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He’d take more if it was given. A helluva lot more. He’d take anything she wanted to offer. But he really needed to talk with her, spend enough time with her to figure out why he couldn’t get her out of his head.
Brett’s expression changed. For a second there, Hunter thought he’d scored the big one. That Brett was going to give him his way in.
And then the other man walked off to sink his putt.
Hunter sank his, too. First try.
The other two in their party congratulated him. Fist-bumped him. Said they’d buy him a beer.
That was when he realized they’d just finished the eighteenth hole. They were done. His win was official.
He didn’t want a beer.
He wanted a date.
* * *
JULIE WAS AT the storyboard easel in her sitting room on Sunday afternoon when her cell rang. Colin and Chantel were at Chantel’s little apartment in town—the place she insisted on keeping so she didn’t completely lose herself in Colin’s opulence—vegging for the afternoon, and Julie had expected to work uninterrupted.
When she saw who the caller was—Hunter Rafferty, owner of The Time of Your Life—she debated whether or not to pick up.
She didn’t want to deal with Hunter that afternoon. He was likable. Able to put everyone at ease. Make them laugh. He was great at his job. And his charm was a job. Which was why his personal attention bothered her.
But...he wouldn’t be calling unless there was a problem with the gala. Something that needed immediate attention. He never called to ask her out; he only did that in person. On the walks to a parking lot after a meeting. That kind of thing. Using her private cell number for personal reasons would be inappropriate.
So, there had to be a problem.
The gala meant the world to her. If they earned even half of what Hunter told her they could expect, the Sunshine Children’s League would be able to feed real Thanksgiving dinners to homeless and orphaned kids all over the Los Angeles valley.
She answered her phone on the fifth ring.
“Can you free yourself up for a couple of hours?” His hello, by way of that question, put her instantly on alert.
This was what she didn’t like about Hunter. For all his ability to put people at ease, he made her uncomfortable.
Julie couldn’t consider his attention harassment. Except that, in a way, she did.
Not because he was friendly with her.
But because...part of her liked it. While the rest of her knew not to trust his party face in a personal setting.
“I’m working.” She gave him her standard answer. Nice that pretty much all she did was work, of one kind or another, so the words were always true.
“Is it something you can break away from?”
“Why?”
“I’m at a festival in Santa Barbara. There’s a great act here. I just caught the tail end of their show, but they’re due to be onstage again in an hour. The show’s about forty-five minutes long. If you like them, I can get with them right afterward and see if we can book them.”
He’d told her about an entertainment cancellation when they’d had a gala meeting on Wednesday. He hadn’t mentioned, when she’d seen him then, that he was on the guest list for the wine tasting at her house on Friday. She’d seen his name. She’d already been toying with the idea of leaving Chantel to act as hostess. Hunter’s name on the guest list had made up her mind for her.
“We’ve got nine great acts lined up,” he reminded her. “Most of them are fairly short. We need a tenth if we’re going to keep the party going long enough to get the money you want...”
The gala was a black-tie affair at a dinner theater in Beverly Hills. Guests paid to be there. That price included dinner and the first three acts. But they could pay more if they were enjoying themselves and wanted the evening to continue. There’d be voting buttons at each seat. If guests wanted another act, they pushed the button. As long as there were button pushes, the gala would continue. And each push of a button served as another pledge.
She wanted ten acts.
If he’d told her about the festival to begin with, skipping the preliminary questions, she could already have been on her way...
Asking for directions, she told him she’d be there in half an hour.
And wasted five of her thirty minutes trying to decide whether she should change from the jeans and the short, waist-hugging black leather jacket she’d worn to brunch with Colin and Chantel in town. By then, considering how long it would take her to get there, she no longer had time to change.
* * *
“NICE JACKET.” HUNTER’S words had Julie cringing even before she was fully out of her BMW. She should have changed.
“My sister-in-law gave it to me,” she said. Which was why she’d had it on. The only time she’d had it on. Sassy was just not her style.
Not anymore.
Not for many years.
“She’s got good taste.”
The look in his eye, accompanied by the grin on his face and the tone of his voice—they made her feel warm.
She didn’t want to like it.
But she did. Sort of.
And that bothered her.
On a day when she’d been all set to enjoy her peace.
As they started to maneuver through the festival crowd at the edge of the beach, he raised an arm and reached toward her, as though he was going to drop that arm casually around her.
She stepped away.
And hated her life for a second.
Hunter always looked good. Great. But in jeans and a blue polo shirt, with that blond hair windblown and just a hint of stubble on his chin, he was drop-dead gorgeous.
The fact that she noticed, that she always noticed, made her nervous. Even if she didn’t have a lifetime of issues to muck her way through, Hunter Rafferty was not her type. At all. He was a charmer. The kiss of death.
Charmers’ smiles were so bright, so compelling, they hid everything beneath them. Everything inside them.
Someday, she might be healthy enough to go out with friends without a panic attack. In a perfect world she might even get healthy enough to date. But she’d never, ever be able to trust a charmer again. One of them had almost killed her.
And he’d condemned her to live in the shambles he’d left behind.
Smyth had taught her something about charmers, though. They smiled even when they were destroying you. She’d never forget his smile as he held her arms above her head...
She turned down Hunter’s offers to buy her a cup of shaved Hawaiian ice, a funnel cake and, finally, a chocolate-covered frozen banana. She kept her distance as they made their way to the stage and sat a chair down from him when they settled in to watch the show.
She gave him her approval of the six nine-year-old girls who sounded like Gladys Knight and the Pips, halfway through their show. After that, she excused herself, knowing he had to wait until the end of the act to speak with the girls’ manager, or parents, or whoever could arrange to have them in the lineup the night of the gala.
She’d tell him when he called her later that she thought the girls should be their opening act. And to thank him for finding them.
What she wasn’t going to tell him was that she’d liked the festival and wished she could have dared enjoy herself with him.
But she wouldn’t.
Because she knew why she was attracted to him. He was exactly her type—in the most dangerous way. And that meant he couldn’t be her type. He was upbeat. Energetic. Always with an idea up his sleeve. Adventurous, like she used to be.
She’d fallen head over heels in love with a man like him, a fun-loving charmer, once before.
And had the fun choked out of her.
Literally.
CHAPTER FOUR (#u1748c73e-1d17-5731-a242-703ed7b3ad61)
HUNTER DIDN’T CALL Julie Sunday night. She’d had to leave the festival, which obviously meant she’d had something else to do. Or so he chose to think.
She wasn’t a micromanager. So she didn’t need to be told immediately that he’d hired the girls for her gala.
And...he wanted to call her badly enough that he shut himself down. He wasn’t desperate. Had never had to be overeager.
And to prove that to himself, he called a woman friend of his, one he’d been dating casually on and off for years, and took her to dinner and then to a club. He enjoyed himself just fine. More importantly, she enjoyed herself.
Mandy was fun. Vivacious. She was easy to please, and pleased to be with him. Best of all, like him, she had no expectations beyond having a good time with someone she could trust. Had no interest in more than that. The only reason he’d ended the evening early—when she’d made it clear that the night could extend until morning—was that he had an 8:00 a.m. meeting, followed by a packed Monday and a busy week.
But he’d see her again soon.
He’d assured her of that. And had won a glowing smile and intimate kiss for his trouble.
Mandy was the woman he wanted to be thinking of when he woke the next morning, made his way out to the kitchen of his high-end beach condo to put on the coffee, and headed to the shower. Mandy. Not his festival companion.
Julie Fairbanks was only on his mind because he had to remember to let her know he’d signed the girls, and he hadn’t put the reminder on his phone.
That need to call her, in the middle of such a jam-packed week, was why she was the first thing on his mind when the phone rang just as he was pulling on a polo shirt. Grabbing the sports coat that matched his pants and gave the shirt the business touch it required, he reached for his phone.
Dad.
“Hey, what’s up?” he answered, slipping into expensive loafers and shoving his wallet in his back pocket before picking up his keys from the nightstand. He’d spoken with both of his parents—separately, of course—the morning before. His regular check-in. But he and his dad, who’d moved to Florida after his parents’ divorce ten years before, chatted frequently. Mostly about golf scores and such.
“I need a favor, son.”
Son. Not Buddy, the nickname his father most often used. Or Hunter. Which generally meant his father wasn’t too pleased with him.
Son. Hunter paid attention.
“Sure. What’s up?” His father was a wealthy man. He could afford to buy just about any favor he needed. And that probably meant it involved his mother. Again.
Karen Rafferty only contacted her ex-husband when she had to. Still, she had a way of pissing his father off—almost as if she was doing it on purpose, as his father sometimes thought. Hunter was more inclined to believe that after so many years of living with a man who didn’t give her what she needed, Karen’s reactions to her ex-husband were automatic. And automatically negative. She was otherwise a kind, decent woman.
As his father was the first to acknowledge.
“You remember Betty’s brother, Edward?”
Betty...John Rafferty’s wife. Hunter’s stepmother of nine years. And Edward...
“Yeah, he was at your wedding,” Hunter said. He pictured the man, about his father’s age, a primary care doctor like his dad, and boating enthusiast, as he recalled.
A widower. With a pretty companion whose name he couldn’t remember and whose relationship with Edward reminded Hunter of him and Mandy now. Enjoying each other with no strings attached.
“He needs your help, Hunter. Anything you can do... You know so many people.”
While John’s California contacts were ten years in the past and mainly in San Diego.
“Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“His daughter is—”
Standing in his kitchen, near the door that led to his garage, Hunter shook his head. “I don’t remember a daughter. Was she at the wedding?”
Granted, he’d been a bit put out by the speed with which his father had found a new wife in his new town, concerned that the woman was using him. But now that he knew Betty, a nurse in the building where John had his private practice, he approved wholeheartedly.
“No. That’s all part of the problem. He hasn’t seen her in practically a decade. Her mom died twelve years ago. Edward buried himself in work, and Cara got in with the wrong people. You know how it is on certain parts of the beach—easy to find crowds to lose yourself in.”
Hunter, with his love of a good time coupled with the cold-war atmosphere in his home, had come close to losing his whole future on the beach in San Diego. Until his father had set him straight, telling him that his love of a good time was not something to be thrown away, but to be capitalized on. It was his talent, and he needed to use it wisely.
“She met a guy who ran some surfing school shortly after her mother died. Edward was sure the school was a front for drugs, but the more he questioned, the more Cara pulled away, saying that he just didn’t want her to be happy. She ended up following the guy to California, where he started a second surfing school. They got married. Had a little girl... He hired someone to check up on her over the years, just to make certain she was okay.”
Hunter wasn’t seeing the problem. He was seeing valuable time slip away. But when his dad called, he listened. “So the business was legit, and everything worked out.”
“Edward hoped the business was legit, that she was healthy and happy. Cara hasn’t contacted him in years or responded to any of his efforts to contact her. At one point, before they left Florida, the guy, Shawn Amos, warned Edward to leave Cara alone. Said that Edward did nothing but make her unhappy. Edward was certain, even then, that Shawn was the biggest problem between him and Cara. He says Amos turned Cara against him. He tried to tell Cara, but any time Edward said anything that could be even vaguely construed as a criticism of Shawn, Cara got defensive and quit listening to him.”
He was sorry for the guy. But he didn’t see what he could do. He was a party thrower, not a trouble solver, and he had to get to work.
They had a dozen events that week, and while he had staff to handle most of the on-site logistics, he always showed up.
“What kind of trouble is she in?”
The phone call to Julie would have to wait. He didn’t want it to be rushed. Just in case he could get her to engage in more than a brief business discussion. Still standing in his kitchen, he looked out toward the beach and realized how long it had been since he’d been out there for the sheer sake of enjoying himself, enjoying the surf. He’d known some great guys who taught surfing...
“She’s missing, Hunter.”
