Paradise Burning (7 page)

“
You mean where does Wade Whitlaw live?
Damned if I know. But your girl had better watch her step. Rumor
has it old Wade patrols his land with a shotgun and isn’t above
taking pot shots at trespassers.”

Mandy’s eyes widened, but in typical Armitage
fashion, she stuck stubbornly to the subject. “Then how could I
have seen a girl sitting on the riverbank this morning?”

“
Easy. She must have had a boat. And
Wade hasn’t seen her yet.”

“
I didn’t see a boat.”

“
How far away was she?” Peter
challenged.

“
Maybe as much as the length of a
football field.”

“
You’re near-sighted, Mouse. Add fifty
or sixty feet for the width of the river, and practically anything
could have been hidden behind the brush along the bank. She had to
have had a boat.”

“
The woman I saw had long blond hair
and an odd-looking dress. She seemed to be young, but I have to
admit she was pretty far away.”

“
Bud’s Fish Camp, a couple miles
upriver, rents canoes. Face it, Mouse, your girl had a boat tucked
away somewhere.”

Mouse
. She
ought to resent it—it wasn’t exactly flattering—but somehow the old
pet name made her feel cherished. A wife instead of a research
assistant.

“
I don’t think so,” she replied far
less firmly than she’d intended. “Is Brad Blue around every day?
I’d like to talk to him.”

“
I don’t know why you’re so interested
in some strange girl,” Peter muttered, every nerve tingling at the
sight of Mandy in the bedroom he had furnished just for her. Until
he could convince her to make the switch to his.
Keep on topic. Don’t scare her!
“But
Brad’s always around. His wife can locate him for you. She runs the
model center. You must have seen the sign on your way in. Her
name’s Claire, and I think you’ll like her.”
Good thought, Pennington
. A friend at Amber Run
would help Mandy feel more at home
. Home is
where the heart is
. Whoever said that surely had it
right.

So far, he’d managed Step One. Mandy was in
Golden Beach. Now he needed to maneuver her out of her hideaway on
wheels and into this room.

And then up the hallway to his room. His
bed.

Their bed.

3-D chess. Complex. Tricky. With dangers
coming at you from every direction.

He wasn’t Pete Rodcyzk any more. He was Peter
Pennington. Older, wiser, more experienced. This time his Mouse
wasn’t going to skitter away.

The next morning Mandy set the alarm for the
crack of dawn and dragged herself down to the steaming river, only
to find nothing but masses of misted greenery, the steady thrum of
insects, and the usual disgustingly wide-awake birds. Close to the
dock where the mist was not so thick, the river was pock-marked by
ever-widening pools as fish sprang up through the dark water to
snatch their breakfasts. But not so much as a glimpse of a female
will-o-the-wisp with long blond hair.

Mandy scowled at the pristine paradise around
her. Why the feeling of disappointment? For some inexplicable
reason she’d been trying to make a mystery out of nothing more than
an intrepid hiker.

In a
dress
?

Mandy stuck to her vigil for nearly an hour,
experiencing an odd mix of reveling in this private Eden and
wondering if she’d gone stark, raving mad to be anywhere but in her
bed at sunrise. She also examined her underlying surge of
excitement, the call of a hunt so much more up close and personal
than sitting at her keyboard. Was this need to solve a mystery in
her genes? Or was she desperately seeking a distraction from a
different call of the wild? Named Peter.

Did it matter? She felt . . .
alive
. She felt good. Whatever urge
had gotten her up in the cold predawn, she was doing the right
thing. She was certain of it.

As the sun began to rise behind the
dense mass of greenery on the far side of the river, Mandy trudged
back to the RV, where she set about reading the instructions on the
brand new coffee bean grinder that had caught her eye at the
grocery store. Well, why not? If she was going to be independently
domestic, she might as well go all the way. Ten minutes later, when
she savored the first sip of coffee made from freshly ground beans,
she felt almost as much satisfaction as the day she’d completed
cooking school.
Real coffee
.
Maybe, one of these days, she’d manage to be a real
woman.

If she hadn’t been so damned stubborn five
years ago . . .

Whither thou goest . . .

How could she have chosen AKA? But when Peter
declared his intention of abandoning his position as Heir Apparent
to the Armitage family business to wander the world, write books,
become an observer instead of a participant, it was as if he was
abandoning Mandy as well. The hurt was all-encompassing.

Jeff’s and Eleanor’s shock had been
nothing compared to her own. So what if he
had
asked her to go with him, they couldn’t both
dessert their posts. Leave AKA without its two most brilliant
assets.

But, dear God, the pain had nearly torn her
in two.

And now Peter thought he could just waltz
back into her life . . .

Peter
. The man
radiated sex appeal like a Catherine wheel shooting sparks in all
directions. He was a lethal weapon. And knew it. There ought to be
a law . . .

Maybe chocolate macadamia nut coffee would
strengthen her resistance. Mandy poured a second cup.

She was free to explore this morning. Before
returning to his aerie to work, Peter had told her she needn’t come
in until eleven as he wanted her to accompany him to a luncheon
interview in the neighboring city of Manatee Bay. So . . . the land
beyond the river beckoned.

On the RV’s small dining table Mandy spread
out the local map given to her by T&T Realty. Which confirmed
that the Calusa River was the end of civilization. In fact, the
elegant community of Golden Beach dwindled to near wilderness
several miles west of the river. To the east there was nothing at
all, except for the one small enclave of homes Peter had mentioned,
clustered together on the east bank several miles upriver from
Calusa Campground.

Bending over the map, Mandy frowned. Finding
the bridge across the river on paper was one thing. To actually get
there, it looked as if she was going to have to negotiate a maze.
North, west, north, east, then south. Almost as if the rugged
individualists on the far side of the river had set up an obstacle
course to keep people out.

In the end, the four-mile trip upriver took
nine miles to drive. Nine miles of flower nurseries, tree
nurseries, grazing cows and horses. Even a riding academy and a
vast horse farm, which included a racetrack and a glimpse of a home
that made Tara look like the gardener’s cottage. By the time Mandy
came to the bridge across the river, she had rubbernecked so much
her shoulders were stiff.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, about
downtown Golden Beach—which prided itself on being one of the
Florida’s finest resort and retirement communities—had prepared her
for the vast bucolic acreage on which some of its citizens lived.
Hearing Peter say there was a cattle ranch across the river was far
less of a surprise than seeing so many cows, horses, pastures, and
stables on
this
side of the
river. Florida was a very strange place. Not at all what Mandy had
expected.

She found the bridge. About a mile beyond it,
homes began to appear, nearly all wood frame and sensibly elevated
on stilts. One or two were Key West style, though not as elegant as
their cousins in Amber Run, but most were country cottages elevated
solely for practicality instead of any attempt at architectural
grace. All were set in the midst of a live oak forest so large and
so old that the Spanish moss dripping from every branch seemed like
honored beards of age. With the river on one side and the oaks
above, Mandy realized these people on the far side of the Calusa
had a natural air conditioning the rest of Golden Beach’s citizens
could only envy.

Nearly every yard was fenced. To keep dogs
and children in, Mandy wondered, or alligators out? Probably both.
Not to mention that these people built here because they enjoyed
their privacy. Mandy winced. Did that make her a voyeur?

It took only five minutes to drive by every
home in the enclave, yet she was certain she was still two or three
miles north of the place where she’d seen the blonde in the white
dress. So what now? Mandy turned around and drove back to a place
where the road forked and she’d gone left instead of right. As she
turned onto this last unexplored road, Mandy guessed she was going
south, but she’d made so many twists and turns to get where she was
that her usually reliable sense of direction was sadly skewed.

The houses fell away, the road narrowed,
turned to dirt. Mandy had visions of Wade Whitlaw hiding behind a
sturdy oak, shotgun in hand. Perhaps she should turn around. But
where? Drainage ditches hugged the narrow track on either side.
Mandy gritted her teeth and kept going, vowing to turn around at
the first wide place in the road. Independence was all well and
good, but she might be overdoing it. One glimpse of a woman on a
riverbank was not worth getting shot at. Or arrested for
trespassing.

The road came to an abrupt dead end.
Mandy braked to a halt, staring in fascination at a very
business-like eight-foot chain link fence topped with four strands
of barbed wire. The gate boasted a key-pad lock
. Oh-oh
. The fine hairs on the back of her neck
rose. This was more than a desire for privacy. That fence, not to
mention the signs she’d ignored, screamed she was trespassing big
time. She needed to get out.
Now.

There was, thank God, a turnaround in
front of the towering gate. Mandy had just begun to maneuver the
car around when she saw a man striding down the road behind the
fence. He was moving in the brisk, almost bristling, manner of a
man who had to be moving—going somewhere, doing something—or go
stark raving mad. Horribly embarrassed, Mandy once again braked,
too polite to run from the scolding she was about to receive. The
man had a right to scold. She
was
a Peeping Tom, caught red-handed. He did not, she noted with
relief, carry a shotgun.

But as Mandy sat there quivering, the man
never faltered in his stride, never gave the slightest sign he even
noticed her existence. He reached the gate, slammed his palm
against the silver metal bar at the center, his taut energy
palpable, then turned on his heel and started back down the sandy
trail. Mandy’s breath whooshed out in a long heartfelt sigh. She
willed her pulse to stop racing. She had gotten a very good look at
him, and he was not someone she would care to confront out here in
the middle of nowhere. Definitely a man who looked as if he
belonged behind an eight-foot security fence topped by barbed
wire.

And yet . . . talk about tall, dark and
handsome! Even taller than Peter, he was as leanly fit as an NFL
end or a soccer player of international distinction. His hair was
short, black and tightly curly. His handsome face, nearly square,
was oddly enhanced by features so strong they verged on the harsh.
A neatly trimmed black Van Dyke surrounded a pair of thin straight
lips. His skin was the golden bronze Mandy had once viewed from
above the black confines of a
chador
. His erect carriage, his long purposeful
strides proclaimed him a man of action. A man totally out of his
element in an isolated backwoods setting in the tranquil resort
town of Golden Beach, Florida.

When Mandy looked past her surprise, three
words leaped to mind: Soldier. Muslim. Iranian. All he lacked was
the uniform.

At least that one time she viewed the world
from beneath a veil, she was quite sure she was in Iran because
Iraqi women were not required to hide their faces. But since
working for either country was outrageously illegal at the time,
she had never been certain where she was. Eleanor had not said, and
she had not asked. AKA was inclined to be mixed up in some very
strange pies.

No matter. Wherever she’d been, this man
matched the look. But with a little something extra thrown in.
Dynamic? Yes, that was likely the best word to describe him. And
screaming of secrets. What was a man like that doing out back of
beyond in Golden Beach?

Dear God, no!
Not again. Mandy hadn’t made the association before now, but
her analytical brain suddenly connected the dots. Golden Beach was
where Mohamad Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi learned to fly.

Ridiculous!
She
was
so
overreacting.
Terrorists would never use the same town twice.

And yet . . .

In a ridiculous effort to appear invisible,
Mandy sat in her car and watched the man disappear back into the
shade of the oaks overshadowing the sandy trail. His back was still
stiff as a board, his shoulders military straight. He had seen her,
but looked right through her. A typical Muslim reaction to an
unknown female.

This had to be a different mystery. Possibly
a piece of the puzzle of the girl on the riverbank, for if she had
truly been heading south on this dirt road, she could easily be
close to where the Russian girl perched on the fallen tree
trunk.