There is no place else for you to go in town or for twenty miles. Sit down. Relax. Have a beer or—” He reached under the bar and pulled out a bottle of red wine and held it up.
Wine for the city girl. This guy already had that much figured out about her. By the look he gave her, he knew enough about her to know she was not here to heap rewards or praise on one of theirs.
She shook her head slowly. She could almost feel the tread of sneaks and stilettos on her back as the other reporters trampled her to get the story. If they convinced Hale to talk while she sipped Pinot Noir, she might as well start fabricating a résumé, because no one was ever going to hire her with her real one.
She pushed damp hair from her forehead.
Wile might be in order.
Or maybe something brash, near the truth.
What were they going to do? Toss her out into the storm?
Addy leaned over the bar and gave the thin, redheaded bartender an earnest smile. She didn’t need to make enemies out of these people.
“Look. I’m a reporter. Zachary Hale has a story to tell and I want to get his side out to the public before there are any more accusations.” She took a breath hoping her message of benevolence would get through. “Or worse yet, charges are filed against him.”
“Aw, just let her go out there ’n’ look, Michael,” a burly, dark-bearded man said to the bartender as he nodded toward the old oak door.
Michael folded his arms over his chest but remained silent.
“I know that he’s from around here,” Addy brushed at her sodden hair, tipped her head to the side and continued. “And I get that he doesn’t want to be hounded by reporters, but that’s going to happen, anyway. It’ll just be more civilized if he has a chance to lay his side out before the lies get too vicious.”
Before the real truth gets out, she thought. Was her nose growing?
“You can’t go out in this.” The bartender tried again, his arms not budging from their determined pose across his chest.
“But if the storm—”
“Hurricane, miss. Hurricane.”
The wind took that moment to snap the boards covering the windows as if to reinforce the bartender’s statement.
“All right. If the hurricane is already here—”
“This is merely the build-up.” He interrupted her with a warning glance that made her insides slightly queasy. “They expect winds of up to a hundred miles an hour to hit us in a few hours.”
She sighed. Did they think she was going to stand on a street corner and wait for a hurricane to blow her away? She had work to do. At least two other reporters already knew where Hale might go to ground.
“If you just give me directions to Sea Crest Hill, I’ll be out of here.”
“Hale’s not there,” the dark-bearded guy said, looking as dark as the storm clouds outside.
He had to be in Bailey’s Cove. Her lead had been sound, as reliable as one could get these days.
If not at his home, where in this town could he be? Bailey’s Cove was his comfort zone. This is where he’d go, said Savanna, her sister who had worked in the off-site records department of Hale and Blankenstock Investments, LLC, for over two years.
Peering into their faces, she examined the crowd once again to reassure herself Hale wasn’t cowering there in the disguise of a local. That would be just like a scoundrel. She got a lot of petulant, stoic looks and plain blank stares, but Hale’s slick good looks weren’t there.
Saying Hale wasn’t at his home on Sea Crest Hill was most likely a misdirection. She’d find Sea Crest Hill and have a look for herself. She’d know his home once she got there. It would be the biggest and the fanciest.
“Thank you so much for your offer of shelter,” she said to the bartender and started to leave.
The door to the tavern burst open and six people entered—two women and four men—sodden, weary and breathing hard except the man who had pulled her away from the falling FRANCINE. He stood tall, brooding and soaked, taking inventory of the people in the tavern as if he were somehow responsible for each one of them—and ignoring her.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_24631a7a-1122-5f2b-9252-66627b2b5277)
ADDY’S SAVIOR FROM the docks signaled a farewell to the bartender and turned to leave.
“Where’s ah— Where’s he going?” The stout white-whiskered man asked from his bar stool at the near corner of the bar’s U shape.
One of the newcomers stepped forward. “Said he had to get back to—”
The bartender shot a hand into the air and he, too, seemed to make a point of not looking at Addy.
Addy studied the red-haired man and the retreating newcomer for a moment. The retreating man was her quarry.
He had to be Zachary Hale.
As impossible as it seemed, tall, rough looking and seething was Zachary Hale. Stripped of his business suit and the affable expression, the whiskered man with his wet hair plastered to his head seemed like a Maine fisherman instead of a criminal tycoon. She was such an idiot for not seeing it in the first place.
She started after him.
“Leave him alone, miss.” She had taken only a step when the sharp demand stopped her.
When she turned, the short white-whiskered man was no longer on his bar stool but standing inches behind her.
“He’s not who you think he is,” the man finished in a deadly calm voice.
Facing him squarely she looked directly into the faded blue eyes and told a lie that at least might fool him for a moment while she fled. “It’s a family thing.” If anyone would understand this, it would be a man from Maine.
The man’s look did not change.
She fled the tavern in time to see the SUV pull away from the curb.
Uncaring any more about the drenching rain, she flew to her car and jumped inside. Gripping the steering wheel as tight as she could, she headed out after the beckoning taillights.
The road was still deserted except for her car and the SUV.
No other reporters. Wally Harriman and Jacko Wilson would be sitting snug in their dry Boston condos waiting for the storm to pass, sure no one would be gutsy enough to travel in such weather.
“He’s not who you think he is”? This man was Zachary Hale and he was hers.
She followed, pushing the rental car as much as she dared as water ran down the back of her neck, down her body and into her bra. She wiggled her shoulders. This, too, would pass.
The street was worse than when she arrived in town. A slick of water covered most of the surface spraying out from the tires of the SUV and then filling back in.
When she passed it, she could barely see the old church through the blowing rainfall, so she spared the historic building a nod.
The hammering of the wind had escalated in the short while she had been in the town and every time the car took a broadside shot of the gusty stuff, she was sure the bitsy rental was going to tip over and tumble her like towels in a clothes dryer. But each time, the hatchback car held on to the ground and kept up the insane pace she asked of it.
Doggedly, she followed the SUV’s taillights off the town’s main street onto a side road leading away from the ocean and climbing gently up a hill. The rain slashed and the wind ripped at the trees surrounding the bungalows lined up along the road. The press of houses eventually thinned out and the road began to climb and curve through pine trees that seemed to close in behind her as she drove.
When a large tree branch plopped down onto the almost absent shoulder of the road, it brushed Addy back toward the center and she stayed there.
If she hadn’t been so fired up about clinging to the sight of Mr. Bad Guy’s taillights, she knew she would have been scared boneless. Now she held on to determination as a way of survival both mental and physical.
The SUV ahead of her turned once again, this time onto an impossibly narrow road or a driveway she would not have seen if he hadn’t turned there.
She slowed and followed with growing trepidation. He for sure knew she was tailing him, but he might also know she was a reporter. If his cell service worked, surely someone at the bar would have called him.
A thought occurred to her that tried to be amusing, but wasn’t. He could be trying to lead her to some remote place where he could get rid of her and hide this minuscule car and no one would ever be the wiser.
The folks of the town would be convinced she had gone away. Or because they would think she was trying to bring down one of their own, especially one who was so obviously a part of the community, they might help him cover up her disappearance.
Was the story worth dying for?
Was she crazy for thinking such things?
Heck, yeah.
But if she could wipe away the memory of the hopeless look on her sister’s face when she first told her story to Addy, it was worth every slick road, every gust of wind and even facing down a fleeing tycoon.
But, she wasn’t going to die. He didn’t frighten her. The FBI agent she had interviewed had said scam artists rarely seriously hurt anyone. They were usually cowards, often helpless if they were forced into a face-to-face confrontation.
After what she had seen of this guy, she had to admit he wouldn’t be terrified of her. Maybe he’d want to come clean, bare his soul to cleanse himself.
Keep dreaming, she told herself.
She squeezed the wheel and followed the lights. After a quarter mile or so of the steeper, rocky grade, and one particularly deep water-filled rut, she patted the steering wheel. “It’s okay, rental car, you can do this.”
The road turned suddenly and a stand of trees gave her a small respite from the wind. Wherever they were going they had to be arriving any time. She breathed a long sigh. The sun would be setting soon and she wasn’t relishing the darkness.
Where Hale was going and what she would do when they arrived hadn’t been very well planned in her head. Somehow, she had always seen herself confronting him in an office, a bar or a coffee shop, or even on the front steps outside his condo building in downtown Boston.
“You’re leapin’, but you’re not lookin’,” her granddad always told her when she did thoughtless things as a child.
Well, she was nothing if not adaptable. When she found out he had left town, she ran toward the place few people knew about. She would chase him into his mansion and follow him into his man cave, whatever it took. She didn’t care as long as he talked.
She hit a jarring bump.
“Whoa, baby.” She patted the dashboard with one hand.
In the past year and a half, she had changed a lot. Zooming to the top and crashing and burning six months later did that to a person. Climbing out of the crater she had made on landing had been the most difficult part and she was not sure she had found the rim yet.
Zachary Hale was going to help her regain her footing. Her old boss at the Boston Times was going to have to give her back her job when she brought this story to him.
Once clear of the sheltering trees, the wind rocked the SUV’s taillights and then a few seconds later slammed into her car. The wheels fought for traction as the car shifted sideways. When she tried to correct, the wind lifted the rear end.
The world seemed to shift as the car slid backward toward the edge of the road. Water coursed around both sides as terror grabbed hold of her and squeezed hard until she couldn’t breathe.
With a snap, the rear end of the car dropped and she screamed. Braking and steering did nothing except perhaps hasten her descent.
The nose of the car shifted suddenly upward toward the angry sky and the sound of her renewed screams bounced off the cheap vinyl and plastic around her.
With a sudden jolt the car stopped, the headlamps pointing upward at a forty-five-degree slant and lighting up the torrent of raindrops. She had no idea how far she had gone. Ten feet? Twenty?
Or how much farther she would drop.
Gingerly she sat up in the seat trying to see outside the confines of the car. There was nothing but rain in the headlights. Darkness was falling.
She tried for a calming breath.
Was this all?
Was she about to plunge off the edge of some bluff?
She turned slowly in the seat to recon the area behind her. Just then, the wind rocked the car, shifting the tires, loosening their hold and the vehicle shifted downward even farther.
Fear of having made yet another stupid mistake moved in for a tick, until she reminded herself there was a prize to be had if she could just buck up and get through this.
The car shook again, but held fast.
Okay.
Now. Stay in the car or get out and run after the story of her the life? For her pride and her sister, she popped open the door.
When she leaped out, the wind hit her like a hand grabbing her, hauling her upward.
The strong hand hefted her up the few feet to the edge of the road and Zachary Hale tossed her onto solid ground. Through the sheets of driving rain she saw the black SUV.
“Get in,” Hale yelled and she eagerly grabbed the door and did so.
A couple minutes later the driver’s-side door popped open. Hale led with her duffel bag and backpack with her electronics as he jumped in and continued up the road.
She closed her eyes for a moment of thanks for being alive and then she glanced at the driver.
Brooding was kind of an understatement, as she observed him in the shed of he dashboard lights. The wind shook even the big SUV and the driver concentrated on the road.
After a few minutes more of driving, he stopped and backed into a short driveway and up to a three-car garage. One garage door raised and he parked the vehicle safely inside.
Addy hadn’t gotten but a glance of the mansion through the downpour. Large and brooding, old, not what she had expected.
Once inside the garage, she did not give herself a second to sag in relief. She grabbed her bags and scrambled out of the vehicle. For a reporter it was probably more apt than for most people to ask for forgiveness for trespassing rather than ask for permission. If she was out of the vehicle, he could see she planned to stay.
As she stood next to the SUV and dripped, the garage door lowered. In the dimness of the light, she could see that a very early model car and a buggy of some sort filled the other two garage spaces. He must be a collector of some kind.
Then a disgusting thought occurred to her. Maybe he bought these with OPM...other people’s money.
Move, she told herself. The moment would never get better than this, and if she invited herself to stay...
She let herself into a breezeway between the house and the garage. The enclosed space ran the length of the garage and was undoubtedly a twentieth-century addition designed as shelter only. Stark and serviceable, the room had hooks on the far wall holding coats for all seasons with men’s boots and shoes lined up on mats below the coats.
Off to the left there was a large box of wood and a set of flip-up doors to a cellar. The doors would have been outside before the breezeway had been built. Outside and close to the entry to the kitchen so the food stored down there could be easily accessed. It was a very old house.
When Hale didn’t follow her, she moved to where she could see him through the window in the door to the garage. If he picked up an ax or a chain saw, she could run out a door on either end of the breezeway.
She put a hand to her wet hair and shoved a large clump out of her eyes. Maybe if she could see more clearly, she wouldn’t think such dire thoughts.
He rounded the SUV making a beeline for where she stood in the doorway. Coming to murder her? “Con men don’t usually turn to murder, unless it’s a last resort” were the FBI agent’s exact words. The woman had seemed confident in herself, but Addy wondered if she was pushing this guy toward said last resort. She had once thought of herself as a good judge of character, but now she’d just have to rely on being extra careful.
She stepped away as he swung open the door. Inside the breezeway, Hale seemed to be racing to remove the rain suit, hanging each piece on hooks on the wall. Then he ripped off his overshirt and damp baggy work pants, tossing each item onto the top of a nearby washing machine. When he turned in her direction, a sweep of raw appreciation for the masculine body made her face flush. She had no idea what had been living under those business suits.
With his dark T-shirt and dark athletic shorts clinging to his body, there was little she could not intimately imagine about this rat. Too bad.
He took a step toward where she had made a large water spot on the floor, and she stood up taller. Getting timid would not get her the scoop every journalist wanted and only she was brave or crazy enough to go after.
“Zachary Hale, I’m Adriana Bonacorda. I’d like to get your side of the story.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Drops of rain fell from his water-darkened hair still tipped with summer’s blond, and splatted onto the smooth, clean concrete garage floor.
“I’d like to throw you out in the rain.” There was only candor, not malice, in his deep voice, a voice to fit the body.
He turned and strode away. When he went through the door to the house and didn’t close it behind him, she tore off her coat and hung it on the hook beside his. Ripped off her wet clothing and hung it there also.
Then, in her girl shorts and tank top, she grabbed her bags and scrambled inside after him.
When she flipped a light switch, she found herself alone in a large old-fashioned kitchen with a cold wood-burning stove and a wooden icebox with shining brass hardware. Antique pots and bowls hung from hooks and the fireplace with a stone mantel had to have been built with the house, perhaps two hundred years ago.
She put her bags down on the old-style braided rug, and shivering, dug in her duffel for the fleece pants and hoodie she brought because she knew Maine was colder than Massachusetts. Darn cold, she thought as she shoved a leg into the pants.
“Close and latch the shutters in there. Cross-tape every window without a shutter.” Hale had disappeared into the interior of the house but his barked commands filtered back to her through the sound of the pounding rain. A roll of wide masking tape sat on the wooden counter next to the icebox.
The first window, long and tall, was flanked by sheer curtains with tulips fancifully stitched across the bottom.
She surveyed for a moment.
Open the window, reach out in the pounding rain and pull the shutter closed.
Easy peasy.
She struggled to push up the first heavy window and when it wouldn’t stay by itself, propped it open with her shoulder while she reached out and pulled the shutters closed. The shutter’s latch fell easily into place, but she struggled to lower the heavy wood and glass window without letting it drop and shatter into a million shards.
After she was finished, a large puddle of rainwater stood on the linoleum around her feet and she was wet again.
When she heard shutters slam in the next room, she closed the next two sets, grabbed the tape and a flashlight from the old wooden kitchen table, just in case, and hurried past Hale into the parlor to do the same in there.
The light she had turned on blinked out, as did the ones in the rooms she had left behind. She flipped on her flashlight.
In the beam of light she could see furniture and fixtures she might have seen in her grandmother’s home or at one of her old aunts’ houses when she was a kid. Her flashlight paused on a round table with three tiers that would serve no purpose in today’s world and then a pair of bulldogs that might be banks. Hale was trying to protect the place as if it was a museum. Wait. It was a museum, of sorts.
When Hale strode past her, she got busy and finished the parlor. A library across the hall and then a maid’s quarters at the back of the house needed her attention next. When she heard Hale run up the stairs, she finished two more rooms and followed. The first bedroom she worked on had a dark four-poster bed complete with a wooden canopy—if that’s what they called the wood ones—and velvet curtains. On a stand sat a pitcher and bowl that had once been used for washing up in the morning. A small primitive bathroom sat tucked between this and the next bedroom and she closed the shutters on all of them and taped a window in the hallway.
She could hear Hale on the third floor or attic or whatever was up there slamming shutters and then his footsteps hurrying.
By the time she finished a fourth bedroom and third sitting room, Hale stood, a shadow in the doorway. She resisted the urge to shine the beam in his direction and the ambient light was too dim to see the expression on his face. A spark of fear sent a prickle of pain along the nerves just under her skin, but there would be no “flight” today.
“Thank you,” he said and vanished. This time, he didn’t call back to her.
The lights flickered on and she wandered out of the bedroom to look in the other rooms down the hallway. Every bedroom had an antique bed or two, some older than others. One was even a rope bed used by the early settlers in lieu of a mattress. The house seemed to be a collection of antiquities spanning the ages.
Addy was not an expert, but she had seen enough around Boston to know colonial American through early-twentieth-century furnishings when she saw them. None of the rooms looked as if they had been lived in for a very long time, with the exception of the four-poster bedroom. It had a space heater sitting near the fireplace. He could entrench himself in this room and make her sleep on the stiff and formal settee in the parlor.
She loped down the stairs doubting Zachary Hale was going out into the storm again, but he wasn’t in the kitchen or the rest of the house. When she heard sounds in the garage again she went out to see him unloading groceries and water from the SUV.
He now wore a navy pull-on shirt with a button V and jeans, and she assumed dry underwear. She’d give a few bucks herself for some of those right now. She had some in her duffel bag, but since she might be tossed out into the storm at any moment...
Throwing her out was exactly what she expected a guy like Zachary Hale to do. He wouldn’t steal from old ladies and then open his home to a reporter, unless he had other plans for the reporter.
She swallowed against the tightness in her throat, let herself out into the garage and grabbed four of the gallon bottles of water from the SUV and followed Hale up a set of stairs at the back wall of the garage. Wherever he was going, there must be a place to make food.
If anyone understood why people went into an ax murderer’s dark basement without back up, it was an investigative journalist, especially one with no options in the outside world short of minimum-wage jobs—if she could even get one of those.
Only her sister would miss her, and that was a maybe, because her sister was busy with two children, living in a tiny apartment and had only called her because she was in dire straights.
Addy shook her head. Their lives were such a mess.
She shouldered open the door at the top of the stairs at the rear of the garage and stopped short. The door opened into a large loft where vaulted ceilings spread out over a comfy living space. This explained where in the unused house he stayed. He didn’t.
A kitchen sat to the left, small, open with a freestanding work island. Two bar stools sat tucked under the lip of its butcher-block counter. To the right of the kitchen area was a more formal dining space with a table—all wood and with six chairs. In the middle of the back wall sat a fireplace flanked by a couch and cushioned chairs.
On the right of the room was a large bed covered with a duvet of large burgundy and forest-green squares. The whole place looked woodsy, spare and masculine with the exception of a few touches that said a woman had been here on more than one occasion.
She put the water on the counter and started to go down for more.
“I’ll get the rest.”
She began to protest, but he held up a hand and continued. “In the bedroom with the four-poster bed, there are dry towels and a space heater.”
She took the dismissal for what it was. He had no idea what to do with the enemy, but apparently even a rat couldn’t throw an intruder, no matter how unwanted, out into a hurricane to fend for herself.
Not getting any dryer, she hurried down the stairs, through the garage and breezeway and to the kitchen. She plucked her duffel and backpack from the braided rug and headed for the bedroom with the four-poster bed...and a space heater.
What she was going to do when the electricity went out, and it surely would, she had no idea.
Worse than the cold, sitting in the cold dark she wasn’t going to get the story from Hale. She needed a plan to put herself in his space where she could glean knowledge from his reactions.
As she carried her bags up the stairs, she wondered if somewhere in the clattering din of the storm would eventually be the hum of a generator to keep the space heater functioning.
In the four-poster bedroom, she flipped a light switch. When the dim bulb came on, it was barely better than nothing.
Part of her wanted to sit down in the semi-dark and write up what she had already learned about Zachary Hale and the other part, the overachiever survival part of her wanted to rush back over to the loft. She would demand Hale tell her all there was to know about his company, Hale and Blankenstock Investments, LLC, and about the partner on which his attorney tried to blame the scandal.
So close. She was so close to all the answers. If she could get Hale to trust her, to open up...
When she shivered almost violently, she remembered she was cold, her fleece suit was damp and her underwear wet.
She put her bag on the old carpeting and flipped on the space heater that stood on the slate floor in front of the old fireplace. Standing in the glow she let it warm her. Well, her ankles. The heat didn’t rise much farther than her kneecaps.
She didn’t have to lie to Hale. She had already told him she was a reporter. Maybe she had fudged just a bit by telling him she wanted his side of the story. She already knew his side of the story and she wasn’t going to be fooled by the face-of-innocence thing. What she wanted was to build her story, her series of stories, on what made such a man tick. How did small-town Maine’s smiling baby boy get to be a billionaire swindler in Boston in thirty-three short years?
Still shivering in spite of warming ankles she pulled her bag closer and shed her wet clothing.
All right, so Hale had only been charged and convicted by her fellow reporters and not a court of law. But as far as that man was concerned, every good reporter knew the percentages on where there’s smoke there’s fire. Where there was the suspicion of huge amounts of misappropriated money, there was some kind of malfeasance committed by someone.
Dancing in the cold she pulled dry underwear from the bag...
But no one had interviewed him. The person closest to him, his partner, had been interviewed and she was freely, if meekly speaking out, though only after his attorney had thrown her under the bus.
How deeply into Hale’s personality did the creepiness penetrate? When one swindled men and women who had worked at hard-labor jobs all their lives, did it take more of a deeply rooted problem than if one swindled fellow white collars?
...and soon the primal relief of dry underwear loosened a knot in her stomach. When that happened some of the old courage and determination, each threaded with a touch of recklessness, had her quickly sliding on her last change of clothes.
She was going to go kick some swindler butt.
Slow down, she thought as she snapped her jeans. Take some time to think this out. She looked around at her surroundings. The fireplace where the heater sat was in the wall to the left of the door and had been capped, either because it didn’t work well or to keep out the winter cold and errant wildlife. The heavy four-poster bed with its dark blue curtains had been placed against the inner wall to the right of the door and beyond it were matching chests of drawers.
On either side of the bed was a large braided rug and portraits of, she supposed, family members hung on most of the walls.
Several feet beyond the end of the bed were two tall windows. Between the windows was a washstand, a commode, with an ewer and bowl sitting on top. Unreasonably she hoped there was no chamber pot in the small cupboard of the stand; she had seen a flush toilet here, after all. The washstand had a granite top and above the towel bar was the picture of a woman.
She walked away from the heater to read the legend.
The nightstand, it seemed, was made for Millie Mauston when she first came to the mansion on Sea Crest Hill in 1889 as Mrs. Colm McClure. The Maine granite top of the stand weighed about eighty pounds and the chest was made of black walnut at her request. Millie, a bright young woman with a head of thick dark hair was pictured beside the legend. The birth and death date said she was twenty-four when she died.
Young. Too young to even get to experience her nightstand for long. Addy turned toward the bed and wondered if Millie had slept there.
“Well, Millie, I hope I get a chance.”
Right now it was time to find out some dark and sturdy info about Zachary Hale. Dark because readers and therefore editors liked the juicy stuff and sturdy because the tale of intrigue surrounding her last conquest in Afghanistan turned out to be diaphanous at best.
The lights flickered out.
Dark. Why had she used the word dark?
Didn’t matter.
If Hale had not locked the door to the loft, she’d take that as a signal she was welcome for a nice fireside chat.
He would not, after all, expect her to sit up here with only the glow of her computer screen and when that went dead, to sit in the rural Maine blackness.
She groped around.
And where was the damned flashlight?
She stopped for a moment in the pitch black.
She used to be nice. She had friends once. She held the door for old men. She used to carry her elderly neighbor’s trash to the chute. Though for a while a year and a half ago, the best she could muster was to find a neighbor kid to carry it for her. She had been too busy pursuing a story, too busy trying to gain the status few reporters ever touched. And she had done it, been on the top of the heap, the star news reporter everyone envied, in orbit with those who might be up for a Pulitzer Prize, everyone said.
Crash and burn would have been a good outcome compared to the embarrassing punishment she had gotten from the press she used to hold so dear.
She searched again for the flashlight.
Aha! On the edge of the bed. The room brightened as she flicked on the beam.
She shrugged into a second tank top and cropped cardigan. When she clutched the sweater around her chest, she cringed at how not warm these clothes were. It was still seventy-five degrees in late September in Boston this year and maybe when the storm passed and the sun came back out, it would be sixty in Maine before the snow started.
With another shiver, she grabbed her laptop and headed down the stairs. Zachary Hale, here I come, she thought.
If her last dry underwear got wet in the storm because he threw her out, so be it.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_0aff2b70-656e-5050-ab19-ec4b85d077b4)
ZACH HELD HIS cell phone to his ear and listened as his attorney warned him that there was a reporter in town asking about him.
“She’s here,” he said as he took a loaf of bread and a package of cookies from the grocery bag and placed them on the kitchen’s island countertop.
“At the mansion? That’s not a good idea.” His attorney, Hunter Morrison, sounded worried and he probably had reason to be.
“She ran her car off the road following me up here.”
Hunter snorted. “I guess leaving her in the ditch to sit out a hurricane might have been a bit much. I don’t suppose she did it on purpose.”
Zach thought of how far her car had left the road, how frightened she had been when he had hauled her out and wondered if anyone was that desperate for a story. “I doubt it.”
“You don’t have her in the loft with you.”
It was a nonquestion that begged a negative response. “I put her in the house. We’ve got power now. If Owen did his job, the generator is functioning and there’s plenty of gas.”
“Well, the old guy’s intentions will have been good.”
Zach snorted this time. He didn’t trust Owen Calloway to be a perfect groundskeeper, but he trusted the old guy and his wife not to meddle and not to gossip. Those two qualities made his only close neighbors gems.
“At any rate I’ve got plenty of wood. As long as the fireplace works, and according to the contractor there should be barely a puff of smoke even in a hurricane. We’ve got food and hot water.”
“You might find Delainey and I squatting up there one of these days.”
Hunter had a new fiancé who enriched his life in every way and Zach was glad that kind of thing worked for the two of them.
“Anytime. Anytime,” Zach said putting a bag of apples and one of oranges on the counter beside the bread. “And I’ll keep the reporter at arm’s length.”
“A little farther away might be better.”
“Maybe she’ll stay tucked in the house.”
“They predict the storm could stall.”
“I’ll feed her once in a while.”
“Be careful of what you feed her. She has a lot of good journalism to her credit, but her last story has been labeled as a desperate grab at a Pulitzer. She’s been down and out since, so she’s most likely very hungry.”
“I’ll slip food under her door.”
Hunter laughed. “Yeah. Be careful and good luck, Zach.”
“Thanks, and I meant it about you and Delainey.”
He signed off with another promise to be wary.
Zachary McClure Hale in loyal and patriotic fashion had been named after his grandfather Zachary Hale and an ancestor by the name of McClure who had brought his wife and infant to the very young United States of America in the early 1800s.
By time and attrition the McClures of New England had either died out, or a few, but not many, had left Maine and lost interest in the family heritage. Virginia McClure, his grandmother, had drilled into him that a Mainer knew where he came from and he protected that legacy. For most of Zach’s adult life, it had been up to him to maintain the ancestral home and the antiques within.
The old McClure mansion was his to look after, but caring for the heritage home had not been a burden. Money to keep the house in good repair was also not a problem. At issue, he had little time for the place and there was scant interest outside himself for keeping it in the best historically accurate repair.
He didn’t begrudge the time he gave. The loft above the garage had become a place to retreat, where he didn’t usually allow people to follow him. Since the time when control had been bequeathed to him, there had never been a reporter and never a woman here other than Cammy Logan, who cleaned the house and the loft and kept a keen eye on any repairs or issues that occurred with either.
Reporters he usually met at a café or his office. Women he wished to entertain in private, he met at restaurants or posh hotels. His penthouse condominium in Boston was also private territory.
The mansion on Sea Crest Hill he kept to himself, until today.
He’d deal with this reporter exactly how he’d dealt with those in Boston. She’d get referred to his attorney for a blanket statement neither confirming nor denying any wrongdoing at Hale and Blankenstock. He gave the loft a quick inspection. The windows were specially installed to withstand a strong nor’easter and even an occasional branch or bit of debris. He was hopeful they would hold out in a hurricane.
The interior with its old blond wood of the 1950’s had withstood time and even come back into fashion a few times. The light-colored paneled walls gave the place a feeling that it was larger on the inside than out. And it was a welcome and necessary refuge he needed in his life.
He had updated the appliances last year and made sure the bed was large and comfortable. Cammy had added a pillow here and there, a few fabric wall hangings and a handmade quilt on the back of the couch to soften the man-effect, but he had to admit they added more comfort.
Zach had barely finished the conversation when the lights flicked out again. He’d have to check the generator.
He grabbed the flashlight and a baseball cap from the ones on the wall pegs and headed down the stairs where he donned a dry jacket from a hook in the garage. Then he sprinted toward the generator shed.
The wind slapped him and the rain did its best to blow him off course as he approached the shed, where behind the lawn mower, weed whacker and other tools to maintain the exterior of the old home, would sit the rarely used generator that powered the essentials of the house whenever necessary. Right now all he needed were two rooms.
When he got inside, out of the storm, the shed smelled of old wood, fuel and age. Built sometime in the middle of the last century the wooden frame could withstand a direct hit from a hurricane if it had to.
The bright beam of his flashlight spread out, illuminating the shed as he closed the door behind him. The fuel cans sat lined up behind the lawn mower next to the generator. Zach moved the mower and grabbed a can of fuel. The can lifted easily. Empty. The second can, same as the first.
Owen did outside maintenance and kept the gasoline rotated and stocked in the shed for emergencies, or he was supposed to keep the fuel stocked. Today two cans stood full and all the spare cans were dry as “bones guarding a pirate’s treasure,” Owen would say. That meant there was enough fuel to fill the generator with a bit to spare. Apparently Owen had mowed and weed-whacked all summer and he was always “Ah-yuh, goin’ ta get more gas tomorra.”
If the reporter used the space heater, the lights, her computer and who knew what else the woman would plug in, the gas would last less than a day. This storm was not going to pass for at least thirty-six hours.
He rubbed the back of his neck as he considered the fix Owen had left him in. A day. Maybe a day.
He dropped his hand to his side. By himself, he could make the generator last several days.
He should have left that woman in the ravine. Other than claiming to be a reporter, he had no idea who she was and didn’t want to find out. Grandmother might frown on his spare hospitality, but he hoped the woman would sit huddled in front of the space heater, burn up the gas with a hair dryer and use her laptop as long as the power lasted and then sit in the dark under a quilt and wait out the storm.
He poured gas in the generator, and when he pushed the start button, it snapped from silent to loud in an instant.
That was luck.
With his hands over his ears, he stood waiting to make sure the old thing continued to run, that nothing had clogged during the year or so of only being started as a test from time to time.
Two things were “at leasts” today. At least he had gotten back from Boston in time to get the house closed up and at least the woodpile out under the tall white pines behind the house had been stacked high and straight.
He’d have a heat and light source when the gas burned up.
What he wouldn’t have for the day or two it took for the storm to pass was peace from a sensation seeker. Now all he had to figure out was how to keep Ms. Bonacorda in the dark, literally, when the lights went out.
These days most reporters he came into contact with were gossip seekers who could take a corn-flake-sized bit of banal and build it into a sensational story. Worse, when a story was written with enough adjectives or read with enough enthusiasm it would be considered by the masses to be gospel. He wondered how many adjectives this woman had in her cache.
He let his hands fall to his sides disgusted with himself. Whatever and whoever this woman was, he had gotten into the mess with Hale and Blankenstock, and he knew the world was going to demand answers from him.
Answers were going to be tough to come by.
Convinced the generator would continue to run, he turned to leave and spotted the note tagged to the door.
Me and Margaret Louise are hunkered down and well taken care of. Don’t you worry about us. You come over if you want to. It was signed Owen and Margaret Louise.
He had no choice but to smile. “Well taken care of” meant the two of them were holed up with enough food for a small regiment and plenty of scotch for the whole army. Owen knew creature comfort and he deserved them, and Margaret Louise knew how to cook, therefore the food in Zach’s freezer...
He tugged the hood of the jacket back on over his baseball cap and stood in the doorway of the shed. He was fascinated, watching the show presented by nature. Lightning flickered in various degrees of strength for almost a minute before it abated to small flashes.
In the near dark, he saw no light coming from the room where he’d sent the reporter. He could have gotten lucky—maybe she’d gone to sleep already.
He doubted it as soon as he thought it.
When he sent her away, she had looked shocked and might have left in a disappointed huff. She might even have been foolish enough to go back out in the storm to see if she could rescue her car. He could have told her that car was going nowhere until O’Reilly’s tow truck hauled it out of the ravine. She was lucky she hadn’t gone in a few yards farther up the road, as that part of the ravine ran down the steep side of the hill.
She must have thought he was story-worthy to risk her neck and she helped shore up the old mansion without question.
Did those things make her someone he’d be interested in knowing or someone he should lock out of the loft and hope she went away without actually damaging the old home and contents? His grandmother had loved the mansion on Sea Crest Hill and his own mother had rejected it as the shabbier side of life.
He turned and gave the generator a last visual once-over. Satisfied, he shifted the cap so the storm had less of a chance to blast rain into his eyes and headed out.
The wind whipped the pine trees relentlessly over his head and the rain pelted down as he fled sure-footed along the stone path to his refuge. In five minutes he’d have a fire going and a glass of finely aged red wine in his hand.
Hopefully that reporter was tucked away in the four-poster bed, her computer in her lap, capitalizing on someone else’s misfortune.
* * *
WHEN ADDY HEARD the sound of boots tread on the steps to the loft above the garage, she drew herself up to her full five foot five inches and whispered encouragement to herself. There was a time when no man could make her back down, but this man had already shown signs of ignoring her and had all but thrown her over his shoulder and carried her off to his cave.
One of his many talents, no doubt, along with the ability to talk, bully and cajole people out of their money, was to carry women off. Already he had shown her that murdering her to keep her out of his business was not plan number one. If he wanted to kill her to shut her up, he could have just left her in her car. She might have been silenced by a flying tree limb or been washed off down the hill into the ocean if he had left her to fend for herself.
Most likely he just planned to stick her up in beguiling Millie McClure’s room full of antiques and ignore her.
She smiled and a shot of courage buzzed inside her.
The door swung open and the man who appeared in the dim light was not the slick swindler she had seen in Boston, nor the Maine backwoodsman. Nor was he the man who would show up briefly, a glittering beacon of humility according to her sister, Savanna, at the holiday parties for Hale and Blankenstock where her sister had met him exactly twice. He would stay for a few minutes, greet each employee and then leave, according to Savanna.
Everyone now knew the glittering beacon was part of a lie.
Hat in hand, the shadows made the furrow of his brows deeper and his unguarded expression more dramatic. He was handsome in his rough and outdoorsy look, and in this moment he appeared to be a man who had many troubles to deal with, many concerns for which he had to be responsible.
Under other circumstances, she might want to walk up to him, put her hands flat on his chest and brush his damp hair back off where it had fallen on his forehead. She would sweep her hand across the furrows of his brows, draw his head down and put her lips against his full and slightly drawn ones. And...
What was she thinking?
This was the enemy of the people.
Hale slowly swung his gaze in her direction as if he had expected her to be there. His features relaxed to neutral, he became a hybrid between woodsman, because of the four-or five-day growth of sandy whiskers, and slick swindler, because of years of practice.
Addy drew in a breath to sort out her thoughts.
“I wanted to speak with you,” she said into the silence. They were in his territory, and short of death by storm or felony theft of his SUV, she was stuck here. She wanted to sound nonconfrontational, perhaps professorish, someone who was just looking for facts, not trying to crucify him.
If his guard went down to anywhere near what it had been when he had opened the door, she’d get something related to the truth, or at least as much of the truth as a person like him could find in his life.
He didn’t answer, but hung his hat on a peg, turned and walked out.
Degenerate...
Running away. Or maybe it was a ploy to have her follow him and then he’d get her out of the loft and out of his hair if he ran back inside and locked the door with her on the outside.
A kid’s game, like musical chairs. She’d be left out. Too bad, so sad. But that was not going to happen.
Make herself useful. That’s what she should do.
What did men like? Couldn’t resist?
She looked at the bags of groceries on the island counter.
Food. Even swindlers had to eat.
She couldn’t cook at all—not even boil a decent pot of water, but maybe she could manage something. She grabbed the nearest bag and started poking around.
Fusilli? Other than being pasta—she knew because she could see its curly shape through the window in the box—she hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t needed to know what it was named to eat it. Nope. Just stick a fork in it.
Cans of plain tomato sauce. What the heck was she supposed to do with that?
The door across the room popped open and Hale entered with his arms bulging with firewood. He turned his back to her as he unloaded and stacked wood in the bin near the fireplace.
Then he walked out again.
A fire, of course. She was probably much better at fire-starting than cooking. Actually, she once tried to combine the two. Unfortunately, the smell of burned pizza stuck around her condo, and to be fair, the hall of her building, for a week.
She hustled over to the fireplace and searched for fire-starter logs or those cute pinecones stuffed with candle wax or something to make fires start easier.
There wasn’t so much as a fireplace match, just a book of matches with the name of the bar in town. Braven’s. She could have, should have stayed there in the bar. Too late.
She poked around for fire-starting aids and gave up.
She wasn’t any better at fire-starting than she was at cooking, so when she heard the footsteps on the stairs, she fled back to the kitchen area where she could keep the center island between them, duck behind it if she had to.
He unloaded the wood and knelt on the floor in front of the fireplace. Then he reached inside and opened the flue. Oh, she would not have remembered that. With wood chips and bits of flimsy bark, he started a small fire, feeding it twigs and shards of wood, and of course, he had used the stubby matches.
Just like now, she always managed to have someone around to start her fires and usually to cook. She wondered if he expected her to do it, to cook. Good luck with that one, buddy.
The fire grew tall and she was a bit envious. She’d have to research fire-starting when she had time.
When the fire blazed, he stood and headed in her direction.
His sandy blond brows drew together in fierce concentration. There was clearly a side of this man she knew nothing about, possibly a deeply dark and sinister side. She should be running away. She should go back to the house, push the four-poster bed up against the door and tie the sheets together to let herself out the window in case she needed to flee into the storm.
He paused and dropped his keys into a dish on the long table behind the couch.
His expression did not challenge nor welcome as he continued toward the kitchen.
Nonreactive. Ego-sheltered.
Serial killer? Chain-saw murderer? At least the two of them weren’t in a basement alone. A basement? Did the place have a basement? Yes, the lift up doors in the breezeway would lead to a cellar of some kind. Maybe that’s where she’d be buried.
She was crazy, the chatter in her head crazier.
Maybe it was he who should be afraid.
As he drew closer, he seemed to grow in size and his expression in intensity. She stiffened, searching for the best exit if she had to run.
And then she relaxed.
Yeah.
She could run away, go back to a world where she would cover stories for microfame and a couple of dollars.
Then she could go live under a bridge in a refrigerator box and wear newspapers on her feet and stuffed into the sleeves of her lightweight coat as she had done when she investigated and had written the series Life Without a Cause to critical acclaim only four short years ago.
Hale came around the counter and stopped a mere two feet from her. He placed one hand, deliberately it seemed, on the counter beside her, and she inhaled.
By being here in his living space, she had made her move, set out her pawn. The next move was his.
A second later he stepped around her to the freezer, from which he took two glass bowls filled with something green. He took off the lids, popped them into the microwave and covered them with a sheet of crinkly sounding paper he’d taken from a box in the drawer under the microwave.
Eat? His move was to feed her. Or maybe he was hungry and planned to eat both...in front of her...while she salivated.
Addy watched the bowls spin on the microwave’s carousel and then realized he was heating pea soup.
Food was a good move on his part. She hadn’t eaten since early this morning. If she accepted food from him, she would be in his debt.
Yeah, as if she wasn’t already—deeply.
He pulled two plates from the cupboard.
He was dreadful at portraying himself as a bad guy, or he was as “diabolically clever” as the tabloids had called him when they alluded to his making off with a few billion dollars.
If she didn’t have an absolutely reliable source, she would begin to doubt the veracity of her facts. The SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, a U.S. government agency set up to prevent investment fraud, had come down hard on Hale and Blankenstock.
More importantly, according to her younger sister, Savanna, this guy was worse than a robber or a thief who stole once and disappeared into the night, Hale was heartless. He had repeatedly taken from Savanna—trusting, single mother Savanna—and many others.
He went back to the fire, hunkered down and carefully placed a pair of logs on the flaming pile. He stayed squatted, silhouetted in the soft light until the fire roared.
He looked handsome. And fit. She wondered how fit—she couldn’t help it, picturing him naked and... It was easy to see, this man lifted heavy things, not just fountain pens and martini glasses.
She shook her head at the silliness of her thoughts.
He had set out a pea soup pawn. Now she was going to have to sit down and eat with him or give up the game without trying and walk back to town beaten down by the storm and failure.
Lunch it was, and so be it.
She pulled open a drawer in the butcher-block island and found place mats and napkins that most likely had never been used. Carefully she set them on the table in strategic places. At right angles so she could better watch him when she wanted and ignore him if it seemed necessary.
She took the plates he had placed on the counter, where they would have sat side by side on the bar stools, and moved them to the table.
If she was to get a story, if she was going to find out what made this guy tick, she’d have to make nice. Pea soup with a swindler. She had done scary things before to get to the truth.
She’d do worse to get his real story if need be.
She opened another drawer where she supposed spoons would be and bingo, there was a tray of flatware. She took a soupspoon for him and a teaspoon for her. Soupspoons were too large and made her slurp soup. She preferred a teaspoon where the contents cooled faster and the spoon fit her mouth. Her former boyfriend had called her a delicate flower for demanding such things. He never did understand her.
Her former boyfriend had also deserted her when the fiction she had unwittingly written had hit the fan.
Former. Back in the part of her life when she soared, Wesley had stuck himself to her side whenever she was home in Boston. He hadn’t liked the falling-flat part, however, so he split quickly, taking with him everything from her condo she had thought was theirs.
So long and good luck.
When Hale left the fire, he came over to where she stood waiting for the microwave to finish. Reaching into the cupboard beside her head, he grabbed a bag of oyster crackers.
He smelled of wood smoke and she could feel the heat of the fire radiating from him. She inhaled and when she shivered, the quaking in her knees wasn’t just because the place was one degree warmer than freezing. She wanted to...move in on the story, grab it and not let go until she had everything she could ever want.
But she held her ground. Letting him know how eager she was would not help her bond with his deepest soul.
When he took the oyster crackers and turned away toward the table she asked, “Why are you doing this? Why are you treating me as if you don’t hate me? You must hate me.”
“You give yourself too much credit,” he responded calmly without turning around.
Good one, she thought. Attack her and keep her on edge. Maybe he didn’t want to play nice after all.
“All right.” She moved around so she could see his face. “You don’t hate me, but you know why I’m here. Is there anything you want to tell me?”
His shoulders stiffened and he drew in a breath. “You have all your facts and you’re looking for that personal touch to make your story more sensational.” Again his words were not angry.
Under his assessing gaze, she suddenly felt as if he knew exactly who and what she was. As if he had been there that day when her source in Afghanistan had been exposed as a liar.
She felt the humiliation try to submerge her again, as if he was qualified to judge her.
She gathered her wits. “You did what you did and I came here to try to make some sense of it. To try to understand.”
In Afghanistan she had been stupid and too eager. She had almost caused others to lose their lives, and that might make her as morally corrupt as he was.
Disgust and repugnance aimed at herself suddenly seemed much worse than it had ever been. It made her sick to her stomach, made her head flood with the images floating around on the internet that portrayed her to be the lowest kind of life-form.
She looked up and he was standing almost toe-to-toe with her.
“What do you think you will be trying to understand?”
His question brought her back into reality, the loft, the hurricane, the many people this man had cheated. His words had been soft as if trying to assess her again, not to challenge her.
“How—how things started. I thought you might tell me how things started.”
He stepped away but watched her warily.
With both palms pressed to the counter she continued. “Did it start out as a swindle?”
She expected him to smile at this, to pull out his charm to deflect her. Perhaps put on enough of a show to make her believe he had been wronged, to make her go sit in the four-poster room and use what she already had about him, type up a tidy article that looked just like everyone else’s.
Not to dig around inside his head for deeper motives. Maybe his mother withheld love. Maybe his father exiled him to the military academy he attended for four years and supposedly hated.
He didn’t smile at all. He looked tired. He had a right to be exhausted. She’d give him that. He had been out saving boats and rescuing women who wanted to tear his life apart. And that was exactly what she wanted to do, to tear his life apart as he had torn apart her sister’s.
She wanted to disassemble him.
Limb by limb, she thought and then asked, “At what point did you realize things were spinning out of control? That you were going to have to distance yourself from the fray so as to look innocent?”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_7c0a4637-922d-5d2e-9709-7275ba5d5070)
AS IF ADDY hadn’t spoken, Hale walked away and brought one bowl of soup from the microwave and placed it on a plate she had set on the table. Then he returned to the microwave for the other. She was sure he was going to put the second bowl back in the refrigerator or even pour it down the drain or, better, over her head.
He did none of the above.
He placed the second bowl on the other plate and looked over at her with a look that said, “Sit.”
She scrambled to do so—for the story, of course, and because she was really, truly, so very desperately hungry.
He sat after she did. Either there were old-school manners in this man, or perhaps, this was her last supper and he wanted to be in a position to run her down if she tried to escape. At least she wouldn’t die hungry, she thought as she instinctively slid back on the heavy wood-and-leather chair.
Hands in her lap, ’cause she had some manners, too, she sat and waited for his lead. “Behave like them and they may treat you as one of them” had been the advice of one of her instructors in college and—sometimes the magic worked. It had when she donned the clothing and the persona of an Afghani peasant woman—or it had worked for a while.
He put his napkin on his lap. She did the same.
After he took his first taste of the soup, she sipped a bit of hers. It was delicious and soon she had to slow herself down, so she floated a few small oyster crackers on top of her soup. As she savored the next mouthful it occurred to her that she was concentrating too much on the food, the conversation being nonexistent.
She snapped her gaze to Hale’s face.
He seemed to be ignoring her or if she left her ego out, he was thinking about something that troubled him. So should he be. He should be thinking about all the people’s lives that he’d ruined, all the heartache he’d caused, all the money he had gained and was going to lose.
Then why did he look so damned mouth-watering? She swiped her lips with her napkin. His sun-highlighted hair, thick, short on the sides and not too long on the top, almost always perfectly styled and trimmed often. Today it had been finger-combed, in an endearingly youthful way. He looked vulnerable without his facade.
If he wasn’t so morally corrupt and she wasn’t so desperate to get at the truth, he might even look...enticing.
She yanked her brain away from that vein of perilous thinking and scrambled for a question to ask.
She needed something affable. Be his friend. Be someone he wanted to talk to, a houseguest with whom he’d at least speak politely. If swindlers spoke politely when they didn’t have to speak at all.
“The home.” She nodded in the direction where the big old house sat connected to the garage via the breezeway. “The antiques in the home are lovely. Tell me about some of the history over there. If you wouldn’t mind.” She added the last part with a warm smile.
The narrow-eyed look he gave her said he knew exactly what she was doing and why, but he cleared his throat and after a moment of silence said, “The home was built in the early 1800s by the man who originally established the town.”
“The Bailey of Bailey’s Cove.”
“Liam Bailey. He built the house for the woman he loved.” Hale’s words sounded as if he read them from a brochure, but at least he wasn’t declining to speak with her.
“How many generations ago did this ancestor of yours live?”
“The builder lived in the early 1800s, about eight generations back, but he isn’t my ancestor.”
She tipped her head and raised an eyebrow. “You live in his ancestral home and are the keeper of the family history. What do his descendents say?”
“No one knew until recently that he had descendents.”
“Missing descendents sounds interesting.” Juicy, better than gold in most people’s lives. She almost added, “Tell me about it,” but one could only use that phrase twice at best before an interviewee started feeling strip-mined.
He didn’t reply and Addy feared she might have worn out her welcome already.
The wind blew outside and a branch or something clattered against the roof. The raging storm had kept every other journalist away from this story and she had no intention of blowing it now.
She started to speak, but so did he.
“Go on. I’d love to hear all about it,” she said first and then she sat up straight and rested her spoon on the plate beside her soup bowl.
“In the early 1800s Patrick McClure came to the newly formed United States to avoid the English taxes. Immigration didn’t help his wife, Fanny McClure, as she died in childbirth, leaving McClure with two children under a year old and the need for a new wife. My direct ascendant was Fanny’s firstborn son.”
He continued to speak in the staccato voice of a museum docent or tour guide, someone who had delivered the information over and over, but he was speaking so she kept quiet.
“McClure had four children with his second wife, one a dark-haired stepson now proven to be the child of Liam Bailey for which the town was named. The three others were most likely McClures. They all had flaming red hair as he did. The dark-haired son has two descendants in the town. Daniel MacCarey, an anthropologist from the university and married to the owner of a restaurant here. The other, Heather Loch, who runs the town’s museum in the original church.”
“The church is a museum?”
He nodded as she lifted her spoon for more soup.
“What does Heather Loch look like?”
“Sixties, a mass of gray hair. You can’t miss her.” His lips curved gently, and the emotion she read into the smile said, fondly.
He glanced at her still smiling and she almost coughed up pea soup. Wow. Nice smile when he wasn’t being all businesslike. Electric. As quickly as her mind fired up with thoughts of Zachary Hale the real man, not monster, the smile changed to a frown. Had he seen the flicker of interest on her face?
Had she really felt it? What were they talking about? Oh, yeah, the church and the gray-haired woman. “I saw her when I drove into town. I thought she was an apparition standing in the doorway of the old church.”
“She’s guarding the museum from the storm.”
“Against a hurricane. How could they let her stay there? It’s too close to water.”
“Without a doubt, more than one person tried to talk her into leaving. Police Chief Montcalm most likely sent a squad car for her.”
“And she told them the church has stood two hundred years and it would stand another two hundred.” Addy might interview that woman, for color if nothing else.
“Something like that.”
He looked directly at her when he spoke. Almost as if seeing her for the first time. His eyes gleamed a soft golden brown, matching his hair. Oh, he was a package.
This was not the evil billionaire she’d expected. Could it be the beard?
She dismissed the notion. Zachary Hale was sly, slick and treacherously dangerous. He had created false accounting records and a trail of phony investment reports, then he put his name on them and sent them off to the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, as proof of his extraordinary ability to make fortunes for people.
She cleared her throat. “About the McClures. Do you know much about them?”
“Patrick McClure seemed to be in the right place at the right time and in the right circumstances.”
“The woman needed a husband.”
“And McClure, Irish immigrant or not, needed a wife. The situation was urgent or the second richest man in town would not have chosen such a bridegroom for his daughter.”
“So the first Mr. McClure came by his fortune in the new world through this woman in need?”
“Colleen Fletcher McClure insisted her father set the two of them up in the home her lover had built. And when her father died, insisted the town’s name be changed from South Harbor to Bailey’s Cove.”
The more he spoke, the more his voice became animated. Addy found herself leaning in, captivated.
She pushed away from the table, took the dishes to wash them in the sink.
“Has your family always lived in Bailey’s Cove?” If she sneaked in a question close to his personal life, he might not notice. If this one worked, she’d sneak one in about his life in Boston.
When he came to stand beside where she busied herself drying the lid to her bowl, she became a picture of innocence.
He turned and with one hand on the edge of the sink, he leaned in toward her almost as if he’d kiss her. His light brown eyes with golden flecks stared clearly into hers.
He leaned in closer and Addy sucked in a breath.
“I know what you’re doing and I’m going to ask you nicely to stop. Once.”
Then he straightened and strode away to the fire and sat on the sofa near where his phone and computer rested on the wooden coffee table.
He’s not who you think he is? The voice in her head insisted.
* * *
ZACH’S GRANDFATHER HAD told him his good nature would get him into trouble one day. And that day had come, in spades, four weeks ago, and now it just seemed to keep coming in the form of a reporter he wanted to toss out on her ear. He would, too, when it was safe, or at least he’d drop her off at the dry-goods store that doubled for a bus station.
His phone no longer had a signal, so he opened his tablet to check for communication from Morrison and Morrison.
The Wi-Fi wouldn’t connect either.
When he left Boston, he had planned on hunkering down to think. Hadn’t planned on Adriana Bonacorda. Admirable in her willingness to persist.
A flicker in the shadows told him the uninvited guest was loitering nearby.
He powered down his computer and slid it into his briefcase.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” she said as she tried to push her bushel of blond curls behind her ear. “I wanted to see if you were willing to sit down and speak with me some more.”
He pressed back against the cushion and studied her. She wore slim black jeans that were showing their age and a pale pink tank top under a faded black one. The tail of her sweater didn’t bother to come to her waist, but the rolled collar hugged the back of her neck in a sensuous manner and dropped to her midriff, accentuating her full breasts. She wore a sloppy old pair of wool socks on her feet as her once red moccasins now sat in the breezeway most likely curling up toe to heel as the leather dried and contracted.
The way her hair frizzed out around her head in a halo of blond almost made him smile. With her wide-set deep blue eyes and her generous mouth she carried the look off well. Her small chin jutted perfectly at the end of sharp jawbones and the color on her high pink cheekbones evened out the proportions of her features. Gave them a kind of perfection.
She looked to be in her late twenties, about a hundred and twenty pounds, and she might be a natural blonde, rare, but not unheard of.
“I won’t talk about anything south of the Maine border.”
The lines of her mouth tightened, but she dipped her chin once and invited herself to sit on the sofa with him but nearer the fire.
“What kinds of things do you do when you’re here in Bailey’s Cove?” she said, asking, he thought, as open a question as possible.
He could list a few, but nothing she could use to build a story against him. He wondered when this reporter had last been interested in the truth.
The wind whistled and roared as he sat and tried to decide what to tell her, how best to lead her away from anything involving Hale and Blankenstock.
“This is a quiet town, struggling,” he said softly.
“I’m afraid I didn’t get to see much of Bailey’s Cove.”
He imagined her clinging to the wheel of her car, trying not to panic beyond the ability to function. Blue eyes glued to the centerline. Butt nearly lifted from the seat in anticipation. He wondered just how crazy she was.
Locking her in a closet might be best for both of them.
She lifted one eyebrow at him. “I was too busy chasing you.”
He relaxed into press mode. She wanted to play casual, to get inside his armor with lightness and charm. Good for her. She wouldn’t be any good at her job if she didn’t pull out all her weapons.
She would find his armor had hardened recently. He was ready for whatever she had.
Liam Bailey. He’d throw her the pirate. Nothing she couldn’t get at the local museum, hell she’d get a well-embellished version at the local bar.
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Mary Brady
The rarest treasure of all Discredited journalist Adriana Bonacorda has a lead on the hottest story of the year–billionaire business titan Zachary Hale is accused of cheating investors! She's so determined to talk to him that she follows him to the charming town of Bailey's Cove, Maine.When a hurricane traps Addy and Zach together, it's her one chance to revive her career. But she's shocked by the passion that springs up between them. Is Zach really a criminal? Or is there a reason for his silence? In a place founded by pirates, where a legendary treasure is supposedly hidden, Addy just might find something truly precious….
The rarest treasure of all
Discredited journalist Adriana Bonacorda has a lead on the hottest story of the year—billionaire business titan Zachary Hale is accused of cheating investors! She’s so determined to talk to him that she follows him to the charming town of Bailey’s Cove, Maine.
When a hurricane traps Addy and Zach together, it’s her one chance to revive her career. But she’s shocked by the passion that springs up between them. Is Zach really a criminal? Or is there a reason for his silence? In a place founded by pirates, where a legendary treasure is supposedly hidden, Addy just might find something truly precious….
“Who are you?”
Zach heard her question, but raised his hammer and bent one of the nails anchoring the rope closer to the beam.
Addy was a reporter.
Anything he said could end up on the internet, in print and on television.
He looked into her face. The angle of her head, the lines of her mouth, even the slant of her eyebrows said she was asking because she wanted to know, not that she wanted to broadcast the information to the world.
No one had ever asked him that question, not his classmates, his coworkers, the women he dated. No one wanted the answer to that question.
She stepped in close, too close to ignore her.
The wind flapped the tarp and the rain smashed into it like the sound of distant gunfire.
He leaned in toward her and her lips parted as if she were about to ask a question, but she did not. He pressed his lips to hers and captured her gasp.
Dear Reader (#ulink_4f84a4d9-e41e-592e-86fd-e2019788e178),
Readers, thank you so much! I hope you like Addy and Zach’s story.
Practically the only people who will talk to reporter Adriana Bonacorda are her blood relatives. Everyone else thinks she’s a liar, a con artist or both. Disgraced, broke and on the scent of a big story, Addy races from Boston to Maine—in a hurricane. Her quarry? Big-time swindler Zachary Hale. Exposing the deepest secrets of this billionaire schemer will put her right back on top of the journalist heap. But when she ends up at his mercy, she finds there is so much more to this man…and she finds her heart and her livelihood are in so much jeopardy.
And wait! Will they find All That Glitters—inside a pirate’s treasure chest?
I’d love to hear from you. Visit my website at www.marybrady.net (http://www.marybrady.net) or write to me at mary@marybrady.net.
Enjoy the Mills & Boon Superromance authors’ blog at www.superauthors.com (http://www.superauthors.com).
Warmest regards and bright blessings to all,
Mary Brady
All That Glitters
Mary Brady
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#ulink_2519d16e-3d79-58c4-b52f-ff7598282b70)
MARY BRADY lives in the Midwest and considers road trips into the rest of the continent to be a necessary part of life. When she’s not out exploring, she helps run a manufacturing company and has a great time living with her handsome husband, her super son and one cheeky little bird.
A large thank-you to my clever and intellectual friends Pamela Ford, Victoria Hinshaw, Olivia Rae, Laura Scott and Donna Smith.
Contents
Cover (#u007fb95a-ce80-5f98-a009-770a10a044ec)
Back Cover Text (#u57f659cf-4d71-5c69-a76d-ab947ba0a784)
Introduction (#u77f6c5f4-ebb2-59f5-a6e5-f8e913cc38b4)
Dear Reader (#ulink_168d900c-5ec5-51a1-88a7-a3152d884923)
Title Page (#u2a1040e6-9525-5196-b380-521f2a4392f9)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#ulink_ff6fc1f5-02c0-5727-8ba8-985c68ef4e2f)
Dedication (#u46ab7ae1-021a-5a85-9dd0-ace4dc068ac3)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_61573d96-0c76-5a48-b6f5-55fe978d95e7)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_bb5bd0d5-f29c-5490-954e-3c703a1a614d)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_38216c02-df21-51c9-902b-13c76972ffa9)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_412f5cf3-67a0-533b-8e98-ba2078ea0d35)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_ddc86e86-80e2-5f33-abc6-5e4e064c5150)
ADRIANA BONACORDA gripped the steering wheel of her rental car until her aching knuckles blanched white. Rain made it nearly impossible to see more than a few car lengths in front of her and the wind rocked the tiny compact. Addy prayed she could stave off the dark threats coming at her from all angles long enough to get to Bailey’s Cove, Maine, in one piece.
“Stay away from the coast, folks” had been the last bit of coherence she had gotten from the car’s radio. All she heard now was squawks and dead air.
Her phone still worked because it started ringing the raucous tones she’d assigned to her younger sister, Savanna.
“Hello, Savanna, sorry, warning, the signal may break up.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Maine after Zachary Hale.” Addy peered through the wind-driven rain searching for her turnoff.
“That’s what I called about. Hey, what’s he doing in Maine?”
“He’s headed to ground and I hope to get to him before he’s in hiding.”
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
Addy harrumphed. “It doesn’t work that way in the world of high finance.”
“I end up with nothing and some fat cats get rich. And he gets off without any punishment?” Savanna almost squealed the last few words in indignation.
“Calm down. During the huge Ponzi scandal, it was early December when the FBI got involved and early March, fifteen months later, before any jail time began to be served, and that scandal involved over fifty billion dollars.”
“Not fair. Just not fair.”
“Savanna you must have called for something besides a rant about Hale and Blankenstock.”
“I guess you just answered my question. I wanted to know how you were doing at getting Hale to fess up.” Savanna sounded sad. Her life was a wreck and she was newly unemployed.
“And you need more money.”
“I do. I hate to ask but can you lend me another hundred? I want to—”
A sign, big and green, loomed off to the side of the road heralding her exit and then vanished into the downpour.
She could barely see the road she was driving on and her sister was a distraction on a good day. “Savanna, I gotta go. I’ll have some funds transferred as soon as I can.”
As soon as I see if I have enough, she thought.
“I need to take the girls shopping. They didn’t get any new clothes for school and now they’re on sale cheap and they really need them.”
“I get it. Yes, I’ll do it when I can. Bye.”
Addy thumbed off the phone and tossed it onto the seat beside her. She squeezed her already hunched shoulders tighter and concentrated hard on seeing through the rain.
The exit ramp popped into view and she braked hard, rocked in the wind and dove off the nearly deserted interstate onto a narrow two-lane road. She had known this drive wasn’t going to be easy in the remnants of a hurricane, but some things had to be done.
Moving closer to the coast, deeper into the fringes of a storm whipping up the Atlantic Ocean, made for bad driving, but maybe not a bad day. There was a pot of gold at the end of this rainstorm, maybe even a Pulitzer Prize. At the very least she’d get a stab at retrieving her pride.
A sudden blast of wind sliced down hard across the road trying to take her small car with it. Addy answered with a fierce jerk of the wheel.
“Please, let me get there.” The sound of her voice eerily muted in the din coming from the outside. “That guy needs to pay.”
As she moved slowly down the road, the windshield wipers beat wildly at the sheets of rain, giving her occasional glimpses of the wreck and ruin going on outside. A branch skittered across the road and a river ran where the shoulder of the road should have been.
This storm, a has-been hurricane, was to brush the coast as it headed north toward the good folk of Nova Scotia.
Well, it was “brushing” hard, Addy thought.
There had been a point when the weather forecasters wondered if Hurricane Harold would break records and head directly for the central coast of Maine. Luckily for the citizens of the rugged state, that was not going to happen.
Braving the storm, Addy felt a touch of the old Adriana Bonacorda. She had been tough and smart. She had needed to be in order to survive. Not every reporter would be daring enough to chase a story into the middle of Afghanistan, a rebel monk to his hideout in Nepal or a billionaire criminal into the fringes of a storm.
She jerked hard again on the wheel to avoid hitting a piece of siding or a door or whatever it was and then hissed out a breath as she brought the car back into her lane.
In addition to the radio warnings, a State Trooper had sternly advised her to stay away from the coast. She had the distinct feeling they would have arrested her for reckless something or other if she’d tried to drive in this weather in Massachusetts, but not here in Maine.
Desperation could make one nuts.
After her big disgrace, she had tried to get worthy stories under more sane circumstances. Instead of a scoop or a better angle, she had gotten scorn, and worse, derisive snickers from the other reporters at every news scene. When she had tried to defend herself online, the whole world was then alerted that she had put her heart and soul into one giant piece of fiction she had unwittingly called news.
She had been duped, an apt word for eager and stupid. Today she battled to recover eager, but stupid she’d left buried in the humiliation.
When the sign marking the turn off toward Bailey’s Cove flashed at her through a break in the rain she popped the wheel with the palm of her hand. “Yes.” She was going to make it. Maybe there were still lucky cards in her pile.
Just then a piece of debris plastered itself to her windshield and, for a terrifying moment of blindness, stuck to the wipers and refused to move away. When it finally flew off, she hunkered down with passion, renewed by luck, and after fifteen more minutes of concentration reached the town.
Bailey’s Cove, Maine, population fourteen-something-thousand, the wildly undulating sign read as she slowed the car to a crawl.
The low-slung buildings of small-town urban sprawl blinked in and out of view as she crept into the small fishing village in the late afternoon storm-filtered light. Some of the buildings had boarded-up windows. A few had sandbags. There were no lights anywhere.
A service station called O’Reilly’s had its large glass windows boarded up, but huge letters scrawled on the boards, OPEN and CALL. She supposed there was a phone number somewhere to be found, but she couldn’t see it for the rain.
These people had been preparing for a direct hit by the hurricane called Harold. Even though the storm was passing them by, they had not known until two days ago they were to be spared the brunt of it.
Addy peered out at the sealed-up buildings, wondering which ones had people inside. There had to be someone here who would refuse to leave and who could tell her where Zachary Hale would hide out. Nothing on the internet had narrowed it down to anything less than “somewhere near Bailey’s Cove, Maine.” In fact, Bailey’s Cove got no direct hits on the internet.
With this storm raging, Hale would think he was safe, sheltered from prying eyes.
Ha!
When a puddle nearly swallowed the compact car, Addy pulled onto the higher ground straddling the lanes. She stretched her beleaguered fingers and retrieved her mobile phone that had flown off the seat during one of her dodges.
She had a signal, but with the exception of her sister who needed money for school clothes, or makeup for herself if she found nothing she wanted to buy for the girls, she had no one to call.
Sad.
Silly.
Stupid.
Shut up, she thought. None of those things mattered. They were the past. Intrepid. Hard-hitting. Totally inquisitive, she said back to the nagging voice inside her head.
After today, Adriana Bonacorda would be headed for the top again. And the frosting...her sister and all the others Hale had robbed would get a chance at recovering some of their losses.
The road continued to descend into town. Buildings appeared and disappeared through the windswept downpour. On the ocean side of the road, she spotted a small wooden church. Soaked and dark, the siding seemed to shudder, but that might have just been the strobe effects of the rain.
After a moment, Addy realized a woman stood in the arched doorway of the church. Her mop of hair swung wildly as she waved. A crazy woman, a comrade, a sister against the storm.
Addy checked for traffic. Nothing but rain. She intended to make a U-turn to question the woman, but when she looked across the street again, the doorway was empty.
Okay. Now she was imagining people. Maybe she was seeing herself in forty years. They both might be crazy and the woman had the same out-of-control mop, but the woman’s had been gray.
Keep driving, she told herself, and she did. She had little alternative.
Scuffling with the wind, she eventually reached what seemed, by the age of the buildings, to be the center of the old town. More boarded-up and shuttered windows greeted her, their darkness almost a grimace.
At the corner, in front of a restaurant called Pirate’s Roost, a sign pointed to the harbor. A sliver of hope gleamed. Maybe that’s where the people were, trying to save their boats or piers or whatever seamen did in a storm.
As she crept several blocks down toward the harbor on what had become a torrent instead of a street, Addy could see she was right. Luck again or savvy? She hoped the latter. Two crews in rain slickers wrestled with boats as one crew tried to secure a boat they had already rescued from the water, the other struggled to pull one out onto the dock. Each small craft dithered dangerously in the wind as they worked.
All one of these people had to do was point her in the right direction and then she’d leave them to their task.
She let the car roll slowly toward the pier.
Once she found him in his hideaway, she’d get a reaction from the scum, swindler Zachary Hale, and if her luck still held, an interview. The whole interaction would likely be a series of bald-faced lies on his part, but it would give her starting points from which to tear this guy to the ground, kick him into the hole he’d dug with the pension funds and life savings of old ladies, blue-collar workers—and her widowed sister. Then Addy would cover him with the truth until he begged to return every dime he had left of his ill-gotten booty.
The trickle down from this story was the gravy. People were going to recoup some of their hard earned money. Retirees, pensioners, kids trying to pay off college loans might actually get a break. Nuns. And Savanna, her sister, who had thought she was on her way to a secure future.
This story would turn the tide for Addy and all the cheated.
Darn, but she was good, and people were going to realize the lies about her for what they were.
As if tired of her fanciful boasting, the bitsy car rolled to a stop on its own as it faced off against the wind.
The closest four-man crew of yellow rain-suited workers had managed to raise the pleasure craft from the ferocious water and pull it onto a boat rack with ropes. But they struggled to rescue it from the wild wind and secure it on the stand.
Addy left her fashionable fedora on the passenger seat, flipped up the hood of her lime-green Ilse Jacobsen rain jacket and snugged the zipper up under her chin. The car undulated in a scary shimmy as she leaped out and hurried toward a man holding a rope for all he was worth.
Halfway there, the wind whipped off the hood of her jacket, slapped her long, hyper-curly blond hair against her cheek and stole away her breath. Her steps faltered and she stopped.
Wet and chilled, she hauled her hood back on, but not before cold rain poured down the back of her neck and, as she leaned into the wind and managed to take another step—into her shoes.
These people were crazier than she was to be out here. These were just boats, pleasure boats, and not someone’s livelihood. And since the remains of Hurricane Harold were passing right by this little-known corner of the world, their efforts were probably unnecessary.
Forcing one foot and then the other, she struggled closer to the workers.
Several boats had already been hauled out and sat tethered in place with taught ropes. Still out in the harbor, hardy lobster boats strained and rocked at anchor, and one particularly large yacht looked as if it were ready to break free and crash everything into flotsam on its way inland. Some poor rich guy was about to be short one boat.
Zachary Hale, she hoped.
As she got within a few feet of the boat, the closest man clinging to the rope hollered above the rushing wind, “Lady, get out of here.”
“I need to ask you a question,” she shouted, and wasn’t sure her voice even got past the end of her nose until he wrapped the rope around one arm and pointed at the flapping overhead. Two identical red flags with black centers curled and snapped above them.
Hurricane! Even a landlubber like her knew the meaning of those flags. Marine warning flags for a hurricane.
Harold had beaten the odds and headed inland. The wind hammered at her as she stood immobile, wavering between the insanity of the storm and the lunacy her life had turned into.
She suddenly saw herself once again standing on a stage facing a jeering crowd at the university. When the booing started, she had thought it was a joke, and then as it continued, she expected rotten eggs, but it had been a more intellectual crowd, and all she got were death threats and promises of a lifelong ban from journalism.
The wind took another shot at her and she tensed her whole body. When she didn’t leave, the man waved her away with a jerk of his head, but it was another shout from him to “go away” that revved up her reporter mode.
She swiped at the rain running down her face and, when he turned in her direction, stepped forward.
“I just need to find Zachary Hale.” She screamed into the wind and it screamed right back at her.
“’Et.... ’Ell. ’Way.” The rising wind carried much of his shout off, but she got the gist.
She inched closer to him. “Tell me where to find Zachary Hale.”
Just then the wind ripped at the boat and one man on the other side lost his grip. With horror, Addy realized the craft, lifted by the wind, now tipped. Then, in slow motion, the boat began to fall in her direction.
She stumbled back, but not quickly enough. The man grabbed her by the shoulder of her jacket and hauled her aside like a net full of cod as the boat crashed into the spot where she had stood a second before.
The white-and-red boat rocked and settled half on one side.
When the wind couldn’t blow her over, she realized the man had not released her. She looked up into his dark, angry eyes. How sweet. A savior. A tough guy with a heart of gold.
A cliché.
Oh, God, she was not always this cynical. Once upon a time, she had actually been nice, she thought, as her feet nearly left the ground. Her savior propelled her toward her car, where he opened the door and pitched her in.
“Go,” he shouted against the wind and then slammed the door turning away as if he had fixed that problem.
“Ah-yuh” and “ahm tellin’ you” she was in Maine.
Addy stayed in the rental car, watched the men and dripped all over the seat and floor mats. Rental car—it was okay. These boat rescuers were going to have to leave sooner or later. They might even need a ride. A grateful man, out of the wind and rain, might be willing to chat about Zachary Hale.
After several more minutes of struggling, the workers finished their task and then raced toward a nearby shed. A short moment later, a black SUV burst out and defied the wind as it made a quick arc and sped near where she parked.
The SUV stopped suddenly and the driver side window lowered. Glowering out at her was her rescuer, his face covered with soft golden whiskers, his hair both plastered to his head and sticking out at endearing angles. Hero type. Handsome and good-hearted. Maybe he’d tell her where the manicured billionaire was hiding.
“Unless you have a death wish, get out of here,” he said as the wind buffeted both vehicles.
“I just—”
The window closed and the SUV took off up the hill leaving her with no answers, a scant few feet above sea level, in a rising storm.
She looked to the second crew who were securing their boat and decided her best chance for an answer was fleeing up the hill. “You are not getting away so easily, buddy.”
Addy slammed the car in gear and hurried after the SUV’s taillights. A year ago, she would have felt the gut clench of paralyzing fear. Today, she almost savored the chase. There was a kind of freedom when one’s tail was dragging along the bottom of the barrel as hers was.
She had nothing to lose.
Water rushed down the street, high enough to make her add a prayer to her bravado as she rode a gusty tail wind steadily up the hill. At the top, the SUV turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
Addy gave the car more gas than was probably prudent, but a hot scoop waited for no one.
When she reached the stop sign at the intersection, the SUV sat parked at the curb around the corner in front of a place called Braven’s Tavern. Addy realized they must be waiting to see if she could climb the hill. Good. She might yet get a chance to speak with someone.
Just then, three of the SUV’s doors popped open and all but the driver leaped out, splashing in their rubber boots. The yellow-suited passengers hurried toward the boarded-up tavern. As Addy inched her car around the corner, the SUV made a U-turn and headed back down toward the harbor. Maybe the driver was crazier than she was.
The yellow suits hurried into the tavern, the big, solid oak door slamming shut behind them.
She let the madman driver go and parked the worthy compact rental in a high spot just past the tavern in front of Pardee Jordan’s Best Ever Donuts where water swirled but didn’t collect.
The donut shop gave her some shelter from the wind, but there was no shelter from the rain. By the time she got to the tavern’s old-fashioned oak door, rain poured down her shoulders, wicked up the pant legs of her jeans and threatened to dampen her underwear.
She grabbed the long brass door handle, tugged hard, and when the door swung open, dashed inside. These Mainers might be rough around the edges, but they would not toss her back out into the storm.
She hoped.
The short, dark hallway of the entry led to an open area where, on the right, hooks lined the wall and the SUV’s three passengers were shedding their rain gear and hanging it up to drip.
To the left, the bar stools stood empty at the square-cornered, U-shaped bar and no bartender leaned over the bar in greeting. Shelves of liquor and a couple unlit beer signs decorated the back wall of the bar lit by flickering candles.
The three workers stopped and turned as a unit to gape at her. One man was tall and lean with a lot of red hair plastered to his head and around his face. One was stocky and white-whiskered and the third man who was somewhere in the middle of height and girth had graying dark brown, unruly curls around his thin face.
Not one of them said a word.
Addy pushed her hood back from her wet hair and gave each of them an even look. Well, what she hoped was an even look because when one’s underwear was starting to take on water it was hard.
They stared back for a moment and then turned away to continue removing their rain suits. She had the feeling they would have stripped down to their underwear if she hadn’t been there—maybe they still would.
“Eh, Michael, sorry about Francine,” the stocky, white-whiskered member of the trio said to the red headed man.
Addy remembered the word FRANCINE as it had headed directly for her upturned face. Francine was the boat’s name.
The shoulders of the tall thin man with what now seemed like a bushel of wet red hair slumped. “Ah-yuh. Wish we’d’a known sooner.”
“...that the storm wasn’t going to pass us by.” In her head Addy filled in the missing words.
She stepped up behind the group. “Excuse me. I’m looking for Zachary Hale.”
A choking kind of cough made her she realize the four of them were not the only people in the bar. She looked over her shoulder to see scattered tables in a room off to the left of where she stood. People, men and women, sat in clumps of two, three or four at timeworn tables with mismatched chairs. All of them stared at her.
She peered first into the faces of the people at the tables to make sure the billionaire hadn’t shed his fancy business suit to hide amid this crowd.
When she didn’t see anyone resembling the slick, manicured tycoon in disguise she turned halfway back to the three men so she could address everyone. “Can anyone tell me where to find Zachary Hale?”
A few of the people continued to stare at her, but most turned back to their beers and bowls of snacks.
“Pardon me, miss.” The red-haired man spoke to her in a friendly voice as he pointed toward the door. “You don’t want to be going anywhere in that, so come sit at the bar and I’ll pour you a beer.”
Before she could even respond, he walked around the bar, and pulled a glass from under the counter.
Addy held her ground and pulled her hood back on. “That’s very nice of you, but I really need to get going. If someone could just tell me where Mr. Hale lives or where he might be right now.”
“You’ll get blown off the road trying to get up Sea Crest Hill in this weather.” A woman’s voice came from the crowd at the tables.
A few heads turned in the middle-aged woman’s direction and she hushed quickly. Her ruddy face got redder and she turned her chair away.
At least these people knew the man. In this small town the hill called Sea Crest couldn’t be too hard to find.
She decided to try a less direct question. She might get another nibble. “Does anyone know if he’s here in town?”
Silence.
Hale was a thief, but she doubted he’d physically harm anyone. He wasn’t that kind of bad guy, so these folks were mum because Hale grew up in this town and not because they were afraid of him. He was one of them and they weren’t going to give her much information.
She rubbed her back where a bead of water trickled down her spine between her shoulder blades. She could lie to them. Make up something about being Hale’s worried fiancé or secretary with important business.
She looked around the room. Every one of them except the woman who had given away Sea Crest Hill was staring at her with varying degrees of resolute.
And she was such a bad liar. Even the slowest of this crowd would call her on it.
Until a year ago, anyone in the news field would have said if there was one thing Adriana Bonacorda could be relied on for, it was the truth.
“Listen, miss.” The red-haired man, evidently the bartender as he had tied an apron around his thin waist. “You can stay here if you want. There isn’t much in the way of amenities, but we’re far enough up hill from the harbor to be safe and dry in this sturdy old building.”
“Thank you. I’ll be all right, but I need to find Mr. Hale.”
“There is no place else for you to go in town or for twenty miles. Sit down. Relax. Have a beer or—” He reached under the bar and pulled out a bottle of red wine and held it up.
Wine for the city girl. This guy already had that much figured out about her. By the look he gave her, he knew enough about her to know she was not here to heap rewards or praise on one of theirs.
She shook her head slowly. She could almost feel the tread of sneaks and stilettos on her back as the other reporters trampled her to get the story. If they convinced Hale to talk while she sipped Pinot Noir, she might as well start fabricating a résumé, because no one was ever going to hire her with her real one.
She pushed damp hair from her forehead.
Wile might be in order.
Or maybe something brash, near the truth.
What were they going to do? Toss her out into the storm?
Addy leaned over the bar and gave the thin, redheaded bartender an earnest smile. She didn’t need to make enemies out of these people.
“Look. I’m a reporter. Zachary Hale has a story to tell and I want to get his side out to the public before there are any more accusations.” She took a breath hoping her message of benevolence would get through. “Or worse yet, charges are filed against him.”
“Aw, just let her go out there ’n’ look, Michael,” a burly, dark-bearded man said to the bartender as he nodded toward the old oak door.
Michael folded his arms over his chest but remained silent.
“I know that he’s from around here,” Addy brushed at her sodden hair, tipped her head to the side and continued. “And I get that he doesn’t want to be hounded by reporters, but that’s going to happen, anyway. It’ll just be more civilized if he has a chance to lay his side out before the lies get too vicious.”
Before the real truth gets out, she thought. Was her nose growing?
“You can’t go out in this.” The bartender tried again, his arms not budging from their determined pose across his chest.
“But if the storm—”
“Hurricane, miss. Hurricane.”
The wind took that moment to snap the boards covering the windows as if to reinforce the bartender’s statement.
“All right. If the hurricane is already here—”
“This is merely the build-up.” He interrupted her with a warning glance that made her insides slightly queasy. “They expect winds of up to a hundred miles an hour to hit us in a few hours.”
She sighed. Did they think she was going to stand on a street corner and wait for a hurricane to blow her away? She had work to do. At least two other reporters already knew where Hale might go to ground.
“If you just give me directions to Sea Crest Hill, I’ll be out of here.”
“Hale’s not there,” the dark-bearded guy said, looking as dark as the storm clouds outside.
He had to be in Bailey’s Cove. Her lead had been sound, as reliable as one could get these days.
If not at his home, where in this town could he be? Bailey’s Cove was his comfort zone. This is where he’d go, said Savanna, her sister who had worked in the off-site records department of Hale and Blankenstock Investments, LLC, for over two years.
Peering into their faces, she examined the crowd once again to reassure herself Hale wasn’t cowering there in the disguise of a local. That would be just like a scoundrel. She got a lot of petulant, stoic looks and plain blank stares, but Hale’s slick good looks weren’t there.
Saying Hale wasn’t at his home on Sea Crest Hill was most likely a misdirection. She’d find Sea Crest Hill and have a look for herself. She’d know his home once she got there. It would be the biggest and the fanciest.
“Thank you so much for your offer of shelter,” she said to the bartender and started to leave.
The door to the tavern burst open and six people entered—two women and four men—sodden, weary and breathing hard except the man who had pulled her away from the falling FRANCINE. He stood tall, brooding and soaked, taking inventory of the people in the tavern as if he were somehow responsible for each one of them—and ignoring her.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_24631a7a-1122-5f2b-9252-66627b2b5277)
ADDY’S SAVIOR FROM the docks signaled a farewell to the bartender and turned to leave.
“Where’s ah— Where’s he going?” The stout white-whiskered man asked from his bar stool at the near corner of the bar’s U shape.
One of the newcomers stepped forward. “Said he had to get back to—”
The bartender shot a hand into the air and he, too, seemed to make a point of not looking at Addy.
Addy studied the red-haired man and the retreating newcomer for a moment. The retreating man was her quarry.
He had to be Zachary Hale.
As impossible as it seemed, tall, rough looking and seething was Zachary Hale. Stripped of his business suit and the affable expression, the whiskered man with his wet hair plastered to his head seemed like a Maine fisherman instead of a criminal tycoon. She was such an idiot for not seeing it in the first place.
She started after him.
“Leave him alone, miss.” She had taken only a step when the sharp demand stopped her.
When she turned, the short white-whiskered man was no longer on his bar stool but standing inches behind her.
“He’s not who you think he is,” the man finished in a deadly calm voice.
Facing him squarely she looked directly into the faded blue eyes and told a lie that at least might fool him for a moment while she fled. “It’s a family thing.” If anyone would understand this, it would be a man from Maine.
The man’s look did not change.
She fled the tavern in time to see the SUV pull away from the curb.
Uncaring any more about the drenching rain, she flew to her car and jumped inside. Gripping the steering wheel as tight as she could, she headed out after the beckoning taillights.
The road was still deserted except for her car and the SUV.
No other reporters. Wally Harriman and Jacko Wilson would be sitting snug in their dry Boston condos waiting for the storm to pass, sure no one would be gutsy enough to travel in such weather.
“He’s not who you think he is”? This man was Zachary Hale and he was hers.
She followed, pushing the rental car as much as she dared as water ran down the back of her neck, down her body and into her bra. She wiggled her shoulders. This, too, would pass.
The street was worse than when she arrived in town. A slick of water covered most of the surface spraying out from the tires of the SUV and then filling back in.
When she passed it, she could barely see the old church through the blowing rainfall, so she spared the historic building a nod.
The hammering of the wind had escalated in the short while she had been in the town and every time the car took a broadside shot of the gusty stuff, she was sure the bitsy rental was going to tip over and tumble her like towels in a clothes dryer. But each time, the hatchback car held on to the ground and kept up the insane pace she asked of it.
Doggedly, she followed the SUV’s taillights off the town’s main street onto a side road leading away from the ocean and climbing gently up a hill. The rain slashed and the wind ripped at the trees surrounding the bungalows lined up along the road. The press of houses eventually thinned out and the road began to climb and curve through pine trees that seemed to close in behind her as she drove.
When a large tree branch plopped down onto the almost absent shoulder of the road, it brushed Addy back toward the center and she stayed there.
If she hadn’t been so fired up about clinging to the sight of Mr. Bad Guy’s taillights, she knew she would have been scared boneless. Now she held on to determination as a way of survival both mental and physical.
The SUV ahead of her turned once again, this time onto an impossibly narrow road or a driveway she would not have seen if he hadn’t turned there.
She slowed and followed with growing trepidation. He for sure knew she was tailing him, but he might also know she was a reporter. If his cell service worked, surely someone at the bar would have called him.
A thought occurred to her that tried to be amusing, but wasn’t. He could be trying to lead her to some remote place where he could get rid of her and hide this minuscule car and no one would ever be the wiser.
The folks of the town would be convinced she had gone away. Or because they would think she was trying to bring down one of their own, especially one who was so obviously a part of the community, they might help him cover up her disappearance.
Was the story worth dying for?
Was she crazy for thinking such things?
Heck, yeah.
But if she could wipe away the memory of the hopeless look on her sister’s face when she first told her story to Addy, it was worth every slick road, every gust of wind and even facing down a fleeing tycoon.
But, she wasn’t going to die. He didn’t frighten her. The FBI agent she had interviewed had said scam artists rarely seriously hurt anyone. They were usually cowards, often helpless if they were forced into a face-to-face confrontation.
After what she had seen of this guy, she had to admit he wouldn’t be terrified of her. Maybe he’d want to come clean, bare his soul to cleanse himself.
Keep dreaming, she told herself.
She squeezed the wheel and followed the lights. After a quarter mile or so of the steeper, rocky grade, and one particularly deep water-filled rut, she patted the steering wheel. “It’s okay, rental car, you can do this.”
The road turned suddenly and a stand of trees gave her a small respite from the wind. Wherever they were going they had to be arriving any time. She breathed a long sigh. The sun would be setting soon and she wasn’t relishing the darkness.
Where Hale was going and what she would do when they arrived hadn’t been very well planned in her head. Somehow, she had always seen herself confronting him in an office, a bar or a coffee shop, or even on the front steps outside his condo building in downtown Boston.
“You’re leapin’, but you’re not lookin’,” her granddad always told her when she did thoughtless things as a child.
Well, she was nothing if not adaptable. When she found out he had left town, she ran toward the place few people knew about. She would chase him into his mansion and follow him into his man cave, whatever it took. She didn’t care as long as he talked.
She hit a jarring bump.
“Whoa, baby.” She patted the dashboard with one hand.
In the past year and a half, she had changed a lot. Zooming to the top and crashing and burning six months later did that to a person. Climbing out of the crater she had made on landing had been the most difficult part and she was not sure she had found the rim yet.
Zachary Hale was going to help her regain her footing. Her old boss at the Boston Times was going to have to give her back her job when she brought this story to him.
Once clear of the sheltering trees, the wind rocked the SUV’s taillights and then a few seconds later slammed into her car. The wheels fought for traction as the car shifted sideways. When she tried to correct, the wind lifted the rear end.
The world seemed to shift as the car slid backward toward the edge of the road. Water coursed around both sides as terror grabbed hold of her and squeezed hard until she couldn’t breathe.
With a snap, the rear end of the car dropped and she screamed. Braking and steering did nothing except perhaps hasten her descent.
The nose of the car shifted suddenly upward toward the angry sky and the sound of her renewed screams bounced off the cheap vinyl and plastic around her.
With a sudden jolt the car stopped, the headlamps pointing upward at a forty-five-degree slant and lighting up the torrent of raindrops. She had no idea how far she had gone. Ten feet? Twenty?
Or how much farther she would drop.
Gingerly she sat up in the seat trying to see outside the confines of the car. There was nothing but rain in the headlights. Darkness was falling.
She tried for a calming breath.
Was this all?
Was she about to plunge off the edge of some bluff?
She turned slowly in the seat to recon the area behind her. Just then, the wind rocked the car, shifting the tires, loosening their hold and the vehicle shifted downward even farther.
Fear of having made yet another stupid mistake moved in for a tick, until she reminded herself there was a prize to be had if she could just buck up and get through this.
The car shook again, but held fast.
Okay.
Now. Stay in the car or get out and run after the story of her the life? For her pride and her sister, she popped open the door.
When she leaped out, the wind hit her like a hand grabbing her, hauling her upward.
The strong hand hefted her up the few feet to the edge of the road and Zachary Hale tossed her onto solid ground. Through the sheets of driving rain she saw the black SUV.
“Get in,” Hale yelled and she eagerly grabbed the door and did so.
A couple minutes later the driver’s-side door popped open. Hale led with her duffel bag and backpack with her electronics as he jumped in and continued up the road.
She closed her eyes for a moment of thanks for being alive and then she glanced at the driver.
Brooding was kind of an understatement, as she observed him in the shed of he dashboard lights. The wind shook even the big SUV and the driver concentrated on the road.
After a few minutes more of driving, he stopped and backed into a short driveway and up to a three-car garage. One garage door raised and he parked the vehicle safely inside.
Addy hadn’t gotten but a glance of the mansion through the downpour. Large and brooding, old, not what she had expected.
Once inside the garage, she did not give herself a second to sag in relief. She grabbed her bags and scrambled out of the vehicle. For a reporter it was probably more apt than for most people to ask for forgiveness for trespassing rather than ask for permission. If she was out of the vehicle, he could see she planned to stay.
As she stood next to the SUV and dripped, the garage door lowered. In the dimness of the light, she could see that a very early model car and a buggy of some sort filled the other two garage spaces. He must be a collector of some kind.
Then a disgusting thought occurred to her. Maybe he bought these with OPM...other people’s money.
Move, she told herself. The moment would never get better than this, and if she invited herself to stay...
She let herself into a breezeway between the house and the garage. The enclosed space ran the length of the garage and was undoubtedly a twentieth-century addition designed as shelter only. Stark and serviceable, the room had hooks on the far wall holding coats for all seasons with men’s boots and shoes lined up on mats below the coats.
Off to the left there was a large box of wood and a set of flip-up doors to a cellar. The doors would have been outside before the breezeway had been built. Outside and close to the entry to the kitchen so the food stored down there could be easily accessed. It was a very old house.
When Hale didn’t follow her, she moved to where she could see him through the window in the door to the garage. If he picked up an ax or a chain saw, she could run out a door on either end of the breezeway.
She put a hand to her wet hair and shoved a large clump out of her eyes. Maybe if she could see more clearly, she wouldn’t think such dire thoughts.
He rounded the SUV making a beeline for where she stood in the doorway. Coming to murder her? “Con men don’t usually turn to murder, unless it’s a last resort” were the FBI agent’s exact words. The woman had seemed confident in herself, but Addy wondered if she was pushing this guy toward said last resort. She had once thought of herself as a good judge of character, but now she’d just have to rely on being extra careful.
She stepped away as he swung open the door. Inside the breezeway, Hale seemed to be racing to remove the rain suit, hanging each piece on hooks on the wall. Then he ripped off his overshirt and damp baggy work pants, tossing each item onto the top of a nearby washing machine. When he turned in her direction, a sweep of raw appreciation for the masculine body made her face flush. She had no idea what had been living under those business suits.
With his dark T-shirt and dark athletic shorts clinging to his body, there was little she could not intimately imagine about this rat. Too bad.
He took a step toward where she had made a large water spot on the floor, and she stood up taller. Getting timid would not get her the scoop every journalist wanted and only she was brave or crazy enough to go after.
“Zachary Hale, I’m Adriana Bonacorda. I’d like to get your side of the story.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Drops of rain fell from his water-darkened hair still tipped with summer’s blond, and splatted onto the smooth, clean concrete garage floor.
“I’d like to throw you out in the rain.” There was only candor, not malice, in his deep voice, a voice to fit the body.
He turned and strode away. When he went through the door to the house and didn’t close it behind him, she tore off her coat and hung it on the hook beside his. Ripped off her wet clothing and hung it there also.
Then, in her girl shorts and tank top, she grabbed her bags and scrambled inside after him.
When she flipped a light switch, she found herself alone in a large old-fashioned kitchen with a cold wood-burning stove and a wooden icebox with shining brass hardware. Antique pots and bowls hung from hooks and the fireplace with a stone mantel had to have been built with the house, perhaps two hundred years ago.
She put her bags down on the old-style braided rug, and shivering, dug in her duffel for the fleece pants and hoodie she brought because she knew Maine was colder than Massachusetts. Darn cold, she thought as she shoved a leg into the pants.
“Close and latch the shutters in there. Cross-tape every window without a shutter.” Hale had disappeared into the interior of the house but his barked commands filtered back to her through the sound of the pounding rain. A roll of wide masking tape sat on the wooden counter next to the icebox.
The first window, long and tall, was flanked by sheer curtains with tulips fancifully stitched across the bottom.
She surveyed for a moment.
Open the window, reach out in the pounding rain and pull the shutter closed.
Easy peasy.
She struggled to push up the first heavy window and when it wouldn’t stay by itself, propped it open with her shoulder while she reached out and pulled the shutters closed. The shutter’s latch fell easily into place, but she struggled to lower the heavy wood and glass window without letting it drop and shatter into a million shards.
After she was finished, a large puddle of rainwater stood on the linoleum around her feet and she was wet again.
When she heard shutters slam in the next room, she closed the next two sets, grabbed the tape and a flashlight from the old wooden kitchen table, just in case, and hurried past Hale into the parlor to do the same in there.
The light she had turned on blinked out, as did the ones in the rooms she had left behind. She flipped on her flashlight.
In the beam of light she could see furniture and fixtures she might have seen in her grandmother’s home or at one of her old aunts’ houses when she was a kid. Her flashlight paused on a round table with three tiers that would serve no purpose in today’s world and then a pair of bulldogs that might be banks. Hale was trying to protect the place as if it was a museum. Wait. It was a museum, of sorts.
When Hale strode past her, she got busy and finished the parlor. A library across the hall and then a maid’s quarters at the back of the house needed her attention next. When she heard Hale run up the stairs, she finished two more rooms and followed. The first bedroom she worked on had a dark four-poster bed complete with a wooden canopy—if that’s what they called the wood ones—and velvet curtains. On a stand sat a pitcher and bowl that had once been used for washing up in the morning. A small primitive bathroom sat tucked between this and the next bedroom and she closed the shutters on all of them and taped a window in the hallway.
She could hear Hale on the third floor or attic or whatever was up there slamming shutters and then his footsteps hurrying.
By the time she finished a fourth bedroom and third sitting room, Hale stood, a shadow in the doorway. She resisted the urge to shine the beam in his direction and the ambient light was too dim to see the expression on his face. A spark of fear sent a prickle of pain along the nerves just under her skin, but there would be no “flight” today.
“Thank you,” he said and vanished. This time, he didn’t call back to her.
The lights flickered on and she wandered out of the bedroom to look in the other rooms down the hallway. Every bedroom had an antique bed or two, some older than others. One was even a rope bed used by the early settlers in lieu of a mattress. The house seemed to be a collection of antiquities spanning the ages.
Addy was not an expert, but she had seen enough around Boston to know colonial American through early-twentieth-century furnishings when she saw them. None of the rooms looked as if they had been lived in for a very long time, with the exception of the four-poster bedroom. It had a space heater sitting near the fireplace. He could entrench himself in this room and make her sleep on the stiff and formal settee in the parlor.
She loped down the stairs doubting Zachary Hale was going out into the storm again, but he wasn’t in the kitchen or the rest of the house. When she heard sounds in the garage again she went out to see him unloading groceries and water from the SUV.
He now wore a navy pull-on shirt with a button V and jeans, and she assumed dry underwear. She’d give a few bucks herself for some of those right now. She had some in her duffel bag, but since she might be tossed out into the storm at any moment...
Throwing her out was exactly what she expected a guy like Zachary Hale to do. He wouldn’t steal from old ladies and then open his home to a reporter, unless he had other plans for the reporter.
She swallowed against the tightness in her throat, let herself out into the garage and grabbed four of the gallon bottles of water from the SUV and followed Hale up a set of stairs at the back wall of the garage. Wherever he was going, there must be a place to make food.
If anyone understood why people went into an ax murderer’s dark basement without back up, it was an investigative journalist, especially one with no options in the outside world short of minimum-wage jobs—if she could even get one of those.
Only her sister would miss her, and that was a maybe, because her sister was busy with two children, living in a tiny apartment and had only called her because she was in dire straights.
Addy shook her head. Their lives were such a mess.
She shouldered open the door at the top of the stairs at the rear of the garage and stopped short. The door opened into a large loft where vaulted ceilings spread out over a comfy living space. This explained where in the unused house he stayed. He didn’t.
A kitchen sat to the left, small, open with a freestanding work island. Two bar stools sat tucked under the lip of its butcher-block counter. To the right of the kitchen area was a more formal dining space with a table—all wood and with six chairs. In the middle of the back wall sat a fireplace flanked by a couch and cushioned chairs.
On the right of the room was a large bed covered with a duvet of large burgundy and forest-green squares. The whole place looked woodsy, spare and masculine with the exception of a few touches that said a woman had been here on more than one occasion.
She put the water on the counter and started to go down for more.
“I’ll get the rest.”
She began to protest, but he held up a hand and continued. “In the bedroom with the four-poster bed, there are dry towels and a space heater.”
She took the dismissal for what it was. He had no idea what to do with the enemy, but apparently even a rat couldn’t throw an intruder, no matter how unwanted, out into a hurricane to fend for herself.
Not getting any dryer, she hurried down the stairs, through the garage and breezeway and to the kitchen. She plucked her duffel and backpack from the braided rug and headed for the bedroom with the four-poster bed...and a space heater.
What she was going to do when the electricity went out, and it surely would, she had no idea.
Worse than the cold, sitting in the cold dark she wasn’t going to get the story from Hale. She needed a plan to put herself in his space where she could glean knowledge from his reactions.
As she carried her bags up the stairs, she wondered if somewhere in the clattering din of the storm would eventually be the hum of a generator to keep the space heater functioning.
In the four-poster bedroom, she flipped a light switch. When the dim bulb came on, it was barely better than nothing.
Part of her wanted to sit down in the semi-dark and write up what she had already learned about Zachary Hale and the other part, the overachiever survival part of her wanted to rush back over to the loft. She would demand Hale tell her all there was to know about his company, Hale and Blankenstock Investments, LLC, and about the partner on which his attorney tried to blame the scandal.
So close. She was so close to all the answers. If she could get Hale to trust her, to open up...
When she shivered almost violently, she remembered she was cold, her fleece suit was damp and her underwear wet.
She put her bag on the old carpeting and flipped on the space heater that stood on the slate floor in front of the old fireplace. Standing in the glow she let it warm her. Well, her ankles. The heat didn’t rise much farther than her kneecaps.
She didn’t have to lie to Hale. She had already told him she was a reporter. Maybe she had fudged just a bit by telling him she wanted his side of the story. She already knew his side of the story and she wasn’t going to be fooled by the face-of-innocence thing. What she wanted was to build her story, her series of stories, on what made such a man tick. How did small-town Maine’s smiling baby boy get to be a billionaire swindler in Boston in thirty-three short years?
Still shivering in spite of warming ankles she pulled her bag closer and shed her wet clothing.
All right, so Hale had only been charged and convicted by her fellow reporters and not a court of law. But as far as that man was concerned, every good reporter knew the percentages on where there’s smoke there’s fire. Where there was the suspicion of huge amounts of misappropriated money, there was some kind of malfeasance committed by someone.
Dancing in the cold she pulled dry underwear from the bag...
But no one had interviewed him. The person closest to him, his partner, had been interviewed and she was freely, if meekly speaking out, though only after his attorney had thrown her under the bus.
How deeply into Hale’s personality did the creepiness penetrate? When one swindled men and women who had worked at hard-labor jobs all their lives, did it take more of a deeply rooted problem than if one swindled fellow white collars?
...and soon the primal relief of dry underwear loosened a knot in her stomach. When that happened some of the old courage and determination, each threaded with a touch of recklessness, had her quickly sliding on her last change of clothes.
She was going to go kick some swindler butt.
Slow down, she thought as she snapped her jeans. Take some time to think this out. She looked around at her surroundings. The fireplace where the heater sat was in the wall to the left of the door and had been capped, either because it didn’t work well or to keep out the winter cold and errant wildlife. The heavy four-poster bed with its dark blue curtains had been placed against the inner wall to the right of the door and beyond it were matching chests of drawers.
On either side of the bed was a large braided rug and portraits of, she supposed, family members hung on most of the walls.
Several feet beyond the end of the bed were two tall windows. Between the windows was a washstand, a commode, with an ewer and bowl sitting on top. Unreasonably she hoped there was no chamber pot in the small cupboard of the stand; she had seen a flush toilet here, after all. The washstand had a granite top and above the towel bar was the picture of a woman.
She walked away from the heater to read the legend.
The nightstand, it seemed, was made for Millie Mauston when she first came to the mansion on Sea Crest Hill in 1889 as Mrs. Colm McClure. The Maine granite top of the stand weighed about eighty pounds and the chest was made of black walnut at her request. Millie, a bright young woman with a head of thick dark hair was pictured beside the legend. The birth and death date said she was twenty-four when she died.
Young. Too young to even get to experience her nightstand for long. Addy turned toward the bed and wondered if Millie had slept there.
“Well, Millie, I hope I get a chance.”
Right now it was time to find out some dark and sturdy info about Zachary Hale. Dark because readers and therefore editors liked the juicy stuff and sturdy because the tale of intrigue surrounding her last conquest in Afghanistan turned out to be diaphanous at best.
The lights flickered out.
Dark. Why had she used the word dark?
Didn’t matter.
If Hale had not locked the door to the loft, she’d take that as a signal she was welcome for a nice fireside chat.
He would not, after all, expect her to sit up here with only the glow of her computer screen and when that went dead, to sit in the rural Maine blackness.
She groped around.
And where was the damned flashlight?
She stopped for a moment in the pitch black.
She used to be nice. She had friends once. She held the door for old men. She used to carry her elderly neighbor’s trash to the chute. Though for a while a year and a half ago, the best she could muster was to find a neighbor kid to carry it for her. She had been too busy pursuing a story, too busy trying to gain the status few reporters ever touched. And she had done it, been on the top of the heap, the star news reporter everyone envied, in orbit with those who might be up for a Pulitzer Prize, everyone said.
Crash and burn would have been a good outcome compared to the embarrassing punishment she had gotten from the press she used to hold so dear.
She searched again for the flashlight.
Aha! On the edge of the bed. The room brightened as she flicked on the beam.
She shrugged into a second tank top and cropped cardigan. When she clutched the sweater around her chest, she cringed at how not warm these clothes were. It was still seventy-five degrees in late September in Boston this year and maybe when the storm passed and the sun came back out, it would be sixty in Maine before the snow started.
With another shiver, she grabbed her laptop and headed down the stairs. Zachary Hale, here I come, she thought.
If her last dry underwear got wet in the storm because he threw her out, so be it.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_0aff2b70-656e-5050-ab19-ec4b85d077b4)
ZACH HELD HIS cell phone to his ear and listened as his attorney warned him that there was a reporter in town asking about him.
“She’s here,” he said as he took a loaf of bread and a package of cookies from the grocery bag and placed them on the kitchen’s island countertop.
“At the mansion? That’s not a good idea.” His attorney, Hunter Morrison, sounded worried and he probably had reason to be.
“She ran her car off the road following me up here.”
Hunter snorted. “I guess leaving her in the ditch to sit out a hurricane might have been a bit much. I don’t suppose she did it on purpose.”
Zach thought of how far her car had left the road, how frightened she had been when he had hauled her out and wondered if anyone was that desperate for a story. “I doubt it.”
“You don’t have her in the loft with you.”
It was a nonquestion that begged a negative response. “I put her in the house. We’ve got power now. If Owen did his job, the generator is functioning and there’s plenty of gas.”
“Well, the old guy’s intentions will have been good.”
Zach snorted this time. He didn’t trust Owen Calloway to be a perfect groundskeeper, but he trusted the old guy and his wife not to meddle and not to gossip. Those two qualities made his only close neighbors gems.
“At any rate I’ve got plenty of wood. As long as the fireplace works, and according to the contractor there should be barely a puff of smoke even in a hurricane. We’ve got food and hot water.”
“You might find Delainey and I squatting up there one of these days.”
Hunter had a new fiancé who enriched his life in every way and Zach was glad that kind of thing worked for the two of them.
“Anytime. Anytime,” Zach said putting a bag of apples and one of oranges on the counter beside the bread. “And I’ll keep the reporter at arm’s length.”
“A little farther away might be better.”
“Maybe she’ll stay tucked in the house.”
“They predict the storm could stall.”
“I’ll feed her once in a while.”
“Be careful of what you feed her. She has a lot of good journalism to her credit, but her last story has been labeled as a desperate grab at a Pulitzer. She’s been down and out since, so she’s most likely very hungry.”
“I’ll slip food under her door.”
Hunter laughed. “Yeah. Be careful and good luck, Zach.”
“Thanks, and I meant it about you and Delainey.”
He signed off with another promise to be wary.
Zachary McClure Hale in loyal and patriotic fashion had been named after his grandfather Zachary Hale and an ancestor by the name of McClure who had brought his wife and infant to the very young United States of America in the early 1800s.
By time and attrition the McClures of New England had either died out, or a few, but not many, had left Maine and lost interest in the family heritage. Virginia McClure, his grandmother, had drilled into him that a Mainer knew where he came from and he protected that legacy. For most of Zach’s adult life, it had been up to him to maintain the ancestral home and the antiques within.
The old McClure mansion was his to look after, but caring for the heritage home had not been a burden. Money to keep the house in good repair was also not a problem. At issue, he had little time for the place and there was scant interest outside himself for keeping it in the best historically accurate repair.
He didn’t begrudge the time he gave. The loft above the garage had become a place to retreat, where he didn’t usually allow people to follow him. Since the time when control had been bequeathed to him, there had never been a reporter and never a woman here other than Cammy Logan, who cleaned the house and the loft and kept a keen eye on any repairs or issues that occurred with either.
Reporters he usually met at a café or his office. Women he wished to entertain in private, he met at restaurants or posh hotels. His penthouse condominium in Boston was also private territory.
The mansion on Sea Crest Hill he kept to himself, until today.
He’d deal with this reporter exactly how he’d dealt with those in Boston. She’d get referred to his attorney for a blanket statement neither confirming nor denying any wrongdoing at Hale and Blankenstock. He gave the loft a quick inspection. The windows were specially installed to withstand a strong nor’easter and even an occasional branch or bit of debris. He was hopeful they would hold out in a hurricane.
The interior with its old blond wood of the 1950’s had withstood time and even come back into fashion a few times. The light-colored paneled walls gave the place a feeling that it was larger on the inside than out. And it was a welcome and necessary refuge he needed in his life.
He had updated the appliances last year and made sure the bed was large and comfortable. Cammy had added a pillow here and there, a few fabric wall hangings and a handmade quilt on the back of the couch to soften the man-effect, but he had to admit they added more comfort.
Zach had barely finished the conversation when the lights flicked out again. He’d have to check the generator.
He grabbed the flashlight and a baseball cap from the ones on the wall pegs and headed down the stairs where he donned a dry jacket from a hook in the garage. Then he sprinted toward the generator shed.
The wind slapped him and the rain did its best to blow him off course as he approached the shed, where behind the lawn mower, weed whacker and other tools to maintain the exterior of the old home, would sit the rarely used generator that powered the essentials of the house whenever necessary. Right now all he needed were two rooms.
When he got inside, out of the storm, the shed smelled of old wood, fuel and age. Built sometime in the middle of the last century the wooden frame could withstand a direct hit from a hurricane if it had to.
The bright beam of his flashlight spread out, illuminating the shed as he closed the door behind him. The fuel cans sat lined up behind the lawn mower next to the generator. Zach moved the mower and grabbed a can of fuel. The can lifted easily. Empty. The second can, same as the first.
Owen did outside maintenance and kept the gasoline rotated and stocked in the shed for emergencies, or he was supposed to keep the fuel stocked. Today two cans stood full and all the spare cans were dry as “bones guarding a pirate’s treasure,” Owen would say. That meant there was enough fuel to fill the generator with a bit to spare. Apparently Owen had mowed and weed-whacked all summer and he was always “Ah-yuh, goin’ ta get more gas tomorra.”
If the reporter used the space heater, the lights, her computer and who knew what else the woman would plug in, the gas would last less than a day. This storm was not going to pass for at least thirty-six hours.
He rubbed the back of his neck as he considered the fix Owen had left him in. A day. Maybe a day.
He dropped his hand to his side. By himself, he could make the generator last several days.
He should have left that woman in the ravine. Other than claiming to be a reporter, he had no idea who she was and didn’t want to find out. Grandmother might frown on his spare hospitality, but he hoped the woman would sit huddled in front of the space heater, burn up the gas with a hair dryer and use her laptop as long as the power lasted and then sit in the dark under a quilt and wait out the storm.
He poured gas in the generator, and when he pushed the start button, it snapped from silent to loud in an instant.
That was luck.
With his hands over his ears, he stood waiting to make sure the old thing continued to run, that nothing had clogged during the year or so of only being started as a test from time to time.
Two things were “at leasts” today. At least he had gotten back from Boston in time to get the house closed up and at least the woodpile out under the tall white pines behind the house had been stacked high and straight.
He’d have a heat and light source when the gas burned up.
What he wouldn’t have for the day or two it took for the storm to pass was peace from a sensation seeker. Now all he had to figure out was how to keep Ms. Bonacorda in the dark, literally, when the lights went out.
These days most reporters he came into contact with were gossip seekers who could take a corn-flake-sized bit of banal and build it into a sensational story. Worse, when a story was written with enough adjectives or read with enough enthusiasm it would be considered by the masses to be gospel. He wondered how many adjectives this woman had in her cache.
He let his hands fall to his sides disgusted with himself. Whatever and whoever this woman was, he had gotten into the mess with Hale and Blankenstock, and he knew the world was going to demand answers from him.
Answers were going to be tough to come by.
Convinced the generator would continue to run, he turned to leave and spotted the note tagged to the door.
Me and Margaret Louise are hunkered down and well taken care of. Don’t you worry about us. You come over if you want to. It was signed Owen and Margaret Louise.
He had no choice but to smile. “Well taken care of” meant the two of them were holed up with enough food for a small regiment and plenty of scotch for the whole army. Owen knew creature comfort and he deserved them, and Margaret Louise knew how to cook, therefore the food in Zach’s freezer...
He tugged the hood of the jacket back on over his baseball cap and stood in the doorway of the shed. He was fascinated, watching the show presented by nature. Lightning flickered in various degrees of strength for almost a minute before it abated to small flashes.
In the near dark, he saw no light coming from the room where he’d sent the reporter. He could have gotten lucky—maybe she’d gone to sleep already.
He doubted it as soon as he thought it.
When he sent her away, she had looked shocked and might have left in a disappointed huff. She might even have been foolish enough to go back out in the storm to see if she could rescue her car. He could have told her that car was going nowhere until O’Reilly’s tow truck hauled it out of the ravine. She was lucky she hadn’t gone in a few yards farther up the road, as that part of the ravine ran down the steep side of the hill.
She must have thought he was story-worthy to risk her neck and she helped shore up the old mansion without question.
Did those things make her someone he’d be interested in knowing or someone he should lock out of the loft and hope she went away without actually damaging the old home and contents? His grandmother had loved the mansion on Sea Crest Hill and his own mother had rejected it as the shabbier side of life.
He turned and gave the generator a last visual once-over. Satisfied, he shifted the cap so the storm had less of a chance to blast rain into his eyes and headed out.
The wind whipped the pine trees relentlessly over his head and the rain pelted down as he fled sure-footed along the stone path to his refuge. In five minutes he’d have a fire going and a glass of finely aged red wine in his hand.
Hopefully that reporter was tucked away in the four-poster bed, her computer in her lap, capitalizing on someone else’s misfortune.
* * *
WHEN ADDY HEARD the sound of boots tread on the steps to the loft above the garage, she drew herself up to her full five foot five inches and whispered encouragement to herself. There was a time when no man could make her back down, but this man had already shown signs of ignoring her and had all but thrown her over his shoulder and carried her off to his cave.
One of his many talents, no doubt, along with the ability to talk, bully and cajole people out of their money, was to carry women off. Already he had shown her that murdering her to keep her out of his business was not plan number one. If he wanted to kill her to shut her up, he could have just left her in her car. She might have been silenced by a flying tree limb or been washed off down the hill into the ocean if he had left her to fend for herself.
Most likely he just planned to stick her up in beguiling Millie McClure’s room full of antiques and ignore her.
She smiled and a shot of courage buzzed inside her.
The door swung open and the man who appeared in the dim light was not the slick swindler she had seen in Boston, nor the Maine backwoodsman. Nor was he the man who would show up briefly, a glittering beacon of humility according to her sister, Savanna, at the holiday parties for Hale and Blankenstock where her sister had met him exactly twice. He would stay for a few minutes, greet each employee and then leave, according to Savanna.
Everyone now knew the glittering beacon was part of a lie.
Hat in hand, the shadows made the furrow of his brows deeper and his unguarded expression more dramatic. He was handsome in his rough and outdoorsy look, and in this moment he appeared to be a man who had many troubles to deal with, many concerns for which he had to be responsible.
Under other circumstances, she might want to walk up to him, put her hands flat on his chest and brush his damp hair back off where it had fallen on his forehead. She would sweep her hand across the furrows of his brows, draw his head down and put her lips against his full and slightly drawn ones. And...
What was she thinking?
This was the enemy of the people.
Hale slowly swung his gaze in her direction as if he had expected her to be there. His features relaxed to neutral, he became a hybrid between woodsman, because of the four-or five-day growth of sandy whiskers, and slick swindler, because of years of practice.
Addy drew in a breath to sort out her thoughts.
“I wanted to speak with you,” she said into the silence. They were in his territory, and short of death by storm or felony theft of his SUV, she was stuck here. She wanted to sound nonconfrontational, perhaps professorish, someone who was just looking for facts, not trying to crucify him.
If his guard went down to anywhere near what it had been when he had opened the door, she’d get something related to the truth, or at least as much of the truth as a person like him could find in his life.
He didn’t answer, but hung his hat on a peg, turned and walked out.
Degenerate...
Running away. Or maybe it was a ploy to have her follow him and then he’d get her out of the loft and out of his hair if he ran back inside and locked the door with her on the outside.
A kid’s game, like musical chairs. She’d be left out. Too bad, so sad. But that was not going to happen.
Make herself useful. That’s what she should do.
What did men like? Couldn’t resist?
She looked at the bags of groceries on the island counter.
Food. Even swindlers had to eat.
She couldn’t cook at all—not even boil a decent pot of water, but maybe she could manage something. She grabbed the nearest bag and started poking around.
Fusilli? Other than being pasta—she knew because she could see its curly shape through the window in the box—she hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t needed to know what it was named to eat it. Nope. Just stick a fork in it.
Cans of plain tomato sauce. What the heck was she supposed to do with that?
The door across the room popped open and Hale entered with his arms bulging with firewood. He turned his back to her as he unloaded and stacked wood in the bin near the fireplace.
Then he walked out again.
A fire, of course. She was probably much better at fire-starting than cooking. Actually, she once tried to combine the two. Unfortunately, the smell of burned pizza stuck around her condo, and to be fair, the hall of her building, for a week.
She hustled over to the fireplace and searched for fire-starter logs or those cute pinecones stuffed with candle wax or something to make fires start easier.
There wasn’t so much as a fireplace match, just a book of matches with the name of the bar in town. Braven’s. She could have, should have stayed there in the bar. Too late.
She poked around for fire-starting aids and gave up.
She wasn’t any better at fire-starting than she was at cooking, so when she heard the footsteps on the stairs, she fled back to the kitchen area where she could keep the center island between them, duck behind it if she had to.
He unloaded the wood and knelt on the floor in front of the fireplace. Then he reached inside and opened the flue. Oh, she would not have remembered that. With wood chips and bits of flimsy bark, he started a small fire, feeding it twigs and shards of wood, and of course, he had used the stubby matches.
Just like now, she always managed to have someone around to start her fires and usually to cook. She wondered if he expected her to do it, to cook. Good luck with that one, buddy.
The fire grew tall and she was a bit envious. She’d have to research fire-starting when she had time.
When the fire blazed, he stood and headed in her direction.
His sandy blond brows drew together in fierce concentration. There was clearly a side of this man she knew nothing about, possibly a deeply dark and sinister side. She should be running away. She should go back to the house, push the four-poster bed up against the door and tie the sheets together to let herself out the window in case she needed to flee into the storm.
He paused and dropped his keys into a dish on the long table behind the couch.
His expression did not challenge nor welcome as he continued toward the kitchen.
Nonreactive. Ego-sheltered.
Serial killer? Chain-saw murderer? At least the two of them weren’t in a basement alone. A basement? Did the place have a basement? Yes, the lift up doors in the breezeway would lead to a cellar of some kind. Maybe that’s where she’d be buried.
She was crazy, the chatter in her head crazier.
Maybe it was he who should be afraid.
As he drew closer, he seemed to grow in size and his expression in intensity. She stiffened, searching for the best exit if she had to run.
And then she relaxed.
Yeah.
She could run away, go back to a world where she would cover stories for microfame and a couple of dollars.
Then she could go live under a bridge in a refrigerator box and wear newspapers on her feet and stuffed into the sleeves of her lightweight coat as she had done when she investigated and had written the series Life Without a Cause to critical acclaim only four short years ago.
Hale came around the counter and stopped a mere two feet from her. He placed one hand, deliberately it seemed, on the counter beside her, and she inhaled.
By being here in his living space, she had made her move, set out her pawn. The next move was his.
A second later he stepped around her to the freezer, from which he took two glass bowls filled with something green. He took off the lids, popped them into the microwave and covered them with a sheet of crinkly sounding paper he’d taken from a box in the drawer under the microwave.
Eat? His move was to feed her. Or maybe he was hungry and planned to eat both...in front of her...while she salivated.
Addy watched the bowls spin on the microwave’s carousel and then realized he was heating pea soup.
Food was a good move on his part. She hadn’t eaten since early this morning. If she accepted food from him, she would be in his debt.
Yeah, as if she wasn’t already—deeply.
He pulled two plates from the cupboard.
He was dreadful at portraying himself as a bad guy, or he was as “diabolically clever” as the tabloids had called him when they alluded to his making off with a few billion dollars.
If she didn’t have an absolutely reliable source, she would begin to doubt the veracity of her facts. The SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, a U.S. government agency set up to prevent investment fraud, had come down hard on Hale and Blankenstock.
More importantly, according to her younger sister, Savanna, this guy was worse than a robber or a thief who stole once and disappeared into the night, Hale was heartless. He had repeatedly taken from Savanna—trusting, single mother Savanna—and many others.
He went back to the fire, hunkered down and carefully placed a pair of logs on the flaming pile. He stayed squatted, silhouetted in the soft light until the fire roared.
He looked handsome. And fit. She wondered how fit—she couldn’t help it, picturing him naked and... It was easy to see, this man lifted heavy things, not just fountain pens and martini glasses.
She shook her head at the silliness of her thoughts.
He had set out a pea soup pawn. Now she was going to have to sit down and eat with him or give up the game without trying and walk back to town beaten down by the storm and failure.
Lunch it was, and so be it.
She pulled open a drawer in the butcher-block island and found place mats and napkins that most likely had never been used. Carefully she set them on the table in strategic places. At right angles so she could better watch him when she wanted and ignore him if it seemed necessary.
She took the plates he had placed on the counter, where they would have sat side by side on the bar stools, and moved them to the table.
If she was to get a story, if she was going to find out what made this guy tick, she’d have to make nice. Pea soup with a swindler. She had done scary things before to get to the truth.
She’d do worse to get his real story if need be.
She opened another drawer where she supposed spoons would be and bingo, there was a tray of flatware. She took a soupspoon for him and a teaspoon for her. Soupspoons were too large and made her slurp soup. She preferred a teaspoon where the contents cooled faster and the spoon fit her mouth. Her former boyfriend had called her a delicate flower for demanding such things. He never did understand her.
Her former boyfriend had also deserted her when the fiction she had unwittingly written had hit the fan.
Former. Back in the part of her life when she soared, Wesley had stuck himself to her side whenever she was home in Boston. He hadn’t liked the falling-flat part, however, so he split quickly, taking with him everything from her condo she had thought was theirs.
So long and good luck.
When Hale left the fire, he came over to where she stood waiting for the microwave to finish. Reaching into the cupboard beside her head, he grabbed a bag of oyster crackers.
He smelled of wood smoke and she could feel the heat of the fire radiating from him. She inhaled and when she shivered, the quaking in her knees wasn’t just because the place was one degree warmer than freezing. She wanted to...move in on the story, grab it and not let go until she had everything she could ever want.
But she held her ground. Letting him know how eager she was would not help her bond with his deepest soul.
When he took the oyster crackers and turned away toward the table she asked, “Why are you doing this? Why are you treating me as if you don’t hate me? You must hate me.”
“You give yourself too much credit,” he responded calmly without turning around.
Good one, she thought. Attack her and keep her on edge. Maybe he didn’t want to play nice after all.
“All right.” She moved around so she could see his face. “You don’t hate me, but you know why I’m here. Is there anything you want to tell me?”
His shoulders stiffened and he drew in a breath. “You have all your facts and you’re looking for that personal touch to make your story more sensational.” Again his words were not angry.
Under his assessing gaze, she suddenly felt as if he knew exactly who and what she was. As if he had been there that day when her source in Afghanistan had been exposed as a liar.
She felt the humiliation try to submerge her again, as if he was qualified to judge her.
She gathered her wits. “You did what you did and I came here to try to make some sense of it. To try to understand.”
In Afghanistan she had been stupid and too eager. She had almost caused others to lose their lives, and that might make her as morally corrupt as he was.
Disgust and repugnance aimed at herself suddenly seemed much worse than it had ever been. It made her sick to her stomach, made her head flood with the images floating around on the internet that portrayed her to be the lowest kind of life-form.
She looked up and he was standing almost toe-to-toe with her.
“What do you think you will be trying to understand?”
His question brought her back into reality, the loft, the hurricane, the many people this man had cheated. His words had been soft as if trying to assess her again, not to challenge her.
“How—how things started. I thought you might tell me how things started.”
He stepped away but watched her warily.
With both palms pressed to the counter she continued. “Did it start out as a swindle?”
She expected him to smile at this, to pull out his charm to deflect her. Perhaps put on enough of a show to make her believe he had been wronged, to make her go sit in the four-poster room and use what she already had about him, type up a tidy article that looked just like everyone else’s.
Not to dig around inside his head for deeper motives. Maybe his mother withheld love. Maybe his father exiled him to the military academy he attended for four years and supposedly hated.
He didn’t smile at all. He looked tired. He had a right to be exhausted. She’d give him that. He had been out saving boats and rescuing women who wanted to tear his life apart. And that was exactly what she wanted to do, to tear his life apart as he had torn apart her sister’s.
She wanted to disassemble him.
Limb by limb, she thought and then asked, “At what point did you realize things were spinning out of control? That you were going to have to distance yourself from the fray so as to look innocent?”
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_7c0a4637-922d-5d2e-9709-7275ba5d5070)
AS IF ADDY hadn’t spoken, Hale walked away and brought one bowl of soup from the microwave and placed it on a plate she had set on the table. Then he returned to the microwave for the other. She was sure he was going to put the second bowl back in the refrigerator or even pour it down the drain or, better, over her head.
He did none of the above.
He placed the second bowl on the other plate and looked over at her with a look that said, “Sit.”
She scrambled to do so—for the story, of course, and because she was really, truly, so very desperately hungry.
He sat after she did. Either there were old-school manners in this man, or perhaps, this was her last supper and he wanted to be in a position to run her down if she tried to escape. At least she wouldn’t die hungry, she thought as she instinctively slid back on the heavy wood-and-leather chair.
Hands in her lap, ’cause she had some manners, too, she sat and waited for his lead. “Behave like them and they may treat you as one of them” had been the advice of one of her instructors in college and—sometimes the magic worked. It had when she donned the clothing and the persona of an Afghani peasant woman—or it had worked for a while.
He put his napkin on his lap. She did the same.
After he took his first taste of the soup, she sipped a bit of hers. It was delicious and soon she had to slow herself down, so she floated a few small oyster crackers on top of her soup. As she savored the next mouthful it occurred to her that she was concentrating too much on the food, the conversation being nonexistent.
She snapped her gaze to Hale’s face.
He seemed to be ignoring her or if she left her ego out, he was thinking about something that troubled him. So should he be. He should be thinking about all the people’s lives that he’d ruined, all the heartache he’d caused, all the money he had gained and was going to lose.
Then why did he look so damned mouth-watering? She swiped her lips with her napkin. His sun-highlighted hair, thick, short on the sides and not too long on the top, almost always perfectly styled and trimmed often. Today it had been finger-combed, in an endearingly youthful way. He looked vulnerable without his facade.
If he wasn’t so morally corrupt and she wasn’t so desperate to get at the truth, he might even look...enticing.
She yanked her brain away from that vein of perilous thinking and scrambled for a question to ask.
She needed something affable. Be his friend. Be someone he wanted to talk to, a houseguest with whom he’d at least speak politely. If swindlers spoke politely when they didn’t have to speak at all.
“The home.” She nodded in the direction where the big old house sat connected to the garage via the breezeway. “The antiques in the home are lovely. Tell me about some of the history over there. If you wouldn’t mind.” She added the last part with a warm smile.
The narrow-eyed look he gave her said he knew exactly what she was doing and why, but he cleared his throat and after a moment of silence said, “The home was built in the early 1800s by the man who originally established the town.”
“The Bailey of Bailey’s Cove.”
“Liam Bailey. He built the house for the woman he loved.” Hale’s words sounded as if he read them from a brochure, but at least he wasn’t declining to speak with her.
“How many generations ago did this ancestor of yours live?”
“The builder lived in the early 1800s, about eight generations back, but he isn’t my ancestor.”
She tipped her head and raised an eyebrow. “You live in his ancestral home and are the keeper of the family history. What do his descendents say?”
“No one knew until recently that he had descendents.”
“Missing descendents sounds interesting.” Juicy, better than gold in most people’s lives. She almost added, “Tell me about it,” but one could only use that phrase twice at best before an interviewee started feeling strip-mined.
He didn’t reply and Addy feared she might have worn out her welcome already.
The wind blew outside and a branch or something clattered against the roof. The raging storm had kept every other journalist away from this story and she had no intention of blowing it now.
She started to speak, but so did he.
“Go on. I’d love to hear all about it,” she said first and then she sat up straight and rested her spoon on the plate beside her soup bowl.
“In the early 1800s Patrick McClure came to the newly formed United States to avoid the English taxes. Immigration didn’t help his wife, Fanny McClure, as she died in childbirth, leaving McClure with two children under a year old and the need for a new wife. My direct ascendant was Fanny’s firstborn son.”
He continued to speak in the staccato voice of a museum docent or tour guide, someone who had delivered the information over and over, but he was speaking so she kept quiet.
“McClure had four children with his second wife, one a dark-haired stepson now proven to be the child of Liam Bailey for which the town was named. The three others were most likely McClures. They all had flaming red hair as he did. The dark-haired son has two descendants in the town. Daniel MacCarey, an anthropologist from the university and married to the owner of a restaurant here. The other, Heather Loch, who runs the town’s museum in the original church.”
“The church is a museum?”
He nodded as she lifted her spoon for more soup.
“What does Heather Loch look like?”
“Sixties, a mass of gray hair. You can’t miss her.” His lips curved gently, and the emotion she read into the smile said, fondly.
He glanced at her still smiling and she almost coughed up pea soup. Wow. Nice smile when he wasn’t being all businesslike. Electric. As quickly as her mind fired up with thoughts of Zachary Hale the real man, not monster, the smile changed to a frown. Had he seen the flicker of interest on her face?
Had she really felt it? What were they talking about? Oh, yeah, the church and the gray-haired woman. “I saw her when I drove into town. I thought she was an apparition standing in the doorway of the old church.”
“She’s guarding the museum from the storm.”
“Against a hurricane. How could they let her stay there? It’s too close to water.”
“Without a doubt, more than one person tried to talk her into leaving. Police Chief Montcalm most likely sent a squad car for her.”
“And she told them the church has stood two hundred years and it would stand another two hundred.” Addy might interview that woman, for color if nothing else.
“Something like that.”
He looked directly at her when he spoke. Almost as if seeing her for the first time. His eyes gleamed a soft golden brown, matching his hair. Oh, he was a package.
This was not the evil billionaire she’d expected. Could it be the beard?
She dismissed the notion. Zachary Hale was sly, slick and treacherously dangerous. He had created false accounting records and a trail of phony investment reports, then he put his name on them and sent them off to the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, as proof of his extraordinary ability to make fortunes for people.
She cleared her throat. “About the McClures. Do you know much about them?”
“Patrick McClure seemed to be in the right place at the right time and in the right circumstances.”
“The woman needed a husband.”
“And McClure, Irish immigrant or not, needed a wife. The situation was urgent or the second richest man in town would not have chosen such a bridegroom for his daughter.”
“So the first Mr. McClure came by his fortune in the new world through this woman in need?”
“Colleen Fletcher McClure insisted her father set the two of them up in the home her lover had built. And when her father died, insisted the town’s name be changed from South Harbor to Bailey’s Cove.”
The more he spoke, the more his voice became animated. Addy found herself leaning in, captivated.
She pushed away from the table, took the dishes to wash them in the sink.
“Has your family always lived in Bailey’s Cove?” If she sneaked in a question close to his personal life, he might not notice. If this one worked, she’d sneak one in about his life in Boston.
When he came to stand beside where she busied herself drying the lid to her bowl, she became a picture of innocence.
He turned and with one hand on the edge of the sink, he leaned in toward her almost as if he’d kiss her. His light brown eyes with golden flecks stared clearly into hers.
He leaned in closer and Addy sucked in a breath.
“I know what you’re doing and I’m going to ask you nicely to stop. Once.”
Then he straightened and strode away to the fire and sat on the sofa near where his phone and computer rested on the wooden coffee table.
He’s not who you think he is? The voice in her head insisted.
* * *
ZACH’S GRANDFATHER HAD told him his good nature would get him into trouble one day. And that day had come, in spades, four weeks ago, and now it just seemed to keep coming in the form of a reporter he wanted to toss out on her ear. He would, too, when it was safe, or at least he’d drop her off at the dry-goods store that doubled for a bus station.
His phone no longer had a signal, so he opened his tablet to check for communication from Morrison and Morrison.
The Wi-Fi wouldn’t connect either.
When he left Boston, he had planned on hunkering down to think. Hadn’t planned on Adriana Bonacorda. Admirable in her willingness to persist.
A flicker in the shadows told him the uninvited guest was loitering nearby.
He powered down his computer and slid it into his briefcase.
“I’m sorry to intrude,” she said as she tried to push her bushel of blond curls behind her ear. “I wanted to see if you were willing to sit down and speak with me some more.”
He pressed back against the cushion and studied her. She wore slim black jeans that were showing their age and a pale pink tank top under a faded black one. The tail of her sweater didn’t bother to come to her waist, but the rolled collar hugged the back of her neck in a sensuous manner and dropped to her midriff, accentuating her full breasts. She wore a sloppy old pair of wool socks on her feet as her once red moccasins now sat in the breezeway most likely curling up toe to heel as the leather dried and contracted.
The way her hair frizzed out around her head in a halo of blond almost made him smile. With her wide-set deep blue eyes and her generous mouth she carried the look off well. Her small chin jutted perfectly at the end of sharp jawbones and the color on her high pink cheekbones evened out the proportions of her features. Gave them a kind of perfection.
She looked to be in her late twenties, about a hundred and twenty pounds, and she might be a natural blonde, rare, but not unheard of.
“I won’t talk about anything south of the Maine border.”
The lines of her mouth tightened, but she dipped her chin once and invited herself to sit on the sofa with him but nearer the fire.
“What kinds of things do you do when you’re here in Bailey’s Cove?” she said, asking, he thought, as open a question as possible.
He could list a few, but nothing she could use to build a story against him. He wondered when this reporter had last been interested in the truth.
The wind whistled and roared as he sat and tried to decide what to tell her, how best to lead her away from anything involving Hale and Blankenstock.
“This is a quiet town, struggling,” he said softly.
“I’m afraid I didn’t get to see much of Bailey’s Cove.”
He imagined her clinging to the wheel of her car, trying not to panic beyond the ability to function. Blue eyes glued to the centerline. Butt nearly lifted from the seat in anticipation. He wondered just how crazy she was.
Locking her in a closet might be best for both of them.
She lifted one eyebrow at him. “I was too busy chasing you.”
He relaxed into press mode. She wanted to play casual, to get inside his armor with lightness and charm. Good for her. She wouldn’t be any good at her job if she didn’t pull out all her weapons.
She would find his armor had hardened recently. He was ready for whatever she had.
Liam Bailey. He’d throw her the pirate. Nothing she couldn’t get at the local museum, hell she’d get a well-embellished version at the local bar.
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Mary Brady
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The rarest treasure of all Discredited journalist Adriana Bonacorda has a lead on the hottest story of the year–billionaire business titan Zachary Hale is accused of cheating investors! She′s so determined to talk to him that she follows him to the charming town of Bailey′s Cove, Maine.When a hurricane traps Addy and Zach together, it′s her one chance to revive her career. But she′s shocked by the passion that springs up between them. Is Zach really a criminal? Or is there a reason for his silence? In a place founded by pirates, where a legendary treasure is supposedly hidden, Addy just might find something truly precious….