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“Liane, this is Mr. Mangus. My daughter, Liane. Mr. Mangus was just leaving,” she added, giving him notice.
Liane looked at Tyler with hollow-eyed curiosity, then up at her mother. “Is he a boyfriend of yours? Is he going to get us into trouble?”
The catch in Stormy’s heart made her see red. She looked pointedly at Tyler. “No, sweetheart. Mr. Mangus isn’t going to cause any trouble at all.”
“Of course, I’m not,” he said, his tone smooth as silk. He avoided her glare by focusing on the child. “But I’m hoping your mother can help me solve a puzzle. Do you like puzzles, Liane?”
The girl shrugged. “Sometimes.”
Giving Tyler a smile with nothing behind it but teeth, Stormy quickly ushered her daughter to the foot of the stairs. “Run up and get your jacket on, sweetheart. We’ve got a date for the beach, remember?”
“Are you going to help the man solve his puzzle?”
“No, I’m not.”
“We don’t have to go to the beach if you don’t want.”
Stormy bent to kiss Liane’s brow. “I want to. I’ve missed it—and you—terribly. Now, scoot. And put on a cap—the wind is nippy.”
Stormy watched her daughter climb to the top landing before she turned to discover Tyler Mangus at her elbow. He, too, had watched Liane mount the stairs, and there was a flicker of wistfulness in his expression. A second later, though, it was gone, and Stormy wondered if she had imagined it.
She moved around him, marched through the long wide hall to the front door, and yanked it open. “I’m requesting you to get off these premises. If you don’t, you’ll be trespassing, and that’s against the law.”
He sauntered past her onto the covered porch that faced the beach road. “You spent a bit of time in the law library at Lowell?”
“That bit of legalese I was familiar with before I went to jail. Good day.” She began to close the door.
He stopped it with the palm of his hand. “I’ll be watching you. My clients want their money.”
“Watch all you want. You’ll be wasting your time.”
“I don’t think so.” He made a point of assessing her from neck to knee and did not try to conceal his admiration. “By the way, I’ve never beenman of the year, but I make an excellentman of the moment.”
Unamused and, worse, unnerved, Stormy closed the door in his face. She watched out the side window as he went down the stairs. Releasing a taut breath, she stood, unmoving, minute after minute, all her reserves drained.
The old beach house—once her parents’ place, which she now shared with her sister, Nina, and her husband and two boys—was old-fashioned, sturdy, and built to suggest an Alabama-raised cottage. A feature that served the old house well during coastal storms and tidal surges that swept over the dunes and carried away all that was stored beneath the house. The foyer was wide and long, and a huge screen door facing the ocean, designed to allow ocean breezes to cool the interior long before air-conditioning was de rigueur. Wicker-bladed ceiling fans did duty when ocean breezes lay flat during receding tides. She was fortunate to have the shelter and knew it. Yet, the loss of her independence wreaked havoc on her soul.
Throughout the whole disastrous affair—the arrest, the trial, her incarceration—she had held back one bit of information. No one had asked it of her, and she had not volunteered it. She held it dear and close to her heart.
Far more experienced in criminal law upon his arrest, Hadley Wilson would not speak to the police without counsel present. If he had later mentioned to his lawyer that little Liane had been in the car seat, sound asleep when he robbed the bank, the attorney apparently had not regarded the information as pertinent to Hadley’s defense; it was not mentioned at Hadley’s trial, either.
Stormy didn’t want the information to come out, and certainly not now while she was on parole. In prison, she had learned from other inmates’ horror stories how insensitive the juvenile court system could be. She’d also learned how easy it was for a parolee to lose custody of a child.
And now Tyler Mangus, asset-recovery agent, was looking for the stolen money. That meant he was bound to do a thorough investigation. Would he be less scrupled—and therefore possibly more thorough—than the police, who had focused only on Hadley and herself?
If so, he could put Liane at risk. That made him dangerous.
He was not easily put off. That made him treacherous.
He was very good-looking. Tall, broad-shouldered with sharp features softened by full lips and those very green eyes. His attractiveness activated a physical response that had lain dormant within Stormy for many long and lonely months.
That made him a menace.
Before she went up the stairs to collect Liane, her gaze fell upon her reflection in the antique mirror that graced the foyer. She barely recognized the image of her twenty-nine-year-old self. Poor diet and high anxiety had caused thinness in her that made her breasts and hips overly prominent. Gray eyes that had once sparkled with life now looked at the world with suspicion. Her hair had once been as luxurious as Liane’s, but prison soap had turned it to straw, and she’d even discovered several gray hairs. Her mouth was too wide, but at least she used to smile. The only smiling she had done of late, though, had been camouflage to avoid exposing her fears and uncertainties.
Liane met her at the top of the stairs. “Are we going to the beach now?”
“Yes, we are,” Stormy said, and as she tugged Liane’s hat more securely around her daughter’s ears, she recalled the peculiar, almost plaintive expression that had transformed Tyler Mangus’s handsome features as he watched the child, almost as if he had been reaching out for the girl.
