Paradise Burning Page 3

  Freedom. Until this moment, as her blood surged, Mandy hadn’t even caught a hint of how much the thought appealed to her. Something inside her had changed. Was Kira’s death a catalyst? The thought—the threat—of seeing Peter? Or was it simply the loosening of the chains that bound her to AKA?

  No matter. “How much?” Mandy asked.

  By late afternoon Mandy had tramped up and down the steps of more RVs than she had thought existed. And then she’d found it. A thirty-footer with a bedroom in the rear, plus a living area with a sofa, a small dinette, and a nearly full-size refrigerator and freezer. The bathroom? Well, she was glad she was skinny.

  She filled out the paperwork, gratefully accepting the dealer’s offer to have the RV delivered to the campground the next day. She’d done it, she’d actually done it. As Mandy signed her name on the rental contract and wrote out the necessary check, she felt a surge of grim satisfaction. Peter was going to have a fit.

  A few hours later she sat in front of her laptop in the only motel room she’d been able to find in Golden Beach and stared at her screen. It was now the night of her fourth day out from AKA. Peter had probably been expecting her since yesterday. Was he worried? Pacing up and down? Calling Jeff, calling Eleanor? Well, too bad.

  After reporting her arrival to AKA the day before, Mandy had left word with the main switchboard that she’d been delayed, then turned off her phone. No explanations, just that. Let them make of it what they would. With every breath of freedom, she was getting feistier.

  Peter.

  Mandy flashed a wicked grin as she typed a long-dormant e-mail address. She stared at the screen, her grin fading in a rush of old memories. There was a time when she and Peter had e-talked nearly every day . . .

  Hi, Mouse. It’s damn hot in Durban. Do you expect snow for Christmas? Not exactly intimate prose, but they’d kept in touch. The Yangtze gorge is glorious, kid. You should have come with.

  What if she had?

  Miss ya, Mouse. London next week. Grab a ticket and join me. Somehow it never happened. The gap between their lives was wider than the Atlantic.

  Yet two years ago, when Peter’s wanderlust had ended in Manhattan, they’d actually set a date and time to meet. Older, mellower, more willing to compromise, they’d agreed to celebrate the publication of Peter’s first book. She’d arrived a day early, planning to buy a whole new wardrobe at Bloomie’s. And found Peter in bed, covered only by the lithe lines of his editor’s editorial assistant.

  Well, not quite, but Peter had answered the door in nothing but jeans and a red face, and Mandy’s imagination filled in the rest. The lithe young thing, attempting to slink out of the bedroom and down the hall, hadn’t exactly left her clueless either.

  Not that Mandy hadn’t expected Peter to have other women, but the day before their first meeting in two years . . .

  Well, hell!

  She’d rolled her suitcase back to the elevator, back to Penn Station. Back to Boston. Where she rolled up the last faintly hopeful remnants of her love life and tossed them away.

  Mandy frowned at the screen, her fingers skimmed the keys. Peter. I have some things to take care of. Expect me when you see me. M.

  Good. That should really piss him off.

  “Not to worry. You’ll get the hang of it in no time at all.” Ed Cramer, manager of Calusa Campground, gave Mandy an encouraging smile as she watched the car with the two men from the RV dealership disappear down the dirt road.

  Cramer had a round face, lined by at least seventy years of hearty living and topped by a ring of white-flecked gray hair not quite successfully combed over a pink bald spot. But his body was lean and his eyes sparkled with an interest in everything around him. Mandy liked him immediately. But life in a campground was not at all what she was used to. And the lecture she’d just received on how to dump her sewage and live with a propane tank nearly had her running screaming down the road, calling the deliverymen back.

  She didn’t do domestic. She didn’t do mechanical. Bytes and bits and codes, zeros and ones, that was her world. This one was scary.

  Ed Cramer was talking—better pay attention. Who knew what dangers she might miss if she didn’t. But he was only enumerating a list of campground activities long enough to make Mandy’s jaw drop.

  “It—it sounds wonderful, but I’m going to be working,” she stammered, somehow feeling that her non-participation would be letting the campground down. “I’m afraid I won’t have time for activities.”

  “Well,” drawled the trim campground manager whose gleaming dentures contrasted sharply with the depth of his tan, “there’s three johnboats down at the dock. You can always fit in some rowing, maybe a bit of fishing, any time you like.”

  “That sounds great,” Mandy murmured. “I’ll remember that.” Like she was going to take some itty bitty dinghy onto a river that was probably stuffed with alligators, water moccasins, and God alone knew what else. Jeffrey Armitage and Eleanor Kingsley had not produced an idiot.

  Mandy thanked Ed for his help, then stood stock still, her gaze following him, almost in amazement, as he headed back toward his office. What was she doing here? She, Mandy Armitage, the girl who was so certain AKA couldn’t function without her, was standing in the middle of a campground in Florida, twelve hundred miles from home. Instead of the cocoon of a cottage on AKA’s vast acres, she had a tin can on wheels. No vital mission to plan. No friends or colleagues. No Eleanor or Jeff.

  She hadn’t wanted to be here. Or that’s what she’d told herself. She’d even blamed her wishy-washy reaction to Eleanor’s orders on grief over Kira. Truth was, now that she had left AKA behind, the heavy gray nothingness that enveloped her after Kira’s death was beginning to show faint streaks of light.

  She’d done it. She was out. Though Florida, admittedly, was a challenge.

  Peter even more so.

  Mandy took a deep breath and looked around. Neatly arrayed around her was a mixed bag of recreational vehicles, from chunky toppers designed for pick-up trucks to classic silver Airstream trailers, to giant fifth wheels. Yet all were nicely spaced out under a canopy of tall pines, sturdy live oaks, and waving palms. Lots of green grass, studded with picnic tables. Not an inch of asphalt in sight.

  About half the residents were snowbirds, Ed Cramer had explained. Northerners who migrated south for the winter. Which, Mandy guessed, included herself. Did she escape the name because she was here to work? Or was she a snowbird, because, come spring, she’d fly away home?

  Or maybe not?

  That thought was alarming enough to get her feet moving. Curiosity and a determination to think of anything but Peter propelled her toward the river that formed the eastern boundary of Calusa Campground. Although not a natural people person, Mandy made a genuine effort to return the smiles, nods, and greetings from her predominantly senior neighbors as she passed by. Not so hard, after all. But the warm glow that had begun to blossom inside winked out when she saw the river. The Calusa couldn’t have been farther from a sparkling clear New England stream if some mad scientist had set out to design it that way. No rushing current, gurgling over granite boulders, the Calusa was the color of mahogany, the current so sluggish the water appeared to be standing still. The dark depths were like a black hole, Mandy thought, ready to pull unwary strangers to their doom. Capable, in fact, of concealing anything beneath an impenetrable surface that screamed of hidden secrets.

  Feeling almost dizzy, Mandy forced her gaze away from the river’s unreflecting surface. She was standing on a small wooden dock. Tied to it were the three small boats Ed Cramer had mentioned. Fishing? No way, no how. She was quite certain the boats were smaller than the alligators that lurked in these waters.

  And yet . . . it was so quiet. As if the world of the Calusa went on hold with the coming of dusk. Or was it always like this? A place where the modern world dropped away and only the primeval remained?

  Frowning at her lapse into the fanciful, Mandy examined the area near the dock.
Graceful arches of willow and live oak dipped their branches into the quiescent black shadows along the river’s edge. Except for the clearing created by the campground, a solid mass of greenery overhung both banks, including massive amounts of vines that looked like wild grape.

  The ambiance was beginning to grow on her. As dark and mysterious as the river was, it was strangely soothing. Peaceful. Balm for a troubled soul.

  She wasn’t troubled! Just a little . . . torn. Struggling hard to maintain her dignity. To not run straight into Peter’s arms and never look back.

  Gradually, Mandy became aware of the noises that were so much a part of this old Florida setting they hadn’t registered before. The insistent chirrups of a myriad insects, the calls of birds she couldn’t see, let alone name. She did, however, recognize the sudden loud scolding of a squirrel. Turning, she discovered him perched on the moss-hung limb of a live oak, the object of his anger a large black and white cat sitting on the river bank calmly washing himself. Mandy strolled over to the cat, murmuring appropriate words of greeting. The cat ceased his bath, cocked his head to one side, and deigned to allow Mandy to scratch behind his ears and rub her hand along his checkerboard back.

  Perhaps it was going to be a season in paradise, after all, as Eleanor had assured her. Perhaps this idyllic spot, the magic of a jungle river and its creatures, could mend the shambles of what she’d tried to convince herself was a good life.

  Even Jeff and Eleanor, who would never be chosen Parents of the Year, had known something was wrong. That something had to change.

  The thing being Mandy.

  But she’d only be manipulated so far. She wasn’t going to do this their way. Or Peter’s way. Only Mandy’s way.

  My way or the highway. And wasn’t that what had put paid to her marriage in the first place?

  “Bye, cat.” Mandy sighed. Head down, shoulders slumped, she headed back to her first night in her new home. The freezer was full of TV dinners. She’d bought a gallon jug of green tea and a pint of Häagen Dazs Macadamia Brittle. What more did she need?

  Mandy peered into the narrow full-length mirror on the back of the door to her equally narrow closet. If she’d known she was going to end up living in a tin can, no matter how luxurious, she wouldn’t have ordered all those clothes. On top of that, since her catalog treasures hadn’t arrived yet, she’d made the rounds of the resort boutiques lining Golden Beach’s Main Street. Definitely, Sin City as far as shopping was concerned. She who never shopped was discovering a whole new facet to her personality.

  Her hair wasn’t bad either. Mandy cocked her head to one side, took another look. A salon Phil Whitlaw recommended had cut and highlighted her hair, transforming it from mouse to gleaming warm brown in a saucy, shorter length that curved softly in just below her ears. Eyeliner and mascara had done wonders for her eyes, but the rest of her . . . that was a woman she didn’t know. Wasn’t sure she liked. An almost-Eleanor look in a sage green pantsuit worn over a lacy white camisole.

  Then again, her alternative was Mandy Mouse’s same-old, same-old jeans and T-shirt. One last peek in the mirror. Frowning, Mandy added a dash more lipstick, grabbed up her laptop and brand new purse, and set out to meet her Nemesis.

  Local maps had not yet caught up with Amber Run. The area where Peter lived was nothing more than a blank white space along the river, about a mile north of Calusa Campground. “Drive in, take a right at the community dock,” Phil Whitlaw had told her. “You can’t miss it. Biggest house in Amber Run.”

  Mandy turned in at the development’s impressive black wrought iron gate and drove past one-acre parcels, each with a neat sign giving the lot number. Closer to the river, she passed three homes in varying stages of construction. At the community dock, considerably larger than the one at the campground, she turned right down a road so overhung with trees, their beards of Spanish Moss almost brushed the windshield. A lot of ambiance for a brand new development. Someone had cared enough to spare the trees.

  And an odd hideaway for Peter the Great, who’d always wanted to be in the thick of things. Mandy had named him that when she was fifteen and studying imperial Russia in school. Jeff had just recruited Peter right out of the Boston University School of Journalism, and the young agent had hit AKA running. As if Heir Apparent were already stamped on his forehead. A street-smart kid with a steel-trap mind who had created his ever-so-slightly rough-edged persona out of imagination, a sharp eye, and sheer determination.

  And there it was. She’d come to the end of the road, and above her head rose a huge house on stilts, enclosed on three sides by a screen of tall trees. Oh. My.

  Peter was home, or at least there was a 4Runner parked beneath the house, with room for another car beside it. The rest of the ground floor area was walled with white wooden lattice, evidently concealing some kind of storage area. A large neatly asphalted circle in front of the house provided guest parking. Sweeping double staircases led up to an elaborately carved front door, and to a wraparound deck that put residents straight into the heart of old Florida.

  Wow! There was no other word. Mandy gaped. This was where Peter expected to live. If she weren’t the most stiff-necked, stubborn, prideful idiot ever created.

  Ah, well . . . time to face the music. Hoisting her purse and laptop to her shoulder, Mandy got out of the car.

  The front door burst open. Peter charged out, braced both arms on the deck’s decorative railing. “Goddamn it, Mouse! Where the hell have you been?”

  Chapter Three

  Dejà vu. She’d already lived this bit. More than once. That fateful moment in Manhattan. The day Peter walked away from AKA. The weeks and months before that when they’d argued, Peter raging, Mandy stubbornly resisting, usually ending in tears.

  Nothing had changed.

  Oh, yes, it had. The mouse was working on becoming a lion, and they were both older, hopefully wiser. Which didn’t keep Mandy’s knees from turning to jelly and her heart from ping-ponging inside her shell of a body in a frantic attempt to escape. She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t handle it. She wanted to leave. Now.

  Peter was nearly upon her. Incredibly, Mandy stood her ground, drinking him in like some toxic brew she knew wasn’t good for her, but couldn’t resist. Except for the scowl, he looked . . . good. Scrumptious. There were more pounds on his six-foot frame, but he’d been lanky, appearing undernourished no matter how much he ate. Now he had broad shoulders, a solid chest. His stomach was still flat, his hips lean. And he still wore his dark curls cut ruthlessly short. The glowing amber eyes hadn’t changed either. Always alert, always examining, analyzing. Unfortunately, at the moment they were flashing a bit more lightning than Mandy could have wished.

  And, yes, life had etched more lines above his square chin and around his eyes. Those eyes that tilted up ever so slightly, a genetic gift from some ancient Asian tribe on a rampage in Europe. In short, he was Peter. The epitome of an adventurer. Exciting and dangerous.

  Peter, who’d once been hers. And she hadn’t been woman enough to hold on. Hadn’t loved enough to come down on the right side of divided loyalties.

  Obviously, his temper hadn’t abated. He looked ready to eat her alive. Standing on the first step, towering above her, he was casting off glints of rage like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. “I’ve been calling AKA ten times a day to find out if they’d heard from you. Blast it, Mouse, you can’t just leave some silly message saying you’re fine, then disappear off the face of the earth.”

  Mandy stepped back. She’d been close enough to smell his shaving cream, and that wasn’t good. Cool. No matter how violent the churning inside, she had to be cool. “I checked in every day. There was no need to worry.”

  “No need!” Peter mocked. “I expected you three days ago. I had the house cleaned, your room ready, groceries, the table set for two. You didn’t even call me. I waited and I waited, pictured you mangled on the highway, mugged, kidnapped. I had to call AKA to find out you were delayed. Well, let me tell you,
Mouse, I’m not a happy camper.”

  “Hello, Peter. It’s nice to see you too.”

  “Don’t lay the guilt on me, kid. Not this time. You’re three days late. I’ve acquired a whole slew of gray hairs. As your employer, your boss, I’d like to know why.”

  “Would you mind coming down off that step? I’m getting a crick in my neck.” Damn. Even on a level surface, she still had to look up to him. This was the point where she ought to suggest they call the whole thing off, but Peter was just angry enough he might agree. So . . .

  “Okay,” Mandy admitted, “I was tweaking your tail. “I was being petty, and . . . I guess you could call it ‘hiding out.’ There really were some things I had to do,” she added hastily, “but I’m here now. If you still want me to work for you, then let’s get at it.”

  With his arms crossed over his chest, Peter studied her, finally giving a curt nod. “Go on up. Give me your keys, I’ll unload the car.”

  Oh-oh. Mandy nodded to the laptop case hanging over her shoulder. “This is all I have. I–I’m staying at Calusa Campground.”

  “Like hell you are!”

  Mandy winced, stuck up her chin. “I rented an RV. I need the independence, Peter. I mean, you know what’s going to happen if I stay here.”

  Yeah, he did. Wasn’t that the whole point?

  And if his Mouse was developing a roar instead of a squeak, maybe that wasn’t so bad after all. “Shall we discuss it inside?” Peter relieved Mandy of her laptop, waved her up the stairs, grimly satisfied that he’d managed to get the words past his clenched teeth.

  The sparks that zinged between them when he touched her made his eyes cross and other parts of his anatomy stir to life. Guess she was right. Living under the same roof while they sorted out the mess they’d made of their lives hadn’t been the best thinking he’d ever done. They’d end up in bed, where they’d never had a problem, and the same old conflicts would remain unresolved, hanging between them as solidly as the Great Wall of China.