Chasing Serenity (River Rain 1)

He was not what I would expect of my first customer on a Monday.

Or ever.

Tall, maybe not as tall as Judge, but still, very tall.

Broad, definitely broader than Judge.

And ignoring the fact that he was openly alpha, perhaps even toxically so (the hero of that film 365 Days came instantly to mind), he was this wearing an almost criminally well-cut suit.

And he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in my life.

He did not glance at a single item in the store.

He came direct to me.

And the way he did it staring at me, I reached a hand out to my phone sitting on the checkout counter, a tickle of fear trailing down my spine.

This man wasn’t toxic (though he probably also was).

He was dangerous.

His dark eyes tracked my slight movement to the phone, giving indication he didn’t miss a thing.

That didn’t make me feel better.

“May I help you?” I asked when he was a couple of feet from the desk.

“Chloe Pierce,” he stated, his voice accented in a way I couldn’t call it from just his saying my name.

And it wasn’t a question.

It was a statement.

He knew who I was.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

“Yes,” I said carefully.

“Did you get the packet I sent to you?”

What?

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

“The packet,” he reiterated, and it hit me his accent was British. I wasn’t exactly sure, but I thought it might be Welsh. “That included the detailed report that I sent to you.”

I went perfectly still.

He read my stillness and thus didn’t wait for an answer to that question.

He asked another one.

“Do you need assistance with that?”

Assistance?

With finding some angle to matchmake my father with the lover he’d taken that had destroyed his marriage?

And maybe my life?

I pulled myself together and inquired, “Did Uncle Corey send you?”

He lifted a veined, long-fingered hand, reached into his inside pocket of his blue suit jacket, and pulled something out.

I saw it was a ribbed, sterling card carrying case. On the spot, I tagged it as vintage.

And Cartier.

He flicked it open with his manicured thumbnail, pulled out a card and set it on the desk in front of me.

“If you ever need me,” he said.

And that was that.

He spoke no more, asked no more, expected no more.

He turned around, and with a predator’s grace, sauntered out.

The door closed and I realized I wasn’t breathing.

I started doing that but could not tear my eyes off the door.

If you ever need me.

Uncle Corey.

I looked down at the card, reached out, picked up the thick, crisp cream stock and read the words in bold, modern, serif small capitals on the front.

It was just a name and a phone number.

The phone number was local.

Phoenix.

And the name was Rhys Vaughan.

R.

He was Uncle Corey’s.

And he’d been left to me.

Chapter 13

The Decision

Chloe

After the mysterious Rhys left, my morning didn’t get better.

It started with a text from Sasha.

Brunch is off and just to say, it’s all off between you and me until you stop being mean to Matt.

Receiving this, I was gripped with fury.

Utter fury.

Because my brother and sister were acting six years old.

Every quarter, I went through dozens of applications from women who had either been born to circumstances it was practically impossible to crawl out of or had been shit on repeatedly since their first coherent thought.

My brother and sister grew up in a beach house in Malibu. We’d all been given cars for our sixteenth birthdays. New ones. High performance ones. Not gently used ones with a hundred thousand miles on them. We went to private schools and our college was paid (or Matt’s was, Sasha, as yet, had elected not to partake, and I didn’t have any patience for the callowness of high school, I couldn’t fathom continuing that journey to college and being confronted with what I considered the dregs of the earth: frat boys). And beyond that, we’d been given trust funds that were enough to set us up in business (case in point, I was standing in mine), hearth and home with a nest egg besides.

And on that dreaded day far, far in the future when we lost Mom and/or Dad, we’d be filthy rich.

Of late, I had thought we’d been fortunate in our lives to have had to deal with very little adversity.

I was changing my mind about this thought.

Those two could have used some adversity.

Now they were behaving like spoiled brats.

Though I shouldn’t be surprised Matt called Sash to complain about me. Those two had been thick as thieves since children.

As Dad used to crow, “My son took one look at his baby sister with that peach fuzz and those big blues eyes, and it was all over.”

It was.

I did my own thing all my life, for certain.

But I did it with an eye to them.

I was always the big sister. Looking after them. Close to each in our special ways.