Renegade Player Read Free

Coast.
    On the beach below, several dogs raced after an irascible gull and Willy laughed aloud at the frustration of the motley pack who stood at the edge of the surf and watched while their tormentor glided safely out over the gentle swells. She hadn’t been swimming in over a week, thanks to last week’s cold spell; but now, with the almost record-breaking high temperatures, the bottle-green water with its blue-white frosting along the shore was an irresistible temptation. She quickly located her favorite three-year-old bikini and within minutes was loping across the single dune that separated the small, shabby court from the Atlantic.
    There was not a soul in sight. The few residents of Wimble Court were old beach-dwellers who had long since forgotten the joys of an impromptu swim, and now even the dogs had found another pastime. After flinching from the first chilly spray, she waded out hip-deep, then dived under a breaker, surfacing on the other side with a laugh of pure exuberant joy. Deliver her from the sterile world of chlorinated, fancifully shaped pools where white jacketed butlers stood by with chrome-plated poles to assist anyone who was gauche enough to encounter difficulties.
    After half an hour or so of body-surfing, glorying in the feel of tremendous surges of power moving her forward to scrape her naked stomach on a gravelly beach, she waded ashore. The dogs had returned, and so she raced with them on the hard-packed beach in an unusual burst of energy and then veered off in the direction of her apartment, hopping over the soft, sun-heated crest of the dune to climb her outside staircase. She never bothered to lock her apartment when she was in the area, a reaction, no doubt, of a lifetime of having to accept security measures as a matter of course. Whether at home with her grim-faced “companion” or at school with other girls with essentially the same background, she was never able to forget that she was Wilhelmina January Silverthorne, heiress to Jasper Silverthorne, who happened to own several square miles of various cities both in the States and abroad.
    It had been the advent of his third marriage, to a woman half his age, coming hard on the heels of her former fiancé Luke Styrewall’s fiasco, that had bought Willy her freedom. Freedom she had grabbed with both hands, leaving behind her almost everything she owned except the little Mercedes 450SL she had fallen heir to when Jasper had divorced his second wife on irrefutable grounds. Willy had taken the car because it had given her her first taste of freedom, which was probably why even now she gloried in the feel of a powerful engine under her command. When she had left home she’d gone directly to her mother’s only living relative, a crusty widowed cousin—Fred, who had been only too glad to return to his state of single bliss, after having recently been freed from almost forty years of henpecked bondage. He had been full of advice and had urged her to try for her license in real estate.
    Cousin Fred had lived in Edenton, but it had been the outer banks of North Carolina that had drawn Willy. She had grown up near the water, both at Hobe Sound and in the South of France, and it had been a constant source of frustration to her that she was never allowed the freedom to enjoy it. When she had finished her course and passed her exams, Willy had applied for, and been accepted by, a small firm of realtors at Nags Head. Here, she was plain Willy Silverthorne, career woman, with no means of support other than what was afforded her by her fairly good brain and her own determination. She was still learning about herself after so many years of being told what she was to like and dislike, and she discovered that she liked to sleep late. She enjoyed driving and cooking. And she loved searching out new restaurants, trying any food with which she was unfamiliar, then trying to duplicate it in her own small but adequate kitchen.
    Now, starved after her