My Dearest Cal Read Free Page A

was thirty-seven now, and he’d had twenty years of practice. There was no one looking for him and, sadly he supposed, no one he regretted leaving behind.
    “When I move on,” he assured Chaney, “I never leave a forwarding address. Keeps life a whole lot less complicated.”

Chapter Two
    I t took Marilou Stockton exactly three days, four hours and twenty-seven minutes to trace Cal Rivers to the newly named and recently renovated Silver River Stables in Ocala. She would have found him sooner if she hadn’t taken time out between phone calls to sit on the sand under a palm tree for the first two days of her month-long Florida vacation. Those few hours in the sun had slowed her investigation down, but they’d definitely been worth it.
    For the first time ever, her fair skin was developing a nice golden glow and, best of all, she could breathe again. She actually felt healthy instead of waterlogged, which meant it was time to take care of business. Once that was done, she could really get into some serious relaxing. The anticipation of day afterleisurely day under these clear tropical skies made her hurry.
    She gulped down her large glass of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice and toast, sacrificing her lazy walk on the beach in favor of studying her maps and the directions she’d been given by Cal Rivers’ Palm Lane mail carrier. The carrier had turned out to be a woman in her twenties with a long memory and a talkative nature. She’d revealed that there’d been no forwarding address. Instead the mail was initially picked up weekly from the post office by a Mr. Joshua Ames, who’d had some sort of power of attorney. The mail had long since stopped coming, though, and so had this Mr. Ames.
    “Too bad, too,” Priscilla reported to Marilou. “He was a real hunk.”
    Since she didn’t go to see him, Marilou couldn’t attest to the man’s physical attributes, but she could swear that he was about as talkative as one of those monks who’d taken a vow of silence. The instant she’d mentioned Cal Rivers on the phone, he’d clammed right up. She wondered what a man had to pay for that kind of loyalty. The only thing she’d managed to extract was an unwitting admission that Cal Rivers was still in Florida.
    Which meant that he probably had a Florida driver’s license.
    Which meant that with a little resourcefulness—Priscilla had an old boyfriend who was a cop—Marilou was able to get his new address from the Division of Motor Vehicles. Once she had that, Priscilla hadbeen more than happy to help her figure out the best route to take to Ocala.
    By 9:00 a.m. on the fourth day of her vacation, with a renewed spirit of optimism, she was in her rental car and headed for Ocala. She figured it would take her three hours, four at the most, to actually meet Cal Rivers, senior face-to-face, hand over the letter for Cal Rivers, junior and be on her way back to the beach.
    For the most part her calculations were accurate. The drive took exactly two and a half hours through terrain that changed from sand and palm trees to fields of green shaded by moss-draped oaks. She was so caught up in the dramatic shift from beach resort clutter to open spaces and Southern-style architecture that she missed the entrance to Silver River Stables and wound up going several fascinating miles out of her way. By the time she figured it out, she’d wasted nearly half an hour. In retrospect, she realized it was probably an omen.
    Armed with more precise directions from a chatty gas station attendant, she finally found the discreetly marked gate. As she drove through, she noted wryly that the postal box was crammed so full of junk mail it was spilling onto the ground. Apparently this Mr. Cal Rivers had a thing about the mail. She ought to cart the whole batch up to him and dump it in his lap.
    Then, again,
that
mail wasn’t her worry. The letter in her purse was the only one she was here to deliver, and the sooner she did that and got on with