She curled her fingers into fists at the reminder. How dare he show up in the town he had irreparably damaged, towing behind him bold and painful evidence of all he had taken away? Was he trying to rub everybody’s faces in it?
Grrr.
The words he had spoken suddenly penetrated the fog of anger around her.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be in town.
Was he talking days, weeks, months? All of it spent next door to her?
How would she endure it, when some heretofore unknown violent part of her wished she could drag him behind his family’s beautiful boat for two or three hours?
Having him next door was going to be torture. Her comfortable little house on the lake was her sanctuary. She desperately needed the calm oasis she found here on Redemption Bay, overlooking the raw, craggy mountains reflected in the vivid blue waters of the lake.
With him staying next door, she wouldn’t be able to relax for an instant. She would always be aware he was there, just a few shrubs away.
She couldn’t bear it.
Okay. Gloves officially coming off now. The idea that he had brought one of his family’s boats back to town to float in Lake Haven in front of everyone like some kind of taunt was the last straw. Why bother being polite?
“I’ll admit, I’m surprised to see you here. Last I heard, you despised Haven Point and never wanted to see the place again. You’ve certainly done your best to see us obliterated off the map.”
He frowned. “I never despised Haven Point. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, wouldn’t you say?”
“What else would you call it? You deliberately let the downtown fall into ruins.”
“I did?”
The jerk actually had the nerve to look surprised at the accusation.
“You must have driven through town on your way here. You had to have seen all the boarded-up buildings and vacant properties in your buildings.”
“Not mine now,” he pointed out. “Aidan Caine owns them.”
“For five years they were yours!” she exclaimed. “And for five years you did absolutely nothing to take care of them except hire a completely incompetent property manager, who robbed you blind along with the tenants of your buildings.”
He glowered at her, looking suddenly as dark and forbidding as thunderstorms over the Redemptions.
Rika whined a little and suddenly planted her haunches at McKenzie’s feet. McKenzie highly doubted Ben would pose any sort of threat to her but she appreciated the moral support, anyway.
“I might have been less...attentive than I should have been,” he said stiffly. “I’ve been a little busy the last few years. And, again, I haven’t owned the property since I sold everything to Aidan.”
“Regardless, the problem was created by you. Haven Point is practically a ghost town, with almost half of the businesses closing or relocating outside the city limits to Shelter Springs since Joe died. I’m the mayor of Haven Point. Did you know that?”
“I did not. Congratulations?”
“Condolences are more in order, thanks to you. It’s a rough job, especially with our constantly plummeting tax revenue. It kills me to know we could have a thriving, active downtown filled with shops, restaurants, hotels, entertainment—if the man who owned most of the real estate in this town hadn’t completely ignored his responsibilities for the last five years.”
His jaw clenched for only a moment before his features smoothed out. “Wow. This is an interesting way to welcome someone to your town. Go directly on the attack.”
She refused to feel guilty. He deserved every ounce of her hostility and more. “I’m very welcoming to newcomers, in general.”
“Just not to me.”
Could he honestly blame her? He had created a huge mess and even with Aidan’s cooperation now, she didn’t know how to help her town find its way out.
“Let’s be honest. You’re not my favorite person right now.”
“Message received, loud and clear, Mayor. I’ll try to stay out of your way while I’m here. That might be a touch difficult, considering we’re next-door neighbors and share a boat dock, but I’ll do my best.”
If it hadn’t been such a long day—and if she weren’t so darn angry at the man—she might have been able to muster a facsimile of politeness, but right now it didn’t seem worth the effort. “How long are you staying?”
“I’m not sure,” he hedged. “A week. Maybe two. Depends.”
On what? His mood? The moon cycle? The futures market?
Why was he here?
He didn’t seem inclined to be forthcoming about that particular question on his own and she couldn’t figure out a way to ask, especially considering she had just unloaded years of frustration on him.
His reasons for being here were none of her business, really. He could travel anywhere he wanted. She was the mayor, not some petty megalomaniac who could demand to see his papers once he crossed over her town boundary.
McKenzie fought the urge to press a hand to her suddenly shaky insides. She had never been very good at confrontations and now that the heat of this one with Ben had passed, she felt a little quivery and unsettled. At the moment, she only wanted to go home, lock the door, run a hot bath and try to pretend the past fifteen minutes never happened.
She certainly wasn’t going to bring her chicken breast out to the terrace to grill now. She would just have to sauté it or something, which wasn’t nearly as good.
Darn the man for ruining what had promised to be such a beautiful evening.
“Good night, then. I’ll do my best to keep Rika on my property.”
“I don’t mind her. I get the feeling the boundary between the houses has been fairly fluid. I see no reason to change that. She’s welcome over there.”
She nodded, but gripped her dog’s collar tightly so her poodle wouldn’t be tempted to go sniffing after Hondo again.
Cheap tart. Okay, so he was big and beautiful, with all those muscles. That didn’t make him good for her.
The dogs, of course. She was talking about the dogs.
“Come, Rika.”
After considerable effort, she managed to convince her dog to leave her new BFF and return to the house. The dog immediately plopped down onto her favorite spot on the rug in the sunroom.
Usually the room was McKenzie’s favorite of the house, too—but with those glass windows, she was entirely too aware of her new neighbor’s presence next door. She closed all the blinds before she turned around and marched into the kitchen.
Her hands were shaking and her knees felt as weak as the first time she had gone backcountry skiing with her friend Paulo and they had nearly been caught in an avalanche when a cornice above them had broken free.
They had managed to ski out of the path just in time. Right now, she didn’t feel as lucky as that day. She felt as if thousands of tons of snow and ice and rock had just tumbled over her head.
Ben Kilpatrick. Here, in Haven Point, after all these years, and tougher, harder, more sexy than ever.
Oh, she used to have such a crush on the man. It was humiliating, really, when she remembered how she had pined for him. He barely knew she was alive but she had watched him with almost stalker-like intensity. When she would visit Lily at Snow Angel Cove to bring her homework or hang out and talk about boys, McKenzie used to pray he would be there. She hoped every time that he would come into Lily’s room—which had become basically a hospital room in later months as her condition regressed—to check on her at some point during the visit.
When he did stop by, he barely noticed McKenzie. She knew that. He plainly adored his ill younger sister and probably didn’t know McKenzie existed.
He had been brooding and angry back then. Though she had never been quite sure why, she sensed the atmosphere at Snow Angel Cove h
adn’t been exactly nurturing and warm. She had always liked his mother, Lydia, but Joe was a serious A-hole most of the time, cold and cruel, especially to Ben.
Why was he here? And why now? It was the worst possible timing. She was heading into her busiest few weeks of the year. Lake Haven Days, the boat show, the Fourth of July town celebrations. She didn’t expect to have five minutes to even breathe in the next week to ten days and now she had to worry about Ben Kilpatrick living next door.
It was enough to make a woman want to tear her hair out—or want to curl up in her bed under the blankets and pretend she didn’t have a business or a town to run.
* * *
AFTER THEIR NEIGHBORS went inside their house, Ben led Hondo next door. The dog immediately found a stick under the big birch tree, carried it to the water’s edge, then flopped down on his belly and started to chew it.
Ben watched him for a moment, then took a few more steps to a double swing overlooking the water just a few yards from the dock.
It was beautiful here. Wispy clouds encircled the tops of the Redemption Mountains and the setting sun painted them pink and coral and lavender, a scene perfectly reflected in the clear waters of the lake.
Because of the way the shoreline curved, he could see the lights of downtown begin to twinkle in the twilight and with a piercing cry, a red-tailed hawk suddenly soared from one of the tall pines that grew in such abundance around the lake, lending their crisp, tart scent to the scene.
Haven Point was an idyllic spot, really. How had he forgotten that over the years? Somehow he must have let the darkness and despair of his home life swallow the memory.
Yes, it was pretty. That didn’t make him any happier at being forced to come back.
He could have said no.
He wasn’t exactly an indentured servant. When Aidan asked him to take on this assignment after Marsh’s sudden fatal heart attack, Ben could have told him to kiss off, to send someone else at Caine Tech.
Yes, they were facing a top-level decision but he could have picked two or three others on his team or Aidan’s, people he trusted, who were likely to be more objective about Haven Point than he was.
It would have been the logical move—and Ben was nothing if not logical.
So why hadn’t he? Why was he here on a beautiful late-June evening gazing out at a couple of colorful wood ducks swooping in to land on the water?
He didn’t have a clear answer to that, even inside his own head. Something was tugging him back here and had been for some time. Closure, maybe? Some sense of unfinished business? He had left town so abruptly, the afternoon of Lily’s funeral, and he hadn’t been back since.
Whatever the reason drawing him to Haven Point, he was here now. Aidan had wanted him to take over for Marshall Phillips on this fact-finding assignment and Ben had agreed.
“I think it will be good for you to go back,” Aidan said three days earlier when he came to Ben’s house personally to ask him to come. “Take it from a man who survived a brain tumor. At some point in your life, before it’s too late, you have to grab your ghosts by the throat and tell them to back the hell off. The only way to do that is to face them head-on.”
He hadn’t seen the point in arguing with Aidan that he didn’t have ghosts, unless he were counting the painful memories of the younger sister he adored.
He didn’t hate Haven Point. It was merely a small, beautifully situated town where he had once lived—one he had intended to spend the rest of his life without ever stepping foot in again.
“Besides,” Aidan had continued with that logic that was always so damn hard for Ben to refute. “You were just saying how that Killy you’ve been working to renovate for the last year is done and ready for her maiden voyage. It seems fitting that you put her in the water for the first time at Lake Haven, where she came from.”
Through the well-landscaped shrubs and trees, he caught sight of a figure moving past the window of the pretty little lake house next door.
He wasn’t sure he would be able to tolerate living next door to Haven Point’s vociferous mayor, even for a few days.
He remembered McKenzie. Those long-lashed dark eyes in her dusky skin, the inky hair, the dimples, which tended to flash equally, whether she was angry or happy.
How could he forget her, when she had been Lily’s dearest and most loyal friend? While his sister’s other friends seemed to have dropped off the edge of the earth after her condition deteriorated and she was forced to curtail most activity outside Snow Angel Cove, McKenzie had come faithfully at least two or three times a week, bringing homework and goodies and movies for the two of them to watch.
Yeah, he had been a self-absorbed, angry teenager, just trying to survive living in his father’s house until he could graduate from high school and get the hell out. But even he had been able to see that McKenzie had made Lily’s last year far more bearable—even enjoyable—than it would have been otherwise.
He would have liked to be able to thank her for that—but considering her animosity toward him, he wasn’t sure she wanted to hear anything he had to say.
He inhaled deeply then let out a sigh. What had he expected? He had burned every bridge he’d ever crossed here and had walked away without looking back.
Now here he was again, fully aware that his history here with the people of this town—the difficult heritage he didn’t like to remember—would make the job much harder than it would have been for Marshall.
CHAPTER THREE
AFTER A RESTLESS NIGHT filled with very strange dreams involving a certain sexy billionaire, McKenzie rose before sunrise and headed outside, leaving a disgruntled Rika behind. She grabbed her kayak and paddle from the shed next to the lake then launched it from the dock.
The rim of the sun started to appear above the high peaks of the Redemptions as she paddled south along the shoreline through clear, quiet water.
Only a few hardy anglers shared the water with her but they were way out in the deep water of the middle, probably going after the huge lake trout that could be found there. She hardly noticed them as she stroked through tendrils of mist that curled off the water on these mountain mornings.
A few loons flapped their feathers and moved away from her as she paddled in their direction. To her left, a fish jumped, going after all the little morning bugs that skimmed across the surface, and in the pine trees offshore on the other side, she heard an owl hoot as he returned to bed after a night prowling the forests. Sometimes it seemed like a dream that she really had a life here—a good one, too, filled with good friends, responsibilities she did her best to tackle, a thriving business she loved.
Things could have turned out very differently for her, the child of an overworked single mother who struggled every day to care for both of them.
When she considered what could have happened to her if she had ended up in foster care in California after her mother died, she had to cringe.
Okay. Things here hadn’t exactly been perfect for her. She glanced at the shoreline, still in shadows as the sun continued its slow climb over the mountains. From here, she could see the house of her father and stepmother, where she had come to live when she was ten—a frightened, lost, grieving young girl.
Though nearly two decades had passed since the day Xochitl Vargas had arrived and been transformed slowly into McKenzie Shaw, she still felt the awkwardness of that first day when Richard had pulled into the driveway with her in the passenger seat of his BMW and her one suitcase of belongings in the trunk.
As uncomfortable as it had been for her, how much worse must it have been for her father, showing up in a small town like Haven Point with the half-Mexican love child he fathered with a paralegal during a business trip a decade earlier?
While it had taken her many years to come to this point, she had a more mature perspective now and could ackn
owledge the person who had been thrust in the most difficult situation—Adele, Devin’s mother and Richard’s wife.
She had opened her home and her family to the by-product of a brief affair her husband had during a difficult time in their marriage. Maybe she hadn’t been completely enthusiastic about the idea—or particularly warm and welcoming, for that matter, but she had done it.
McKenzie couldn’t really say she blamed her. What woman would have been thrilled at being forced to face the evidence of her husband’s infidelity every morning at the breakfast table?
Adele’s coolness had been more than offset by Devin and Richard. Devin had been thrilled to have a new sister—even one just two years her junior—and Richard had gone out of his way to make up for the ten years he had never known she existed.
She felt a pang at the thought of her father, gone three years now. She missed him so much sometimes and would have dearly loved to ask his advice a hundred times a day.
Some distance past her childhood home—where Devin lived alone now since her mother had moved away after Richard’s death—McKenzie pivoted the kayak around so she could paddle back home in time for work.
A few more boats had come out on the water by the time she made it back to Redemption Bay and reached the dock she shared temporarily with Ben. Even so, Lake Haven seemed quiet, serene.
Who could come here without feeling embraced by the beauty of the place?
Ben, probably. She frowned at the reminder as she hauled the kayak out of the water and carried it to the shed. He obviously hated it here—or why would he not have taken at least a passing interest in his holdings over the years?
As she headed out of the shed, she heard a low-throated bark and glanced over to the house next door just in time to see Ben and Hondo come out to the deck. The dog caught her attention first as he hurried down the deck steps to take care of what looked like urgent business. She smiled a little, then looked at Ben—and immediately wished she hadn’t.
He wore only jeans and his hair was damp, as if he had just stepped out of the shower. He held a mug of something steamy and as she watched, he took a sip, then lowered the mug and appeared to be enjoying the sunrise bursting over the mountains.
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