with caution. “A small-engine plane she was piloting went down a few months ago. The authorities ruled it as pilot error, but Laura was an experienced pilot. I know something isn’t right, but no one will believe me.”
Her words echoed over Hunter and he remembered the sensation of thinking the same thing when his older sister had died in a car crash over three years ago. Something had not been right about the accident. No one had believed him, either.
At least no one from the Conrad family had believed him.
But he’d proven them all wrong.
“I can’t help you,” he said, the agony of the past hitting him in the gut.
“No,” she said, grabbing his arm to keep him from trying to leave again. “Do not walk away from me. I hired a pilot to fly me down here even though I was afraid to get on a plane after what happened to my sister. I’ve been careful and I did my research. You’re supposed to be the best at what you do and I know you’re licensed in both Florida and Oklahoma, but if you treat all your clients the way you’re treating me, you must have a lot of time to sit around staring at the water. Why won’t you listen to me?”
He heard that. Surprised by the bit of fire that had just exploded inside this pretty package, Hunter glanced down at her soft, warm hand holding on to his wrist with a tight grip. But he still wasn’t convinced that he should be the one to help her. “Those people will come back. You need to get out of here.”
“I can’t leave now,” she said, her voice quiet, defeated. “If I get back in my rental car, they’ll find me and kill me and then there won’t be any justice for Laura. You might hate my father and my stepbrother, but Laura deserves more. A lot more.”
Hunter closed his eyes, willing her to go away. But he couldn’t send her out there to be slaughtered. When he heard a car turning into the drive, he glanced up and saw the same dark sedan. They were back.
He grabbed her and lifted her toward the bike. “Get on,” he said, swinging his leg over the seat. Seeing the panic and fear in her eyes, he reached out for her. “Now!”
She stared at the car for a split second and then hopped on the motorcycle.
“Hold on,” he said over his shoulder.
She wrapped her slender arms around his stomach, causing him to experience a strange, heavy discomfort followed by an acute awareness.
The dark car stopped, idling, the driver watching.
Hunter cranked the bike and took off behind the building and cut through on a side street. He had only minutes before the sedan would find them. So he zigzagged through the back streets and zoomed up and down alleys and driveways before he finally headed out to the one spot where he thought they’d be safe for a while.
He took her to the camp house.
Hunter didn’t want to talk about anything that had to do with the Conrads, but he was deep into this now. He parked the bike up underneath the fat pilings that held the house sturdy and high off the ground and protected it during storms. Out over the water, a golden sky shimmered against the waves like a lace curtain. The sun was setting off to the west, but it cast out muted rays that turned the horizon into a kaleidoscope of color.
“We should be okay here for a while,” he said as he helped Chloe off the motorcycle. She felt light in his arms, but the darkness in her eyes told of her exhaustion. “This place is secluded and off the beaten path.”
Hunter knew he needed to help her. It was that simple.
But oh, so complicated. It went against every cell in his body to help anyone connected to the powerful Conrad family. This would be a betrayal of his sister’s memory.
“Where are we?” she asked, glancing around at the fishing gear, four-wheelers and boats stored underneath the broad, square wooden house. She tossed her hair away and straightened her heavy leather jacket.
“We call it AWOL,” he said. “It’s a man cave I own with three of my friends. We hang out here on weekends and fish and...try not to talk much.”
That won him a quiet smile.
“I see the water,” she said, looking out past the palm trees and dense tropical foliage. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s the big bay,” he explained. Hunter liked the openness of the water. He could breathe here. Most days.
He liked Florida. Funny how he’d just realized that.
“How did you wind up here?” she asked, probably to stall the inevitable questions he needed to ask her.
But he answered her, needing the time to gauge her and study her. Maybe get a feel for who she really was.
“Friends,” he said.
He’d come down here a couple of years ago to visit Blain Kent after returning from one last tour of duty. Blain now worked for the Millbrook Police Department as a detective. They’d met in Oklahoma at a place similar to the Hog Wash when Blain was passing through years ago. Almost got in a fight over a pretty woman, but when she’d told off both of them, they laughed and spent the rest of the night playing darts and talking shop, since they were both headed for deployment.
“A lifetime ago,” he said, shaking his head.
He’d tried to put Oklahoma behind him.
Now it was staring him in the face with a pretty smile and sad eyes the same color as the sunset.
Blain was a former marine and this summer he’d married Rikki Alvanetti. Hunter had wound up in Special Forces. He still didn’t like to talk about what he’d been through, so nobody bothered him about it. And he wasn’t planning on going the way of his three buddies. Unlike Blain and their friends Rory Sanderson and Alec Caldwell, Hunter had no intention of settling down. Marriage and a family were not in his future.
He was a loner. Always had been.
He remembered how Alec, Blain and even Preacher had each brought a woman here. Now Alec and Blain were married and Preacher was next. Hunter had promised that would never happen to him.
But here he stood with a woman he didn’t want to help, a woman who represented a big hurt in his lousy life. He would not take her inside this house. And yet he had to keep her out of sight.
She didn’t ask any questions after he’d given her the lowdown, telling her only what he wanted her to know.
Motioning to a planked picnic table, he walked her over to the wooden Adirondack chairs the guys had built last summer. The table and chairs were hidden behind a thick row of bamboo stalks, but it gave him a good view of the road and the shell-covered lane leading up to the house. They could use the table as cover if they had to. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
Satisfied with their surroundings, he stared at Chloe. “I need you to level with me.”
“I told you, I need a private investigator,” she said, stepping near before she sat down, her brown boots tight against her jeans, her perfume more exotic than the lilies Preacher had planted down by the shore. “And I’m willing to pay whatever price you name.”
She smelled of money. Her family had a lot of it. He needed money, but he wondered what taking on her case would cost him. He didn’t want any Conrad blood money.
She must have sensed his dilemma. “You saw those men. They won’t stop until I’m dead.”
“I kind of got that part after the fun we had back at the Hog Wash,” he said. “You need to tell me everything, starting with why you came all this way for me when there’s plenty of PIs in Oklahoma.”
She looked out at the water glistening in a rich yellow-orange beneath the bronze sky, a second’s worth of hesitation holding her still. “Because I heard that