Shadowed Paradise (8 page)

If Gene Blue had been anything like his son,
it was a choice Claire could easily understand. “I wonder if I’d
have been that brave,” was all she said.

“
Yeah . . . the power of love to make
idiots of us all.”

Great. Brad’s sarcasm effectively quenched
Claire’s wistful thoughts on love and romance. “Where did you say
your parents got their farm?”

“
My grandmother was a Tyree before she
had the misfortune to marry Wade Whitlaw. The Tyrees came here
right after the Civil War, about twenty years after the Whitlaws.
They had nearly as many acres and only a few less cattle, which was
most of the reason Wade Whitlaw wanted Hattie Tyree. She came with
a respectable amount of acreage as a dowry, land the Whitlaws had
wanted for years.” Brad’s lips quirked in a secret smile. “But
that’s another story altogether.

“
Anyway, Hattie wasn’t about to see her
daughter go landless or penniless. She got her brother Ben Tyree to
give my mother a nice bit of farm and pastureland along upper
Shake-It Creek north of town. It was a good place to grow up. You
would have liked my grandmother,” Brad added quietly. “She kind of
reminds me of your grandmother. True integrity. And lots of
soul.”

For a while they ate in companionable
silence. As delicious as the food was, Claire didn’t really taste
her Shrimp Scampi. “You make me feel ungrateful,” she admitted at
last. “I’ve been so wound up in my recent past that I forgot I had
an excellent childhood. And I’ve been blessed with two parents who
are still living. They’ve worked together every day of their
married lives, running a small educational publishing company.
Miraculously, they almost never raise their voices to each other.
They’re the ones who thought of asking Grandma to take Jamie and me
when our lives fell apart. We could have gone to live with them, of
course, but they thought the complete change of scene would
help.”

“
And has it?”

“
Oh, yes,” Claire murmured, “I think it
has.”

“
Hey, Cuz!”

Brad peered over the deck’s railing, waved a
friendly salute to a group of young men in the parking lot below.
Each carried a surfboard and wore nothing but swim trunks. Tall,
bronzed, beautiful, not a day over eighteen, the quintet was as out
of place in a town full of senior citizens as a race of aliens.
“How’s the surf?” Brad called.

“
Dying,” was the mournful reply from
the tallest of the five surfers, a slim, broad-shouldered young man
with sparkling blue eyes and hair so short it was only a shadow on
his well-shaped head. “You know it’s only good when it’s storming,
cuz. The last three days were great, but it’s time to pack it in.
Gulf’s about as flat as my board.”

With a polite nod to Claire and a wave to
Brad, the young man ambled off. His friends trailed behind, each
juggling his surfboard to keep from banging into a group of seniors
walking to their cars.

“
My cousin Slade,” Brad explained. “His
father’s Garret Whitlaw, my mother’s younger brother and heir to
the Whitlaw acres.”

A chorus of shrieks rose from the parking
lot. Claire scanned the gathering shadows below, seeing nothing but
six gray-haired seniors clustered outside their cars staring after
the sound of squealing tires echoing along the road that led back
to town. At the first scream Brad was at the railing, looking ready
to leap into the lot below. Just as suddenly, his shoulders
slumped, he sank back into his chair, planted his elbows on the
table, and pillowed his forehead against clenched fists.

“
What’s wrong? What happened?” Claire
demanded.

“
I don’t know that boy,” Brad vowed. “
I don’t know his friends. I’ve never seen that bunch of young
hellions before in my life.”

Taking a closer look, Claire could see that
Brad’s shoulders were shaking, his lips twitching. “Okay,” she
said, “what did they do?”

“
Mooned the seniors.”

“
You’re joking!”

Brad shook his head, which was still bent
over his coffee cup. “It was only two of them. And Slade wasn’t one
of them. I think.”

Claire chuckled. “It’s what you said last
night, isn’t it? It’s tough to be young in a town full of senior
citizens. The temptation to break out must be enormous.”

Brad lifted his head, reached for his coffee.
“There are only a very few places the kids can surf. And,
fortunately for the town’s peace of mind, only a few times a year
when the surf’s up, because no matter where the kids go or what
they do, someone complains. Major generation gap. The sight of all
that silver hair just set the kids off, but it was a stupid thing
to do. Most of the seniors take this kind of nonsense as a joke.
Then again, this just might be the group to lodge a complaint with
the city council. Then some vote hunter will propose a ban on
surfing in Golden Beach, and there goes another of the few perks
kids have in this town.”

Claire could see his point. Teenagers were
frequently their own worst enemies.

“
I hope your cousin’s hair was a
fashion statement and not political.”

“
Political, yes, but not the way you’re
thinking. Grandad hates skinheads almost as much as he hates long
hair. Slade is flaunting his unfortunate tendency to be more like
his cousin, that awful Blue boy, than his old man. Garrett
Whitlaw’s the good guy of the family. Runs the ranch, sits on the
County Commission, belongs to all the right clubs, yet never fails
to offer a hearty shake to every color, creed and bank account.
Just too good to be true is my dear Uncle Garrett. He even does his
damnedst to keep granddad from shooting trespassers—”

Shooting?
“I do
wish I could tell when you’re teasing the new kid on the
block.”

“
Nothing but the truth, Ms. Langdon.”
Brad raised his right hand, palm out. “Wade Whitlaw’s ancestors
squatted on this land for years before they owned so much as a
single acre. In fact, his daddy nearly lost it all to developers
back around the turn of the century. Now that it’s platted, deeded,
and fenced, he’s going to make damn certain no one else sets foot
on it. Including me.”

Abruptly, Brad pushed back his chair. “Let’s
get out of here before those seniors come storming up the stairs
looking for somebody to sue.”

“
They left. And the check hasn’t come
yet.”

“
It’s not going to. They bill me
monthly.”

“
Oh, no, you don’t! I’m paying for
dinner,” Claire hissed.

“
I told you there isn’t going to be a
check to pay. Zip.
Nada
. Don’t
argue, woman, I’m bigger than you are.”

Heads were beginning to turn their way.
Claire gritted her teeth and let Brad guide her down the outside
stairs to the parking lot. Seething silence filled the Thunderbird
as he drove south along the shore road, passing high-rise condos,
marinas, a city park and public boat ramp. Still furious and not a
little humiliated, Claire paid scant attention to the elegant
stucco homes lined up along Golden Beach’s broad boulevarded
streets. Then, abruptly, the road narrowed, the houses dropped
away, leaving nothing but sand dunes, sea grass, and a few low
wind-swept pines.

On their right was a narrow strip of sand
offering miles of gulf beachfront. To the left, invisible behind a
dense screen of cabbage palms and palmetto, was the Intracoastal
Waterway and an ever-widening bay. The area overflowed with people
during the day, but was a lonely, deserted wilderness of sand and
sea at night. The haunt of alligators, snakes, raccoons,
possums.

And predatory males.

Claire’s mouth went dry. Just because he’d
paid for dinner . . . Her heart threatened to leap into her throat
and choke her. There was just one reason to drive down a deserted
beach road at night.

The man was pure temptation. A tidal surge of
pure sex. She wanted . . . but she wasn’t ready. Not yet, not yet,
not yet.

The T-bird bounced over ruts left by the rain
as Brad turned into the deserted parking lot at the end of the
road, turned off the engine. Into the silence he drawled, “Tell me,
Ms. Langdon, when was the last time you went parking?”

Oh, hell
. Brad
felt a twinge of guilt. She was pale, jaw clenched, ready to throw
open the Bird’s door and run. He wasn’t above teasing, but
terrifying an innocent was another matter entirely. “Let’s take a
walk,” he offered, stifling a sigh. As Brad guided Claire along a
wooden walkway over the dunes to a park bench facing the gulf, he
could feel her tremble. Silently, he swore. He was so used to
Diane’s gusty enthusiasm for sex, her total amorality, that he
hadn’t stopped to think. This was Claire Langdon. He liked her, was
drawn to her, had not questioned his urge to be alone with her. Or
not more deeply than relying on his ability to charm her into . . .
whatever.
Shit!

So now he was confronted by an icy female
wall, hiding fear and God alone knew what else. Well, if she
thought a little deep freeze was going to put him off . . . “What
do you think?” he asked, nodding toward the gulf.

Before them, as far as the eye could see, the
black of the sky could be distinguished from the black of the sea
only by the brilliance of the stars. The sole signs of civilization
were the running lights on six or seven fishing boats scattered
about a mile off shore. At the edge of the beach gentle whitecaps
shone through the darkness, hissing rather than roaring as they hit
the shore.

“
It’s like the end of the world,”
Claire said. “The place where sailors fell off the edge of the
earth. Beautiful but . . . too infinite. Maybe a little
scary.”

Oh, yeah. A woman whose
brain still functioned while she trembled under his hand, expecting
him to pounce at any moment.
Brad examined her
delicate profile, the proud lift of her chin, the curves of her
small but ample figure, the determined set of her shoulders.
Everything about Claire Langdon screamed,
Don’t Touch
. But somehow the message
wasn’t
I don’t want to be touched,
but
I’m afraid to be touched. I’ve
been hurt and I’m terrified
. How he recognized that,
Brad wasn’t sure. Most likely by the same instincts that had kept
him alive through hundreds of tight situations in nearly every part
of the world.

The steady seabreeze tugged at Claire’s
shoulder-length hair, riffling it back over her ears. Her full
inviting lips were narrowed into a thin line. Time to stop the
games and get serious before he began to feel like a sexual
predator.

“
Contrary to what you’re thinking, I
brought you here because I wanted a private place to talk. I also
wanted to be damn sure that when you’re asked tomorrow how you
liked my house, you can honestly say you’ve never seen
it.”

Talk?
House?
She was on a dark beach with a
star-quality hunk, her body pulsing like a neon girlie-bar sign,
her brain threatening meltdown, and he wanted to
talk
?

‘
I’d like to offer you a
job.”

Job?
Claire
stared at him, unable to take it in.

“
Not for a month or two,” Brad
explained. “I’m building models out by the river. When they’re
ready, I’ll need someone to show them.”

She could handle this, Claire vowed. She
could turn starlight and romance into business as coolly, as
blandly as Brad Blue. “I don’t have a license,” she said.

“
If I pay you a salary, you don’t need
one.”

“
Developers can’t afford full-time
salaries.”

“
This developer can.”

Which could be straight business talk. A
tantalizing peek at the Blue ego. Or it could be a great deal more.
Like plain, old-fashioned “being kept.” No way. He had Diane Lake.
What did he need with Claire Langdon?

As she pictured the TV anchor’s reaction to
her working for Brad, Claire’s lips curled into something
dangerously close to a smirk. She gazed up at the brilliance of
Venus hovering overhead, and the curl became a flat-out smile. Oh,
yes, Diane Lake would absolutely hate it.

As if he’d read her thoughts, Brad said, “I
suppose you’ve been told I’m involved with someone.”

Above them the breeze off the gulf rustled
through the cabbage palms, the long spiky fans silhouetted against
the night sky like the clutching multi-fingered claws of some
mysterious beast. Diane Lake waiting to pounce? Claire wondered.
Brad himself? “T & T gossip is pretty thorough,” she admitted.
“I heard about Diane. And Phil.”

“
Phil was a very long time ago. The
only kid in first grade who didn’t call me Little Boy Blue.” Brad
leaned forward on the bench, rested his elbows on his knees. “We
went off to college together, got married right after graduation. I
don’t think either of us ever dated anyone else.”

“
Then why . . . ?” Claire’s voice
trailed off. She had no right to ask. She wasn’t even sure she
wanted to know.

Brad didn’t seem to mind the question. “As
strange as it seems, in all those years together Phil and I never
considered we might be destined to live entirely different lives.
When she got the chance to take over her father’s business, she
leaped at it. Two years after we were married, Phil was back in
Golden Beach, and I was about as far from here as I could get. End
of story.”