Temptation Bay (A Windfall Island Novel) by Anna Sullivan Read Free Book Online

sharks for a reason.
    And sharks, from the sound of things, weren’t all that different from Wreckers.
    After Maggie dropped him off at the Horizon—or, more accurately, kicked him out—there hadn’t been much of the day left. Dex chose to spend it in his hotel room, factoring in what he’d learned from Maggie and re-thinking his game plan. He hadn’t expected the case to go smoothly, or for Windfall Island to be a simple place just because it was small, but he’d come, he admitted, with expectations, which, if Maggie was to be believed, the place defied.
    He was nothing, he told himself, if not flexible. Patience, however, was another story, and sleep hard to come by with his body still wired and his brain spinning scenario after scenario, all of them ending the same way: with him solving Eugenia Stanhope’s kidnapping, a case that had baffled the best investigators, in and out of organized law enforcement, for the better part of a century. Making a name for himself.
    Any name but failure.
    He took out his cell and speed dialed, smiling when his old man’s voice came over the line. “Hey, kid,” Carter Keegan said heartily. “Still tilting at windmills?”
    “You know me,” he replied. “Never could resist a lost cause.”
    “Plenty of lost causes right here in the big, bad city of Boston. Take the other day…”
    Dex smiled, listening to Sergeant Keegan’s voice, with its broad Southie accent, as he talked about the Boston Police Department and the insanity that took place on a daily basis. His old man, a cop through and through, thought he was crazy to give up a perfectly respectable career as a fourth generation Boston cop to go out on his own.
    Considering Dex was almost down to his last thin dime, Dad wasn’t too far wrong.
    “Your mother’s gone out to the store. She’ll be sorry she missed you,” Carter was saying. “I swear, she worries more now than she did when you wore a uniform and walked a beat in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods.”
    “I was close to home then,” he said, completely understanding how his mother felt. Phone calls could be made, e-mails sent, but there was no substitute for seeing the face of someone you loved. “How’s Lou?” he asked, wishing he could see her for himself, but knowing his father wouldn’t sugar coat it.
    “Louise is doing better, I think. It’s still day by day, but she’s getting tired of your mother being, what do they call it these days, a hovercraft?”
    “A helicopter mom,” he said, his mind going just for a moment to Maggie. She and his sister were a lot alike: strong, independent. Fighters. It took a lot to bring Lou down. If she was tired of being coddled, then she was on the mend. “That’s good to hear,” he told his father.
    “It’s damn good to see. You should drag your sorry butt up here and find out firsthand.”
    “I’m on a case, Dad. I’ll get home first chance.”
    “Hell, kid, just make sure you call your mother later on. Otherwise she’ll find a reason to blame me for it.”
    Dex laughed, feeling restored. Traveling around the country chasing missing persons cases meant he couldn’t be there for a sister whose life had imploded, a sister who’d always been there for him. Hearing she was doing better, hell, hearing his old man call him kid, went a long way toward soothing his conscience.
    And made him even more determined to solve Eugenia Stanhope’s mystery. After all, he thought as he exited the Horizon, he wasn’t the only one living with the choices he’d made.
    Dex slipped his phone in his pocket and walked out of the hotel. The sky, far off at the horizon, was a mass of purple and gray where Mother Nature warred with Neptune in some distant, empty stretch of the Atlantic. The angry color bled to a clear, deep blue above Windfall Island, but the breeze off the water had a bite, both in temperature and tang. And attitude, Dex thought, fancying he could feel just a light slap in it from the storm