Free Sweet Caroline's Keeper by Beverly Barton

to precede him. By the time Fletcher and she reached the foyer, Roz, Brooke and Gavin were only a few steps behind; then Lyle came out of the room across the hall and halted several feet away from the others. Caroline grasped the brass handle and opened the door.
    She wasn't quite sure what she'd been expecting, but the man standing on her front porch wasn't it. He was tall, broad-shouldered and lean, with a bronze tan, thick dark blond hair and tinted aviator glasses that hid his eyes. He wore a cream-colored sport coat and a teal-blue shirt, casually elegant attire that a man with money might wear to project both a fashionable and yet masculine image. He wasn't handsome, but he was devastatingly attractive, in a self-assured way that professed to the world he was a man to be reckoned with. A shiver of apprehension fluttered in Caroline's stomach. She heard an indrawn breath and assumed it came from Brooke. Then a low, soft whistle told her that Roz had just made a comment.
    "I'm Wolfe," the man said, his voice dark and rich and distinctively Southern, as he removed his sunglasses and slid them into his pocket.
    "Won't you come in, Mr. Wolfe. We've been expecting you. I'm Caroline McGuire."
    When she held out her hand, he simply stared at it for endless seconds, then encompassed it within his own huge hand. The moment they touched, a current passed between them. A shocking sensation of awareness. And when their gazes met, Caroline gasped. She had never seen such cold eyes, moss green and void of any emotion.
    "Hello, Caroline," he said.
    Startled by her reaction to the stranger, Caroline snatched her hand away but couldn't stop looking directly at him in the same way he continued staring at her. Did he feel it, too? she wondered. That odd sense of recognition, as if she had known this stranger all her life, perhaps even in a dozen other lifetimes?

 
     
     
    Chapter 5
     
     
    H e couldn't take his eyes off her. She was more lovely than any picture he'd ever seen of her. This was Caroline—his Caroline. He wasn't sure exactly when he'd begun to think of her that way. It had been a gradual thing, taking place so imperceptibly that he had no way of pinpointing the precise moment that his thoughts of her had become possessive. Perhaps if he'd had a family of his own, his feelings for Caroline wouldn't have taken on such monumental proportions. Aidan Colbert had had a few distant relatives, but no real family to speak of, and David Wolfe had no one. There were no parents, no siblings, no wife and no children. Only Caroline.
    When he noticed the flush on her cheeks and the way she suddenly broke eye contact, Wolfe realized he had been staring at her for longer than was socially acceptable. In the future, he would have to be careful and take advantage of unguarded moments, when no one else was around, to drink his fill of her. He wondered if a thousand lifetimes would be enough.
    Someone cleared his throat. Wolfe glanced behind Caroline to where four people stood guard over her, each inspecting him thoroughly. The two men glowered at him as if they didn't quite trust him. The two women surveyed him from head to toe as if he were an item up for auction. He recognized all four people from photos that had been included in the packet Sam Dundee had given him this afternoon before he'd left Le Bijou Bleu, Dundee's private island. The dossier contained brief bios and photographs of the people most important in Caroline's life.
    Fletcher Shaw came forward and extended his hand to Wolfe. He sized up the handsome young man quickly as he reached out to accept his gesture of greeting. They were about the same height, but Shaw was more slender, his handshake weaker. Caroline's stepbrother possessed an air of superiority, one that declared without words that he was the master and considered David the servant
    "Fletcher Shaw."
    "Wolfe." He looked directly into Fletcher's blue eyes and noted just a hint of uncertainty there. Most of his adult