Passion's Dream (The Doms of Passion Lake Book 1) Read Free

Clay asked without looking up from the photo.
    “Her name is Leah Stanhope,” Burke replied.
    Something deep down inside of Clay just… released.  As if he’d been waiting for this information and could now relax.
    “She your wife?  Your mistress?”
    “She was my ward.”
    Clay scoffed.  “C’mon, Burke, nobody is anybody’s ward !  This is the 21 st century, not Victorian England!”
    Burke inclined his head.  “Nevertheless, when her father, my business partner, died twelve years ago, she was only sixteen.  He named me her legal guardian in his will, which made her my ward, which she remained until she reached the age of twenty-one.”
    Which would make her twenty-eight now, Clay calculated quickly. 
    “So what does all this have to do with me?”
    “You recognize her, don’t you?”
    “I might have seen her before,” Clay hedged.
    “Three years ago,” Burke said.  “She had just found her degenerate husband in their bed with another woman and had driven to her favorite beach to mourn the loss of her marriage and her dignity.  She met you.”
    Trying to hide his shock, Clay looked down at the photo, then back at Burke.  “How’d you know?”
    “She told me about the man she’d met on the beach.  A Native American man wearing a U.S. Navy T-shirt.  She told me that he had just held her and let her cry.  That, for the first time in three years, since she had married Richard, she had felt… safe …with a total stranger, she’d felt safe!  She told me how kind he’d been to her and how awful she’d been in return, running off without even thanking him or asking his name.  She wanted me to find him so she could thank him properly.  I hired a private detective.  It took him about a week to find you, but by that time you had been deployed, destination classified.”
    Destination Kazakhstan.  Clay grimaced.  The armpit of the world, along with all the other ’stans.  They’d been deployed to rescue an American businessman being held hostage by a terrorist cell.   Fuckin’ tangos.  There’s something fundamentally wrong with people who insist that their way is the only way, and that disagreement must be punished by death.  “All right, yes, it was me.  So, what am I doing here?  You in the matchmaking business now?”
    Everett Burke took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.  “I made a judgment call three years ago.  I told her the P. I. hadn’t been able to find you.”  He opened his eyes again and put his glasses back on.  “I now realize that that was probably wrong.”  He met Clay’s gaze squarely.  “Six months ago, she told me she felt like she was being followed.  Whenever she left the gallery she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her.”
    “She works for you?” Clay asked.
    “She runs my gallery.  She’s my top appraiser.  And she is a gifted artist in her own right.  Her sculpted fabric pieces and clothing items are highly sought after by an elite clientele.  But I digress.  After the feeling of being watched, her phone started ringing at all hours of the day and night.  She answered at first, thinking it might be a customer, but no one was ever on the other end.  So she stopped answering calls from numbers she didn’t recognize.  Three weeks ago, she started getting these…”  He shoved some papers across the desk.
    Clay picked them up and shuffled through them, reading aloud, “Look over your shoulder. Someone’s watching you.  You’re not alone.”  All were short, written in neat, block letters, all vaguely threatening, but nothing specific.
    “They were all hand delivered, shoved under the front door of the gallery or under her apartment door, usually after business hours or when she wasn’t home,” Burke continued, “all in envelopes with no return address.  That’s when I called the police, but we were told that unless this