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"Give me a love story like that of Jake and Laurel, and you hook me forever. Purity. Lack of manipulation. A desire to heal. Every Laurel deserves a half-hour with a Jake like this at least once in her life." - peer reviewer
...Riveting...Rhapsodic...
...Accomplished
Read what the critics had to say
Walk a mile with Jake - here are 5,280 steps:
NEW YORK CITY
September 8
Laurel Kingsford flinched when the door of her office banged open and Jerry Garcone cruised in. The wisp of concept she’d flirted with all morning, the breakthrough solution to one of the most difficult problems her design team faced, disappeared from her mind.
She’d been Jerry’s mentor in the firm since he came aboard three years earlier. He should know better than to barge in like this by now.
“Sorry to disturb you, IQ, but Nick wants to see you in his office ASAP. Want me to tell him you’ll be up after you powder your nose?”
IQ again. The nickname had settled on her because she was so bright, the guys in the management clique said, but one of the other women on staff had whispered the truth. It stood for “Ice Queen.”
“No, I’ll be along as soon as I can save my work and shut down the system.”
It was totally unfair, she was warm and open with everyone, but she was in New York to build a career, not catch a husband, and she turned down social invitations from male employees, Jerry among them. The nickname had been her reward, and it stuck—even after she and Rob became engaged.
Jerry maintained a friendly manner in her presence, but he was too ambitious for his own good. No way would she trust him alone with Nick if she could help it, not when everyone expected the new head of the fuel cell project to be named in the next few days.
Tom Everett, retired project head, had recommended her as his replacement and rightly so. She had the qualifications: six years in fuel cell engineering, two as team leader, several summers of deep-sea research with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at Woods Hole, and a love of everything nautical. She planned her summer vacations around one NOAA field project or another, and they always invited her back.
The job was hers. She was comfortable with that, but experience had taught her the importance of guarding her flanks. Her breathing accelerated. Could this be it, the formal announcement?
Jerry peered over her shoulder at her screen. She glared and he stepped back. “Okay, see you up there.” He didn’t bother to close the door when he left.
Five minutes later, Laurel left the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor and entered the reception area outside Nick’s office. For the past weeks, she’d taken care to dress more formally, to be ready, if and when the announcement came. Today’s suit set off her eyes, and didn’t disguise the fact that she was young and trim, even if in her own mind she was too tall, and her figure less than eye-popping.
Nick’s receptionist smiled. “Go on in, Laurel, they’re all there.”
All?
With a sudden sense of foreboding, Laurel entered the division head’s office. Opposite the entrance, a bank of windows extended from knee height to the ceiling. Outside, Manhattan enjoyed another warm early September morning.
Nick Zaia’s desk dominated the center of the room and he stood when she entered. Marianne, Laurel’s friend and head of the Propulsion Project, was present too, and so was Jerry Garcone. Jerry wore a suit she hadn’t seen before, of very good cloth. She hadn’t noticed downstairs. He wore it well, along with a huge grin. Beside him, Marianne did not look happy. Her eyes flashed a warning.
“Ms. Kingsford. Good. Come in, please.”
Laurel’s sensors went to full alert. Nick always called her by her nickname. He came around the desk and offered his hand. He was tall and fair-skinned, with curly black hair and wide blue eyes. His outward demeanor was open as they shook hands.
Nick went to the windows, where he looked out for several seconds. Then he moved back behind his desk. He didn’t sit, or invite anyone else to.
“I didn’t expect you to get up here so quickly, Ms. Kingsford, but now that you’re here, you might as well hear it from me.” He shuffled papers on his desk while he shifted from foot to foot then looked up at her.
“I’ve just accepted Marianne’s resignation as Propulsion Project manager…” His eyes were unreadable as they bored into Laurel’s. When she did not react, he went on. “We’ve named Jerry Garcone to replace Tom Everett as head of the fuel cell project. Management decided a fresh approach, a new attitude, would be good for the department.”
Laurel was struck mute. They couldn’t leapfrog Jerry over her. She was senior on the design team, practically carrying the whole project on her shoulders. Jerry didn’t have a prayer of handling the job. Had Marianne quit over the news? Until now, she’d been the only woman in a leadership position in the company, and Laurel’s strongest ally.
“But… I thought…” She tried, but the words wouldn’t come.
Nick seemed emboldened by her confusion. “I know Tom recommended you to replace him, hon, but we felt the program would be more stable with a… with Jerry’s hand on the tiller.” He stepped around to her, seemed genuinely sorry to have to deliver the news, and placed his hand on her shoulder. “You’re a great asset for us. I just hope you can see your way to working under Jerry. We need you to keep producing the same high-quality work you have all along.”
The truth came with his choice of words, the way he’d been about to say “a man’s hand on the tiller.” A heat began in Laurel’s neck and rose upward over her face. Marianne out. The ally she’d counted on. It was all lost. How could she face the other team members, the other female employees? She trembled, shook his hand from her shoulder and stalked out the door, her body stiff and shuddering.
“Laurel, wait!” Marianne called. “Don’t…”
On the elevator down to her floor, Laurel fought back tears only until she reached her office. When the door closed behind her, the dam burst and tears flowed so thick she stopped trying to wipe them away. Tears of indignation, not sorrow; resentment, not remorse.
She booted her computer. She might cry when things like this happened, but she could still function. They wouldn’t get the innovations she’d conceived for the fuel cell, the ones she’d anticipated being asked to develop. Technically, they might be the property of Forrester NA, but they could hardly prosecute her for stealing something they had no idea existed.
When the system was up, she tapped in her code words and stuck a CD in the drive. Two minutes later she’d burned the contents of her personal files into the disk.
She pulled up the operating system and typed in the instruction, “FORMAT C:\”. After assuring the mainframe that she really, really wanted to reformat her hard drive, which would result in the irretrievable destruction of all data there, she typed the final “Y” and waited as the routine got under way. Ten minutes later, her hard drive was fresh as a newborn babe. Deleted files? What deleted files?
Just in time too. Moments after she removed the CD, her system went off and the screen went black.
The rats were making sure she didn’t do anything irrational, like quit and take work papers with her, exactly as she’d just done.
Let that bushwhacker Jerry Garcone stew in his own salsa.
All she could think of was getting out of there and getting home to Rob. Rob would know how to help. He would comfort her. She pulled the liner from her wastebasket and dumped its contents on the floor, then cleaned out her desk. When she finished, she pulled her keys, employee ID, parking passes, and even the unused lunch tickets from her purse and threw them on their desk.
She’d given this company the best of herself, her abilities and talents, her spirit. Not because it was a way to make a living. It was much more, a demonstration to them, as well as to herself, of her value as a person.
It was exactly eleven forty-five when, carrying a half-filled trash bag and the disk containing solutions to problems her design team didn’t know it had yet, she left her office. Not much to show for six years of hard work, hopes, and dreams. She ignored the stares that escorted her to the exit.
There would be other jobs. She’d quit without notice, so there’d be no money other than the refund of the retirement contributions she’d made, but they would manage.
Laurel turned the key and pushed open the apartment door. “Hello! Robbie. I’m home early,” she called as she entered the hall. Rob had been busy today. He’d finally picked up the half dozen pairs of footgear he usually kicked off and then abandoned in the entryway. About time.
She went into the kitchen and put the plastic bag of belongings on the table. “Are you home, honey? I’ve got news.”
Well, maybe he hadn’t been so busy after all. The breakfast dishes were still piled in the sink. Maybe he’d gone out job hunting. That would be good news.
She entered the living room - on the way to the bedroom, and the first wrong note sounded. The home entertainment center, which held her TV, VCR, stereo, CD player and tape deck, was missing.
Her hand went to her throat and a chill spread. “Rob! Rob! Are you all right?”
She whirled a complete circle. Looking for what? An intruder? She ran into the bedroom.
“My God!”
The drawers of Rob’s dresser were on the floor, empty. On the vanity, her jewelry box stood open. She went to it and quickly pawed through. She didn’t have much of value. She sighed with relief. Everything seemed to be there, except the small case she’d jotted her access codes and passwords in—the computers at work, the cable company. She’d probably neglected to put it back last time she retrieved a forgotten password.
A needle of dread lanced her, stealing her breath. She had put it back, she remembered clearly, after recording the codes to access her accounts on line, the ones the bank had just set up two weeks ago. She reached over and booted her computer. In less than a minute she had her accounts on the screen.
Ten days earlier, the funds from her savings account had been moved to her checking account. The day after that, a check for virtually the entire balance had been paid to the account of someone named Andrew Pierce. She sat on the unmade bed. The sheets were cold, unwelcoming. Her mind reached for understanding. Rob’s closet was empty. Everything of his, his guitars, his hobby kits, everything was gone.
He’d betrayed her. She sobbed and fell backward onto the sheets. It would be too late to reverse the transaction. The money would be gone. He’d left her nothing, not even a note to say, “I’m sorry.”
THE TWICE TOLD HOTEL | MEXICO POINT
Southeastern End of Lake Ontario
Those whom God wants to punish for the sin of selfishness, he first makes lonely then burdens with long life.
Jake Eastland, six generations removed from his Revolutionary War ancestor Joshua, knew from bitter experience how empty such an existence could be. At ninety-three, alive but seeing no reason whatever to be happy about it, he frowned as the arrival of the hotel elevator disturbed his reverie. A moment later the doors opened and Sheik Carroway, longtime manager of the hotel marina and sometime friend, stepped out into the vestibule of Jake’s penthouse apartment.
Sheik waved a registration card. “The desk asked me to bring this up. Only one new guest today, Jake. A young woman. They put her on the second floor.”
With a dismissive movement of his fingers, Jake indicated the table beside his chair. The hotel lost money after Labor Day and he didn’t much care. A year earlier, at his villa in the Swiss Alps, death had handed him its calling card in the form of a cerebral event. After seventy years out in the world, he hadn’t come back to revamp the hotel’s business plan.
He’d come home to die.
But Death refused to cooperate. Time dragged on. He imagined himself suspended in a kind of living purgatory from which he could not escape until life had exacted retribution for his many failures and misdeeds. One year would not be nearly enough.
Sheik, a robust man in his sixties, with a shock of white hair and watery blue eyes, dropped the card on the end table beside Jake’s chair and crossed the room to the expensive exercise bike near the windows.
“The log still says 614. You do your exercise today?”
“Promise me it’ll kill me. I’ll ride till I drop. Otherwise, tell me again why I should bother.”
Sheik came over and plopped down in the chair opposite Jake. “Come on, Jake. Don’t talk like that. You’re lucky. You get around good, you still got all your marbles, and you’re rich as Croeseus. What more do you expect? Hard-ons?”
Jake’s mood lightened. He had to suppress a smile. “I own Croeseus. Got him in a trade with the Rogala boys in 1945. Money isn’t everything, bub.”
“Maybe, but when you don’t have any, like me, it’s a hell of a long way aheada’ whatever comes second.” Sheik threw a worried glance Jake’s way. “You’re down again. You been takin’ the happy pills doc gave you? He’s gonna be here again tomorrow, you know. He’ll be pissed if you ain’t. That means he’ll yell at me, not you.”
Jake made a face. He’d thrown out the pills. Nothing to live for was one thing, voluntarily turning yourself into a zombie, another. He motioned in the direction of the lake.
“Any nibbles on the Whaler?” He’d amused himself by selling off his personal toys. Only the twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler remained.
Sheik nodded. “Oh yeah. Almost forgot. Guy offered twenty-nine for it. I told him I’d talk to you. It’s ten thousand under the market, Jake. Three years ago you put twenty-five into new engines alone.”
“Tell him I’ll think it over.”
Sheik braced his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. “Okay, Jake. I gotta get back downstairs. Don’t forget to ride the bike. Five miles a day. Keep your ticker runnin’ good.”
Jake let his gaze rest on the instrument of torture Sheik referred to. Its handlebars obstructed the view from where he sat.
He made as if to rise. “Okay. Maybe I’ll take myself for a spin right now.”
Sheik’s expression said he didn’t believe a word of it, but he went to the elevator without comment. The moment the doors closed, Jake fell back into the armchair, eyeing the remote control of the TV. The numbness of having nothing to do but waste himself watching television came over him, just as it did every day. Eventually, from desperation he’d turn the thing on. But not yet.
The blue of the registration card caught his eye. Reaching, he scooted it closer and flipped it over. Adjusting his glasses so he could see through the reading lens, he held the card to the light.
On the first line, the guest had printed her name: Laurel A. Kingsford.
Jake’s heart took off on a run of extra beats and his hand trembled so violently the card slipped from his fingers.
No. It couldn’t be that Laurel. It just couldn’t be.
Ten hours later, at nearly three in the morning, Jake had yet to sleep. Outside, wind swayed the trees. Light from the parking lot below cast nervous patterns through them onto the ceiling of his bedroom, adding to his wakefulness.
Beneath his fingers on the rumpled bed lay the blue registration card of Laurel A. Kingsford.
His only living heir. His granddaughter.
She thought he was dead.
Not surprising, considering that after her mother died and her grandmother took custody, the poor kid spent her formative years tucked away at one boarding school or the other. Hard to learn much about your family when you’re only allowed to visit on holidays and vacations. By then, he and her grandmother Jean Gamble had been divorced thirty years, and Jean had been through a string of other husbands.
Jake’s chest ached as remembrance, amplified by the shadows fretting on the ceiling, overrode his effort to suppress it. From the very day his daughter Saundra came into the world, he’d been pushed to the outside of her life. After the divorce from Jean Gamble, she’d vowed that so far as Saundra was concerned, Jake no longer existed.
By then, she had a good start on the girl. She countered his court orders with her own, fought him to a legal standstill, turned away every attempt he made to visit as the girl came up, all the while filling the child’s mind with poison.
He’d vowed it would be different with Laurel, but business intervened like it always did. He let things slip, and Jean pulled the same tricks she’d done with Saundra all over again with Laurel. Before long, he’d lost his chance with his granddaughter too.
Jake focused on the shadows moving on the ceiling, straining to find order where none existed. Some things, like the movements of trees in the wind, were beyond control. Not the girls, though. For their sake, he could have done more, a lot more, to counter Jean’s malicious influence. But he hadn’t—how long would it take to pay retribution for that?
Now it was different, though. Now he could make it up to her, be the grandfather she’d never had. Laurel—his granddaughter who thought he was dead and had been taught to hate his memory—had taken the room for two weeks. But two weeks wasn’t enough, he needed more time. He’d have to be careful about telling her, not blurt out the truth, win her over slowly, wait until just the right time, let it happen naturally.
He’d have to find a way to involve her in something, get her to stay longer, then, when she was ready for it, he’d reveal his secret.
Did he dare, after everything? Did he dare?
Shore smells wafted through the open windows with the cool September air; driftwood, drying seaweed, life and death. During lulls in the wind, the slosh of small waves came too, slapping as they tripped in the darkness and rode up the land. Tiny pebbles rubbed a chorus as the water moved them, swoosh, shuuu, the sound longer as the water receded.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
His only granddaughter.
Could it really be sixty years since the night he first learned he had a daughter? With a flush of shame, Jake remembered. Not all the things Jean told young Laurel about him were necessarily lies. Come right down to it, most were probably true. His failures went back a long way, all the way back to that day in June of 1925, the day he killed his mother.
JUNE 1925
A plume of dust at the far end of the lane signaled the arrival of a visitor. Jake shaded his eyes. A gasoline buggy, but that’s all he could tell. It was still half a mile off, moving so slowly on the rutted track its own dust caught up to it.
He frowned at the approaching cloud. Bad news came unannounced a lot more often than good. He’d hoped to find a way to turn things right side up before the papers came. What a fool he’d been. Lost the boat, and now the house was next.
Two years earlier, he’d talked his mother into putting the last of her savings into a fishing boat. From the beginning, nothing went right. The boat had too deep a draft. He had to fight just to get out of the inlet. The fish did not run. They barely scraped by on what little he earned. Then a freak storm drove him ashore. About all he’d been able to salvage was the nets.
Last week he’d traded them to Joe Zaia for a beat-up model T. Zaia lived a few miles north on the Salmon River at Port Ontario. He swore the Ford ran great.
He’d lied. On the car’s running board, the major components of its generator lay disassembled. So far, Jake had replaced the head gasket, rebuilt the water pump, and installed new universal joints on both ends of the drive shaft. Now, the generator. The thing had yet to run for more than a few hours.
After five minutes, a brand new model T bumped over the planks that bridged the dry stream fifty yards off and came to a stop next to Jake. It didn’t appear too new anymore after three-quarters of a mile of ruts and dust.
On the door, in the middle of a large white and silver six-pointed star was the word ‘Sheriff.’ The driver unlatched the door and stepped out, brushing at the sleeves of his shirt.
The sheriff was a big man, fortyish, two hundred and fifty pounds at least and tall, near six and a half feet.
He tipped his hat. “Hello, Jake. Is your ma to home?”
“Yes, Sheriff Graybill, she’s in the house.”
The sheriff nodded, went to the house and knocked on the screen door. Receiving a response, he pulled the door open and went in. Several minutes later, he came back out. The screen door slapped closed behind him with a different, emptier sound. His eyebrows were crunched together, like he didn’t care much for his job just now.
He tipped his head toward the house. “You might want to go in and see to your ma.”
He bent and spun the crank. The engine caught. He got in, backed up, and with a short clash of gears bounced away toward Route 104.
Jake Eastland watched the law get smaller. He sat on the running board and began to re-assemble the generator. It ground on him the way honest folks like his dad caught nothing but bad breaks while the shysters and cheats always seemed to crawl their way to success.
“No!” he said aloud, resolve forming deep inside. “I’m not gonna’ be like that, not gonna’ lose all the time.”
The words echoed against the side of the silent house. He put the part down. Entering his mother’s house, the place his family had settled generations ago, he wiped his feet and took off his cap, the habit so ingrained he didn’t think about it. He passed through to the back where the kitchen faced the shore of Lake Ontario. Outside, the high water mark lay thirty feet below and a hundred yards away.
His mother stood at the white porcelain sink, facing away from him, slicing potatoes. Illness had kept her inside, almost from the day of the storm, and again today she hadn’t put up her hair.
Once a rich, gleaming brown, it was now gray and hung straight down, its natural wave absent as if defeated by gravity. Life, and the grinding struggle for survival, had stolen its luster. Only a few dark strands remained to hint of former glory.
His throat contracted and his eyes filled. Crossing the room, he stepped up behind, put his arms around and hugged her.
“Oh, Jake!” She broke out into full-fledged tears, spilling words between huge sobs. “…what I’ll do… lose the place… know what else… I’m so…”
His eyes found the sheath of papers on the small worktable to the left of the sink.
The top sheet bore the heading “Notice of Foreclosure” in inch-high block letters.
He hugged her harder, rocking her side to side, lost in his own thoughts, not noticing at first the way she sagged against him.
There was one thing he knew about. He prayed it was the answer. Every once in a while, when he was in the area and the lake smooth, he’d been able to negotiate the difficult entrance channel to Sandy Pond and sell his catch to Tony McBride at the Wigwam Hotel.
He’d heard whispers how, if a man had the guts and the right friends, he could pick up a hundred dollars in a single night.
He took a deep breath. He would get the model T running. Then he would pay Tony a visit. He was willing to do whatever it took. He’d make the payments. His mom could live in peace.
She was heavy, all her weight on him, and still. Too still.
“Mom. Are you okay?”
Her head fell to the side.
He touched her neck, searched for the pulse. The reassuring pressure was not there. He carried her into the sitting room and put her in a chair. She couldn’t do this. Not now. He would get the goddamn money.
“Mom, don’t. Please breathe! I’m sorry I lost the money. I’ll get it back, I promise.” He fell to his knees and hugged her.
“I’ll get the money, Mom. We’ll never be poor again. Never. Please wake up. I’ll do it, Mom, I swear.”
More than seventy years ago, and Jake remembered pleading with his mother like it just happened a minute ago.
He traced the outline of the card on the bed beside him. Such a simple thing, the touching of pen to paper, yet it changed everything. He was no longer alone, no longer empty, and he had everything to live for.
Jake’s heart made an extra beat. He had to smile in the darkness. Surely death wouldn’t come calling now, before he had the chance to try one last time. His heart began another of the arrhythmias that came almost daily. Sometimes they made him dizzy. He’d regarded them as a nuisance.
But now, in the darkest hours of the night, with so much unfinished business, for the first time he began to fear them.
TWICE TOLD HOTEL
Laurel picked a table in the lee of the building, where she’d be sheltered from the breeze off the water and warmed by the bright morning sun, dapples of which peeked through the vines on the trellis edging the veranda behind her.
Last week, flattened by the suddenness of multiple disaster, she’d decided to come to the Twice Told Hotel. It was the favorite summer place of her childhood, and even though she was a relative stranger now, as close to a home as she had anywhere.
After Labor Day, things at the little hotel were quiet, rates were low. It was the perfect place to be alone, make plans, and gather herself for a new start.
Whatever it would be, it needed to happen soon. The refund of her retirement money hadn’t arrived, and she had less than a hundred bucks in her wallet. Thank God the credit cards were still in her name.
Six years of hard work, her hopes for family, career, all of it gone. Even after a week, it still seemed like a dream.
Why had Rob done it?
What did it matter? Gone was gone. Like castles in the sand, none of the towers she put up stood very long. She sat straighter. Moping wouldn’t help. Think about something else. Anything.
Movement drew her attention to the dining room entrance. The screen door, old-fashioned hinges twanging, opened and an elderly gentleman stepped outside. It was Mr. Eastland, the man who lived in the penthouse, a newspaper tucked under his arm, a cup of coffee on a saucer in his hand.
He was a tall old guy, big-framed but with no extra flesh. She’d seen him several times and they’d begun to exchange greetings.
He stopped, breathed the fresh morning air and surveyed the wide veranda with its stamped tin ceiling, green-carpeted stairways, and varnished mahogany railings. He glanced her way, squinting at something near the mouth of the Little Salmon River behind the nook where she sat.
His gaze lowered, found her, and he smiled and came toward her, paying close attention to his coffee.
“Company?”
He seemed a sweet old guy. “Sure, Mr. Eastland, the more the merrier.”
Mr. Eastland liked to wear flamboyant shirts, and this morning’s was no exception, clashing red and yellow swirls of color. Other than the shirt, he dressed conservatively. Gray chinos fit his trim figure, and his shoes were expensive looking, probably Italian.
She pretended to shield her eyes. “Whoa! I should’ve worn my shades.”
He turned this way and that, allowing time to appreciate the full grandeur of his shirt. His white hair touched his shoulders in back. She wondered whether it had been dark or light. Light, she decided. His eyes were large for his face, wide and expressive, a rich blue with azure highlights. They were his best feature, and kind, his eyes were kind. Some part of her trusted him from the start.
“Proud of myself,” he said as he put down coffee and newspaper and sat opposite her at the table. “Managed not to spill more than half on the way out. I’m not as steady as I used to be.”
“You seem pretty steady to me, Mr. Eastland. You don’t look all that old, either.”
“No? How’s ninety-three sound? Born right here at Mexico Point in nineteen-ought-five.”
“You’re joking. I thought you were probably in your seventies.”
“I wish!” He sipped his coffee. “You have any idea what it’s like to be this old?” He gazed at her over the cup, and one corner of his mouth curved a bit, giving his face a droll expression. “This hotel’s been here sixty years, and I had it built, started it in nineteen thirty-eight, when I was thirty-three.”
“You’re the owner? That’s incredible—my grandmother came here every summer for years. I wonder if you knew her.”
His hand stopped in the act of lowering the cup. He stared at her, his expression intense. “Maybe. What was her name?”
“Jean Gamble.”
His eyes seemed to take on a deeper blue and look straight through her, as if some invisible scene played in his memory, then he blinked and nodded and put the cup down.
“I hardly ever visited myself—too busy—but sure, Jean Gamble. I remember her.” He reached for the newspaper, and when he spoke again his tone was different.
“Well then, let’s see what’s happening while we wait for a waitress to show up.”
Before she could formulate a single question he’d opened the paper to the financial page, slipped on a pair of glasses and tuned her out.
Darn! He’d gone from warm to distant in seconds. Something she said? Lately, she couldn’t do anything right. She looked away, over the varnished railing, out to the water.
From the nearby shore, Lake Ontario rose to the horizon, majestic. Out there the cries of gulls rode the soft morning breeze, but the part of her that responded to the wild serenity of the place, the way everything balanced, was not free to receive its gift this morning.
She reached for the sections of the paper Mr. Eastland had discarded. He didn’t notice. He was reading the stock market report.
___________
Jake Eastland was not reading the stock market report. He hardly saw it. His heart still raced. Jean had loved the Twice Told, tried to get it in the divorce. He’d bought her off by offering lifetime guest privileges, and she’d taken full advantage, arriving each season complete with entourage. Mentioning he’d built the place was a mistake. He’d barely allowed himself to meet Laurel and she’d already come too close to the truth...
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