Authors: Colleen Thompson
The Off Season
ALSO BY COLLEEN THOMPSON
Fatal Error
Fade the Heat
The Deadliest Denial
Heat Lightning
Head On
The Salt Maiden
Triple Exposure
Beneath Bone Lake
Touch of Evil
The Best Victim
The Night Holds the Moon
(with Parke Roberts)
The Jersey Devil Made Me Do It
(a Pretty Little Liars novella)
Harlequin Intrigue
Capturing the Commando
Phantom of the French Quarter
Relentless Protector
Harlequin Romantic Suspense
“Lethal Lessons” (novella) in
Deadlier Than the Male
(Silhouette Romantic Suspense)
Passion to Protect
The Colton Heir
Lone Star Redemption
Lone Star Survivor
“Rescuing the Bride” (novella) in
Cowboy Christmas Rescue
Writing as Gwyneth Atlee
Touch of Fire
Night Winds
Canyon Song
Against the Odds
Trust to Chance
Innocent Deceptions
Dangerous Attractions
(originally published under the pseudonym Colleen Easton)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Colleen Thompson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503937864
ISBN-10: 1503937860
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant
CHAPTER ONE
Christina Paxton’s two-year-old looked up, studying her with a serious expression before her daughter’s thin voice sliced through Christina’s 2:30 a.m. stupor. “Murder me. Bad people.”
Christina blinked hard, every fine hair rising along her arms, behind her neck. Her daughter, Lilly, hadn’t said that, couldn’t have. As a doctor, Christina knew better.
I’m dreaming on my feet, that’s all. Or hallucinating, maybe.
As tough and unflappable as she tried to convince others she was during her long shifts in the ER, the brain could get by with so little sleep for only so long before it started fraying at the edges.
It’s the storm, that’s all,
she told herself as the wind’s cold breath rattled windows sugared with ice crystals. That had to be it. She’d heard the wind blowing in off the dark expanse of the Atlantic, which was hurling itself against the beach across the street. The rushing and the crashing made her feel small inside this huge house, and more alone than she could bear.
But she
would
bear it. She had no choice, so she swallowed back a lump and helped Lilly pull up a fresh pair of the training pants they were still working on keeping dry through the night. As the bottoms of Lilly’s pajamas followed, Christina wanted to ask, “What did you say?” but she couldn’t find her voice.
If she just tucked her daughter back into bed, maybe they could both grab a few more precious hours of sleep before the alarm went off. But Lilly was staring again, studying her mother with such fierce concentration that it sent a chill clean through her. Unlike the brown eyes of both her parents, Lilly’s eyes were a deep, crystalline blue that Christina always imagined had been passed down from her own birth mother. Not that she could recall any other details of the woman’s face, not after thirty years.
Still, some memories remained branded in her brain, despite the fact that Christina hadn’t been much older than her daughter was now on the snowy night her mother dragged her and her baby sister from the warmth of wherever they’d been staying, then disappeared into one of Philadelphia’s roughest neighborhoods. Christina still had nightmares of the icy flakes finding purchase on her thin clothes where she’d huddled, the freezing metal of the dumpster burning as she pressed her back against it. She remembered shaking in the cold, wrapping skinny arms around the four-month-old sister she’d been ordered to look after, and holding on for dear life.
Now, inside the big Victorian she’d been house-sitting since moving back to the little South Jersey shore community where she’d been raised, fresh chills skated over her nerve endings, and she pulled her terry robe a little tighter. Outside, a storm blown in off the Atlantic was doing its best to sandblast the paint off the 140-year-old structure, deepening her dread.
“Mur, mur, mur-me,” Lilly crooned to herself. “Murder me.”
Christina’s heart dropped like a hammer. “What are you singing, baby? Where did you hear that?”
She held her breath, waiting for her daughter to start chattering about the latest Disney princess or Christina’s friend Renee’s three-and-a-half-year-old son, Jacob, who served both as Lilly’s best buddy and as her arch nemesis. She ached for her daughter to return to the linguistic shorthand typical of toddlers and other tyrants.
Movie now! No bath! Want mac ’n’ cheese! My blankie!
Instead, Lilly frowned, her little forehead creasing in a surprisingly adult expression. “Kill me,” Lilly said, words that sounded obscene, spoken in her sweet voice. “No leave babies.”
An icy fist formed in Christina’s stomach, knuckling her vertebrae. It was hard to drag a breath in, but from somewhere she heard her most sensible mom voice speaking. Because this couldn’t be real.
“Don’t be silly, sweetie,” she said. “It’s much too late to play pretend now.”
“No pretend, Kay-dee.”
Christina flinched, the night swirling around her. Because no one called her Katie. Not since her adoptive parents renamed her Christina when they’d brought her home, rather than using what was written in block letters on the tag of the T-shirt she was dressed in the night she’d been found.
A new name for a new start,
the woman she would always consider her real mother had insisted. Christina had grabbed it like a lifeline, never looking back, going by the full first name—never Chris or Christie—ever since.
“Mommy-Kaydee,” Lilly babbled, one chubby hand moving in a circle. “Katie-Mommy.”
No way had her daughter just spoken a name Christina hadn’t heard in decades—or gestured to illustrate how Christina had switched roles. “Wake up,” she murmured to herself, panic crowding her throat. “You have to wake up now.”
In spite of her denial, the weight of her daughter’s solid little body felt real in Christina’s arms. As did the trembling that found its way into her own voice. “Let’s get you back to bed now, honey.”
She tucked her daughter back into her bed—they’d left the crib behind in Dallas—and pulled up the blankets, knowing that if he had been there, her husband, Doug, would have given her a hard time about her fixation on keeping their daughter warm enough. A pediatric surgeon eighteen years her senior, he would have cited cases of infant suffocation, of SIDS deaths linked to co-sleeping or too many covers. She could almost hear him saying,
Trust me on this. She’s fine.
But Doug would never lecture her again, would never again offer his brand of comfort edged with condescension. As if she didn’t see more death on a weekly basis in the emergency department than he ever had in surgery.
As if she hadn’t cut her teeth on it that snowy night her four-month-old baby sister went still and cold in her arms.
In the dim light of the little elephant lamp that her adoptive mother—a well-respected local property manager whose business mainly catered to wealthy, out-of-town clients—had brought to the home she’d arranged for them to house-sit, Lilly’s long eyelashes fluttered, and her breathing slowed and deepened. Christina stood there in the darkness, rubbing her daughter’s silky blonde head until she was asleep.
Too shaken to go back to bed, Christina stayed with Lilly a long time, staring through the narrow spaces between the wooden blinds. Gazing out as flakes spun crazily past a lonely streetlight, flakes that looked so pale against the black void of the sea.
She wasn’t sure what dragged her gaze back to the shoreline, but at some point she blinked and focused, abruptly realizing there was a vehicle parked on the street below that she didn’t remember seeing earlier. A big, dark-colored SUV, lightly coated with a layer of frozen sleet and snow. She rubbed the chilled flesh of her arms, remembering the recent rash of break-ins she’d heard about along this stretch of unoccupied vacation properties, the senseless vandalism—drywall smashed, sinks plugged with all the taps left running—that had cost the owners far more than the thefts. It was the reason Christina and her daughter were living here rent-free this winter—to make more than two million dollars’ worth of off-season real estate a less attractive target. The old security system had been repaired, too; she remembered setting it after taking out the dog this evening and coming up to bed.
She thought of calling the police, asking them to send a patrol to check the strange vehicle, but what self-respecting criminal would be out on a night this raw? It was probably just some neighbors coming in for the weekend to check their property. So instead of picking up the phone, Christina flipped a couple of lights on and off on the remote chance that some idiot was out there trying to decide which house offered the easiest pickings, then dismissed the worry before trudging back to bed.
Exhausted as she was, she lay awake a long time, with the words she’d surely imagined her tiny daughter speaking whispering through her restless mind.
Waiting around, even in the best of circumstances, had never been Harris Bowers’s strong suit. He’d been born restless, prone to move, to act—often without bothering to think through the consequences first.
Over the years, this tendency had cost him deeply. God only knew he had the scars, inside and out, to prove it.
Yet the most recent and most serious among them had served a purpose. To remind him of the price of his impatience. The same blast that had slowed his step and left scarred patches on the right side of his chest and his right arm and shoulder had forced him to take the time to think things through, to plan out his actions before rushing into the thick of things with his gun blazing and his pulse pounding like a war drum at his temples.
But he damn well didn’t have to like this newfound caution, especially when it involved freezing his balls off in the darkness, thanks to the Tahoe’s half-assed heater and the three inches of new snow blanketing this neighborhood, where the kind of mansions rich people called beach cottages sat across from a beach area that only the toughest shorebirds visited in January. He thought longingly, too, of the coffee he’d denied himself during his night’s vigil—a jolt that was going to be his first order of business as soon as the sun boiled its way up from the cold Atlantic depths.
Turning his face toward the houses he would never be invited into, Harris performed one last, long visual sweep. A flicker caught his gaze and held it: a light coming on in a second-story window from the only house currently occupied along this stretch of Cape Street.
Reflexively, his left hand touched the butt of his SIG Sauer before he spotted the woman, her slender figure silhouetted as she looked out over the street.
His sluggish blood stirred to life, his heart pumping as if he’d just mainlined half a pot of bitter station brew. Had she seen him sitting here, his vehicle idling in the darkness? Did she have any idea of the memories the news of her return to town had sparked?
He thought back to those hot nights, to walking and laughing on the boardwalk. Wandering among what a couple of shore kids like them called the
shoebies
—those socks-and-sandals day-trippers who packed their hometown every summer. The two of them playing the rigged carny games and burning through greasy delicacies, with the supercharged metabolisms eighteen-year-olds took for granted. For just a moment, he was flung back to that season, the air thick with salt and humid heat, the scents of deep-fried funnel cake and french fries, and the laughing cries of the thieving gulls who’d swoop in to steal the food from their hands if they let down their guards a moment.
And then there was the night, a memory smooth and clear as sea glass, when he’d taken her to a rental place, one of a row of crooked bungalows up on stilts—later bulldozed after Hurricane Sandy—that his uncle had co-owned with some boozer cousin. Truth was, Harris hadn’t asked permission but had swiped a key one evening when he knew it wasn’t rented, then gone over to make sure there were clean sheets on the bed and even a bouquet of white-and-yellow daisies with purple irises, because it was a girl’s first time only once, and he’d figured it might take some extra wooing.
Her first time, and their only time together, sat in his memory like a lead weight, frozen as the snowy pellets that splashed down to melt in the salt water. Cold as the conscience of a kid too green and too pig-stupid to realize that revenge was a blade that cut both ways. A blade that would end up leaving him the person gutted, while she’d ended up with an MD tacked onto her name and some rich old guy for a husband.
Still, she’d ended up back here, wrecked on home shores, just as he was.
Harris reached into the Tahoe’s center console, where he picked up a pair of good binoculars, not even pretending he was staring at anything but her.
A few short hours later, the alarm pulled Christina from a dream. Bobbing along its surface, she silenced the annoying tone and reflexively reached to her left. Her hand bumped a warm, breathing bulk beside her in the predawn darkness, and she started, exhilaration and pure relief shooting through her veins.
“Doug!” she cried out, jerking upright, so thankful to have wakened from an eight-month nightmare that she felt the burn of tears.
Hand shaking, she switched on the light, and reality impaled her. The white glow from the windows, thanks to last night’s snowfall, the absence of her husband . . . and the presence of the retired racing greyhound he’d adopted last year as a running partner, who’d sneaked up beside her on the comforter. Again.