Driftwood Cove--Two stories for the price of one Read online

  Digital Galley Edition

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  Contents

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Driftwood Cove

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  An excerpt from Primrose Lane

  About the Author

  Also by Debbie Mason

  ACCLAIM FOR DEBBIE MASON

  “A Fairytale Bride” by Hope Ramsey

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Newsletters

  Driftwood Cove

  Debbie

  Mason

  New York Boston

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Debbie Mazzuca

  Excerpt from Primrose Lane copyright © 2017 by Debbie Mazzuca

  “A Fairytale Bride” copyright © 2016 by Robin Lanier

  Cover design by name. [insert cover photo/art credits if applicable, or delete this line.] Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: February 2018

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  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-4417-8 (mass market), 978-1-5387-4418-5 (ebook)

  Printed in the United States of America

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  For my parents, Jean and Norm LeClair, who taught me everyone has a story and most people deserve a second chance.

  Driftwood Cove

  Chapter One

  There’d been no foreboding signs to alert Shay Angel to the danger, no warning that this was the day her past caught up with her and her life might be on the line.

  Her morning had started off the same as usual. The alarm on her bedside table went off at seven, and she hit the snooze button three times at ten-minute intervals just like she always did. She didn’t fall out of bed or trip over her boots on the way to the shower. Her one-bedroom apartment was sparsely furnished, and her boots were right where she’d left them—directly at the end of her bed, toes pointed toward the door in case she needed to make a quick exit.

  Even the unreliable showerhead had cooperated today. Her five-minute shower had been exactly the way she liked it, hot and strong. Just like her coffee, which she drank from an oversized travel mug that read Do I look like I “Rise & Shine”? Her assistant at the security company she worked for had a sense of humor. Shay didn’t.

  Nor, for the most part, did she do friends, which her assistant was desperately trying to change. Lately—okay, so in the past ten years—Shay didn’t do boyfriends either. Something else her assistant was desperately trying to change by signing Shay up on every matchmaking app known to mankind. Without Shay’s permission, of course.

  Just one more reason Shay had been lulled into thinking the day, for the most part, would be pretty good. She’d had forty-five minutes of peace and quiet before she’d left for work. No pings or beeps and bells and whistles from texts or emails from the apps she was signed up for alerting her to a new and perfect match.

  She’d met her match a long time ago. Only he turned out to be perfectly imperfect. And he was calling her at a perfectly imperfect time. She reached for the vibrating cell phone on her desk and hit Decline. She’d stopped taking his calls ten months before but couldn’t quite make it official by blocking him completely. He was one of the reasons she’d accepted the job in Vegas. The move put twenty-three hundred miles between her and her past, in which Michael Gallagher had played a starring role.

  But she didn’t have time to think about him now, or ever, really. She had bigger worries to contend with. Like the cop who sat on the other side of Shay’s desk with a familiar, suspicious look in her eyes.

  “In less than three months, four of the homes your company installed security for have been robbed of more than a million dollars in diamonds. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that your clients are the ones being targeted, Ms. Angel.” Detective Sims slapped a file onto Shay’s desk.

  Working to keep any sign of worry from showing on her face, Shay drew the manila folder toward her. There was no way she’d give Detective Sims the satisfaction of seeing her sweat. Shay’s petty-criminal parents had imprinted her DNA with a deep dislike and distrust of law enforcement, but she didn’t have to like or trust Sims to know the woman wasn’t making up the evidence in the file.

  Over the past five days, Shay had been trying to convince herself that no one at Sterling Security was involved in the break-ins. Then yesterday she’d overheard a conversation between her boss and an installer and could no longer deny the likelihood that they were in this up to their ears.

  Which totally blew, because her suspicions put her bright and shiny dream for her future at risk. She’d left her job in New York to work for Ray Sterling, a man who was renowned in the security business. She’d planned to learn all that she could from him and then branch out on her own. Now…

  Without saying a word, sh
e closed the file and held the gaze of the woman sitting on the other side of her desk.

  Shay’s uncle Charlie had taken up where her parents left off. He’d taught her how to not only run a con and make a cop with a single glance, but also how to allude and confuse them. Other than the summer she’d turned nineteen, his lessons had served her well.

  Sims’s dark eyes narrowed beneath her frosted blond fringe.

  Leaning back in the chair, Shay crossed her arms as she waited for the detective to show her hand. It didn’t take long.

  “Do not try to intimidate me. I’ve heard all about your Superwoman act. How you saved your assistant and got Ace Rodriguez and his gang of thugs out of your neighborhood. But you don’t scare or impress me like you do the beat cops. I know who and what you really are.” Sims leaned forward and tapped the file with a hot-pink fingernail. “You were put away for grand theft auto at nineteen. Not much of a leap between stealing cars and stealing diamonds, now, is there? So tell me, Angel, where were you on the nights in question?”

  Charlie and her parents had been good teachers, but it was prison that taught Shay the most valuable lessons of all. Number one, how to stay alive. And number two, that she’d do whatever it took to ensure she was never put away again. Even if it meant turning on the man who held the key to making her dreams come true.

  First, though, she needed more proof to support her suspicions that her boss’s son was behind the break-ins. If he was, it meant Ray had found the perfect fall guy, or girl in this case. He’d correctly predicted that Detective Sims would focus on Shay. It wasn’t like he had to be especially smart or a mind reader to guess that she’d draw the detective’s interest. Everyone and their mother knew that in law enforcement’s eyes, once a con, always a con.

  In the five years since she’d walked out of the prison’s gates, Shay had been on the receiving end of the expression. If it wasn’t said to her face, it was whispered behind her back or delivered with raised eyebrows and knowing smirks.

  Another cliché she knew to be true: It takes a thief to catch one. And that’s exactly what she planned to do. Once she got rid of Sims.

  Given her own concerns over the robberies, Shay had been prepared for a visit from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department. Still, it ticked her off that she was on the top of Sims’s suspect list, the emotion evident in her voice when she said, “I was working the crisis hotline the night of the first robbery, and I had a one-on-one MMA session that clears me of the third break-in.”

  “You don’t expect me to take your word for it, do you? And what the hell is a private MMA session anyway? Do I even want to know?”

  “Mixed martial arts. I’m an instructor at Elite Gym,” Shay responded through clenched teeth, reaching for the kitschy holder on her otherwise empty desk. Her assistant, Cherry, a former stripper who was into all things crafty, had made the card holder for Shay as an early Valentine’s Day gift. Which meant it was pink and sparkly and covered in hearts. And smelled like Love’s Baby Soft perfume. Cherry must have given it a fresh spritz that morning.

  According to her assistant, the fragrance was imbued with the power to bring out Shay’s inner girly girl and break her dating dry spell before the most romantic day of the year. Despite wanting to hurl at the task before her, a smile tugged on Shay’s lips as she withdrew a business card from the holder. The reluctant smile faded as she turned the card over to write the names and numbers of the people who would provide her alibis.

  She’d have to talk to them. Let them know the police would be calling to verify her whereabouts for the nights in question. Instead of throwing the card at Sims like she wanted to, Shay flicked it across the desk with the end of her pen.

  After glancing at the names, Sims raised an eyebrow. “Judge Watkins. I’m surprised he didn’t ask for another instructor when he found out you were an ex-con. He’s a hardass. You would’ve served ten years instead of five if he’d presided over your case.”

  Other than Ray, and obviously Sims, no one in Vegas knew that Shay had done time. Any chances of keeping her record private were gone now. Sims would see to that. Shay had met her type before.

  “I have an appointment in twenty minutes, Detective. If there’s nothing else…”

  “You’re not off the hook yet, Angel. You’re missing alibies for two of the break-ins.”

  “You know as well as I do that one person is responsible for all four robberies, and it’s not me.”

  “And how exactly did you come to that conclusion?”

  “How do you think? I’ve spoken to my clients and read the reports.” There was something off about Sims’s reaction, her tone of voice, and it gave Shay pause. What if there was more to this than she knew? She came up with a question that might immediately rid her of the worrisome suspicion now niggling at her brain. “If you’re planning on questioning Ray and his son, you might want to get on that. They’re leaving today for the security conference in New York.”

  “Why would I want to question the Sterlings? They’re one of the richest families in the state. It’s not like they need the money nor would they benefit from the negative publicity. Ray’s well respected and—”

  “Let me guess, a generous benefactor to the mayor’s last campaign.” It was as if history were repeating itself. If it came down to her word against the Sterlings’, Shay didn’t trust the law to be on her side. She’d learned the hard way that the same rules didn’t apply to the rich and connected.

  It’s why she’d accepted Ray’s offer last March—to earn the respect and power that went with having a fortune. She wanted to learn from the best, and once she had, she planned to develop a concept she could franchise. The security industry was a 350-billion-dollar business, and she wanted a big piece of it. But she had a long way to go before she earned the kind of coin that guaranteed her a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  “Watch your step, Angel,” Sims said as she came to her feet. “And don’t leave town.”

  “I’m curious, just how well do you know Ray?” Shay said to the woman’s back.

  Her hand on the knob of the office door, the detective hesitated before turning to face her.

  A faint, knowing smile lifted Shay’s lips. She’d been bluffing, but from the slight flush of color on Sims’s cheeks and her initial hesitation, Shay had obviously hit a nerve. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. The detective was Ray’s type…a man who'd been divorced four times.

  It also explained why Sims had ended up here today, targeting her. Shay nosing into the investigation had made Ray nervous, and he knew the perfect way to shut her down and protect his son. She’d made the mistake of confiding in him a few months back, sharing her greatest fear.

  “What are you insinuating?”

  A younger version of herself would have told Sims exactly what she was suggesting, but Shay liked to think she’d become smarter, more strategic. Self-preservation won out over righteous indignation and revenge every single time. “Nothing, but now that you mention it, you’re awfully defensive. Can’t say I blame you, though. Connected as he is, Ray probably has your boss on speed dial, doesn’t he? Don’t worry. I won’t tell him you’re harassing me. I know you’re just doing your job.”

  Sims looked like she was trying to decide whether she’d just been threatened or whether Shay was clueless.

  “I am just doing my job. It has nothing to do with office politics or my relationship with the Sterlings.”

  So, clueless it was. Except Sims’s mention of her relationship with the Sterlings was either a Freudian slip or strategic. If it was strategic, the woman had correctly surmised that Shay wouldn’t let up on the investigation and somewhere there was evidence of her relationship with Ray. Which would also mean Sims knew Shay was playing her.

  “Relax, I believe you. Now I really do need to head out for my appointment or I’ll be late, and that would make my boss an unhappy man.” Shay had every intention of making Ray Sterling a very unhappy man before he left for NYC. She refused to h
ave the threat of prison hanging over her any longer than she had to.

  * * *

  Sitting in a black Challenger outside Ray Junior’s apartment building, Shay hacked into the security system and remotely took control. She kept an eye on the front of the building while angling the exterior cameras so that one captured the entrance to the casino across the road and the other one focused on the parking garage.

  There was no time for her to celebrate successfully overriding the security system. She might get in the building undetected, but she still had to deal with the cameras in the elevators and on Junior’s floor. And then there was the matter of searching his apartment in under an hour in order to confront her boss before he left town.

  As she leaned over to grab her knapsack off the floor, the passenger door opened and a blond bombshell slipped in. A decade older than Shay, her thirty-nine-year-old assistant wore a hot-pink leather jacket, matching miniskirt, and thigh-high white shiny boots.

  “What are you doing here, Cherry? I need you back at the office.” If things went south, Shay didn’t want the Sterlings looking at her assistant. Cherry needed this job even more than Shay did. “Wait a minute, how did you even know where I was?”

  Cherry made a limp wrist hand drop, the stacks of rings on each finger no doubt weighing down her hand. “How many times do I have to tell you? If you don’t want anyone to know where you are, stop driving Hell Baby.”

  A powerful muscle car, the sleek black hellcat with its yellow rims was Shay’s pride and joy. “Okay, you found me, so what do you want?”

  Glancing from the building back to Shay, Cherry blinked eyes framed with long blue lashes that sort of matched her eyes. “I know you’re desperate for a man, but Ray J, Shaybae? Do you seriously not look in a mirror?” She tugged on Shay’s ponytail that stuck through the hole at the back of her ball cap. “You have this lush black mane that you never let down to play, stunning gray eyes, and pillow lips. Like it or not, girlfriend, you’re a ten even sans makeup and with the Goth uniform. And poor Ray J, he’s a two on a fab hair day, and that’s me being kind.”