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She felt an uncharacteristic flutter in her chest. Her head was even dizzy. Yes, it must be the fumes from the cheap towel.
“Whoa,” Sam said in his rich, deep voice, then leaped forward to steady her elbow.
She hadn’t realized she was wavering on her feet. But the less this man touched her, the better. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your presence?” she asked, shaking his hand off her. “Do all your rescue targets receive such hands-on service?”
Now he was full-out smiling. She hated that he reacted to her this way, but it was as if he refused to be ruffled by her bad mood.
Worse, it was as if he saw straight through her offensive shield—over-the-top rudeness and all—and wasn’t intimidated in the least. He studied her as if none of what she said was real.
Nobody treated her this way. Except maybe Richard Lee, but she didn’t like Richard, and he didn’t like her. With Richard it was all business. With her high-tech, artificial-intelligence patents, she stood to make him a fortune, and at the end of the day, that was all he cared about.
Sam-the-lifeguard (yes, she would think of him like that—it was good defense for her), was back to peering into her eyes. Frankly, he looked worried for her health. Well, she was, too, but that wasn’t his business.
“I’m fine,” she insisted again, sounding unlike herself and too similar to a breathless sixteen-year-old girl, which was just irritating. She wrapped her cheap towel even more tightly around her body. If she could just put her armor back on—suit, expensive shoes, briefcase (even if it was full of meditation books)—then she would feel like herself again.
“Sorry to have to bother you,” he said to her, “but we’ve got unfinished business.” He shifted his gaze to Natalie. “I have to fill out an administrative report,” he said apologetically. “This won’t take a minute. Don’t sue me, okay?”
Sarah couldn’t very well be insulted that he was speaking to Natalie, not her, because she had told him that Natalie was her lawyer. “Leave my name out of your administrative report,” Sarah told Sam.
“Yes, please do,” Natalie agreed. “Sarah is a celebrity, and it wouldn’t do to bring that kind of attention down on her or Wallis Point.”
“I know who she is,” Sam said. “I didn’t recognize her, at first, but now that we’re at Cassandra’s cottage, I fully understand.” Both he and Natalie looked at her.
Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
“You know who I am?”
“Yes. But I didn’t know who you were when I rescued you.”
“You didn’t rescue me,” she clarified. “I rescued myself.”
“Right,” he agreed easily.
Why can’t my employees be so agreeable? she thought. Maybe he wasn’t that bad.
No. There had to be a catch.
“What do you want?” she snapped.
He gave her a sexy, lazy smile. He backed up a step so he was leaning his hip indolently against the beach buggy, the motor still idling.
She shook her head. She was practically forty. Over the hill, compared to him.
Sam tilted his head at her. “How old are you?” he asked.
She started. “Why?” Was this guy a mind-reader?
“For the report,” he said, still calm.
“Don’t put me in any of your reports!”
He shrugged. “It’ll be anonymous. No name given. Nobody will ever know that it was you.”
“Why don’t you just pretend it didn’t happen at all? Forget about it.”
“Can’t,” he said softly. “The chief of lifeguards knows about the incident. You’re lucky—it’s only because it’s early in the season that the medical team wasn’t called and ready for you by the time we brought you in—sorry, by the time you brought yourself in.” He gave her a teasing grin, showing a smile with really nice teeth. “Then you would be in the system—name and all. Police, fire and EMTs—they brook no nonsense.”
She crossed her arms. “You’re implying I create nonsense.”
“We’ve dealt with VIPs here before, Ms. Buckley. They never complained.”
She could feel her face growing red.
“You’ll be written up as female, aged whatever,” he continued. “That’s how our public reports always read. No other identifying information.”
“I don’t care what you put down,” she snapped. “Make something up.”
“Nope.” He shook his head. “Not falling into that trap. You tell me.”
“No.”
He pursed his lips. “How about twenty-one? You good with that?”
“Don’t be an ass.”
He grinned, showing a dimple this time. “You talk just like my middle schoolers. The ones with bad manners, anyway.”
“Excuse me?”
“He teaches middle school earth science,” Natalie chimed in. “In the local school system.”
“Ah. Very funny,” Sarah replied to Sam-the-lifeguard who was also a science teacher.
Obviously, he’d wanted her to know that. Wanted her to know he was serious of mind as well as body.
She licked her lips, trying desperately not to look at that body. Toned, sun-kissed skin. Welcoming chest. Really, really hot abs...
Stop. Just tell him you’re thirty-five. Not too much of a lie. Or go lower, thirty-two. It was a nice, round age for a woman. Not as preposterous as saying thirty, which was about the age that he looked.
He gave her a kind smile. “My daughter will be happy to know I’ve met you already. She idolizes you ever since Cassandra showed her the article in Business Roundup.”
Sarah coughed in surprise. She could feel her eyes bugging out, a blatant show. When she was younger, she’d practiced her “business” face in the mirror. An old mentor had suggested it as a necessity. He’d also suggested that she looked too vulnerable, which she’d been trying to correct, or at least to cover up, ever since.
This was a major fail.
“You think I’m too young to have a daughter, don’t you?” Sam winked. “Well, I had her when I was twelve.”
She couldn’t hold back a bark of laughter.
And yet, he wore no wedding ring. Not even a white tan line to indicate that he’d taken it off.
Not all men wore wedding rings.
“I’m not married,” he said, reading her mind again.
Natalie stood by silently. Sarah could swear she was hiding a smile.
It hit her all of a sudden. They were handling her. The way she usually sought to handle others.
The name of the game is power, her old mentor had taught her. Others will try to top you—don’t let them. It’s a sign of weakness and the worst you can do is to show weakness.
“Thirty-nine.” Sarah directed the information to Sam-the-lifeguard. “Put that number in your report.” It was the truth. She had almost two weeks until her fortieth birthday.
Deliberately looking through him rather than at him, she then turned to Natalie. Enough of this, she thought. “Where is Cassandra?” She crumpled the envelope the lawyer had handed her and dropped it on the deck. She didn’t want to read another one of her aunt’s placating notes. She wanted the truth, and she was through with the flaky games. “Tell me what’s going on. Stop enabling her.”
* * *
SAM COULDN’T HELP IT. He was fascinated, both intellectually and physically, by this emotionally fearless, over-the-top woman. Sarah Buckley wasn’t like anyone else he knew. She seemed to have this armor about her, clutching at her beach towel as if it was a shield, and her words to him were like verbal jousts. He’d been having fun talking to her, actually.
And his daughter was enamored of her, too. That made it difficult for him. He had to keep his hands off. And yet, he couldn’t walk away, either.
Good thing he had Cassandra as a buffer.
He turned to Natalie, feeling pretty confident as to where Cassandra was. She was with Lucy at the town library. Sarah was just going to have to chill out and wait for the two to return home. Yes, Cassandra could have left the house keys with him, but he wasn’t fixed to a lifeguard stand this year. He was more of a floating supervisor and therefore more difficult to find than he’d been in the past.
Natalie blinked nervously, shifting her weight from side to side. Sam could see how Sarah would do that to her. Natalie had been in some of his high school classes. She’d been a shy, bookish girl back then. She wasn’t like that anymore—she was a lawyer who argued cases in court and won all the time—but Sarah was an overpowering person, to put it mildly.
“Actually,” Natalie said to Sarah, “Cassandra left you the letter because she wanted to explain in her own words where she was. You really should read it.” Natalie knelt and picked it up.
A line formed in Sarah’s forehead. “She’s not here, is she?” Sarah asked flatly.
“Well, I’m sorry, no,” Natalie replied.
Sarah’s face turned red and blotchy. “I’ll kill her,” she said through clenched lips.
“It’s okay.” Sam reached out and touched her arm. “She’s with my kid. At the town library. She’s been bringing her there for the past four days, since Monday.”
Sarah stared at him. “You entrusted your child to her?”
He sent Natalie a help me out, here, look.
But Natalie appeared even more alarmed than Sarah had. She put her hand over her mouth. Blood drained from her face.
“What is it?” he asked Natalie. “Why are you upset?”
“Because my receptionist was given to understand that Cassandra had an emergency and was on her way to the airport to fly out of the country—which she never does—so I assumed it was a particularly bad emergency.” Natalie hastily smoothed the balled-up envelope that Sarah had crumpled and dropped.
But Sam felt so sick, so panicked, that he grabbed it from Natalie’s hand and ripped open the envelope himself. As quickly as he could, he pulled out and smoothed the two pieces of thick blue stationery.
Thursday morning, Cassandra had written on the heading in bold but shaky handwriting. The next line read, Dear Sarah, and that wasn’t for him so he stopped reading and lifted his head.
“So, she’s only been gone for a few hours?” he asked Natalie.
“It appears that way. She came to my office just before noon. She said she wanted to speak to me, but since I wasn’t there, she left the letter and key with my receptionist and said she was on her way to the airport. There was a car waiting outside for her. She left a number at her destination for me to call tonight. That’s all that I know.”
“Where did she leave Lucy? My daughter?”
Natalie looked at him helplessly. “I don’t know. What does her note say?”
But as Natalie spoke, Sarah grabbed the letter from him. He struggled to align himself so he could read beside her, but all they ended up doing was bumping heads.
Sarah glanced at each page for about two seconds. “There’s not a word here about a Lucy.” Sarah glared at him. “Just about her damn cats. And you. Evidently, I’m supposed to go and see you.”
“I need to find my daughter!” Adrenaline coursing through his veins, he turned and jumped off the short deck and onto the sand, sprinting toward his house, hoping Lucy was there.
“Wait, Sam! I think I know where your daughter is!” Sarah called, waving the pages as she spoke. “There is a mention of a Lucy!”
He turned, still running backward. “Where?” he shouted back.
“The library. Cassandra says she left Lucy at the library!”
His heart thumped wildly, but he gave Sarah a short wave of thanks as he changed course toward the street where he’d parked his truck.
He could be at the library in five minutes. Ten if he hit the two traffic lights on the way. If Lucy wasn’t there anymore...
No. He couldn’t think about that.
Inside his truck, he grabbed his keys from under the front seat then backed out of his parking space as fast as he could.
Please, let Lucy be okay.
He shifted into Drive and stepped on the accelerator. He was halfway down the boulevard when he realized he was driving in bare feet and wearing only his orange lifeguard shorts and the whistle around his neck. Crap.
* * *
AFTER SAM LEFT, everything seemed emptier. Sarah stood with Cassandra’s letter clutched in one fist, the house key in the other, both arms hanging limply at her sides.
She’d skimmed the whole letter, once. There were excuses, explanations—and as far as Sarah was concerned—rationalizations for why she’d left Sarah again.
Her Italian man in Naples. Sarah knew all about that. She’d heard it before, months after Cassandra had chosen to skip her parents’ funeral. And again when Cassandra had finally dropped into her life once more—as if her excuses were supposed to make up for another desertion.
How foolish had she been to think anything had changed with her aunt?
“I’m sorry,” Natalie murmured. “If I’d been at the office, and I’d known what confusion Cassandra was leaving behind, then I would have attempted to sort it through. When I came out here to see you this afternoon, I assumed she’d fully thought out what she was doing.”
“Oh, she’s thought it out, all right,” Sarah said bitterly. “Trust me.”
“But it’s irresponsible to leave a child unattended!”
