St. Anthony’s Island, the Caribbean Sea
WELCOME TO THE Island of Lost Causes.
Tack Reeves couldn’t help but shake his head at the sign that greeted him at St. Anthony’s baggage claim. Looking around at the crowd of tourists in T-shirts and flip-flops, nothing seemed very lost about this tiny Caribbean airport. He grabbed his old faded olive green seabag from the ground near his feet and moved with the tourists, though his jeans and plain black T-shirt looked out of place in the sea of neon around him. People herded together like this reminded him of the markets in Kabul, Afghanistan, where it was impossible to tell the citizens in the crowd from the insurgents. He felt that old familiar steel ball of unease at the center of his stomach.
One redhead wearing too-high platform sandals bumped into him, making him flinch. She looked up, smiling sheepishly as she apologized for the accidental contact. The old Tack, the one before his sixth deployment, would’ve found time to talk to the twentysomething in the barely there sundress. Maybe even had the clothes off that fit little body before she’d managed to get her first tan lines. But those carefree days were long gone.
Besides, he had a job to do.
It was probably another dead end, like the dozens he’d run down in the last year. His target, Cate Allen, was like a ghost. Her billionaire husband had hired him to find her and his son, but after nearly a year of working the case, he was starting to think seriously the woman might be dead.
At the very least, she really, really, didn’t want to be found. He was following the latest lead to this small island, hoping this time he’d finally get a break. But it was a long shot. Cate Allen was a missing wife to a famously reclusive billionaire. He’d quietly offered ten million dollars for her return, but nobody knew about this except a chosen few. How he’d kept it out of the news was anyone’s guess, but Tack figured money had something to do with it. He steered clear of the other tank-top-clad college coeds on their way to spring break. At the end of the gleaming steel baggage carousels stood a group of drivers, holding up signs. One of them bore his name: Reeves.
He looked up at the woman holding it and for a second nearly froze in his tracks.
Could it be...?
On the surface, this woman looked nothing like Cate Allen, the dazzling, overly made-up brunette socialite, always in designer stilettos, Chanel suits and bright red lipstick. This woman screamed quintessential beach bum with the long blond hair in a loose braid down her back, the aviator sunglasses perched casually in the neckline of her scooped tee and the flip-flops on her feet exposing toes that lacked nail polish. But Tack had memorized the photos he’d trolled through online. He knew every laugh line, every little quirk of her face. His gut told him, This was her.
Nobody else had a dimple like that on her right cheek, that flirty “dare you to ask me to dance” upward quirk of her pouty lips. And no matter what she did, the woman couldn’t hide the fact that she was gorgeous. No matter how much she dressed down.
She hadn’t seen him yet, and for that Tack was grateful. He needed a minute to compose himself. He’d been hunting this woman for almost a year, and she’d stymied him at every turn. He couldn’t let himself be carried away. This could still be another dead end, the welling of hope in his chest just another precursor to disappointment.
And everything was riding on this case.
Her eyes met his then, and his knees locked up. They were greener than her photographs—a clear blue-green, like the Caribbean Sea. Damn, but she was so much more beautiful than her pictures. And they were near a perfect ten. He was just a few feet from her. She smiled at him, hesitant.
“Mr. Reeves?” she asked, and then her eyes widened a bit as he took another step closer. “You’re...tall,” she managed.
“Six-four,” Tack said. “Got my dad’s height and my mother’s forearms, just don’t tell her that,” he joked as he always did when people asked him why he was built like a tank. His mother was a big-boned woman who, years ago, didn’t mind getting after her boys with a wooden spoon when they got out of hand. The tough love apparently worked as she was now the proud mother of two marines and an army ranger.
Cate smiled, and the brightness of it took him by surprise. She certainly didn’t look like a woman with a backyard full of buried secrets. But then, the best liars always believed their own tales.
“You’re...?” He deliberately paused, studying her face.
“Cate. Cate Dalton, St. Anthony’s Resort,” she said, not missing a beat, the lie coming out of her mouth as smooth as silk.
Cate. The woman hadn’t even changed her first name. Now it all seemed so obvious, but before, when he’d been rummaging through hundreds of records, he never would’ve guessed she would’ve done something so careless. Everything else, every bit of her trail, had been so carefully scrubbed. She’d left hardly any clues. But she kept her first name.
He wanted to know why.
A little scar barely the length of a nickel ran across her chin. It hadn’t been in the photographs he’d pored through, and he wondered what it was from. “We spoke on the phone. This is your first time to the Caribbean?”
“That’s right.” He could lie, too. No need to tell her he’d been hopping from island to island for the last four months, on one goose chase after another, starting to think he needed to rethink his new career as a private eye. “Need a little R and R.”
“You’ll find it here. Where are you from?” she asked, beaming at him as she put on her sunglasses.
“Seattle.” The lie came smoothly. No need to tell her he lived in Chicago now, the same city her ex-husband, the real estate mogul, called home these days. Tack’s younger brother lived in Seattle. He visited often enough, and he’d be able to bluff his way through any further questions.
She nodded and beckoned for him to follow as she moved to the exit. She headed out the first sliding door to the bright tropical