CHAPTER SIX

      CASSIE LAY ATOP the padded sundeck of a thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser and hoped this second outing Celeste had arranged for her would go more smoothly than the first.

      So far everything had gone according to schedule. The rental car had arrived at the hotel that morning promptly at nine o’clock, and less than an hour later, Cassie had crossed the causeway on I-45 into Galveston.

      She’d spent another half hour looking for Ethan Gold’s house on Jamaica Beach, but she hadn’t minded the search. From her very first glimpse of the Gulf, the tension had steadily melted away.

      Now Cassie felt positively decadent, lying topless in the sun on her own boat. Well, okay, her own borrowed boat. The distinction didn’t bother her one bit because she had two whole days to loll about in the sun and surf and pretend that this life really did belong to her.

      Soon enough she’d have to come back to earth and start the old job search, but for now, this had to be one of her cousin’s better ideas, she decided lazily.

      According to Celeste, Ethan Gold, her old drama professor at the University of Houston, had insisted that she have the use of his beach house while she was in town. “There’s a boat and everything,” Celeste had told her. “I know how much you love to be out on the water.”

      Cassie had forgotten just how much she did love the fresh air and open sea. When she and Celeste were kids, their fathers had owned a fishing boat together, and on weekends and summers, the cousins had practically lived on the Gulf. They’d become expert swimmers early on—their fathers had seen to that—and had even learned to handle a boat by the ripe old age of eleven.

      They’d become so proficient, in fact, that by the time they hit adolescence, they were taking the boat out alone, sometimes with permission and sometimes without.

      The two had been as close as sisters back then, and those days were some of the happiest and most carefree of Cassie’s life.

      Then everything had changed. Celeste’s family moved away, and Cassie’s parents divorced. Her father relocated to Florida, and Cassie seldom heard from him. A few years later, her mother was diagnosed with emphysema and later, lung cancer. For almost a decade, it had been one trauma after another, and somewhere along the way, the carefree, adventurous Cassie had gotten lost in the harsh realities of life.

      In her most vulnerable moments, she sometimes wondered how differently things might have turned out if her parents had stayed together. Would her mother still have gotten sick? Would Cassie, free of responsibilities, have had the nerve to pursue her dreams the way her cousin had?

      She liked to think so, but she’d learned a long time ago that there was no profit in looking back. Besides, she had the rest of her life to work on those dreams, to try and recapture that old carefree Cassie, and now she had nothing to hold her back. No job. No fiancé. No responsibilities except to herself.

      That was why she’d been so eager to accept Celeste’s proposal. It wasn’t just the money or the new clothes or the luxurious accommodations that had attracted her to the scheme. It was the scheme itself. The promise of adventure for which Cassie had been yearning a long, long time.

      And so here she was. Footloose and fancy-free.

      Well, almost.

      There was the little matter of that threatening voice on the phone the other night.

       “Did I scare you?”

      Yes, as a matter of fact.

      Every time Cassie thought about that anonymous call, shivers stole up and down her spine. The person on the other end hadn’t actually threatened her, but if the call had been nothing more than a prank, why had the caller gone to the trouble of electronically disguising his voice?

      And afterward, Lyle Lester had shown up at Cassie’s door.

      True enough, he’d left a flashlight and candles outside her room, but his arrival had been extremely fortuitous. Could he have called her from the hallway on a cell phone? Cassie wondered. She’d received a couple of hang up calls since then, too. Was Lyle responsible for those as well?

      He’d said the other night that he was an admirer, but just how big a fan was he? Had his appreciation crossed the line into psychotic obsession?

      And speaking of psychotic…

      Cassie frowned as an image of the stranger she’d seen at Metro materialized in her head. The more she thought about him—and she’d thought about him a lot—the more bizarre his behavior seemed. Everyone on the patio had reacted as though they’d heard a gunshot when the truck backfired. But rather than taking cover, the stranger had lunged straight for Cassie. Why? Why had he been so willing to put himself between her and a bullet? And, even more disturbing, why had he assumed she was the target?

      In retrospect, Cassie had to admit that her own behavior that night had been a little on the bizarre side as well. Coming on to a complete stranger was so totally unlike her.

      But…was it really?

      How did she know what she might be capable of? It had been a long time since she’d had the opportunity to explore the real Cassie. For the past ten years, she’d been a caregiver, a fiancée, and a schoolteacher, but none of those things had satisfied her deepest yearnings, her darkest fantasies.

      Somehow, the blue-eyed stranger had tapped into her hidden desires, and for a fleeting moment, he’d unleashed something wild inside of her. Something at once familiar and strange.

      He could give her adventure. She knew that instinctively.

      He wasn’t like any man she’d ever known.