The Third Mrs. Mitchell. Lynnette Kent
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with streaks of silver which didn’t show up in the lousy license photo. Pete hadn’t known her long enough or well enough to be sure whether all that color was natural or not.
After all, they’d only been married thirty-six days.
He pivoted back to the window, automatically taking off his hat. “Mary Rose?”
The red door swung open. The best legs on Hilton Head Island during the summer of 1992—and probably every year since—unfolded into the sunlight. In one smooth move, Ms. Bowdrey stood up out of the car and faced him, pushing up the sleeves of her navy-blue sweater, tucking strands of shiny, shoulder-length hair behind her ears. “I don’t believe this. Pete?”
“That’s right.” He needed a second to remember the next line. “Uh…how are you?” His mama always said good manners could salvage even the most bizarre situations. “It’s been a long time.” Not that he could tell by looking at the woman in front of him. Still sleek as a cat, this Mary Rose could be the eighteen-year-old girl he’d spent that summer with. Married.
Worked so damn hard to forget.
His first ex-wife gave him a beauty-queen smile. “That it has. I’m fine. How about you?” With a faint clink of diamonds and gold, her hands slipped into the pockets of her short white skirt, heading off any impulse he might have felt to give her a hug. She kept her dark sunglasses on, so he couldn’t read the expression in those marine-blue eyes.
Pete didn’t need an interpreter for this message: Keep your distance was as clear as the nearby billboard for fast food and gas. “I’m good. Where’re you headed?”
“New Skye. I’ll be visiting my sister for a little while.”
“That so?” He’d have felt better if she’d said the sky was falling. The possibility of Mary Rose spending more than an afternoon in the same county he lived in, let alone the same town, was big-time bad news.
Why couldn’t he have been asleep when the Porsche passed through?
Pete shook off the feeling of dread creeping up his spine. “Well, it looks to me like you’re in kind of a hurry to get there. Speed limit’s sixty on this stretch of road, you know.”
Mary Rose bit her bottom lip, which was frosted with the same pink as her fingernails. “I guess I wasn’t watching the speedometer. I’ll slow down from now on. I promise.”
“I hope so.” Pete turned toward the cruiser again. “You get back in the car. I’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”
Standard procedure didn’t use up much brain space, which was good because Pete registered a definite lack of available cells at the moment. Working on autopilot, he wrote up the ticket, logged in the information and ran a check on Mary Rose’s license. There were no outstanding violations on her record, which probably meant she’d talked the other suckers who pulled her over out of writing her up. Maybe she took off her sunglasses for them.
When he handed the citation through the Porsche’s window, Mary Rose gazed up at him, her mouth open in surprise. “You’re giving me a ticket?”
“You can contest the charge in court. There’s a trial date on the sheet. If you fail to appear, your plea of guilty will be assumed and you’ll be expected to pay the full fine.”
“But…” She pressed her lips together for a second, then relaxed them into a sweet, coaxing curve he remembered all too well. “Come on, Pete. There’s no traffic. I wasn’t hurting anybody. Can’t you let this one go?”
He wasn’t even tempted. “Sorry. You keep it under the speed limit from now on, all right?” Tipping his hat, he stepped back, needing to get away. Fast. “Good seeing you again, Mary Rose. Take care.”
Mary Rose watched through the rearview mirror as Pete Mitchell returned to his car. The man was still seriously gorgeous, being possessed of wide shoulders, narrow hips and a tight butt, plus those light gray, dark lashed eyes gleaming like polished pewter in his tanned face. When they were together all those years ago, he’d worn his black hair pulled back in a short ponytail, but the regulation highway-patrol buzz cut wasn’t bad at all. A little austere, maybe, but Pete had always been a straight-arrow kind of guy at heart.
That was why he’d married her in the first place, right? You got a girl in trouble, you took responsibility. If you were lucky, she lost the baby and set you free.
Her ex-husband had been nothing but lucky.
Blowing an irritated breath off her lower lip, Mary Rose put the car in gear, checked for traffic and eased into the sparse flow. Pete followed in his cruiser; while she kept the needle carefully set at sixty, he breezed past her with a wave.
“Oh, of course.” She hit the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. “Mr. Big Shot doesn’t have to obey the speed limit.” She threw him a furious glance as he took the next exit, once again vanishing from her life.
Or maybe not. He had grown up in New Skye, graduated in the same class with her older sister, Kate. Did he still live there? What were the chances she might see him again while she was in town?
Mary Rose shuddered at the thought, tempted to turn around and head straight back to Charleston, damn the speed limit.
But running away was not an option. Kate was in deep trouble. She sounded more desperate with every phone call.
And not even the possibility of another encounter with the man she’d never quite managed to forget was going to keep Mary Rose from standing by her sister during the worst days of her life.
Fifteen minutes after leaving her ex-husband behind, Mary Rose took the interstate exit for the town of New Skye, North Carolina. She hadn’t been home for at least six years; her final Christmas in college had been her last visit, despite her parents’ repeated invitations. Nobody climbed the ladder of success in the business world by indulging themselves with extended vacations. This was the first time since graduate school she’d taken off more than five business days in a row.
Anyway, it wasn’t as if she never saw her family. They all spent a week together in the condo at the beach every summer and a week skiing in Colorado every January. She talked to her parents once a week and chatted with Kate and her kids whenever either of them had a spare hour or so. That was as much family togetherness as Mary Rose, personally, could stand.
So now she studied her hometown with interest as she drove through. The outskirts of New Skye—with its service stations and fast-food restaurants, the water-treatment plant, the police academy, the firefighters’ training tower—could have been any small town in the Southeast. Plenty of asphalt, few trees and the flat Sand-hills landscape did little to invite a traveler to linger longer than it took to get a tank of gas.
But then she turned off the commercial strip to drive slowly along Main Street, toward Courthouse Circle. This wasn’t the dead downtown scene she remembered from her high-school years. On each side of the newly bricked street, antique shops, coffee bars and cafés inhabited what had once been empty storefronts, or worse, bars and pickup joints. The old movie house had been renovated and was showing an art film she’d seen advertised recently in New York. Huge pots of pansies and daffodils punctuated the sidewalks underneath newly-leafing pear trees.
Mary Rose clicked her tongue in amazement. New Skye had certainly changed for the better in her absence.
She was glad to see that some things remained the same, like the Victorian elegance of the county courthouse, standing tall on its island of bright green grass. Traffic circled around the red brick, white-columned building, one of the oldest in town—the fire of 1876 had destroyed all of the business district except the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the courthouse and the Velvet Rose Tavern. Thankfully, the Velvet Rose had succumbed to its own fire only a couple of decades later. The downtown branch of the public library—still functioning, still imposing with its white marble—had been built in its place.
On the far side of Courthouse Circle, Main Street followed a single hill rising up out of the flat terrain.