Shadow's Lady (A Pajaro Bay Cozy Mystery + Sweet Romance)

Shadow's Lady

(A Pajaro Bay Cozy Mystery + Sweet Romance)

by

Barbara Cool Lee

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

John Donne,
Meditation #17
from
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
(1623)

Winner of the Romance Writers of America®'s Golden Heart® Award for Romantic Suspense.

He was supposed to seduce her, not get rescued by her. So how did Matt DiPietro find himself lying in a brass bed being fed chicken soup by a sheltered girl with innocent blue eyes and a pretty good right hook? He had to find a way to get back in control of the situation before both of them ended up as shark bait....

Welcome to Pajaro Bay, where mystery and romance mingle on the California coast. Readers praise the series for its "sweetness," its "excellent characterization," and say the books are "adorable, lively and like a warm hug."

Shadow's Lady (A Pajaro Bay Cozy Mystery + Sweet Romance)
© copyright 2014 Barbara Cool Lee

Excerpt from
Dashing Through the Surf
© copyright 2014 Barbara Cool Lee

All rights reserved. Except for the use of brief quotations in a review, the reproduction or use of this work in whole or in part in any form whatsoever is forbidden without the express permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Link to Table of Contents.

As always, for Mom, my co-writer. :-)

He was the most gorgeous man she had ever seen, but he was standing between her and the chocolate cookies.

"Excuse me," Lori squeaked.

From six-foot-something above the ground, nearly brushing against the
Happy New Year
signs dangling from the ceiling of Santos' Market, he looked down at her.

"Huh?" said her Adonis.

His eyes were a deep brown, and his skin, even under the fluorescent lights, reflected a golden-suntanned olive tone that spoke of warm Mediterranean nights.

She was beginning to feel a bit warm herself.

The man wore black jeans and a gray fisherman's sweater—both just tight enough to hint at an impressive set of muscles beneath. His long, wavy dark hair was tied back in a ponytail that (since this was modern-day California and not some faraway Italian villa) should have made him look like a fashion victim, but instead set her mind racing toward images of rakish pirates and fair damsels in distress. She wondered if he had a boat. Everyone in Pajaro Bay seemed to have a boat.

Apparently unaware of the hypnotizing effect he had on the opposite sex, her Adonis was still looking quizzically at her.

"You're standing in front of the cookies," she managed to say.

"Oh," he responded.

She had almost convinced herself to ignore him because he was obviously just a monosyllabic jock when he smiled, and she was forced to clutch her shopping cart tighter to keep from reacting.
Wow
. That smile was downright lethal.

He stepped away from the cookies. The aisles in the little general store were narrow, and he had to turn his back to her to get past the shopping cart. He looked good that way, too.

She pulled the shopping cart closer and began loading it up. Chocolate-covered graham crackers, chocolate-filled marshmallow squares, chocolate chip, chocolate oatmeal—

"I know we're in for a string of bad weather, but I don't think we're expecting any food shortages," he said.

"What?"

He pointed to her cart, piled high.

"I won't be able to get back to the store very often in the next few weeks," she explained. "I'm staying over at Pajaro Light Station."

Something changed in him. Not his expression—he was still smiling—but something she couldn't pin down. He appeared exactly the same, but she knew he was looking at her differently. She brushed it aside. One of her imaginings, Mom would say. Her crazy hunches about people.

"Really?" he asked casually. "Isn't the lighthouse automated now?"

"I'm not running it. I'm doing some photography for the tourist brochures."

He just looked at her, until she stammered out: "I—I was hired by the historical society to do the work before the spring tourist season begins." Why was she explaining to this man? It was none of his business.

She watched him count the cookie packages.

"How many of you are staying there?"

"Only me," she said, and then wished she hadn't told a stray pirate she was living by herself on an island miles from shore. That was her naïveté showing again. She was alone in the big, bad world now. She needed to be more aware of her surroundings now that she had no one else to fall back on for help.

Oh, well. Half the village knew her life story already. If he was interested, he could learn everything about her just by tapping into Pajaro Bay's infamous grapevine.

But he wasn't likely to do that. The guy either didn't notice what she'd said, or, more likely, he didn't care. Because he just shrugged his shoulders. "Have fun," was his parting comment, and then he headed off down the aisle.

She watched him go.

"Did you find everything you were looking for, Ms. York?"

She turned to see the clerk staring at her.

"Who was that guy?"

The clerk looked at her blankly. "What guy?"

She glanced back down the aisle. Her pirate was gone. Probably had to go raid a cargo ship or something.

"Yes," she said. "I have everything I need."

January 12th, 5:36 a.m.

1.7 nautical miles NE of Pajaro Light Station, Central California Coast

Left arm, right arm, turn head, breathe.

Matt DiPietro ignored the fact that he could no longer feel his left leg, that it dragged uselessly behind him while his other leg did its best to propel his body through the sea.

Left arm, right arm, turn head, breathe.

He ignored the fact that the waters of Pajaro Bay were their usual numbing 52 degrees, the same temperature as the pelting rain that threatened to drown him every time he lifted his head above the waterline for a breath of air.

Left arm, right arm, turn head, breathe.

And most of all he ignored the fact that the flash from the lighthouse on Pajaro Isle had gotten farther away in the time he'd been swimming toward it, because if he thought about that too much he might start listening to the little voice warning him that the tide was carrying him out into the Pacific Ocean, where his body wouldn't touch land until it hit Hawaii.

There was no point going to Hawaii now, he thought idly. He'd already seen Waikiki Beach in January. It had been the senior trip at Pajaro High, after they'd won the big game. They'd partied all night at the luau, and the guys had taken turns slapping him on the back and saying 'way to go, dude,' and the cheerleaders had fought with each other to ask him to dance, and he'd wandered off down the beach alone in the darkness, feeling vaguely unhappy, but not knowing quite what to do about it.

An odd thing to think about now, fourteen years later, while vainly swimming for his life through the unforgiving Pacific. Maybe not so odd, though. It was that same vague restlessness that always drove him out in the pre-dawn hours to kayak until his arms ached and he'd drowned his aloneness in sweat.

He'd allowed himself to lose track of his surroundings out here, focusing on the rowing and the sheen of the water as the last of the moonlight was obscured by the approaching storm. He had been off his guard in the wrong place at the wrong time, so now his life would end with his body drifting off to Hawaii at the ripe old age of 32.

Not likely. He'd be passing over the Pajaro Trench before he even got out of the bay. And in the trench there would be some great white shark lurking, ready to rise out of the fathomless deep to polish its teeth on his sorry hide.

Something brushed against Matt's right leg.

Like
this
great white. He fought down the energy-draining panic that surged through him, and forced himself to keep swimming straight toward the lighthouse.

Left arm, right arm, turn head, breathe. Same rhythm, only a little faster now as the adrenaline warmed him like a swallow of double-caf espresso.

A shark had not bumped against his leg. It was a piece of driftwood. Or it was a tendril of kelp. Or it was a fat halibut heading out to deeper sea before it could get hauled up on someone's line and end up on a slab of ice back at the wharf.

It was not a shark. And his numb left leg was not leaving a bloody wake behind him, like a neon sign guiding every ocean predator to where his battered body flailed uselessly toward that blinking light on the horizon.

Matt decided this would be a good time to pray.

•••

'Put down that wireless, Mrs. Aiden,' the grizzled pirate snarled. 'You'll not be talkin' to nobody tonight, if ye know what's good for ye.'

"This is getting ridiculous," Lori said. She closed the cover on local author Alexander O'Keeffe's book,
True Tales From Pajaro Bay
, leaving the fate of the lady lighthouse keeper hanging for the moment.

She had to snap out of this mood. No matter what the author wrote, every pirate in the story had a ponytail and a devastating grin. It didn't matter if the text called him grizzled. It didn't matter if it said he was a filthy cutthroat. All pirates were looking disturbingly like a guy she'd seen only once, being all gorgeous and muscular and dumb while she tripped over her own feet and stared at him.

The man wasn't worth all this mental energy. He had been one of those perfectly tanned beach bums who flocked to the coastal village to surf and sail and hang around Santos' General Store smiling disarming smiles at all the female tourists. She shouldn't even be thinking about him—much less putting his face on every pirate in the story.

Transference. That's what it was. Becoming obsessed with something irrelevant to avoid thinking about what was really bothering her. She should have another cup of tea and forget about him.

She paused to listen to the roar outside, where a wind whistled through the gnarled pines and the storm seemed to echo each of the foghorn's numbing blasts with a thunder crack of its own. Inside, where she sat in the kitchen, the old keeper's cottage creaked around her, but it stood firm against the storm, and in her rocking chair in the corner she basked in the warmth of the Aga.

"I suppose it'd be too much bother to let me make a cup of tea?" she asked the Aga stove. The antique cast iron range sat in the half-remodeled kitchen like a glossy red sports car parked in a condemned garage, gentle warmth radiating from every part of its gleaming, crimson-enameled body. It looked for all the world like the wonderful stove Aunt Zee had claimed it to be, and not the demonic beast that had ruined just about every meal Lori had tried her hand at since she'd gotten to the island.

The very large, very fluffy, and very gray cat curled up on top of the stove opened one green eye to watch her.

"Sleeping with the enemy again, Ophelia?"

Lori stood up and the cat glared balefully at her. Lori had to grit her teeth before she reached out to gently push Ophelia off the stovetop. The cat just yawned at her and didn't move.

Animals. They were so... unpredictable. She tried talking to the cat as if it were sensible: "Sorry, Ophie. You have to take cover for a while. Aga and I are about to do battle again, and I don't want you caught in the crossfire."

Lori finally wrapped her hands around the fat beast's middle and picked her up, then quickly set her down on the floor as gently as possible.

She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. How did people deal with these furry, fussy, stubborn creatures? Not for the first time, she wished she'd turned down Aunt Zee's offer to let Ophelia come along "to keep her company."

And not for the first time, she wondered what on earth she was even doing out here.

Correction. She knew exactly what she was doing out here—proving a point.

The whole thing had blown up over Christmas dinner. Everybody in the family had known that she'd planned to be a nature photographer. That in itself had been a compromise from her original plan to become an art teacher. So a photographer she would be, and somehow as long as it stayed a future plan, no one had a problem with it.

She got good grades in her photography classes and her parents and fiancé went on about her talent, but the moment she talked about actually going somewhere, doing something outside of the home studio her parents built for her, the roof blew off. She was sick of creating insipid still life photos of a single white rose in a vase. Why couldn't anyone understand that? She wanted to see the real world, not the clean, edited and safe little cocoon her family had created for her.

"But what if you fall?" asked Mom, with that little pinched look around her mouth that always signaled disapproval. "What if you get hurt somewhere far away from us?"

She'd been talking about photographing the birds in Lincoln Park, not backpacking through Patagonia, but it didn't matter. She'd dared to suggest something other than the perfect plan they'd made for her. She'd violated the unspoken rules that defined her life: Lori must never to do anything alone. Lori must never push herself too much. Lori must never take a risk. As if she were some fragile hothouse orchid.

But of course her great-aunt had saved the day.

Aunt Zee had been breaking rules ever since she had swept into Hollywood back in the days when movie stars were Movie Stars. She was the one and only Zelda Potter—screen legend, platinum blonde femme fatale of the silver screen, and the only one who understood Lori.

"And why shouldn't you be a nature photographer?" she'd asked in that inimitable gravelly voice. "If that's what you want to do, go for it. And what's wrong with backpacking through Patagonia? The steppes are gorgeous at this time of year." She had set down her fork and glared at the family across the Christmas dinner table.

And then she'd grinned that mischievous little smile that had brought down Cary Grant or Bob Mitchum or whoever-it-was in that last film noir of hers, and added, "but maybe you'd like to photograph the wildlife at the Pajaro Bay Lighthouse first?"

Into the sea of hysteria and confusion that had followed that statement, Lori had overheard her whisper to Mom, "if you say no, you're going to lose her, Teresa." And somehow that had settled it.

So now just weeks later Lori stood in the kitchen of a half-restored lighthouse, halfway across the continent from the protection of her family, with the wind whistling outside and Aunt Zee's impossible gray Persian cat glaring at her.

Ophelia reached out a paw to snag one of Lori's fuzzy slippers. Lori pulled her foot away from the cat's grasp, so Ophie just jumped up on the rocking chair and sat down on the book.

"Good," Lori said to her. "Keep me away from that book. I don't have to keep reading to know how it'll turn out. The place is overrun with cutthroats looking for the missing kegs of rum. The lady lighthouse keeper is gonna get killed by the gorgeous dumb-jock pirate."

Lori padded over to the sink to wash out her teacup. She turned on the water, squirted some dish soap in the cup, then reached to take off her diamond ring before dipping her hands in the suds.

No ring. For at least a half-second she was shocked, then recovered. She didn't wear an engagement ring anymore.

"You chose this," she reminded herself, and opened the cupboard to find the tin of tea.

•••

Matt was having a hard time remembering how to swim. He had tried a course parallel to the lighthouse for a while, hoping he could get past the undertow that had been pushing him away from shore. But now that he'd turned back toward the island, for some reason his arms seemed to keep getting tangled up in themselves, and his legs were no help at all—the right leg was shaking with fatigue, and the left one just hung back there like a useless lump.

But at least no great white had taken a bite out of him yet. "Doesn't matter," he told himself through chattering teeth. "You'll die of hypothermia long before the sharks get to you."

It was too cold to swim for hours in the bay. The double layers of wetsuit and diveskin he wore weren't enough to insulate him from the frigid sea for such a long time, and his thoughts were getting fuzzier by the minute. A nap would help.

With a cough and a sputter as his head dipped below the waterline, he realized napping wasn't such a smart idea. He had to keep moving, but between the storm and the sea there was no relief from the warmth-stealing water. He felt like he was caught between two armies—the rain slammed down mercilessly on the ocean surface, and the waves, whipped by the wind, rose up to meet the storm, and neither would let him through without a fight. He was getting really sick of water.

Ahead, the beam from the lighthouse clicked steadily on.

It was still too far away.

But it was closer.

Matt snapped to alertness.

It
was
closer. The pale sandstone cliffs of Pajaro Isle glistened ahead.

He was wide awake now. Yes, he could see the tiny island, and not just the light atop it. What time was it? It must be getting close to dawn, because he could just make out the cypress trees clinging to the edge of the cliff, and he could actually distinguish the glowing oval of the signal light itself as it flashed on and off through the raindrops.

And beneath the towering light stood a small squarish shape that must be the keeper's cottage.

Dawn. If the island was visible, it meant he was, too. Matt looked back out to sea, wondering if his kayak—or anything else—was following along in the tide behind him. He let his body bob in the waves, treading water as he scanned the sea, looking for any sign that he wasn't alone.

He couldn't see much over the cresting waves. With a bit of luck the overturned kayak had been caught in the current and was drifting miles away by now.

He had stopped swimming. Not good. Enough of this wasted energy. Time to move on.

Once again he began the slow, painful swim toward the beckoning light.

The keeper's cottage. Square windows glowed golden through the rain. Of course. The place was no longer empty. That girl from the grocery store was staying there. His fuzzy brain tried to remember what he'd learned about her. Everything blurred in his tired mind, but he remembered her eyes. Vivid blue. Alert. Suspicious of him. Shockingly beautiful. When he'd stumbled across her in the cookie aisle, she was loading up on chocolate chips like she was outfitting an expedition. She'd batted those eyelashes at him and told him she'd been hired by the historical society to come out to the island and take pictures.

She must be in the cottage now. And she'd have blankets, and a radio to call for help. And coffee. His mouth watered at the thought of a gulp of steaming hot coffee warming him down to his toes.

He doubted there'd be a welcome mat out for the likes of him, but that didn't really matter. One way or another, he was going to take what he needed, and the lady lighthouse keeper had better not get in his way.

•••

And on stormy nights, locals say the lady's dog still roams the cliffs of the lighthouse island, searching endlessly for his murdered mistress.

Outside, a dog howled.

Lori stared at the book in her lap. "...the lady's dog still roams the cliffs...," she whispered.

She looked around the warm kitchen, and across to the tiny sitting room where Ophelia sat on the floor by the bookshelves, carefully washing herself. The cat hadn't heard anything.