Shattered Blue: A Romantic Thriller

by Jane Taylor Starwood

  “Ah, hell, Brian. I wish you could see your little girl now,” he whispered. “And Jenna. She’s amazing.”

  He sighed, swiped the back of his hand across his eyes as he set the photo back on the desk. Talking to a ghost. He was even more exhausted that he thought.

  “Hey, stranger. Welcome home.”

  Matt looked up to see Jenna leaning against the doorjamb in a blue fleece robe and fuzzy blue slippers. She opened her arms and he went to her and wrapped her in a bear hug. He felt the tension drain out of his shoulders.

  “It’s good to be here, Sis,” Matt said.

  Instead of making him hot cocoa, Jenna opened a bottle of twenty-year-old, single-malt Scotch, which suited Matt just fine. After a couple fingers of excellent whiskey and an hour of quiet conversation, he collapsed into bed and slept soundly from four-thirty until seven, waking to the sound of giggling outside his door.

  EIGHT

  Restless after washing the breakfast dishes, Shane decided to pay a visit to Matthew Brennan’s hill. After all, she should know what she was supposed to be keeping an eye on, right? Whatever was up there might give her some clues about the man, some hint of what he was really like. Something to satisfy her growing curiosity until Beth got back to her with the results of her Googling.

  Anyway, it was a great morning for a hike, and she hadn’t climbed that hill since she’d moved in. She’d always planned to, but then it had been sold. To Matthew Brennan.

  Shane pulled on her hiking boots and set off down the driveway with the cats trailing behind her. When she started across the arroyo, the corrugated steel echoing beneath her feet, she turned and clapped at Furball and Fiona to send them back up the drive. Then she headed up Matt’s hill, avoiding the road.

  The slope grew steeper and steeper and her quads and hamstrings complained about the unscheduled workout, but she climbed on, stopping now and then to rest and grab a deep breath of fresh air.

  The day was clear, the temperature edging toward true spring. The sun warmed her shoulders and raised a sheen of sweat on her skin.

  It took her ten minutes to reach the leveled ground where Matt was building his house. As soon as she turned to look—first down the Mimbres Valley to the south, then at the Black Range to the east—she could see why he’d chosen this spot.

  All around her, stretching into the distance, was her view from the top of the access road, only much farther, much deeper, spooling out so far into the vast landscape you could melt into it, float away on the wind gliding over the hills, down the valleys to the desert plateau far beyond. It was glorious. And it wasn’t hers.

  That nasty little nip of envy annoyed her and she pushed it away. Her view was perfect; she wasn’t going to let his make it any less so.

  She did a slow spin, smiling, taking it all in, memorizing it for later. She loved her little hollow in the hills, but this was amazing, stunning. Whatever else Matt Brennan might be, he definitely had an eye for scenery.

  After she drank in the view, Shane headed for the tent next to the skeleton house. A bit more meat on its bones now, she mused, noting the rising walls of straw bales. Several bales sat on the ground. She tested one, digging her fingers under the ties and lifting. She estimated the weight at between forty and fifty pounds. If those muscles of Matt’s hadn’t been there when he started, hauling these babies all day would sure go a long way toward building them.

  Well, damn, she thought. Yesterday she’d run from him like a scared rabbit, and now she was mooning over his muscles? Put a rein on it, Shane.

  When she unzipped the tent flap and stepped inside, her eyes widened in surprise.

  The place was as neat as a monk’s cell and almost as spare. Along the wall to her left were stacks of paperback books, a tall rack full of CDs and a battery-operated player. She looked around and saw small, wireless speakers set in each corner. Surround-sound in a tent. The guy was serious about his music.

  Ranged along the back wall were makeshift shelves stacked with neatly folded jeans, shirts, briefs, socks and work boots, along with a first-aid kit and toiletries.

  To the right, a folding cot held a neatly laid out sleeping bag, blanket and pillow, complete with clean white pillow case. A battery-operated reading light lay on the pillow, along with a pair of serious-looking binoculars.

  In one of the front corners stood a large cooler. Shane peeked inside to find ice packs cooling tomato and vegetable juice, Dr. Pepper and beer. And not just any beer: her favorite, Dos Equis Amber. How weird was that?

  Next to the cooler, a grocery sack held a king-sized bag of corn chips, a few jars of salsa, several pop-top cans of tuna, a loaf of bread, apples, oranges and bananas. Another sack held paper plates, plastic cups and utensils.

  Talk about being prepared. The man was a regular Boy Scout. With a neat-freak badge.

  Shane stood up, turned in a circle, blew out a long breath. This guy’s tent was neater than her house. Way neater. Why did that annoy the hell out of her? Maybe because he was a guy, and guys weren’t supposed to be this neat. Maybe because he was an extremely sexy guy—who might just possibly be, if she’d read his signals right, attracted to her—and she was looking for reasons to write him off. Any reason at all, like being a hopeless slob. But damn, he wasn’t. Look at this place. She should hire him as her housekeeper.

  So, hunt for ammunition. Maybe she’d find a hidden stash of porn. She could only hope.

  She knelt in front of his books. Fitzgerald. Steinbeck. Cheever. Elmore Leonard. Joyce Carol Oates. A fat collection of Sherlock Holmes. A well-thumbed copy of “Moby Dick.” “The Poetry of Robert Frost.” “The Portable Mark Twain.” “How to Build a Strawbale House.” “A Field Guide to the Constellations.” “Green Houses and Sustainable Communities.”

  Wow. She hadn’t expected all that. And not a dirty magazine anywhere.

  Among his CDs she found John Coltrane, Wynton Marsalis and Leon Redbone alongside classic Beatles and Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, old and new Bob Dylan, Madeleine Peyroux, Hank Williams (senior, but not junior), and both Woody and Arlo Guthrie. He had boxed sets of Mozart and Chopin, and Simone Dinnerstein playing Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” He even had her favorite classical piece of all time, Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt,” performed by the Berlin Philharmonic.

  Again, wow.

  Shane couldn’t get her mind around the fact that a man like Matthew Brennan—whose sophisticated, if wildly eclectic, tastes were amply demonstrated all around her—would leave Los Angeles and a highly successful career, buy a hilltop in back-country New Mexico and build a strawbale house with his own hands.

  Why would he do that?

  Unless, like her, he was hiding from something. Or someone.

  No, that theory didn’t hold water. He hadn’t changed his name, and right now he was back in L.A. selling his share in that highly successful business.

  Okay, if Matt wasn’t hiding, maybe he was running away. From what? Career burnout? Possibly, but wasn’t he too young to have burned out on anything? How old was he, anyway? Mid-thirties, she guessed.

  Idly, she picked up the binoculars from his pillow, carried them outside and scanned the surrounding hills. The lenses were powerful enough to pick up details in trees and rocks a long way away. She watched a tiny brown lizard skitter under a rock at the edge of the arroyo, then trailed the lenses up the hill behind her house, where a glint of light caught her eye. Probably a bottle or can left by some careless hiker. She’d go up there later and clean up the mess.

  She swung the binoculars slowly along the saddle between the hills, then along Mountain View Drive to the top of the access road, bringing them into focus on her mailbox.

  She could see every scratch on the metal surface, every pebble in the dirt below. It struck her how clearly anyone looking through these lenses could see her when she came and went from her run. For that matter, Matt could be watching her at any time, couldn’t he?

  With her heart starting to gallop, she swung a
round to focus on her house and found her bedroom window on the second floor, between the sparse branches of a cottonwood. She could see the wrinkles in her bedspread, the dent her head made in the pillow.

  Prickles of warmth started in her chest and marched steadily upward until they tormented the top of her skull. He wouldn’t. He didn’t. Would he? Did he? Why the hell not? She’d put herself on display, hadn’t she?

  It had never occurred to her that he could see into her bedroom. The view from her window every morning was one of the things she loved best about her house. Curtains? Who needed them way out here? She never had before. But now?

  Anger surged, flooding the humiliation out of her. Of course he didn’t need dirty pictures. He had a ringside seat at a nightly live strip show.

  Shane ducked into Matt’s tent and tossed the binoculars onto the pillow. Half of her wanted to trash the place. The other half, maddeningly, was telling her to calm down, that she was jumping to conclusions again.

  She sat on the cot, dropped her head into her hands and growled. If only she could take a do-over, she’d beggar herself to buy this hill. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about peeping Toms and impossibly appealing neighbors who happened to be one and the same.

  After a moment more of indulging in her fit of righteous indignation, Shane got up, smoothed the sleeping bag, made sure everything else in the tent was exactly the way she’d found it, zipped up the flap and started down the hill.

  When she reached her kitchen door, she remembered that flash of light and headed up the hill on the other side of her house. It was her property, but there was no fence around it and she hadn’t posted “no trespassing” signs, and occasionally hikers passed through. She didn’t mind, as long as they packed out whatever they brought in and didn’t disturb her or her animals.

  In a few minutes she reached the stand of boulders at the top and looked around. No beer bottle, no soda can, no shiny gum wrapper, nothing to account for the reflection she’d seen. The dry grass was flattened as if someone had been standing there, but that was all. She looked around and didn’t see any other signs of hikers. Whoever had been there was gone, disappeared around the shoulder of another hill. No harm done, so she wasn’t going to worry about it.

  As she started downhill, her quads, glutes and hamstrings told her in unison they were going to need a break from running tomorrow. That would make it a good day to head into the Black Range on a collection trip. No running, no steep hills, just strolling around looking for seedpods, bones and interesting branches. She’d pack a lunch and make a day of it. The thought made her smile.

  As soon as she walked into the kitchen, she remembered that she’d planned to call Beth this afternoon to see what else she’d discovered about Matthew Brennan. But it could wait until after lunch. All that hill climbing had made her ravenous again. She headed for the fridge to see what she could throw together.

  NINE

  With Jenna at work, Steffie at school, and time to kill before meeting with his lawyer, Matt opened his laptop and checked his email. He answered what was necessary, ignored Vanessa’s poison-pen missives and deleted spam. Then, following a one-sided battle with his better angels, he ran a search on Shane MacKinnon.

  After he’d drilled down through masses of irrelevant hits, he was left with next to nothing. There was a sketchy bio on a Silver City art gallery site, along with photos of her weavings, but no picture of Shane. That seemed odd, since there were photos of all the other artists. He read the bio.

  Shane MacKinnon draws from nature to create unique, woven works of art in wool, incorporating branches, bones and other natural materials found in the hills and mountains of southwest New Mexico. Employing traditional Navajo-style frame looms she builds herself, she uses only hand-spun wool from New Mexico’s native Navajo-Churro sheep, bred and raised in the Gila National Forest north of Silver City.

  Commissions may be arranged through Silver Linings Gallery.

  That was it. The only other half-way promising hits led to dead ends. She wasn’t on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other social networking site he could think of. Frustrating. And intriguing.

  Who are you, Shane MacKinnon?

  Matt closed his laptop, walked down the hall to the bathroom and turned on the shower.

  By two forty-five he was pulling into a parking lot next to the steel-and-glass office tower in downtown Los Angeles that housed the offices of Brennan & Thomas. Before he turned off the engine, Vanessa’s sleek silver Porsche 911 pulled in beside him. He braced himself, then looked at her just in time to see a practiced expression of disdain settle over her perfectly symmetrical features.

  Matt climbed out of his truck, parked his Levi’d butt on its dusty red fender and crossed his arms over his white dress shirt. He’d decided to dispense with a jacket and his sleeves were rolled up for comfort, baring the tanned skin of his muscular forearms.

  His ex-wife—sleek and gorgeous in a pencil-skirted suit of white raw silk, one perfect auburn wave falling across a honed cheek—oozed out of the Porsche in a sinuous glide. She shut the driver’s door with a resounding thunk and trained her almond-shaped green eyes on Matt from across the roof of her ride.

  “Nice wheels, Matthew.” Her tone could have curdled cream. “What do you call that color, ‘Redneck Red’?”

  “Good to see you, too, Vanessa.”

  “Cut the crap.” She waved a dismissive hand.

  That’s when he saw it: a diamond the size of Dodger Stadium on her left ring finger.

  She registered his surprise, flashed a smug smile, waggled her finger. “Oh, this little thing? Didn’t you know? Rod wants to make an honest woman of me. We’re getting married next month.”

  Matt snorted. “Leaving aside the impossibility of making an honest woman of you, I thought Rod was smarter than that.” Then he laughed without a trace of humor. “I guess his little brain got the best of him. Good for you, Vanessa, good for you. I hope you’ll both be very happy.”

  She shot him a killing glance. “Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”

  “But it becomes you, Vanessa. You’re never more beautiful than when you’re zinging one in.”

  “Why, Matthew, is that a compliment?”

  He shook his head. “More like sad commentary.”

  “Bastard.”

  “Bitch.”

  Matt strode ahead of her, opened the heavy glass door and gestured with mock chivalry for her to enter first. “Let the rodeo begin,” he said.

  Vanessa swept into the lobby on a flash of auburn and white silk, stiletto heels beating an angry rhythm on the polished black marble.

  More than three hours later, Matt crept back to West Hollywood through rush-hour traffic in a haze of smog and anger. Just as he’d expected, they’d tried to cheat him out of his rightful share of the business. He was certain Vanessa was the instigator of all the nonsense their attorney had spouted, trying to blind him with legalese.

  Thank God he’d hired Bill “The Bulldog” Dwyer, or he might have ended up with a fraction of what his share was worth. Not that he really needed the money, but he’d be damned if he’d let Vanessa and Rod walk away with what was his.

  Those two deserved each other. Rod had let Vanessa twist him around her scarlet-tipped little finger until he didn’t know which way was up. Stupid, pitiful bastard—who used to be his friend.

  And Vanessa, crying poor-mouth because she’d fallen for Raymond Ripley’s foreign investment scam, which turned out to be a fraud nearly as massive as Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. No cause for pity there. She’d made her own bed, now let her lie in it. Or let her move into her Porsche.

  Poor, my sweet ass. As long as there was a some wealthy fool she could get her claws into, Vanessa would land on her pampered feet. Shame on him that he’d been one of those fools. At least he’d been able to protect most of his assets. He’d been glad to let her have that glass monstrosity she’d pushed him into building above the beach in Malibu.

  He hat
ed that house, along with every ostentatious thing Vanessa had bought to fill it. The vindictive part of him—which at the moment was running about ninety-nine percent—hoped it would go down in the next mudslide with Vanessa inside, clinging to the concert Steinway neither of them could play.

  That picture in his head made him smile for the first time in hours.

  When he finally pulled into the driveway in West Hollywood, Jenna opened the front door for him. The minute he saw her standing there on the porch, smiling at him, his bricked-up shoulders started to loosen.

  Jenna always knew the best thing to do, the right words to say. Why couldn’t he find a woman like that? Kind, caring, understanding, but no pushover. The kind who stood up for herself, spoke the truth as she saw it, knew when to give and when to take. A rare breed.

  No, that mold was probably broken. Too bad. The world could use a lot more Jennas. And a lot fewer Vanessas. He felt his shoulders tense up again.

  Don’t carry it into the house, he admonished himself.

  He breathed deeply, then exhaled, pushing the anger down and away. At least for a while. No illusions it was gone. The sting of betrayal and of knowing he’d set himself up for it ran too deep.

  Before he was half-way up the walk a bundle of joyous girl-child hurtled down the porch steps and threw her arms around his legs.

  “Uncle Matt, you’re home!”

  Matt laughed as he reached down and picked Steffie up, settling the comfortable weight of her into the crook of his arm.

  “Ooof! You’re getting too big to carry. Stop growing, will you?”

  Steffie giggled and her sweet voice lifted his heart. “That’s silly, Uncle Matt. We’ve been waiting for you. Supper’s ready. I set the table, with real napkins and candles and everything.”

  “You did? I can’t wait to see it.”

  “And you better be hungry, because Mommy cooked a great big chicken, and your favorite, mashed potatoes and peas.”

  “Mashed potatoes and peas? What are we waiting for? Let’s eat!”