Passion Key (A Romance & Suspense Series) Read online

  “It’s so hot and moist down here,” she said. “I don’t how someone couldn’t have realized that before.” She pointed at the windows. “I’m the new owner, so I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly review every nook and cranny of the place.”

  He seemed to stifle another smile and she wondered what it was about her that seemed to amuse him.

  He looked up at the ceiling.

  “You do have a problem upstairs, though,” he said.

  Sure enough, there was a very faint line running along the edge of the ceiling. She was again surprised that she hadn’t noticed it.

  “That’s either leaking around a window upstairs, or a plumbing problem. Is there a bathroom directly above that?”

  She thought about it. “No.”

  “You’re lucky, then,” he said. “If it’s not a plumbing problem, it could be water leaking around a window. I’ll check that, too.”

  “Okay, when can you get started?” she said.

  “How about I come back tomorrow afternoon, around one o’clock?”

  “Before we pick a time, you need to tell me how much this all going to cost me,” Justine said.

  “With or without the Yankee tax?” he said.

  She didn’t understand at first, but then she got the joke.

  “Without, of course,” she said. “And then I won’t apply the Southern Surcharge to you when you visit the resort.”

  He laughed, and she was again struck by how attractive he was.

  If you cleaned him up a little…

  She stopped herself from continuing that thought.

  That part of her was dead now.

  5.

  Her car was a white Porsche convertible, several years old with nearly fifty thousand miles on the odometer. But Justine loved the way it handled, and when she punched it, the car practically leapt off the road.

  With the heat of the day now past, and the faint tinges of sunset beginning to appear on the horizon, she turned south on Highway One with the top down and the radio on. The combination of wind, good rock music and the warmth of the sun’s rays felt fantastic even at the late hour.

  Justine had learned the hard way about how much sun you could actually get driving a convertible in the Florida Keys. She had taken a two-hour car trip and never felt the heat of the sun because of the constant movement of air against her skin. Only about an hour later, when she parked the car and went inside, did she feel just how much sun she’d gotten. She would never forget that sunburn, all on the left side of her face and neck.

  What had the carpenter said? It was easy to underestimate the Florida Keys.

  She readily agreed.

  Now, she checked her odometer to see how far from Passion Key she had traveled. When she hit the twelve-mile mark, she started looking for the private road that led back to a tiny stretch of land dotted with for sale signs.

  She spotted it, turned the Porsche onto the road, and followed it to the unpaved driveway. Another car was already parked there, a silver Ford Taurus with government plates.

  Justine parked the Porsche and walked past the Ford along the dirt path toward the beach. A stand of palm trees and palmetto bushes blocked the view to the ocean, and just beyond the small stand of vegetation there was a picnic table with two people seated next to each other.

  “Nice spot,” Justine said to them.

  They turned to her and Justine recognized Agent Herring and Agent Runyan. Herring was the older of the two, a slim man with gray hair at his temples and pale skin. He wore a dark suit and had a handkerchief out, ready to dab at his forehead. Runyan was short, with a gymnast’s body and her brown hair was shaped by a bob haircut. Justine was always taken aback by how beautiful one of her FBI handlers was.

  “If the Bureau ever decides to sell this land, I would imagine they could make a pretty penny,” Herring said. Justine sat on the other side of the picnic table, her back to the ocean. For the first time, she realized that Herring actually did look a little like a fish.

  “How are you doing, Justine?” Runyan asked. The woman had big brown eyes and Justine liked and trusted her.

  “Oh, the resort needs a little tender loving care, but we all knew that,” she said. “I’m adjusting. I guess I’m mostly surprised about this meeting. I thought we weren’t supposed to get together for a few months. Let me settle in first.”

  A pelican flew overhead, continued on over the water and then dove for a fish. Agent Herring took a deep breath.

  “A situation has arisen that we felt would be unfair not to share with you. You are in no danger and your new identity is airtight.”

  Justine felt dread rise inside her.

  “But…” she prodded.

  Agent Runyan took over. “But our relationship is built on trust, and we want you to know that you can trust us. Which is why we’re here.”

  Justine looked back and forth between the Feds.

  Finally, Herring delivered the news.

  “Your ex-husband has escaped from prison. We don’t know where he is.”

  6.

  Typical.

  That was the first word to come to Archer Thorpe’s mind when he thought about the woman at Passion Key Resort.

  He could spot an attitude a mile away, and this Justine woman had one that could probably be seen from all the way back in Miami.

  But was she the typical out-of-towner? Admittedly, his first instinct had been an overwhelming yes to that question. In some ways, she looked a lot like plenty of woman who passed through Passion Key. A real beauty with a knockout body.

  But now, he wasn’t so sure if she fit the mold.

  He was back in his shop, finishing up a table repair for Mrs. Carlson, a firecracker of a woman whose husband had died years ago, probably from trying to keep up with her.

  The building had been through a number of incarnations over the years, including a cigar factory and a hotel. When he bought it he had gutted it, and turned it into both a workshop, and a home.

  Archer double-checked to make sure his repair was invisible. It was. Along with a fiery personality, Mrs. Carlson had a keen eye and demanded the best. He had yet to disappoint her, he noted with no small amount of satisfaction.

  He carefully wrapped the table in a cotton sheet and placed it in the section of his workshop for completed projects.

  The refrigerator held a fair amount of ice-cold beers and he selected one, popped the cap off and walked through the back door of his shop out to a small seating area that faced the open ocean. Archer sat down in one of his Adirondack style chairs and took a long drink from the beer. The water was unnaturally calm today, and the sun was bearing down with a frightening intensity, but the heat on his skin made Archer feel alive, something he had rarely felt when he lived in San Francisco a few years back.

  That had been a different time. And he’d been a different man.

  Now, he relished the lifestyle he had put in place on Passion Key, the ramshackle approach to life that was the exact opposite of how he’d been before. Archer had a theory. Too many people in life are always looking to judge if they’re doing better or worse. His theory was that most of the time, the comparison was negligible. The key thing that he felt most people missed was simple. Rather than trying to judge if something was better or worse, relish in the fact that it’s different. Not better. Not worse. Just different. Once he had chosen to approach life that way, everything had changed for him, for the better.

  He took another drink of the beer.

  That woman from Passion Key Resort.

  Now she was different.

  He smiled.

  In the café, when she couldn’t help but look at his sweat stained shirt with open disdain, it had been too funny. He neglected to tell her that he’d actually been in the back, rebuilding the restaurant’s built-in storage cabinets and that the back door had been blocked which was why he was exiting through the restaurant.

  But there was something about her face that made him keep it from her.
r />   And it was a beautiful face.

  No doubt about that. Passion Key saw no shortage of beautiful women, wealthy model types from Miami, young college girls down for some naughty fun on spring break, and just about everyone else who wanted to cut loose in the Keys.

  But this Justine Beaudry. There was something about her. Something haunted in her eyes that made him want to discover what was troubling her.

  He drank the rest of his beer and laughed.

  Look at him! He was acting like a teenager.

  So some hot woman took over the resort and asked him to do some work for her. He was not getting involved with anyone. He relished the simple island life and it was the whole reason he’d come here, the entire point of creating a simple existence of working with his hands and keeping the rest of his body out of trouble. Especially woman trouble.

  Archer got up and went back into the workshop. He set the empty in a crate by the side door and looked at a stack of fresh cypress planks he’d just had delivered.

  They weren’t for a paid gig.

  They were for something special he was going to make just for himself.

  Problem was, he had no idea what that project would be.

  7.

  Justine parked the Porsche in her one-car garage, just off the back of the resort, and went to her room. She felt a little sick to her stomach and knew that it had everything to do with her ex-husband escaping from prison. The sad fact was that when he had his freedom, she lost hers.

  All because of one stupid night.

  It had been a typical vicious Chicago winter night, and in their big house north of the city along the Gold Coast, Justine had been awakened by a noise. Ordinarily, she would have just gone back to sleep, but it was so cold that she always worried about pipes freezing and bursting because their mansion had been built in the 1920s and parts of the house had very little insulation.

  Because of that, she swung her feet out of bed, slipped into her fleece robe and fur-lined slippers, and went down the stairs into the great room and listened.

  There was another banging sound and she knew it was coming from the garage. They had a bedroom suite over the garage that had originally been the maid’s quarters and it was one of the areas that had little insulation. There was a bathroom above the garage and she worried that one of those pipes had frozen.

  Justine walked through the kitchen, then through the mud room and opened the door to the garage.

  Her husband Daniel was standing at the back of his car with the trunk open. He and another man were shoving a third man into the trunk. Justine saw the man’s face and the blood that had poured from a small hole near his temple.

  He was clearly dead.

  A look of fury crossed Daniel’s face and he turned to her.

  “Go back inside.”

  The ice in his voice was several degrees colder than the sub-zero temperatures outside.

  Justine did as she was told. For weeks after, she and her husband never talked about the incident. In fact, they never really talked at all.

  Privately, using public computers where she could clear the machine’s history, she began to piece together who her husband really was.

  So not long after when the FBI approached her, she was all too ready to talk.

  Now, in her new condo with the memories rushing back at her, Justine wanted to cry, but was determined not to. Daniel had made her cry far too many times to remember and she’d be damned if she’d let him do it to her again. Let the jackass come down and try to find her, she thought, trying to muster up some bravado but the words sounded hollow to her.

  The heck with it, she thought.

  She wasn’t going to sit around and worry. That was the old Justine. This was the new Justine.

  The O’Connells, her first guests, were having a cocktail by the pool.

  “How are we doing, folks?” she asked, forcing her voice to be calm, steady and cheery. It was the complete opposite of the fear and unsteadiness she felt inside.

  “We got a lot of sun today,” the man said. His face was already pink from exposure to the sun.

  “People always underestimate the power of the sun down here,” Justine said.

  The woman looked carefully at Justine. “How did you come to own this place? Are you married?”

  “Louise, don’t pry!” her husband chided her.

  The woman rolled her eyes.

  “It’s hardly prying, Jesse.”

  Justine laughed.

  “No, it’s fine. I ran a small business back in Chicago,” Justine began, using the story she’d carefully rehearsed many times with her FBI handlers. “The good news was it became very successful. The bad news was I could no longer keep running it. So I sold it. And since I’d been a Midwestern girl my whole life and didn’t care to see one single more winter I sold the business to a giant holding company, took the money and bought this place.”

  “And you live here alone?” the woman asked.

  The man shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Honey, you are relentless,” he said to his wife.

  Justine figured it was a gesture, and a phrase, he used often.

  “No, not all,” Justine said. “Every week I stay with someone new, like you two.” She smiled and her guests laughed.

  “Now,” Justine said. “What are you two planning on doing while you’re down here?”

  “Exactly what you see us doing. We are going to sit by the pool all day and jump in the water when we get too hot,” Jesse O’Connell said. “And then in the evening we’re going to go into town and find a good restaurant.”

  “But we’re not going to eat at the same place every day,” Louise said. She pointed at Jesse with her thumb. “This bozo finds a place he likes and then wants to go there all the time. Not me, I like to explore.”

  “Well, you have plenty to choose from around here,” Justine said. “Now, is there anything I can do for you two?”

  The woman looked at her husband.

  “Well,” Jesse began, seeming almost sheepish. “There’s quite a loud banging once in awhile. We think it’s a door or a window slamming somewhere.”

  Justine frowned.

  “I know what you mean, I had a contractor here to look at it, he’ll fix it tomorrow,” she said. “In the meantime, I’ll figure out a way to make sure it doesn’t cause a problem this evening.”

  She said her goodbyes to the couple and walked down to the beach.

  The tide was going out and she walked along the smooth part of the sand, her toes squishing into the wetness. Justine loved the feeling. Walking barefoot always made her feel like she was on vacation.

  The wind had started to pick up and she saw whitecaps not too far from shore. It was a warm breeze and the sea grass was rustling at the top of the dunes. The sound of the waves hitting the shore eased her mind for a moment and she felt the tension relax just slightly from her neck and shoulders.

  A soft sigh escaped her lips.

  This place would be perfect, she thought.

  If my husband were still in prison.

  8.

  The resort Justine had been awarded by the FBI had been in the hands of the government for reasons that hadn’t been exactly shared with her. From hints supplied by Agent Runyan, it sounded like the property had been owned by a financier in New York who had swindled investors with an elaborate Ponzi scheme. Passion Key Resort had just been one of his hundreds of properties that were mostly run only for the sake of appearance, hence the obvious signs of disrepair that needed attention.

  By and large, though, she thought the property had a lot of potential, and it was now in her name. Beachfront real estate in the Keys was expensive, and Justine knew she could make the place a success.

  The question was, did she want to?

  It had troubled her slightly when she agreed to testify against her husband and enter the witness protection program. She had still been in shock, frankly, and in some ways felt incapable of making decisions.


  But she’d made them anyway.

  From somewhere deep within her a pocket of strength had begun to blossom and for the first time she felt steadier on her feet.

  That was, until yesterday.

  Come on, girl.

  Justine shook off the negativity. The FBI would handle her ex-husband, she had her own life now.

  Just as she arrived at that conclusion, Justine heard a car pull up outside the front door, and a door slammed.

  She got up, and saw a couple emerging from a red Toyota that had to be a rental.

  “Good morning,” Justine said. “Welcome to Passion Key!”

  Over the next two hours the rest of her guests arrived and now all four suites were occupied.

  The couple with the red car was from Minnesota and the other two parties had arrived from New Jersey and Windsor, Ontario.

  Justine went back to the office and fired up her computer. She spent the next hour organizing the resort’s paperwork and bank records. Everything had been set up for her, but she needed to familiarize herself with the financial workings.

  She had learned her lesson.

  While she’d been married to Daniel, she had allowed herself to be blissfully unaware of his business dealings. She had enjoyed the expensive house, the travel, and the gifts. But they had been small compensation for the feeling that her husband had married her for appearances and promptly dove into his business dealings and kept her alone, only taking her out to public functions when absolutely necessary.

  When the Feds had finally approached her about her husband’s real business, she knew the artifice that her life had become was now over.

  No, she would never let that happen again.

  Justine made a short to-do list and was putting on her running shoes to get a workout in when she heard someone call out from the lobby.

  “Hello!”

  She finished lacing up her sneakers and went to the lobby where she found Archer Thorpe standing with a toolbox in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.