Shadowed Paradise (21 page)

“
They’re carnivores,” he explained
kindly. “Meat eaters. And fish, of course. I feed two herons and an
egret nearly every day at home. Egrets are the big white ones. They
once were hunted almost to extinction for their plumes,” he added.
“For ladies’ hats.”

“
You have a house then?” Claire
inquired, seizing at any sliver of a viable conversational
topic.

“
On a lake. Ken offered Claire a french
fry, which she promptly popped in her mouth, grateful for the
excuse not to talk.

“
Sometimes I even get an ibis in the
back yard. That’s an American version of a stork,” he explained
with patient tolerance for her northerner’s ignorance.

“
How about alligators?” Claire asked
with a grin, determined to pierce his gravity.

“
One or two,” he admitted, still
unsmiling. “When they get over six feet, the Homeowners’
Association calls the county to come and get them. They used to
take the gators out to Calusa State Park and let them go, but they
tended to find their way back, so now it’s shoes and
handbags.”

Claire winced. Gators might be scary but they
were here first. To be made into shoes and handbags because you
grew longer than six feet . . .

“
Six feet is pretty big,” she said,
trying not to feel sorry for the alligators.

“
I’ve seen bigger,” Ken returned with
classic one-upmanship. “I started out to get the newspaper one
morning a couple of years ago and my front door wouldn’t open. I
kept pushing, but it wouldn’t budge. So I went out the back door
and around the house, and there’s an alligator lying on the front
porch, right across the doorway. The gator hunters must have missed
that one, because he was at least eight feet.”

“
Oh, my!” Claire didn’t have to fake
it. She was every bit as shocked as Ken undoubtedly wanted her to
be. Or did he? He was so solemn about it all, it was hard to
tell.

“
My neighbor had been feeding the
alligators marshmallows,” he explained. “They love marshmallows.
The trouble is, when you feed them, they begin to associate people
with food.
Not
a good idea, I
assure you. My neighbor had gone north for the summer, and I guess
the alligator came looking for his marshmallows.” Ken took a bite
out of his hamburger and chewed carefully—Claire wondered if he was
counting the number of mastications—before adding, “Believe me, I
wasn’t sorry to see the gator trapper drag that one
off.”

“
How dangerous are they?

I have a little boy, and one of his great
passions is catching a glimpse of an alligator. So far the only
ones he’s seen are from the boat that cruises Calusa Lake. It was
cold the day we went, they were mostly under water. We only saw a
few snouts . . . and the back of one swimming away.”

Ken picked up another fry, chewed . . .
swallowed. “If you took that cruise, you must have gotten the
captain’s standard warning.” Suddenly—oddly?—Ken Millard came
alive. His voice deepened, eyes brightened, his shoulders
straightened. He had become the captain of the tour boat.

“
There are only two things that move on
this lake at night,” he quoted with the force and confidence of an
actor declaiming one of Shakespeare’s immortal
lines
. “Alligators. And alligator
food.
”

“
I remember that!” Claire cried.
“You’re right, he did say it. But, well, I just thought he was
talking about that particular lake.”

Suddenly, as if horrified by his
assertiveness, Ken deflated, returning to the persona of Ken
Millard, the all-but-invisible accountant. He finished the last of
his hamburger, fished out the napkin from beneath the checkered bag
and carefully wiped his hands. “Well,” he pronounced, “if there’s
one thing you can be certain of in Florida . . . if there’s fresh
water, there’s probably an alligator in it. The only place it’s
safe to swim in fresh water is your backyard pool. And there have
even been a few surprised homeowners who woke up to find their
pools had been invaded overnight. Gators are nocturnal, you know,”
Ken added. “They feed at night.”

“
But are they dangerous?” Claire
persisted. “I mean here, around Golden Beach.”

Ken gave the question careful consideration.
“Well, until recently they mostly ate dogs, a child or two—”

“
What?!
” Claire
all but shrieked. Passers-by turned to stare.

“
Sorry,” Ken apologized, “but it’s
true. Really. Only two in this area that I know of, both wading in
shallow fresh water. Got dragged under. But last spring we had a
really bad week,” he added over Claire’s horrified exclamations.
“Three women dead in one week. In separate parts of the
state.”

Appalled, Claire felt her head buzz under the
blinding heat of the noontime sun. What planet had she been living
on that she didn’t know that alligators—their habitat invaded by
wave after wave of humans—had developed a taste for something other
than turtles, snakes, fish, their own young. And marshmallows.

Claire’s bagel rose in her throat.
“Excuse me,” she gasped, “I’m late getting back to work. Thanks for
the gator lesson.” She was going to put Jamie in a suit of
chainmail. She was never going to let him go near the water again.
Dear Lord, it was as bad as
Jaws
. Worse. Somewhere she’d read there were a
million alligators in Florida.

Impossible to keep Jamie safe. They were
living on the fringe of ten thousand square miles of swamp teeming
with carnivores of every description. South Florida was a vast and
dangerous jungle. With some of the two-legged predators as bad as
the four-legged variety.

What was she doing in this godforsaken
place?

And Brad Blue was building homes along the
Calusa . . . where he wanted her to show his models.

Alone.

Dear God, help! I want to go home.

“
He was talking about alligators
eating
people
. Women and
children,” Claire told her grandmother later that day. “And he said
it as if he were saying alligators eat
fish
. My hair stood on end. Am I just a city
slicker, or do I have a right to be shocked?”

“
You must remember Ken Millard has
lived here all his life,” Ginny replied in the calm, reasonable
manner that characterized her personal life and was at startling
odds with the characters who populated her Gothic novels. “In
Florida the veneer of civilization is very thin. The natives grow
up learning to live with it. The tourists are simply blissfully
ignorant. If they’re lucky, someone will tell them not to swim in
the gulf after four or five in the afternoon and that the only
place to hike is on a well-marked trail. The palmettos and pine
woods are full of rattlesnakes. Fresh water abounds with water
moccasins as well as alligators.”

“
Ginny, what am I doing here?” Claire
burst out. “I swear the Wild West was less dangerous. How can I
expose Jamie to such things? You know how kids are. In a year or
two he’ll be at that age when the more I tell him not to do
something, the more he’ll want to do it.”

“
Your parents brought you up on
beachfront, didn’t they?” Ginny reminded her. “Did you toddle down
to the water and start dog paddling toward Long Island?”

“
Of course not!”

“
Well then . . .?” When Claire merely
grimaced, Ginny added, “Any place you go is going to have its
dangers. Did you take Jamie to play in Central Park at
night?”

“
All right, all right,” Claire
conceded, “but I still can’t understand somebody who casually
says,
Oh, by the way, alligators eat
people.
”

“
No one ever said Ken Millard was a
perfectly normal, well-adjusted human being,” Ginny said, “but then
who among us is? Ken does my taxes, and I admit he’s a bit
introverted. A shame, when he’s such a handsome young
man.”

“
Okay, the table’s set,” Jamie called
from the greatroom.

Claire leaned over the dividing countertop.
“That’s very good . . .,” she responded automatically before
trailing to a halt. “You’ve only set two places.”

“
Gramma said you weren’t eating
here.”

“
Ginny?” Claire’s tone was
ominous.

Claire’s grandmother bent her head over a
sauce pan, stirring industriously. “I was told you were eating
out,” she murmured. “Jamie and I are having rotelle.”

“
Eating out?” Claire echoed faintly.
“Who told you that?”

“
Brad called,” Jamie replied. “He said
seven o’clock and you didn’t need to dress up. Isn’t that right,
Gramma?”

“
Casual
was the
word he used,” Ginny confirmed, carefully keeping her eyes trained
on the rotelle spiraling in the rapidly boiling water.

“
Thanks for telling me.” Claire’s voice
dripped sarcasm. She stepped toward the stove and leaned down to
hiss in Ginny’s ear, “Since when are you arranging my
dates?”

“
I wasn’t given a choice,” her
grandmother replied with studied innocence. “I was simply told.
Obviously, I thought you already knew about it.”

Miserable, manipulating,
arrogant . .
. She wouldn’t go. She’d stay home. She’d
be eating pasta when Brad arrived. She’d smile sweetly, open her
eyes wide, and tell him she had absolutely no idea he was planning
to drop by . . .

He’d warned her. He’d told her if she didn’t
agree to see him, he was going to kidnap her. And how neatly he’d
arranged it. She could make a scene in front of Jamie and her
grandmother. Or she could get dressed and go.

And make a scene in front of Brad Blue, the
ex-farmer, ex-fed Russian cracker developer who was entirely too
accustomed to having his own way. And his way with women.

Women
. Plural.
And no way would she let herself be just another line on his hit
list.

The other night she must have been mad.

Yet it had seemed so right. Two people who
needed each other. And she’d certainly made it horribly clear she
was willing!

Claire’s New England common sense had only
caught up with her later, leaving her wondering how she could have
been so weak. It had felt right, but how could she really know?
There hadn’t been enough time to discover what Brad Blue really
wanted. Perhaps he was sending out all the right signals just to
get her into bed?

Well, he’d succeeded. And she was terrified
of what happened next.

So who’d been fantasizing about being
carried off by her knight in shining red armor?
Face it, girl, you’re conflicted!
Every inch of
her anatomy was throbbing with anticipation, his touch riding
roughshod over every last vestige of her New England
reticence.

Claire’s pulse pounded. Her brain spun as
wildly as the rotelle in swirls of light and color and blatant
desire. She was lost. She had only to see him, touch him. Hear his
name. And she fell over the edge into some yawning, self-indulgent
abyss of desire.

It wasn’t right.

Nothing that felt this good could possibly be
right.

There was no way Claire Langdon of Manhattan
and Bedford deserved this terrifying miracle called love.

“
Do you wish to order now, Miss Lake?”
The waiter hovered beside the stunning blond seated at a window
table in the elegant dining room of Heron Lakes Golf & Country
Club.

“
Not yet, I’m expecting a guest.” Diane
Lake’s smile, so well known to local television viewers, was
notably absent, her tone abrupt.

“
Another martini, perhaps?” the waiter
inquired solicitously.

Sure, why the hell not? Diane thought,
tossing a curt nod in the waiter’s direction. What was one too many
after she’d walked off her job? She’d steamed her way through the
six o’clock news, staged a dying swan routine for the producer and
simply walked out, leaving her co-anchor Kevin Johnson to pick up
the pieces.

Holy shit, but the guilt trip was
delicious! They’d never fire her. The camera loved her. Audiences
loved her. She wasn’t going to be in this Florida backwater for
long. Cultural capital of Florida, hell! She was for Miami. Or
Philly. Maybe even Atlanta. Just a couple of more stepping stones,
and it was
New York, New York, make way for
Diane Lake
.

But Brad Blue? Diane’s lips curled. Brad was
dead meat. Hang up on her, would he? Return her gifts? Nobody did
that to Diane Lake. He’d be back. On his knees. Crawling. Meanwhile
. . . there were other fish in the sea. Even tougher challenges.
After all, she was Diane Lake and the world was at her feet.
Anything was possible.

“
Dear girl, you’re looking particularly
bitchy this evening.” Jordan Lovell slid into the seat across from
her.

“
You’re late, she said shortly.” Diane
had long since given up trying to charm Jordan Lovell. But his
sharp intellect and waspish tongue made him an excellent sounding
board for her rage.

“
We can’t all be television
newscasters, darling,” he assured her sweetly. “Some of us actually
work for a living.”

Diane eyed Jordan with an odd mix of distaste
and admiration. “That’s what I like about you, Jordan. You’re such
a son of a bitch.”

Lovell posed his head to one side,
considering her remark. “You may be right,” he conceded before
turning to the waiter who had immediately appeared at his side.
After ordering his drink, he regarded Diane with raised brows. “Now
do tell what was so urgent you finessed the eleven o’clock
news.”