Beyond a Shadow
Alison Kent
ISBN 0-7582-1012-4
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Strangers in the night—what could be hotter? With this newest addition to her dangerously sexy SG-5 series, Alison Kent delivers a sizzling story of one woman in search of excitement, a man all too willing to provide it, and a love worth risking everything for…
Most people come to Comfort Bay, Oregon, in search of a little peace and quiet. But neither is on the agenda for undercover operative Ezra Moore. He’s got ten days to unload a shipment of illegal weapons—and take down Spectra IT, the international crime syndicate he’s managed to infiltrate. He knows Spectra’s man , Warren Aceveda, is playing dirty pool, and if he’s going to beat him and stay alive, he’s got to play even dirtier. But even the best-laid crimes can blow up in your face, and Ezra is about to find out just how badly…
Alexa Counsel likes her calm, and OK, sometimes boring life in Comfort Bay. But there’s nothing boring about the hot new handyman who’s just started working at the local Bed and Breakfast. Great with his hands? Oh yes. But there’s something much deeper running beneath those still waters. Something she’s not sure she understands or she can trust. No one is going to use her as a cover, no matter how irresistible he may be. But Ezra is the only man who’s ever made her feel like a real woman, and she’s already in way too deep to turn back now…
Playing cat and mouse with one of the world’s fiercest criminals, Alexa and Ezra are about to find out just how dangerous and delicious starting a new life—and finding a new love—can be…
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Chapter One
Two inches. Maybe three. That was the distance standing between Emmy Rose Maples and certain death. If she didn’t drown, she would succumb to hypothermia like her mom was always warning her. She knew that she wouldn’t really freeze. The water would have to close around her in a big block of ice for that to happen.
Of course, all she had to do to make sure she didn’t die was back up a couple of steps. But she liked standing here and staring down. She didn’t even have to move her eyes to see the toes of her galoshes, the edge of the dock, and the rolling green water pulsing from the ocean into the bay. Pulsing. She liked that word. Her mother had used it once to describe the way the waves pushed in through the harbor’s entrance.
Pulsing. That was exactly what her blood was doing now, pulsing through her veins as she looked at the water and listened to it lap against the dock’s pylons. The same cold wind whipping her hair around her face drove the waves, making little white caps that crashed into the rocks like the marshmallow foam on hot cocoa.
She probably didn’t need to be worrying about drowning or hypothermia. Her mom would be the one to kill her if she saw her down here without her hood. Her mom would think it was bad enough that she was wearing her dad’s mackinaw instead of the pink parka hanging in the mudroom on the hook beneath her name. She hated pink. She looked like a wad of bubble gum.
“If I were you, young Miss Maples, I would not stand so close to the edge. Were you to receive an unexpected bump, you would most certainly fall.”
“To my death, right?” she asked, glancing over at the man who had spoken. The man she had been waiting for. “You forgot that part. That I would fall to my death.”
He considered her for a moment, his dark brown eyes kind of squinting as he swung the duffel bag he’d been carrying from his shoulder to the surface of the dock. He stepped over it and walked toward her. Then he stood beside her, his boots next to her boots, as they both stared down.
“I don’t believe you would fall to your death at all.”
“Why not?”
“Do you know how to swim?”
She nodded. “This coat is my dad’s. It’s heavy. It would be even more heavy if it was wet.”
“So what would you do? If you fell in wearing the coat?”
“Try to get out of it without struggling.”
“Why no struggling?”
“I don’t want to get tangled or use up all my oxygen.” She shrugged. “But that doesn’t mean I could do it, so I might still drown.”
“Then you should practice so you will know for certain.”
Emmy Rose shuddered. Her heart beat so hard it hurt. “You want me to jump in?”
“What I want is for you to know that you can save yourself. I do not want for you to put your life in danger.”
“So,” she began, thinking about what he had said. “If I want to practice, I should tell my dad and have him here to help me. And probably have my mom’s permission, too. Even though she would never in a million years give it to me.”
“Do you think she would rather worry than know you can take care of yourself?”
Emmy Rose scuffed one toe against the dock’s wet and salt- crusty planks. “You don’t know my mom.”
He didn’t say anything after that. He just stood beside her, silent and still. Like a statue. She sneaked a quick glance to the side and saw he had his hands down in the pockets of his army pants and his shoulders hunched up in his pea coat against the sharp gusts of wind.
She started to tell him he would be warmer if he wore a hat, but then she remembered that she wasn’t wearing one either. Her mom called that “doing what I say, not what I do.” And she knew her mom would probably be down here on the warpath any minute to drag her home for supper. She might as well head back on her own.
Before she went, though, there was something she wanted to know. She looked back down into the water in time to see a sliver of silver as a fish swam by. “If I jumped in right now, do you think I’d make it?”
“I know you would, because I would jump in behind you to make sure.”
That made her smile. It also made it easier to breathe. “I was down here waiting for you.”
“I thought you might be,” he said, walking over to pick up his duffel, but not before motioning her away from the dock’s edge.
“You know, the water here is a lot colder than where you were born. I looked it up on the Internet in the library at school. I might have to be the one to save you from shock if you jumped in.”
He laughed then. A huge laugh out of the middle of his chest that sounded like bamboo wind chimes. “That is quite the possibility, Miss Maples. I am not sure I am looking forward to getting used to the cold.”
They started walking up the dock, away from his boat to ward the steps cut into the rock of the harbor’s natural entrance. He let her go first, and she liked the idea of having someone behind her to catch her if she slipped and fell. What she didn’t like was the idea of bashing her head open on the rocks and bleeding to death.
“My mom wasn’t sure if you were going to get here before dark.”
“Your mother will learn soon enough that I am a man of my word.”
She didn’t figure her mother would have hired him if he was a liar. Her mother hated liars. “She’s cooking a whole bunch of food for supper. Well, her and Alexa are cooking. And baking apple pies.”
“And you did not help?”
Emmy Rose ignored him for a second while she stepped from the staircase onto the sidewalk that ran along the edge of the coastal highway and separated the town of Comfort Bay from the road. She headed toward the boardwalk and her mom’s candy shop, using the path worn down in the grass instead of the fake bridge tourists used to get there.
“I like to eat, but not really to cook,” she finally said, hearing the cold grass crunch beneath her boots.
“Do you know how to cook?”
“Sorta,” she said. Her mom bugged her about it enough. She didn’t want him bugging her, too. “It’s just with all the cooking for the stay-over guests and the candy for the shop, I get sick of everything being about cooking. I’d rather gut a fish and panfry it over a camp fire.”
“Do you build your own camp fires?”
“Sure do,” she said proudly.
“Can you do so without flint or a match?”
“Uh, well, no.” She wasn’t exactly a Boy Scout.
“But you can catch and gut your own fish?”
“Yep.” She gave a big nod and kept walking. “My dad’s a fisherman. He taught me everything.”
“Did he teach you how to catch a fish with your hands? Standing and waiting as a predator would?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “We mostly fish from his boat when I get to go, which isn’t very much.”
“I see,” he said, but that was all.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, stomping against the planks then stopping when she realized she couldn’t hear him walking. She hadn’t heard him on the grass or on the dock or now on the boardwalk. And so she turned around.
He was standing right behind her, looking down. “It means you will never go hungry as long as you have a baited fishing hook and know how to make a fire.”
“Is that your sneaky way of telling me I need to learn how to cook?” She narrowed her eyes. He sure was bossy. Just not in the same way her mom and dad were bossy. They just ordered her around. He made her figure things out for herself.
He laughed again, but stopped as quickly as he’d started. “I believe someone is calling your name.”
“I don’t hear anything—” But then she did. And she was so glad it was Alexa and not her mom.
This way she could get back into the house without her mom seeing that she wasn’t wearing her parka or hood. “We better hurry. Dinner’s probably ready, and we’ll be in all kinds of trouble if we’re late. At least I’ll be in trouble. I can’t really see you getting in trouble with anyone.”
He gestured with the hand that wasn’t holding onto his duffel bag’s strap and bowed like a gentleman. “After you, Miss Maples. After you.”
She giggled, and he smiled, his teeth as bright as the whites of his eyes and shiny against his dark skin. She smiled back, just knowing the Christmas holidays were going to be a lot more fun now that Ezra Moore had come to town.
