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  To a little girl with a big dream who grew up and turned her dream into a career. Go have a cookie—you’ve earned it.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincerest thanks to the phenomenal team at Grand Central Publishing/Forever, who believed the steamy romance between a scarred woman and a broken man was a story that should be told. A special note of appreciation goes to Lauren Plude for falling in love with my characters, and to my brilliant editors Dana Hamilton and Michele Bidelspach.

  Heartfelt thanks and all the sexy-man GIFs to my amazingly talented and encouraging agent, Sarah Younger.

  My gratitude to the American Heart Association, an organization whose research, dedication, and tireless efforts help save lives every day.

  Finally, thanks to all who truly understand why I call my Facebook page “Dr. Jekyll” and my Twitter feed “Mr. Hyde.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Mother Nature’s a tease.”

  A snap of lightning revealed itself, then vanished so quickly that it held no color, no discernible shape. There was no cry of thunder to punctuate it. Only a spark, there and gone in a blink.

  So swiftly that the congregation of mourners, with their heads bent and expressions brushed with quiet grief, didn’t glance up to acknowledge the bolt that had struck so low in the early-evening sky that it very well could’ve tasted the ocean.

  Sofia Mercer couldn’t argue with her friend/dry-humor dispenser’s assessment. “The best tease there is.” Her focus traveled past the hilltop cemetery and its canopy of trees—trees that offered no real protection from the elements and left everyone vulnerable to the assault of wind—to the deep gray water in the distance. Waves danced, swayed, collided. Her chest ached, not with the bite of mourning that had settled inside her the moment she’d gotten word of her great-aunt’s sudden death but with the dull soreness that aggravated the dark mahogany north-to-south scar between her breasts. The sensation coincided with crappy weather—not that it was always accurate. And she certainly wasn’t interested in convincing people, even her closest friend, that she prepared for storms based on whether her surgical scar was itchy and achy.

  Which was the only reason she hadn’t taken her umbrella when she and Joss Vail had left New York City this morning to drive to Cape Cod for the funeral. According to Joss, who swore by her trusted weather app, Barnstable County would be blessed with a sun-and-surf Memorial Day weekend. That had been hours ago, when they were loading suitcases and tote bags—mostly Joss’s—into Sofia’s all-the-extras SUV for an overnight stay on the Cape.

  If the stab of lightning overhead and the warning ache of Sofia’s scar were any indication, this edge of the county was due for rain and chaos before sun and surf. Now they were standing in a town that was as close to the Atlantic as one could get without taking a dip in the water, huddled against the wind with the other mourners. Most were strangers to Sofia. Maybe they’d been familiar—friends, even—before, but time had chipped away any connection. Some had responded with forced smiles when she caught their eye. A few had offered awkward hugs before escaping across the grass to fiddle with cell phones or spew gossip about her in whispers that rode the wind.

  Sofia couldn’t be comforted or consoled or insulted. She couldn’t be forced to care about smiles or embraces or whispered gossip—not when she and her father had been forced to put Eaves, Massachusetts, in the rearview mirror.

  Years in the past, she reminded herself again. It didn’t matter, but it did.

  It mattered that only death could compel Sofia to return to Eaves. It mattered that she felt like an outsider, an interloper, an intruder. Though logically she deserved to grieve among the people who, even if they’d never loved her, had respected Luz Azcárraga. Yet none of it should matter, because she was here today to lay an orchid on Aunt Luz’s casket and say a prayer and good-bye.

  Prepared to do just that, she took a bracing breath of sea-and-salt-scented air and ventured deeper into the gathering, toward the array of luscious spring blooms and gilded-framed photographs on easels that surrounded the six-foot-deep carving in the earth. The images reacquainted her with the Argentine woman Sofia remembered. Luz hadn’t been much older than Sofia’s mother. So vivacious and piss-and-vinegar, she’d resisted monogamous relationships, and to defy the conservatives who’d tried to shut down her erotic boutique she’d famously bicycled into a town hall meeting wearing nothing but tattoos, ass floss, and Not-Allowed-symbol pasties.

  How many more crazy-wild stories would Luz have shared over the round of ice-cold beer Sofia had been promising her every birthday since she’d turned twenty-one? Maybe she’d broken that promise so many times that Luz eventually quit holding her to it. Maybe not. No way to tell—and, hell, she deserved the painful weight of that unknown. The casket was already inside the plot. Without apology or explanation, Aunt Luz was gone.

  As the priest concluded his prayer, the guests began to disperse, murmuring words Sofia didn’t register. Approaching the casket, she was vaguely aware of Joss trailing her. The next time she was annoyed with her friend for leaving dirty dishes in the sink or borrowing stuff without asking first, she’d recall that Joss had passed up the opportunity to cater pastries for an elite Upper East Side bazaar and sacrificed a Hamptons weekend with her man to moral-support Sofia through her great-aunt’s funeral.

  Kneeling, Sofia paused before whispering, “Bless you, Aunt. Good-bye.” She reached down and let the orchid drop soundlessly onto the casket, then straightened to find her friend studying the frames.

  “You look like her—especially in this pic here,” Joss commented, glancing from Sofia to the photograph of a twentysomething Luz posed on an antique bicycle against a backdrop of a sandy Eaves street and the Atlantic Ocean. There were flowers stuffed in the bicycle’s basket and decorating her hair.

  Sofia considered her own features: the dense wavy hair, gently hooked nose, and smattering of freckles came from her father’s Irish heritage and the full lips, the dark eyes, and the touch of warmth in her pale complexion were gifts from her Argentine American mother. She was proof that once upon a time nothing but love had existed between her parents, that no cultural or political differences could eclipse their need to be together. Nice fantasy, whenever she was in the mood to overlook the divorce and how she couldn’t remember her mother even if she wanted to.

  “When I was a kid, people would call me Luz’s miniature. As the story goes, when I was born she insisted that even though I’m only a quarter Argentine, I would look like her.” At the warning howl of wind, she crossed her arms to rub them. The high-necked black leather dress she wore was decently durable, but the garment was sleeveless and left her exposed from midthigh to the tops of her pink high heels. “Not even genetics could stop Aunt Luz from getting her way.”

  “A determined lady. Like you.”

  Determined, sure. But Aunt Luz had no hard limits when it came to family. Folks hurt her, abused her, walked away from her, but she refused to cut them off. Sofia’s heart—the one that had failed, and the one that pumped life through her body now—could never be so forgiving…and that
frightened her. “Shh, Joss. Don’t let Aunt hear you,” she said with a soft smile. “A lady she had no ambitions to be. She was a beer-drinking, card-playing firecracker who peddled lingerie and kinky sex toys for a living.” She took another glance down at the casket as she began to walk away. “And I loved her.”

  “I know you did.”

  “It’s complicated, Joss.”

  “I know,” she said again, steering Sofia to the side, out of the way of a group of people approaching the plot with long-stemmed roses in tow.

  “Miss Mercer? Espere un momento—Miss Mercer?”

  Sofia halted. She hadn’t been referred to as miss since before her thirtieth birthday, which had come and gone uneventfully. At thirty-one, she was still in her twenties at heart. Literally. The female organ donor had been several years Sofia’s junior.

  A hulk of a man with sun-toasted olive skin, an angular face, and a gray-streaked braid about as long as Sofia’s arm approached. Accompanying him was a cocktail of scents: leather from his jacket, tobacco on his breath, and something earthy that had her thinking of the barefoot walks through the woods she’d loved before everything fell to shit.

  A biker. He had to be one. He probably had tattoos, club patches, a road name, and stories that’d blind her mind’s eye.

  He traveled with steel between his thighs, with the sun sitting on his brow and the wind fondling his hair. She just knew it—and was instantly jealous.

  She lived in the safest New York City apartment she and her friend could afford, and the only reckless danger she dabbled in was scoring X-rated flicks for the monthly pizza-and-porn night she and her work friends gathered for after hours.

  “Yes?” she said slowly, noticing one hand was hidden behind his back.

  He muttered, “Vamanos” as he revealed a leash gripped in his fist. At the other end of it was a gray-coated, silver-eyed wolf.

  “Holy shit cakes!” Joss yelped, then slapped her designer as-seen-on-the-red-carpet coin purse over her mouth. “Sorry—but what is that and why is it at a funeral?”

  “Siento, señorita,” the man said with a look that should’ve been patient but was instead pissed off. “You allergic?”

  “To wolves?” Sofia and Joss asked in tandem.

  At that he smiled, and he dropped a few notches on Sofia’s asshole meter. “Tish is a purebred Siberian husky. Four years old. An award-winning show dog, before Luz took her out of the business. Tu tía found Tish to be a remarkable companion. Hold this, por favor?” He was already looping the leash over one of her wrists.

  Sofia’s scar began to ache again, and she rolled her eyes skyward. Twilight was falling, and overcast thickening. “You are…?”

  “Javier Bautista.” His handshake almost took her arm out of its socket.

  “You’re Aunt Luz’s lawyer?” In the brief minutes they’d spoken on the phone, she’d imagined a suit-and-tie type of man. At least one who religiously used a razor.

  “Got the card to prove it,” he said, giving her a lengthy stare that danced the fragile line between rude and stranger-dangery. He held out an embossed business card between two fingers.

  “Then you took care of her funeral.”

  “I took care of Luz.”

  “Luz didn’t let anyone take care of her.”

  “No, Miss Mercer. I didn’t let her stop me from taking care of her.” Tangled up in his accent and hoarse baritone was a delicate strand of emotion. “Luz left clear instructions. But…joder! Neither of us expected an aneurism to take her out.”

  Sofia didn’t know the intricacies of her great-aunt’s life or death. But she wanted to learn every detail, including what really defined Luz’s relationship with Javier Bautista—who, even ripened by the elements, appeared not much older than forty.

  “I’m headed to the bar a coupla doors down from Luz’s store. Going to have a beer in her honor. Join me?”

  “I’m not going to do that.”

  “When do you want to settle the paperwork?”

  “Paperwork?” She glanced to Joss, who gave her a look that said What the hell you looking at me for?

  The lawyer’s brows formed a tight V over cinnamon-brown eyes.

  Joss took her cue without hesitation, stepping away to tour the gravestones peppered across the dense grass, seemingly relieved to escape the company of the Siberian husky, which now sat solemnly at Sofia’s feet.

  Sofia swung her wary gaze from the canine to the man. “Mr. Bautista—”

  “Just Bautista.”

  “Okay. Bautista. All I know is that I’m here for my great-aunt’s funeral. I don’t know why I’m holding a wolf’s—dog’s—leash, and I definitely don’t know what paperwork you’re talking about settling.”

  “Luz left it all to you,” he said slowly. “The business. Stock. Tish. Everything.”

  You’ve got to be fucking kidding. Sofia didn’t say the words. Paralyzed, she said nothing—simply stood with her skinny pink heels sinking into the ground and Tish the wolf-dog sitting vigil beside her as Javier Bautista invited her to find him at the bar if she changed her mind and then walked away…

  Leaving Sofia wide-open to a sudden onslaught of rain and questions.

  Shrieking, Joss rushed back over as the crowd of guests scattered and the cemetery crew began to cover Luz’s grave. For the first time Sofia noticed that almost everyone carried umbrellas.

  “I’ll never trust that damn weather app again,” she said, rediscovering her ability to speak.

  “Fair enough. And that man? Javier Bautista?”

  “Just Bautista.”

  “Mm-hmm. Boyfriend. Boyfriend. Boyfriend.”

  “Why are you repeating that word?”

  “To remind myself that I’m stamped. Otherwise I’ll need to change my panties. He’s hot, don’t you think?”

  “I think, Joss, that he’s old enough to be your father.”

  “You do not.”

  Relenting, Sofia said, “All right, I’m exaggerating. But I think Aunt Luz might’ve been more to him than just a client. And clearly he’s much older than you and me.” Not just in age—he had the kind of wear and tear that didn’t come from coasting through the years, but from experience, brutal knocks, hard living.

  Joss paused, her blue eyes narrowed to long-lashed slits. “Why’d Bautista haul ass away from here without the dog?”

  “She’s my dog…now. Aunt Luz left her to me.”

  “What are you supposed to do? Take her back to Manhattan and hide her in the apartment? Which, by the way, isn’t an option.” Joss plastered her itty-bitty purse on top of her head, but it offered no shelter whatsoever for her ash-blond curls. “Let’s get in the car. We both look like wet dogs, and we’ve got an actual wet dog to consider.”

  Sofia tugged the leash, met resistance, and gave Tish a pleading look. “I can’t leave you here,” she said to the dog, painfully aware that the beast wouldn’t move if she didn’t want to and could very competently snap off a limb if she felt threatened enough. “Come with me? Tish.”

  The dog’s ears twitched, and a pink tongue darted out to lick across her nose. The movement gave Sofia a good enough look at her choppers. Hell.

  Tish rose to all fours, power and sinew beneath the fur, and began walking.

  “If you’re going to try to keep this dog, you have to establish authority,” Joss cautioned as they neared Sofia’s SUV.

  “First I have to establish that she’s not looking at me and seeing Tish chow. Help me get her in the backseat.” After some maneuvering, the dog was settled on one of the rear leather seats with Joss beside her and Sofia behind the wheel.

  “Where’s the reception being held again?” Joss inquired after a too-long stretch of silence.

  “I’m not going,” Sofia said, blinking drops of mascara-tinged rainwater out of her lashes. “I was just super-soaked out there, and…Joss, she left her world to me. Everything that made her Luz. She left it all to me.”

  “Everything?”

&nbs
p; “Her dog, her business. Aunt Luz’s attorney”—she fumbled for the business card—“said there are stocks.”

  “In what?”

  “Don’t know. God, I didn’t know she had a pet. She left everything to me.”

  “You said that already,” Joss reminded her carefully.

  “I know. Just trying to see if repeating it helps me believe it. I wanted to be just like Aunt Luz—focused, a real go-getter. Now I find out she left her life to me.”

  “Believe it yet, Sof?”

  “No.” She turned the key in the ignition, and the V8 engine purred. She’d have to have the vehicle ridded of dog odor once they returned to New York. It had taken a decade of doing without designer clothes and restaurant dinners to save enough money to cash-buy the Lexus—the one gift she’d allowed herself since the fashion merchandising certificate she’d tacked onto her business degree. Parking, gasoline, and maintenance costs made owning a car in the city an impractical luxury, but the SUV was freedom, safety, and emotional comfort on four wheels.

  “If we’re not going to the reception, let’s at least get some sandwiches to take back to the cottage,” Joss said. “We need to find something to feed Tish in case she gets any bright ideas about gnawing on me or my possessions.”

  Fingers of fading sunlight now bled into the swirling blue-and-lavender horizon. The beautiful wash of red and gold and violet lounged over the sloping hills and a curtain of tangled trees. The rain had ceased, but Sofia didn’t trust that a ten-minute downpour was the worst of the storm.

  Navigating onto Eaves’s main road, which would take them from the cemetery to what comprised the resort town’s hub, Sofia saw that the perfect black pavement cut into a cave of overhanging trees. It was almost glorious enough to give her peace.

  All too soon the trees gave way to a mishmash of buildings tucked here and there. Lowering the windows in hopes of drying her hair and neutralizing the stink of rain-drenched dog, she was greeted with charcoal-and seafood-accented air.

  “When I was a kid, there was a gas station on this street…somewhere…that had a sandwich shop in it. The owner named sandwiches after his favorite customers.”