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“Oh, thank God,” she cried as he approached. “I was afraid I was going to have to spend the night out here in the cold.”
He didn’t speak and as he came closer, she could make out his features and she began to realize he had a familiar look to him. She frowned. Oh no! It couldn’t be.
He stopped a couple of feet away. “Mrs. Marino, I’m Marc Huntington. Marge is my mother. Just so you know I’ m not some random beach bum.”
Her heart began to thud in her chest. Marc Huntington. What was he doing here? It had been years since she’d seen him—at least fifteen of them. She’d heard he was overseas, in the service, fighting bad guys and raising hell.
But here he was, staring at her and looking none too friendly, despite his polite words. “How did you get out here, anyway?” he growled. “And why?”
He didn’t recognize her. That was a relief. But why should he? She barely recognized him—and wouldn’t have if she’d met up with him anywhere else. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been about half this size, a lanky, smart-mouthed teenager who probably didn’t even know she existed.
Now he was all corded chest muscles and wide shoulders, with dark hair that tended to fall over his forehead and crystal-blue eyes that seemed remarkably hostile. Bottom line—he was pretty much the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen. She drew her breath in sharply and couldn’t say a word.
His brow furrowed. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. It took two tries before she could speak. “Uh...I’m...my name is Torie... But I guess you know that. I was just exploring the caves and the fog came in and...and...”
“Okay,” he said impatiently. “No problem. Your husband was getting excited when you didn’t show up for tea. Everyone is out looking for you.”
Husband? Husband? She didn’t have a husband. Oh. But she did have Carl Marino, and he was pretending to be her husband. She had to keep that straight in her mind.
“I’m sorry to be a bother,” she said, finally getting control of herself. The shock of coming face to face with the man version of the boy she’d had a crush on for years had thrown her for a loop, but she was getting her balance back. She had to remember he was the enemy, just like everyone else in the Huntington family—the enemy she’d come to slay like a proverbial dragon.
And now here was one of them, saving her from the cold. A bit awkward, to say the least.
“I lost track of time.”
He nodded, his blue-eyed gaze skimming over her bare arms and legs in the skimpy sundress she’d worn. “Next time, bring a jacket,” he suggested gruffly. “It can turn cold fast.”
And she’d known that. After all, she’d spent every summer of her childhood right here on this very beach. But it had been a good fifteen years since her last visit and she’d been so excited to see her old secret places, she’d forgotten about the vagaries of the weather.
“I’m okay,” she insisted, despite her chattering teeth. “Are you going to lead me back?”
He looked her up and down and, for the first time, there was a hint of humor in his eyes.
“No,” he said. “I’m going to carry you.”
“What?” She began to back away from him on the sand. “No. You can’t carry me all the way back.”
“Why not? I’m trained to carry awkward loads, and you definitely look like a lightweight anyway.”
She stopped and glared at him. Was he making fun of her? Why the hostility when he thought he’d only just met her?
“Awkward and bird-brained at the same time?” she asked crisply. “I didn’t realize you knew me that well.”
His mouth twisted. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“No, but it’s what you said.”
His look was long-suffering. “Mrs. Marino, your husband is having a fit back at the house. He seems to think you’re likely to walk off a cliff or something, unless you’re carefully watched. So I intend to make sure you get back safely.” He made a gesture with his head. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
She looked at him, at the smooth, hard flesh she was going to have to touch in order to do what he’d suggested, and her heart began to pound like a hammer. There was a time when she’d dreamed about touching him—but that was when she was half in love with him from afar. Now, the thought was horrifying. He was the enemy. She couldn’t do it.
“No,” she said. “I’ll follow you. I’ll...I’ll hold on to...” She was going to say, your shirt, but he wasn’t wearing one, and the only alternative was the back of his low-slung board shorts. The thought of sticking her fingers down there made her gasp.
He watched her, waiting as her face registered a growing realization of the problem.
“Exactly,” he said, his voice mocking. “I’ll carry you,” he said again.
She was shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”
His patience was running thin and it showed. “Listen carefully. There is a hard current running through the deepest part of the channel, right where we have to cross. If it knocks you down, the strength of it could carry you right out to sea. Then I would have to swim out after you, and I don’t know how successful I’d be. It’s safer for all concerned if you just let me pick you up and...”
“Isn’t there some other way?”
His frown was getting fiercer. “What is your problem?”
She drew in a deep breath and told him with a glare. “You’re almost naked, you know.”
He gave her a look that said he thought she was nuts. “You’re not exactly well-covered yourself. If we’d been swimming, you wouldn’t think twice.”
“But...”
“Look, every minute we delay, it’s only getting worse. Come on.” His quick smile was sarcastic. “I’ll be gentle, I swear it.”
By now she was seriously annoyed with him. He wasn’t even trying to see this from her point of view—and he had no interest in exploring alternatives. She looked around, trying to think of some way to avoid this, and he took a step forward and grabbed her, swinging her up into his arms. It was pretty obvious he wouldn’t mind just chucking her over his shoulder, good to go, but when she shrieked he relented and straightened her so that one arm was under her knees and the other behind her back. She threw her arms around his neck to avoid being dropped, and they started off.
He was impossibly hard and exciting to touch, but even worse, his incredible warmth worked on her like a drug. She was clinging to him, trying to get closer. She closed her eyes and took it all in, trying to pretend he wasn’t the boy she used to watch with stars in her eyes.
Those stars had dimmed when the Huntingtons had fired her father, accused him of crimes and kicked her whole family out of what had long been their beloved home. Let’s face it, the Huntingtons had pretty much destroyed her family and torn apart their lives—and all over a lie. Nothing had ever been the same again and the pain and resentment still smoldered deep inside her.
But she’d never been in stronger arms. It felt good—as long as she didn’t think about who he really was.
The water was surging against him and she could feel the effort it took him to keep his footing. He almost went over at one point, splashing a spray of seawater against her legs, and she cried out, holding on more tightly, pressing her face against his neck.
“I’ve got you,” he told her gruffly. “Just a little bit more. We’re almost there.”
She peeked out. She couldn’t see a thing but the cold, clammy gray of the fog. How did he know they were almost there? She couldn’t tell. But she knew one thing—his skin against hers felt like heaven. To think she’d been resisting.
But the fog was lifting and she began to see the shore herself.
“Here we are,” he said, and she could feel the difference in the way he was walking. They’d hit dry sand. He began to lower her and she felt a pang of regret.
“Put on my jacket,” he told her as he picked it up off the sand and handed it to her. She did as he suggested. It was big and heavy, made of denim with a few studs at the pockets—and it still felt warm, as though his body heat had lasted.
She turned to look at him. His arms were raised and he was pulling a long-sleeved thermal shirt down over his head. She watched, marveling at the interplay of muscles, and then gasped as she noticed the deep, ugly scar that disfigured an area of his rib cage.
Her shocked gaze met his ice-blue eyes as the shirt came down into place and covered everything—the muscles and the scar. She blinked at him, feeling breathless.
She wanted to ask about the scar, but the look in his eyes told her not to do it. Still, she had to say something. It was only right.
“Did you do something horribly brave that saved the day?” she asked a bit too quickly.
His look was dismissive. “No. I did something horribly stupid and ended up injured, which is something you never want to let happen.”
“Oh. Of course.”
But she didn’t want him to think she was just a snotty brat. She needed to let him know she did appreciate what he’d done for her.
“Thank you,” she said at last, feeling almost shy now that they were on firm ground and about to end their rescue encounter. “I really appreciate it. I mean...”
“What I’d appreciate,” he said, his voice calm but icy, “is some answers.”
She’d been stopped in the middle of her sentence, and she was still staring at him. “Uh...answers? About what?”
“About what you’re doing here. Why you came.”
She blinked at him, a flicker of panic near her heart. Had he really caught on to her so quickly? “I...we came to see the estate, of course. It’s for sale, isn’t it?”
He nodded, waiting.
“Well, we came to see if Carl wants...I mean if we want to buy it. Isn’t that what this is all about?”
His gaze never left her eyes. “You’d think. That’s what all eight of you people came for, to spend the weekend looking over the property, evaluating it.” His eyes narrowed. “I would have thought the house itself would be the main attraction. Either that, or the patio, the waterfall area, the huge front yard. And yet you’d hardly dropped your bags in the bedroom before you were off to see the caves. And your husband was off to nose around in the old vineyard area.” He cocked an eyebrow. “What gives?”
She frowned at him. She hadn’t realized Carl had gone off on his own sightseeing mission. She had to admit, it might look odd that the two of them had been so driven by alternate goals so immediately. She ought to do her best to quell all suspicions—if she could.
“What do you mean, ‘what gives?’ Nothing. We’re just interested in everything, the house, the land, the beaches. I’d heard about the caves and...and I wanted to see them for myself.”
He didn’t look convinced. “The caves are cool, but they’re hardly the best feature on the estate.” He eyed her speculatively. “They do have a lot of historical significance,” he said. “Smugglers seem to like them, and have since the old Spanish days.” His gaze narrowed and he added acidly, “Is that what you were doing out there? Hiding something?”
She wanted to laugh out loud at such a silly suggestion, but she could see that this was no joke in his mind. “If I were, I wouldn’t tell you about it, would I?” She bit her lip, regretting her words before she’d finished uttering them.
Keep it friendly, Torie, she told herself silently. Save the anger for when you’ve got the ammunition.
She quickly added out loud, “I’m going to enjoy seeing everything. It seems to be a wonderful property.”
“Oh, it is that.” A stormy look filled his blue eyes. “And it’s worth a whole lot more than my mother is asking for it.” He gave her a faint, sarcastic smile. “But you know that, don’t you?”
A crash of thunder seemed to give an eerie emphasis to his words and large raindrops began spattering around them. Torie was shivering again.
CHAPTER TWO (#uce04502b-fed4-565b-a065-cf556c391e3e)
THUNDER rolled and the rain began in earnest. Looking up, Marc swore under his breath.
“The fog no sooner thins out than the rain comes,” he grumbled. “Come on. We’ll never make it back across the dunes. Head for the tool shed just beyond the ice plant over there.”
He pointed toward a wooden structure only a few hundred feet away and they ran for it, reaching it in moments, the threat of a downpour chasing them. Luckily the door wasn’t locked and they tumbled in, breathing hard and laughing. Marc slammed the door shut, holding back the cold, wet wind, then turned to look at her.
They were both still laughing from the run across the sand, but Torie saw the humor fade in his eyes, and she looked away quickly.
“This shouldn’t last too long,” he said. “We might as well have a seat and wait it out.”
The interior of the shed seemed clean enough, with tools piled along one side and bags of gravel and peat moss stacked along the other. They sat down on the plastic bags and listened to the rain pound on the roof. A couple of leaks appeared along the walls, but they weren’t bad. Neither of them spoke, and the rain was too loud to try to talk over anyway.
Marc’s head was turned away, looking out a small window at the rain, and Torie had time to study him, the back of his head and the angle of his neck and the width of his shoulders.
She shivered again, but not with cold. She was beginning to realize this wasn’t going to be easy. How could she ever have imagined it might be? For fifteen years, she’d hated the Huntingtons. They’d seemed like monsters in her mind. She’d ached to find a way to clear her father’s name and turn the world right again.
But now that she’d come face to face with them, things looked a bit different. If she’d succeed, she needed to be smart about it. She was going to have to stay strong. Reality had a way of cancelling out fantasy every time.
They were just people. That didn’t mean they weren’t guilty of some ugly things. But they were still proving to be only human—for now.
First there had been Marge, Marc’s mother. When she and Carl had come up the front walk and climbed the steps to the wide porch and the huge front door, her heart had been pounding so hard, she’d thought she might faint. And then the door had swung open and there was this short, redheaded woman in a simple pants suit, welcoming them to Shangri-La with a warm smile. She didn’t look much like the Cruella de Vil monster Torie had been remembering her as all these years. In fact, she looked more like a Brownie den mother. Sort of a letdown.
Marc’s older sister Shayla had shown them to their rooms. She was a little closer to the mark. She’d always been snooty and full of herself, and things hadn’t changed. But Torie had to admit, even she didn’t seem like a fiend close up.
There had been two boys in the family, Marc and his older brother Ricky. Torie had assumed, as she and Carl had first arrived, that both young men were off living their own lives somewhere by now. The surprise had been to find Marc here.
Of course, the one most to blame for what happened, Marc’s father, Tim Huntington, usually called Hunt, wasn’t here at all. He’d drowned when his sailboat capsized in the bay years before. She would never be able to confront him. There would always be a hole in her soul for that.
In her dreams, she came charging up to Shangri-La and found the evidence to clear her father, presented it to Marge and Shayla with a flourish, and had them dissolving into tears of regret and apology. She would demand they write up a complete retraction and send it to the Alegre Beacon, the local paper. The little town of Alegre would be thrown into an uproar. The mayor would name a special celebration and present Torie with a plaque commemorating the day.
And Torie would take the plaque back down to Los Angeles and present it to her mother. That was her dream.
At least, it had been for years. She’d recently discovered evidence that cast a shadow on those hopes. Was there more to all this than she’d ever known? Possibly. And that was the main reason she was here today.
The downpour was almost over. The noise on the roof had faded to a dull drumbeat. Marc turned and looked at her, his blue eyes full of skepticism.
“So tell me about Carl,” he said without preamble.
Her eyes widened. She hadn’t really expected that. “What about him?”
“How long have you and Carl been married?” he asked her.
She frowned. She hated questions like this. She really didn’t want to lie. But what could she do? Try to avoid it, she supposed. Just dance around the facts any way she could.
“Not long,” she said brightly.
“Newlyweds, huh?”
She gave him a vague smile. She couldn’t imagine Carl as a newlywed—not to anyone. He was a fairly cold, unemotional person. Business deals were all he cared about. Her accompanying him here was all part of a bargain to him. He needed to pretend to have a wife—she needed a way to get onto Shangri-La without letting the Huntingtons know who she was. They’d struck a deal.
“Any kids?”
“No. Oh no.”
“I guess not if you always ask for separate bedrooms.”
