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      CHAPTER ONE

      “HUDSON GROUP, HOW may I direct your call?”

      “Macintyre Hudson, please.”

      Could silence be disapproving? Lucy Lindstrom asked herself. As in, you didn’t just cold-call a multi-million-dollar company and ask to speak to their CEO?

      “Mr. Hudson is not available right now. I’d be happy to take a message.”

      Lucy recognized the voice on the other end of the phone. It was that same uppity-accented receptionist who had taken her name and number thirteen times this week.

      Mac was not going to talk to her unless he wanted to. And clearly, he did not want to. She had to fight with herself to stay on the line. It would have been so much easier just to hang up the phone. She reminded herself she had no choice. She had to change tack.

      “It’s an urgent family matter.”

      “He’s not in his office. I’ll have to see if he’s in the building. And I’ll have to tell him who is calling.”

      Lucy was certain she heard faint suspicion there, as if her voice was beginning to be recognized also, and was on the blocked-caller list.

      “You could tell him it’s Harriet Freda calling.” She picked a fleck of lavender paint off her thumbnail.

      “I’ll take your number and have him call you back when I locate him.”

      “It’s okay. I’ll hold,” Lucy said with as much firm-ness as she could muster.

      As she waited, she looked down at the paper in her purple-paint-stained hand. It showed a neat list of names, all of them crossed off save for one.

      The remaining name stood out as if it was written in neon tubing.

      The boy who ruined my life.

      Macintyre W. Hudson. A voice whispered from her past, Everybody just calls me Mac.

      Just like that, seven years slipped away, and she could see him, Mac Hudson, the most handsome boy ever born, with those dark, laughing eyes, that crooked smile, the silky chocolate hair, too long, falling down over his brow.

      Just like that, the shiver ran up and down her spine, and Lucy remembered exactly why that boy had ru-ined her life.

      Only, now he wasn’t a boy any longer, but a man.

      And she was a woman.

      “Macintyre Hudson did not ruin your life,” Lucy told herself sternly. “At best he stole a few moments of it.”

      But what moments those were, a voice inside her insisted.

      “Rubbish,” Lucy said firmly, but her confidence, not in great supply these days anyway, dwindled. It felt as if she had failed at everything she’d set her hand to, and failed spectacularly.

      She had never gone to university as her parents had hoped, but had become a clerk in a bookstore in the neighboring city of Glen Oak, instead.

      She had worked up to running her own store, Books and Beans, with her fiancé, but she had eagerly divested herself of the coffee shop and storefront part of the busi-ness after their humiliatingly public breakup.

      Now, licking her wounds, she was back in her home-town of Lindstrom Beach in her old family home on the shores of Sunshine Lake.

      The deeding of the house was charity, plain and sim-ple. Her widowed mother had given it to Lucy before remarrying and moving to California. She said it had been in the Lindstrom family for generations and it needed to stay there.

      And even though that was logical, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect, Lucy had the ugly feeling that what her mother really thought was that Lucy wouldn’t make it without her help.

      “But I have a dream,” she reminded herself firmly, shoring herself up with that before Mac came on the line.

      Despite her failures, over the past year Lucy had de-veloped a sense of purpose. And more important, she felt needed for the first time in a long time.

      It bothered Lucy that she had to remind herself of that as she drummed her fingers and listened to the music on the other end of the phone.

      The song, she realized when she caught herself hum-ming along, was one about a rebel and had always been the song she had associated with Mac. It was about a boy who was willing to risk all but his heart.

      That was Macintyre Hudson to a T, so who could imagine the former Lindstrom Beach renegade and unapologetic bad boy at the helm of a multimillion-dollar company that produced the amazingly popular Wild Side outdoor products?

      Unexpectedly, the music stopped.

      “Mama?”

      Mac’s voice was urgent and worried. It had deep-ened, Lucy was sure, since the days of their youth, but it had that same gravelly, sensuous edge to it that had always sent tingles up and down her spine.

      Now, when she most needed to be confident, was not the time to think of the picture of him on his website, the one that had dashed her hopes that maybe he had gotten heavy or lost all his hair in the years that had passed.

      But think of it she did. No boring head-and-shoulders shot in a nice Brooks Brothers suit for the CEO of Hudson Group.

      No, the caption stated the founder of the Wild Side line was demonstrating the company’s new kayak, Wild Ride. He was on a raging wedge of white water that funneled between rocks. Through flecks of foam, frozen by the camera, Macintyre Hudson had been captured in all his considerable masculine glory.

      He’d been wearing a life jacket, a Wild Side product that showed off the amazing broadness of his shoulders, the powerful muscle of sun-bronzed arms gleaming with water. More handsome than ever, obviously in his element, he’d had a look in his devil-dark eyes, a cast to his mouth and a set to his jaw that was one of fierce concentration and formidable determination.

      Maybe he didn’t have any hair. He’d been wearing a helmet in the photo.

      “Mama?” he said again. “What’s wrong? Why didn’t you call on my private