Barefoot in Pearls (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 3) Read online

  Would he guess that the woman who ran the housekeeping company was once a maid at the resort and recently married one of the über-rich men who’d moved here to start a minor league baseball team? Unlikely.

  “Ahh, let me think.” He peered at her, pursing his lips, nodding as he thought it through. “Definitely on the bride’s side. Maybe a sister or cousin. And she’s a neat freak.”

  True enough, Mandy was scooping up a plate that had held hors d’oeuvres and looking around for someone to hand it to. Someone who worked for her, but would he know that?

  “And she’s pregnant.”

  Ari sat up straight. “Really?”

  “Look how she’s sort of absently rubbing her stomach.”

  Mandy was indeed giving herself the telltale pregnancy rub with her free hand. “Huh. Who knew?”

  “Me.” He leaned closer. “I’ll settle for a peck on the cheek. Ready whenever you are.”

  “No way.” She shook her head, backing away. “She is not a cousin or sister of the bride,” she said, glancing at Mandy as her husband, Zeke, walked toward the table, talking to the groom. “She’s in charge of our housekeeping service and married to a billionaire.”

  “But she is pregnant.”

  “That remains to be seen. Would you have known that her husband is a billionaire?”

  “No, but that guy behind him is.”

  She leaned to the side to see who he meant. “Well, yes, Nate Ivory is a billionaire, but that so doesn’t count since his whole family is tabloid fodder, and we weren’t betting on him.”

  He laughed softly. “How many things do I have to get right to qualify for a win?”

  If he kissed her, even on the cheek, she’d probably melt right into his arms. Still leaning away, Ari spied Lacey Walker across the dance floor in the center of the reception area. “You win if you can guess who she is.”

  “Easy. She owns the place. Built it, in fact. Husband’s the architect.”

  Ari’s jaw dropped. “How do you—”

  He put his finger on her chin, closed her mouth, and guided her face to his. “Forget the cheek. I want the lips.”

  As if she could say no. Ari inched closer, already anticipating the touch.

  “Hi there, Luke. Nice to see you again.”

  Lacey’s voice pulled them apart. So he knew Lacey Walker.

  “Cheaters never win,” Ari mumbled, making Luke laugh, low and sly. They both stood to greet the woman who did, indeed, own Casa Blanca with her architect husband, Clay, backed financially and emotionally by her three best friends from college.

  “Hello, Lacey.” Ari reached out to give the other woman a hug. “You’ve obviously already met Gussie’s brother, Luke.”

  “Just before the wedding.” They greeted each other with an easy hug. “Say, Clay wanted me to give you a heads up that the mason will be at the job site tomorrow morning at eight. He’s apparently anxious to meet you.”

  “Absolutely,” Luke replied. “I’ll be there bright and early.”

  Ari knew a little about building from her interior design classes. A mason would be the contractor who’d prepare the foundation…and level any uneven ground. Her heart tripped, the pearl necklace and its possible significance still tugging at her.

  “What are you thinking about building?” Ari asked.

  “No one’s thinking about it anymore,” Lacey said on a laugh. “Clay’s architectural firm handled the design for the house Luke’s building up on Barefoot Mountain.”

  “Barefoot Mountain?” Ari and Luke actually asked the question in perfect unison, but Ari sounded strangled, while Luke laughed at the name. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” he added.

  Lacey waved her hand. “Oh, you have to remember I’m a Mimosa Key local, born and raised. We used to ride dirt bikes on that hill when I was a kid, and it seemed like a mountain to us.”

  Dirt bikes? On a burial ground? Ari tamped down her reaction. She didn’t know it was a burial ground yet. But she had to find out.

  “And you really want to destroy a…local landmark?” Ari asked him.

  “Well, Cutter Valentine does,” he said. “And it’s his ten-thousand-square-foot estate home I’ve been hired to build.”

  “That’s what’s going there?” Ari almost choked. “A McMansion for a has-been ballplayer?”

  They both looked at her, instantly making Ari regret the exclamation.

  “He’s not exactly a has-been,” Luke said with a wry smile. “Cutter’s retiring from a stellar career and is going to be managing the Barefoot Bay Bucks minor league team.”

  “And, frankly, it’s a godsend that someone is finally building up there,” Lacey added. “That land’s been in probate and court messes, and no one wanted to touch it after Hurricane Damien hit. But it turns out Cutter’s great-uncle willed it to him, and he let it sit because he didn’t want it.”

  “Then the opportunity for him to manage the Bucks came up,” Luke said. “It was serendipity.”

  Which Ari didn’t believe in. “Why didn’t anyone want to touch it before now?” she asked, her sixth sense sparking. Maybe someone knew what Barefoot Mountain really was.

  “Balzac Valentine died during the storm, in the house,” Lacey said. “One of the windows blew in and killed him.”

  “Oh, how tragic,” Ari said. “Why didn’t he evacuate?”

  “Lots of us didn’t,” Lacey told her. “That hurricane was headed straight north for the Panhandle, when bam!” She snapped her fingers and pointed to the left. “It turned and crashed straight into Barefoot Bay with cat-five winds. It happened so fast, most of us had no choice but to hunker down and ride it out.”

  “Did you?” Luke asked.

  She nodded, a frown pulling at her lightly freckled brow. “My daughter and I lived right over there where the main hotel is now, in a house my grandfather built. We spent that night in a bathtub with a mattress on our heads.” She closed her eyes on a sigh. “It was a miracle we survived, because nothing else did.”

  Ari had heard bits and pieces of the story, folklore around Casa Blanca now, but seeing the memory darkening Lacey’s amber eyes made it real. Yet her mind went back to the land in North Barefoot Bay. “Did you know the man who died?”

  “I’d met him as a child, but he was a recluse after his wife passed away.” She nodded, narrowing her eyes to pull up a memory. “My grandfather knew him, though. They were both Mimosa Key founders who claimed land in the forties.”

  “And left it to Cutter Valentine?” Ari asked, wondering about the pro baseball player and how much he might—or might not—care about sacred ground and making a mental note to sit down and talk to Lacey about her grandfather, and that hill.

  “Nobody was more stunned than Cutter when he found out he had a great-uncle who left him part of an island,” Luke said. “But, then, that’s how Cutter Valentine’s life goes. Perfectly.”

  “Who lived there before Cutter’s great-uncle?” Ari asked. Maybe someone, somewhere kept a record of that land or its history.

  “No one,” Lacey said. “Before my grandfather and his cronies built a wooden causeway from the mainland, this island was purely overgrown scrub and mangroves, totally uninhabited but for gators and birds, like lots of the keys and small islands along this part of the coast and the Everglades.”

  “And these settlers just claimed the land?” What if it belonged to someone else? “Is that even legal?”

  Lacey gave a dismissive laugh. “Back then? Land acquisition was a free-for-all, according to my grandfather. No one cared about this island off the coast of Florida, so the founders built the bridge and took the land they wanted.” She swept her hand toward the spectacular view of white sands that curved in a half moon at least a mile long. “Which is how I ended up with such prime property for Casa Blanca.”

  But someone might have lived here before, Ari thought. Seminole, maybe. Or Calusa. Grandma would have known. An old, dull pain, more like the memory of the ache than the actual thing,
pressed around the edges of her heart, but Ari pushed it away. Ari’s grandmother would have known and she would have cared. She’d have done something about the very idea of leveling a burial ground.

  “Anyway, you know Clay is really happy you took the job for Mr. Valentine, since your sister works here at Casa Blanca. It’s incredible good fortune that it worked out that way.”

  Fortune. Serendipity. Coincidence. All the words scraped over Ari’s heart. He was here for a reason, all right. But was it because he was The One for her…or the one she was supposed to stop from destroying sacred land?

  Right that minute, Ari had never missed her grandmother more.

  Luke’s reply was drowned out by a cheer that rose from across the dance floor, where a group of guests surrounded Mandy Nicholas and her husband, Zeke. “And it seems we have even more to celebrate today.” Lacey beamed at the couple. “Did you hear Mandy’s going to have a baby?”

  “I heard,” Ari said dryly, sliding a look at a very smug Luke.

  “Love is in the air, as always!” Lacey blew them a playful kiss, moving on to greet guests at the next table.

  “Pregnant, huh?” Luke turned to her and tipped her chin up. “About my winnings…”

  She inched out of his touch, thinking hard. She had to make him understand why he couldn’t destroy that hill. “One more bet, Luke.”

  He gave a pretend grunt. “You really want me to work for it, don’t you? All right. Name it.”

  “I bet you”—she put her hands on her hips and looked up, purposely coy—“don’t have the nerve”—he lifted one brow at the words—“to take me to Barefoot Mountain after the reception is over.”

  He frowned, not following. “Kind of dark and scary at night, especially in a place where a guy died.”

  “I’m not afraid of the dark or the dead, Luke. I respect both too much.” She layered on plenty of emphasis, which she hoped he’d understand later.

  “All right, I’ll take you,” he said. “Which means I won that bet.” He lowered his face, then moved his mouth to cover her ear. “I’ll collect my winnings up on the mountain, Arielle.”

  If she didn’t chase him away with what she planned to tell him up there. Until then, maybe she should dial back the banter and remember he might end up disliking her very much by the end of the night.

  Chapter Four

  The clouds were heavy by midnight, blocking any moonlight and threatening rain, but the headlights of Luke’s old-but-new-to-him Ford F-150 lit up the dilapidated house like it was a set on a Broadway stage. Broken windows, missing shingles, fallen fascia, and torn porch planks made the sinister little structure look every bit the part of a place where a man named Balzac Valentine had been hit by debris and killed.

  Parking the truck in the expanse of dirt between the house and the base of the hill that separated it from the water, Luke glanced at Arielle in the passenger seat next to him. “You still want to do this?”

  “Are you asking again if I’m scared?”

  He heard the challenge in her voice and was way too smart to say that most women would be. Clearly, Arielle wasn’t most women.

  “Just making sure you want to go exploring in the dark.”

  “Who said anything about exploring?”

  Whoa. “So, let’s get right down to business then.” Except he wasn’t entirely sure what that business was.

  He assumed this was a hookup of some sort, but after the conversation with Lacey, he’d sensed a strange distance from Arielle and a pullback from the flirting they’d both been enjoying. Throughout the rest of the evening, she’d evenly divided her attention among the guests and her maid-of-honor duties and saved a little time for Luke. Too little. He’d snagged a few dances and more conversation, but something had definitely changed, and it wasn’t on his end. He was still as attracted to Arielle as he’d been the minute he’d met her.

  He hadn’t really been able to pin her down until the festivities wound down, when she’d returned from the bridal dressing room in jeans, sneakers, and a simple navy tank top that did crazy things to her curves and even crazier things to his hormones. Then, she’d announced the bet was on, and they were going to the mountain.

  She put her hand decisively on the door latch, ready to climb out of his truck with the speed of a woman who really had some business to get down to. “Let’s go,” she said.

  He reached out and closed his hand over her arm, which felt narrow in his fingers, but strong, too. Deceptively strong. “It’s going to be very dark out there.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you found your way around with your eyes closed today.”

  He lingered for a moment, memorizing her striking features in the reflection of the headlights he’d yet to turn off. Her cheekbones were high, her lips wide, her jaw straight. But there was something in her eyes that kind of scared him. Determination. Raw, focused determination. To do what?

  “Are you going to tell me why we’re here?” he asked.

  She gave a very light laugh, absently toying with the pearl necklace she wore. He didn’t recall her wearing that at the wedding, and it seemed an unusual choice to go with jeans and a simple top, but what did he know about fashion?

  “You seem pretty smart,” she said. She pushed the door open, stepping down from the high truck. “You’ll figure it out.” She slammed the door and disappeared into the darkness.

  Okay then.

  He turned off the ignition and lights and sat for a second, scanning the dark shadows outside the truck. He’d fought too many wars to follow blindly. He reached into the side compartment and snagged a small but powerful flashlight, slipping it into his pants pocket. Swinging down to the ground, he rounded the truck to meet her. Neither spoke as they got close enough to make out each other’s face, and Luke automatically reached for her hands.

  “Don’t tell me you want to go into that house,” he said.

  She eyed the building, even the outline of it nearly impossible to see now. “Not now. I want to take you to the hill. I have to show you something.”

  “In the dark?” He almost pulled out the flashlight, but stopped, waiting to see what she had in mind with this midnight adventure.

  “You can feel things better in the dark.”

  Like…her body? An automatic male response cut through him, getting primed for what he hoped she had in mind, despite her all-business attitude.

  With a surprisingly calm demeanor, she held his hand and started walking away from the truck, with an utter lack of…sensuality.

  “This isn’t about sex, is it, Arielle?”

  Her step slowed. “That’s why you think I brought you out here?”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  She let out something between a sigh and a laugh, carefully navigating over the dirt road that rounded the side of the house and led toward the base of the hill. “I have an apartment, you know.”

  “Not as adventurous.”

  She smiled up at him, her white teeth showing in the dark. “I suppose you like adventure, having been in the French Foreign Legion and all.”

  “Unlike a lot of the seven thousand guys I fought with, I didn’t join for the adventure.” He heard the flat tone in his voice, felt it in his gut.

  “Then why did you join?” she asked as they walked.

  He didn’t answer while they found the closest thing to a path there was, his brain going back to his run along here in broad daylight. He’d made the trip once with his eyes open, and she hadn’t been there. Then he’d repeated the course with his eyes closed, as he’d learned to do in every run drill he’d practiced. That time, he nearly flattened the unexpected visitor.

  “Or is that part of the thing you don’t talk about?” she prodded to break the silence.

  “I thought my sister told you the story of why I left the States.”

  “I know there was the accident that scarred her and that you felt guilty for your part in it and ran away,” she said. “That’s her perception of why y
ou left.”

  “That’s why I left the States,” he said. “Not why I joined the Legion.” For some reason, he wanted to confide in this alluring woman, which didn’t make sense, but here, in the deep, dark night, that need felt right. So he went with it.

  “You of all people will appreciate what actually happened.”

  She leaned into him, silently asking for more.

  “I made a bad, bad bet and lost.”

  “What did you bet on?”

  “I bet I had the balls to kill a guy for money, and when push came to shove, I didn’t, and I had to get the hell out of Dodge before someone killed me.”

  She slowed down, and his eyes had adjusted enough to the lack of light to see the stunned look on her face, underscored by a low, distant rumble of thunder far out in the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Are you surprised I was involved in something like that?” he asked.

  “I’m surprised the thing you did after you discovered you weren’t able to take someone’s life for money was join an army to, well, I assume, kill people for money.”

  “Trust me, the irony wasn’t lost on me. And it really wasn’t for money. The Legion doesn’t pay enough for that to be the sole reason for joining.”

  “So, what was your reason?”

  Oh, hell. He was all in now. “I was hiding, to be perfectly honest. In the French Foreign Legion, you get a new name, a new identity, and you’re completely protected and anonymous.” He put a hand on her back to guide her to where the path swerved after the second grouping of oleander bushes.

  “What was your name?”

  “Ricard Caron.” He emphasized the hated French accent.

  “Can I call you Ricard?”

  “Please don’t,” he said in all seriousness. “I hate the name.” And all the…misery it represented.

  “But you’re not anonymous or protected now.”

  “No need. The guy who was after me is dead.”

  “So you didn’t really want to be in this mercenary army?”

  He let another distant rumble answer for him.

  “Am I getting into the ‘I don’t talk about this’ territory?” she asked, giving his hand a gentle squeeze.