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“Ditto.”
Why is it that CBX residents are the only ones who seem to have sense these days?There was a reason I avoided outsiders, but damn, sometimes it sucked to be proven right. Except we’d adopted Claire as one of us—our mistake.
Get real, my inner voice chided. She’d spent one summer here and then disappeared for nine years. She had no loyalty to CBX. Still, I couldn’t quell my disappointment.
“Have you heard anything else about the Markham resort?” I asked.
Wes frowned. “Why would I know anything about that?”
I shrugged. “You spend more time in the civic center than I do.” All the Carolina Banks government buildings—city hall, the police department, the library—were on the same block in the center of the islands, away from tourists and valuable oceanfront property.
“I haven’t heard anything, but then again, I don’t pay attention to stuff like that, either. I thought the proposal was nixed.”
“That’s what I thought too,” I muttered. The Markham resort proposal required tearing down some residential buildings and rezoning, which historically wasn’t done. The Carolina Banks might be a tourist destination, but we took care of our own first.
“Why are you asking?”
“You’ll never guess who I saw just now.”Hell, I can hardly believe it.
“If I’ll never guess, you might as well cut the crap and just tell me.” Wes had never had a high tolerance for bullshit, which was what made him a great cop and why we got along so well.
“Claire Holden.”
It took a second for the name to register, but when it did, a huge smile erupted on Wes’s face. “No shit. I haven’t heard that name in a while. Is Brit here too?”
Brit was Claire’s college roommate who’d also lived and worked in CBX that summer. She’d been a nice girl, but I hadn’t clicked with her like I had with Claire. Almost all of my waking hours when I wasn’t working had been spent with that blond with the incredible smile.
And the rest had been spent thinking about her.Fuck.It seemed old habits died hard. She’d been back in my life an hour and had been on my mind for fifty-nine minutes of that.
“No, Brit’s not here.”
“What does this have to do with the Markham resort?” Wes played the dumb cop when it suited him, but he didn’t miss much. The department was wasting his talents by putting him on security detail. Then again, it wasn’t like CBX had a lot of crime, especially in the off-season.
“Claire’s sister is Stephanie Markham, wife of the Markham CEO. And Claire works for him.”
“Then problem solved,” Wes said.
Wes must not have remembered Claire like I did. As a girl, she’d been dogged and determined, not to mention savvy. She and Brit had been cashiers at Surf, Sand, and Sun, a local souvenir shop. She managed to persuade old man Turner, who was notoriously stingy, to give her and Brit a significant raise only four days into the job. My high school buddy Nate had worked there for three seasons and had never gotten so much as a dime’s raise.
She sure as hell was no longer a girl. Through her thin towel, I’d seen curves she hadn’t had before—curves that made me want to pull that towel off to discover what else had changed. But judging by the fire that had sparked in her eyes, she was as tenacious as ever.Fuck me.I had way too much other shit going on to deal with this curveball.
“How do you figure the problem is solved?” I asked.
“You two have history.”
“We were friends, sure.”
Wes snorted, an unbecoming sound for a man in uniform. “You were more than friends.”
I was annoyed, especially given how she’d dominated my thoughts since I’d seen her. “I would think I’d remember if we were more than friends.”
What I remembered was wanting to be more than friends. I remembered how beautiful she was. And funny. And smart. Claire had been the total package. The only strike against her was that her stay was temporary, but that trumped everything else. The relationship was over before it ever could have started.
Just like now.
“If she’d stuck around another week, the two of you would have been sucking face all over town like Lyra and… what was his name?” Wes snapped his fingers as he tried to remember. “Pierre? Perrin? Something like that.”
My sister had notoriously poor taste in men, which was how she’d wound up a single mother. I’d blissfully forgotten that she’d spent that summer wrapped around a foreign exchange student with a summer work visa. “It wasn’t like that between Claire and me.”
