Page 111 of Hard Luck (Blackstone House)

He loved the woman he thought I was. The one I’d been pretending to be. I didn’t love her. I didn’t hate her either, but I grew more uncomfortable by the minute, as if I were wearing too-tight jeans for Thanksgiving dinner.

And I couldn’t even open the top snap for relief.

“There’s a path over here,” he said. “We can get down to the sea.”

My first thought?Thank goodness.

My second thought? “Why the hell is there a path?”

“I guess they used it to take supplies and criminals to the prison.”

“No, I mean why is therestilla path? Everything else is overgrown.”

“Huh.” Cole paused halfway across the cracked yard in front of the main building. “It’s wide and built from brick, more of a road really. Guess the trees didn’t grow fast enough. And don’t forget animals live here.”

Maybe. But as we headed to the harbour, I swore I saw branches along the way that looked cut rather than broken. Cole said nobody ever came out here, but I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps that was why the well we’d found near the barracks still worked? I’d wound the bucket down on a surprisingly new-looking rope while Cole explained that seawater was heavier than freshwater, so when it rained, the precipitation formed a semicircularlens under the island. I already knew that thanks to an overly talkative Navy SEAL with a geologist for a mother, but I’d acted dumb and said “wow” in all the right places. After sharing half a dozen almost ripe mangoes for lunch, we’d decided to carry on exploring.

It might have been fun if not for Dr. Blaylock’s fate and complications caused by the L-word.

“This jetty would’ve been a bitch to get to in the old days,” Cole said as we approached the harbour.

Actually, “harbour” was too grand a description. There was a natural gap in the rocks that surrounded the island, and the gap opened up into a small lagoon, protected from the wind. There was a tiny pebble beach, barely thirty feet wide, and a jetty had been built out into the water, rotten wood bridging the gap between a man-made wharf and a larger rock in the middle of the lagoon. It was unusable now.

I stripped off my wetsuit for the first time in over a day and held my hands up to the sun.

“Now, this is starting to feel like a vacation.”

Cole crossed his arms behind his head and stretched. “This is such a damn mess.”

“We’ll get your boat back.”

Once Cole was safely out of the way in his villa on Emerald Shores, I knew exactly where I’d be going with the girls. Okay, notexactlywhere, not yet, but there was no way Echo didn’t know theCrosswind’s location at this precise moment. She snooped on everything.

“You think? The cops in San Gallicano are underpaid, understaffed, and undertrained. The government keeps cutting taxes because that wins elections, so public services suffer, then voters get unhappy, so the government cuts taxes again. It’s a vicious circle.”

“Welcome to politics.” I waded into the shallows. “Forget that for the moment and swim.”

“I swam enough yesterday to last me a lifetime.”

“C’mon, if you fall off the horse, you need to get right back in the saddle.”

“I’m not a big fan of horses either.”

“Really?” I hopped up onto a rock. “How about mermaid sex?”

Cole sprinted into the water like a lifeguard fromBaywatch. Damn, he was pretty.

“Get the wetsuit off,” I instructed.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Too late, I remembered Echo and her satellites. Ah, too bad. She was a big girl, and she knew how to blur the parts she didn’t want to see. Cole shoved his wetsuit and shorts down over his hips, and I parted my legs, biting my lip as he pushed my bikini bottoms to the side.

“Fuck!” he cursed, and not in a good way. His arms windmilled as he leapt backward and landed with a splash, cock sticking up like the mast on a sinking ship.

“What?”

“Something touched my leg.”

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