Trial By Seduction

“Wait—yeah, there she is, just beyond the light now, heading for the water.” Philip clutched his cousin’s forearm. “Oh, my God, took—she’s taken off her shoes.”

“Easy boy,” Mark said calmly. “You have seen feet before.”

But as his gaze focused on the woman’s slim figure, his carefully cultivated cynicism began to peel away like an old coat of paint under a bright sun.

By God, this wasn’t just another of Philip’s over-endowed bimbos. This one actually was different. She was... beautiful.

Yet it was so much more than that. Beautiful wasn’t enough to account for this tightening of his gut, this startling sense of recognition. No, it wasn’t just beauty—it wasn’t even the way the wind blew her white shirt back against her breasts, outlining their feminine swell with a curve of silver mist. Bathing beauties were as common on Moonbird Key as coquina—his eyes saw them, but they had long since lost the power to stir him.

So what was it? What kept him here at the window as silent as an awestruck schoolboy? He let his shoulder drop to rest against the wall, trying to affect a casual air while he studied the vision before him, trying to pinpoint the difference.

Her hands were clasped demurely behind her back, dangling white sandals, and her shoulders were bravely squared. She had reached the water’s edge now, and as the incoming waves licked at her toes she cast one last look back at the hotel, seemingly watching for someone.

Philip was still chattering stupidly. “Was I right or what? Isn’t she a babe?” His tone was proprietorial, as if he had not just discovered but actually invented her.

A babe? Perhaps... Mark nodded mutely. She was so small, so heartbreakingly delicate that her sensual perfection of form was somehow surprising, like the tiniest fluted turbonilla that had ever escaped the pounding of the sea. Next to her, the Gulf of Mexico seemed clumsily dangerous.

Philip shivered comically as the wind lifted her full white skirt, exposing a slim, pale and graceful thigh. “Ooo-weee, man, is she hot,” he said, exhaling a liquored breath.

For one hot black instant, Mark thought he might shove his cousin, thrusting him from the window, denying him the right to watch. Shut up, he wanted to shout. He hated the tone, the bawdy, half-drunk lechery...

Somehow he checked himself. Philip didn’t understand. How could he? He saw only the high, rounded breasts, the long blond braid...

Mark saw more, felt something completely different from Philip’s lip-smacking lust. And yet lust was part of it. His fingertips pulsed with a burning awareness. He wanted suddenly, almost painfully, to touch her. She needed to be touched—he felt it as keenly as if she had cried her need out loud.

She might have been a little girl, lost and afraid, except for the somber, self-possessed quality of her slow march toward the water. Not lost, he thought, the clamps tightening in his gut. Exiled, rather. Sent out unarmed to meet the demon.

“Goddamn it, you two voyeurs knock off that gawking and get to work.” Edgerton’s voice cut through the strange, tingling fantasies like a cold dousing, and Mark looked at his cousin, oddly surprised to remember that Edge was in the room.

Good God. He squeezed his eyes, trying to clear his vision. What the hell was the matter with him? He needed a new woman in his life about as much as he needed sunstroke. He must be more tired than he’d thought. Yes, that was it. The gauzy silver-blue mist was playing tricks with his tired brain.

“Somebody has to meet the temps.” Edgerton was shuffling papers irritably. He flicked on the light over the bar. “And this timeline just doesn’t work. I don’t know who we’re going to get to staff the pressroom.”

Mark bit back his irreverent response. He might as well cooperate—the Moonbird Hotel’s grand reopening was also designed to kick off Edgerton’s campaign for a seat in the state legislature, so the poor guy was doubly uptight. He wasn’t going to rest until Mark and Philip were marching in lockstep, alongside the army they’d already hired.

Mark straightened, turning away from the window, ignoring the stupid pinch that felt like the snapping of a psychic cord. Nonsense. There was no such thing.

But as he crossed the room toward his cousin, hand outstretched to accept the typed agenda, he couldn’t help looking over his shoulder, just once, to convince himself that he had been seeing things.

It was merely another woman. Gorgeous admittedly, but ever since he’d turned eighteen Mark had been littering the beaches of Moonbird Key with beautiful women, lovers who had foolishly dreamed of possessing him—or perhaps his money. He had buried those dreams without regret, like so many pirated jewels smothered under the thick, wet sand.

Yes, he’d been around far too long to start spinning Andromeda fantasies about a total stranger. It had to be the mist. One last look...

But, God help him, the one last look was fatal. While he watched, the woman bowed her head and, as if someone had cut the strings that had been holding her erect, suddenly crumpled to her knees at the water’s edge.

He could hardly bear to watch. She was, somehow, the personification of pain. Incoming waves frothed around her legs, lifting her sodden white skirt, then sucking it down into the sand, but she was oblivious. She lowered her face into her hands, and her shoulders began to shake softly, as if her heart was breaking.

Mark made a low noise in his throat and, without a word, strode past Edgerton, who stood frozen in disbelief, his hand full of typed agendas thrusting at empty air.

“Hold on there, buddy. Where do you think you’re going?” His words were aimed at Mark’s back like buckshot. “After that girl out there? For Pete’s sake, man, you don’t even know who she is! You don’t even know if she’s a paying guest.”

Mark hadn’t intended to stop, hadn’t meant to respond, but he found himself pausing once again in the doorway. What an officious hypocrite the man was! The only thing Edgerton liked better than a pretty blonde was a pretty blonde with money. Twenty years of repressed anger surged to the fore, temporarily subduing twenty years of kinship.

“You may find this hard to believe,” he said as calmly as he could, though his hands had folded into involuntary fists, “but I really don’t give a damn.”

Glenna McBride hardly knew why she had arrived at the Moonbird Hotel so early. She wasn’t due for another four hours—and Purcell Jennings, the photographer she would assist on this assignment, wouldn’t arrive until dinnertime tonight.

So why was she here now, prowling this empty, seaweed-strewn beach in the half-light of dawn? Wasn’t this gesture a little too melodramatic for a woman who prided herself on her practicality and emotional control?

Morbid, that’s what it was. And she did not do morbid—except perhaps in her dreams.

She should at least have brought her camera. This haunted landscape would make wonderful pictures—especially her kind of pictures. Purcell Jennings might be the acknowledged king of lush, colorful coffeetable books, but Glenna was getting fairly good with black-and-white film.

She checked her watch, making an automatic note of the time. Five forty-five. Dawn was only a pearly promise on the horizon. The water was gunmetal gray, and the shore was a ribbon of silver, dotted blackly with bits and pieces of seaweed, shells and driftwood. Playthings of the sea gods, dropped carelessly like toys at bedtime when the tide receded.

But what difference did it make what time it was? She wasn’t going to return some other morning to take photographs no matter how interesting the lines and shapes of this monochromatic landscape.

She hated the Gulf of Mexico. She had no desire to capture its undulating malevolence and hang it on the living-room walls.

Look at it now... Like a patiently crouched jungle beast, it hardly moved, the rhythmic breathing of the tide its only sound. Its surface was calm, giving no hint of the strange creatures that peopled its depths or the blind currents that blew across its floor, stronger than any human could imagine—or withstand.

But she knew. God help her, she knew.

Glenna shivered though it was not cold. Try as she might, she couldn’t rid herself of the fantasy that the water was waiting for her. It was as if, in her long years of hating it, she had made herself its enemy. Now it recognized her, and it was deciding what to do with her.

“Hogwash.” Embarrassed by her lapse into melodrama, she spoke aloud. She had always rather liked that word, which was used frequently by the son of her neighbors back in Fort Myers. She had heard him say it to his boastful friends and had admired the succinct but encompassing disdain it conveyed. “Hogwash,” she repeated, but it didn’t have the same authority out here in the strange, misty dawn. She shivered again.

She’d been standing too long in one place and she felt the soggy sand give slightly under her heels. She pulled her sandals off and held them behind her back, but that didn’t help much. The ooze of the sand between her toes was disturbing, too, and she had to will her legs to start walking.

If she kept going, she thought, she would soon walk right into the Gulf. Would the water recognize her? Would it associate her with Cindy? Or would it even remember Cindy? Had it perhaps swallowed her so greedily it hadn’t taken time to know her?

A bird burst suddenly from the mangrove trees just behind the hotel, its wings beating the air noisily. Her heart beat, too, with great, swollen thumps, and she had to fight the urge to run back toward the hotel. She’d been running for ten years, damn it. It was time to face the enemy.

Somehow she held her ground. But what, she asked her stabbing heartbeat, had she hoped to accomplish here, at this ungodly hour, ten years after Cindy’s death?

Had she thought the ocean would speak to her, giving up its secrets?

Was she trying to vanquish her nightmares by reliving them? Did she really expect to see Cindy floating here now, her blond hair matted with seaweed, her blue eyes wide with dead horror, the way she floated through Glenna’s dreams? .

Cindy...

Touching her face, she realized that salty tears were running down her cheeks, dropping to endless anonymity in the sodden sand. She looked at her damp fingertips, confused. She had never cried over Cindy, not even ten years ago, when as a scared twelve-year-old kid she had been told that her glamorous, golden sister was dead.

But maybe, she thought in numbed surprise, that was what she had come for. To cry. To let go.

Surrendering with a strange sense of relief, Glenna fell to the sand, lowering her face to her hands. She doubled over tightly, almost unaware of the small shells that dug into her forearms. Cindy...

And then suddenly she was sobbing openly, harsh, desperate sounds that rang through the misty air. It was as if ten years of tears had been magically preserved, waiting for this day.