Stranger in the Moonlight (Edilean 7)

“You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely and positively.”

“But didn’t you once love Dad?”

“I was a girl from a very sheltered upbringing and your father went after me just as he does those companies he buys.”

“I’d like to go after Kim like that,” he said under his breath.

“Well, don’t!” Lucy half shouted. “Don’t do it to her! Don’t use the Maxwell charm and money and all you’ve learned with those awful women you date on Kim. Don’t dazzle her. Don’t fly her off to Paris to wine and dine her so she’s swooning over you. She doesn’t deserve treatment like that.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Yours!” she said, then made herself calm down. “Travis, I love you much more than life. I’d die for you, but I want what’s real for you. Don’t just take this girl to bed and show her what you learned from some ambitious starlet. Find out about her. See if you really do love her. Or is it just gratitude that she showed you how to ride a bicycle? Get to know her now. And let her know you—the real you. Not the slick, smooth lawyer who can outtalk anyone. Let her see that boy

who was awed by a little girl who put a string of beads around his neck.”

“I’m not sure I know how to do that.”

He looked at Kim. She was staring out at the lake, and he didn’t know that he’d ever seen anyone as pretty—or more desirable. If she were any other girl he’d be making a pass at her and using anything he could to get her into bed. But then, as his mother had said, he’d leave her. It seemed that all his life he’d had to rush off to somewhere else. If it wasn’t to some business meeting for his father, it was to some race or to a climb, or to do some other thing that could possibly, as his mother said, dismember him.

“I guess we should go,” Kim said into the silence, startling Travis back into the present.

He didn’t move. “I don’t mean to be so secretive.”

“Then tell me what’s bothering you!” she said. “Are you concealing some horrible thing you’ve done? You couldn’t be a wanted criminal, because by now I’m sure Colin has looked you up. If you have a record he knows about it and he would have warned me.”

Since neither the sheriff—nor Kim—knew Travis’s real last name, nothing would be found, he thought. “No criminal record,” he said, and smiled at her. “The truth is that I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve done in my life.”

“Does that mean being a stuntman or running down doctors in Morocco?”

He laughed. “Morocco for sure. But why the hell was your brother leading a donkey across an area that had been marked off for a car race?”

“My guess is that Reede thought everyone should stop for him. His work is important; yours is not.”

“I have to agree with him on that. Kim . . . ?”

“Yes?”

“I have some big decisions to make in my life right now.”

“About what?”

“What I’m going to do with the rest of it. In three weeks I’m going to stop working for my father.”

“What do you do for him now?”

“Put people out of work,” Travis said.

Kim looked at him sharply.

“It’s not as bad as I’m making it sound. The businesses were going under and all the employees were going to be fired. My father buys the company and fires a mere two-thirds of them.” He looked out at the lake. “I’m tired of it and I need some changes. You have any openings in your jewelry store? I think I could sell things.”

“By flirting with the customers? No thanks. What do you want my help with?”

He wanted to say, To run away with me, but his mother’s words rang in his head. Get to know her now. And let her know you—the real you. “To be my friend,” he said. “We were friends as children, so maybe we can be again.”

“Right,” Kim said as she looked back at the lake. Friends. Story of her life, it seemed. Her last two boyfriends had broken off with her because she was more successful than they were. Whenever Kim got a new contract from a company that wanted to sell her jewelry, there would be a fight. She’d calculated that it took just three major arguments to end a relationship. She was sure that the only reason she and Dave had lasted for six whole months was because she hadn’t told him that Neiman Marcus wanted a trial run of a display of her jewelry.