Page 3 of Island Holiday

Maybe she was working undercover. That was definitely a possibility. He didn’t want her persistent isolation to get her in trouble. Because for all that he watched from a distance, with no solid intel as she crisscrossed the country, deep down he felt as if she was searching for something.

Revenge? Justice? A sense of purpose?

He understood that last one. The answer was irrelevant to Connor. He only wanted her to be safe.

An alert popped up in the corner of his secondary monitor. Gamble wanted to see him immediately. He turned off his monitors, locked his computer, and headed upstairs. He probably shouldn’t be hoping the summons had anything to do with Sonya, but he couldn’t turn it off either.

It was Christmas after all, and the season of miracles.

Chapter 2

Sonya was in herfavorite place on earth. Well, almost. She was in the South Carolina Lowcountry, only a few miles away from the resort owned by the family of Harper Ellington, one of her two best friends. But she’d discovered Brookwell Island, a barrier island town south of Charleston, came in at a close second.

Next week, over Christmas, she was expected to spend the holiday at the resort with Harper, the greater Ellington family, and the third woman who made up their sisters-of-choice trio, Hannah Lynch. Well, Hannah Mathison after marrying Seth, who would definitely be joining them as well.

They were such a cute couple. Seth was an awesome guy, a Guardian Agency protector, and best of all, he made Hannah so happy. The Ellingtons had embraced Seth just as swiftly as they’d once embraced Hannah and Sonya when Harper had invited them to spend winter break with her during their first year of college.

Harper claimed it was an Ellington family trait to recognize good people.

Always skeptical, Sonya blamed that initial warm acceptance on the renowned Southern hospitality being in high gear for the holidays. Harper’s family didn’t know Sonya came from a long line of thieves and con-artists. She hadn’t shared those ugly details then and didn’t see the need to ruin the magic with that admission now.

Looking back all these years later, she understood what Harper meant, though she still considered it a fluke and a wonderful twist of fate to have been fondly adopted by the family. In addition to the two best friends she now called sisters, she’d gained two brothers, countless aunts and uncles, awesome parents, and cousins for miles.

And she would go see them all as soon as she was done here on Brookwell.

She had to stop Zimmer first.

She was taking a big risk, trailing Zimmer to Brookwell. Her bosses wouldn’t be happy to know she was this close to the situation. After her chat with the student at the airport, she’d taken her findings on Zimmer to Gamble and Swann and asked permission to keep digging into what appeared to be a worrisome scheme. They’d given her latitude to follow the money, not the man in question.

But after that brief chat with the young woman in the airport, Sonya had become obsessed.

Economics professor Christopher Zimmer had been a client when she worked for the financial firm. Though he’d avoided all the turmoil when she blew the whistle on her boss there, his close association to the board members had raised her suspicions. When his name showed up in an article on consumer travel trends, she’d started poking around.

Carefully.

On the surface, Zimmer’s finances looked legit, even the huge consulting fee hitting his personal bank account with regularity. Then she found the project fund and, eventually, the string of shell companies behind it. On paper, he was the sole manager of the account that was funded by a consumer advocate testing group.

Sole manager. That alone sent up red flags for her.

And the more she dug into it, the angrier she got. Peeling back the layers and payments, she discovered he hired mostly female college students on work study and he paid them via direct deposit or a prepaid credit card. He provided the trendy suitcase and the airfare and usually threw in a weekend at a posh hotel or condo.

Orders for the suitcases weren’t paid for through the fund, only his personal finances. More red flags. And as of four weeks ago, he’d started traveling the same routes as the hired testers, although she couldn’t prove he’d interacted with them during their trips.

She’d sent the intel up the line and Gamble and Swann promised they were handling it. She trusted them, but the whole thing made her cringe. Her typical detachment went up in flames and she couldn’t seem to stop being mad about it.

Granted, emotions and non-verbal cues were not her true strengths. Sonya was much better with numbers than actual people, but the patterns in the money and the traveling were concerning. She didn’t often lean hard on her intuition, but in this case, she couldn’t shake the certainty that something worse was brewing. Was he testing airports and security measures? Or was he already using the suitcases for some kind of smuggling effort that put the student testers in jeopardy if they were caught?

Her remote work allowed her to do her job from anywhere with a good internet connection, making it easy to trail afterZimmer. Apparently the same held true for Zimmer. Despite his obligations to the university in Iowa, he was letting his teaching assistants handle the class load. He was rarely in one place for more than a couple of nights. Most of the time, instead of big hotels near the airports, he used privately owned rental properties.

She preferred vacation rentals too, so it seemed hypocritical to callthata red flag, but it still bothered her. She knew quite a bit about resort properties and hotels thanks to Harper. Although Zimmer had yet to use any Ellington-owned properties, he habitually sent the suitcase testers to East Coast cities, coming close to places Sonya thought of as family spaces.

With the holidays just a week away, she was determined to figure out what brought him—alone—to Brookwell Island. As much digging as she’d done into Zimmer’s scheme, she hadn’t found a record of any testers being sent here.

A shame really. The town was absolutely lovely, especially on a clear day with blue December sky stretching to the horizon.

Brookwell was only a short drive across a few bridges from the Ellington resort. The quaint coastal town was decked out for the season. From the moment she arrived, she’d been delightfully distracted by the decorations. Garlands of holly and evergreens sparkled with white lights at night. Twined around every lamp post, both traffic lights, and outlining each storefront on Central Avenue, the effect was picturesque. The gazebo in the center of town might’ve inspired a Hallmark Christmas movie, right down to the holiday music drifting from the speakers.

All that was missing were the soft drifts of perfect, fluffy snow.

---