Free Solitude Creek by Jeffery Deaver

curtain. ‘View’s amazing.’
    True. Pebble Beach golf course not far away, contortionist
pine trees, crimson bird-of-paradise flowers, sculpture, fountains. Deer wandered past, ears twitchy and legs both comical and elegant.
    Her mind seemed to wander. Maybe she was thinking of her meeting. Maybe of her ill mother. Calista, a twenty-five-year-old bookkeeper, wasn’t from here. She’d taken two weeks off from work and driven to California from her small town in northern Washington State to look for areas where her mother, in assisted living because of Alzheimer’s, might relocate, a place where the weather was better. She’d tried Marin, Napa, San Francisco and was now checking out the Monterey Bay area. This seemed to be the front-runner.
    She walked into the bathroom and the shower began to pulse. March lay back, listening to the water. He believed she was humming.
    He thought again about the remote. No. Too eager.
    Eyes closed, he replayed the incident at Solitude Creek once more.
    Ten minutes later she emerged. ‘You bad boy!’ she said, with a devilish smile, but chiding too. ‘You scratched me.’
    Hiking the robe up. A very, very nice ass. Red scratch marks. The image of them hit him low in the torso. ‘Sorry.’ Not a
Fifty Shades of Grey
girl, it seemed.
    She forgot her complaint. ‘You look like somebody, an actor.’
    Channing Tatum was the default. March was slimmer, about the same height, over six feet.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    Didn’t matter, of course. Her point was to apologize for the jab about the scratches.
    Accepted.
    She dug into her purse for a brush and makeup, began reassembling. ‘The other night you didn’t really tell me much about your job. Some non-profit. A website? You do good things. I like that.’
    ‘Right. We raise awareness – and money – to benefit people in crises. Wars, natural disasters, famine, that sort of thing.’
    ‘You must be busy. There’s so much terrible stuff going on.’
    ‘I’m on the road six days a week.’
    ‘What’s the site?’
    ‘It’s called Hand to Heart.’ He rolled from the bed. Though not feeling particularly modest, he didn’t want to walk around naked. He pulled on jeans and a polo shirt. Flipped open his computer and went to the home page.
     
    Hand to Heart
     
    Devoted to raising awareness of
    humanitarian tragedies
    around the world
     
     
    How you can help …
     
    ‘We don’t take money ourselves. We just make people aware of needs for humanitarian aid, then they can click on a link to, say, tsunami relief or the nuclear disaster in Japan or gas victims in Syria. Make donations. My job is I travel around and meet with non-profit groups, get press material and pictures of the disaster to put on our site. I vet the groups too. Some are scams.’
    ‘No!’
    ‘Happens, yep.’
    ‘People can be such shits.’ She closed the laptop. ‘Not a bad job. You do good things for a living. And you get to stay in places like this.’
    ‘Sometimes.’ In fact, he wasn’t comfortable in ‘places like this’. Hyatt was good enough for him or even more modest motels. But his boss liked it here; Chris liked all the best places so this was where March was put. Just like the clothes and accessories scattered about the room. The Canali suit, the Louis Vuitton shoes, the Coach briefcase, the Tiffany cufflinks weren’t his choice. His boss didn’t get that some people did this job for reasons other than money.
    Calista vanished into the bathroom to dress – the modesty bump was growing – and she emerged. Her hair was still damp but she’d rented a convertible from Hertz and he supposed that, with the top down, the strands would be blow-dried by the time she got to whatever retirement home she was headed for. March’s own sculpted brown hair, thick as pelt, irritatingly took ten minutes to bring to attention.
    Calista kissed him, brief but not too brief; they both knew the rules. Lunchtime delight.
    ‘You’ll still be around for a