Executive Perks (28 page)

She was perfectly safe on the island, she reminded herself. The sun beating down on her, the wind flipping her hair around, the ocean providing the rhythmic soundtrack to it all, she could just curl up right now and fall asleep. Except for the fact she’d just gotten out of bed. Time for a little exercise…other than the kind Aaron was regularly giving her every hour or so.

Except for the house up on the bluff and the wooden stairs leading thereto, the beach was empty of anything except the natural adornments. Slipping her sneakers and socks off, she trudged barefoot in one random direction. Maybe there were caves to explore or rocks to climb. Lost in her own thoughts, she at first did not hear the voice calling. When it registered, she paused and looked back in the direction she had come from, certain Aaron was following her and flagging her down to wait for him. But when she turned back, only empty sand greeted her.

She looked around in confusion until a figure up on the bluff caught her attention. The cape made it hard to tell, but it didn’t look like either of the middle-aged caretakers. The figure was too slender, the blonde hair whipping around the girl too long and thick. Too far away to see who it was, Virginia started in that direction, but this time she did hear Aaron’s voice, behind her. A glance again at the deserted beach showed him now running down those rickety stairs and then at a full clip along the beach toward her. She headed back, but his speedy pace meant he met her much farther than half-way.

And he wasn’t even breathing hard. Disgusting. She’d been exercising all her life and she wouldn’t have been able to keep that pace up.

“Why the hell did you head off by yourself?” Hands on hips, intense blue eyes focused on her, he might not have been breathing hard, but he was breathing fire.

The challenge in his voice annoyed her. “I didn’t realize I was restricted in my movements. I’m not in custody or anything, am I?”

“Yeah, protective custody. It’s protecting my sanity. When I got off the phone and turned around to find you gone, my heart practically stopped.”

Hard to stay mad at a pronouncement like that. “I just went for a walk on the beach. No big deal.”

He slipped his hand into hers. “You want to go for a walk on the beach, we’ll go for a walk on the beach. Together.”

She was tempted to argue a little more, but the warm feel of his big hand in hers stopped her. She nodded shortly and they began to walk again down the beach.

“Is there anything down here?” she asked, to change the subject.

“No, not really. The Vincent’s house is up on that bluff there, but you can’t see it from the beach.”

The warm sand against her toes and the sun on her face almost lulled her into forgetting. Almost. “The Vincents? That reminds me. Do they have any kids?”

“I think they have a grown daughter. Why?”

“That must have been it. I saw her up there.”

Aaron looked in the direction she indicated. “Where?”

“She’s gone now. But she was there a minute ago. Right before you called down to me.”

“I don’t think so, Virginia. Their daughter lives in California, I believe.”

“Couldn’t she be visiting them?”

“Not without my permission. No. They know that.”

They had stopped walking and she was afraid from the look of concentration on Aaron’s face that he was about to go up and deliver a very stern lecture. Perhaps the girl had been here before they came and her parents didn’t want to risk their boss ousting her from the island because he and his girlfriend were there. That must be why she disappeared so quickly.

Unless…no, but it couldn’t be a woman after her, could it?

“Let’s go up and talk to the Vincents.” Aaron started to tug her along, but she resisted.

“Let’s not. It could have been my imagination.”

“If you saw someone, that’s not good.”

“It was probably just Mrs. Vincent.”

“Let’s see.”

The Vincents’ house was not accessible by a stairway and even though she considered herself pretty fit she would never have attempted to climb the craggy hill that led up to them. She and Aaron walked back to and up the stairs they had come down on and circled around along the bluff to the simple cape cod that housed the caretakers…both of whom claimed complete ignorance of any girl, related to them or not, in a cape or not.

“If anyone like that had come on the island, Mr. Winston, we would have heard the alarms.” Mrs. Vincent barely halted her canning of some blueberry concoction to point that out.

The cape cod’s kitchen was smaller and cozier than the one in the main house. Mr. Vincent picked up the quaint teapot on the stove and gestured toward them with it. “Tea?”

“No thanks,” Virginia responded.

“And you heard, er, saw nothing?” he asked them both.

“Nothing.”

“Do you have a picture of your, ah,” he glanced at Virginia, “your daughter?”

If the Vincents were confused by Aaron’s question, they were either too polite or too dependent on him for a job to say so. Mr. Vincent left the kitchen and came back with a picture of an Asian-looking girl. It was in a frame, but it looked more like a mug shot to Virginia than a family photo.

“That’s Melissa,” Mrs. Vincent said, adding with dignity, “she’s adopted. The day they handed that baby girl to us right off the plane from China was the best day of our lives.”

Mr. Vincent, contemplating the photo, nodded. “Truth is we’d like to have her come visit sometime soon, Mr. Winston, but she’s real busy at Berkeley. Doctorate takes so doggone long.”

Virginia shook her head no to Aaron in a mute signal.

“You go on outside for a minute, Virginia. I want to talk to the Vincents alone.”

Worried he was going to interrogate them further or worse, she resisted. “Let’s go, Aaron. We’ve taken enough of their time.”

After a moment, he nodded and they went out.

“So that wasn’t the daughter you saw,” he said grimly as he and Virginia headed back to the main house.

“At this point, I’m not so sure I even saw anybody, Aaron. Maybe it was a bush or something and a trick of the light made me think I saw a girl. It was far away.”

“I don’t know. I don’t like it.”

Once they made it back to the house, a check of the panels controlling the sensors in the harbor confirmed they were still operational and hadn’t been tripped. But no matter how Virginia tried to trivialize her sighting of the girl or acted as if it was just her imagination, the incident spooked both of them. She insisted nonetheless on heading back down the rickety stairs onto the beach and continuing their aborted walk.

As they walked on the sand, hand in hand, Aaron thoughtfully looked out to the waves that were cresting much higher than she’d ever seen them.

She prompted, “So what did Rye say?”

“He said the dead girl’s name was Samantha Mallory.”

“So have the police found out what she was doing at the funeral home?”

“No, not yet. But they’re sure now she was killed elsewhere and then dumped there.”

Virginia shivered. “The poor girl.”

“Apparently, she was just scraping by in the city on a waitress salary. She’d moved there recently from Boston, but the police are still trying to piece it all together. One of her neighbors claimed she’d moved there for a man, but didn’t know his name. Said he looked like a druggie from what she saw of him, though apparently a well-dressed druggie. The police artist is working with the neighbor on a sketch and maybe that will lead to something.”

“Is there any connection they can find between this Samantha and either of us?”

“Not yet. Other than her resemblance to you, of course. They speculate she might have been mistaken for you.”

“But why bring her body to the funeral home where we were locked in, then?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to make sense of it all. But there’s something else. I asked Rye to look into your brother-in-law.”

“Brian?”

“Yes. It turns out he owes a lot of the wrong people a lot of money. Maybe your death is his way of trying to get access to the funds he needs to pay them back.”

“I can’t believe that Brian could be behind something like this.”

“I’m not saying he is. Not without further evidence, but it bears keeping in mind. People aren’t always in their right mind when they’re hooked on drugs.”

She looked out at the waves, horrified to think of what the effect on Nora and the kids would be if Brian were involved. Lost in her thoughts, she felt Aaron’s light kiss on the top of her head. “For all I kid about you being a goody-two-shoes, Virginia, even I have to admit there are some lines you can’t cross. It’s too hard to come back. Drugs is one of them.”

“Are you speaking from personal experience?”

He grinned. “Sure, let’s get all my dirty underwear out here.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I never took drugs, Virginia, but I saw a lot of people around me lose their souls to the stuff.”

She shouldn’t want to know all this about him. She shouldn’t feel as if she wanted to crawl into his skin. It was too much. Too needy. He would probably only push her away.

The arms that pulled her closer surprised her. When he buried his head in the crook of her shoulder, her arms reciprocated. He kissed her cheek and lifted his head. “I want to share everything with you, Virginia. But I’m afraid it’ll scare you. And I couldn’t bear to see you turn away from me now.”

“I wouldn’t, Aaron.” And she knew it was true. “But we have plenty of time to get to know each other. You tell me when you’re ready.”

The kiss they shared registered as sweet rather than sexual.

By the time they made it round a winding bend in the beach, Virginia noticed a tall white structure on a strip of land jutting into the ocean. “Your island has its very own lighthouse? How cool.”

“Faux lighthouse. Another of Captain Seabridge’s conceits. He had it built, but it was never operational, which didn’t exactly matter since there was no need for one out here anyway.”

As they got closer to the structure, Virginia saw that it was smaller than a real lighthouse, but still at least two stories. The weathered exterior could have used a coat of paint. Otherwise, it looked sturdy. “Is there anything inside?”

“Not much. Actually, I haven’t been inside in years.”

“Can I see?”

Chapter Nine

When they got inside the little lighthouse, the first thing they saw was a winding wrought-iron staircase that disappeared up into the ceiling. No windows on the first floor, just the staircase and a dusty wood floor.

“Oh, let’s go up, Aaron.”

“If you like. Let me go first, though. I’m not too sure how sturdy this staircase is.”

It held both their weight as they made it to the top, but that was the most that could be said for the sturdiness of the staircase. It shook and creaked the whole way up, almost making Virginia regret the impulse to explore. The top floor was worth getting to, though. Circular in nature, of course, the room sported huge windows looking out to the sea, with assorted implements that seemed vaguely nautical strategically placed on tables in between.

“It’s lovely,” Virginia said.

Aaron looked around and then shrugged. “It’s deserted, at least.” He perched one shoulder against the interior stone wall of the lighthouse, folding his arms across his chest and considering her. “Do you ever play games, Virginia?”

“What kind of games?” she asked suspiciously, peering out the window at what she suddenly noticed were dark storm clouds outside. If they didn’t head back soon, they were likely to get caught here in a rainstorm.

“Well, what if I played Captain Seabridge and you were the jilted lover tempting me into one last tumultuous round of sex before you fling yourself out of the lighthouse window?”

She jerked back from her contemplation of the storm clouds. “My God, is that how she did it?”

“No clue. It’s just a game.”

Games which involved preludes to her own demise did not have an inviting ring to them. She was living them. No need to play. “I have a better idea. I can go with you pretending to be Captain Seabridge, but instead of making me the jilted lover, or the demented bride for that matter, let’s dial back to an earlier Captain Seabridge adventure.”

“What one would that be?”

“The one where his ship gets overrun with pirates and he’s captured.”

“That sounds like a little less fun from my perspective. But for the sake of argument, who would you play in this scenario?”

“The pirate who’s captured you, of course.”

“A female pirate?” The dubious look he flashed her made her feel mischievous.

“Unless there’s a whole facet of your identity you have yet to mention to me, I’m a female pirate, yes.”

He guffawed. “A female pirate it is. Or better yet, how about I’m the pirate and you’re the beautiful noblewoman I’ve taken for ransom and can’t keep my hands off?”

“I’d rather be the pirate.”

“I bet you would.”

“So you look like a fine male specimen, bucko,” she said in her most commanding tone, leaning back against the window grate and spreading her legs wide, in the confident pose she imagined a pirate would assume. “Take your shirt off.”

One corner of his mouth came up. She doubted Aaron Winston was into games in which he was the submissive. “Come on,” she urged. “Don’t forget I have thirty or so bloodthirsty sailors up on deck who would be more than happy to feed you to the sharks if you don’t obey me.”