The Way You Look Tonight Read Free

Once I send this in, we should be good to go."
    Clearly, he needed a vacation, because he should have seen this coming. Mia Sullivan always got what she wanted.
    Especially when she was trying to help someone she loved.
    "One day you’re going to find a guy you can’t wrap around your finger," he told her as he took the pen she handed him and signed next to all the yellow flags. She was smiling when she took the papers back, but her grin suddenly looked a little forced.
    He put a hand on her arm. "Everything okay, sis?"
    "Everything’s great." He wasn’t sure he believed her, but she was already walking out the door and saying, "You should be the proud owner of the lake house by tonight."
    He’d seen the dollar figure listed on the offer and hadn’t blinked an eye, but now he had to ask, "Just how good is my offer?"
    The twinkle was back in her eyes as she said, "Good enough to hop on your Ducati tomorrow and be there to light a fire on the beach and lie back to look up at the stars by nightfall."
    "Thanks, Mia." She had been, and always would be, a major pain in the rear. But he wouldn’t trade his little sister for anyone else.
    She didn’t turn back again, simply waved at him over her shoulder. Noting that every last one of his male employees was drooling over her instead of working, his voice was harder than it would otherwise have been as he told them, "Mandatory company meeting at lunch."
    With that, he walked back into his office to prepare for his next meeting...and, with a summer at the lake in his sights, to get started on writing up a list of revised duties for his staff at Sullivan Investigations.

Chapter Two
     
     
    Some days, Brooke Jansen loved her job.
    Every day, actually, since she’d moved from Boston to live at the lake full time and start her own chocolate truffle business. She even loved it on days like today, when she couldn’t quite get her latest truffle recipe to taste right.
    She’d spent the past eight hours working on a new summer-themed box of truffles, one she hoped would please people as much as the winter-themed box she’d debuted at Christmas. Now it was time to work out some of the kinks in her back with a swim. Plus, she tended to have some of her biggest epiphanies while underwater. She had been swimming like a fish from the day her grandfather had plucked her out of her father’s arms and plopped her into the lake despite his son’s protests that she wasn’t ready yet.
    Brooke took her saucepans and glass bowls over to the sink. As she quickly washed them out, she marveled at the view of the lake and the Douglas firs in the mountains beyond the water. Even though she’d been living on Lake Wenatchee for the past three years, she still could hardly believe how beautiful it was.
    She’d spent every summer as a young child traveling from Boston to Washington State to visit her grandparents, Frank and Judy. She’d loved every second outside on the sandy beach, swimming in the cool lake water, roasting marshmallows by the campfire...and spending time with the two warmest, most loving people she’d ever known.
    In all those summers, her parents had only come to visit the lake house a handful of times, and each visit had been awkward, borderline uncomfortable. Mostly because her parents and grandparents hadn’t seen eye to eye on much of anything...especially her. Her mother and father weren’t ogres by any stretch of the imagination, but they had always been so focused on their careers that they often seemed to forget they had a child who wanted to have fun. And when they had focused on her, she’d often sensed their disappointment that she was neither cuttingly sharp like her lawyer mother, nor brilliant like her economist father.
    They’d wanted a little baby Einstein. Instead, they’d gotten Strawberry Shortcake.
    On top of that, it had been so difficult for her mother to get—and stay—pregnant with her that from the moment Brooke was born, her parents had treated