Holly Read online

  “So how fast does it go?”

  “One fifty, easy. But this thing will climb, too. It’s for off-road racing.”

  “Legally?”

  “Leon never did understand the difference between legal and illegal.”

  Nick put out his hand and gingerly touched the side of the truck. “I’ve never been a lover of machinery, but I envy your brother’s passion. He loved something so much that he risked everything for it.”

  “I guess you could look at it like that. I can tell you that none of his family did. Look, Doc—” he began, but Nick put up his hand.

  “I’d be proud to take the place for the next few days. I like it here.”

  “Even the kitchen?”

  “Which one?” Nick said, looking toward the glassed-in office.

  Suddenly, Carl’s face turned white. “You mean you’d stay in here? In Leon’s garage?”

  “I won’t hurt…it,” Nick said, looking at the truck. “I certainly don’t plan to drive it.”

  Carl hadn’t thought of anyone staying in Leon’s garage, and for a moment he had a vision of his brother escaping prison and coming after him. In Leon’s mind, the blood bond wasn’t nearly as strong as what he felt for his truck.

  “I, uh, I…” Carl stuttered.

  Nick looked at his watch. “Aren’t you on shift in about two and a half hours?”

  “I…”

  “Go on!” Nick said. “Leave me here alone with the truck and I’ll take care of it. I’m just going to do some fishing and I’ll sleep in here. That house is…” Words seemed to fail him when attempting to describe the house.

  “I…” Carl said again, then the next moment Nick’s hands were on his shoulders and he was being pushed out of the garage and escorted back to his car. Nick took the keys, the paper with the code to the garage alarm system on it, and his bags from the back, and the next thing Carl knew he’d started the engine and was driving away.

  “Leon is gonna kill me,” he said all the way back to the clinic.

  Chapter One

  HOLLY FELT AS THOUGH SHE’D PULLED OFF THE coup of her life—and by Christmas it would all be settled. After many calls, letters, emails, and promises, she’d finally persuaded her parents to buy Spring Hill Plantation just outside beautiful, historic Edenton in eastern North Carolina. Of course, it hadn’t hurt that her stepsister, Taylor, was going to marry a man who lived there.

  Now, she was in the little grocery store that was two miles down the road from the ghastly house her parents had rented last year and she was trying to find something to eat that didn’t have a thousand calories a bite. She’d recently lost eleven pounds and she didn’t want to put it back on. Facing a summer near her skinny, beautiful stepsister had made her quit eating and go to the gym four nights a week.

  And of course there was the prospect of seeing Lorrie again, she thought. For a moment her eyes glazed over as she remembered him. She was no longer seeing the store, but instead, saw the river and the dock and Lorrie. She’d been thirteen that summer and Lorrie had been sixteen—a tall, lean, bronzed young man, with golden hair and brown eyes.

  That summer had started out horribly. Her parents nearly always rented a house somewhere for the summer, but until that year the houses had been in communities where their two daughters could swim and meet other people their own age.

  But that summer a friend of her father’s had offered them the free use of his beautifully restored old house, built in 1778, located on a river, and set in the midst of four and a half acres of old trees and pretty flower gardens.

  Holly had hated the place at first sight. Its isolation, the remoteness, had made her want to scream. In an instant she’d envisioned a summer in a hell of loneliness. Taylor was old enough to drive so she’d be going to nearby Edenton and joining the real world.

  But what am I to do here the whole summer? she thought, near to tears. Catch tadpoles? Sit by the river and watch the turtles come up for air? It wasn’t what a pubescent girl wanted to do.

  She’d tried to persuade her parents that they absolutely, positively could not force her to stay in that horrible place for an entire summer. They’d just smiled, then answered the always-ringing telephone.

  For the first week, Holly had been so bored she thought she might lose her mind. Her parents had already left to fly to London, and Taylor had met a young man. Holly had been left in the charge of a woman who was at least as old as the house and who did little except sleep in the padded swing on the back porch.

  It was at the beginning of the second week that Holly had been sitting on the edge of the pier, her legs tucked up to her chest, and contemplating her family’s regret if their youngest child ran away from home, when she heard an unusual noise. She looked up to see a rowboat coming toward her.

  She had to blink, then rub her eyes and blink again to be sure she was seeing correctly. Coming toward her, his back to her, was a beautiful, shirtless young man. She couldn’t see his face, but if the front of him was half as good as the back of him, he was an Adonis.

  Holly had stood up, smoothed her shorts and T-shirt—wishing she weren’t wearing her rattiest clothes—and waited.

  When he reached her dock and turned, he was so beautiful that her breath nearly stopped.

  “Hello,” he’d said, throwing a rope at her feet. “I’m Laurence Beaumont and I’m your next-door neighbor. You want to tie that down?”

  She had no idea what he meant. Tie what down?

  “The rope,” he said. “Tie it to the cleat.”

  It had taken her a moment to understand what he meant. Cleat? Oh, yeah, the thing she used to scrape mud off her shoes. She picked up the rope and tied it in a very neat bow to the metal cleat, then looked over at the young man.

  He looked at the cleat, then back at her, but he didn’t laugh. Later, she wondered at that. What other sixteen-year-old would have looked at a boat rope tied into a bow and not howled with laughter?

  But Lorrie hadn’t laughed at her, not then, nor at any other time.

  From that first moment, they’d been friends—kindred souls maybe, since they were so alike. Her name was Hollander, his was Laurence, but they were Holly and Lorrie to everyone. His family had lived in the same house since 1782 and two of his ancestors had signed the Declaration of Independence.

  Holly had some big-shot ancestors on her father’s side, and her father himself had been an ambassador to three different countries. “He knows everybody and talks to each one every day on the phone,” she’d said under the breath.

  Lorrie had laughed. “My old man makes deals all day.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “Died when I was three.”

  Holly felt as though she’d been hit in the stomach. Her mother had died when she was one. When she told Lorrie, he sat down on the dock and they began to compare notes of their lives in earnest.

  Both their fathers had been raised in impoverished gentility, with fabulous educations and old-world family names. Both fathers had married heiresses who’d died young. Both men had remarried women with no money. The difference was that Holly’s stepmother, Marguerite, was a sort of financial genius, while Lorrie’s stepmother’s main talent was in spending. Holly’s mother’s fortune, from Hollander Tools, had increased, while Lorrie’s mother’s fortune had long ago disappeared.

  “All I have left is the title to the falling-down old house and a few hundred acres,” Lorrie had said cheerfully, looking at Holly. “What is it about you, kid, that’s making me tell you my life story? I didn’t tell my last three girlfriends this much.”

  Holly hadn’t liked being called “kid,” and she didn’t like to think that this beautiful young man had ever had a girlfriend, but she took the compliment to her heart. “I guess we were just meant to be together,” she said, willing him to take her away forever in his canoe.

  Smiling, Lorrie tousled Holly’s short, dark hair. “Maybe so, kid. Maybe you’re what I need this summer. Hey! I’ll race you t