by Noelle Adams
It made her pulse quicken. She took a few steps away from him so she wasn’t quite so close to his stool.
He was a very attractive man. He looked smart and successful and confident.
None of those things mattered to her nearly as much as the fact that he was another human being, and she preferred to stay away from them as much as she could.
“We got some fresh muffins in,” Roy said, gesturing toward a table set up against the wall. “From the coffee shop in town. It’s a good price, if you want any.”
Holly loved the muffins from the coffee shop. She used to go in to get them every week until the woman who served the coffee started asking her a lot of questions. So she perked up a little as she put down her bottle of bleach and went over to look at the plastic cartons of muffins. They were in cartons of two and cartons of six. If she bought six, she could have a treat every day for the rest of the week. She tried to decide between blueberry and banana nut before she saw a package that had both.
She picked it up and carried it back to the bar, where Roy was putting her hamburger into the normal Styrofoam container.
She gave Roy a twenty and refused the change he tried to offer her.
When she picked up both cartons, she realized her dilemma. She didn’t have enough hands to also carry out the bleach.
It was fine, she decided. She would come back in to get it.
“Cade,” Roy said, obviously noticing her hesitation. “Why don’t you help her out with her stuff?”
Holly sucked in a sudden breath, her eyes widening at his highly undesirable suggestion. She shook her head to refuse, but the man on the stool was already getting up, picking up her bleach, and taking the cartons from her hands.
“It’s no problem,” he said with a friendly smile. “I’m just killing time here anyway.”
She didn’t have the emotional energy to wonder why a man like him was killing time on a Tuesday in a drugstore in Cape Charles when she would have expected him to be working.
She wanted to snatch her stuff away from him, but that would cause a scene. That would cause a fuss. That would delay her interaction with him and might bring other people into the mix.
She’d get rid of him sooner if she just accepted his help.
She ducked her head and hurried to the door, very conscious of him walking behind her.
She wore one of her mother’s old dresses. They’d been in style when Holly was a child, but now they were outdated and hung loose on Holly since she was smaller than her mother had been.
She didn’t care. There was no reason to get new clothes when her mother’s were still perfectly usable.
But she had the random, unexpected thought that Cade probably thought she looked frumpy.
Her bike was parked around the corner of the building, where she always left it. Her groceries were still in the basket, and it would take some juggling to fit her new purchases in as well.
Items like the bleach were always a pain to carry back on her bike.
The man, whose name was evidently Cade, was frowning as he took in the situation. “How are you going to get all this back?”
She frowned too but for a different reason. It wasn’t his business how she got her stuff back home. She didn’t like people interfering, seeing what she bought. She grabbed the bleach from his hand and put it at the bottom of the front basket, situating the other bags on top of it. They stuck up far above the rim of the basket, but she was sure they would be stable.
“You better let me drive you home,” Cade said, shaking his head. “You’re never going to get all this stuff—”
He broke off his words when she snatched the cartons of muffins and cheeseburger out of his hands. “No,” she said, realizing she was going to have to tell him firmly she didn’t want his help. She didn’t know why he’d decided he was going to be some sort of Good Samaritan today, but she sure wished he’d do his good deeds for someone else.
His eyes were resting on her face, and a little smile tilted up on his lips. “So you do speak?” His tone sounded amused, gentle, almost flirtatious.
She didn’t like the sound of it at all. “Thank you for your help.”
“But how are you going to—”
She fit the cartons in the second basket and then swung her leg over the bicycle. She carried this much stuff home all the time. She wasn’t worried about it. “Thank you.”
She realized her tone sounded cool rather than grateful, but some people were impossible to brush off in any other way.
“No problem,” he said, stepping back as if finally accepting her rejection of him. “Be careful on the way home.”
She rolled her eyes as she started pedaling, riding through the parking lot and out onto the road. She didn’t need to be told to be careful. Her entire life was spent being careful.
There was no one in the world more careful than her.
She was aware that the man was watching her as she pedaled her way down the street and turned a corner.
He must be related to Roy. They had exactly the same color eyes.
Maybe he was home visiting his family. She’d never seen him before. He didn’t look like he belonged in Cape Charles. He looked like he was from a big city somewhere.
He would probably be going back home soon, so it wasn’t likely he’d be pestering her when she came back to the drugstore next week.
Four
On Thursday, Cade relaxed back in a beach chair, gazing out at the Chesapeake Bay on a private stretch of beach, and decided this was a pretty good idea.
He hadn’t rented out the ramshackle vacation house for the next few weeks to have a good time, but it was still nice to get away, to feel completely alone with just the birds and waves for company. The only other times he’d felt like this was when he was out on the boat alone, and even then it was hard to find a place on the bay where a number of other boats weren’t in sight.
The morning was hot and humid. Autumn came late to the Eastern Shore. But it wasn’t unpleasant with the bay breeze blowing on his skin. His only plans for the week were to hang out here and hopefully find out more about that mysterious, reclusive girl.
He knew a mystery when he caught whiff of one. He knew a good book concept when he stumbled on one. It felt like there was a crime or a tragedy in her past that he could uncover and then channel into a book.
Whether there was or not, Holly intrigued him in a way that nothing had for at least three years.
She’d spoken to him two days ago, when she apparently spoke to no one. She’d been brief and dismissive—and she hadn’t appeared to like him very much—but he still considered it progress.
He needed this. If he didn’t have success with this next book, his career in writing true crime would be pretty much over. He’d have to reinvent himself, and he hated the idea of doing that. It had taken him so much time and work to become the person he was today.
Sometimes he felt bored and tired in always writing the same kinds of things, but he was good at it—and it had served him well in the past. He wasn’t sure what else he could do.
Maybe this book could be a little different. He didn’t always have to write about serial crimes, after all. One crime that was buried deep enough, that was far-reaching enough, could make a damned good book.
And hopefully one that people would want to read.
He’d assumed, when his book on the Fall River rapist had done so well, that the hardest part was over. Naturally, he had to keep working, writing good books, but people knew his name and were waiting for more of his books. There was no reason to expect his following books not to do as well as the first had.
He still couldn’t understand why they hadn’t. He’d analyzed every minute detail of their concept, writing, and marketing, and nothing was different. Certainly, nothing was worse about the subsequent books. They should have done well, but instead each book sold fewer and fewer copies.
It made absolutely no sense.
He brushed the questions aw
ay—the way he always did eventually since they were so depressing and futile. And he picked up the pair of binoculars that were resting on the sand beside him.
He pointed them over toward the beach to the left, where Holly’s property began, and scanned the sand.
He’d have to do some pretty fast talking to explain how he happened to have rented the house right next door to her, but he was ready for it. She might be suspicious, but she would have no reason to expect the worst from him. He’d been nothing but polite to her on Tuesday, and they had no history that would lead her to expect that he was up to something underhanded.
He assumed that someone had hurt her pretty badly in the past. That was the most common reason for people to become agoraphobic or whatever the clinical name for her condition was. Or maybe it was more about her mother, who had evidently been the same way. But whatever the reason, Holly would have no cause to believe that he wanted to do her wrong.
She didn’t have to like him or trust him. He just wanted to get her to talk to him.
He’d been out here for an hour so far, and he hadn’t caught sight of her. Maybe she didn’t come down to the beach every day. Maybe she spent most of her time inside.
If that were the case, it was going to be a lot harder to devise a means of interacting with her.
He started brainstorming as he put down the binoculars and closed his eyes against the warm salty breeze.
There had to be some way to come into contact with her other than simply knocking on her door.
Three hours later, he finally caught sight of her on the beach.
He’d gone inside a couple of times—once to use the bathroom and then again to grab something for lunch. But the rental house wasn’t very nice. It had four walls, a roof, and indoor plumbing, but that was basically all that could be said about it. He didn’t want to spend any more time in there than he had to.
So he planned to station himself on the beach all day and wait to see if Holly made an appearance.
She finally did at about one o’clock in the afternoon.
She was wearing another shapeless cotton dress. This one had straps like a sundress and it only reached her knees. Her hair was loose today, and it was remarkably beautiful with the sunlight glinting off the straight, blond length of it.
She was walking along the beach, occasionally leaning down to pick something up and put it in the plastic bag she carried. He thought at first she might be collecting seashells, but then he saw her bend over to grab an empty soda can.
She was picking up trash.
He focused on her face. It was lovely—tanned classic features and smooth, bare skin. But her expression was focused, almost disapproving, as if she were doing an important task rather than idly cleaning up trash she passed by.
Her stretch of beach was quite long, and it took her a long time to walk the length of it since she stopped every few feet to scour the sand for any stray items.
He got up off his chair as she started walking away from the bay, back toward the wooden walkway that crossed the dunes.
That was a very convenient feature. Cade had to traipse over the dunes to get back to his Spartan lodging.
He walked closer to the border between the properties as she followed the walkway, keeping the binoculars focused on her.
But the trees blocked his view once she reached the lawn. He would have to walk over to her beach in order to actually see the house.
He wasn’t prepared to do that. Yet.
He’d seen the sign at the edge of his piece of beach that said PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING.
She was serious about keeping people away. He wouldn’t be surprised if she had a ferocious guard dog or some other security measure.
Maybe she had a gun.
He wondered what she did by herself in the house all day, other than occasionally cleaning up the beach. If she didn’t have a bank account or a driver’s license, then she probably didn’t have a job.
How did she support herself? Roy had said that she’d inherited the property from her mother, but she would still need money to support herself.
Yesterday he’d asked an old girlfriend of his who worked as a local realtor to try to dig up any sales records for the property. That might give him some more specifics to jump off from. He was still waiting to hear back on that.
He returned to his chair, wondering if he should give up for the day. She might not come back to the beach now that she’d done her duty and cleaned it up.
But he had no other ideas for the moment, so he stayed where he was, drinking a beer, reading a book, and picking up the binoculars every fifteen minutes to check to make sure she hadn’t come back.
It was six in the evening before she made a reappearance.
He’d been about to go back inside since he was bored and hungry, but he scanned her stretch of beach one more time.
He jerked in surprise when the lenses landed on her breasts, barely covered with a small amount of white fabric.
She was in the process of pulling her dress up over her head.
He checked around her and saw she was still alone, but there was a folded towel on the sand beside her.
He turned the binoculars back to her body, and he couldn’t help but make a complete journey up her long, slim legs, curved hips, flat belly, and firm breasts. He thought at first she was in her bra and underwear, but then he realized it was a bikini. It was white and fit a little loosely, and it looked like it had seen better days. So she was barely covered at all as she walked down into the waves, wading deep enough until she was able to swim.
She was a strong swimmer, heading farther out into the bay until she turned so she could swim parallel to the shore. He recognized that her strokes were smooth and confident, but his mind kept returning to the vision of her barely clad body.
She was gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous.
He tried to tell himself his interest was purely professional—it was just another facet of the intriguing mystery she held—but he knew it wasn’t true.
He liked the look of her body. A lot.
He stayed where he was, watching her swim back and forth across the length of her property, for more than forty minutes—as if she knew instinctively where the boundary lines were—until she finally did the breaststroke to the shallows and stood up to wade back to the shore.
He felt a little like a sleaze as he stared at her wet body, her skin glistening in the setting sun.
He felt even more like a sleaze as his own body reacted to the sight of hers.
This was sleazy, he told himself, finally lowering the lenses.
It was one thing to spy on her when she had clothes on, but this was different. That old bikini barely covered her. She might as well be naked.
No matter how much he wanted to look, he kept the binoculars down as she dried off and wrapped the towel around her as she returned to her boardwalk.
There were limits to the depths that even he would go, and the book he wanted to write would hardly justify leering at her body like that when she didn’t know he was around.
She probably felt like she was safe and alone there—completely private.
He’d told his mother he would be back by seven for dinner, so he needed to get going anyway.
He did his best not to keep visualizing her stunning body as he returned to the old house to gather his stuff and drive back into town.
He kept seeing her though. Wet and glistening in the sun. All evening. And all night. And it was the first thing he thought of when he woke up the next morning.
Hopefully, she’d keep her clothes on when he returned to spy on her today.
He got to the beach earlier that morning—it was just after seven when he lugged his chair over the dunes.
He also carried a thermos of coffee and a bottle of water and another book, plus his phone and his binoculars, so it was quite a task to get it all down to the sand in one trip.
He set up his chair and put down everything else so he could
focus the binoculars over toward Holly’s stretch of beach.
Instead of Holly, the first thing he saw was a dead deer.
It was just in front of the NO TRESPASSING sign, so it was on his side of the beach, up close to the dunes. The sight of the brown, furred body was so startling he actually took a step back.
It was definitely a deer though. There were a lot of deer around, but they usually kept to the wooded areas. He had no idea what one was doing out on the sand like that or how it died.
Curious and disturbed both, he walked over toward the body.
He’d reached it and was leaning over it, trying to find an obvious injury to explain its death, when someone else was suddenly here, pushing him away.
He blinked in surprise at the sight of Holly, who had shoved him from the deer’s body with both hands. Her face was tight and furious as she hissed, “Stay away.”
He was more disturbed than ever, wondering if she had somehow killed the deer and now wanted possession of the carcass. “What?” he managed to choke out.
Her eyes were searching the body of the deer. “What did you do to it?” she demanded, something changing on her face. “It’s dead! What did you do to it?”
He suddenly realized what was happening, and he was immediately relieved. She wasn’t trying to take possession of her kill. She was trying to protect the deer’s body from him. “I didn’t do anything to it,” he said, holding out his hands in a universal gesture of surrender. “I just saw it lying here and came over to see what happened to it.”
She glared at him suspiciously for a few moments, but her attention was clearly diverted by the deer. Her features twisted as she looked back down at it. “What hurt it?”
“I have no idea. It doesn’t look like it’s injured. Maybe it was sick.”
“It didn’t look sick before,” she said, her voice cracking. A couple of tears were streaming down her cheeks. “It was fine yesterday.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it yesterday.”