Passion Key (A Romance & Suspense Series) (2 page)

4.

The O’Connells were the first to arrive.  Jesse was a large man with squash-shaped head and a protruding belly.  His wife, Louise, was average height, but very thin with dark red hair that was obviously not naturally red anymore.  But they seemed very friendly and ready to enjoy their time.

Justine, being new to her role, alternately worried about not being attentive enough, or she feared she was smothering them.

In the end, she got them into their suite, and they seemed genuinely pleased with the accommodations.

She went back down to the lobby.

A man was leaning against the door frame, idly looking out the main window at the ocean beyond.

Justine’s breath momentarily caught in her throat.  It was the same man from the restaurant with whom she had a somewhat unpleasant exchange of words.

“Hello?” she said.

The man looked away from the window and Justine immediately remembered the man’s eyes.  They were even more piercing with the light reflected from the water outside.  Was it her imagination, or did the man stifle another smile?

“You called about some work that needed to be done?” he said.  His voice was neutral, deep, but he wasn’t a loud talker. 

“You’re the carpenter?” she asked.  It sort of slipped out again.  Why did she speak without thinking to this man?

He seemed to shrug his shoulders.  “Carpenter seems like an awful professional sounding word.  I like to think of myself as a more of a fixer upper.”

“I see,” Justine said.

For a moment, she pondered the idea of trying to get rid of him.  She remembered his workshop, what a total mess it was and had her doubts about whether or not she wanted a man who took so little care of his own place to suddenly begin working on hers.

The man straightened up and for a moment she thought he was going to walk out.

Instead, he stepped forward, smiled, and held out his hand.

“My name is Archer Thorpe,” he said, and Justine was startled by the flash of his teeth.  They were white and even, and for a moment, she realized that he was an incredibly handsome man.  She almost laughed at herself.  Yeah, he was good looking, but she was done with men for the time being. They couldn’t be trusted and besides, she was in paradise.  She wanted nothing more than to run her little resort, and get plenty of sunshine, along with an evening margarita or two.

Justine took his offered hand.  “I’m Justine,” she said, leaving off her last name for some reason.  Her mind momentarily froze and she realized that she hadn’t come up with an excuse for getting rid of the guy fast enough.  She would just have to show him the project, but she would minimize it so that she could get rid of him fast.

“Okay, well, the problem is in here,” she said, leading him toward the bank of windows at the rear of the office.

“The problem is, these windows are in bad shape, and with how much wind we get, I need to be able to open and close them.  Right now, some of them are rusted shut, and others need handles replaced.  It looks like the frames are warped or something.  I don’t know if I should just replace them all.”

She stepped back as Archer moved to the windows, and studied them, running his hands along the window jams.  His hands were clean and not rough, in surprisingly good shape for a laborer.

“Are you from around here?” he said.

She raised an eyebrow at him.  “Not originally, no. Why?”  It seemed like an odd time for a personal question and she couldn’t help the surprised tone from creeping into her voice.

“Because most people who aren’t from here, even though they’ve heard about how corrosive the humidity can be, still underestimate its power until they’ve seen it firsthand.”  He pointed to the windows.  “You don’t need to replace these, I just have to take out some of the damaged framing and replace it.  After that, all it’s going to take is some elbow grease to replace the rusted hardware, and then get them properly lubricated and sealed.”

Now that he mentioned it, Justine did see that there seemed to be an extraordinary amount of gunky buildup on the window’s hardware.

“It’s so hot and moist down here,” she said.  “I don’t how someone couldn’t have realized that before.” She pointed at the windows.  “I’m the new owner, so I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly review every nook and cranny of the place.”

He seemed to stifle another smile and she wondered what it was about her that seemed to amuse him.

He looked up at the ceiling.

“You do have a problem upstairs, though,” he said.

Sure enough, there was a very faint line running along the edge of the ceiling.  She was again surprised that she hadn’t noticed it.

“That’s either leaking around a window upstairs, or a plumbing problem.  Is there a bathroom directly above that?”

She thought about it.  “No.”

“You’re lucky, then,” he said.  “If it’s not a plumbing problem, it could be water leaking around a window.  I’ll check that, too.”

“Okay, when can you get started?” she said.

“How about I come back tomorrow afternoon, around one o’clock?”

“Before we pick a time, you need to tell me how much this all going to cost me,” Justine said.

“With or without the Yankee tax?” he said.

She didn’t understand at first, but then she got the joke.

“Without, of course,” she said.  “And then I won’t apply the Southern Surcharge to you when you visit the resort.”

He laughed, and she was again struck by how attractive he was.

If you cleaned him up a little…

She stopped herself from continuing that thought.

That part of her was dead now.

5.

Her car was a white Porsche convertible, several years old with nearly fifty thousand miles on the odometer.  But Justine loved the way it handled, and when she punched it, the car practically leapt off the road.

With the heat of the day now past, and the faint tinges of sunset beginning to appear on the horizon, she turned south on Highway One with the top down and the radio on.  The combination of wind, good rock music and the warmth of the sun’s rays felt fantastic even at the late hour.

Justine had learned the hard way about how much sun you could actually get driving a convertible in the Florida Keys.  She had taken a two-hour car trip and never felt the heat of the sun because of the constant movement of air against her skin.  Only about an hour later, when she parked the car and went inside, did she feel just how much sun she’d gotten.  She would never forget that sunburn, all on the left side of her face and neck. 

What had the carpenter said?  It was easy to underestimate the Florida Keys.

She readily agreed.

Now, she checked her odometer to see how far from Passion Key she had traveled. When she hit the twelve-mile mark, she started looking for the private road that led back to a tiny stretch of land dotted with for sale signs.

She spotted it, turned the Porsche onto the road, and followed it to the unpaved driveway.  Another car was already parked there, a silver Ford Taurus with government plates.

Justine parked the Porsche and walked past the Ford along the dirt path toward the beach.  A stand of palm trees and palmetto bushes blocked the view to the ocean, and just beyond the small stand of vegetation there was a picnic table with two people seated next to each other.

“Nice spot,” Justine said to them.

They turned to her and Justine recognized Agent Herring and Agent Runyan.  Herring was the older of the two, a slim man with gray hair at his temples and pale skin.  He wore a dark suit and had a handkerchief out, ready to dab at his forehead.  Runyan was short, with a gymnast’s body and her brown hair was shaped by a bob haircut.  Justine was always taken aback by how beautiful one of her FBI handlers was.

“If the Bureau ever decides to sell this land, I would imagine they could make a pretty penny,” Herring said.  Justine sat on the other side of the picnic table, her back to the ocean.  For the first time, she realized that Herring actually did look a little like a fish. 

“How are you doing, Justine?” Runyan asked.  The woman had big brown eyes and Justine liked and trusted her.

“Oh, the resort needs a little tender loving care, but we all knew that,” she said.  “I’m adjusting.  I guess I’m mostly surprised about this meeting.  I thought we weren’t supposed to get together for a few months.  Let me settle in first.”

A pelican flew overhead, continued on over the water and then dove for a fish.  Agent Herring took a deep breath.

“A situation has arisen that we felt would be unfair not to share with you.  You are in no danger and your new identity is airtight.”

Justine felt dread rise inside her.

“But…” she prodded.

Agent Runyan took over.  “But our relationship is built on trust, and we want you to know that you can trust us.  Which is why we’re here.”

Justine looked back and forth between the Feds.

Finally, Herring delivered the news.

“Your ex-husband has escaped from prison.  We don’t know where he is.”

6.

Typical.

That was the first word to come to Archer Thorpe’s mind when he thought about the woman at Passion Key Resort. 

He could spot an attitude a mile away, and this Justine woman had one that could probably be seen from all the way back in Miami.

But was she the typical out-of-towner? Admittedly, his first instinct had been an overwhelming yes to that question.  In some ways, she looked a lot like plenty of woman who passed through Passion Key.  A real beauty with a knockout body.

But now, he wasn’t so sure if she fit the mold.

He was back in his shop, finishing up a table repair for Mrs. Carlson, a firecracker of a woman whose husband had died years ago, probably from trying to keep up with her.

The building had been through a number of incarnations over the years, including a cigar factory and a hotel.  When he bought it he had gutted it, and turned it into both a workshop, and a home. 

Archer double-checked to make sure his repair was invisible.  It was.  Along with a fiery personality, Mrs. Carlson had a keen eye and demanded the best.  He had yet to disappoint her, he noted with no small amount of satisfaction.

He carefully wrapped the table in a cotton sheet and placed it in the section of his workshop for completed projects.

The refrigerator held a fair amount of ice-cold beers and he selected one, popped the cap off and walked through the back door of his shop out to a small seating area that faced the open ocean.  Archer sat down in one of his Adirondack style chairs and took a long drink from the beer.  The water was unnaturally calm today, and the sun was bearing down with a frightening intensity, but the heat on his skin made Archer feel alive, something he had rarely felt when he lived in San Francisco a few years back.

That had been a different time.  And he’d been a different man.

Now, he relished the lifestyle he had put in place on Passion Key, the ramshackle approach to life that was the exact opposite of how he’d been before.  Archer had a theory.  Too many people in life are always looking to judge if they’re doing better or worse.  His theory was that most of the time, the comparison was negligible.  The key thing that he felt most people missed was simple.  Rather than trying to judge if something was better or worse, relish in the fact that it’s different.  Not better. Not worse.  Just different. Once he had chosen to approach life that way, everything had changed for him, for the better.

He took another drink of the beer. 

That woman from Passion Key Resort.

Now she was different.

He smiled.

In the café, when she couldn’t help but look at his sweat stained shirt with open disdain, it had been too funny.  He neglected to tell her that he’d actually been in the back, rebuilding the restaurant’s built-in storage cabinets and that the back door had been blocked which was why he was exiting through the restaurant.

But there was something about her face that made him keep it from her. 

And it was a beautiful face.

No doubt about that.  Passion Key saw no shortage of beautiful women, wealthy model types from Miami, young college girls down for some naughty fun on spring break, and just about everyone else who wanted to cut loose in the Keys.

But this Justine Beaudry. There was something about her.  Something haunted in her eyes that made him want to discover what was troubling her.

He drank the rest of his beer and laughed.

Look at him!  He was acting like a teenager.

So some hot woman took over the resort and asked him to do some work for her. He was not getting involved with anyone.  He relished the simple island life and it was the whole reason he’d come here, the entire point of creating a simple existence of working with his hands and keeping the rest of his body out of trouble.  Especially woman trouble.

Archer got up and went back into the workshop.  He set the empty in a crate by the side door and looked at a stack of fresh cypress planks he’d just had delivered.

They weren’t for a paid gig.

They were for something special he was going to make just for himself.

Problem was, he had no idea what that project would be.