During the remainder of the week, Willy continued to take her place in the sun without comment, leaving the shade to the Porsche, which she had by now identified as a 928S. It had been nice while it lasted and she had felt no compunction using Randy’s place, even after he had gone. After all, it wasn’t her fault he had mistaken her good nature for something more and ended up in traction and disgrace. She had made it clear to him from the very first that she wasn’t interested in anything serious, but her idea of serious and Randy’s had been miles apart. Willy had been perfectly willing to go out to restaurants with him or to cook at her apartment for him, and they had both enjoyed the live plays at the beach and the Lost Colony performance. They had danced and laughed together, and when he had followed her up to her apartment one night after a pretty freewheeling party, she had offered to make coffee for him before he headed home, even though she was more than a little disgusted with him for drinking too much.
He had taken her invitation to coffee for something more, and before she managed to eject him, he had ruined a perfectly good blouse and bruised her rather badly. She had fought back angrily and he had accused her of teasing, which had angered her still more, for she had never deliberately led him on. With the gloves off, it had all come out in the open: either she give him what he wanted or he took it, it was that simple. After all the money he had spent on her, a dumb little office worker, he intended to collect.
Willy’s strength under fire had surprised her, and she had managed to throw him out ignominiously, but then, she had never been so frightened in her life; and when she heard the next day that he had wrecked his car before daylight and been found to have an extremely high alcohol content in his bloodstream, she had shuddered and wondered how she could have been taken in by his bland good looks and pleasant manners.
Randy had not returned to CCE. Willy knew that it had been his father’s firm and she suspected he must be in a good bit of hot water with the board of directors or whoever reigned in his absence. She didn’t ask, nor did anyone tell her, and she had resumed her social life with an occasional date with Matt, who knew from the first that she was strictly a career woman. There was also Richy, the nineteen-year-old who lived with his mother in the apartment below her own. She had met him during spring break when he brought home two college friends, and because she could see that it mattered so awfully much to him to be seen on good terms with an “older woman” Willy had gone along with him, falling into a comfortable sort of friendship that made no demands on either of them. His mother had laughingly accused Willy of baby-sitting for her and it bothered neither Willy nor Richy. He was a convenient escort, and if she paid her own way—and his as well sometimes—then, what difference did it make? It was undemanding and Willy happened to know that Richy had his eye on a girl at East Carolina University and he even went as far as to ask her advice about how to handle a relationship.
By Saturday she was ready for a break. She had managed a trip to Hatteras to check on the new listings and found them highly desirable. They were both owned by the same Ohio couple who were worried about a gas shortage and had decided to sell them both and look for something closer to home.
Willy opened the salt-streaked window in her one tiny bedroom, having closed it during a brief, hard thunderstorm in the night, and allowed the wind to blow in off the Atlantic. It smelled good—far better, to her way of thinking, than the exclusive atmosphere around her father’s Hobe Sound home in Florida. This was her kind of beach and she had grown fond of her inexpensive, haphazardly furnished apartment at the end of Wimble Court, despite the fact that she had grown up in a twenty-seven-room Italian-style villa on three acres of the most expensive turf on the East Coast.
On the beach below, several dogs raced after an irascible gull and Willy laughed aloud at the frustration of the motley pack who stood at the edge of the surf and watched while their tormentor glided safely out over the gentle swells. She hadn’t been swimming in over a week, thanks to last week’s cold spell; but now, with the almost record-breaking high temperatures, the bottle-green water with its blue-white frosting along the shore was an irresistible temptation. She quickly located her favorite three-year-old bikini and within minutes was loping across the single dune that separated the small, shabby court from the Atlantic.
There was not a soul in sight. The few residents of Wimble Court were old beach-dwellers who had long since forgotten the joys of an impromptu swim, and now even the dogs had found another pastime. After flinching from the first chilly spray, she waded out hip-deep, then dived under a breaker, surfacing on the other side with a laugh of pure exuberant joy. Deliver her from the sterile world of chlorinated, fancifully shaped pools where white jacketed butlers stood by with chrome-plated poles to assist anyone who was gauche enough to encounter difficulties.
After half an hour or so of body-surfing, glorying in the feel of tremendous surges of power moving her forward to scrape her naked stomach on a gravelly beach, she waded ashore. The dogs had returned, and so she raced with them on the hard-packed beach in an unusual burst of energy and then veered off in the direction of her apartment, hopping over the soft, sun-heated crest of the dune to climb her outside staircase. She never bothered to lock her apartment when she was in the area, a reaction, no doubt, of a lifetime of having to accept security measures as a matter of course. Whether at home with her grim-faced “companion” or at school with other girls with essentially the same background, she was never able to forget that she was Wilhelmina January Silverthorne, heiress to Jasper Silverthorne, who happened to own several square miles of various cities both in the States and abroad.
It had been the advent of his third marriage, to a woman half his age, coming hard on the heels of her former fiancé Luke Styrewall’s fiasco, that had bought Willy her freedom. Freedom she had grabbed with both hands, leaving behind her almost everything she owned except the little Mercedes 450SL she had fallen heir to when Jasper had divorced his second wife on irrefutable grounds. Willy had taken the car because it had given her her first taste of freedom, which was probably why even now she gloried in the feel of a powerful engine under her command. When she had left home she’d gone directly to her mother’s only living relative, a crusty widowed cousin—Fred, who had been only too glad to return to his state of single bliss, after having recently been freed from almost forty years of henpecked bondage. He had been full of advice and had urged her to try for her license in real estate.
Cousin Fred had lived in Edenton, but it had been the outer banks of North Carolina that had drawn Willy. She had grown up near the water, both at Hobe Sound and in the South of France, and it had been a constant source of frustration to her that she was never allowed the freedom to enjoy it. When she had finished her course and passed her exams, Willy had applied for, and been accepted by, a small firm of realtors at Nags Head. Here, she was plain Willy Silverthorne, career woman, with no means of support other than what was afforded her by her fairly good brain and her own determination. She was still learning about herself after so many years of being told what she was to like and dislike, and she discovered that she liked to sleep late. She enjoyed driving and cooking. And she loved searching out new restaurants, trying any food with which she was unfamiliar, then trying to duplicate it in her own small but adequate kitchen.
Now, starved after her swim, she made herself a breakfast of shrimp on whole-wheat bread washed down with a mixture of orange juice and Perrier— hardly orthodox, but nourishing, for all that—and then she climbed into a pair of brief cutoff jeans that had lost all but the two bottom buttons on the fly, leaving her stomach bare to the bikini line. She left on her halter, loosening the neck strings, which were beginning to chafe, and wandered out onto her roofless porch.
Here she had all the sunny privacy she could ever want, plus an almost constant breeze that sometimes faltered at ground level, and she intended to sleep in the sun until lunch, take another dip, cook herself something exotic and then, if she felt like it, sleep until dinnertime. Drowsily, she half-decided to hunt up Richy later and see if he was game to go out to a new Greek restaurant she had seen advertised.
The first awareness that she was not alone came gradually, just a vague, uneasy feeling that the sun-induced redness behind her eyelids had changed from reddish to a dark gray-brown. She felt the cold prickle along her spine that told her someone was staring at her and she was suddenly afraid to open her eyes.
In spite of all she could do, her unnatural rigidity must have revealed her alarm, for he spoke. A deep, chocolate-smooth voice with a hint of grit told her not to be alarmed, and she opened her eyes and gazed up what seemed an inordinate length of extremely masculine body to encounter a dark, speculative gaze. He openly scrutinized her half-naked body, making her burningly aware of her thousand or so freckles.
“I’m your new neighbor,” the man informed her in a tone meant to reassure, “come begging.” He extended a plastic measuring cup and Willy allowed a small, nervous laugh to escape her. “Sugar?” she asked, feeling some of the tension drain away, to leave her curiously limp.
“Actually, dry sherry, if you have any,” he replied apologetically, and at her look of surprise, he elaborated, “I’m trying out a new seafood recipe—scallops and shrimp in a sour-cream, cheddar and sherry mixture—and I discovered I’m fresh out of sherry. My ... the man who packed for me must have considered all opened bottles perks of the job.”
Her interest was thoroughly piqued, and not only because of the recipe. Who would have thought such a strikingly masculine-looking man would be interested in cooking? She led the way to the kitchen, hastily tying her straps as she went. She was only too conscious of the fact that her hair, which she had braided earlier to get it out of the way, showed an untidy tendency to escape its confinement and she tugged surreptitiously at her gaping jeans.
Reaching her topmost cabinet, she shuffled her few bottles until she emerged triumphant, waving a dark bottle with a Spanish label. She handed it over and he studied the label, looking up at her with what she thought was a surprised look of respect.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t have anything except créme,” he admitted with a crooked smile that revealed one slightly chipped tooth among a lineup of strong, straight white ones. He held up the measuring cup and pulled the cork, inhaling appreciatively.
“Take the whole bottle,” she offered generously, still perched on the stool she had knelt on to reach the cabinet. Her face was flushed from her nap in the sun and there was a new crop of freckles emerging, none of which, had she but known it, marred her unorthodox appeal one whit as she coiled herself carelessly into a graceful twist. “I know I can never depend on a recipe for the right amount of seasoning. Only taste will tell.” She smiled openly. “What do you do with it?”
“Do with it?” the man repeated with a lift of heavy black brows.
“Bake it? Broil it? Chill it?”
“Oh.” He grinned. His face relaxed some of the oddly watchful austerity to give her the first hint of what a devastating effect he might have on an unsuspecting female under certain circumstances. “Actually, you’re supposed to bake it in cockleshells, after topping it with crumbs. Do you suppose I might be able to find enough shells on the beach along here or has it been pretty well picked over?”
“Well, we’re pretty private this far south—residential, mostly—and since most of the residents have long since collected whatever they needed in the way of baking shells and ashtrays, you could probably find enough. But if you’re in a hurry, I have a dozen or so and you’re welcome to as many as you need.”
“Thanks. That’s awfully generous of you. Perhaps in appreciation I could prevail on you to help me sample it . . . unless you lack the nerve to sample a stranger’s first attempt at shellfish coquilles.”
Willy unfolded her elegant length from the barstool. “Oh, I’m a purple-heart winner when it comes to bravery in the kitchen,” she assured him with her slow, half-shy smile.
“Sounds promising. No purple heart, I sincerely hope, but how about a
croix de guerre
?”
“If you’re sure you have enough, perhaps I will come try a bit when it’s done. If I like it, may I have the recipe?” she asked.
“Not unless you agree to help me stuff your shells and do a bit of preliminary tasting. Your taste for sherry may not agree with mine. I like it well-laced.”
She grinned more freely now. “So do I, up to the point where it stops tasting like sherry and begins to taste like library paste.” She located her shells in a bottom drawer and, after selecting half a dozen of the largest, most perfect, followed him from the room.
“Don’t you need to lock up?” he asked. “This may take a while.”
Willy glanced up at him, shaking her head. “There’re only a few of us living here at Wimble and they’re all awfully nice people. Besides,” she added with a gurgle, “there’s nothing to steal, unless someone covets the rest of my cockleshells.”
“Not even your purse? You’re the first woman I’ve run into who can go more than twenty-five paces without a full stock of supplies.”
“Well, since I don’t lock up, I don’t need keys, and since I don’t smoke, I don’t need cigarettes, and since I assume I’m trading my very good sherry for a sample of your equally good cooking, I won’t be needing any money, so why bother?”
He shrugged. “Why, indeed?” he agreed, his well-worn deck shoes almost silent as he led the way down her ramshackle stairs.
“Hey,” she called after him as she hopped barefoot across the patch of hot concrete that separated the two frame cottages at the end of the street. “Who are you?”
Turning to see her predicament, he grabbed an arm and pulled her, laughing, into the scant noonday shade beside his garage door. “Sorry ... I forgot to introduce myself. Kiel Faulkner. And you?” He bent to lift the door, revealing a familiar silver-gray Porsche.