“If Nicole was there, your people, who are on the lookout for her, would know and you wouldn’t be here.”
“The Santa Raquel police are looking for her all over the city.”
“But they don’t have the time or the resources that I have. We’re going to find her.”
Michael headed up a path that would lead them to the beach.
He was there to find his prey.
Not to enjoy a walk with a beautiful woman on the beach.
He would not enjoy it.
Or so he told himself.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IF SHE WASN’T so worried about Nicole and in the company of a bounty hunter she didn’t want to trust, Sara would have enjoyed a little time on the beach that afternoon. Santa Raquel was known for gorgeous summer days, days where the blue skies met deeper blue ocean waves.
A middle-aged couple, maybe in their early fifties, were walking the beach hand in hand. They nodded at Sara and Michael and she saw the woman smile. They thought she and Michael were a couple. The night before they could have become one. If he hadn’t stopped the kiss to tell her he was a liar.
And then laid the news on her about his daughter.
Had he been in touch with the little girl?
Who watched her when her daddy was working? The girl’s mother? Did his ex have visitation rights?
She didn’t want to know. Couldn’t get involved.
Picturing Michael as a father put an end to any idea that they could go out for dinner and maybe find that they had things in common. Put an end to any idea that this strong attraction they shared meant there was supposed to be something more between them.
It also made him that much more attractive to her. What woman’s heart wouldn’t soften at the thought of a big, strong man tenderly combing out tangles, or watching his little girl brush her teeth?
A single father, with a little girl who needed mothering...
No. Her heart shut down. She’d fallen for that one once. She couldn’t afford to do it a second time.
Sara assessed everybody on the beach, her gaze quickly passing over those who were obviously not Nicole. Every rock that could be hidden behind, every bathroom, beach umbrella and cove met with the same inspection.
The day was passing into late afternoon. Soon it would be evening and then night. She had no idea where she’d rest. Or when.
Neither she nor Michael spoke.
She needed to leave him to his thoughts to increase their chances of finding Nicole. But the woman had been missing almost twenty-four hours. And she could pretty much assume at this point that Trevor knew she was on the loose.
He might even know what city she was in.
Question was, would Michael find her before Trevor would?
Or was Michael working for Trevor while the man stayed at home with his infant son?
“Can you please tell me what you’re thinking?” she finally asked her companion.
“What I’m thinking?”
“About Nicole. What are your plans?”
“To keep looking until I find her.”
She worked best with something a little more concrete. And this was his call. Sara didn’t say anything more.
“I’m sorry.”
The apology had her looking at him instead of the waves. “The truth is I’m still figuring that out. That’s how I work. On instinct. I’m a little off my game here, sharing the job.”
“It’s—”
“And don’t tell me it’s okay,” he continued. “The truth is, while my mind is on the job, I’m aware of the fact that my instincts may not be as in tune as they need to be. I’m as attracted to you this afternoon as I was when I first saw you at the pool yesterday afternoon.” He shook his head. “Hard to believe that was only one day ago.”
“Time is only a matter of measurement.” Sara had said the first thing that came to her brain, because her thoughts were occupied with the first statement he’d made—the one about still being attracted to her.
Her entire body heard that remark. “And it’s not as if we just met for an hour or two,” she added. “We’ve been together nonstop for so many hours that if we’d been dating, we’d have had at least four dates by now.”
She wanted to snatch the words back the second she’d said them. She’d been attempting to reassure him, to ease his discomfort with himself. Because that was what she did.
But the words sounded like an invitation. And they most certainly weren’t.
Michael looked at her. She could feel the strength of his gaze. And ignored the compulsion to look back.
He must have gotten the message because he said, “I will give your question the respectful answer it—and you—deserve. My guess is that if Nicole is awake at the moment, she’ll be here at the beach. It’s someplace she can blend in, be ignored and unnoticed, even if she doesn’t move for hours. Most likely she’s asleep.”
“And a good place to sleep unnoticed when you don’t want to spend money on a motel room or risk being identified by a motel clerk, is on the beach on a sunny Sunday summer afternoon...” She was getting the hang of this.
“Right.”
“I haven’t been paying particular attention to sleepers.”
“I have been. Every single one of them.” He listed at least eight or nine. In detail.
“So what next?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. I can run you home if you’d like to get a good night’s rest. I can pick you up again in the morning.”
“Michael, we—”
He held up his hand, half turning toward her as sand kicked up beneath his tennis shoe. “Let me finish. I was going to say that I know you probably don’t want to do that, and I completely understand.” He put slight emphasis on the word, and she knew he’d done so because of their earlier conversation about her giving understanding and wanting it in return.
“But I have to offer because the night ahead isn’t going to be comfortable,” he said.
“I didn’t expect it would be. You had me bring a blanket for sleeping in the car.”
“Do you have to work tomorrow?”
“Someone has arranged for another counselor to take my appointments until I get back. But depending on how long this takes, I might have to slip back into town a time or two.” She thought of two of her newest clients—ones that had come in earlier in the week, before Nicole had arrived. Sometimes getting a broken woman to trust one person was a feat—asking them to talk to someone new during the most critical crisis of their lives could be too much to ask.
“Okay, so my plan is this. We park someplace inconspicuous, close to the pier that Simon told us about, the one he told Nicole to seek out. If she’s just hanging out, waiting for your people to work their magic, the only place she can hope to do that anonymously is with street people.”
“We’re going to spend the night in the car waiting for her to show herself?”
“That’s the plan. Unless something else happens, or something else occurs to me, in which case we’ll change the plan.”
In a car with Michael for a whole night. The idea didn’t sound as distasteful as it should have.
But she wasn’t going to fall for him. Because of his daughter. All she had to do was think of Bessie, of how much she missed her little girl, and she shut down.
“Do you know how Nicole found you to begin with?”
He’d spoken openly about his assumption that she worked at a women’s shelter. She’d neither confirmed nor denied his statements.
“Yes.”
“Are you what brought her to Santa Raquel, or did she find you once she got here?”
“She was referred to my place of business.” By a homeless meth addict who’d supposedly known someone who’d been a re
sident at the Lemonade Stand, but she definitely wasn’t going to tell him that part. The information would only solidify his belief that Nicole was an addict, too.
She and Michael walked in silence again. She studied every single person lying down, making certain it wasn’t Nicole.
“Can you tell me if she knows anyone else in Santa Raquel?”
“No.”
“No, you don’t know or no, you can’t say?”
“No, she doesn’t.” Even she could see why that answer could be critical to their search.
They’d covered about a mile of beach interspersed with occasional rock edifices they had to get around. There were another three or four miles to go before cliffs entirely took over the coastline for a while.
“Tell me about your ex-husband.”
The question was so random, so out of nowhere, that Sara stumbled. She righted herself immediately, not that Michael was reaching out to help her. They seemed to have established a nonverbal but very clear no-touch rule after that accidental brush in the ladies’ room back in Mariposa.
“Why?”
Not even Lila knew about her years with Jason. What was the point?
“Because I’m curious, and being attached to your side makes the curiosity grow to unrealistic proportions to the point that it’s getting in the way of my ability to focus on Nicole and get this job done as efficiently as possible.”
She processed his answer and said, “Jason thought I was a master manipulator. Or at least he accused me of being one.”
“Were you?”
She looked over at him. “What do you think?” He had a doctorate degree in psychology. Let him figure it out.
“I don’t see it.”
“He used to get overly frustrated with my habit of always putting myself in other people’s shoes, trying to understand rather than judge. He thought I was working him. That I could sense how to get to him because I understood so much, and then used that against him to get what I wanted.”
“Did you get what you wanted?”
“Unequivocally not.”
“So I guess you weren’t manipulating him.”
She stumbled again. Walked on. And welcomed the cool ocean breeze on her hot skin. So simple. How could she have missed that key point?
Because she was too close to it to see it?
“My sisters say I’m a master manipulator,” Michael said.
“Are you?”
“You tell me.”
She saw herself in the hot tub the night before. Ready to strip off her clothes and have sex with a man she’d just met that afternoon.
She’d never had sex before the fifth date before.
Had he manipulated her reaction? He’d been admittedly out to woo her into telling him what he wanted to know.
And she remembered the conversation she’d had with herself before she’d met him that day. The one when she’d counted back and realized she’d been without a man for more than a year. Some would say that karma had brought Michael her way that afternoon. That her strong reaction to him had been of her own making.
“I think manipulation is all a matter of motivation. If you mean to make someone do something they don’t want to do, or wouldn’t ordinarily do, just to serve yourself, then you’re being manipulative. If people are influenced to do good because of you, or if you can help them find themselves, help them discover what they really want, then thank God for you. So do your sisters like you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do they do everything you tell them to do?”
“Hardly.”
“I guess you have your answer.”
They walked a few yards in silence and then, without warning, Michael was gone. He’d taken off so quickly she hardly knew he was gone and had to stop walking long enough to figure out what direction he’d taken.
He was several yards up the beach, heading toward the road, when she started after him. She bumped into his back, knocking the wind out of herself, when he stopped running as abruptly as he’d started.
People were looking at them.
“Walk,” he said. “It wasn’t her.”
“You thought you saw her?”
“Yeah. I almost dive tackled a kid with a ponytail.”
Sara saw the guy. And could almost see how Michael could’ve mistaken him for Nicole. If she’d strapped her chest with an Ace bandage and bought some old boys’ clothes and a baseball cap.
But if Michael hadn’t chased the guy, she’d never, for one second, have noticed the nondescript male on the beach. Which was why she was the counselor and he was the bounty hunter.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MICHAEL SPRANG FOR hot dogs on the beach. Thinking of Mari. He missed her. One hell of a lot. He’d texted her when he’d parted ways with Sara to use the restroom. Or rather, he’d texted Ashleigh and Peanut to give her messages and they’d both texted him back, telling him to stop searching long enough to eat a decent meal.
They were always on his back to eat.
Because when he was on the hunt, he didn’t. He made up for it, though, when he got home.
The way he looked at it, he was doing his sisters a favor. They had a need to mother him and he made it easy for them.
“So you never did tell me the reason for your divorce.”
Her husband accusing her of a manipulation she wasn’t guilty of had obviously been a cover-up for something the guy hadn’t wanted her to know. Michael had figured that out right away. He could also guess what the jerk had been covering up. He just didn’t know what Sara’s take on it all was.
And he kept wondering.
So much so that she really was getting in the way of his job. He needed her here. But he had to find a way to quit obsessing about her.
To satisfy his curiosity and be done with it.
“Jason had a thing for strippers. I wasn’t okay with it.”
Michael took his eyes off the beach for a moment and turned to her. After a very quick look at her face, he returned his attention to the crowd.
He’d heard her right. He just couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Your husband preferred a stripper over you?”
“Not one. Make that plural.” Her voice was dry. Accepting.
“He liked strip clubs. Went to them. And you disapproved.”
“No, he liked strippers. As in, to date, sleep with and overall have as his companions.”
“In the multiple.”
“Well, one at a time, but never the same one for any length of time.”
“Whoa, there’s a man with some serious sexual issues.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“How long were you married before you found out?”
“We weren’t.”
The tide was moving in. Michael stepped closer to Sara to avoid getting his shoes wet.
“You said you were divorced.”
“We weren’t married yet when I learned he had a thing for strippers. He’d been dating one when I met him.”
“And he dumped her for you?”
“Yep.”
“And you thought you could cure him.”
“Something like that.”
It was classic.
And he’d have thought the same thing.
“How long were you married before he cheated?”
“Before he cheated or before I knew he had?”
“Either.”
“A month before he did. A year before I knew.”
“You forgave him the first time, right?”
“Yep.”
“How long were you married?”
“Two years.”
“How many other women did you know about?”
&nbs
p; “Three. I later found out there were at least five.”
Hot anger—to a degree he hadn’t felt in a long time for anything other than Shelley’s heinous death—shot through him.
What kind of asshole fool did something like that to a woman like Sara? A man who had everything and shit on it, when there were men who’d give anything to have a beautiful, sweet and loving wife to go home to every night—
“By the time we were divorced, I was over it,” Sara said, interrupting his thoughts. “I was relieved to be free of him.”
She didn’t sound relieved. She sounded...hardened.
And it was the first time in the twenty-four hours he’d known her that he’d heard her that way. She’d been soft and warm, friendly and sexy, welcoming and dismissive, strong and haughty. Empathetic. But not...hard.
And he understood why she was alone.
Sara Havens had trust issues.
And he was a man who’d already lied to her. Over and over again. And would lie to her again if bringing in Nicole Kramer required it.
His curiosity was satiated.
The distraction dealt with.
Good.
* * *
SARA USED THE public restroom at the beach before they went back to the SUV. She didn’t know how long it would be before she’d have the chance again.
At Michael’s urging she’d checked the other restrooms along the beach for signs of Nicole. She’d been checking them all day everywhere they stopped. A woman on the run would still need to use the facilities from time to time. And if she’d hung out in one for more than fifteen minutes, as the waitress at the diner had said, she might hang out in others, too.
At least it kept the man she thought was following her from finding her.
Her life had come to this. Consumed by a woman she hardly knew but cared for as though they’d grown up together, and consumed by a man she hardly knew, couldn’t trust, but wanted to kiss. Again.
She was throwing away her paper towel, having pushed in the automatic swing lid on the big plastic trash can by the door of the four-stall room, when she noticed the shirt. She recognized the stripe. Because she’d been the one to find it on the rack and hand it to Nicole, telling her that it matched her eyes. They were green with gold flecks. The shirt was green with a gold stripe.
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