Season of Strangers Read Free Page A

attracted to him, but Julie Ferris wasn’t the kind of girl who went for one-night stands. She disapproved of the drugs he used and badgered him about his drinking.
    â€œYou don’t look like you’re feeling much better,” she said, frowning at the smudges beneath his eyes, the slightly sallow color of his usually suntanned skin. “That stuff is going to kill you, Patrick. How long will it take before you figure that out?”
    Patrick stiffened, drawing himself up to his full six foot three inches. “What I do is none of your damned business.”
    Julie stopped a few feet in front of him, tilting her head to look up at him and fixing those big green eyes on his face. “It is when my clients are involved.” Her brows drew together, moving the tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose. “We need to talk about the Rabinoff deal. You really blew that one, Patrick.”
    â€œI know, I know.” He raked a hand through his wavy black hair, shoving it back from his forehead. “Things just sort of got away from me.”
    â€œThey got away from you because you weren’t paying attention. You’re too smart for that, Patrick. If you kept your mind on business instead of Shirl’s cleavage or Babs’s derrière—”
    â€œOkay, okay, I’ll fix it.” He didn’t tell her it was her derrière that usually snagged his attention. “I know the secretary over at the mortgage company. I’ll get her to put a rush on the documents. Anything else you want me to do?”
    She rattled off a list of items, each word punctuated by a green-eyed glare that scorched right through him. Damn, she was pretty. Not beautiful like some of the women he knew, but cute and smart and sexy as hell. He forced himself not to think of what she’d be like in bed.
    After eight years of giving it the old college try, he knew it wasn’t going to happen.
    Â 
    Julie lay in the middle of her big pine bed, listening to the pounding of the surf rolling in on the beach, the intermittent throb of a foghorn in the distance. Her bedroom was white, like the rest of the house, with light pine hardwood floors and woven throw rugs in bright southwest colors—a bit of New Mexico on the California shore. The house wasn’t huge, just three bedrooms and an office, living room, dining room, kitchen, sunny breakfast room and two-car garage.
    It was the wall of windows overlooking the beach, the deck that ran the length of the house, and the privacy of the property that had seduced her into buying it. That and her friend, Babs, nagging her that with the money she was earning, she needed the tax deduction.
    Julie thought of the evening she had spent with her friend. A pleasant dinner at The Grill after they’d worked late at the office, though later she had suffered another migraine headache. It was a bad one, leaving her weak and drained, but once she got home it had disappeared. She had slept for a while, then awakened abruptly from an unpleasant dream. Now she was finding it impossible to go back to sleep.
    She rolled onto her side, pulling up the covers, plumping her pillow, trying not to think of the work piling up on her desk and hoping the sound of the ocean would lull her as it usually did. Her love of the ocean was one of the reasons she had bought the expensive beachfront property. She had stumbled on to the place while working with Owen Mallory, showing him a series of luxurious homes, hoping he would add one of them to his worldwide collection.
    This little house sat next door to the vast estate he had finally chosen, which meant, at his insistence, she had access to a long stretch of private white sand beach.
    Julie fidgeted and turned just as the phone began to ring on the nightstand beside the bed. Sitting up quickly, she reached for it with a suddenly unsteady hand. She had always hated late-night calls. They were usually nothing but bad news.
    â€œJulie,